“Help!” she cried. “Someone help us!”

“Help!” Manuel joined her.

“Don’t strain yourself, dear,” Jessie said gently. She worried about the effect of this on his health. She never imagined they’d be floating out in the bay on a flake in November.

“Help!” she yelled again.

Men began appearing from the houses on the high ground. Jessie saw them point to the old couple on the flake in the middle of the cove. In spite of her predicament, she almost smiled.

Manuel was looking behind them, out to sea.

“I wonder will there be another flood?” he said.

“Hush, now,” Jessie answered. “Our neighbours are on their way to rescue us. See how they’re getting a dory out?”

Manuel nodded. He had begun to shiver. Jessie, too, was chilled and could not feel her feet. Then the water began to rise again and the boards of the flake began to creak. The swell broke the flake in two, throwing Manuel and Jessie into the sea. Jessie screamed and trod water madly, trying to find bottom. Manuel was too stunned to speak but his feet, as numb as they were, found the sea floor. He raised a frozen arm to grab hold of Jessie but she was too far away, still screaming. Then she stopped.

“I’m all right!” she called out. “I can stand up! On my toes!”

“My God!” said Manuel. How long could they last like this? The sight of his wife’s face pointed at the sky, her hair covered in cold ocean water, tore at him.

“Hold onto a plank,” Manuel cried. “It’ll keep you afloat.”

He saw Jessie clutch one and gasp in relief as she did so.

“Are they still coming?” she called.

“They are,” said Manuel. “They’re almost here.”

Two Stepaside men hauled Jessie first and then Manuel into the dory when it arrived alongside the flake. The men rowed quickly to the beach, casting worried glances at their frozen passengers. Then they carried the Inkpens ashore and up a steep bank to a large house where most of their neighbours fearfully waited for more flooding.

Bertha was already there when Jessie and Manuel were carried in.

“A fine night for a cruise,” the maid said, her face wet with tears.

“Terrible flooding,” Manuel said, his face grey. “Our kitchen floor is all wet.”

“Mr. Inkpen,” said Bertha. “Didn’t you see the big wave? It was monstrous. Sure, it took all the stages and flakes out!”

As the women took off Jessie’s stockings and slippers and dried her feet, one of the men said, “The big wave is after receding again and will be back again soon. All the houses and everything on lower ground is in danger of being swept away.”

“Oh my goodness,” said Jessie. “I didn’t realize it was that bad.”

“It’s just as well you didn’t,” said Bertha. “There’d be no point to it, the situation you were in.”

The women took blankets off the stove and wrapped Manuel and Jessie in them. They pushed hot toddies into their hands and urged them to drink.

“Here it comes!” someone called from the window. “Here comes the wave!”

The villagers rushed outdoors to watch the wall of water crush the Inkpens’ home and virtually every stage and flake in Stepaside. The roar startled Manuel this time and the reality of his experience caused his heart to flutter and pearls of sweat to pour down his face. Still seated, he grabbed Jessie’s hand. Besides their house, furniture, linen, crockery, and clothing, the sea took Manuel’s wharf, barn, two stores, and fishing gear. The old couple’s sheep and ten hens drowned as well.

When Manuel learned all this after the second wave pulled back, he sobbed into Jessie’s breast.

“I’m too old for this,” he cried.

10

Sarah Rennie of Lord’s Cove fed her youngest children, Rita, Patrick, Margaret, and Bernard, their supper. They gobbled down their vegetables—hers were good eaters, not like some children in the village, thank God—and happily chewed their salt fish. They knew some lassie bread was waiting if they ate it all, that was her promise.

Sarah kept some potatoes, carrots, and fish in the pot for her husband, Patrick, and her older sons, Martin and Albert. She hadn’t expected them home, this being a special night for the Lord’s Cove men to get together for cards. Every bit of time away from work was deserved for them; for her, too, when it came, as it occasionally did. Patrick’s two missing fingers were testimony to his own diligence. She knew she wouldn’t see him till the wee hours. She expected the boys home much earlier than that, though. Albert had school tomorrow, she had reminded him as they headed out with their father.

“Don’t be late now,” she had said.

Four-year-old Margaret had barely swallowed her lassie bread when her head began to loll.

“Upstairs for you, little maid,” Sarah said, gathering the child in her arms. When she came downstairs from tucking her youngest daughter in her cot, Sarah returned to her sewing machine. Baby Bernard was still not tired—he rarely was, Sarah sighed—so she secured him in his high chair and gave him his rattle again. “Bababa,” he said as he banged it on the wooden tray.

“You two should get at your lessons now” Sarah said to Rita and young Patrick, running a line of blue thread into the bobber on her Singer.

Just then the sound of thunder drowned out her children’s responses and Sarah’s skirts were anchored in icy water. She screamed, her eyes wide in horror. Sarah could not scream again because she was suddenly immersed in a mountainous wave. Her house was borne out on the water, heading for the Atlantic. Then the wave returned and threw it into the middle of The Pond with a great heartless thud.

The noise had drawn Patrick Rennie from Prosper Walsh’s house and he now stood on a hill above the village with his heart ripped in two. “My wife and children are in there!” he screamed, tearing the lining of his throat.

“They’re all drowned,” one fisherman whispered to another.

“Yes, they’d have to be,” his friend agreed grimly.

The men put their arms around Patrick’s strong shoulders, but then he disappeared like a shot, followed by his sons, Martin and Albert. All three ran toward The Pond, stopping abruptly at the shore.

“Sarah!” Patrick called out.

“Mom!” the boys cried. “Mom! Rita!”

“Sarah, answer me! Sarah!”

But there only came silence. Behind them the harbour was empty of sea water, its rocky bottom entirely exposed. The moon was luminous, throwing whiteness throughout the village.

Patrick ran back and forth on the shore of The Pond. Like most fishermen, he could not swim; there had never been any time for such leisure in the summer. He tore at his hair. The meaning of the silence ate into him, devouring his soul.

“Sarah!” he cried.

“Get out of there!” someone called suddenly.

Martin glanced at the dry harbour bottom and realized that another wave might be on its way.

“Come on, Dad,” he said firmly, taking his father by the elbow. The boy had no intention of losing his father. Slowly and in a stupor Patrick backed away from The Pond. But as he walked up the hill, he kept looking back at what was now the graveyard of his family.

For the past five years, eighteen-year-old Mary Walsh of Lord’s Cove had worked in a hotel in St. Pierre during the winter and spring and helped a French woman there raise her three children. Every summer she returned home to make fish for her father. Mary’s mother had died not too long before from an illness that had plagued her for years, leaving Mary and her younger brother, Bertram, motherless. Like most Roman Catholics, Mrs. Walsh had left this life with a lighted candle in her clasped hands, supported by the loving hands of a stronger relative. Mary’s mother had expired before the candle had burned more than an inch down. It was a memory that seared Mary’s young brain.