August Gale (30 page)

Before his retirement, McGettigan served in two more parishes, and he found himself delivering several more death notices to widows who lost their men to the sea. Yet he never faced another catastrophe like the August Gale. In the years before he died, McGettigan returned to live in St. John's where he enjoyed the city's fine restaurants and plays. In his quiet hours, alone before the parlor fire, he sipped his rum and reminisced about his time in Marystown and his surly and fearless friend, Captain Paddy. When the memories of the gale overwhelmed him, the priest sought solace from the books that lined his walls. Often, he read works from the British poet, Alfred Lord Tennyson. One poem in particular captured his emotions and sorrowful recollections of the storm. He read the words so often he could recite them by heart:

The Marystown fishermen's voices had been stilled, their hands forever vanished in the sea. Yet one voice still resonated in McGettigan's mind, one image still held strong. The priest saw Captain Paddy, his hand on the helm; he heard the skipper's shouts commanding the crew, “Heave up the anchor! Hoist the sails! We're away again, lads!”

Fair seas to you, Paddy
, the priest whispered.
Rest in peace, in the waters that you loved
.

M
y father walks along the Brooklyn pier. The October wind is brisk off the New York Harbor; whitecaps dance on the gray-green water. Decades past, a wooden wharf stood here, the pier where my grandfather awaited the Staten Island ferry on an August afternoon in 1935.

Somewhere nearby, in the waterfront neighborhoods of Brooklyn, Ambrose sat on a bench, eating his lunch as a breeze carried a newspaper to his feet. I imagine the terror that gripped my grandfather as he read the New York newspaper headline: A
UGUST
G
ALE
K
ILLS
M
ORE
T
HAN
40 N
EWFOUNDLAND
F
ISHERMEN
.

Scanning the story further, he found the words that caused him to cry out:

The hurricane that roared across Newfoundland over the weekend swept away forty lives. Tragedy concentrated in some cases on individual families. Captain Patrick Walsh and his son were found dead aboard the
Annie Anita
when she drifted into Hazel Cove on her beam ends. Six other men and another of Walsh's sons were listed in her crew and they were almost surely drowned
.

That was only part of the Walsh family tragedy, however. Captain Walsh's eldest son was skipper of the schooner
Mary Bernice.
Today, the vessel was found drifting bottom up in Placentia Bay, her crew missing
.

Along this gritty waterfront, my grandfather sat alone, collapsed in grief, sobbing for the death of his hero, Paddy, and his three nephews, James, Jerome, and Frankie. Distraught, he made his way here to the Sixty-ninth Street wharf to await the ferry home to his wife, Patricia, and his newborn son, Ronald. The news of the tragedy broke something deep inside my grandfather. “He went beserk,” a relative told me. “Screaming and shouting. He totally lost it.”

Five years have passed since my father shared the story of the August Gale with me. Here on this pier, a sudden and persistent breeze carried the prophetic newspaper to my grandfather's feet.
What if that story had not been remembered, retold decades later by my father, voiced to me on winter night? Would my grandfather have remained a stranger, my father's childhood a mystery?

On the horizon, the Statue of Liberty rises up toward the blue October sky.

My father gazes across the bay to Staten Island.
His story began here too. His memories, the good and the bad, resonate here
.

Surprisingly, it was my father's idea to visit the homes, neighborhoods, and churches of his childhood. “I thought it might be good for you to see them,” he tells me. My two younger sisters, the twins Janice and Joan, and my mother decide to accompany us; they realize this is a once-in-a-lifetime trip, and they do not want to miss it.

Yet this sojourn, like our Newfoundland journey, has triggered yet a new round of emotions in each of us. The night before we drive to New York, my dad reminisces about his younger years. The story of Ambrose's deadly street fight in Bay Ridge stands out in his mind. Ironically, it is one of my father's good memories.

At the time, in 1942, my Nana, father, and Ambrose lived in Bay Ridge, in one of the many apartments they rented during the post-Depression years. On the day of the fight, my father is seven years old and sent to buy milk at the local market. The dark-haired boy runs along Sixty-ninth Street. The grocery is a couple of blocks away from his family's home. He eyes the candy shelves as he enters the store, wishing he had a few spare pennies. He grabs the milk and pays for his purchase. Sprinting from the store, he races down the sidewalk. Up ahead, the entry to a Greek restaurant's cellar storage is open. The boy doesn't see the metal door, and his foot catches its edge causing him to trip. The milk bottles shatter, scattering dozens of shards. He falls, his hands splayed out in front of him. Before he gets up, he worries about the milk that pools on the sidewalk, and then he notices the blood that runs down his left hand like a little river.

“He needs seven stitches,” the doctor later tells Ambrose. “You need to take him to the hospital for ether.”

“He doesn't need ether,” Ambrose says. “Stitch him up here.”

The boy winces but says nothing. He knows his father doesn't like crying or weak men. In Newfoundland, Ambrose grew up without painkillers or hospitals. Ronnie falls quiet as he watches the doctor thread a large needle that reminds the boy of a fishhook. The doctor pulls the needle in and out of the boy's hand, six times. The child has never felt pain like this. But he sighs now, thinking it is over. The doctor eyes his work.

“We need one more,” he says.

This stitch would hurt more than the first six. Still, he does not cry. Later, Ambrose takes his son home and leaves to confront the Greek restaurant owner whose open sidewalk vault caused the accident. “You hurt my son!” he yells at the owner. “You need to pay for his doctor's bill.”

Affronted over the accusation and this brazen dark-eyed man, the owner hollers, “Get out!”

When Ambrose refuses to leave, the owner grabs a butcher knife and chases him into the street. There is shouting, screaming; strangers stop to stare at the man who shakes the silver knife in the afternoon air. Ambrose eyes the blade; he could outrun this man, but he does not. During the Depression, he fought as a middleweight to earn extra money, and like his brother Paddy, he refuses to back down from a challenge. He punches the restaurant owner in the head as the knife is raised. The man falls to the street, and his skull strikes the curb with a loud crack.

The wail of ambulance and police sirens grow closer, and soon the dead body and Ambrose are taken away. Days later, a judge frees Ambrose, ruling that the lethal punch was thrown in self-defense.

As my father retells this story, the details that linger in his memory are not the fight or a man's death, but the seven stitches and Ambrose's pride.

“He was so proud I didn't cry,” my father tells us.

Ambrose's son had suffered like a man. He bragged about his boy at poker games and to relatives. My father will carry those words, Ambrose's love and respect, close to his heart for the next six decades.

Absentmindedly on this October evening, my father rubs the scar. The gash on his left hand is faded now, the crescent moon mark barely visible. The sun dips below the trees outside as my two younger sisters and I try to visualize Ambrose, his bravado, his pride for our father. Would we have grown close to our grandfather, forgiven him if we had had the chance?

“I don't know if I would have liked him,” Janice says.

“I probably would have hugged him if I met him,” Joanie adds.

My father shakes his head at the thought of his daughter embracing Ambrose.

“He's still my grandfather, our blood,” Joanie says. “He had to live with the guilt.”

The conversation pauses as my father tries to explain his animosity, the memories of his mother who struggled to feed and clothe her two sons. One vision continues to haunt him, the image of his mother bent over a sink, scrubbing dirty pans in the back room of a restaurant.

“Every night, Billy and I had to sit at the counter and eat our dinners there while she washed dishes,” my father says, his voice breaking. “It was painful as hell.”

The memory ends there. My father wipes tears that we have never seen before.

“I'm sorry all this happened to you, Dad,” Janice says. She, too, is now crying.

The room is still. My sisters and I are beginning to realize how much hurt lingers. My mother sits quietly, by my side. She, more than any of us, knows how long my father has buried his feelings. For most of my parent's marriage, my father refused to talk about Ambrose or his childhood memories. “It has affected him his whole life,” she has told me. When she met my father in 1956, she was a raven-haired striking young woman, working as a secretary at the Raytheon Company in Bedford, Massachusetts. One of her jobs was collecting time cards, and the dark-eyed young man who stocked the shelves immediately caught her eye. “We just looked at each other, and it was love at first sight.”

Just out of the Navy, my father's confidence and good looks enamored the young woman from Lowell, Massachusetts; my mother's laughter and bright eyes captivated my father. Within a year they were married, in February 1957, at a wedding in which the guests were told Ambrose was dead. “I don't want to talk about him,” my father explained to my mother. “I don't want to hear his name.”

For the next forty-nine years of their marriage, my mother respected her husband's request, and now on this fall evening, she is keenly aware of how far my father has come in sharing, relieving the burden he has carried for decades.

The following morning is cold, brisk, and the October breeze swirls leaves into the air as we walk along Brooklyn's Sixty-ninth Street. My father searches for the street door that tripped him and prompted the deadly brawl. “I want to show you where the fight was,” he says.

Hands stuffed into his khakis, he looks for the familiar details of his childhood. Much is different now. He does not recognize the apartments built over the years. Tall buildings replace the vacant lots where boys tossed balls. The stores and restaurants have changed hands and names. Yet, there are two crimson metal doors. My father walks to them, trying to remember. He stops to stare at the two sheets of metal pressed into the sidewalk. Could this be the street vault he tripped over as a small boy?

Inside the nearby deli, a young man in a baseball cap pours coffee. A middle-aged man stands behind the counter. “Excuse me,” my father says. “I used to live here more than sixty years ago. Do you know if a Greek restaurant used to be here back in the 1940s?”

The two men cannot help my father recreate his past. They do not know if this deli was a Greek restaurant years ago. Still, there are the crimson metal doors outside. We step back outside and stare at them again. I see my father, a small boy running down this street, two milk bottles in his hands. I hear glass shattering and the sound of a boy's surprised cry as he eyes the blood running down his palm.

“This must be it,” my father says, staring at the doors, lost in his reverie of the past.

As we drive away from the street with the crimson gates, away from the water, I consider my father's scar, a symbol of his lesson learned as a child. The tender palm of a boy stitched together with a needle, large and shaped like a fishhook. Ambrose knew that his son had to endure, to accept pain. He had witnessed many a Newfoundland fisherman, his own brother Paddy, suffer through festering fishhook wounds, wrists swollen and blistered from the salty sea.
Pain is being lost in your dory on the Grand Banks with nothing to eat and your hands bleeding from pulling on the oars day and night in the cold curtains of fog. Pain is drowning in the sea, with a gale roaring overhead, a gale that you know will take you and your three sons to a watery grave. Pain is part of life, boy
.

At sea, Ambrose knew there were no doctors, no quick cures for infection. The Newfoundland fishermen had their own ways of dealing with pain. Afflicted with a fishhook in their hand, the superstitious and religious dorymen often pressed the hook three times into their wound, three times in honor of the Holy Trinity, three times to heal. Unknowingly, my father carries out his own ritual. Often, he presses his fingers into his palm, absentmindedly rubbing the scar, touching the wound to remember.
It taught me a great lesson. It toughened me up, taught me how to tolerate pain
. Ironically, the man who taught him the lesson would later provoke the deepest hurt.