August Gale (26 page)

Lillian demanded that the priest dig up the body that rested in her husband's plot, and the widow had another request for McGettigan: “Please check on Frankie, too. What if the body in his grave is really that of his older brother Jerome?”

“Both your boys are gone, Lil,” McGettigan told her, his voice sharp with irritation. “What's the difference which one is buried in the grave or in the sea?”

McGettigan's mood had soured since he had received Lillian's request. He wanted no part of exhuming a body that had been buried the day before. There had never been a body dug up in the history of Marystown, and McGettigan didn't want to be the first priest to oversee such a desecration. The whole town had gone mad, McGettigan thought. He couldn't walk the footpaths without meeting the eyes of a grieving widow or a fatherless child. The entire community slowed to a standstill. Several schooners had not left the bay since the storm. The shades of most homes remained pulled, the dwellings dark with sorrow. Many years would pass, the priest reckoned, before his congregation would recover from this terrible loss. Even McGettigan, himself, struggled to wake himself from a netherworld of shock and sadness.

The priest shivered at the thought of the roaring wind that had shaken the presbytery's roof. And there was no forgetting what he viewed on his doorstep the night of the gale. McGettigan knew that many of his parishioners believed in tokens, spirits that foretold of death. But the priest had little belief in such foolishness. The only spirit he believed in was the Holy Ghost, and he scolded himself for sharing his vision of Paddy and his crew with his maid. Now it seemed everyone in town looked at him queerly, thinking he was as daft as the town's grieving widows.

Still, there were other strange things that had occurred since the hard rain lashed his windows. The priest had begun to hear odd sounds as he walked through the church. Hooks like those hanging on the trawl lines rattled, unseen, hidden in the shadows. McGettigan had shouted in the darkened sacristy, “Who's there?” His voice echoed in the empty church, his fear rising to the rafters. He had departed from the building quickly, discounting the odd noises.
I just need a good night's rest
, he told himself. Still, he couldn't shake the image of Paddy on his doorstep, his old friend staring at him with vacant, unseeing eyes.

As if he weren't tormented enough, now Lillian was demanding that he dig up Paddy's body. Knowing he had little choice but to put the rumors to rest, the priest reluctantly gave in to the widow's request. McGettigan informed the local doctor and the constable of his decision. The three men agreed to examine the body the following day, before the flesh could further decompose.

Along the dirt paths, the fish wharfs, in shops and kitchens, word about the exhumation passed from mouth to mouth like a fire in the dry September woods. “Did ye hear, McGettigan's digging up Paddy's grave?” “Aye, the body never should have been buried there in the first place.”

Predawn fog crept into the Marystown harbor, as men with pickaxes and shovels headed along the dirt path to the boggy woods of Sacred Heart Cemetery. A small motorboat cut across the bay, ferrying the doctor and the constable to the northern shores of Marystown. Two young lads, Hughie Ducey and Bernard Butler, sat quietly among the men. As the boat neared the mooring, the skipper cut the engine and warned the boys, “Ye stay here till this business is done.”

Hughie and Bernard nodded. From their seats, they watched the men disappear over the hill leading to the graveyard. Once their backs slipped from sight, the boys jumped from the boat, running into the woods that bordered the cemetery. They settled behind trees for cover, hushing each other, as they eyed the crowd gathered at Paddy's grave. McGettigan stood by the freshly dug plot, cursing the dozen men who had shown up for the spectacle. Billy Mitchell placed himself at the front of the grave, his bloated face mocking the priest with a toothy grin. Three young men stood quietly with their shovels, waiting for McGettigan's orders. Tom Reid's eldest son, Billy, held his spade, nervously shuffling his feet, fearing whose body they'd find beneath the earth. The eighteen-year-old didn't relish the gruesome task ahead of him, but he couldn't stand the thought of his da resting in the wrong grave.

Shaking off the morning cold, the priest shouted to the men: “Get on with it!” The pickaxes and spades struck the ground, and the piles of dirt grew taller as the men removed the earth covering the two coffins. Mitchell took pleasure in the look on the priest's face; McGettigan's cheeks grew redder with every strike of the spade. The priest sighed as the pine boxes grew visible.

“Pull Paddy up,” he ordered.

The men carried the casket to the grave's edge and removed the nails from the wooden cover. No one spoke as the crowd viewed the body. A few of the men stepped back and blessed themselves. They knew your luck could turn after touching a corpse, that strange things could happen to those who disturbed the dead. McGettigan glared at the superstitious fishermen and pulled a knife from his pocket. The priest bent over the coffin. His thick arms raised the body upright. Without a word, McGettigan slashed the back of the coat covering the broad shoulders. The ripped cloth tore to reveal a long red scar—the gash Tom Reid suffered from his own ax.

Billy Reid stared at the blackened face of his father. “Da!” he cried.

McGettigan dropped the body back into coffin and turned from the grave with a final command: “Carry him up the hill and bury him in the Reids' plot.”

Tom Reid's sons carried their father's coffin up a small knoll and began digging their dad's grave. The boys would later build a large wooden cross to mark the plot where their mother would stand for hours, weeping and praying for her lost husband. While Reid's sons toiled in silence, two other men tossed dirt back onto Frankie Walsh's coffin. McGettigan wasted no time in leaving the cemetery and the dreadful mess behind him. Black robes slapping his heels, he retreated to the parsonage, where a bottle of rum waited. Billy Mitchell patted his bountiful belly and laughed. “Big Bull McGettigan won't soon forget this one!”

“Aye, Billy,” muttered one of the grave diggers. “I'm sure ye won't be letting him.”

Left alone to place the last shovelful of dirt on his father's grave, Billy Reid whispered a prayer for his da and his family. “How,” Reid wondered, “do I explain this to Ma?”

Later in her kitchen, Jessie Reid, scolded her son: “'Tis a shameful thing, you at the wake and not knowing your own father!” Billy Reid dug the toe of his worn shoe into the kitchen floor, unable to meet his mother's angry eyes. Throughout Marystown and the rural outports beyond, word of the mismatched bodies traveled. On fish wharves, in backyard gardens, at kitchen tables, and in huddled groups of schoolchildren, the stories were swapped, the details savored: “You should've seen McGettigan's face after he slashed the coat off Tom Reid's back. Shockin' angry he was.”

Slumped into his parlor chair, the priest sipped from a tall glass of rum. McGettigan gazed at the midmorning sun sparkling on the bay. His thoughts drifted back to just a week past, before the gale had torn apart this small outport and his reputation. McGettigan knew there would be no forgetting this day: a Catholic priest digging up a corpse and swapping bodies from one grave to another. The sacrilege would be remembered for generations.

He reached for the decanter of rum, hoping to dull the memory of Billy Mitchell's face, gloating at the graveside. The priest had no doubt Mitchell would make his way from one kitchen table to another, drinking cold beer and greedily consuming platters of beef, as he offered the details again and again.
There would be no getting over this
, the priest thought.
No getting over any of it
.

A
lan Brenton leads us through the graveyard. He walks past dozens of white-washed, century-old markers. “It's over here,” Alan says.

My father, sister, and I follow him toward the center of the Sacred Heart Cemetery, where two dark granite markers rise from the grass. We fall quiet, awed to be standing before Paddy Walsh's gravestone. The words etched in the polished granite read: C
APT
. W
M
P
ATRICK LOST AT SEA
1887 – 1935. E
VER
R
EMEMBERED; EVER LOVED
. Next to Paddy's stone stands another similar marker: I
N LOVING MEMORY OF
J
AMES
, J
EROME AND
F
RANCIS. LOST AT SEA
A
UG
. 25, 1935. R
EST IN PEACE
.

Mary Bernice, the baby for whom James's schooner was named, is also remembered on the stone with her name and august 20, 1920, death date. A third marker, rounded and whitewashed, bears the name of Lillian and Paddy's baby, Cornelius, the infant who died December 30, 1917, after a few short months of life. An etching of a small lamb and a cross cover the top of the stone, and the epitaph reads,

T
HERE WAS A LITTLE FLOWER THAT BLOSSOMED BUT TO DIE

T
RANSPLANTED NOW IN HEAVEN

T
O BLOOM WITH
G
OD ON HIGH
.

Nearby, there are several other grave markers for young children and babies, victims of a rural outport ravaged by poverty and disease in the early 1900s. A cluster of stones mark the loss of Paddy's younger brother Philip, who fathered seventeen children and buried six of them. One stone records four of the children's deaths: I
N LOVING MEMORY OF THE DARLING CHILD
A
DRAIN
W
ALSH, DIED
N
OV
. 1933,
AGED
13
YEARS
. A
LSO
A
LAN
W
ALSH
AGED
3
MOS
. E
DWARD
W
ALSH
AGED
5
MOS
. T
HOMAS
AGED
2
MOS
.

On this June afternoon, Alan, my father, sister, and I are the only visitors to the cemetery. Scores of small, wooden crosses mark the flat, barren terrain, where tufts of grass struggle to grow. The bogs and scrub brush that once overran the graveyard are long gone. So too, are the woods where young boys once hid to watch the spectacle of Tom Reid's body being pulled from the grave. In my mind, I see a crowd of men gathered on this patch of dirt sixty-eight years ago; Father McGettigan stands among them. I imagine the priest's anger as the fishermen lift the coffin from the ground and the scar is revealed on Tom Reid's back. As the priest feared, the story of the mismatched bodies has lived on for nearly seven decades. Almost everyone we meet knows the tale. “Did ye hear,” they ask us, “the story about Tom Reid being waked and buried as Paddy?” The peculiar wake and the exhumation (the only one to ever occur in Marystown) have become lore, legend, in this small town.

“Bit strange that Paddy's name is on the gravestone, but his body isn't there, eh?” Alan asks.

Though the names of Paddy and his three sons are listed on the stone, only one body lies beneath the earth: the remains of twelve-year-old Frankie. Like thousands of other fishermen, Paddy Walsh's body rests in the sea. I envision the skipper's final moments, the waves swamping his dory, the water filling his lungs. Before his last breath, did he cry out for help, seek redemption for his three sons and himself? Or did he die rebuffing God, like his younger brother Ambrose would decades later?

During his final days in a hospital bed, my grandfather shunned the Catholic priest who offered him last rites. “I haven't believed in God my whole life,” Ambrose told the minister. “And I'm not about to give in now.”

My grandfather did not want or receive the priest's absolution, yet I know he harbored remorse for his transgressions. His guilt weighed heavily on his conscience on March 28, 1989, the day of my Nana's funeral. That morning, Alan Brenton's first wife, Sybil Turpin, had flown to California to visit Ambrose and his wife, Arlene. Ambrose had just learned of my Nana's death through a family friend who lived in California.

While Arlene went to work, Sybil and Ambrose sat at the kitchen table. Staring blankly at the wall, Ambrose fell unnaturally quiet.

“He was never really what you call happy,” Sybil recalled. “But on the day your grandmother died, there was a heavy sadness about him. I think his life was flashing before his eyes then—the choices he'd made. He never talked about leaving his first family, but it was always there, his regrets about what he had done.”

From his wallet, Ambrose pulled the photographs that he had long kept hidden in his billfold. He handed Sybil two pictures, one of a toddler and the other, a boy of eleven. “These are my sons, Ronnie and Billy,” he told Sybil. “Patricia did a good job raising them. They turned out to be better men without me.”

That's a hard thing to admit when you're in your eighties and your life is nearly done
, Sybil thought. Ambrose had never before talked to her about his sons or his first wife, but on this afternoon, his thoughts focused on the past. He spoke about his son Ronnie's visits to the ship-rigging loft in Brooklyn, and he talked about how Patricia often wrote him letters, sending him updates about the boys: the college degrees they had attained, the women they had married, and the children they had raised.

Ambrose also had something else he wanted to share. He insisted Sybil read a story about the shy, blonde-haired girl he fell in love with on Staten Island. He retrieved the story from his bedroom closet, explaining, “This is about Patricia; it was written by my granddaughter, the reporter.”

Titled “Nana,” the high school essay detailed how my grandmother doted on my five sisters and me, spoiling us with homemade chocolate fudge, strawberry shortcake, and Sunday dinners; how she taught us penny poker and pig Latin, told us spooky stories and took us for walks in the woods, where mounds of dirt transformed into castles, tree branches into witches' fingers.