They were happy, that is, until the flood.
Overtaken
1919. All around them candlepin houses had closed because of the war. Bowlers had been drafted; pinbodies, too. Truitt’s Alleys had survived, welcomed back the wounded Salfordians, Freddy Pearlman who’d gone deaf in an ear, Pinky DeMuth who’d lost half his jaw and hid it with a kerchief, Martin Younkins who’d lost his left leg, Jack Silver who’d lost a hand and part of a forearm and bowled with the ball tucked in the crook of what was left. They formed a team, the Salford Half Nickels.
The same year, Bertha Truitt bought a Stanley Steamer. The Stanley factory was six miles away from the alleys, run by the Stanley twins. Machines! You shouldn’t love them, but Bertha did. The controls with which you lit the boiler, let the steam go; the hissing noise of it. Mechanical Bertha, who had loved her bicycle, loved her motorcar better. She was steam powered, too, all human beings were, some set to simmer and others to boil. Listen to Bertha Truitt percolate! The things she would do, with her steam-powered notions. Doubt her? Feel: there’s her boiler. Why she never corsetted: she’d been built by her inventor particularly, she wasn’t going to choke her source.
Leviticus wouldn’t get into the thing. He mocked her for her superstitions, but he had his own: he thought cars of any sort about to explode, with malicious intent, at any time. “Internal combustion!” he said. “A terrifying thought.” Bertha insisted that a steam car was the safest sort, being water powered, but he wouldn’t believe it.
Dr. Sprague favored nature, Bertha liked the works of man. She had a love of factories and shipyards, of railroad lines and cemeteries. Cemeteries particularly: she had been delivered to Salford in a cemetery, had married because of one. She was, really, a Victorian, though it was 1919, Victoria long dead, and Bertha never her subject anyhow. She still dressed in her old-time togs, divided skirts and waistcoats, and was a curiosity on the street. It was a form of armor, a way to get men to do business with you.
This morning she wore a green vest and one of her many-sided hats, a dark blue one that made her look like a minuteman or like a medieval sorcerer, depending. Some couples grew to look like each other, but Truitt, getting ready for her drive on a January day in 1919, looked like her house: octagonal, indomitable. She was going to Stearn’s Warehouse to investigate some rock maple for new and bigger pins. The new pins would have a groove in the middle, Joe Wear’s idea so pinbodies could grip them better.
“Come with me,” she said to Leviticus that January morning. She had just started the car. It was a complicated procedure: you lit the boiler with a little torch, then got in the car to pump the steam from the boiler in the back of the car to the engine in the front. Later Leviticus would not know whether to be glad or destroyed that he had not gone with her. At any rate he had never ridden in the steamer and never would.
“In your motorcar? Bertie.”
“I’m an excellent driver.” Pump.
“So you say. No, thank you. An explosion will be the death of me, but not today.”
He believed this and also he had a bottle of whiskey in the belvedere. Prohibition was coming: only one more state needed to vote the Eighteenth Amendment in, and it would come any day, and the law would go into effect a year later. The way he drank would be his undoing. He knew that. He told patients who drank less that they had to stop; his organs were half-unraveled with drink. Meanwhile he had bottles sent down from friends in Gaspé, the finest Canadian whiskey.
Finally the car was ready to go. She drove off. Once she was gone, he ascended to the belvedere and looked for her car on the street. She had already turned toward the river. He lit a cigarette and doused the match with water. He was terrified of fire, poor man. That’s what everyone said later. Poor man, to go that way: he must have been terrified.
In Boston, Bertha parked the car on Commercial Street and went for a walk in the Copp’s Hill Burial Ground. Cemeteries reminded her of bowling alleys, especially Copp’s Hill and the Old Granary, with their tilted stones, the various projectiles sailing between them (tourist children, birds, genealogists). Dead wood: one of the differences between candlepins and tenpins. In tenpin bowling the dead wood, the knocked-over pins, is cleared between balls, spirited away by the pinsetter. In candlepin the dead wood lays where it has fallen for the whole frame, laced between the upright pins or flat out in the gutter. Dead wood can help you, if you know where to strike it, to knock it into standing pins. If you hit it wrong, though, it can absorb all the momentum of the ball, send it spinning in place out of reach of all other pins.
She’s not dead wood yet, Bertha Truitt. She’s moving through Copp’s Hill, looking at the names on the stones. Shem, Goody, Increase. Plenty of Williams and Sarahs, too. In cemeteries she feels like herself, whatever that is, without hearing the voices of other people like an electrical charge that makes her act otherwise. People who report seeing the Salford Devil describe, variously, a flying badger, a mammoth skunk, a mass of bats shaped like a bat. She believes wholly in the Salford Devil, and the shifting is evidence. It is a reactive animal.
Her, too. She is the Salford Devil—like the Salford Devil—a different person depending on who finds her, matronly or alluring, a chatterbox, a silent thoughtful woman, funny, humorless, shy, bold. Not on purpose: that is the charge pulsing through her. She feels no long story in her soul. She has a serial self. First one person, then another. Boxcar Berthas, one after the other. Once she had been an heiress to a factory that made boots for the Confederate Army; not anymore. Once she had loved an Italian. No longer. Once a man who believed in God. So long, so long, say goodbye, see you later, tomorrow, soon, around.
Bertha walked in Copp’s Hill. She thought of Minna’s thewy golden brown hair, a shade lighter than her skin; the careless length of Minna’s legs overlapping her own on the davenport; the hot breath with which she filled Bertha’s ear when whispering into it. Minna was twelve and it took all of Bertha’s will not to treat her like a baby, carry her down the stairs and tuck her into bed and feed her from a spoon, sing nonsense to her, nibble at her neck. She still believed that she owned every inch of Minna. She was her author, her inventor. Out in the world, everyone said, Oh, isn’t she her father’s daughter.
Well, she missed them. She needed to go home. Tomorrow she would send Joe Wear to talk to the foreman at the lumberyard, sort everything out. The things she did, just to prove that a woman could! Honestly: the intricacies of maple bored her. Joe could talk about maple, how it was different in the floorboards than in the pins. He could touch lumber and know its character and history, water damage, tendency to splinter or warp. Bertha could only look at the man selling the wood and judge him. She was good at this but not infallible. Joe, with wood, was infallible. Send Joe.
She went to her roadster and lit the boiler and climbed in. She waited for it to start up. It purled in the way that unnerved Leviticus. She wished he were in the seat next to her. She missed him more than she was sympathetic to his fear.
Just now he would be in the cupola, pulling on a bottle of whiskey. She knew he drank. She liked to think he didn’t hide his drinking: they simply didn’t speak of it. She wouldn’t have expected him to give up alcohol for her nor would she ask him to give up his pantomime teetotal. Only sometimes did it bother her—when he fell twice a year into alcoholic melancholy, or when she reflected that he would die before his time. Then again, being so much younger than she, his scheduled time was long after hers, and drinking might even it up, a pair of scissors snicked across two lengths of ribbon at once. She supposed a better love would have wished him a long, long life without her, but her love was deep and true and bottomless and in the end (she didn’t know that it was the end) not all that good. She had loved him immediately for the following reasons: his quietude, his broad forehead, the deep lines in his lower lip, the way his pinker upper lip was half-masked by his mustache, his mustache itself, the certainty of his medical knowledge, which she did not always believe. She had loved him next f
or the erotic scrubbing curve of his tummy, the way he hated the word tummy, his carelessness in all things (coins spilling from his pockets, food down his shirtfront), his love of cats—no man she’d ever met loved cats so much, whispered more endearments in their ears; she’d forgiven his foolishness over the Mother Cat, what a lot of fuss over an animal whose time it was. His love of Minna, of course, which was just as it should be and no more (despite her eccentricities Bertha believed the love of a mother and child, and husband and wife, were more important than father and child: in this she was a woman of her time). Most, first, ever: his admiration of her. That was evident the moment they met, and despite her pleasure in his admiration she had thought then it showed her own weak character, to find admiration so lovable. Now she knew: in marriage, what else mattered but admiration? And of course she admired him, too—loved him, knew his follies, lusted for him even now, felt it quicken her step—but most of all she admired him. It was the one marital affection you were allowed to take out in its true state and display to the dinner guests.
As for the affections you weren’t supposed to show in company—even now. Bertha Truitt, in her dotage—though she never would have used the word—miles away from the man, felt flush with him. In their early days he had been decorous, polite, the way he’d been while reading her head, but by nature he was a nuzzling, nestling, insidious man, and eventually every county of his body had rubbed against every county of hers—unlike Savior Ercolini, who had always been extraordinarily specific in his physical affections.
Now why had she thought of that man? He was another life.
Gunshots. She’d parked on Commercial Street near the elevated train tracks. She thought they were gunshots anyhow, six sharp metal reports. Then she heard the roar of an enormous animal. You couldn’t tell whether the animal was rampaging or dying, at first.
An elderly woman pushing a pram nearby turned to Bertha. “What was that?” she said.
Bertha said, “It sounded like—”
But then the woman screamed.
Not gunfire but a spitfire of rivets popping sockets on the tank atop the Purity Distillery Building. The tank was full, had been full, was now unburdening itself of two and a half million gallons of molasses in all directions. It had already killed two children and a horse, had done that straight off.
Bertha knew how to swim in water. She knew how to find the pocket of air in an upturned boat. She knew to stay indoors in a lightning storm, to go to the basement in case of tornado, she knew that salt or a wool blanket would smother a fire. She knew how to protect her heart—that is, her brain—from the various inflammations of dissatisfaction. She knew to look a mad dog straight in the eye and show her teeth; she knew never to try the same thing on a bear.
She had planned for disaster, just not this one. She could not make sense of it.
Nobody could. People tried to outrun the flood, but which way was safety? No guessing. The molasses scooped the baby from its pram; it turned a big man into a missile and sent him through a trolley windshield.
Drive, Bertha. Put the steamer in gear, turn the wheel.
The molasses smashed the door of Bertha Truitt’s motorcar, wrenched it off the frame, and dragged her out. She couldn’t hear anything over the sough. The smell was overwhelming, a kind of sweet lumber. It painted the back of her throat. Slow as molasses. The molasses wasn’t slow. The molasses had grip and intention. You couldn’t swim against it. You couldn’t punch your way out. It plucked her hat from her head, which hurt worse than anything, the yanked hair, the indignity. It had the finicking audacity to unlace her boots, the animal strength to turn the car over. Then the molasses pushed her down beneath its surface and blacked her eyes and shut her up. Above her it swept an entire house, whole, out to harbor. The baby stolen from his pram; scrap iron; stray dogs: all passed over Bertha Truitt like the shadows of birds. She had already thought of Minna, of Leviticus, of the winding cats including her favorite, the black-and-white Donizetti, who was bony and old now, she would miss him, she would grieve, and now the cats were multiplying in her octagonal memory, they clogged the spiral staircase and filled the dumbwaiter and she was just on the brink, the brink, of thinking of her parents, and of her sister, and of lost Nahum—now, how would they find him to break the news of her death? she had worked so hard to banish him from her memory—and then another clobbering wave of molasses lay itself over the first, and her brain lit up like a lightning storm, then went over green, then was struck entirely dark.
In the old days, the disaster happened. When a stranger called or wrote or traveled by train, you learned of both the disaster and your ownership of it.
In Salford, in what was not yet known as a widow’s walk, the widowed innocent Dr. Leviticus Sprague looked down Mims Avenue and wondered when Bertha would be back. His ticking punctual Bertha always knew the hour. Her heart kept excellent time. His did not. He hadn’t brought up his watch. The fact is he did not drink so very much in those days—more than most men, but less than many. He kept his senses, his wits, nineteen times out of twenty. Now the January sunlight cut through the eight windows of the cupola—no, let’s be honest, only four, that’s as much as is mathematically possible—and he felt warmed from the inside and the out.
Superba did not have a phone. At six o’clock someone knocked on the door. Margaret Vanetten answered. A policeman stood there, holding an object like a sodden corsage. The molasses had taken Bertha’s hat to the shipyard and pasted it to the side of a tugboat in drydock. Her name was stitched inside. They had not found anything else, not car, not body, not laced shoe.
Margaret Vanetten climbed to the darkened cupola, a place she’d been forbidden. She hadn’t gone there since Minna’s birth.
“Dr. Sprague,” she said. “She was a wonderful woman—”
Margaret Vanetten had got ahead of herself. She always did, that one.
We Regret
Leviticus Sprague would not come down from the cupola. The women of Truitt’s Alleys stood on the third floor of the Octagon and shouted up the little wrought iron staircase, which they didn’t want to climb for fear of embarrassing him or themselves. They didn’t know about the speaking tube. Not one of them had been in the house before.
“She might be alive!” LuEtta Mood called.
“You should go look for her!” bellowed Hazel Forest.
Getting Dr. Sprague out required a man. They would have asked Joe Wear, but nobody could find him—Truitt’s was dark and locked, and if he was in his apartment overhead, he didn’t answer the door. Jeptha Arrison was not a man to send on any mission. Finally Nora Riker’s husband, Norman, was dispatched. They thought Norman would know how to talk gently but firmly: jostling Nora had died the year before of flu.
“Drunk,” Norman Riker said when he came back down. He didn’t say anything else.
So the morning after the flood LuEtta and Mary and Hazel went downtown to look for Truitt. They’d been young women when they first met her, and she middle-aged; now they were middle-aged, and she—they had no notion. They loved her but were unaccustomed to this particular strain of love, worry on her behalf. They felt helpless with their lack of experience.
“I hope we don’t find her,” said LuEtta.
“Well,” said Mary Gearheart. The vicious little girl had grown into a deadly calm, censorious woman. “Well, LuEtta, I hope we do, and I hope she is healing.”
“I only meant,” said LuEtta, but she couldn’t finish the sentence. She knew what it meant to find a person alive but beyond saving.
“Ssh,” said Hazel. She was a nurse. You could not pronounce death without a body. “Girls, let’s look.”
Truitt wasn’t at the Haymarket relief station, where living victims had been brought, browned by molasses, their skin mottled like oilskin. Everything was dulcified, awful. The pillows and floors were smeared with molasses, the doctors and nurses with molasses and blood. People sobbed but quietly. Gummed wheels stalled the gurneys; the sticky floor sucked at
the soles of shoes. Truitt might be walloped, unrecognizable. Two unidentified women had been brought to the relief station, neither of them Truitt. One of them, an old lady, regarded the bowlers with one dark eye—was the other plugged up with molasses, or plucked out?—and said, “I can’t get out, I’m trying to get out, Rachel.”
Outside, the streets were brown, glutinous. They heard gunshots. Real ones.
“What is that?” asked Hazel.
“Horses,” said Mary. “Trapped. They’re putting them down, poor things. Mortuary next, I suppose.”
The dead bodies were easier to look at than the live ones, since there was no longer anything to struggle against. The molasses turned people to pillaged antiquities, or bugs caught in insufficient amber. Louder than the relief station: filled with wailing, with no injured to disturb. After the women had toured the place and stepped outside, they gasped for breath.
“What I meant,” said LuEtta to Mary and Hazel, on the trackless trolley back to Salford, “is I wonder whether she ran away.”
“From home?” said Mary, in a voice of wonder.
“To somewhere.”
They began to discuss it, at first with concern, then titillation. She had done it before, landed in Salford, Bertha ex machina, rumors of a fled marriage and a child left behind. She had begun again so entirely, with such enthusiasm, they hadn’t held it against her. Perhaps this was her rhythm: take on a life, live it, shed it. If they could imagine her escape, then the gold shining behind her car was sunshine, not molasses, and she had nothing in common with the people they had seen that day, the man who had a spear of iron pushed through his chest, the old woman in the care station, alive, a ruined rowboat, crushed and washed far from harbor and longing for her Rachel.
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