Maura Hanrahan: Tsunami

Then Pearl felt her mother’s arms around her and she was being passed to someone on a ladder. He carried her to the beach. It was freezing. Her little brother James was crying. Her mother was still in the house with her big brother. “We went all the way to Bartlett’s Island!” Carrie cried. Really? Pearl wondered. Then they were all on the beach. She blanched at the crimson that was spreading across her mother’s arm.

“She needs a bandage,” Beatrice Hollett said.

“Get to higher ground!” someone called. Maybe it was Mr. Hollett. They ran as fast as they could to Humpess Head, Pearl holding Carrie’s hand. Something was chasing them. As they ran, Pearl glanced behind to see that it was a wall of ice water and it took their house again and carried it away where they could no longer see it. On the hill where they finally found safety, Carrie Brushett pulled her five children to her and sobbed from the deepest part of her belly.

When William Brushett rowed into Kelly’s Cove on Great Burin Island two days later, his heart was thumping. He had felt the rumbling, heard the thunder, and watched the walls of water steal houses and take lives. The night before he reached Kelly’s Cove he paced a friend’s floor in the village of Stepaside, worrying for Carrie and his children. Now, as snow fell on his shoulders while he rowed, the cove was chock-a-block with debris, mostly wood from dories, schooners, and buildings. William was afraid he would see a body.

When he hauled his boat up, he met Ben Hollett, who called, “yes, they’re safe,” before William could even ask. William’s tears flowed in rivers and he let out a great sob that filled the harbour. He glanced up at the village and saw Pearl come round the corner of a neighbour’s house. “My chair is gone, Daddy!” she cried. “The one you made for me.” He ran toward her and pulled her off the ground into his big fisherman’s arm. He held her tight as he faced the harbour and surveyed the damage the tsunami had caused.

William could see right away that his house was gone. So were his flake and his stage. The Brushetts lost the three barrels of potatoes and two barrels of turnips that would have seen them through the winter. Their five hens were drowned. They’d also lost the four gallons of molasses they’d bought. Gone also was their two tons of coal and two cords of firewood, their means of staying warm from now until spring would break months later. The long wild ride to Bartlett’s Island had cost William and Carrie Brushett possessions worth $1,493—everything they owned. All they had left was the forty dollars in William’s pocket. But Fred, Lottie, Lillian, Pearl, and James were alive and they only had cuts and bruises.

The village of Lawn rises out of a lush valley on the southern end of the Burin Peninsula. According to the local families, the first Europeans to over-winter there were Irish and they enjoyed one of the best fishing harbours on the South Coast. The people fished cod, caplin, salmon, herring, and lobster, which they processed in a factory that employed eight people in 1891. They also ran a seal fishery.

As six-year-old Anna Tarrant lay frozen with fear on the kitchen day bed in her Lawn home, her mother came rushing in from the root cellar, the family tabby behind her. Hilda Murphy Tarrant, a native of St. John’s who had married a local man, dropped her carrots and blue potatoes with a great thud. Beneath her the ground shook.

“Mommy!” Anna cried, in spite of her sore throat. Anna’s little sister, Elizabeth, and brother, Charles, only two, toddled in. Baby Joe was upstairs in the crib his father had made long ago for the Tarrants’ first child. Elizabeth and Charles were too young to be scared of the rumbling itself but they caught sight of the whitening of their mother’s face.

“Where’s Isadore?” Hilda asked of her oldest child.

Anna shrugged. “I don’t know,” she whispered. She had been sick all day, drifting in and out of sleep, and hadn’t paid too much attention to the comings and goings of her sister and brothers.

Hilda put her hand to her mouth.

“Where’s your father?” she cried, looking around the kitchen, seemingly oblivious to the shaking stacks of dishes.

As soon as the rumbling stopped, Pat Tarrant appeared. At forty-three, he was ten years older than his wife. He had been in the Royal Navy as a young man and had witnessed an earthquake in the crystal waters of the Indian Ocean.

“Hilda, get the children in warm clothes and get them to high ground,” he ordered. “There’s a tidal wave on the way.”

“I’m sick, Daddy,” Anna said feebly.

“I know, child,” her father answered, bending down so that he was face to face with her. “But you have to be brave now. You have to get dressed and put on your winter coat. Then you have to go up the hill with Mommy because there’s going to be a big wave come in.”

“Pat, what do you mean?” Hilda said. “Will it come all the way in to the houses?”

“It might, maid,” her husband answered. “We have to be prepared. I’ve seen it happen when I was overseas.”

Hilda shuddered. Anna hiccupped in fear.

“We have to find Isadore,” Hilda said, shoving a fingernail between her teeth.

“Don’t worry,” Pat said. “I’ll get him. I’m going to alert the neighbours anyway. You bundle up the children and take them to the top of the hill as quickly as you can.”

In a flash he was gone. Then, as Anna was getting out of her pajamas and into a dress Hilda had fetched from upstairs, her father rushed back into the house. Holding his hand was ten-yearold Isadore, ashen-faced.

“Mommy!” he said, running to Hilda and wrapping his arms around her.

“He was just next door at Victoria and Nick’s,” Pat said. “He was too afraid to move with the tremors.” He turned to his eldest. “You’re safe now. Just do what your mother says and help her with the other children.” Then he was gone again.

Pat Tarrant went from one house to another on the low land that ringed the harbour, banging on doors and shouting, “There’s a tidal wave coming! Get to high ground!” Men and women came out of their houses and watched him knock on their neighbours’ doors

“Do you think so, Pat?” they called.

“I do!” he replied, still walking. “I do, I saw it in the Indian Ocean.”

He was a respected man and they believed him. They raced back into their houses and pulled babies out of cribs, toddlers out of beds, and wrapped their children in their winter coats. They slammed their doors shut and fixed their eyes on the high land as they made for it as quickly as they could, ignoring the stillness of the water below. There was no wind in the air but Pat Tarrant’s words held sway.

With everyone except Kate and Tom Tarrant, an old couple who refused to leave their home which abutted the beach. Distant relatives of Pat’s, they did not believe their house was in any danger.

“It’s a clear night,” sixty-seven-year-old Tom told Anna’s father. “I think everything’s all right.”

“That rumbling is all over now,” his sixty-three-year-old wife echoed him. “Everything’s fine now.”

Pat shook his head; he was certain the old couple was in danger. But there were others to warn, more doors to bang on. He moved on. He looked up from the beach and saw dozens of people streaming out of their houses to the higher ground. Some of them went into dwellings built on the hills around Lawn; others went beyond the houses to even higher land.

As Hilda Tarrant led her children out the door, with her youngest in her arms, she looked behind at a sponge cake on the kitchen counter. She had baked it for Pat’s birthday, which was today.