August Gale (29 page)

B
Bride Hanrahan still dreams about her father grasping for her as he thrashes in the roiling sea. Her hair is white, her eyes failing with age, but the vision she had as a young girl remains vivid: the flash of yellow oilskins, her father's face disappearing in the ragged waves.

“It's the same dream I had the night my father drowned,” Bride says. “I always see his hand reaching for me as he cries for help.”

Seventy years have passed since the 1935 August Gale, but the thought of her dad alone, sobbing in the sea during his final moments, still torments Bride. She cannot bear to look at her father's picture; the portrait makes her too lonesome for his company. She cannot smell or view the sea without shivering, and she cannot erase the memories of the gale or the days following the storm.

“I still see Father McGettigan coming to our door,” she says. “My mother knew. ‘Get the candles,' she told me, ‘so we can pray that yur poor father is in heaven. Ye'll never see yur dad no more.”

“Of course we will, Mom,” the young Bride argued. “Da is going to come home!”

A month later, her family received another unexpected visit from Father McGettigan. The priest handed Bride's mother a letter from the constable in Harbour Buffett, a village in Placentia Bay. The note explained that a body had washed up on in Keating's Cove, a beach not far from where the
Mary Bernice
had capsized. The dead fisherman wore his yellow oilskins, a green hand-knit sweater, and his Kingfisher hip boots. The middle finger on his right hand was crooked, bent from a previous injury. A small gunny bag hung around his neck. A cloth pendant of the Blessed Mary and a medal of the Virgin's mother, St. Anne, were tucked inside.

“My mother knew it was my father from his crooked finger and the sweater she had knit for him,” Bride remembered. “He was so long in the water. His body was broken up, so they just put him in the grave there.”

Decades later, Bride and her sister visited her father's burial place in Port Royal, a small community near Coffin's Cove and Haystack, the village where the
Mary Bernice
had been towed to shore. Bride and her sister sat by their father's grave, boiled tea on the beach rocks, and prayed.

“My daddy used to like his tea, so we had our cup with him and cried. He always said, ‘If I drown, I don't want to be buried at sea.' After all his suffering, at least his body made it to shore.”

Now eighty-six and living in a senior citizens' complex in Boston, Bride pulls the picture of her dad from a drawer to show a visitor. She eyes her father's face, his smooth, youthful skin. The photograph was taken when he was in his thirties, two decades before his death.

“A long time has gone by, but I'm always thinking about him and the gale, and the other poor souls who went down with him. I always wonder what would my life have been like if my poor daddy hadn't drowned.”

Like Bride Hanrahan, the August Gale children and widows pondered the same question, lamenting how their fate would have been different if the hurricane had veered away from Newfoundland on that summer night in 1935.

“They were all left in a dreamland,” says Gerald Hoffe, who married Paddy Walsh's youngest daughter, Lillian. “The families had two lives: before the gale and then after. For many of the survivors, it was harder being left behind. They were stuck in time, trapped by memories and grief.”

Less than a year after she was placed in the St. John's Belvedere Orphanage, Lillian Walsh returned home to Marystown. A picture of her taken soon after she reunited with her family shows her standing in a field of daises outside her house. Her aunt, uncle, and younger brother Paddy Jr. stand with her in the garden. Lillian wears a dress and a slight, forced smile. In her hand, she holds a bouquet of flowers that she has picked—a gift, perhaps, for her mother.

For the most part, her older sisters Lottie and Tessie looked after Lillian and Paddy Jr. while their mother continued to grieve. Eventually, after Lillian completed her grammar and secondary education, she left Marystown to study nursing in St. John's. She worked in the operating room and supervised her own floor of hospital patients. She earned a reputation as a skilled and unflappable medical professional. Like her father Paddy, she did not shy away from a challenge or a patient who needed calming or a stern word.

A stroke victim later in life, Lillian ended up in a nursing home, in pain and unable to control her limbs. Shortly before her death, she bemoaned her crippled body and the tragedy that had claimed her beloved father and brothers. For years, she wished that her dad had taken her with him on that fateful journey. Depressed and distraught, she cried to her husband, “I wish I had sailed with my dad and brothers that day. I wish it was me in that boat.”

Lillian's younger brother Paddy Jr. struggled with his own sorrow and confusion over the tragedy that claimed his father and three brothers. He grew up in Marystown shadowed by his dad's legacy. The young boy became accustomed to fishermen's voices trailing his footsteps. “Aye, that's Captain Paddy Walsh's son. Only Walsh male not taken by the sea.” Out of respect for his father, Paddy Jr. received special treatment from captains, who allowed him to board their vessels and climb the masts. Still, the boy longed for his dad and three older brothers. Surrounded by women in his home, he was lonely and bereft of male companionship. In a photograph taken soon after the gale, Paddy sits on a fence post in the corner of his yard. His hair is curled in ringlets that obscure his face. His gaze is cast downward, forlorn. Facing east toward the ocean, his small body is framed by the bay as it reflects the summer light.

For two years after the storm, he woke at night screaming, unsure of where he was or what terrified him. Unable to cure the young boy, the local doctor suggested his mother Lillian ask the priest for help. Reverend John Fleming, who would replace Father McGettigan, stopped Paddy on his way to school one morning. He rested his hands on top of the boy's head and uttered several prayers.

“You will be fine now, Paddy,” the priest explained.

Paddy never had another bout of nightmares or hysteria. In the years that followed, he dreamt about captaining a schooner like his father, but Paddy never pursued a life on the sea because he knew such a decision would break his mother's heart. Instead, he continued to row the family dory across the bay to attend the Catholic school located on Marystown's northern shore. There in the five-room school run by the Sisters of Mercy, Paddy earned his high school diploma. Eventually, he left Marystown and settled in Calgary, where he became a stockbroker, married, and had three daughters of his own.

In 2001, sixty-six years after the August Gale, Paddy's eldest daughter decided Marystown would provide a fitting backdrop for her father's seventieth birthday. With the approval of Alan Brenton, who owned Captain Paddy's former house, and the local mayor Jerome Walsh, a party was planned in the meadow where the skipper's cows and sheep once grazed. On a warm August afternoon, scores of relatives—grandchildren, cousins, nieces, nephews, and other gray-haired men and women who had lost their fathers to the 1935 hurricane—gathered to celebrate Paddy Jr.'s birthday and to remember the gale that forever changed their small community. Tables and tents were set up in Skipper Paddy's old field. Music played, memories were shared, and the legendary doryman Jim “Pad” Kelly sang sea shanties and told stories about the “devil” that danced on the water that summer so long ago.

When the local newspaper reporter asked Paddy how it felt to be “home,” he explained: “When you leave a place you love, you can take a little bit of it with you, and you leave a little bit of it behind, but it will always be home.”

Among the seventy people attending the reunion was Jamie Walsh, the baby born the night of the gale. Like Paddy, Jamie relished the opportunity to be among family, to remember the town where she had lived as a young girl. Birthed the night her father Captain James Walsh drowned, Jamie never recovered from losing both parents at an early age. After her mother Lucy abandoned her at the age of six months, Jamie was raised by her grandparents in Little Bay. Seven years passed before Jamie's mother returned to Marystown.

“That was the first time I had ever seen her,” Jamie recalled. “Then she left again for the States. My grandparents could not have been any better raising me, but I always had an insecure feeling, like someone would always be leaving me.”

Jamie would wait another eight years before her mother remarried and could afford to take her to California. Fifteen and used to living in a small outport of eight hundred, Jamie was overwhelmed with the cars, crowds, and the noise in her new home. She also felt like an unwelcome stranger in her mother's company. Her mother Lucy could not look past the cruel irony: As her daughter drew her first breath, her husband took his last.

“She always resented me for it,” Jamie remembered.

While her mother refused to talk about Marystown, her deceased husband, or anything connected to the sea, Jamie collected model schooners, lighthouses, and pictures of sea captains and sailors, and she always wondered:
What if my daddy had lived? Would he have held me and sung to me? Taken me fishing on his schooner?

Three weeks after Paddy Jr.'s party, Jamie and several other August Gale children gathered for a memorial service on August 25, the anniversary of the storm. Doryman John Brinton's daughters, Mary, Sadie, and Theresa, and fisherman Michael Farrell's son Michael Jr. sat in the front pew of the Sacred Heart Church with Jamie to remember their fathers. The gray-haired men and women held each other and wept as the service concluded. “None of us ever forgot the loss,” Jamie said. “Ever.”

Like her granddaughter, Lillian Walsh carried the memories of the August Gale close to her heart for the remainder of her life. She also chose to remain single. “I'll never find another man like Paddy,” she told relatives. “So, I'm not going to bother trying.”

For the first five years following the gale, she continued to wear black and spent much of her time isolated in her home. After countless hours staring at the bay watching for Paddy's returning sails, she could no longer bear to view the water. She moved the parlor couch and chairs away from the windows, turning her back on the tides, the rhythm of the sea that she had grown to know so well. Rarely did she venture outside, preferring to remain in her darkened rooms, sewing and conjuring memories of the past.

“For a long time, she didn't know if she was in this world or the other,” her son-in-law Gerald Hoffe recalled.

Her two eldest girls, Lottie and Tessie, watched over their mother and tried to pull Lillian from her stupor. The summer after the storm, the three of them sat on a wooden bench outside their home. Flanked by her daughters, Lillian wore a black dress, stockings, and a large, dark bow around her neck. Her mournful attire is stark against the white picket fence and her daughters' light-colored dresses. I imagine that someone had coaxed Lillian outside for some fresh air, sunshine, and a family portrait, but it is clear that she was there reluctantly. In the picture, her lips are pressed together tightly, her white hands folded in her lap. Lillian's daughters wrap their arms around their mother's shoulders, holding her close, trying to boost her spirits.

“Don't ever believe that you can die from a broken heart,” Lillian often told her family and friends. “Because if it were true, I'd be dead.”

In 1950, she sold the home on the hill, the old Molloy Hotel that Paddy had bought as a surprise for her. She lived with her daughter Lillian for several years in Chapel's Cove, and she told stories about the August Gale over and over to anyone who would listen. She recounted her premonitions the night before her husband sailed, the terrible deaths that befell her three sons and husband, and the misidentified body that led to Tom Reid being buried in Paddy's grave. When her husband's youngest brother Ambrose finally returned to Newfoundland in 1975, he visited Lillian.

“The two of them sat at the table telling stories till the air turned blue,” Gerald remembered. “They were both fond of talking of the past. Neither one of them got over losing Paddy. He was Ambrose's hero and Lillian's one and only love.”

Two weeks before she celebrated her ninetieth birthday, Lillian died of cancer. Her body was returned to Marystown, where she was buried next to her son Frankie's grave.

Not immune to the sorrow that gripped his community, Father McGettigan found himself caught up in his own grief following the gale. He continued to hear odd noises in the church, a rustling like the sound of oilskins. His parishioners noticed the dark circles beneath the priest's eyes and his haunted gaze. McGettigan could barely look at Paddy's empty, abandoned wharf. The priest knew there would be no more shouting, cursing, and singing from the skipper as he set sail or returned home. Paddy's voice, like the voices of the other August Gale fishermen, was silent, still now.

Soon after the first anniversary of Marystown's tragedy, McGettigan received orders to serve in St. Mary's Bay, along the southern coast of the Avalon Peninsula where the
Annie Anita
had washed ashore. Several in the Marystown congregation were eager to see the gruff priest depart, while others mourned his exodus. Before he left, he stopped to say good-bye and offer a prayer for Paddy's widow, who he knew would struggle for a good long while. Picking up Paddy Jr. in his arms, McGettigan encouraged the five-year-old boy to behave as best he could. “Be good to your mother, son.”

Though he desired to put the sorrow of the August Gale behind him, misfortune and poor luck followed the priest. The second anniversary of the August Gale had barely passed when a storm struck St. Mary's Bay. McGettigan's young maid, Lizzie, who had moved with the priest, stood outside the presbytery admiring the last summer roses as the sky darkened. Suddenly, she heard a loud crack and saw a flash of light. A thunderbolt struck the rectory. The lightning shattered the chandeliers and blasted the bedroom where Father McGettigan brushed his hair, preparing for Mass. The bolt blackened the priest's bronze bed and knocked McGettigan face-first to the floor. Outside, the lightning burned a ribbon of grass down to the bay. Shaken and temporarily stunned, the priest recovered, but he became especially wary of dark skies and summer storms.