Son of a Critch Read online

  There was money to be made at the shrimp fishery, but climate change has made the water too warm for shrimp and they’ve shagged off, too. If the waters off Newfoundland aren’t too warm for icebergs, I can’t see how they’d be too warm for shrimp. I wonder if the shrimp are staying away in protest against the seal hunt. But who needs the fishery when you have oil? And we had that. Offshore oil fields and oil rigs and oily politicians who spent the oil revenues and didn’t see the drop in oil prices coming because they had oil in their eyes. Newfoundland must be the only place on earth that went broke because it discovered oil.

  Newfoundlanders have always taken from the sea. But she takes back. Fishermen are forever lost at sea. Sealers are found frozen to death on ice pans, clutching each other in prayer like macabre ice sculptures. Eighty-four men drowned in a sinking oil rig on Valentine’s Day 1982. Newfoundland is an island and is as much surrounded by death as it is water. An old song sung in bars here goes “And everyone here should get down on one knee, thank God we’re surrounded by water,” while another song warns, “Your heart would ache for all their sake if you were standing nigh; to see them drowning one by one, and no relief being nigh.”

  Most Newfoundland fishermen can’t swim. Why bother? If you fall into the cold North Atlantic you have mere minutes to live. And if there was a chance of surviving, someone might try to jump in and save you. You’d be putting them out and you wouldn’t want to do that! No, you’d die of embarrassment. So it’s best not to bother anyone and just drown. Wouldn’t want to be too uppity.

  The real Newfoundland is not like the award-winning tourism ads. I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never stood on a cliff with the sun splitting the rocks as two whales breach in a choreographed ballet while some little red-headed girl plays the fiddle for me. I have, however, stood in a five-foot snow drift in the month of May while two nimrods drive by in a beat-up Camaro, Great Big Sea blaring out the window, throwing Tim Hortons cups at me and giving me the finger. But they don’t make hooked rugs with that on them.

  Newfoundland is both a simple place and a complex one. The people are warm and friendly but their humour is sharp and biting. Newfoundland is always walking the line between prosperity and poverty. The people who live here are forced to go away for work, but they would never leave. This place is not black and white. It is as grey as the sky above it, the water around it, and the fog that links the two. It takes and it gives, just like the surrounding ocean. Sink or swim: it will make of you what it wants.

  2

  WHO KNIT YOU?

  NEWFOUNDLANDERS HAVE A LOT of beautifully strange sayings. This makes it difficult for outsiders to follow two Newfoundlanders having a chat.

  Whadda y’at?

  Nudding. You?

  This is it. I’m gutfounded.

  Yes, b’y. Drop ’a tea? I’ll put the slut on now da once.

  Some mausey day out there.

  Not fit. Makes me right crooked.

  I’d rather this than have it splittin’ da rocks.

  Yes, b’y. Wicked day. Best kind.

  Deadly day. Perfect, old man, my son.

  Now, all that was said there was a quick hello, an offer of tea, a complaint about the weather, and then a reversal of opinion. Simple. But local sayings, coupled with a speed of speech akin to a Formula 1 race car, can make it as hard for a mainlander to follow as it is for an American to follow the puck at a hockey game. My favourite Newfoundland saying is “Who knit you?” meaning “Who are your parents?”

  Newfoundlanders have an overwhelming desire to discover the lineage of every person they meet. When you meet someone for the first time they won’t leave you alone until they’ve uprooted your family tree in a way that the folks at Ancestry.com could only dream of.

  What’s your name? Trudeau? How you spell that? No, that’s wrong. You spell it with an OH? No? Yes, you do. That’s how you’re supposed to spell it. You must be a Protestant Trudeau. The Catholics spell it T-R-U-E-D-O-H. Yes, they do. Where ya from? Montreal? No. Your crowd are from Conception Bay. Fine folks. They were all preachers, see? Honest folk who couldn’t tell a lie. That’s where the name comes from. What they’re saying might sound foolish to us but to them it’s true, though. We started calling them the True-thoughs, see? That was hundreds of years ago, mind. Now, Newfoundlanders speak fast because we have so much work to do. Sure, I’m busier than a bayman with two woodstoves here today. We didn’t have time to say “True-though” every time we saw one of your crowd in the bay so the name got shortened and that’s where your name comes from. Truedoh. Now, get off my step cuz you’re just a politician looking for votes now and I don’t have the time to change your name to Bullshit-though.

  Newfoundlanders can claim pretty much anyone as one of their own. Celebrities need have only the thinnest thread connecting them to the island to be considered born and bred.

  “What band do ya like? KISS? Sure, they’re a Newfoundland band. Gene Simmons is married to Shannon Tweed. She’s a Newfoundlander. Married to a Newfoundlander? That makes you a Newfoundlander so KISS is a Newfoundland band. They used to be called KISS ME ARSE but they had to change it when they moved away. People would ask them what the name of their band was and they would say ‘Kiss Me Arse’ and people would get mad and say ‘I only wanted to know the name of your band. If you’re going to be like that, then screw it. I won’t come see you!’ So they shortened it to just KISS.”

  We’ll even brag about the infamous. “My God, did you see the news about Bill Cosby? Terrible news. Him charged with drugging all those women. What a horrible, horrible man. But did you know he was a Newfoundlander? He was stationed here at the American base in Argentia when he was in the military. He’s an African-American-Newfoundlander. We’re some proud of him. Of course we’re disgusted by him but in a proud way. Like, we’re ashamed to admit he’s one of ours but he is one of ours.”

  Not even God is safe. “We love to brag about Newfoundlanders, don’t we? God, forgive me. Oh, God. That’s another one. Jesus. Sure, he was a Newfoundlander. Everyone said Jesus was friendly? Almost too friendly, bordering on creepy. That’s because he was a Newfoundlander. He loved his mother. Hail Mother full of Grace. Newfoundlander, see? The family left here to move to Bethlehem but then they travelled many miles to Nazareth so Jesus could find work as a carpenter’s apprentice. Having to move away to find work in your trade—Newfoundlander! He walked on water. Why? Because the apostles were all fishermen, that’s why. Hanging out with a bunch of fishermen…Newfoundlander. He multiplied the loaves and fishes. Who loves fish and chips that much? Newfoundlanders! And at the wedding of Cana, he transformed the water into wine. Sneaking booze into a wedding? Newfoundlander!”

  To understand me you have to know who knit me. Newfoundlanders love to tell strangers where they were born, but they often don’t want to talk about their own lineage. My parents never spoke much about the past. I once asked my dad to help me research the family tree. “Why would you do that?” he asked incredulously. “People spend all that money trying to find out where they came from and then they spend twice as much to cover it all up again.” I think the old man didn’t want to look back because there wasn’t that much good to look back on.

  My paternal great-grandfather was a fisherman. I was shocked to learn this because I’d never known a Critch to have any real-world skills. Neither my father, my brother, nor I could hammer a nail straight or fix a car or catch a fish. Give a man a fish, he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish, he eats for a lifetime. Give a man a cell phone and twenty bucks, he’ll probably just order a pizza. Michael Critch, the fisherman, was born in 1857. He drowned in 1896 on a whaling expedition. You know your parents are old when your great-grandfather was a whaler. A report in The Evening Telegram read, “Michael Critch was drowned at Lasher Shore, near St. Mary’s. There was a turbulent sea on at the time, and he, overreaching himself, fell into the water, and was swept away.” That was the last time a Critch tried to overreach himself.


  Little is known of his wife, the former Mary Healy. She did make the paper once as well, though. It was also for dying, of puerperal fever after bearing her thirteenth child, in 1892. She was forty-two. That same year, the Great Fire would destroy almost all of St. John’s, leaving eleven thousand people homeless in what realtors of the time would call a hot market.

  My grandfather Patrick took over the family fishing enterprise after his father’s death. He also found himself written up in the newspaper when he was just twenty-six, making him the first Critch who didn’t have to die to see his name in print. His best friend did. On Sunday, August 8, 1909, Patrick Critch and his buddy Peter Whelan were fishing at a place called Black River Fall. His friend had fallen in and drowned. Patrick tried like mad to save his friend, and when all efforts proved fruitless, he left to get help. The body was thought lost, but Patrick wouldn’t give up. He kept diving and searching. Coming up for air and then diving into the water yet again, like a man possessed. The Evening Telegram wrote, “After a while, he succeeded in getting the body in and placing him on the bank rendered all assistance possible to bring back life. On seeing all attempts were futile, he placed the body face downwards and covered his head, and rode on horseback for home.” The reporter added, “It certainly was a trial which required a strong nerved person to combat with. Nevertheless the courage with which Critch worked so earnestly in recovering the body speaks well of him.”

  Perhaps Patrick fought so hard to bring his friend’s body home because his father’s had never been found. The last line in the report of his father’s death read, “The body had not been recovered when the coastal steamer came this way.”

  Having lost a father and a best friend to the water, Patrick decided to pack it in for dry land. His sister Alice had made her way to Brooklyn, where she met a German immigrant named Peter Kercher. Like many Newfoundlanders of the time, Patrick followed her to New York to make his fortune as an ironworker. During the construction of the Empire State Building in 1930, Lewis Hine added to their glory with his series of well-known photographs of men labouring and resting on pencil-thin beams hundreds of feet in the air. Hine saw the ironworkers as blue-collar heroes, daring men with fine balance and short life expectancies.

  Newfoundlanders filled the early ranks of the ironworking trade. The growing New York skyline was the Alberta of its day. Newfoundlanders traded their “Foundland” for “York City,” keeping the “New” to remind them of home. Thanks to their years on the sea, they were able to put their rigging skills to work building New York’s first skyscrapers. The heights on which they found themselves must have been dizzying. There was nothing taller than five storeys back home. They were called “Fish” by the other immigrants, many of them Irish. Having spent generations as the butt of jokes, the Irish were delighted to have some newcomers, with slightly funnier accents than their own, for Americans to pick on.

  ITALIAN AMERICAN: Where are you from?

  IRISHMAN: Ireland. Ah, for the love of God. What’s it to ya, ya bloody big eejit?

  ITALIAN AMERICAN: Irish, are ya? Ha! How do you get a one-armed Paddy out of a tree? You wave at him! Ha! Ha! Ha!

  IRISHMAN: Arse. Hey, you! New guy! Where are you from?

  NEWFOUNDLANDER: Newfoundland.

  IRISHMAN: A Newfie, are ya? How do you get a one-armed Newfie out of a tree? Ya wave at him! Ha! Ha! Ha!

  NEWFOUNDLANDER: Arse.

  Having escaped an almost certain death on the water and having made his modest fortune high above the Big Apple, Patrick returned home, his feet finally planted on terra firma. He worked construction and married Catherine Tobin and settled in to start a family. Or, seeing as he was Catholic, it might be more accurate to say he got Nan pregnant.

  This was not unusual. Nothing brings a Catholic couple together like an unexpected pregnancy. Catholic brides didn’t have to worry about whether they would “Say Yes to the Dress.” They were too busy trying to “Fix This Mistake Before My Water Breaks.” At the altar, the priest was as likely to be asking “Do you take this woman to be your lawfully wedded bride?” as he was to be yelling “PUSH!”

  I’ve never understood the Church’s problem with same-sex marriage. Gay weddings are far more joyful than straight, Catholic ones. I was once the emcee at a gay wedding. It was beautiful. The groom and the groom clearly loved each other. It was the first wedding where I knew the couple truly wanted to marry. It wasn’t just because they were two men who had overcome the bigotries of society to pledge to the world that they were in love. It was because I’d been raised Catholic and this was the first wedding I’d ever attended where I knew, for sure, that nobody was pregnant.

  But, reasons be damned, Patrick and Catherine ended up having a happy marriage. Together they had two boys. That’s a drop of eleven youngsters in just one generation. So much for quotas. They had my father, Michael, in 1922 and two years later his brother, Leo.

  But their marriage was a short one. Dad told me that one of his earliest memories was the upsetting sight of his mother taking the candles off the Christmas tree. He asked her why they weren’t going to have a Christmas and she told him that you couldn’t have a tree when you were in mourning. His father, Patrick Critch, died of tuberculosis on Christmas Day 1928. Patrick had been working on the roof of a house in St. John’s when he fell to the ground, breaking his leg. He caught TB in the hospital. He could navigate a steel beam fifty storeys above Manhattan, but in the end a two-storey house in St. John’s got him.

  Drowning. Falling off roofs. It’s no wonder we Critches stopped being useful. Being useful was dangerous. Darwinism was all well and good, but it would be survival of the least-fit for us from here on.

  I often wonder how things would have gone for my family if they’d had better luck. Patrick’s sister must have grown homesick, because she convinced her German-American husband to leave Brooklyn behind and immigrate to the British Dominion of Newfoundland. Alice had broken the shackles of poverty and Peter had been smart with his money. He’d become an American citizen in 1907 and now, for love, found himself becoming a British subject in 1914—not a good time to be German in the British Empire. When war broke out, German aliens in Newfoundland were rounded up for fear that the colony might be attacked by Germany from the sea. In the resulting panic, Peter was suspected of a being a spy. He was a victim of Newfoundland insecurity. “What would somebody want to be in Newfoundland for, anyway? Sure, the only reason someone from Germany would come to a place like this would be to blow it up!”

  My great-uncle was arrested and interred in a POW camp. They took Escasoni, his fifty-acre property surrounded by grassy fields and rivers, and turned it into a sanatorium for troops. Peter and Alice never got their home back. In 2015 it was still a functioning nursing home owned by the government. Peter was, however, released from the POW camp on condition that he go to the United States, pay a four-thousand-dollar bond to stay there, and report twice monthly to the British consular agent in New York. Peter had gone alone to the States but was joined by Aunt Alice. He died young, but Aunt Alice lived to be one hundred, banished miles from Escasoni and never having lived the life she’d imagined for herself before the Great War.

  There would be no fifty-acre estates for the Critches. There would be no New York high-rises, either. Nan, Dad, and Leo were left to navigate the Depression years together. To say they were poor was an understatement. Church mice would drop off hampers to them. A census from the time shows that their annual rent in 1926 was eighty-two dollars. Nan’s total income was just one hundred and twenty.

  Pretty soon, Dad was left to care for his mother alone. Leo left Newfoundland during the war to work as a relief farmhand, taking the place of GIs in the States who’d left home to defend their country in far-flung places—like Newfoundland.

  Newfoundland was a vital base of operations for Allied Forces in World War Two. Being the most easterly point in North America, the island became a hunting ground for Nazi submarines. U-boats would wait outside the mo
uth of the harbour, picking off naval convoys as they left to join the war effort. To keep them from sailing right into the harbour itself, a “submarine net” made of links of chain was stretched across the narrows. These giant chains still exist, tossed into the woods off Signal Hill like a giant Tim Hortons cup. The Nazis even landed in Labrador, where they set up a weather station. They didn’t stay long, though. Like the Vikings before them, the Nazis just couldn’t take the weather.

  Rumours of Nazi spies on the island were rampant during the war years. Dad’s cousin Alice (not the aunt that married the German) swore that she’d once danced with a Nazi soldier (the Critch women have a thing for Germans, apparently). She said she waltzed with a handsome blond man one night in Topsail. He spoke with a strange accent, and when a group of American GIs showed up, he suddenly disappeared. The next morning the town was abuzz when a German submarine was sighted disappearing under the waves like an anti-Semitic whale. Now, I suppose it could have been a fella from Montreal who didn’t fancy her two-step and the sub might have just been a log in the water, but where’s the fun in that?

  The small community of Bell Island was the only place outside of Pearl Harbor in North America to be attacked by the Axis powers. A German sub came close enough to torpedo two ships and blow up the wharf. My uncle Frank was in the Newfoundland Home Defence Force then. (Frank was actually Dad’s cousin. His father wasn’t around either, and their mothers decided to pool their resources and raise them up side by side.) These were the men of the Newfoundland Militia tasked with knocking on doors to make sure people had their lights off during blackouts and guarding against enemy attack. Nobody on Bell Island ever thought they’d actually have an enemy attack to guard against, though.