Thursday's Storm

by Darrell Duke

  Nervously, pant legs and soiled apron pockets are emptied of worn rosary beads, whose tiny crucifixes spin and twirl recklessly in the wind.

  Some folks fight the wind and, at best, are bent over in all directions. The rest are now on their knees. Frantic calls to saints Barbara, Christopher, and Thomas Aquinas to quell the storm go unanswered as the sea continues its fit of rage.

  Although they figure the worst is probably past, the prayers continue. Hail Marys are seized by storm and trampled. The surge moves the beach of massive boulders with ease. The pounding of their hearts is topped only by the noise of the wind and the shifting of rocks big and small.

  A man is halfway through a verse of Amazing Grace when his missus says get a bit of sense, there’s probably no one on the boat, anyway.

  “My God! I s’pose they were able t’ get off, all right,” another says.

  Miraculous medals hand-sewn by mothers onto tattered and earth-stained clothes glisten in the sun. But, as far as anyone can see, no miracle occurs.

  Disappearing and reappearing again and again behind mountainous walls of murky water, the drenched bulk of wood moans her final moan and hastily takes one last swig of the tempestuous sea. With breath held deep in their lungs, those on shore watch and wait, until on the swell the schooner appears no more.

  After an hour or so, the storm subsides. Like gnarled lines of trawls, strange strings of passing clouds cling to the sky. With them comes a heavier rain. The sun never misses a trick.

  People stand, squint, and blink. Necks stretch forward for reassurance that what they just witnessed is real. Rosary beads hang from limp arms and hands while half-open mouths utter little sound.

  They dare to clean up the mess, with the rest of their lives to talk about it at night around kitchen table card games, and in twine lofts making and mending nets to fish the same sea.

  A young lad, cap clenched tightly in hand, bolts away from the murmuring crowd. He runs across ripening bakeapple marshes, over fenced meadows, and past nervous horses and cows fresh out of stables. His lean body, trimmed by the long, hard childhood of a man’s work, is twisted slightly now and then by the lingering gusts. Down dirt roads, dustless from the fresh sheets of rain, curious, weather-beaten faces emerge cautiously from their two-storey homes. No usual nods of the head, winks, or “How’re ye gettin’ ons,” occur, as weary eyes gaze in every direction at the storm’s handiwork. There’s little to say. Only it’s too bad they’ve missed half a day working. They pause the odd moment to watch the strange, moving sky.

  Thomas S. Keats, the merchant, stands in the doorway of his store. His arms are folded. His eyebrows lift and he takes on a curious stare when he sees the gritty lad racing toward him.

  Fixing his woollen cap back on his soaking wet head, the boy leans over, his hands resting on his thighs.

  “A boat . . . just sank, out there,” he pants, pointing to the open sea, his eyes wild. “A schooner.”

  Chapter seventeen

  The Bad News

  It’s still pouring rain. Puddles form quickly in potholes farther in The Bottom where the sea didn’t reach earlier. Rainwater running off the hills and down over lanes create small rivers in places where the road is eaten away.

  It seems harmless enough now for most people to leave their homes, and they make their way out. House to house, store to store, stagehead to stagehead, they ask if the Fox Harbour crews are back yet, or if they’re someplace else, safe and sound. But no one has anything to tell.

  The Pauline King and the Lady Jane were fishing farther up Placentia Bay and likely took shelter in the nearest port, some say. The Annie Healy, no doubt, with Captain John Mullins to the helm, is safe in St. Bride’s harbour, or perhaps forced to beach at Point Lance, as the Annie Healy’s crew is known for fishing near Point Lance Rock.

  More fish is picked up, washed with water from the brooks and ponds, and restacked in piles under tree rinds until the weather clears. Henhouses and fences lie in piles with the odd dead bird sticking out from beneath the rubble.

  Dories and flats are rowed to pick up what the storm has laid to waste. Oars blown from boats, longers plucked from stages and flakes, and coverless barrels half-emptied of rotting fish livers lay around the harbour.

  Billy Penny and Cyril Leary use long gaffs to pick up debris from the water around Healy’s Wharf. Mike and Henry Healy bail their boat, Tojori, to make ready for leaving.

  Word of a schooner sinking off Argentia has come in a string of versions to Cis Davis’s telephone, so the Healys agree it’s best to have a look. A handful of men who were fishing outside some of the Cape Shore communities walk by the wharf, saying they barely beat the storm and made it to The Sound. Some even say they saw the Annie Healy bashing her way through the storm and wished they were on a big boat like that instead of in their little jaunters. They say their bodies will be bruised for a month. They imagine the Annie’s not far behind now.

  Tojori’s Mianus engine spits the usual dirty black smoke. Its loud knocking echoes through the dripping trees and soggy hills.

  Jim Healy manoeuvres the wide vessel past smaller boats partially submerged and barely visible behind the pelting rain bouncing on the water. Mike does his best to clean the glass in the end of the rectangular wooden box their father bought in St. John’s years ago for looking under water. Jim says it hasn’t been touched for fifteen years, when the Queen of Providence sunk right over there, and it’s not like they needed it to find her then with her masts sticking thirty or forty feet out of the water. But the old man said the box was a good one, and any chance to use it was worth what he paid for it.

  “The way the water’s stirred up, ’tis a waste of time, Mike,” Jim says to his brother. “Be the time ya gets the cobwebs outta the box, we’ll be home again.”

  In the harbour, gulls hop and run and jump and squawk in one place on rolling and bobbing barrels, while punts and dories, if not too damaged, are right-sided and set back in the water to join in the cleanup.

  More men in small groups scuff wearily from the path leading to The Sound and onto the lane leading to the main road. The weight of their wet clothes drains them of their last reserves of energy as they step onto the road and turn either way toward their homes.

  “Go out now an’ ask ’em if they heard tell of yer father an’ the crew,” Lize Foley tells young Bernadette.

  Leaning over her kitchen table, looking out the window, Lize watches the Healys head out the harbour again. She sits back on the chair and barely has strength enough to crank the wooden handle of the Singer sewing machine. She frets over the flannelette she’s after writing down at Healy’s shop since Jack left. He told her to get a new dishpan, nothing else, and he’ll square up with Jim and Mike when he gets back with his share of the fish. In late fall and winter, when it’s too windy to leave the fire in at night, the bedroom floor is too cold to kneel upon for prayers. The nightdress Lize is making will help comfort her bad knees. Jack will understand, she tries to convince herself. Although she’ll never admit it, she wishes they were like their daughters in the States, with real money to buy things, instead of fish to barter for the meagre necessities of their ordinary existence.

  With her mother’s woolsquare covering her head, Bernadette reluctantly walks back and forth alongside O’Brien’s house, just up the lane, waiting for one of the passing men to say something. As Bernadette trudges uncomfortably in her bare feet, there are more potholes than places to step. Muddy water flicks on the lower back part of her flowery skirt.

  No schooners have entered The Sound, according to one nice man, a friend of her parents, who’s sure there’s great concern about, because Lize would never allow her child out in such poor weather, miserable, cold, and alone.

  Bernadette runs back down the lane, glad to have something to report to her mother, even if it isn’t what they both want to hear.
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  Neither the Annie Healy, the Pauline King, nor the Lady Jane have returned yet, but Lize guarantees they wouldn’t attempt navigating the shoals of Fox Harbour in such wind.

  “They’re liable to be gone in someplace else,” she says to herself, continuing to sew.

  At four thirty Mary Jane Sampson finally lets her son, Billy, out of the house. He finds Liz Kelly at her grandmother’s. With their coats over their heads, the friends head out Dreaddy’s Road in the rain, laughing and shouting. They jump over some puddles and land in others with shouts of joy. They couldn’t be happier.

  When it’s time for Billy to go home again, young Liz goes into Mrs. Anne Murphy’s for a visit and, hopefully, a bite to eat while she dries off. The rain eventually lets up, and with the bit of wind left over from the storm, Mrs. Murphy says what a lovely evening it would be for drying clothes if she hadn’t already dried them over her stove.

  On her way home Liz sees two old men standing by the road, in front of Mon McCue’s woodpile. One is nodding slowly, the other shaking his head. They’re not carrying on, the way most men in Fox Harbour do, and the great smiles they’re known for are absent from their lips.

  Liz jumps over a big puddle of muddy water and runs up a lane, a couple of houses away from where the men are standing. She bolts around the back of the houses, hurries over a section of fence blown down by the wind, and creeps alongside Mon’s house. She sneaks down the lane and hides behind the pile of wood to hear what the men have to say. Three other men come walking up the road. They stop to ask the two old fellows if they’ve heard the latest news.

  “Yes, b’y, that’s what they’re sayin’,” one of the men says. “The Annie Healy’s really gone. They found her hatch an’ something else belonged to her in Long Harbour.”

  Numb with shock, Liz stumbles forward from where she’s crouched. She puts her hand out to catch herself but fumbles farther when it slides over the loose, wet bark of the wood. She stays on her knees and elbows, afraid the men have heard her, waiting for one of them to grab her.

  “Did anyone tell their women yet?” a man asks.

  “Tell ’em wha?” the oldest man says.

  “That the b’ys are gone, lost.”

  “Jaysus! Ye can’t go tellin’ the like of dat when ye don’t know if ’tis true,” the old man says angrily, shaking his head.

  “Well, b’y, that’s what all the crowd is sayin’.”

  “What about Mon? Do he know?” asks another.

  Liz bolts out from behind the wood. She feels like attacking the men, but takes off racing for home, instead. She tries to block it out, deciding she won’t utter a word of what she’s just heard. She won’t stand for such nonsense.

  “Likely story,” she says to herself. “No way is the Annie Healy gone.” But the horrible thought gets bigger with each step.

  Her legs grow heavier and the muddy road has lost all appeal. She can tell the rumours are spreading like mad by the expressions on the faces of those she passes on the road and the closed mouths of those with their necks stuck out windows and over garden fences. No matter how she tries to erase the dreadful notion, her skip is reduced to a walk. Her mind is all a spin as she thinks back to last week when she and her mother and daddy were in the garden at the potatoes and Captain Mullins and the men came over the road like an army—that’s what her mother said—insisting her daddy go with them; she thinks of how her poor daddy wasn’t well enough to be at the potatoes, let alone go fishing, and how he should have listened to her mother when she said, “You needn’t think yer goin’, sick like that.”

  No! What those old men said isn’t true. It can’t be. People in Fox Harbour love to make up stuff, something to talk about, especially old men, bitter because they’re no longer able to fish. The Annie is safe somewhere else and will soon be seen coming in the harbour right full of fish so Liz and her family can have lots of flour and molasses and salt beef for the winter. Mommy will give Daddy her chair and he’ll rock the little ones, telling of all the big boats in Golden Bay, and the small ones, and the thousands and thousands of birds at Cape St. Mary’s, where Liz would love to go someday and have a picnic and go to the edges of the high cliffs and throw crusts of bread to the birds, not that anyone could afford to throw away crusts of bread. We’re looky to have a bite to eat areselves, let alone give it away to the birds, her daddy would say. Say nothin’, saw wood, he also says. And that’s what Liz intends to do. She starts running again.

  After a brief yarn with the shore boys at Healy’s Wharf, Billy Sampson runs up under the big flakes toward his house to tell his mother the news of the boat sinking off Argentia. Mary Jane’s stomach falls again, as someone has already been by with their own version of the story’s growing details. But she shrugs off the idea of it being the Annie Healy and says nothing to Billy, only go wash your hands and face and get ready for supper.

  Soon word comes from several sources of the horrors taking place only miles outside The Isaacs. Dismal stories trickle in from Patrick’s Cove, Ship Cove, and Point Verde, where three schooners foundered earlier in the day, with swollen, lifeless, bloodied bodies bashing against the ragged rocks of the rugged Cape Shore coastline. The Virgin Rocks are blamed immediately as the culprits.

  Word from Magistrate Sullivan’s office at Placentia tells of Ship Cove men attempting to tow a submerged schooner in to Placentia. Bodies of drowned sailors have been recovered, they’re told, but all are believed to belong to Burin Peninsula crews. This brings some relief to the people of Fox Harbour.

  Crowds of people near Placentia Gut watch in fright and hopelessness as a submerged schooner is carried closer and closer to the land by the strong current below Castle Hill. The ruined ship all but disappears, except for the masts, and then heaves above the surface again like a wounded whale. The body of a dead man is lashed to the boat’s riggings. Each time it appears the shouts and screams of those on the beach echo off the surrounding hills. The ship’s tons of screeching and moaning wood seem to plead for the drowned man, as his head rolls from shoulder to shoulder, whiplashed from chest to back. The shrieks from the women and children grow louder as the schooner barrels in through The Gut. The dead man’s eyes look their way. The sight of his ghostly, torn, and bleeding flesh sends young girls and boys alike bawling behind their mothers’ aprons. The women pray while the men stuff their pipes and rolled cigarettes into their mouths, fumbling for a light.

  If we can get the boat ashore, the magistrate wires the newspapers, we’ll be able to see a name and if there are more bodies on board her.

  Ellen Kelly is pacing her kitchen floor when her daughter bolts through the door. Liz stands with her clothes dripping wet against the wall, putting on her best face for the almost-silent crowd. Her younger sisters are sitting on the floor, rocking back and forth, holding a stick between them and quietly reciting a nursery rhyme.

  Gran Kelly rocks furiously in the chair next to the stove, quickly passing her prayer beads through her fingers and thumbs. Although her eyes are open, she doesn’t bother to look in Liz’s direction, and never misses a word of the rosary whispering past her lips.

  The opening of the porch door and the stomping of boots on the floor gives the crowd a few seconds of hope. Until Uncle Mick Duke pushes the kitchen door open. He stands there awkwardly, cap in hand.

  He looks at his sister, Gran Kelly, around the room full of youngsters, and then to Ellen sitting on the edge of the daybed.

  “Ya needn’t tell me they’re gone, ’cause I already knows,” Ellen says. “I heard someone throwin’ lumber down behind the house earlier.”

  “’Tis a sign,” Gran Kelly says in a low voice. “An omen.”

  “I’ve bad news for ya, Ellen,” Uncle Mick barely manages to get out.

  The moments between these words and the next seem an eternity.

  “The Annie’s gone,” Uncle
Mick mumbles. “There was never . . . there was never a body got on ’er.”

  Ellen stares out the window, to the water, and watches the Annie Healy float in the harbour, the way she’s done for years. John comes into the house, the boys struggling with his black wooden sea box with the leather handles, and the girls in their Sunday dresses and freshly washed hair clinging to his dirty clothes. He tells them all to sit, right excited to paint on their little minds images seen only from the deck of a schooner on still nights: sunsets over Red Island, dolphins so lovely they make the salt water look the thickness of fresh cows’ cream, strange and beautiful birds from God knows where silhouetted on Point Lance Rock, and the commanding Isaacs, oh what a sight to see, like two burly soldiers in the distance standing guard over Fox Harbour. His smile upon every word speaks of the joy in his heart.

  “Mother! Mother!” the youngsters cry.

  Ellen’s mouth is half-open, almost smiling, but there’s no sound.

  John. Her John. Gone? No more shaking his cap at the young ones when they’re bad—the maddest he ever got. No more admiring him quietly while he turns the little ones upside down looking for gold, tickles them first thing in the morning, and tells them stories by the Parlor Stove during long winter evenings. Tales of storms and ships pounded to matchwood and dead men seen walking the beaches of Argentia and in The Sound, for years.

  The emptiness in Ellen’s guts since yesterday gets heavier and heavier. The weight of it takes her slowly to the floor. She screeches and roars, frightening the young ones who stay where they are, looking at one another. One after the other, their crying shakes their mother back to the present.

  Gran Kelly drops her beads and stumbles from the rocking chair, holding her chest, past Uncle Mick, and into the porch.