Then, on the night of November 18, Nurse Cherry found herself in the Catholic church in Lamaline, on the high ground with most of the local people trying to make sense of what was happening. After the first wave people continued to stream into the church, drawn to the fire that was kindled. There they peeled off their clothes, leaden with salt water, and tried to dry them. The paleness of their faces bespoke their terror. Young girls shrieked and children cried in confusion.

Nurse Cherry nodded at each group that entered the church. Her steel grey eyes looked them up and down, taking in every detail. She looked for glassiness in their eyes, for stillness and silence, for anything that would betray shock. She gave only the briefest of looks to those who howled and sobbed. They’ll be all right, she thought—they’re letting it out. She looked at the men and the boys who were almost men. Keeping it all in, most of them, she thought. But it’ll come out later, in a drunken rage in the spring after a trip to St. Pierre, or a heart attack in twenty years time. Thank God they weren’t all like that. She gave no thought to herself and which group she was like. She only observed.

Hannah Lake came in with her skirts dragging on the floor with sea water.

“Get them off,” Nurse Cherry ordered. “And whatever else is wet.”

“How can I do that?” Hannah asked, shifting two-year-old Leslie on her hip. “I’ve got nothing else to put on.” She turned her head to indicate that there were men in the room.

“Hannah, there are women on the way with blankets,” Nurse Cherry said. “You get out of those wet clothes the minute they get here. In the meantime, you get up by that fire and get your boots and stockings off. I don’t care who sees your legs, lovely though they may be. All your little ones need is a mum with pneumonia going into winter.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hannah answered.

“Good girl,” Nurse Cherry said. Then she turned to the next arrivals. “What have we got here now?” After the second wave hit Lamaline, a great rush of people scurried up the hill to the church. One of them was a woman whose screams rose to the heavens. She had been one of a group of people trapped on one end of Lamaline between the great waves. They had been trying to get into a dory that was already stuffed with twenty people. They saw this as their only hope of escape from a third wave that they knew was coming, and did. Getting into the dory, the woman tried to carry a kerosene lamp with her and it spilled onto her forearms, severely burning both of them. She then fell into the frigid sea water and somehow waded to safety, followed by some of those who had been in the small boat. Then they ran up the hill, away from the wall of water that was heading for Lamaline.

Now Nurse Cherry ordered men to fetch a bucket of cold water as fast as they could. As soon as the men laid it on the church floor in front of her, she pulled the woman’s arms into it. The great cries that followed sent children to their mothers’ skirts, their hands clapped tightly over their ears.

“Hold her there,” Nurse Cherry told the two men who happened to be closest. “Never mind the screams. Go on.”

Then she set to work rooting salve out of her black bag and preparing a dressing. She knew she had Demerol, too, and she would give the victim a shot of that to ease her terrible pain when her charred skin had been soaked enough.

When the people left the church and the others left the Orange Hall where they had gathered for the uneaten supper, two men rowed Nurse Cherry over to nearby Allan’s Island. They waited until nearly midnight, when they were certain the seas were angry no more. As they hauled the boat onto shore, a group of women were waiting.

“Nurse Cherry, come to Mrs. Lockyer’s, quick!” they said.

Inside on the kitchen day bed was eighty-two-year-old James Lockyer. His seventy-five-year-old wife, Monica, stood over him.

“We had twenty dozen heads of cabbage and it’s all gone,” she said.

“She’s going foolish,” someone whispered to Nurse Cherry.

“She’s in shock, that’s all,” Nurse Cherry answered. “Mrs. Lockyer, please sit down and this lady here will get you a cup of tea. I’ll see what I can do for Mr. Lockyer here.”

As a young woman led Monica to an old pine chair at the table, Nurse Cherry pressed her stethoscope to James’ chest. His heartbeat came slowly and reluctantly. It was irregular, too. She opened his eyes and moved her long fingers in front of them but the old man’s stare did not waver. Nurse Cherry ran her hands down his arms, legs, and trunk. He’s broken most of his ribs, she thought.

“Tell me again what happened to him,” she said to the small crowd in the room.

“Our fence is down, too,” Monica offered.

Nurse Cherry smiled kindly at her.

“Well, ma’am, the first wave shifted his store,” someone said. “Pushed it up toward his house and he got caught between the two of them.”

He’s been crushed then, Nurse Cherry realized. Probably has massive internal injuries.

“Is there anything you can do, Nurse?” a young woman asked.

“Is he still alive?” said another.

“Yes…” Nurse Cherry began.

“Is he going to live?”

“Well, he’s in no pain,” Nurse Cherry said quietly. “People in his state can’t feel anything.”

“What do you mean?” asked the young woman, her face blackening. “What’s his state? What’s…”

“I mean,” said Nurse Cherry. “I mean, he’s between this world and the next. I’m very sorry—I can’t do anything for him.”

The girl stared hard at her, her young face a mixture of anger and pain. Monica’s eyes narrowed quizzically. She looked as though she might say something but her lips stayed pressed together.

“He’s going to die,” another woman said. “There’s nothing anyone can do about it.”

“Well,” said a little girl with curly black hair. “There’s something we can do. We can pray.”

13

As the High Beach men set out for Lamaline the morning after the tsunami, Nurse Dorothy Cherry began her journey by horseback to Taylor’s Bay. East of Lamaline, Taylor’s Bay lies open-mouthed to the Atlantic Ocean. It first appears on French maps from 1744, where it is identified as Baue de Tailleur. For many years afterwards it was frequented by French fishermen on a seasonal basis.

By 1881, it had a year-round population of twenty-one, most of whom were adult men. Knowing they couldn’t rely solely on the fishery to keep hunger at bay, they cleared twenty-five acres of land, tossing rocks, pushing boulders, and pulling tuckamore off the earth so they could plant potatoes, turnips, carrots, and cabbage. In the meadows that surrounded the bay they put their one horse, seventeen sheep, fourteen cattle, and fourteen milch cows. Ten years later, there were thirty-six people in Taylor’s Bay, including more women.

Most of the settlers were nominally Church of England, but when did they ever see a minister? They didn’t have a school but one of the women could read well and she gave seven children lessons in her home during the winter. A few years before the tidal wave, Taylor’s Bay was home to eighty-two people; the men fished and the women cured fish on a flat beach that was ideal for such an enterprise. The total value of fish products was at an all-time high. The future looked bright for Taylor’s Bay.

All that ended on the night of November 18, 1929, with the first of the great waves that rushed in on the low-lying lands of the village. The next morning Nurse Cherry set out just after dawn. Her breath turned into almost imperceptible ice crystals as she mounted Thomas Foote’s mare. Thomas, twenty-seven, walked alongside her, carrying a package of warm bread and tea buns his nineteen-year-old wife, Eva, had baked while it was still dark. “For the livyers in Taylor’s Bay,” Eva had said as she pressed it into her husband’s hands. The mare carried Nurse Cherry’s kit and a load of blankets. The Footes had been lucky. Thomas had lost only four quintals of fish and a half ton of coal, substantial, to be sure, but nothing compared to the losses of many of his neighbours whose dories, wharves, stages, and stores were smashed or gone altogether. Albert King, a twenty-three-year-old bachelor, followed Thomas and Nurse Cherry on his bay horse. From the East Side of Lamaline, he, too, had fared comparatively well last night, losing only some fishing gear. He’d have to make it up before the fishing started next spring, but he went to bed counting his lucky stars; things could have been much worse.