Tsunami

Nurse Rendell opened her mouth to speak but closed it again when she saw the firmness in the woman’s jaw.

That night three women and their youngest children slept on board the Meigle. The mothers had shaken Captain Dalton’s hand, pumping it, as they climbed onto the ship. Fudge, the M.H.A., had taken the Taylor’s Bay refugees under his wing; he’d see to it that they got clothing and boots once the Meigle arrived in Burin, he announced. Then he would travel west to Fortune Bay with them on the Glencoe.

Now, in the sharp night air, Captain Dalton stood at the wheel as the little party slept below, feeling safer than they had in well over a week. He laughed softly at the irony of how being on waves rather than land reassured and comforted them. He would tell Cora about this, he thought, and, next to the fire, they would have a grand discussion about the complexities of the human mind.

“She was reluctant to come, Captain,” Dr. Mosdell tut-tutted as he made his way onto the Meigle, tied up in St. Lawrence harbour after a snowy and windswept morning. “But I did manage to get her here.”

“Welcome on board the Meigle, Nurse Cherry,” Captain Dalton said formally, bowing his fair head to the slightly stooped woman following the doctor up the gangplank. He could see that beneath her cap, her brown hair was unkempt and her eyes were narrow in the manner of one who has recently awakened. He guessed that Mosdell had woken her. Doctors are odd beings, he thought.

“If anyone deserves a rest, it’s you, Nurse Cherry,” Dalton said firmly.

“I should have thought that if anyone deserves a rest, it would be you, Captain!” Nurse Cherry answered quickly.

Dalton drew back at the sharpness in her voice. He stepped back to let her pass.

“One of the nurses will show you to a cabin, Nurse Cherry,” he said. “We hope you’ll be most comfortable on board.”

Nurse Cherry stood erect and grimaced. She studied the deck and then the captain. “I don’t know who gave the orders to bring me on board,” she snapped. “But I had work to do, plenty of it, and I was interrupted in my tasks.”

“I beg your pardon, Ma’am,” Dr. Mosdell said, suppressing a smile. “You were, in fact, prone on a daybed when I found you.”

Nurse Cherry’s mouth opened wide but no sound emerged.

“I mean, Nurse Cherry,” the doctor continued. “Not that you were sleeping the days away or that you had neglected your duty in any way. I mean that you had travelled along the entire shore in the worst kind of weather and in so doing had worked yourself into a state of exhaustion, so much so that you had collapsed in the middle of the day in a stranger’s house.”

Nurse Cherry’s mouth still gaped open.

“Ma’am, Dr. Mosdell is only concerned about your health,” Captain Dalton interjected. “As we all are. As we have moved from one village to another, we have heard about your visits, made on horseback and on foot, and your work, done at all hours of the night and day. Do you not think it is time for a rest?”

“I am only tired, that’s all, not grief-stricken, like my patients. If I rest, what shall happen to these people?” Nurse Cherry said, her face the colour of a ripening tomato. “After all they have been through.”

“You are not alone now,” Dr. Mosdell answered. “We have a medical staff on board, physicians and nurses both. The people here are no longer entirely dependent on you. The burden is off you alone.”

Dalton waited for a look of relief to cross Nurse Cherry’s face but it did not come. Instead, her mouth remained hard and her chin, held defiantly high.

“Gentlemen,” she said finally. “I resent the way you took me out of that home, making the decision yourself and taking charge of me as if I am not in my right mind.”

Mosdell and Dalton exchanged quick glances.

“My responsibility as a doctor extends to you, too, Nurse Cherry,” Mosdell said quietly. “When I see a woman exerted beyond a point that is safe, I have to do something about it, as you know. I think now we ought not to spend more time discussing it. It is cold up here, don’t you think? Shall we have some tea down below?”

“I don’t think I want any tea right now,” Nurse Cherry answered.

“Come with me, Nurse Cherry,” Captain Dalton said. “I’ll find Nurse Rendell. She’ll show you what a comfortable bunk we’ve prepared for you.”

He breathed a low sigh when the Englishwoman followed him to the cabin. In the hallway he introduced her to Nurse Rendell and turned quickly on his heel when he had passed her over. Up top again, he met Mosdell.

“We’ll have her in Burin tomorrow,” he told the doctor. “And she can rest there a couple of days. I’ve arranged return passage for her on the Argyle.”

“Well!” laughed Dr. Mosdell. “She could certainly use the rest! She’s wound up as tight as a drum!”

Dalton thought of Cora and the kind words she unfailingly had for her elderly and frequently contrary aunts.

“She’s been through a lot,” he said ploddingly. “She’s tired and overwrought, poor woman.”

Before the Meigle pulled out of St. Lawrence, the expedition party met with the local committee and charged them with supervising relief measures as they had with their counterparts elsewhere. Meanwhile, Captain Dalton and his crew took account of the damage the tsunami had done to the town. The harbour was desolate; all the stores and stages on both its sides had been swept away. Little black lumps of coal floated in the harbour, like a torment to the cold people on shore. The winds blew dark ash off them. Cracked oars drifted in on the beach. Thwarts, broken in two, flopped onto the rocks, in a blunt offering. Women could only glance hard at these things and close their eyes. The men tried hard not to think of spring when the fish would start coming in. How would they catch it?

When news of the situation at St. Lawrence reached Magistrate Hollett in Burin, he telegraphed Prime Minister Squires in the capital. As Squires read of the devastation in St. Lawrence, the largest settlement in the area, he clutched his chin tight and sucked in his breath. His face grew white as he realized that every time a message came from the South Coast the picture was more grave than originally thought. Worries over the disaster invaded his every thought. Squires lay awake night after night, shifting helplessly in his bed, wondering if his government had sent enough supplies. How would his government pay for the rest? It was almost a month now since the stock market crashed and the meaning of that event was beginning to sink in. As the days went by, the administration in St. John’s still did not have a good fix on the death toll on the lower portion of the stricken peninsula. That would only come with a full report from the Meigle.

Still the dire messages from Burin kept coming. When Hollett visited St. Lawrence, soon after the Meigle left, he wrote to Squires: “The people are in a state of dire destitution. Immediate assistance is necessary.”

There was, though, no loss of life at St. Lawrence. The people had seen the waves coming and had headed for higher ground. Though rebuilding their town would be a long, hard task, men and women would sometimes cast their eyes to the sky and bless themselves, murmuring prayers of gratitude that no one had died that terrible night.

22

In Burin, Captain Dalton saw that Nurse Cherry had an escort to take her to the home of the local Nonia nurse, where she could stay and rest for a couple of days before returning home to Lamaline. She smiled as she left the ship, to his relief.

“Thank you for kidnapping me, Captain,” she said.

Dalton smiled back, almost confident that she was joking.

The skipper’s first order of business here was to meet with Magistrate Hollett so the two men could bring each other up-todate on the aftermath of the tsunami. When everything was straightened