I crept down the stairs in my stocking feet and put on my outdoor clothes in the back porch. Then I retraced my steps to the front gate, fever and all, and slammed it shut. Returning to the back porch, I stomped the snow off my feet on the stoop, and entered the house, banging the door behind me. I was long and slow taking my clothes off, and by the time I was hanging up my scarf, my mother appeared in the kitchen.
“What’s the trouble?” she said, her voice warm and concerned. “Why are you home so early?” I realized for the first time that she had become gentler, and that she had been like that for a long time. Even to my father. Possibly especially to my father. As I mounted the stairs to bed, I pondered these things, but none of them made much sense to me.
You maybe thought I was telling you this tale about Mr. Manuel Jenkins because there was something secret and terrible in his past that we eventually found out about. But no. Or possibly you were looking for something dramatic at the end, like the Mounties coming to get him, or a tragic death under the front-end loader. But none of these things happened. He just came. And then he just went. None of us, not one of us, ever saw him again. He never wrote to us, which seemed odd to me at the time, because he was a great one for saying thank you. So I think now that perhaps he didn’t know how to write. Maybe those big hands of his never held a pencil. Come to think of it, he never would join the kids when they did their crossword puzzles. “Too hard for me,” he’d say, chuckling, and we always thought he was joking. No. He just left. Disappeared down the road in his front-end loader and was swallowed up by the hill behind Mrs. Fitzgerald’s house.
I’m forty-one years old now, and from time to time I still ache to see Manuel Jenkins. I’ve been happily married for sixteen years, and I have four beautiful children. But I feel as though something is unfinished. Does that seem curious to you? It’s like seeing a really great movie and having to leave the theatre ten minutes before the end. Or like wanting a pony all your whole life long, and not ever having one. Or like yearning to see, just once more, the rocky coast where you grew up. And I’m exactly the age my mother was when he left. Sometimes I think that if I could see him just once more, I might understand everything, all of it. And that then I could put the memory of him away where it belongs. Although I live on a farm in the middle of Saskatchewan, I have a notion that one of these days I’ll just turn around, and there he’ll be at the back door, filling the kitchen with his size and with his grace.
It could happen, you know. I feel it could.
Black Snow
Jon Tattrie
During World War I, on December 6, 1917, two ships collided in Halifax Harbour. The Imo was carrying supplies and the Mont Blanc was packed with explosives. The Mont Blanc caught fire and exploded at 9:04 a.m. and levelled Halifax’s North End. It was the biggest man-made explosion the world had ever known. The following story is an excerpt from the novel of the same name, a love story set in the very real world before, during, and after the Halifax Explosion.
The man staggers down the street through the smoking ruins, his charred skin feathered with peels of white blisters. He is naked, except for a white sailor’s hat.
“Where am I?” he slurs through a broken face, eyes staring wildly at nothing. I shake my head, gaping at the suddenly birthed hell all around me. Buildings burn and a rain of ash falls from the smoldering black sky. I am crumpled on my side, my arm crushed under me, screaming in agony. I silence myself, but the screaming goes on. I wonder where my wife is. Evelyn. My life.
A house next to me collapses on itself. Someone is stuck in the basement, under the rubble. As I stumble to my feet, the coals from the tipped-over fireplace set the wreckage alight. The screaming intensifies with the roaring of the inferno. I run to the home, joined by the black ghosts of those still breathing, but the fire devours the home like kindling and before we get far, the screaming stops.
Other voices take up the cry.
I look around, trying to see where I am. Minutes before, I had been on the harbour, heading to work at the sugar refinery, standing with some dockyard workers, watching a ship burn on a sunny December morning. I had seen the crash – a stupid thing, one ship sailing down the wrong side of the Narrows and cruising right into a second ship, like two people trying and failing to get out of each other’s way.
After a mighty crunch, the ships parted, one listing toward Dartmouth, the other toward Halifax. A burly dockyard worker next to me spotted the crew of the Mont Blanc rowing like madmen toward Dartmouth. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “Run, Frenchies, run!”
Beside me, hundreds of men stopped work to watch the flaming ship under a crisp blue sky, and behind me every woman and child in Halifax pressed their noses to the windows for a better view. The rooftops were crawling with spectators as the big ship loomed in on shore like a Viking funeral boat.
I was standing next to the Patricia, Halifax’s shimmering firefighting machine. Freshly polished, she looked like the future. The old, horse-drawn engines rattled up beside us. The heat was intense. Hoses were unfurled as the ship kissed the end of the pier.
I opened my mouth to speak when the world was destroyed. I remember flying, spinning in a whirl of silence, watching a heavy anchor travel over me, thinking this was death. I remember thumping to the ground.
I look at myself. My coat is gone. So is my hat and my left shoe. Water trickles into my mouth. Tears? I send my good arm to my face and pull it away, damp. Blood. Somewhere on my head I’m bleeding, but I can’t tell where. Maybe everywhere.
A woman in a dirt-white dress crawls out of a pile of burning timber across the road. Her hair is brown, same as my Evelyn’s. She gets to her feet, pressing her right hand to her face, holding a limp baby with her left. She goes the same way as the sailor. A spooked horse gallops past dragging a broken buggy, a huge shard of glass piercing the animal’s side.
A wind clears some of the black from the sky and I can see a mushroom cloud towering over the Narrows. I limp down toward the harbour.
Dazed, I wonder where the city is, imagining it has been picked up like Dorothy’s house, carried on a wind and deposited safely in some Emerald City.
I fall as I walk down a street. I land on something soft, see it is a woman twisted against a wall and start to apologize, but the woman is dead.
A man in a torn black coat runs up the hill, screaming, “The Germans are attacking! The Germans are attacking!”
I want to correct him, but can’t speak.
A young man about my age jogs past, sees I am alive, and lifts me to my feet.
“We need all the help we can get!” he shouts, calm in the hysteria.
I run after him toward the docks. Hundreds stampede the other way.
“The magazine’s going to blow!” one of them hollers. I look to the young man for confirmation.
He shakes his head. “Let them run. It won’t blow. There’s people that need our help.”
“My name is Ben,” he says, offering me his blackened hand.
“Thomas,” I say, shaking his hand. It’s bloody. His red hair is smeared with blood.
“You’re bleeding,” I tell him.
“The whole city is bleeding.”
“I need to find my wife.”
Ben’s face grows grim.
“Where is she?”
“Rector Street.”
He closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, the sadness is gone.
“We’ll find her. She’s fine.”
Pier 6 is gone, the burning ship is gone, and so are all the people. Where it is not on fire, the ground is damp.
“Tidal wave,” Ben explains. “The Mont Blanc blew a good chunk of the harbour into the city. Swept people back out, too.”
We pass the Patricia, or a snarled dark twin of her. No sign of the firemen.
A group of soldiers dig through the smashed wood of a destroyed building. Ben walks up to an officer and offers a smart salute. The two exchange words, and Ben points toward m
e. The officer nods and dismisses Ben.
“Start digging,” Ben says. “We need every hand we can get. This is the orphanage.”
I start picking up beams and throwing them behind me.
We dig a long time before we find a pile of mangled little bodies. “They must have been hiding in the basement,” Ben whispers.
I’m in a fog, my brain isn’t working, but seeing the dead children jolts me.
“I need to find my wife,” I say, tasting the kiss she left me with that morning.
Ben looks at me hard.
“Rector Street is gone. The whole North End is gone. The whole damn city is gone. What didn’t get blown up by the explosion burned to the ground. I’m sorry, Thomas, but your wife is dead.”
But he doesn’t know that. He can’t know that. I walk away from him, heading home. Rector Street is razed. Plumes of dark smoke hang over the remains. I can’t tell where it starts or ends, what is street and what isn’t, or where my house is. Was. I find a neighbour and we start digging. He doesn’t know where our homes are either, so we just dig and dig and dig.
When we hear cries, we run in that direction and dig until we find a terrified survivor, or a corpse. We help them, or lay their body to the side.
We work for hours in that cooling hell, throwing bathtubs out of living rooms, tipping over scorched beds, pulling fallen walls apart.
As the sun leaves the sky, stealing what light remains, snow begins to fall on the burning city.
My hands are raw and frozen. My neighbour has stopped digging. We’ve excavated half the neighbourhood, stacking the bodies of friends and strangers on the street. We had found our houses, but no bodies in them.
A calm busyness has taken hold of the city. Soldiers and sailors march past, telling us where we can find shelter and help.
“Come on, dig,” I tell my neighbour, pulling a scorched chair out of a destroyed home.
He looks at me.
“They’re dead,” he whispers, crying softly, and I don’t believe him. My wife is my air; I couldn’t be alive if she were dead.
I stare at my neighbour like a traitor and turn from the ruins of my home into the growing storm.
I stumble into the thickening snow. The city is bright with fire, houses burning like Bedouin camps, brighter than it has been in years. We’ve been living in blackout conditions since the war, but tonight, Halifax is alight.
Troops march past, garrison lorries race around the debris, horses pull carriages laden with corpses and the wounded. Women and men lift broken houses, pulling out the living and the dead and the dying.
The blizzard settles on the city, its swirling whiteness dancing over the char-black ruins. A family huddles in a buckled house with the windows all blown out, burning their broken home to stave off the cold. Some have nailed carpets across the smashed windows to block out the worst of the storm. Most have gone to friends and family in the South End. They say Citadel Hill protected those fine houses from the explosion that destroyed the north.
“Thomas!” a weak voice calls to me. It’s a man I work with at the refinery. I sit next to him and we warm ourselves by a fire.
“Michael, this is awful,” I say to him. He’s paler than the snow in his hair, and bright blood trickles down his face, staining his winter coat. He stares at me blankly, then points to his ears, indicating they aren’t working. I speak louder.
He shakes his head.
“Dead, all dead. Mother, father, wife and five kids.”
“I’m sorry.”
He nods.
“Here, borrow my coat for a bit,” he says, starting to take the thick garment off.
“No, no, I’m fine.”
A wind claws my skin beneath the thin shirt I am wearing. The blast had blown my jacket off me, along with my hat and one shoe.
Michael pauses, then opens the great coat so it falls like a blanket on both of us. I thank him and we sit, staring into the fire.
A man holding a torch, shouting for his family, wakes me. The flames shine on his shattered face in the howling storm, the yellow glow flickering over his red cuts. He screams their names over and over.
“Poor man,” I say to Michael. He is silent. I look at him, but his face is still, blue, his chest at peace. Dead. Like all the others, dead. Like this whole city.
I stand, chilled to be so near death. How had I slept through it? I start off into the maelstrom, and then turn back.
I take Michael’s coat, then his boots. Everything is too small. I don’t know what to do with the rest of him, so I pull him onto the side of the road.
A horse-drawn wagon comes up behind me and stops. I can’t see the driver’s face, just the wild eyes of his horse. It snorts clouds of warm air into the frozen night.
“Dead?” shouts the driver. I nod. “Put him on. I’m going to the morgue and I got room for one more.”
I carry Michael to the back and lift him onto the wagon. I sit down next to him and the driver whips his horse into motion. There must be twenty bodies stacked in with me. The driver runs up what used to be Russell Street.
“Where are we going?” I shout up to him.
“Chebucto Road School,” he hollers back. “It’s been turned into a morgue. They learned from when the Titanic when down a few years back.”
I nod in the darkness. So that’s the scale of it. This is a poor man’s Titanic. A whole city sunk and no lifeboats.
The windows are punched out of the new brick school, but the walls are mostly standing. Six wagons like ours stand at a back door while soldiers unload a seventh. The drivers make low talk. I stand and walk past the soldiers, following the torches down to the basement.
It’s an orderly apocalypse down there. Rows and rows of bodies, some covered with white sheets, some not. Some have little piles beside them: a girl’s body next to some school books, a watch and keys next to an old man, a baby next to a young woman. Soldiers keep bringing corpses in. Others walk around with clipboards, compiling a list of the dead.
A young woman asks if she can help me.
“I’m looking for my wife.”
“Name?”
I tell her, and she checks her clipboard, then shakes her head. My heart stops.
“She’s not on my list. But most of them –” She waves her hand over the dead. “We don’t know who they are.”
I notice other people down in that dank, dark basement. An old man, leaning on his grandson, limps from one body to the next. At each one they stop, and the young man pulls back the sheet.
The old man shakes his head, and they replace the sheet and move on. Collapsed souls searching among broken bodies.
“Where do I start?” I ask the young woman.
A tear sneaks down her cheek. She rubs it away. “I don’t know,” she says, and goes back to her task.
I start at the beginning and move slowly down the long aisles. I see friends, colleagues from the refinery, cousins. Strangers. Mostly sliced up bad, killed by the windows. Killed by curiosity. Crushed by walls, burned to death.
I look into the face of death hundreds of times that night, but I don’t see my wife. I crawl out of the basement, past the wagons endlessly unloading the dead.
I walk to the Commons. The field is full of army tents. The invincible Armoury watches over them. A few soldiers stand smoking cigarettes.
“You can sleep here, sir,” a young one tells me, offering me a smoke. I thank him, inhale deeply.
“Where is everyone?”
“Guess folks are nervous about sleeping so close to the explosion, what with the fire and all. But it’s perfectly safe here. A little fire might even warm us up,” he jokes. I don’t smile. I’ve forgotten how.
“Sorry, sir. But please, come in and rest.”
I walk through a foot of clean snow covering the Commons, past the hundreds of tents. I find a few families, poor people who had no South-End friends and whose relatives are all gone.
The blackness of the night suddenly comes over me. I l
ean against a tree, pulling Michael’s coat tight, but can’t stop shaking. A moan slips out of me. Evelyn. I put my love on the wind, and hope it carries it to her living ear.
I awake chilled; my face is frozen. I blink away the nightmares and the frost and look around. I’m in a tent, under a thick covering of army blankets. I kick them off and go outside.
It’s still snowing. The field of white tents blends into the white snow covering the Commons.
“Morning, sir,” says the young soldier from the night before. He offers me another cigarette. We stand smoking, shivering.
“What’s going on?” I ask.
“Everything’s under control. We got help in from the Valley, from Cape Breton, from the South Shore. I heard that even Boston is sending supplies. This city’ll be up and running by Christmas.”
He must be nineteen years old.
“The trains from the Valley are bringing coffins full of food,” he says. “To save space,” he explains, his face troubled.
We smoke for a moment.
“I’m sure Evelyn is just fine,” he tells me.
“How do you know her name?”
He looks embarrassed, eyes to his polished boots.
“You were shouting to her all night, sir.”
I toss the cigarette on the ground.
“Thanks for everything.”
“Sir? You might want to go to Camp Hill. Me and the boys, well, we’re worried you might have a concussion.”
I thank him and start back to the North End.
“Your wife might be there,” he calls over my shoulder.
I turn and start running. My head, it isn’t right. I can’t think. Why didn’t I go straight to the hospital?
Nova Scotia Love Stories Page 8
