After the Fog

by Kathleen Shoop

  * * *

  Johnny snaked his fingers under his earflaps and pulled at them, his leather helmet feeling as if it were shrinking. He huddled his team up tight. The fog had settled thick on the field and when a player kicked off, they lost sight of the ball in the air. The fans nearest the field could see their reaction, and informed the crowd and the information rose upward like a wave.

  Johnny couldn’t see through the fog to his father and Unk shoving fists into the air, hollering after each play. He did catch a glimpse of the Notre Dame scout, head bent over his notebook, glancing back and forth at the field.

  Johnny blinked. If he were tipsy, he’d know he was hallucinating. But there she was. He squinted and shook his head to clear his mind. Over the years he’d tried to convince her of the benefits of coming to his football games. Where else would she have ample opportunities to use her nursing skills? But she always flinched, as though the thought of seeing her son tackled to the ground was too much to handle.

  But there she was, her trademark black nurse’s bag dangling from her arm. Then she was gone, climbing into the stands, vanishing into the thick fog.

  Her appearance threw him. He’d planned to show the scout what he was made of—like Rose had ordered. Except what he wanted to show the scout was he had no intention of playing football in college. Johnny was sure he could bring home a win, even while downplaying his own prowess.

  He reminded himself the other fellas would give their right nut to play for Notre Dame. So, when the ball was snapped, instead of Johnny putting the team on his back and barreling up the field himself, he handed off to the fellas who could use a second look by the scout. He launched a few balls downfield knowing after years of practice his guys would be there to make the catch, even in the fog, and that would spotlight them.

  And, when they dropped a pass, Johnny would get the blame for making the throw in the first place. He felt proud, as though his shifting the attention onto others he would ensure that everyone got what he wanted in the end. And, he’d convinced himself that he wasn’t letting anyone down in the process.

  * * *

  Rose had spent so much time being angry with Henry that week that when she saw Unk out in this sickly fog, she didn’t have the energy to make her way up the bleachers. Besides, the crowd wouldn’t allow for movement and after a few minutes of staring up at him, Rose decided Unk was doing fine, especially considering how he’d looked earlier. Rose set aside her worry about the fog, like everyone else. Sure she’d seen one man die, and heard about another. The people she’d visited the day before were sick, but each of the deaths came to people with a history of breathing issues. And, the hundreds of people at the game didn’t seem affected beyond the coughing and lack of visibility. It was like any other day in Donora.

  She had not really spoken to Henry since their last argument, but there he was, up two rows and over a few people, with Unk. She would not miss Johnny’s big game. She’d snuck in to a couple of games over the years, but the sight of him being chased down by linebackers, their thick arms closing around his body, slamming him to the ground, was too much.

  She always found an excuse not to attend a game. She knew football was simply a gateway to opportunity and she relished the day when he would be safely ensconced in a job without risk of physical harm. Football led to college and that would lead to success and career and then she’d find peace.

  But this game was different. He’d promised Rose he’d show the scouts how talented he was. She knew the way Henry and the residents of Donora savored the retelling of a big game, and she was determined to have seen it with her own eyes.

  As she went up the bleachers, she thought she saw a red coat through the fog, Dottie Shaginaw’s, and near Henry, but that would not make sense. Nurse Dottie always worked the Saturday shift in the mill hospital.

  Diamond Dottie had no reason to be at the game, even a game important to the town. Rose was squeezing herself in between Davey Steinmetz and Arnie Lyons, and glanced behind her, catching sight of a man patting Henry’s shoulder then slipping up the bleachers through the thickening fog. She had tried to read Henry’s expression, but the haze was too dense, and burned her eyes, blurring her vision.

  By the time she refocused, she was being jostled and pulled to standing by people around her. Johnny had handed the ball off to Max Furman for a first down.

  Rose vaguely knew what that meant, but didn’t have time to ask; Mrs. Tripp had turned around to say she was needed down below. Rose stood to make her way down when Big Ralph stopped right in front of her.

  “Maybe you can go resuscitate your husband’s career, Rosie? Sebastian’s up there with him right now. Maybe yunz are more connected than I thought.”

  Rose climbed back up where she’d come from and saw Mr. Sebastian sitting, talking intently to Henry.

  Could Sebastian be telling Henry about Rose? Her past? Rose’s hand flew to her ear, her two lobes. She could not believe Sebastian recognized her from so long ago, but something like that, her ear, was unmistakable.

  If Henry would have looked up at that moment, he would have seen Rose staring at him, but he didn’t take his attention from Sebastian. Someone jostled Rose as he pushed by, making Rose turn and start back down the bleachers. Maybe Sebastian didn’t even know that was Rose’s husband. No way he would tell Henry about Rose. He’d want his secret kept, too. Or would he?

  Big Ralph elbowed her again as she descended. “Hey Rosie, why don’t you do some first-aid, neb around a bit, tell people how to live their lives and then go on home and…” Rose didn’t hear the rest of what the fat man said.

  Her mind was on overload. “Ahh, stuff it, big Man,” Rose said pushing by him, inching down the bleachers, between neighbors, seeing that the lower she got the thinner the fog was. People slapped her on the back with “Johnny’s the best,” and “Another Donora boy gonna play in the big-time,” and “Johnny’s gonna put us on the map like Stan Musial!” Rose smiled, thanking everyone as she passed, enjoying the fact they were talking about her kid. The one the town knew would do them proud, even if Rose was a thorn in their side.

  Rose stood at the bottom of the bleachers looking for whoever supposedly needed her, but no one was there. Her line of sight was much better and she watched several plays develop into nothing. Monongahela was getting the best of Donora, with Johnny actually seeming to sabotage several of his own plays, not scrambling as she’d heard he typically did, surprising even the most seasoned lineman, Instead, he stood there, knocked to hell, the ball flying out of his hands and recovered by the other team. What the hell was he doing?

  Rose glanced from the field to the scout, unable to see too much of either. But she could tell by the way the scout was bent over his notebook that he was scribbling something, grimacing and shrugging after that last fumble.

  It shocked her to hear Johnny’s laughter rising out of the fog. She strained to see his face, was he really laughing? She couldn’t see his expression clearly, but still, she knew his laugh. Rose recalled their last words to each other “Show them what you want,” she had said, “I will,” he told her, and Rose knew he was doing exactly that.

  Her heart beat heavy and fast. Johnny had looked her in the eye and promised. Could he have purposely spoken words that he intended differently than Rose would have taken them? Had he lied without literally speaking a lie? She pulled her bag close, hugged it into her belly, feeling betrayed by yet another child. She told herself Johnny would come through for them. It was the kind of boy he was. Wasn’t he?

  Dave Delrio’s name was called over the loud speaker, instructed to head home. His father was ill.

  “And paging nurse Pavlesic.” The scratchy sound of the speaker cut off Rose’s self-pitying thoughts. “Head on down there with our boy, Delrio. Doc Bonaroti says you’re up.”

  Rose looked toward the huddle on the field, to where Johnny was giving orders to his teammates, and throwing a game. Rose was disgusted at the thought. Rose left the game, pushin
g back her sadness, moving toward the job she was required to do.

  Chapter 16

  Rose wove her way through the fog, behind the Delrio boy. Each time he passed under a streetlamp there was enough light emitted to reveal a splash of his orange uniform, but even as Rose yelled for Delrio, she knew she wouldn’t catch up with him until they reached his home. The darkness forced her to move slowly, to put her hands up in front of her to be sure she didn’t step off the sidewalk, and run into someone.

  By the time she wound down Castner Avenue to Norman, feeling her way along the porch rail, to retaining wall to porch rail, she found fireman Bill Hawthorne and Doc Schubert were consoling the Delrio’s. Rose couldn’t believe another person had died.

  “He’s not dead,” Hawthorne said. “He fell out, took a heart attack, maybe. But, we gave him some oxygen and he’s hanging in there.”

  Mr. Matthews arrived shortly after Rose. He’d been told there was a death and had rushed there, wanting to remove the body since he happened to be so close. He was out of breath, his face, tomato-red, his hair in disarray as though he’d never brushed it. His shirt sleeves were blackened and pushed up well past his elbows, tie askew.

  Matthews was a serious man who normally arrived at homes looking as though he were headed to a wedding more than to prepare a body for burial. Rose raised her eyebrows at his disheveled appearance then shoved a chair under him as he collapsed, gasping for air.

  Hawthorne draped a sheet over the undertaker’s head and pushed two oxygen cylinders underneath to form a makeshift oxygen tent. “Just crack the valves and we’ll give him fifteen minutes. He’ll be good as new,” Hawthorne said.

  “Asthmatics. They never fare well in the fog,” Dr. Schubert said.

  “He doesn’t have asthma,” Rose and Hawthorne said at the same time. They all stared at each other, while the Delrio family fussed over Mr. Delrio, their sobs, punctuating the thick silence. Blue smoke swirled around the room, forcing everyone to clear their throat if not outright cough and choke.

  Hawthorne coughed into a balled up fist. “It’s this damn fog. Yesterday at three in the afternoon we had eight hundred cubic feet of oxygen. Now? Nothing. We’ve borrowed from Monessen, McKeesport, Charleroi…this is more than—”

  “Eleven!” Matthews yelled from under his oxygen tent.

  “Pipe down, Matthews,” Hawthorne said. “That O2 is worth its weight in gold right now!”

  “Ah, screw it, I’m fine,” Matthews said ripping the sheet off his head. Hawthorne closed the valves, and Matthews rested his hands on his knees, breathing heavy but not wheezing.

  He leaned back against the chair, staring at the worried Delrio family “No disrespect meant to you folks, talking this way, but I’m shoveling up body after body all night and I get back to the funeral home after nine bodies and I find out Roberts and Calucci both have a body each. Ten A.M. and eleven bodies later, I’d say we have a problem. And it’s not just because we’re out of caskets.”

  Rose folded the sheet into a tight square. “But, no one even knows. No one said a word at the game.”

  Hawthorne nodded. “Every house I go to, the folks inside think they’re the only ones sick. No paper on Saturday, no information. Eleanor’s working the Red Cross angle, setting up some emergency aid station at the Donora Hotel. The Irondale’s filled with bodies I can’t take. Eleanor should have oxygen, beds, and adrenaline at the aid station by late today. Something’s wrong, folks, whether we admit it or not.”

  The silence that followed nauseated Rose as much as the fog itself. What was happening? She remembered the smoke pouring out of the train stack, but that evidence that something was very wrong in town didn’t change the fact she needed to get back out there and help her neighbors.

  Dan Peterson banged on the front door. He needed Rose and Hawthorne to head to his house. His father, Mr. Peterson, needed them. He was a rickety, slim fellow, always suffering from a wet, hacking cough.

  Rose pushed ahead. She loved that stinky bastard and didn’t want to see another dead person in Donora. If they could just get some rain, some hard winds to blow away the stagnant, filthy air. Rose was sure a good harsh downpour would cleanse Donora and reveal the steel blue sky’s underbelly once again.

  She and Hawthorne were about to enter the Peterson home when a wailing woman drew their attention from the opposite direction. Linda Rvsevich screeched like a rabid raccoon. It wasn’t until Rose and Hawthorne dragged her into the Peterson home that Linda produced her five month-old baby from inside her trench coat.

  The baby was grey and wheezing. But, before Rose managed to check the infant at all, Sonny Rvsevich appeared saying he’d procured a vehicle and was driving his wife and child to the hospital in Pittsburgh.

  Rose and Hawthorne argued with them the entire way down the stairs to their car, telling them they’d have an accident in this fog. But the Rvsevich family just plodded on, set on their path.

  Back inside the Peterson’s, Rose found Doc Schubert treating Peterson, and she and Hawthorne threaded their way through town heading upward and around the snaking streets, going wherever they heard someone was ill.

  They headed south and Rose remembered the drawing she’d seen in a textbook of a lid spanning the mountain-tops, capturing industrial smoke, pressing it back down for all in the valley to breathe. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind. She thought of the football field where the people at the top of the bleachers couldn’t see the field and the folks further down had a better, though still gritty view.

  Rose realized then they had to get as many weakened people as possible to their cellars. It had helped Mrs. Cushon the day before and she remembered Henry saying Bonaroti suggested it for Unk, but Rose hadn’t really understood its importance at the time.

  Rose and Hawthorne found Mrs. Dunaway straining to breathe in her living room, her son at her side, her face blue and eyes full of fear. Hawthorne and Rose began to move the woman to the cellar, and she pushed them away, punching helplessly on Rose’s chest. “You’re gonna shove me in the cellar and let me die? It’s easier to have me closer to the ground for burial?” Mrs. Dunaway wiggled and flopped as they carried her downstairs.

  Her son stood mute then followed them down the stairs.

  “Bonaroti said this was poison,” he said. “But no one listened. And now, you of all people are going to just let my mother sit in her cellar and suffocate? They’re piling bodies up in the Hotel, for God sakes!”

  Once safely down the stairs, Hawthorne administering a shot of oxygen, Rose gripped the boy’s shoulders, making eye contact. She didn’t have time to explain.

  “Run up stairs—grab blankets, water, chairs—anything to make it comfortable in the cellar, then you’re going to sit and wait for this fog to clear. Your mother will recover her ability to breathe.” Rose’s voice was calm, and steady and commanding. “She’s never had trouble before. Make her comfortable, play cards, distract her and you’ll see. This won’t last forever. But, do not let her go back upstairs.”

  In the cellar the woman wheezed and hacked like a clotted smoke stack, but the oxygen was lessening the duration of the coughs. Rose headed back upstairs looking over her shoulder, seeing a desperate son comforting his aching mother as they waited for something—the fog to clear, or for her to die.

  Upstairs, after delivering a shot of oxygen, Hawthorne placed as many calls as the clogged lines would allow, making a list of people who needed help. Alice, the phone operator, informed him that Doc Schubert had received word the mill hospital was taking on ill citizens—and not just employees—while the Donora Hotel took morgue overflow. Caskets were nowhere to be found and Bonaroti’s suggestion to leave town was much too late to heed. Rose scanned the list for patients she knew.

  They waited for Alice to phone back with more details, and Hawthorne impatiently tapped his pencil on the table. “Normally thirty people die here all year, Rose. You know that. Sixteen deaths since yesterday. The caskets. We’re in trouble.�
�

  Rose looked back over the list trying to discern a pattern. Were the sick people concentrated in one spot?

  “You work your way up the list, I’ll work my way down,” Hawthorne said. Rose was relieved to see Theresa’s name was absent from the paper.

  “Everyone on your half of the list,” Hawthorne said, “is located close to your house so you should be able to stop home for dinner with that scout. John deserves it. Can’t let a little fog keep one of our own from making it to the big-time.”

  “John?” Rose said.

  “Yeah. John, your son?” Hawthorne raised his eyebrows at Rose. “Young buck is growing up.”

  Rose’s face crumpled into confusion. What did renaming him have to do with growing up? Truth was, Johnny was behaving like a five-year-old when it came to his future.

  But, this was the way things worked in Donora—–a neighbor, like Hawthorne, wanting to make sure Rose had dinner waiting for Johnny’s scout. No matter the trouble, you kept on with your plan, your life. Rose pretended to study the list some more.

  The game. Rose hoped Johnny had managed to refocus on the game and make the kind of plays he was known for, the kind that made a gaggle of scouts rush to have him sign on the dotted line.

  “Wait,” Rose said. “What about the council meeting? We should be there. We need to back up Bonaroti. The mills are going to have to shut down. If the smoke won’t disperse up above—if the air is stagnant and won’t release itself into the atmosphere, then we have to stop the smog at the source down below. The mills. It’s the only answer. Bonaroti knew it and we all ignored him.”

  Hawthorne and Rose split up, went to the homes on their list, dividing it vertically instead of horizontally so they would both work on opposite sides of town, meeting on Meldon where they would speak at the meeting.

  Rose moved efficiently through the names and downward through town. The intensity of care allowed her to push away her problems and toil in the isolated moments of other people’s pain, one patient, one home at a time, and avoid her own.