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By Root 6776 0

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 the Titanic only three years later, ran onto an iceberg in the bitter June twilight. Right [168] 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 [169] 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