Jane Hillier’s husband was also at Corner Brook. She had two boys, Fred and Cyril, who fished with their father now, and four younger children. Jane had been terror-struck to see the harbour run dry from her station outside the Hall with her friends and neighbours, who also stood mesmerized. Down below, her oldest sons rushed their younger siblings out of the house, realizing that it was dangerously near the beach and acting on instinct. As their toddler brother, Stanley, ambled out, Fred picked him up under his arm, despite the child’s protests, and pushed each of the other children from behind, trying to hurry them to higher ground. By now, Jane was running toward them.
“Go back up the hill, Mother!” Cyril called. “We’re coming!”
When they reached the top of the hill where Jane stood waiting, glassy-eyed, for her children, the first wave drove in and smashed their house to pieces. Jane let out a wail. When the wave hauled back, Fred saw the fence fall down, the family’s fishing store flow out with the sea, and their trawls and rope unfurl in the water. The cash their father was earning would come in handy, he thought. They would lose just about everything, he knew, including his quintal of Madeira fish. Jane was thinking of the twenty pounds of pork she had stored away and the coal that was meant to keep them warm the winter.
Not far away, on the grasses of the hill, young bride Gertrude Caines felt her face grow hot with tears. She was twenty-one and not long married to Leslie Caines, a thirty-year-old fisherman, who had grievously injured his hand. Leslie was no longer able to fish and Gertrude was wasting away with worry. They had five dollars a week from Public Charities but it was not enough and moreover, it was not what Leslie wanted and certainly not what she wanted. Gertrude spent the entire summer bent over the dark earth, coaxing potatoes, carrots, turnips, beets, and cabbage out of the soil. As the July fog hung, she spread caplin on her garden, having gathered the little fish from the beaches herself. As September approached, she went among her burgeoning crops in the dusk and prayed to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Now, on the night of November 18, 1929, Gertrude knew, all her vegetables were gone.
9
Two waves had reached into Point au Gaul on the bottom of the Burin Peninsula, swamping the village and taking the lives of Jessie and David’s three young children, Jessie’s mother, Lizzie, the two Walsh women, Thomas Hillier, and young Irene Hillier.
The men of Point au Gaul had recovered most of the bodies under brilliant moonlight the night of the tsunamibut some were still missing the next day, including Irene Hillier and Mary Ann Walsh. That same strange night, a horse that had been swept out to sea swam back and walked onto dry land with no ill effects.
On November 19, 1929, the day after the tidal wave, a southeast wind came up. It churned the sea higher and higher, whipping up another panic in the village. The whitecaps brought wreckage back to the beach and right up to the remaining houses. The wind and waves also carried Mary Ann’s body to a small island on the other side of the neck of land on which her house had been situated.
The men and boys scoured the beaches of Point au Gaul but they could not find Irene’s body. Every family prayed that it would be delivered. Irene’s mother, Jemima, could not sleep; night after night she sat up at her bedroom window, listening to the waves and the wind. “It’s awfully cold for Irene out there,” she said repeatedly of her only daughter. Her husband, Joshua, who went to look for Irene at dawn every morning, tried to cajole his wife into bed but she would not rest. “I can’t sleep till she’s found,” Jemima said between her tears.
The bodies were all laid out in the hall, ironically built on high ground. Nan Hillier did not go to see her mother’s body. She did not see Jessie’s children either. “You’ll want to remember them as they are,” Herbert told her. “It’ll be too upsetting to see them any other way.” Besides, Nan was too busy tending to Jessie who still babbled and veered into hysteria.
Now homeless, David and Jessie moved in with Nan and Herbert. David’s dory was swept away, as was his stage and fishing gear. He would have to start his fishing enterprise from scratch. The Hipditches had lost most of their winter provisions as well, but that meant nothing, compared to the loss of their children.
The village held a joint funeral for Lizzie and her four grandchildren, including the missing Irene. But Jemima could find no comfort in the ritual, nor in the constant expressions of sympathy that came from her neighbours in Point au Gaul—not as long as Irene was out there somewhere.
The day after the funeral Lizzie’s spinning wheel, which she had been using the day of the tsunami, washed up on the Point au Gaul beach. It was intact and Nan took it into her own home to keep. A day later, a child playing in a small brook about a hundred yards inland found a prize teapot that Lizzie once owned. The teapot lid was missing but there wasn’t a chip out of the pot.
The newly widowed Lydia Hillier, too, grieved heavily, even as she awaited the birth of her third child. She also faced a practical problem in that the main source of her family income was gone. Her nineteen-year-old stepson, Harold, would have to be the breadwinner now. But Harold’s store and fishing gear had been swept away. And she worried that relations with her stepchildren were not always smooth. This was their house first, Lydia reminded herself worriedly, before she married their father. She reached far inside herself to comfort Caroline who cried ceaselessly for her father. Little Ben was so quiet it worried Lydia. Still a toddler, he was too young for her to know how much he understood. At least I still have my children, Lydia kept telling herself.
Her neighbour, John Walsh, no longer had anything. The sixty-six-year-old bachelor was in poor health but had somehow managed to jog up the hill to safety before the first wave cracked his little dwelling in two. Then it turned the clapboard into splinters and carried it out to sea. John Walsh turned around from the top of the hill with tears streaming down his ruddy fisherman’s cheeks. He had no bed now, he knew, no bedclothes, no sugar or tea, no stove to cook on or keep him warm. He had only the clothes on his back. He saw that, in addition to his house, his stage was demolished. He knew that his trawl lines would be gone, too, as would his 140-fathom, nine-inch manila rope. Where was his boat? He figured that was wrecked too. At his age, he’d have to start all over, somehow. Sixty-eight-year-old Manuel and sixty-one-year-old Jessie Inkpen had spent their whole lives in Stepaside, Burin, a little cove named after the home village of its first English settlers. The Inkpens had prospered and lived in a ten room, three-storey house, built near the water. By November of 1929, Manuel was in poor health and increasingly dependent on Jessie and on Bertha, their live-in maid.
Bertha had gone out visiting for the evening and the couple was having a cup of tea after their supper of fish and brewis when the first wave struck Stepaside. Manuel and Jessie found themselves knee-deep in gelid salt water as they sat at their kitchen table, and stood, shocked at the cold on their legs.
“My God!” Jessie cried.
“We’d best get out,” said Manuel, still holding his cup of tea.
“Shall we bring anything?” Jessie asked. “Shall we put our coats on?”
“I don’t think so, dear,” her husband answered. “I think we better get moving quickly before the water rises up.”
Their legs already numb with cold, they pushed one foot in front of the other, until they reached the back door, the one nearest the kitchen. Jessie, stronger than her husband at this stage in their lives, pushed against it and heaved. It opened and they stepped onto a flake, their own.