Strange sight cured nasty temper

By Laurent d’Entremont



Halloween is drawing close so the timing is right to tell this true story that I came across by interviewing old-timers many years ago.

This is a story about ‘Old Willie’, a man I barely remember from my earliest memories of the 1940s. Perhaps the reason I remember him at all is because of his car. Back then, he was still driving a 1927 Model T Ford Tudor closed car.

Willie was an old man by then and I would see him and his wife, Rose, at church each Sunday. Rose was a forever-slender woman with pink cheeks and a very pleasant personality. Sometimes after mass my father would crank Willie’s car to get it started. I doubt very much that the car had left the village many times in the more than 20 years that Willie and Rose had owned it.

Like many from his generation Willie did a bit of farming in spring and summer. He grew potatoes, carrots, peas and other crops. He may have kept a cow for milk and a dozen chickens for eggs. He also found time to work in the building trade making stone buildings and other masonry. He was a multi-talented man.

This was before my time, but earlier Willie also had a lobster boat, which was the type used in the 1930s. It was about 30-feet long and six or seven feet wide powered by a one-cylinder motor that shook the whole boat when it fired. He fished a hundred or more traps with a helper from his neighborhood. It was just a small fishery and quite common for those days.

I was told that Willie had a temper and knew all the bad words that most of us had never even heard; words that could stop a nine-day clock. This is what got him in trouble and changed his life forever, as I was about to find out through my interviews.

About 35-years-ago I was interviewing some of the older fishermen on things that had happened in the past. Especially things pertaining to folklore or superstitions that some of those older men were suppose to believe, or pretended to believe. These were put on tapes and are now stored at the archives of University St. Anne in Church Point, Digby County.

Of course, those I spoke with all knew the same stories that my grandfather had told a hundred times, like the vanishing of Rosalie Amiro who had gone to gather dry tree bark to start the morning fire and disappeared without a trace, never to be seen again. Or the one about a mother who received a visit one night from her son who was suppose to be fighting on Vimy Ridge during the First World War. She was quite surprised to have this unexpected visit. Her son was dressed in his army uniform and she had a very pleasant visit with him before he disappeared through the door. Sadly, a few days later she received a telegram saying that her son had been killed in action. This had happened precisely at the very same time that he had visited his mother. He had never left the French soil, it was learned.

Someone also told me a story that my grandfather knew but had never told his grandchildren. It was about Willie, his hot temper and the horrifying incident that had happened aboard his fishing boat many years before.

At the end of lobster season, Willie and his helper were setting mackerel nets just outside our long harbour. Fishing was poor on that day (it was poor on most days), and Willie was in bad humor, very bad, especially since he had only three mackerel in his nets.

He was so mad that he threw the three mackerel, one at a time, at the little white church that was near the mouth of the harbour, swearing a blue streak and blaming the church and all involved for his bad luck fishing.

After this despicable temper tantrum he looked in the back of the boat and, much to his horror, there was a strange apparition beside the hired man. This scared the living daylight out of Willie and he never swore again for as long as he lived.

This was the same man that I remember with a prayer book and hair white as snow in church each Sunday with his wife Rose. Willie, it appears, had learned his lesson.



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