A Wedding in December

by Anita Shreve

  "The smoke is oily," Dr. Fraser said. "Phyllis, where are my binoculars?"

  "In the library."

  "I'll get them," Hazel said. Innes turned in time to see her stand and make her way to the swinging door. She was graceful in her movements — the slide, turn, and rise from the dining room chair — even when on a simple errand. And that, possibly, was the difference between Hazel and her sister. There was no child in Hazel.

  Louise and Mrs. Fraser joined the men at the window. In the harbor, objects shot into the sky at angles from one of the ships. "Oooh, it looks like fireworks," Louise said.

  Below, on the streets, passersby began to gather in groups to watch the blaze. "Haven't seen anything like this since the war began," Dr. Fraser said. "I'm assuming this isn't some kind of sabotage."

  "Germans in Halifax?" Louise asked, her voice rising.

  "No, I'm sure not," Innes heard Mrs. Fraser say with slight annoyance.

  Innes, his eyesight keen, could see lifeboats being lowered from the burning ship. The smoke was indeed thick and oily. Barrels appeared to ignite from time to time.

  Hazel returned with the binoculars and walked directly to the window, where she handed them to her father.

  "They're abandoning the ship with some haste," Dr. Fraser said after he had had a moment to adjust the eyepieces.

  "The ship is drifting closer to the Halifax shore," Innes said. He thought the calamity, for all its potential horror — were men caught in the fire? — quite beautiful with its tongues of flames and irregular fireworks.

  "I see the words 'Belgian Relief on the other ship," Dr. Fraser said.

  Below, on the street, two nursing sisters had stopped to watch the spectacle. A boy, who must already have been late for school, had climbed atop a letter box to get a better view. Hazel was standing so close to Innes that the sleeve of her dress brushed his jacket. Was this by design? For a moment, Innes could think of little else but Hazel's proximity.

  "Best to return to our breakfasts," Dr. Fraser said, setting the binoculars on the windowsill. Innes, reluctant to take his seat with Hazel standing so near to him, picked up the binoculars and examined the ship for himself. Hazel stepped away from Innes, as was only proper.

  "I'm not sure I've ever seen such black smoke," Innes said to Dr. Fraser.

  "They'll get it under control," the doctor said.

  But Innes wasn't as confident. He followed with the binocu­lars a lifeboat in the water. He could see the men paddling franti­cally toward the Dartmouth shore.

  Innes remembered the papers he had to look at before he and Dr. Fraser left for the hospital. He set the binoculars on the sill. "I have some things in my room I must collect," Innes said to Dr. Fraser. "I'll be in the hallway at nine-fifteen?"

  "Yes, of course. Earlier if you want to get a good look at the fire."

  "I think you probably have as good a view from here as any­where," Innes said, taking a last sip of coffee and looking at Hazel, who had returned to her seat. She turned, and there it was again: that secretive glance, covert and inviting. Or did Innes simply wish it so? The thrumming, which only Hazel seemed ca­pable of setting in motion, had started up again in Innes's chest.

  Innes took the steps two at a time, swung around the newel post at the top of the staircase, and headed for his room. He found the papers Dr. Fraser had given him spread upon the floor near the bed. He'd tried to read them last night before falling asleep, but he couldn't remember a single word. He glanced at the title. Purulent Ophthalmia in Infants.

  He noticed that the plume of oily smoke had risen higher into the Halifax sky and was drifting with the slight wind. Pa­pers in hand, Innes walked to the window. The glass was smeared in the east light, suggesting it had not been washed in some time. Innes saw a clock tower, a church spire. Dozens, per­haps hundreds, of Haligonians had come out onto the streets to observe the fire. Clearly the garrison city had not seen much wartime action. Without the binoculars, it was more difficult to make out what was happening at the site of the fire. Innes imag­ined the ship abandoned by now. It would wreck itself on the shore. He glanced down at the abstract. The inflammation devel­ops in less than three days after birth, he read.

  A blast from a factory whistle caused Innes to glance up. Two streets away, a tram stopped. A woman on a bicycle was passing just under his window.

  A brilliant, blinding radiance, a flash of light brighter than anything Innes had ever seen, obliterated everything beyond the glass and had the effect of a blow to the face. In one fluid move­ment, Innes dropped the papers, raised his arm to shield his eyes, and turned his back to the window.

  Innes heard a low rumble, an explosion of great magnitude, and then the sound of glass shattering. He arched his back against the pain — he was being shot — and was blown through the air. He heard the screeching of metal and felt his clothes being torn from his body. In a protective gesture, Innes tried to keep his arms over his head.

  He felt a great sucking wind of such ferocity, he thought he might lose his limbs. He was aware of movement, of twisting in the air. He hit what seemed to be a vertical wooden beam and fell. His shoulder took the brunt. He lay stunned and lost consciousness.

  When he came to — a minute later? five minutes later? — his nostrils were clogged with dust. For one panicky moment, Innes was certain he was suffocating. For how long had he been un­conscious?

  He coughed. He blew his nose. He tried to stand, but he couldn't. What had happened? Where was he? He couldn't remember.

  When he opened his eyes, he saw that he was both outside and inside a building he didn't recognize. It was as though he had been put through to another world, a hellish place covered with dust. Not ten feet from where he was sitting, the floor had buckled, its wooden boards jagged edged. The air was thick with smoke. The wall next to him was bent inward at an impossible curve that Innes thought could not hold another second. Through a blown-out window, he saw that he had landed on an upper story of a home. Not a house at all, Innes thought, survey­ing large cones of cotton and wool that had been tossed into a jumble. A textile factory?

  Innes looked above him. The entire roof was missing.

  For long minutes, Innes heard no sound. It was as though the world had simply stopped.

  He could remember a flash of light. Before that, a fire.

  He felt a biting pain in his back. He reached to the place where he was hurt and cut his finger on a shard of glass. A splin­ter had hit him in the back just below the shoulder bone. Re­moving a sock from his foot — his trousers and shoes were inexplicably gone — he padded his fingers with the sock and tried again to reach the splinter of glass. He pulled it out and flung it, pressing the sock to the wound.

  What in God's name had happened?

  He remembered the Frasers then. He thought of Hazel. Had he been blown out of the Frasers' home? And, if so, where were they?

  Innes reached out with his foot, trying to snag a cone of rag wool. The movement inadvertently pushed the cone away. Innes darted forward with his hand and snatched it, bringing it back onto his lap. He could feel the blood running from the wound on his back and soaking his undershirt. With speed, Innes pressed his other sock up against the wound and tied a length of

  the rag wool around his body, pulling as tightly as he could with­out breaking the wool. He must get himself to hospital. He had no idea how deep the wound was.

  Oddly, he had little pain, though he was aware now of the cold. He scanned his small corner of the floor that was still in­tact, looking for a garment of any sort. All this wool and no clothing. He had an image of his mother knitting. A woman from below screamed, a sound that chilled Innes and kept him immobile for a long minute. He tried yelling back, but had no reply. He noted a leather apron with short sleeves on a hook. Trying to stand, he felt the pain of the wound in his muscles.

  There was pain in his face as well. He ran his hand along his cheek and discovered that tiny slivers of glass were imbedded from his cheekbone to hi
s jawbone. One by one, he picked them out by feel. He examined the interior of his ear for any glass fragments as well, but he found none. Holding on to a diagonal beam, Innes reached over the blasted flooring and flipped the leather apron off the hook.

  Now that Innes was standing, he could see, through the par­tially destroyed wall across from him, an astonishing sight. Sea-water was advancing across a devastated landscape. It was as though the ocean meant to conquer the city. He watched as the water rolled over the city and then subsided.

  In the sky, he saw a zeppelin, which turned out to be, upon closer inspection, a thermal cloud, curly in shape and giving off flashes of light. He heard a groan from below. Louise, for all her hysteria, had been right. Halifax had been shelled by the Germans.

  Innes surveyed the ruins of the attic he was in, searching for a way down onto the street. It was simply a matter of time before that curved wall collapsed and with it the rest of the building. Fear, which Innes had not felt until now, motivated him to begin climbing down through the wreckage. His entire body began to tremble.

  He found a stairway intact, though it had been ripped from the wall and now hung at such an angle that Innes had to de­scend almost vertically. He held on to the banister with his good arm. He must get directly to hospital, he thought as he felt the blood running down his back — less copiously than before, but still there wasn't enough pressure on the wound.

  He searched the bottom floor of the building, a maze of bro­ken objects and chunks of plaster. He tried to find the person who had screamed. He lifted beams and bits of furniture. He called out several times.

  When he had no response, he decided to leave the build­ing, reaching the street through what remained of a window, its glass completely missing. He stepped out into a city as still as death.

  This couldn't have been the Germans, Innes thought. The damage was too vast, too uniform. The street on which the Fraser house had once stood simply no longer existed. For as far as Innes could see in any direction, houses had been leveled or partially destroyed, their roofs blown off, their walls buckled. From the sky, a shower of ash and debris was falling. Telephone poles tilted at angles. A cloud of smoke rose high over the city.

  Forty feet from where he stood, Innes saw a woman pinned under a beam. He made his way with bare feet over scrap metal and glass and wood to the spot where the woman lay. Her face was bloodied, the only color in an ashy landscape. There were splinters of glass protruding from her eyes. He bent to take her pulse, but there was none. The beam had crushed her chest.

  A young girl of about ten years walked around the corner from an overturned carriage. She was naked but for a cotton slip. Her face and arms were dirty, her blond hair singed.

  "Where's your mum?" Innes asked, standing and walking toward her.

  The girl simply stared straight ahead with no expression. Innes wondered if she could see. He waved his fingers in front of her eyes, and she blinked. "Take my hand," he said, reaching for her when she did not respond. "We have to find some clothes for you."

  Innes, shivering now, knew that he must find a length of fab­ric to secure the pressure bandage to his wound. When he and the young girl had gone a few steps, he remembered the dead woman under the beam.

  "Stay here," he said to the girl. "Don't move. I'll be right back."

  Innes quickly retraced his steps to the body and tore lengths of cloth from the woman's skirt and underslip. He removed her shoes and socks.

  Already he was looting the dead.

  He returned to the girl and handed her the shoes and socks and told her to put them on. Still she seemed not to be able to hear him. Was she an immigrant with no English? Innes spoke to her in French with no success. Gently, Innes sat the girl down on a bit of upholstered cushion from the overturned carriage and slipped the socks and shoes on her feet. They were, of course, too big for her, but they would have to do.

  Innes guessed that the girl would not be able to assist him in tying up his wound. He lowered the leather apron, undid the rag wool yarn, wadded up the material from the dead woman's un­derslip, and pressed it against his wound. Using his one free arm and his teeth, he wound the cloth from the skirt around the band­age. He tied it across his chest as tightly as his strength would allow and then put the leather apron back on. He brought the child to her feet.

  "Come on then," he said, taking her hand again.

  Innes and the girl headed up the hill, Innes guessing that the blast would have lost power and momentum as it had moved upward.

  The devastation was beyond anything Innes had ever imag­ined. There were fires everywhere, the city covered with a black oily soot. Power lines were down, automobiles were overturned, and a church steeple lay in the center of what had once been a load.

  Innes saw headless corpses, survivors staggering naked. He saw a chair with a dead child still sitting in it, a woman kneeling on a sidewalk praying. He saw a man clawing frantically at the wreckage of a house and stopped to help, but the fire inside was too fierce, and he had to back away. Above him, a white sun began to appear through the soot and ash.

  Everywhere Innes looked, faces were blackened, hair was singed, bodies had burned to bone. Innes stepped over a radia­tor a piece of crockery, an arm attached to a hand. Signs of the once placid domestic life of the city — a bit of knitting, an intact chair, a Christmas wreath, a fan of papers — were strewn over the streets. Innes hoped the girl beside him would not re­tain the images now forming on her retina. He stopped once to treat a serious cut on a woman's neck by making a bandage from her skirt. He told her to follow him. In a sight that unnerved Innes, a man sat with his back against a dead horse, cradling an infant in his arms. From the loll of the child's head, it was clear to Innes that the child had perished.

  Others moved up the hill in tandem with Innes. The Citadel, a fort on a hill, seemed to be the goal. Innes passed a barrel with a ship's insignia, a man with a missing foot, a house completely flattened. He saw dozens of animals — cats, dogs, cows — some dead, some still alive but bloody. After a time, he spotted an intact building — a house? a shop? — with two men in the doorway. They would help him, Innes thought. At the very least, they would know the direction to the nearest hospital.

  As he approached the building, a middle-aged woman came from within and took the child from him. "What's your name, love?" the woman asked. The girl did not respond. Without a word to Innes, the woman carried the child into the build­ing. Above the blown-out windows of the shop, a sign read DRUGGIST.

  Innes entered the building. Along one wall, bodies were al­ready lined up as if in a morgue — some disfigured, others with glass protruding from their faces. Many were partially naked. An entire city, Innes thought, had been called to the windows by the spectacle of the fire and then in an instant killed or wounded.

  "I'm a doctor," he told the first person he encountered. "I need a better bandage for my wound and some clothes and shoes, and then I can help."

  Clothes and shoes were found for Innes. He suspected they had come from the dead, but he didn't ask. The middle-aged woman washed out Innes's wound with alcohol and applied a pressure dressing. "Your daughter is being cared for," she said.

  "She's not my daughter," Innes said. "I found her alone in the street."

  "She won't speak."

  "She's in shock," Innes explained.

  A long counter on which the chemist had once mixed his po­tions was now in use as a kind of gurney. Innes learned that the chemist had been making sutures and applying dressings. Innes took over, calling for instruments, antiseptics, and anesthetics. The chemist and the middle-aged woman assisted him with rudimentary medicine. An hour earlier, Innes reflected with a kind of shock, he'd been eating kippers and toast in the Fraser dining room.

  Innes worked steadily, the work a buffer against fear and ur­gent curiosity. He had little time to think beyond the immedi­ate, to speak to the wounded, or even to wonder at their circumstances prior to the blast. With their clothing missing
and faces blackened, there were few clues to the occupation or class of the people Innes treated. He removed glass slivers from eyes and faces. He set broken bones. He sutured deep lacerations. His work was not expert; his instruments were rudimentary. Each of the patients would need to be transported to hospital for better care once a vehicle could be found.

  The makeshift ward was a cacophony of moans and cries. When the morgue against the far wall could no longer contain all the dead, bodies were laid on the frozen ground outside the door. Men and women searched for relatives, indicating with a cry that a search was over. Innes was told that at St. Joseph's School, fifty children had been killed. Nearly everyone at the Dominion Textile Factory had died. The blast had momentarily emptied the harbor of water. Ships had leaped into the air.

  Innes worked until he felt faint. He was made to sit in a chair. He was brought soup, which was on the boil over an open fire at the back of the building. There was no electricity, gas, or water in the city. Innes thought about the Frasers and wished that he could go in search of them. If he had survived the blast, perhaps they had as well.

  He could not imagine Hazel's broken body.

  In the late afternoon, Innes was relieved by a military officer. Innes asked for and was given directions to the nearest surviving hospital. There, he hoped to find Dr. Fraser, to assist him in his labors.

  Innes left the druggist's, happy to be away from the stench. But after a few minutes, he wished himself back inside. He found a school in ruins. A woman with her belongings in a pillowcase appeared to be wandering aimlessly. A block of houses was still burning. Odd bits lay in passageways that had once been roads: the axle of a truck, a sewing machine, a woman's lace corset, a bread tin. Men tugged at timbers. One house, remarkably intact, still had its wash on a line on its porch. A letter, addressed to Craig Driscoll, was wedged between two pieces of wood. Innes noted the presence of soldiers, which he took to be a good sign. It was understood now that the explosion had been caused when the Mont Blanc, a munitions ship, had blown up in the harbor. Innes remembered the sailors rowing for their lives to Dartmouth.