A Splendid Ruin: A Novel

by Megan Chance

  It took me a long time to work my way through the jigsaw of wreckage. The morning advanced, the sun undisturbed, the relentless press of time unaffected. Blood from my forehead dripped down my cheek and onto my dusty shoulder, but I hardly felt the gash. I had been lucky. Dead bodies lay in the street where people had dragged them from the ruins. Here, a leg protruded from a pile of rubble. There, a man sat on a heap of brick, sobbing over a dead woman half-buried at his feet.

  The ground shifted, wakeful still. More than one person screamed. I stopped, my heart pounding. The earth breathed beneath my filthy, bloody feet, turning in its sleep, no longer something I could trust. I walked quietly, lightly, careful not to disturb, flinching at every sound, pausing to wait for the reaction, the restless waking, the roar, then relieved again when it was only a shudder.

  I passed a crowd gathered to watch smoke rise from the streets below. “Fire,” said one man. I caught the eye of another driving a produce wagon, though I didn’t mean to, and he frowned and stopped. He called, “You should be in the hospital. Get in. I’ll take you.”

  It was then I noticed there were others in the wagon as well, all hurt. The wagon would put greater distance between me and the asylum more quickly, so I didn’t protest, though I had no intention of going to any hospital—it was no place to hide—and who was to say one was still standing, anyway?

  I climbed into the back, among baskets of carrots and cabbages and other wounded. It was only then I realized how much I hurt. The bottoms of my feet were shredded. I ached all over. The wagon slowed as the streets became mobbed with those escaping the city, people lugging personal treasures, framed pictures, carpetbags, men pulling playwagons loaded with children and possessions, hauling trunks that scraped and thudded relentlessly over the cobblestones. One woman had a parrot on her shoulder and carried a birdcage that held two kittens. A boy shuffled along holding a chromolithograph over his head. No one spoke, everyone was gray faced, and no one was running, but only walking in a steady, onward flow, and I had the sense that they too felt that the world was restless, that a wrong step could wake it again.

  Soldiers—where had they come from so quickly?—were everywhere, directing digging men. The produce wagon stopped, and a soldier peered over the side at us.

  “They need a hospital,” said the produce man.

  “Mechanics’ Pavilion,” the soldier said. “Hurry up now.”

  Mechanics’ Pavilion. No, that could not be right. It wasn’t a hospital. I had been there skating with Goldie. There would be people there I knew.

  But that was another life. No one would be skating today.

  The entrance of the Pavilion was cordoned off by police. Crowds pushed to get inside. One of the officers hauled me from the wagon and passed me to a nurse. I’d been off my feet long enough by then that they throbbed, no longer numb from shock and walking. They moved me and the others so quickly I had no time to argue or to thank the produce man, and he was gone.

  Inside, the huge building was filled with people, men and women holding crying babies, children whining at their feet. Near the entrance were operating tables surrounded by doctors and nurses, all of them full. I had to turn away at the sight of a badly mangled woman held down by her husband as the doctor brought a bone saw to her leg.

  The nurse hurried me past. Mattresses and cots and blankets crowded the floors. Damaged and destroyed hospitals had apparently rushed staff and supplies to whatever large buildings were still standing, but I was surprised at how quickly it had been organized, though honestly I was so shaken that my notion of time could not be counted upon.

  It stank of blood and coffee and carbolic. Everywhere were people searching for someone. Thankfully, it was too chaotic for anyone to care who I was. A nurse directed me to a mattress, stitched up the gash on my forehead, and cleaned and bandaged my feet. The high, vaulted ceiling echoed with the buzz of talk and groaning and cries of pain. I stared up at it uneasily, remembering how Blessington had fallen upon me, discomforted by being again inside, twitchy. I would have fled if not for the fact that my feet hurt so much I didn’t think I could. I was impatient now. It was time to begin putting my plans in motion.

  Two men passed carrying a makeshift coffin of a wicker basket. They went behind the seats ringing the main floor; the Pavilion was serving as a morgue too. It wasn’t until then that I wondered if the earthquake may have made my plans moot. Were the plans I’d spent so long scheming in the asylum only to be shiny, pretty useless things?

  I had made them assuming nothing would have changed in the time I was gone. Who lay now in the morgue beyond? Was anyone I knew on those operating tables? Shin? LaRosa? Downtown was a shambles, what of Nob Hill? What of the Monkey Block? Had God given me my escape only to take away the reason I’d wanted it? Had he taken retribution for me?

  I hoped not. I didn’t want the Sullivans dead in the earthquake. I didn’t want them dead at all. I wanted them to suffer, as I had suffered. An earthquake wasn’t enough.

  As if in answer to my thoughts, the building seized, the ground rumbled and rolled. The vaulted ceiling shook, wooden struts groaned. I stumbled to my feet, forgetting pain in panicked terror, and rushed to the door along with many others. Police gathered to block the way and push us back.

  “Stay where you are!” a doctor shouted. “Do not move! Stay where you are!”

  The shock eased, but everyone was jumpy. I limped back to the mattress. A nun brought coffee, blessedly hot, and bread. My forehead and my feet stung, and I was exhausted by panic and fear, but I knew I could not rest here. There were too many people; someone might recognize me, and while I knew I might not be thinking clearly, I believed I must find some place to hide until I could locate my allies—if they were still alive, and if they were still my allies. If they weren’t alive, if they refused to help me . . . No, I wouldn’t consider that.

  I glanced at my poor bandaged feet and winced at the thought of walking, but I had no choice. First I needed shoes.

  Then I heard something change within the cocoon of sound and motion all around me, a low and almost imperceptible rustle at first, then carried whispers, a rush of excitement, or panic, or both. Nurses and doctors and everyone who could lift a hand were pulling mattresses and carrying patients toward the rear entrance of the Pavilion.

  Then the whispers formed voice. Fire.

  Time to go. I hobbled toward the seats ringing the pavilion floor, toward the makeshift morgue. There were still people moving among the corpses, but the hurry now was for the living. I tried not to look at the mangled dead too closely, to feel nothing at the stilled children, the man missing an arm and a part of his skull, the woman who was only half there. I found a young man still wearing his boots. I unlaced them and took them off, ignoring his crushed shins and the blood matting his trousers. I shoved my feet into the boots, lacing them again as tightly as I could. They were too big, but the bandages on my feet helped, and they would do.

  The rush to doors intensified; the panic of the crowd grew electric, and now I smelled the smoke. I took the man’s coat from him, not noticing until I had it on that blood stained the back, but it was more decent than only my nightgown. Someone shouted, “Hurry!” and men came running now to carry out the dead.

  There was no more time. I clomped in my heavy boots to where the others were herded out into waiting automobiles and ambulances and wagons and whatever could be corralled. Once I was outside, it was an easy matter to disappear again into the crowd and the pandemonium.

  Across the street, the facade of city hall’s elegant dome had peeled away, leaving only the metalwork structure. I stared at it in shock, remembering the awe with which my cousin had pointed out the pride of San Francisco and Sullivan Building. “This is what Papa does,” she’d said, grabbing my arm. “Look at how lovely it is! Papa says it’s what all buildings in the future will aspire to.”

  It had been imposing, and beautiful. What had taken decades to build was now only a spectacular wreck of broken
pillars and piles of powdery stone. The ground shook again to the accompaniment of screams and gasps. Another pillar from city hall toppled, smashing, spewing debris from its interior.

  A steady exodus spilled from rising pillars of smoke. Most headed toward the waterfront and the ferry to Oakland, away from the city. Others stood watching the fire grow south of Market Street, where there were mostly poor shanties and ramshackle wooden buildings. Firefighters raced with their engines and muscled horses while others worked relentlessly, looking for survivors. Smoke grayed the air. A tangle of warped rails, fallen trolley poles, and drooping wires choked the streets. Posters from Carmen, which had apparently played at the Opera House last night, lay trampled and torn.

  I was caught in the moving crowd, pressed on all sides, borne along without volition.

  My feet hurt even with bandages and shoes. I stopped dead at a sudden, deafening blast, and a manhole cover shot fifty feet into the air, with it a fusillade of paving stones and dirt. The horse standing near shied, upsetting its cart, spilling kegs of wine, which ruptured and poured into the hole, so the stink of sewage mixed noxiously with the tang of wine.

  “Get out of here!” shouted a soldier. “Go on! Over there!”

  I went to where he directed me. Men scrambled over fallen walls, trying to pull survivors from the ruins in a cloud of smoke and heat. Screams from inside the rubble: “Help!” “Don’t let me burn alive!” and “Please, get me out!” Rescuers swore and worked feverishly, then fell back as the boards caught in the intense heat and the screams that followed from those caught within—dear God, such a terrible sound, one that vibrated into my skull until the flames took it and it dissipated in smoke. I spun away, my eyes stinging. The cries were swallowed by the sound of sucking air and crackling boards and plaster and paper. The heat was stifling; cinders fell like rain, one burning its way into the wool of my jacket until I beat it away.

  After that I walked without regard for my feet or the smoke or my throbbing head. The city was no longer mine but a place I didn’t know. I had no idea where I was going, only that I must keep on, get away, stay hidden, find a place to rest, to think. I was mad with thirst; the next time I came across a broken water main, I knelt with others to drink. Though the water was dirty and tasted foul, it was water, and I was grateful for it.

  Finally, I stopped at the edge of a large crowd filling a square surrounded with buildings. It took a moment before I saw something familiar in the piles of gathered trunks and bags and people sitting on the grass to watch the billowing gray smoke beyond as they might watch a fireworks program or a grand parade. The genteel grass lawns, the hedges and the benches, mobbed. The pillar with the statue Victory stretched into the sky, glinting in smoldering sunlight, the blocky white pedestal nearly hidden by the masses.

  Union Square.

  I remembered my uncle and his mistress walking that circled path. Goldie pulling me back behind the pedestal. “Is she wearing any new jewelry? Can you see?” So long ago. Hard to think it had been my life. Now the square felt entirely different, alien and yet oddly safe and companionable, as thronged as it was. We were all survivors of a disaster, and the wonder of it, the disbelief that it had happened, that it was still happening, was evident in the voices of those all around me as they recounted their stories of this morning.

  “I was on my way home from the night watch and the road just rose up under me. Thought I was drunk at first, but I hadn’t had a drop. Not a drop.”

  “I got up to start the stove and I heard this terrible sound and then the stove jumped like it’d come alive.”

  “The pigeons would not quiet. Did you notice that? They would not quiet. I wonder if they knew?”

  “I thought it was a train off the tracks—”

  “—a tornado—”

  “—I never heard a sound like that.”

  On and on, people repeating themselves with fervor, as if repetition might make it more real. I was exhausted. There were more explosions, someone said they were setting off dynamite to stop the fires. It only added to the nightmarishness. The sun lowered, turning the sky a weird greasy orange, and the smell was sickly and hot and sweetly cloying. A death smell. A roasting smell. When I remembered what must be roasting, I wanted to be sick.

  Some of the people in the square had army tents. A relief wagon at the edge of the square offered soup and water. I had not been hungry, especially now, with the smell, though I was still thirsty. But there were so many people. Someone might recognize me.

  I could not bring myself to care just then. I got some water and collapsed in the grass like the others, and there I slept until the wee hours of the night, when the St. Francis Hotel and the other buildings around Union Square caught fire, and we were ordered to flee into streets, where the pavement was so hot the cobbles popped. Shattered glass and brick flew from all sides. My lungs burned. My ears rang with gunshots, explosions, and a hundred different shatterings and rumblings and crashings, and the roaring, gasping suck of the fire-fueled wind, and all there was to do was keep going through the restless night, moving blind and purposeless into the weird, dusky copper darkness, until finally I was on a street too quiet to be alive. I was so tired and bleary I could no longer feel any part of myself, and I had no idea where I was.

  The throbbing pulse of the city had stilled. Shadows huddled in corners, men and women and children sleeping, or trying to. Now and again a scampering rat. A group of people wrapped in blankets and carpets slept on the sidewalk before a house that dipped and sagged. A rosebush twined about its porch, and how red those roses glowed in the strange bronze light. I’d never seen such a vibrant color. It did not look real. I was mesmerized by them, such beauty in the desolation, such an otherworldly hue.

  I stared at them for a long time.

  On your feet!”

  I jerked awake to the shout and a sharp jab in my shoulder.

  A soldier, young and angry, with another very tired-looking soldier behind him, prodded me again with the bayonet fixed at the end of his rifle. “I said, get up!”

  I stared at him, disoriented. There had been no bells to wake me, I was not in Blessington, there were no roses; all these things came to me before I remembered, though I had no idea really where I was. An alcove of some kind, slumped in a filthy corner that stank of old beer.

  Slowly, I rose.

  He gestured with the rifle to a broken window. The still intact part read SHOEMAC. “All saloons are closed. Liquor is forbidden. Looters are to be shot on sight.”

  “I wasn’t looting anything,” I protested. “I didn’t know this was a saloon.”

  “How’d the window get broken?”

  “The earthquake? I don’t know. I was only sleeping—”

  He backed away, aimed his rifle at my chest, and said, “Empty your pockets.”

  I resisted the urge to feel for the gold button. “I was only sleeping,” I protested again. A shouted, “Hold! No looting!” came from across the street. The soldier training his gun on me jumped, the other turned to look.

  “I said hold!” Again, the shout across the street. Another shout, and a shot shattered the quiet.

  I cried out, but I wasn’t hurt, the shot wasn’t for me, not from my soldier’s gun. By the time it registered, the two questioning me had run to their comrade and the man who’d been looting, now lying sprawled and lifeless. People ran, more shots rang out, the soldiers, everyone, panicking.

  I too ran. Someone shouted behind me; I braced myself for a shot that didn’t come, and didn’t relax until I’d turned the corner, but even then I hurried on, my feet aching, my heart racing.

  The city was misery and ruin. Groups gathered in the middle of streets, sitting around stoves that had been dragged from houses, or makeshift ones made of brick and metal. The yellow-gray pall of smoke made it hard to see anything past a half block, and the fires still raged. Find Shin. Find Dante LaRosa. Yes, but how exactly was I to do that in this chaos? I needed someplace safe to sit and think and
plan my next steps.

  Explosions from dynamite shuddered the air, the crashing of walls its accompanying thunder. When I came upon a bread line, I waited, too hungry and thirsty now to care if I met someone I knew. I must look like everyone else anyway—dust covered, filthy, unrecognizable. After two hours of standing, drinking hot coffee and water passed out by a man making his way down the line, I took the box they offered, and then hurried off alone to eat whatever was inside.

  I found a place behind a pile of rubble, and sat on the tumbled brick near a fallen chimney. The afternoon was advanced by then, the day grimy and unseasonably hot, or maybe it was just the heat of the fires. Soot and ash and dirt itched, and the wool coat was now far too warm, but I kept it on as protection against hot cinders and wind-spun sparks. Nearby, a man sat on the curb of a broken sidewalk, reading a newspaper as if it were perfectly normal to be doing such a thing in the middle of devastation. I could see the headline from where I sat: Earthquake and Fire: San Francisco in Ruins.

  Well, I hardly needed a newspaper to tell me that, but I wondered where he’d got it and where I could find one myself. I was hungry for news, for something to show me how to proceed. The man folded the paper again and stood, caught sight of me watching, and before I could look away, came over and handed it to me. “I’m finished.”

  I took it eagerly. The newspaper was a combined effort of the Examiner and the Call and the Chronicle.

  But not the Bulletin. Why not? What had happened to it? Where was Dante?

  No Hope Left for Safety of Any Buildings.

  Whole City Is Ablaze.

  At Least 500 Are Dead.

  Who was dead? Which of those five hundred were those I knew?

  I was so lost in my questions that I didn’t notice the man who stood in front of me until his shadow crossed the page. He was as grimy as I was, wearing a ratty gray sweater and sagging trousers.

  “Hello?” I said politely.

  “I’ll take that,” he said.

  “Oh, but I’m still reading it—”