The Doryman (11 page)

Chapter Twenty-Six

A
ngela spent yet another night worrying about her husband. Again she thought of her children; were they orphans? Lucy and Monnie were almost old enough to go into service. She knew people in St. John's who could help them get good positions. She'd probably send them there. Like herself and their Aunt Rachel, they'd do that for a few years before they got married. They were very pretty girls, Lucy with her dark eyes and skin, and Monnie with her sky-blue eyes and high cheekbones. They were almost grown now. But Patrick, named for her father, was just a few months old. He wouldn't even know his father if he died now. And Vince and little Jack ... well, boys needed their father. Vince would want to go fishing with Richard in five or six years, in the shore fishery, at least. He was six now and adored his father, following him everywhere, always asking him questions. Richard got such a charge out of him.

Where was Richard? That question had almost driven her mad during their fifteen years of marriage. It was always in her head, whenever there was any sign of weather, and many times when there was not. It always left her frustrated. It emphasized her powerlessness. There was never any answer to it. Not until she looked out the window or up from the turnips and cabbages in her kitchen garden and saw him coming up the hill. It was late now, nearly the end of November, but he might still be at sea.

They were strange events last night, awful strange, not like any of them had ever seen before. Nobody could explain it. Thank God the storm hadn't caused much damage. Hopefully it was the same in the other communities in the bay, although Little Bay was more sheltered that most.
It might be different around Burin
, she thought, where many of the buildings and houses were perched on bald rocks poking out into the sea, and farther up the bay, around Lawn where she had relations. No shelter there. They built their houses in that place to be near to the fishing grounds, but maybe it wasn't so safe there.

*

Angela would have been pleased to know that Richard was in fact onshore at Oderin. The
Tancook
had finished her last trip of the year and had done well. John, Val, and the rest of the crew were in a good mood, having returned to the harbour with a full load of fish. They eagerly looked forward to Christmas.

They were so well pleased with themselves that they didn't mind doing the usual end-of-season work, as back-breaking as it was, and even though they were exhausted after baiting their hooks and hauling their trawls almost around the clock for weeks on end. Around suppertime they were on deck with the
Tancook
moored, folding and lifting the mainsail, an onerous task, when they felt the first tremor.

“What the hell was that?” Val asked.

“It's like the earth shook,” Richard said.

“Like an earthquake you get down south,” John answered.

Like his brother, Val had been to the West Indies and had seen the destruction wrought by the high winds of fall hurricanes and sudden earthquakes.

“Be glad we don't live down south,” he said. “They can do some harm. They can wreck a place. It can take years for a place to get back on its feet after a quake.”

A couple of hours later, Val and Richard stood in the doorway of one of the stores of the Manning premises, having just put away the mainsail with the other dorymen. They had paused for a quick rest. Then they noticed the peculiar action of the waves.

Suddenly, Oderin Harbour was empty, clean and dry. They were looking at its bottom. Then, about five minutes later, it was full with a high wave. The men were amazed.

“I don't know what the hell that is,” Val said.

Richard was bewildered, too. He was thankful that the waves weren't higher and that they didn't seem to be destructive. Like Little Bay, Oderin would be spared that night. He hoped they weren't worse anywhere else.

*

The subterranean earthquake off the Grand Banks that November night measured 7.2 on the Richter scale. The quake caused the sea floor to move several yards, causing the water to go back and forth for several hours. Some of the waves raced across the ocean at more than 800 kilometres an hour, as fast as an airplane. This speed took them far, far away from where they originated.

When a
tsunami
reaches shallow water near a coastline, its waves increase in height and become a mountain of water. It is at this point that harbours become empty and everything on their bottom exposed. But then the waves rush in at frightening speed, wreaking the kind of damage experienced by the people of the Burin Peninsula on November 18, 1929.

Tsunamis
create massive waves, often fifty feet high but sometimes 135 feet high. Each wave is higher than the one before. The time period between waves is between ten and thirty minutes. Because of their size, they can be murderous. In 1896, more than 20,000 people were killed by a
tsunami
in Sanriku, Japan.

Japan is vulnerable to
tsunamis
, sitting as it does in the Ring of Fire, the prime
tsunami
-prone region that encircles the Pacific Ocean. Hawaii, a string of islands in the middle of the Pacific, the world's largest ocean, is very susceptible to
tsunamis
, generally experiencing one a year. Alaska, much farther north but also on the Pacific, has one about every two years. The
tsunami
that hit the Burin Peninsula in November 1929 was way outside the Ring of Fire, and the people who lived there had no way of knowing it was coming. They didn't know what hit them. Some of them thought the end of the world had come.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

A
s details of the disaster trickled into Oderin, Richard and the Mannings readied the
Tancook
for an unexpected winter voyage. It was bitterly cold, with intermittent snow squalls and a stubborn wind coming from the southeast. A sense of helplessness pervaded the air as they heard sad tales of dead women and children trapped in houses swept out to sea. Despite the weather, the Banks fishermen felt the need to render whatever assistance they could to the stricken people of the peninsula, so they hauled the heavy sails out of storage. They worked almost around the clock to hoist them and get the standard rigging in place. They took two of the dories out of storage and put them back on the schooner in case they were needed. They nearly froze as they did these things, but they wanted to do what they could.

Richard had sent word to Little Bay via another Oderin western boat that he was fine, that he had been on the island when the “tidal wave,” as they called it, struck. He felt bad that Angela had fretted over him. She had worried for almost two days, until she'd heard he was fine. It was the same for his sisters Rachel and Mary Jane, and their husbands, too, and would be for young Annie when she married. He knew that Little Bay had been largely spared. But he also knew that friends in Burin and Lawn and Lamaline were destitute and homeless.

They sailed out of Oderin Harbour into a squall, worrying not about themselves but the survivors of the disaster. They said little, but each man thought of the horrors of little children drowning in their own homes. As they drew near to the Burin Peninsula they saw eerie signs of the
tsunami
. Wreckage floated by them: a window frame from someone's house, part of the lace curtain still attached, pickets from a fence, the stouts that had once held a stage in place. They didn't know if they should pick these things up or not. There was no protocol for such events in this country.

Farther along they saw smashed-up dories and part of the sloped roof of a house, a chest of drawers still intact, chair legs. It was the pieces of houses that caught in their throats, that quickened in their stomachs. The sights were horrific, but they could not help but watch. Most of all they feared seeing bodies, but the search for bodies was partly why they were out here. So few of them had been recovered, a fact that had added to the incalculable grief the survivors felt.

“Burin would have got some of the worst of it,” Richard said to John, who was at the wheel.

“Yes. Rock Harbour maybe, where it's built exposed like that,” John answered. “And Port au Bras.”

“Some of those houses in Port au Bras are awfully close to the breakwater,” Richard said. “Might not have been a good thing the other night.”

John nodded, recalling that many in the community had died during the quake.

“All right, let's head to Port au Bras, then,” he said.

Then Richard spotted a large white object floating in the water to the south. John pointed the
Tancook
right at it.

It was a house, a two-storey with all its windows broken out. It was battered, to be sure. But it looked sturdy, and it was still floating quite well all this time after the quake. They moved closer to it, tentatively since they didn't know how movable it was in the water. Although they didn't realize it, they were afraid, too, afraid that they might find the body of a child or its mother.

“The roof looks like it's in good shape,” Val said. He had joined his brother and brother-in-law at the wheel.

“Come on, we'll row out to it,” Richard said, getting excited.

Before long, he and Val had lowered one of the dories into the water, ignoring the choppiness of the waves in their eagerness to help. Then they rowed ferociously and came right up to the house.

“Be careful, lads!” John called out. But they couldn't hear him with the wind.

Richard and Val could see that the house still had some furniture inside. In the top storey there were beds and chest of drawers that slid here and there with the swell of the sea. They decided they should tow it back to Burin, where the local people would know what to do with it.

They rowed back to the
Tancook
to fetch ropes, which the other men threw down into the dories. With the rest of the crew, Richard and Val spent the next two hours tying the house to the ship. It was a tedious and dangerous task, lest the house topple over on top of the dorymen. But it did not, and they sailed for Burin. As they slowly began the tow, Richard stood at the
Tancook's
stern, deep in thought. Then he went up to John at the wheel.

“John, b'y,” he said. “That house belongs to Port au Bras. It's one of those houses that was by the breakwater, and I believe a fellow by the name of Fudge owns it.”

“You sure?” John answered, glancing at him. God, it's cold, John was thinking. What a time for a disaster like this one.

“Yes, I'm sure,” Richard answered. “I thought a lot about it when we were rigging her up.”

“All right, that's good enough for me, Dick,” the Captain answered. “Your memory never failed you yet as far as I know.”

He changed course and pointed the schooner towards Port au Bras.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

P
ort au Bras was one of the communities hardest hit by the underwater quake. Eleven houses had been swept away. So had fish, provisions, stages, flakes, outbuildings, and small boats. The worst of it, though, was the loss of seven lives, including three little girls, all sisters, with only four bodies recovered.

Whenever a schooner or western boat came into port, local people came rushing out to meet it. Children appeared on the shoreline, running about in excitement. Their mothers gathered and chatted, waiting for the ship to dock and expel its dories and dorymen. This time, as the
Tancook
pulled into Port au Bras, there was only a sorrowful silence. No one came to meet them. No one stared in wonder at the odd sight of a schooner towing a house.

When they were moored, the men gathered around Captain Dalton of the relief ship
SS
Daisy
, who told them of the losses in great detail. The
Daisy
had towed one house to Burin and salvaged four schooners, which she brought back to Port au Bras. The Captain planned to fetch others, which he knew were on the bottom of the bay, when the weather improved, though it was late November now. He complimented the
Tancook
for the retrieval of the Port au Bras house.

“You'll find the people here are in deep shock,” he said to sombre nods all round. “It's the same all along the coast. Some of them just sit and stare. They can't even speak. They can't believe what happened. It was so fast, so unexpected.”

“What do the doctors and nurses say about their prospects?” Jack asked.

“Well, it'll take time,” the Captain answered, not really sure what to say. “Shock is a hard thing.” Then he returned to a topic with which he was more familiar. “There's lots of rebuilding to be done.”

“It had to be winter,” Richard muttered.

“Those people are really suffering without their own homes,” Captain Dalton added. “They'll be without them till late spring at the very earliest.”

“Well, we'll be off to find the owner of this house,” John said, suddenly anxious to do something, anything.

“It's one of the Fudges, I'm sure of it,” Richard said.

They doffed their caps at Captain Dalton, who boarded the
Daisy
. He was set to return to Lamaline and St. Lawrence, where the weather had prevented his earlier attempts to land.

The men of the
Tancook
bent into the wind and headed into the village. They knocked on the door of the first house they saw, and entered.

“We're sorry for your trouble,” John began quietly. Dozens of eyes looked blankly at him. “Ah, we found a house, ah, at sea,” he continued. “And we towed it back here.”

“It was one of the ones on the breakwater, belongs to a Fudge,” Richard said, sounding more confident than his brother-in-law.

“That's mine or my brother's,” a hollow-eyed man said quietly. “If it's his, he won't want it. His wife and three little girls are all dead. They died in that house.”

The men of the
Tancook
felt shivers travel down their spines. They hadn't considered such a scenario. The man who spoke showed no more interest in their find.

The room was filled with silence.

Richard looked around the little kitchen. There were people everywhere, some standing, some sitting, others leaning against walls. A jumble of people were crammed on the daybed. There were tired old men and women, sombre people in their middle years, and quiet children and youths. No one said anything. Most of them looked at the floor. There was a hint of shame in their way. But there was a strain of anger, too, threatening and bubbling just beneath the surface.

There was a cloud of sickness about the place. People coughed and sneezed. Then it dawned on Richard that most of them were homeless, their homes having been carried off to sea by the waves and now they were crowded in here, one of the few buildings left standing in Port au Bras. His heart sank way into his belly.

They looked cold. Some of them shuddered and shivered. Then he realized it was almost as cold in here as it was outside. They had no wood; they had lost that, too. Of course, he thought. They had lost everything. And the main window in the kitchen had been blown out. They had patched it over with sailcloth, but a fierce draft blew in. Some of the children had bluish lips. Mucus dripped from their little nostrils, but even the older ones made no effort to wipe it clean.

Richard suddenly remembered the bedclothes, sweaters, sweater coat, mittens, and caps the Manning and Jarvis women of Oderin had piled onto the bunks of the
Tancook
for the stricken people. “We've got some warm clothes aboard the boat,” he said. “I'll go and carry them up.”

He hoped to see their faces brighten at this news, but they didn't. Captain Dalton had said that the doctors on the relief vessels had left drugs for the people, but there seemed to be no cure for what ailed them.

In the forecastle of the
Tancook
, Richard grabbed a big canvas bag and stuffed it with whatever he could find: tea, bottles of molasses, twine, small nails. Then he ripped his holy medal off his neck – the one his mother had given him long ago – and threw it into the bag. It never occurred to him that the people of Port au Bras were not Catholic.