August Gale (23 page)

Along with desiring an ocean burial, Ambrose had another request: “Play ‘When You and I Were Young, Maggie,'” he told Alan “while my ashes are thrown overboard.” Written in the late 1800s, the song had been Paddy's favorite. The skipper often sang the lyrics (off-key and loudly) at parties or alongside the family piano. The ballad told of a tragic love story between a Canadian schoolteacher and his pupil, Maggie. The two fell in love and became engaged, but Maggie contracted tuberculosis. The couple was married a year before Maggie died in 1865. Their brief time together reminds me of the short time Ambrose spent with my Nana, the decade during which he fathered his first two sons.
Did the song stir memories of their years together in Staten Island and Brooklyn? Of his youth when he fell in love with the shy, blue-eyed girl, Patricia O'Connell?

In his later years, when he returned to Marystown, Ambrose played the song repeatedly during his stay. “I'd come home from work and that tape was playing all the time,” Alan tells us. “I don't know what it meant to him. He was always listening to it.”

I imagine my grandfather, alone in Alan's home, the somber lyrics wafting through the parlor with Ambrose on the couch, reflecting upon the years gone by.

Life's trials and challenges had not yet touched my grandfather when he left Marystown as a young man of eighteen, his hair thick and black, his face unwrinkled by time and choices that would weigh heavily on his conscience. He would not return to his birthplace for nearly five decades. His absence remained a mystery to his friends and family, who thought he had vanished from the earth. His mother, Cecilia, prayed nightly for him, fearing that her youngest son had gotten into some terrible trouble or was dead. And in the years after she lost Paddy to the August Gale, Cecilia continued to pray that Ambrose was safe, that some terrible fate had not claimed him, too. “She died not knowing if Ambrose was alive,” Alan tells us, shaking his head. “Shocking that he never wrote his own mother, aye?”

For decades, Ambrose had no contact with Marystown; he wrote no letters and made no calls—until he needed help. He phoned his sister Donalda in 1974 to ask her if she would allow Ambrose's son Michael to live with her in Marystown to avoid the Vietnam War draft. Donalda agreed to take her nephew in, but only after she hollered long and loud at her brother for disappearing without a word to his family.

“My mother was furious with him,” Alan says of Donalda. “For all those years, she had seen Granny Walsh suffer not knowing where her boy Ambrose was to.”

After his lengthy absence, Ambrose accompanied his son to Marystown. It was the first of several trips he would make to his birthplace, where he would reconnect with his family and childhood friends, reminiscing about the dories he rowed, the rigging he climbed, and the journeys he sailed with his brother Paddy.

“Ye can take the boy out of the bay, but you can't take the bay out of the boy,” Alan's son Jack would later tell me. “Where did he want to be buried? Where did he want his ashes spread? All those years after he left Marystown, he never talked Staten Island or Brooklyn or San Francisco. He talked about Marystown and what it was like before he left. This was always his home.”

Marystown offered my grandfather a safe harbor, a haven with few complications, few memories, to remind him of his devastating decisions. Still, he carried the guilt and regrets with him. He rarely talked about leaving his first two sons and his wife Patricia, but he once confided to Brenton's wife, “Take it from my experience, people always think the grass is greener on the other side, but it isn't.”

In the years before his death, Ambrose found work painting hospital offices. While on the job, he met a psychiatrist with whom he shared stories about his life, the family he had abandoned. The doctor offered my grandfather some free advice: “It would be good for you to talk to your sons to resolve your feelings.”

Surprised at the sudden contact, my father reddened with anger when Ambrose explained, “A psychiatrist said it would be good for me to call.”

My father's voice rose in disbelief. “But what about us? What about Billy, Ma, and me?”

Ambrose fell silent. He had no words to say.

On an August afternoon in 1990, my grandfather's last wish was fulfilled. Ambrose's daughters cast his remains into the sea while the melancholy song “Maggie” blared from Alan Brenton's boat. Kathy and Donnie wept as the familiar lyrics bade their father a final good-bye:

“There wasn't a dry eye on board the boat,” Alan remembers. “Geez, it was some sad.”

My grandfather was a month shy of his eighty-second birthday when he died in a California hospital in June 1990. Thousands of miles away, my father and uncle were unaware of Ambrose's illness or his death. No one had thought to inform them of their father's passing. Weeks after Ambrose's ashes were tossed into the cold Newfoundland waters, my father received a phone call from Ambrose's brother, Leo, with the belated news. His father—the man whom he had worshipped as a child and resented as an adult—was gone. There would be no chance for final words, no chance to mourn, to reconcile.

As he hung up the phone, my dad shed his own tears, stung by a final abandonment: “My father died and no one told me.”

T
he boy knew the bodies were coming home.

Word spread quickly throughout the town, as if there were an invisible cord that connected them all. From the fishing wharves, to the kitchens, to the hayfields, to the shops, the news passed from mouth to mouth. “B'y Gad, Skipper Paddy and his son Frankie are coming home.”

The talk had found its way to the small ears of the boy, and the words terrified Paddy Walsh Jr. His father and brother were not only returning to Marystown, they were coming home to the boy's house. They were going to be laid out in his family's parlor, and the thought of all this, the idea of bodies in his home, frightened the child. In his four-year-old mind, bodies meant no heads, no arms, no legs. He didn't want to see his father and older brother Frankie this way.

In the days since Father McGettigan had delivered the death notices, his mother's constant keening had shaken young Paddy, leaving the child nervous and uncertain. The priest had explained that his father and three brothers were gone, but the boy couldn't grasp the finality of what “gone” meant. He wanted his dad home, singing alongside the piano, his loud voice filling the room. He longed for the laughter of his older brothers, Frankie, Jerome, and James. But their bedrooms were empty and still now, and all this talk about bodies further confused Paddy. Seeking comfort, the boy ran into the kitchen hoping to find the woman who cleaned their home and tended the garden. “Please, ma'am,” Paddy pleaded, grabbing hold of the maid's dress, “look after me.”

Outside, dusk settled over the bay, stealing the last remnants of light from the summer sky. A few miles east, a schooner ferried Capt'n Paddy Walsh on his final voyage. The vessel sailed past the sights Paddy had eyed hundreds of times: the red lantern at Tides Point, the rocky coves of Beau Bois, and the green hills of Little Bay. As the schooner glided into Marystown's harbor, men, women, and children along the bay's southern and northern shores viewed the vessel as if it were an apparition. Women made the sign of the cross, whispering silent prayers. Fishermen removed their caps, still trying to reckon with the notion that Captain Paddy was dead.
B'ye Gad Almighty. Paddy Walsh. He had no fear of nothin'. He could find fish better than any of 'em. Yis b'y
.

A crowd of men gathered at Paddy's wharf, waiting to carry the coffined bodies from the schooner. Another group huddled at the wooden gate leading to the skipper's home. Billy Mitchell stood among them. One of Marystown's heftiest residents, Mitchell's face flushed red with the exertion of walking. His fondness for salt pork and beef “will be putting ye in an early grave,” Mitchell's doctor had threatened. But the doctor's warning didn't concern Mitchell; not much did.

Unlike most of the men in Marystown, Mitchell didn't fish; he couldn't boast about how much salt cod he killed or how far he could row a dory. Mitchell earned his keep making barrels at the local mill, and his passion was spinning stories. He collected details like bits of string, saving them until he settled in at a neighbor's kitchen table, where he could entertain and be rewarded in food and drink. There were few better storytellers along Newfoundland's southern shores, and Mitchell wasn't about to miss out on one of the biggest yarns of his lifetime. He knew Paddy Walsh as well as the next fellow and was determined to see for himself if the notorious skipper was really dead.

As the men carried the coffins along Paddy's wharf, Mitchell angled his way toward the larger box. Before anyone could stop him, he opened the lid. Mitchell eyed the blackened and bruised cheeks, the face bloated by death and sea. “'Tis not Paddy Walsh!” Mitchell hollered.

Father McGettigan squared his shoulders and glared at Mitchell. The priest wasn't in the mood for the storyteller's theatrics. He had listened to widows and children wail and screech over the past three days. More difficulties he did not need. He turned to Mitchell and spoke louder than he wanted: “Don't be stirring up trouble, Mitchell! Mrs. Walsh has it hard enough without you creating stories.”

“You can say what you like,” Mitchell answered. “But the body 'tis Tom Reid. You're taking him to the wrong home, ye are.”

McGettigan shot Mitchell a final warning before he ushered the men to Paddy's fish store, the wooden shed where the skipper stored and repaired his gear. Pushing aside the nets and fish tubs, the fishermen removed the bodies from the coffins and laid them on workbenches. They took in the sight of the blocky captain and the small boy. “Jaysus, ye think Mitchell is right? 'Tis it Paddy or Tom Reid?”

A group of local women nudged their way into the store, ushering the men from the room. “Hush now, and don't be daft with ye nonsense! We've work to do!”