Maura Hanrahan: Tsunami

Back home in Red Head Cove, Mary’s brother and sisters marvelled at the sight of pots and pans dancing around on the stove. It was as if the household items had decided to put on a performance for them. Then the children’s eyes looked up in unison at the ceiling while the house shook.

“It’s a real windy night!” the littlest sister said.

“No, it’s more than that,” her brother answered solemnly.

Meanwhile, as the Nerissa slowly made her way along the Southern Shore past Ferryland light and Chance Cove, Mary and her father, Martin Kehoe, raised quiet prayers to the heavens for their safe passage. Five-year-old Aubrey King stood with his horse in the garden of his home in Point au Gaul, a village on the bottom of the Burin Peninsula. In the last moments of the afternoon, young Aubrey fed the horse hay and tried to push some into its mouth, like a mother feeds a baby. The boy patted the animal’s dark snout. “Atta boy,” he murmured. Then, as he had done so many times before, he stepped back to admire the animal’s large body; his appreciative eyes took in its sleekness, strength, and bulk. The horse was a work animal, part of the machinery that kept the family economy going through the year; it was used to haul wood in the winter and do farmwork in the summer. But little Aubrey loved it like a pet and the animal responded in kind.

Then, late in the afternoon when dusk was nothing more than a hint, Aubrey’s horse suddenly bit him. The boy drew back, ashen-faced and breathless. Then the ground beneath the two of them quivered and shook. The horse grew skittish and Aubrey, still reeling from the shock of the bite, was too afraid to comfort him.

He ran into the house, even as the earth continued to shake under his feet. There he was greeted by the sight of his mother frozen in front of a picture of her father that had fallen from the wall for no reason at all.

In Great Burin, well to the north of Point au Gaul, eleven-yearold Sam Adams was outside in his family’s garden when, late in the afternoon, he felt a tremor under his feet. It was a strange sensation but it didn’t last any time at all and it was mild.

“Did you feel that?” Sam called out to a neighbour.

“Yes, like the earth moved a little,” his friend answered.

Sam nodded. “What do you suppose it was?” he asked. The other boy shook his head and shrugged. Sam dismissed the tremor as one of the mysteries of life, like stars falling to the earth or whales beaching themselves. He left the garden and went inside, where his mother told him that some dishes stored in the cupboard had shook so much she feared they might break. Sam told his mother about the tremor but the two of them did not know what to make of it.

Bessie Hennebury of Lord’s Cove, not far from Point au Gaul, was almost fifteen in November, 1929. She was in her father’s fishing room, helping to weigh his dried fish so it could be collected and shipped away to market. She was standing by the big weights that Mike Harnett, the merchant’s agent, had brought with him to weigh the fish. As she passed the fish to Harnett, everything started shaking: the fish, the tables, the walls, the weights. Indeed, it seemed as if the very ground under them was moving. The clanging sound of the metal weights seemed like it would not stop. It scared Bessie so much that she bolted out of the fishing room, running straight home. She raced up the hill, away from the beach and the water, her heart pummelling her chest walls so that she thought it would break them open. She did not look behind her to see what was happening. As she ran, she didn’t notice if the earth beneath her was shaking here, too; she was desperate to think the tremor was restricted to the fishing rooms.

In Burin Bay Arm, George and Ernest Pike, brothers of ten and eight, were in a hillside meadow above their home. The afternoon was so windless that the meadow grass was motionless. Running through the late fall air was a thread of coolness that hinted at the winter that was just around the corner. Above the boys, though, the skies were an azure blue and cloudless. The Atlantic far below was quiet as if asleep.

The weather was of no concern to the Pike brothers, though. The boys had one thing in mind: their neighbour Mrs. Moulton’s sheep. Mrs. Moulton kept sheep to make wool to sell for a bit of cash, and to have some mutton once in awhile. Some of the old lady’s sheep had somehow escaped from the meadow and Mrs. Moulton was distraught. She was offering twenty-five cents to anyone who could return the strays. The Pike boys were delighted at the opportunity to make a little cash. They had spent their dinner break and the walk home from school planning how they would retrieve the lost sheep. Now, George and Ernest bent over a hole in the fence that surrounded the meadow, intent on their task as they attached a rope snare in the hopes of catching a sheep. In their minds’ eyes were the hard candies they would buy and savour if their venture was successful.

It wasn’t long before they were rewarded. But as soon as a sheep was caught in the snare, the boys were startled by the arrival of a motor car, one of the few in the area. The car turned around just below the meadow. George and Ernest fell to the hard ground on their bellies, trying to hide from the car’s occupants; they thought the people in the car might think they were doing something wrong by catching the sheep.

Then without warning, the ground shook with great force.

“What’s that?” George asked.

“The car must have her winter chains on,” Ernest answered.

“You’re crazy,” his brother replied. “Chains on a car wouldn’t shake the ground like that.”

Ernest frowned. He didn’t know what was going on. When the car left the area, the shaking and the bold noise that accompanied stopped. George and Ernest rose and smoothed out their jackets and pants.

“I don’t know what that was,” George said, staring out at the ocean as if it held the answer. Ernest looked at him, expecting him to say more, but he didn’t.

Then the two boys turned their attention back to the task at hand. They took the sheep out of the rope snare and led it out of the meadow and down to Mrs. Moulton’s. The old lady was standing outside her house, wearing a white cotton apron and a winter coat that she had evidently thrown over her shoulders. She was surrounded by her family, some of whom were pacing back and forth on the road.

“Look at that commotion!” George said.

“I’m not going back in for the money!” one of Mrs. Moulton’s sons cried. From their talk, the Pike boys realized the Moultons were convinced the house was haunted. They thought there was a ghost under the house, a ghost who had caused the stove covers to jump, the dishes to rattle and break, and the pictures to fall off the wall. As they fretted over the ghost shifting the house as it had, Ernest realized they thought the tremor was specific to their house. He knew then it had been more general, taking in at least part of the village all the way to the meadow and possibly beyond. He thought of telling the Moultons this but they were too panicked to listen to him, he figured. And in spite of everything that was happening, the succulent candy remained uppermost in Ernest’s mind. It was getting late, his mother would expect the boys to return home soon, so he decided to take care of business.

He stepped forward to announce their success in catching Mrs. Moulton’s sheep. When her son reached for it, he shook his head.

“No money, no sheep,” he said.

The Moultons stopped talking and the men looked at each other. Mrs. Moulton poked one of them. “I want my sheep back,” she said.

Her son sighed and went into the house, walking slowly as he did. He came out with twenty-five cents and handed it to Ernest. The boys pocketed their reward and went home.