The Doryman by Maura Hanrahan

year and the women making fish in the spring, summer, and fall. Women rationed fruit and eggs through the fall so they’d have enough to make fruitcakes and figgy duff at Christmastime. In late winter they started to run out of vegetables; it got even harder to spare things along. Children went to school for a few years, maybe more if their parents could spare them from chores.
    There were flus and colds. As the 1920s drew to a close, the dreaded tuberculosis that was sweeping the world visited their village, carrying Rachel’s brother Jim and her daughter Margaret away. So many were sick and trying to cling to life. One winter, of the couple of hundred people in Little Bay, twenty-one died. The people felt helpless and cursed as they waited to see who the disease would take next or if it would leave them. Then finally as spring came, it disappeared.
    Years passed. Richard and Rachel’s mother Elizabeth died. Old Steve died. Their children grew.
    Through it all there was always the threat of storms that would take their ships and men away from them. And for all its summer brightness and gentle breezes, there was always a sinister threat in the August air.
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    Strange things happened in August, especially on coastal shores and in the waters that surrounded islands like Newfoundland. August Gales are at least as old as the written record. The first recorded August Gale made herself known in Pensacola, Florida in 1559, when she drove five Spanish ships ashore. The first recorded shipwreck in North America occurred in August of 1583, when the Delight met her doom in a gale off Sable Island, Nova Scotia. Torrential rain and dense fog blinded the captain while heavy seas tossed the Delight to bits.
    As the centuries passed, these summer windstorms kept on tormenting fishermen and vessels. In 1609, a “tempest” made its way up the Atlantic seabord, putting the vessels in a British convoy on their way to the colony of Virginia asunder. Two of the ships sank, while a third, the Sea Venture , was presumed lost at first. Eventually, though, she made landfall at Bermuda, where her crew was shipwrecked. After ten months on the island, they built two small boats and sailed to Virginia. Their story is believed to be the inspiration for Shakespeare’s play, The Tempest .
    Less than two decades later, the New England coast was struck by another August Gale, “the Great Colonial Hurricane.” The Reverend Increase Mather wrote that there was “no storm more dismal.” Indeed, the gale left many shipwrecks in her wake. In 1788, another wind blast destroyed a great swath of woods through New Jersey to Maine.
    The Caribbean Islands to the south were even more vulnerable to the moodiness of August. In 1666, a howling gale smashed every boat along the coast of Guadeloupe, including a seventeen-ship fleet with 2,000 troops. The island’s batteries, featuring six-feet-thick walls, were totalled and her cannons swept out to sea.
    For five days in 1785, an August storm battered the Eastern Caribbean, from St. Croix in the Virgin Islands to Cuba. Over 140 people died from her impact. In 1813, more than 3,000 Martiniquais died when an August Gale swept onto their island. In 1831, almost 2,000 people in Barbados lost their lives to an August Gale.
    The vagaries of August weather are known on the other side of the Atlantic, too. In 1456, Prince Machiavelli witnessed a tornado that tore across Italy. He wrote, “From confused clouds, furious winds, and momentary fires, sounds issued, of which no earthquake or thunder ever heard could afford the least idea; striking such awe into all, that it was thought the end of the world had arrived.”
    It must have seemed like the end of days in France, too, in August 1845, when a tornado all but destroyed the town of Moneuil. Between seventy and 200 people were killed by the tornado, which was between 330 to 1,000 feet wide, over a distance estimated between nine and