This is in 1909. They gave him a little tin trunk with some clothes, a Bible, a brush and comb and a signed photograph of Reverend Sears. He told us about that trip many times. There were three hundred and fourteen children, boys and girls, on that ship, all of them signed on to help farmers. He said many of them were only three or four years old. They had no idea what was happening to them, where they were going. Just little waifs shipped abroad to a life of rural slavery. For you see, he kept in touch with some of the survivors he’d made friends with on theAramania .”
“Survivors of what?”
“The shipwreck, my boy, and how he came here. We spoke of the names of rocks on the way out, you’ll remember, but there’s other things in the sea that’s a mortal danger, and they can never have names because they shift and prowl and vanish.” He pointed at the icebergs on the horizon. “Remember, in 1909 they didn’t have ice patrols and radar and weather faxes. You took your chance in iceberg alley. And my father’s ship, like theTitaniconly three years later, ran onto an iceberg in the bitter June twilight. Right out there, right off Gaze Island. There’s no chart for icebergs. Of those three hundred and fourteen children only twenty-four were saved. Official count was twenty-three. And they were saved because young Joe Sop-that was later Skipper Joe, master of one of the last Banks fishing schooners-come up to the Gaze to get the cow and saw the lights and heard the children screeching and crying as they went into the icy water.
“He run down to the houses bawling out there was a shipwreck. Every boat in the place put out, there was two widow women pulled oars and saved three children, and they got what they could, but it was too late for most. You only last a little in that water. Freezes the blood in your veins, you go numb and die in the time it would take us to walk back to the old house.
“Weeks later another shipload of Home children on the way to Canada anchored offshore and sent in a small boat to take the survivors, to send them on to their original destination. But my father didn’t want to go. He’d found a home here with the Prettys and they hid him, told the officials there was a mistake in the count of the saved-only twenty-three. Poor William Ankle was lost. And so my father changed his name to William Pretty and here he grew up and led an independent life. And if it was not happy, he didn’t know it.
“If he’d gone on with the others he’d likely have gone into a miserable life. You ask me, Canada was built on the slave labor of those poor Home children, worked to the bone, treated like dirt, half starved and crazed with lonesomeness. See, my father kept in touch with three of the boys that lived, and they wrote back and forth. I’ve still got some of those letters-poor wretched boys whose families had cast them off, who survived a shipwreck and the freezing sea, and went on, friendless and alone, to a harsh life.”
Quoyle’s eyes moist, imagining his little daughters, orphaned, traveling across the cold continent to a savage farmer.
“Now, mind you, it was never easy at the Prettys’, never easy on Gaze Island, but they had the cows and a bit of hay, and the berries, the fish and their potato patches, and they’d get their flour and bacon in the fall from the merchant over at Killick-Claw, and if it was hard times, they shared, they helped their neighbor. No, they didn’t have any money, the sea was dangerous and men were lost, but it was a satisfying life in a way people today do not understand. There was a joinery of lives all worked together, smooth in places, or lumpy, but joined. The work and the living you did was the same things, not separated out like today.
“Father’d get those pathetic letters, sometimes six months after they was written, and he’d read them out loud here and the tears would stream down people’s faces. Oh, how they wanted to get their hands on those hard Ontario farmers. There was never a one from Gaze Island that voted for confederation with Canada! My father would of wore a black armband on Confederation Day. If he’d lived that long.
“One of those boys, Lewis Thom, never had a bed of his own, had to sleep in the musty hay, had no shoes or boots and wrapped his feet in rags. They fed him potato peels and crusts, what they’d give to the pig. They beat him every day until he was the color of a dark rainbow, yellow and red and green and blue and black. He worked from lantern light to lantern light while the farmer’s children went to school and socials. His hair grew down his back, all matted with clits and tangles. He tried to trim it with a hand-sickle. You can guess how that looked. He was lousy and dirty. The worst was the way they made fun of him, scorned him because he was a Home boy, jeered and made his life hell. In the end they cheated him of his little wage and finally turned him adrift in the Ontario winter when he was thirteen. He went on to another farmer who was worse, if can be. Never, never once in the years he worked on the farms-and he slaved at it because he didn’t know anything else until he was killed in an accident when he was barely twenty-never once did anyone say a kind word to him since he got off the ship in Montreal. He wrote to my father that only his letters kept him from taking his life. He had to steal the paper he wrote on. He planned to come out to Newfoundland but he died before he could.
“The other two had a miserable time of it as well. Oh I remember our dad lying on the daybed and stretching out his feet and telling us about those poor lonely boys, slaves to the cruel Canadian farmers. He’d say, ‘Count your blessings that you’re in a snug harbor.’
“My father taught all his children to read and write. In the winter when the fishing was over and the storms wrapped Gaze Island, my father would hold school right down there in the kitchen of the old house. Yes, every child on this island learned to read very well and write a fine hand. And if he got a bit of money he’d order books for us. I’ll never forget one time, I was twelve years old and it was November, 1933. Couple of years before he died of TB. Hard, hard times. You can’t imagine. The fall mail boat brought a big wooden box for my father. Nailed shut. Cruel heavy. He would not open it, saved it for Christmas. We could hardly sleep nights for thinking of that box and what it might hold. We named everything in the world except what was there.