by Glen Huser
Two hundred stevedores drowned.
“What’s a stevedore?” I remember asking Uncle Hartley.
“A longshoreman. Someone working on the waterfront loading or unloading those big ships. It was what Harriet’s dad did, what he was doing when Halifax exploded.” Uncle Hartley sipped at his beer for a minute. “Incredible to think of the force. That one ship, the Imo, was thrown to the shore near Tufts Cove where most of the crew died along with lots of Micmacs in Turtle Grove. That was their reservation. Some of the survivors worked for me later in the brewery. Josiah—he lost one of his eyes and had a crippled foot but you couldn’t find a better worker. I remember him saying all his children—I think there were three of them—died.”
Other details. The roof of the railway station became a mess of twisted iron and shattered glass. An orphanage, the King Edward Hotel, and the Home for the Deaf became instant piles of rubble. The Acadian Sugar Refinery where Harriet’s dad worked crumpled and burned. A mushroom cloud spread its plume five miles in the air.
Bradley and I knew about these clouds. We had seen a movie at school about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The show’s narrator declared the world had never see the like of such a cloud before. I was ready to argue the point with my grade five social studies teacher but Mrs. Brinkley shushed me and said, “We don’t dispute information from documentary films.”
“Is it true that a doctor was seen carrying a whole bucket full of eyeballs?” Bradley asked Uncle Hartley on another of his visits.
“That’s what we heard. Glass travelled with tornado force. Your aunt was lucky they didn’t actually have to remove hers.”
Our family chatter, along with Uncle Hartley’s comments, echoed for me when Aunt Harriet finally talked to me about it herself.
“I’m not sure how long I was blacked out,” she said. “I remember regaining consciousness and there was a kind of eerie stillness in which there were—what?—little flickers of sound, people crying, calling for help, the sound of tortured wood giving way or brick collapsing. I think I heard a crazed horse galloping by, and a dog howled somewhere off in the distance. I imagine my face must have been a mass of pain but, oddly, I don’t remember being aware of that right away, even though I couldn’t see a thing. Maybe the shock kept the pain at bay for a little while. I knew my face was a ruin when I ran my hands over it, dislodging slivers of glass, some of them becoming embedded in my hands. I felt my fingers covered with something fluid, and when I put them to my mouth, there was the taste of blood and something else—I thought it might be coal oil or gasoline.
“I remember screaming ‘Phillip’ over and over again, crawling over rubble, trying to find him. I heard someone groaning and I crawled toward the sound. ‘He’s alive! Thank God he’s alive!’ But it wasn’t Phillip’s hand I grasped. It was an old woman’s. ‘Phillip’ I called out again. ‘No—Madge. Madge Pattison,’ the old woman said. I could barely make out her words. She was another of the boarders at the house. As I held her hand, I could feel the life go out of it.
“I found another body. It was the body of a child and my fingers discovered its cold nakedness and I remember thinking there were no babies in Mrs. McTavish’s rooming house. Where had this baby come from? And then, as I kept crawling like some kind of sightless animal back and forth, cutting myself on broken china, impeded by the wreckage of the house’s walls and shattered furniture and strewn bricks, I found him. He was dead, but my fingers discovered nothing that was shattered, nothing cut and torn as my own face was. Somehow in death he’d managed to stay as beautiful as he’d been in life. His hair was mussed and sticky with oil, to be sure; some of his clothing was ripped; but his forehead was as smooth as when my fingers had traced it in the night, the skin across his cheekbones untouched, his eyes open, his lips … no blood, just the oil that had rained down on everything. I took what was left of the sleeve of my nightgown and wiped all that oil off his face.
“Mrs. McTavish said his neck had been broken. She’d been away from the house that morning, over at Dr. McCormack’s cleaning up after a dinner party he’d given the previous night. His house was on the South Side and the buildings there weren’t demolished like those in the North End closer to the docks. Shaken on their foundations and all the windows blown out, but still standing.
“Mrs. McTavish joined the people headed along the streets to the north, aware, as they went, that they were heading into increasing devastation. She’d caught a ride part of the way with rescuers who had a tin Lizzie, but when they stopped to begin loading the wounded straggling southward, she got off and pretty well ran the rest of the way to her street. She told me later she’d stopped here and there to help some of the injured, calling to men to come to the aid of a woman whose arm had been severed; covering a man with a child pinned under him, both dead in their front yard; taking a teenage girl who was in a state of shock to where a cluster of survivors had gathered.
“The horrors along her route prepared her a bit for what she might find on her own street. When she found me, I recognized her voice. ‘Oh my God, my God, my God.’ Her chant joined other sounds—people running, the shouts of those trying to help the wounded, as well as the moans and cries of the injured and dying themselves.
“‘My house is burning,’ I heard her scream. ‘Oh, my God! My house!’ And then I think she noticed me stirring where I lay against Phillip. I’d wrapped my arms around him and was hanging on to his poor body as if it were a life raft. I felt her hands on me, pulling me away from Phillip. ‘No,’ I remember I kept saying. ‘No,’ and Mrs. McTavish said, ‘He’s dead, the poor boy. Let him go. Let him go. It’s you we need to tend to.’ And then she noticed the other bodies. ‘Oh, poor Miss Pattison. And a poor wee babe.’
“She pulled me away from the building—I could feel the heat of the fire—over to where there was some debris from a garden shed. Some men came by and Mrs. McTavish called out to them, ‘Over here, come and help this injured girl. She’s been blinded.’
“‘So’s half of Halifax,’ they hollered. ‘There’s a hospital wagon coming along behind us. Sorry, we can’t stop.’
“Mrs. McTavish had found a blanket in the rubble and wrapped it around me. I remember I’d begun to shiver fiercely, my teeth literally chattering. She wrapped me up in the blanket and then held me in her arms as close to the warmth of her body as she could.
“‘They’re trying to free a family trapped in a cellar with their broken house burning on top of them. Oh God, human eyes were never meant to see such sights.’ And then she was deliberately quiet and I sensed she was chiding herself for what she’d said about human eyes, knowing mine would likely never see anything again.
“It seemed to take forever for help to come. ‘There’s some of his things,’ Mrs. McTavish said as we waited. ‘I’ll make a package of them. Here’s a tablecloth I’ll not be serving supper on again so it might as well be put to good use.’ She tightened the blanket around me. ‘You can take it with you. Everything’s scattered to high heaven but there’s his book he like to write in and some of his sketches. They’re just a bit damaged.’ She kept coming back and holding me, but then she’d spy something else and collect it.
“One of the neighbor women came along. ‘Oh, Peggy.’ She began weeping when she saw us. ‘All Richmond’s gone. Blasted to hell.’ She’d tried to find her sister and her four children but it was like they’d never existed. Their bodies were never found, Mrs. McTavish told me later. Likely they’d gone down to the pier to watch the fire. Those closest simply disintegrated or were washed out to sea with the enormous wave the explosion created.
“Finally one of the wagons made it to our end of the street, a dray that was collecting the injured and carting them to whichever hospital was the closest, and Mrs. McTavish helped me up onto it. There were so many wounded on it that she couldn’t ride but she walked alongside and somehow they kept finding room for another one or two of the injured on their way south. Some of the victims were people she kn
ew and once, when we stopped to pick up someone, she whispered to me, ‘Harriet, it’s enough to break the stoutest heart.’
“Mrs. McTavish told me that I didn’t utter a word throughout this ordeal, not a word since I’d cried ‘No’ as she pulled me away from Phillip. I thought I’d asked her about Per, about the men who’d been working at the sugar refinery wharf, but it must only have been in my mind. I overheard someone talking about it though—the refinery and the iron foundry and some of the other businesses along the waterfront. ‘Don’t be expecting anyone alive from anywhere along there,’ I heard the driver say to someone else.
“The Victoria Hospital was wall-to-wall wounded so they took our wagon to St. Mary’s College. Someone cleaned my face and I felt a doctor’s fingers exploring around my eyes. ‘There’s nothing can be done here,’ he told Mrs. McTavish, ‘but I don’t think we’ll need to excise them.’ They gave me a shot of morphine and I was lost to what was happening for a few hours. I was one of the lucky ones. I heard they ran out of morphine and ether before the night was over.
“Of course I heard about it all afterwards. No one talked about anything else. The worst blizzard in twenty years descended on the wounded city, adding new layers of misery. People perished in the cold of the tent city the army erected on the commons. Many died slow, horrible deaths, trapped in the cellars of their homes as coal fires from kitchen ranges and heaters kept the rubble burning. In the middle of that dreadful blizzard with its drifts of snow and howling wind, the North End was dotted with blazes burning throughout the night. Can you imagine it? The horror?
“Mrs. McTavish spent many hours at my bedside those first days at St. Mary’s, and she would tell me what she heard at the doctor’s where she was staying and what she read in the papers. Every visit brought new information. The search for survivors in the rubble throughout Richmond. Finding The Mont Blanc’s anchor shaft miles away from where the ship blew up. One of its cannons found in Dartmouth. Windows shattered as far away as New Brunswick. All those orphans dying … my dad and everyone at the sugar refinery …
“Curtis, the stories chilled our blood. I think those of us in hospitals were in a kind of shock for weeks, quiet in our pain, as if crying would be some kind of affront to, you know, the hundreds of dead. One day Mrs. McTavish read me a little piece in the newspaper about Phillip Pariston, a young artist visiting Halifax whose drawings had been scattered to the four winds. Killed in the blast, his remains had been dug up from the Fairview Cemetery and shipped to his family for reburial in Vancouver.
“Mrs. McTavish, incensed that there had been nothing included about his ‘wife’ went over to the newspaper office and talked to a reporter the next day. Following her visit, there was another small article about his blind wife being hospitalized in St. Mary’s College and how she liked to take out the few sketches that had been retrieved and trace them with her fingertips as someone described them to her. A few more of his sketches were found by people collecting odd bits of debris that fell for miles around, and some of these were forwarded to me. Mrs. McTavish would sometimes go over the bits and pieces of paper. She didn’t like talking about the figure studies Phillip had done. She’d just say ‘this one’s naked as a jaybird.’ I told her that artists study the human form as doctors do, but I don’t think I convinced her.
“Finally, after a couple of weeks, I was told I was well enough to ‘go home’ but, of course, I had no home to go to. Mrs. McTavish had decided to leave Halifax but she saw me settled with a couple she knew who were taking in boarders. I didn’t stay there long. The depression that had been with me in Montreal and when I first came to Halifax returned, relentless and soul-destroying. A doctor got me into the YMCA where they were tending to cases of shock—those who had gone out of their mind.
“Then one day I just walked away from it and that’s when Jean found me—out on the sidewalk—and took me in to stay at the house where she worked. She said they could use another hand. I remember I said, ‘A blind one?’ and she said, ‘Never mind, we’ll figure it out.’”
“Was the fact that you were pregnant with Phillip’s baby—was that a source of comfort?” I asked her.
“Oh yes.” Aunt Harriet put her hand over her mouth for a few seconds. “I’d forgotten. Sometimes it’s like a jigsaw puzzle, trying to fit the pieces together. Jean helped deliver him. I called her my little mother for a long time.”
“SHE DID,” JEAN LAUGHED WHEN I ASKED HER ABOUT IT. “She called me her little mother. I guess I was fussing like a mother over her wee babe and, with her being so helpless, I fussed over her too. She liked to have me do her hair and makeup for the evenings when she’d play in whatever little orchestra Emma Carter managed to get together. Lovely hair she had, kind of a whitish-gold colour and we’d do it with combs and a beaded headband that covered some of the scars on her forehead. She’d want too much makeup, though, I thought at the time. ‘You look like one of those painted china dolls,’ I’d say. Too much powder and too much rouge. She’d just laugh and say she might as well look like Madame Butterfly—hadn’t her life been filled with misery and music.”
Jean had been in Halifax during the explosion but it was something she didn’t like to talk about.
“I wasn’t where it hit worst,” she told me once when I asked. “I was working in a place up on North Street. Doing housework. I was washing sheets and did get scalded, but it wasn’t nothing compared to what happened closer to the Richmond yards. I’ve never had any trouble figuring out what hell must be like after that day.”
THE PICTURE OF THAT DAY GREW AND DEVELOPED IN MY mind like a photo negative gaining more and more definition as it remains immersed in solution. The head of the bed, I knew, sat in a small alcove with just enough room for a night table.
“It was kind of a haven,” Aunt Harriet told me. “I could lie there, just sleeping or reading, and sometimes I would just rest and watch the Atlantic sky with its bits of movement—clouds, a gull—caught in the rectangle framework of the window. I felt very close to the sky.”
The adjacent wall was filled with Phillip’s sketches, ones he thought might particularly please her eye. Chalk sketches of bouquets he’d brought her, renderings of the waterfront and beach, studies of her head and hands. Pieces he thought might offend the quick eye of Mrs. McTavish, he kept piled on the counter of the little oaken secretary. These included the figure sketches he’d worked on in Toronto, and more recent sketches of Harriet herself, nude or partially clad.
“He insisted on sketching Mrs. McTavish herself one day. I think he caught her scowling at all the pin marks we were making in her floral wallpaper. Completely won her over. She had it framed and hung over the piano in the downstairs parlour.”
In my mind’s eye I could see the wall of sketches, a gallery of artists’ paper yielding, only where it had to, space to a bureau, a dresser with an oval mirror, a washstand in the corner. The journal in its leather case lay on the small drop-leaf table.
”I thought perhaps he’d had it out during the night and had been writing in it, but there’s no entry so he must have been reading it, or perhaps looking at the few photographs in its end flaps.”
Phillip had gone down to the kitchen and brought back a tray with a coffee pot and mugs. He set his cup on the window seat as he sketched her. He would have poured her coffee and made certain she was comfortable against the pillows. I can see him reaching out and moving a curl of her hair in just the way he wanted it to fall over her shoulder.
He would have stopped briefly to wind the gramophone and set the arm onto the Rubenstein record before picking up the sketch pad again, then settling with his back to the double windows of the small bay directly across from the bed.
I wondered if, as he picked up his sketchboard and pencil, he might have happened to glance out the window, might have seen the munitions freighter and the Norwegian steamer moving toward each other. Ships in the harbour. They would only have registered as shapes, colour, pattern—a fleeting registry. He
had already done two or three sketches of the harbour from that second-storey window.
“I heard the bells of the fire engine, but they were some distance away and Phillip was so absorbed in his sketch … and then—it happened. The impossible happened.”
CHAPTER 21
“I SUPPOSE CARRYING PHILLIP’S CHILD WAS WHAT really got her through those horrible months when she had to confront not only his death but the loss of her sight, and I think for a while, even her mind. When Phip was born, she must have had the care of him as kind of a return to sanity, an anchor.”
It wasn’t unusual for me to bring a dinner conversation around to the Halifax catastrophe.
Across from me at the table, my mother looked as if she were weary beyond measure of the retold tale of Aunt Harriet. She was in for a post-operative checkup, and she’d nibbled dubiously at a stir-fry I’d prepared.
“She said Uncle Hartley was smitten by Phip at first, and then he got around to noticing her.” My mother stirred at the mention of Hartley’s name. “I guess she was still pretty striking-looking, even with the damage to her face. I mean, when you look at their wedding picture—she was very tall and graceful and had beautiful hair.”
I could see she was thinking about Hartley.
“In the dark, I suppose it didn’t matter so much what she looked like.” My mother put down her fork, moved aside her wineglass and poured herself a cup of tea.
“You mean ‘what he looked like.’ Uncle Hart wasn’t exactly a lady-killer when it came to looks, was he?”
“I know what I mean. You think the sun rose and set on her, don’t you?” she blazed at me. “I think you wish she’d been your mother.”
“That’s ridiculous.” I cleared both of our plates noisily into the sink.
“There are things you don’t know.”
“What? That she and Phillip never married? What does it matter? They had plans, but just being together was what was important to them at the time. Aunt Harriet needed to become stronger.”
