knew something of the deaths and destruction that had visited Point au Gaul that night but he didn’t want to be the one to tell Nan; he thought that duty should fall to her husband. He thought also that the family should be together when she was informed of the many likely deaths among her kin. Silence hung heavy as they waited.
Suddenly the door burst open and Nan’s brother, Tom, ran in, his face covered in red patches.
Nan ran out to the porch to meet him.
“What’s wrong, Tom?” she asked, her heart thumping loudly again.
He pulled her to him and sobbed.
“Don’t you know Mother is gone?” he cried. “Father’s home is gone, too!”
Nan drew in air and let it out in a great cry.
“Oh no!” she sobbed. “Oh no!” The tears poured down her face as she and Tom hugged each other like survivors on a raft.
Then Tom told her that their sister Jessie’s children had all been swept away.
Nan howled at the news and fell into a chair. Jemima’s daughter, Irene, was gone as well, he said. She rocked back and forth, her arms folded across her chest.
Then Jessie and David opened the door and came in. Jessie’s clothes were drenched, even her long dark hair was dripping cold water.
“I want my baby,” she said. “My children are gone. I want to know what happened to Thomas and Henry. I’m nursing Elizabeth…”
David stood like a fencepost, his eyes sunken and blank.
“She keeps talking like that,” he said. “And I can’t keep her indoors.”
Nan took Jessie in her arms and for ten long minutes both sisters cried from deep in their bellies. Afterwards it seemed that Jessie’s babbling had ceased. But then she said that she had to nurse Elizabeth. Nan took her upstairs and began to undress her and dry her off.
Downstairs, the men stood in the living room, saying nothing. Before long they heard Jessie scream about her lost children. She demanded to know what had happened to them and why they weren’t safe. When there were silences they knew Nan was talking softly to her. Then Jessie shouted again, wanting to know every detail of how they had been torn from their grandmother’s home and why. David put his hand to his mouth and closed his eyes.
“Sit down, David,” Tom said gently.
Upstairs, Nan begged Jessie to quieten down.
By now, Herbert had returned home with his and Nan’s four children. They sat on the day bed in the kitchen, like ducks in a row, too afraid to move or say anything. Herbert sent Tom to fetch Nan’s father, Henry, so that the old man could be with his daughters and son in his grief.
Soon Henry was sitting in Nan’s kitchen with his grandchildren, listening to Jessie’s mournful cries. After awhile, Ruby went upstairs and sat outside Nan’s room where her Aunt Jessie lay. She crouched down and prayed for her dead cousins but mostly for Aunt Jessie. Now Ruby knew what they meant by the phrase “hell on earth.”
Herbert and Tom settled David in the Hillier kitchen with cups of tea and lassie bread. As he spread the molasses on the bread, Herbert felt guilty that his wife’s kitchen was untouched, that his floors were dry. But there was little time for emotional indulgences. He and Tom quickly went to the porch and put their rubber boots on. They had decided to go out and see what could be done. By now, Herbert deeply regretted going to the Orange Lodge supper in Lamaline when he might have been of some assistance to his own village. There was no way of predicting what would befall Point au Gaul, he knew, but perhaps he shouldn’t have dismissed the earth tremor as he did. It was obvious now that it had something to do with the great waves that had swept houses, fishing rooms, and women and children away.
As he and Tom picked their way through the wreckage that was strewn through Point au Gaul, Tom told him what had happened in his absence. The first wave had rolled in on the flat land of the village and lifted houses and stores off their foundations, smashing them to bits. It swept the entire waterfront clean, carrying virtually everything there out to sea. It was the first wave that had taken Henry and Lizzie Hillier’s house out to sea and with it, Lizzie, and her four grandchildren.
On the opposite end of the beach on a neck of land, the first wave—the one that young Ruby Hillier mistook for sheep—splintered an old two-storey house. Two women, eighty-five-year-old Mary Ann Walsh and sixty-year-old Elizabeth Walsh lived there together. One of the women was killed in the initial crash while the other was pulled out to sea.
“They say Thomas Hillier is missing, too,” Tom said of his neighbour with the same name, the fish oil inspector.
Herbert shook his head.
“He wasn’t even supposed to be home,” Tom continued. “He wanted to come home for his birthday and have a party. It was the first time in his life he ever wanted one, well, since he was a child anyway. Young Caroline was running around earlier talking of how they were making two cakes. She was so excited about it. Now they’re out looking for him. He went out to haul his boat up before the first wave came.”
“How’s Lydia?” Herbert asked of Thomas’ wife.
“Well,” Tom answered, his brow knitted, “she has another baby due soon.”
Herbert shook his head again.
“I’m very sorry for your mother,” he said suddenly.
Tom nodded.
By now they had reached a group of men who were looking for bodies. It was a difficult task given the amount of debris clogging the beach and harbour. They broke into small groups and assigned each other sections of ground to cover. They were confident by now that the erratic tidal action was over and the bright moonlight was helpful to them as they went about their grim task.
Two of the men found Thomas Hillier’s body at ten o’clock. Water-logged and leaden, it took four of them to carry the body to the hall.
“Right where his boat would have been,” said Herbert. “It’s the strangest thing. Was he dragged out and brought back in? Or hit on the head by a piece of wood?”
“There wasn’t a mark on him,” Tom answered. “He obviously stayed out too long. He tried too hard to get his boat to safety.”
“He wasn’t a fisherman,” Herbert muttered. “He wasn’t around the water as much as the rest of us. Perhaps he wasn’t as afraid of it as we are…”
At the hall, pregnant Lydia cried over the body of her husband. She pushed her large tummy to the side and lay her chest and head on him as he reclined lifeless on the table. She could not hear the sobs that rippled through the hall for her and her fatherless unborn child. At her side, her daughter, Caroline, sniffled for the birthday party that would never happen. She kept thinking of an incident from earlier that night. Before supper, her high-spirited father had thrown a stone into a pool of water and splashed mud on his jacket. At home, as the family’s potatoes boiled on the stove top, Caroline had asked him, “Father, may I brush the mud off your jacket?” Thomas had turned to his daughter and answered quietly, “Yes dear, you do that as you may never get the chance again.”
Not long afterwards the men came across the body of Nan’s sixty-six-year-old mother, Lizzie. She was not far along the beach from Thomas Hillier, making the villagers think that she might have died from injuries sustained in the initial crash of the first wave, although there were none visible to the naked eye. Very soon afterwards, Herbert and the other men found the little bodies of Jessie’s three children, Thomas, Henry, and baby Elizabeth. Three-year-old Henry, clad in his pajamas, was lying in the house of a motorized dory trapped in the landwash. His hands were curled around the rails as if he were trying to save himself; it was obvious he had survived the impact of the first wave and was trying his best to live. The men who found him buried their faces in their hands and tried to stifle the sounds of their grief.
After finding the children and bringing them to the hall, the men gave up searching for the night. They knew young Irene Hillier was still out there, and so were the Walsh women, but they were too tired and grief-stricken to continue. They simply could not take anymore.
