After the Fog

by Kathleen Shoop

  She prayed this damn air wasn’t making it difficult for Johnny to breathe. She did not want him gasping for air, causing his spine more trauma. They all held a section of the makeshift stretcher and shuffled toward the steps, blindly feeling with their feet, moving down the steps to the truck. Rose and the others slid the door and Johnny onto the truck bed and they exhaled in unison, relieved it didn’t look as though they’d inflicted more damage.

  Rose and Henry climbed into the truck bed with Johnny. Bonaroti came around the back and closed the back hatch gently while Adamchek bent over, hands on knees, huffing.

  “I’m sorry it took me so long to get here, Hen, Rose.” Bonaroti met Henry’s gaze then Rose’s before reaching across the hatch to straighten the blanket over Johnny’s legs.

  “Six-thousand calls in the last few days,” Bonaroti said, shaking his head. “Six-thousand sick residents. Our friends and family…yesterday’s council meeting yielded nothing—” Bonaroti coughed into his hand, his glasses flopping forward on his nose.

  Adamchek straightened, but didn’t look at any of them. Of course he’d be defensive that Bonaroti was still harping on that. Rose glared at Adamchek, wanting to berate him for his idiocy. He was one of the people who spoke up for the mills at all times. But, Adamchek had lost his typical bravado, slumped around the side of the truck and got inside. Rose continued to stare at the back of his head through the window separating the truck bed from the cab.

  Bonaroti’s hand covered Rose’s and he squeezed it.

  “He sided with us, Rose. He wanted the mills to shut down. I sent you home before he had a chance to speak. Later I ran into him helping folks. When we got the call from Tish, well, he nearly collapsed. I thought it was his heart—all that fat finally sucking the life right out of him. Bonaroti glanced at Adamchek. “But he wasn’t having a heart attack. He was suffering from empathy. Hard to believe. Insisted on finding a way to get Johnny down to Mercy Hospital. Said he’d want someone to do it if it were his son. He’s barely spoken a word since.”

  Bonaroti shouted up to Adamchek. “Ready, head on down to Mercy.” Adamchek started the engine. The truck began to pull away.

  Bonaroti shouted, stabbing his finger in the direction of the mills below them. “Wait!”

  Everyone turned to look, squinting into the fog.

  “Well I’ll be damned,” Bonaroti said.

  Rose got on her knees to get a better view. Henry craned to see. It was as if God had reached down from Heaven and pressed the switch to off, and the mills stopped. The great bursts of blast-oven fire fell back to the ground, and with that the endless sound of nails firing, metal being flattened, sheared and shaped stopped for the first time Rose could remember. Donora was silent instead of a cacophony of industrial sounds that had become part of their every day existence, background noise that passed for them, as quiet.

  Bonaroti’s mouth fell open and he pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “They did it. Took the mills to a dead heat. I’ll be damned.”

  With that Bonaroti took off down the hill, and finally Adamchek drove them to the hospital, inching along as if they were out on a scenic drive, working through the fog. Rose and Henry talked to John, telling him stories of the day he and Magdalena were born, his first birthday, the way Magdalena and he were inseparable until fifth grade.

  Gales of wind licked their faces and lifted Johnny’s hair. Rose brushed it back as it blew back across his forehead. She locked on Johnny’s gaze, talking, hoping they’d reach the hospital before her retelling of Johnny’s life-story reached this horrid day.

  * * *

  Rose and Henry arrived home from the hospital a little before noon, Sunday, Halloween Day. Once their cab crossed the Donora border, the fog welcomed them like wayward children. Back inside the darkness Rose felt her environment matched her life again.

  Rose, seated in the passenger seat of a taxi, churned a stew of dismay and sorrow at her son’s position, anger at everyone, God included.

  “Mills are still down,” Henry said.

  Rose looked out the window.

  “Still foggy,” Henry said. “Maybe it wasn’t the mills.”

  Rose didn’t want to hear a word about anything other than her son.

  Rose rubbed her lower back as she shuffled out of the car. The voices of the doctors describing Johnny’s injuries and his protocol for treatment played through her mind. The doctor explained that while Johnny was directing Dicky’s car through the smog by walking in front of it, the second car came out of the darkness like a shot. In an attempt to get out of the way of two cars, Johnny wrenched his body at the wrong angle and Dicky hit him, compressing the spinal cord, but not severing it. The cord wasn’t severed, even when Dottie Shaginaw pulled him back out of traffic. But, it appeared to be bruised. And, sometimes that was enough to ruin a fella’s chance of ever walking again.

  There was no way for the doctors to discern if the damage was permanent at this point. Paralyzed from the waist down. Rose straightened against the words—each one piercing her heart like nails firing into wood. She wanted to believe it wasn’t true, but she had to prepare herself for the chance that it was. Eventually the words would be part of who Johnny was. Until then, Rose, herself, may as well have been paralyzed.

  Henry pulled Rose close, arm around her shoulder, holding her up as they moved up the yard to the side door of their stuffy little home. She was too tired to push him away. They passed the Tucharoni’s kitchen window and Rose glimpsed Mrs. Tucharoni’s coal-black hair, her grave expression telling Rose she had heard about Johnny.

  On the steps outside the door, Rose and Henry stopped and looked into the sky. Rose dropped her head back, and felt it hit her cheeks. Tiny pricks of water that quickly turned to drops of rain, drenching them. Rose started to choke, leaving her to wonder what exactly she was choking on.

  * * *

  At the kitchen table, Rose sat, head in hands, feet sticking to the linoleum floor Sara Clara hadn’t cleaned. The smell of coffee filled her nose. She wished for a time when that smell alone was comforting, when she might have given a shit if the floor was clean.

  Her body was tired, weighted down with anxiety, fear, worry. She couldn’t sleep, and the only thing that she could do was recite her rosary, and wait for the doctors to call.

  Meanwhile, the news traveled around town and up the hillsides as the smog dissolved and blew out of town with miraculous winds. The weather had shifted, and lifted the giant lid off the hillside that cupped the valley, the combination of rain and wind cleansing Donora. The air was as clear as the residents had ever seen it. But, remnants of the smog still clung to the insides of people’s lungs causing calls to continue pouring through phone lines. At least people could now leave town and head to a hospital. Nearly seven thousand people were sickened over those five days; nineteen had died.

  Rose was marveling at that thought when the phone rang. Magdalena picked it up, listening. Rose watched her daughter’s mouth fall open and she stumbled back against the sink, bracing herself. Rose raised her eyebrows and reached her rosary-clad hand into the air, signaling for the phone to be handed over. Magdalena’s eyes darted to Henry who’d come into the kitchen with Buzzy, Sara Clara and Leo, and then she looked at Rose.

  Magdalena dropped the phone onto the counter and backed away. Henry dashed to pick it up.

  “Hello?” Henry said. He pulled the phone from his ear and stared at it. “No one’s there…”

  Everyone turned their attention to Magdalena who had whitened like fine-milled flour.

  “Unk died. The fog got him,” Magdalena said. Her voice was thin and she began to shudder. Henry pulled her into him and guided her to the kitchen table. Rose could not get that fact through her head. Could that be true? Wasn’t he safely in the Donahue’s cellar? Wasn’t that what they told her the night before? It couldn’t be true. She couldn’t have lost two lives to this fog. Thirty people a year died in Donora until that weekend. Now, Unk was number twenty. Number
twenty.

  The silence in the kitchen was punctuated by the sounds of coffee perking, the occasional sob, the retelling of what they’d heard from Bonaroti when he called to confirm Unk’s death—his chronic illness mixed with whatever was in the killing smog was just too much for him.

  Unk never did go into the Donahue’s cellar declaring he would not live like a mole. He’d rather be dead! The family so wrought with pain at what had happened to Johnny, and the town, and now Unk, they silently milled around, unable to do anything else. Except for Rose who could not move, and her hand relaxed and her rosary dropped to the floor.

  Magdalena lifted it from the floor, coiled the beads around her finger and settled them on the kitchen table. She went to Rose and undid the gumband and the bobby pins, releasing her mother’s thick hair down her back. Magdalena started at the bottom of the strands, gently persuading the knots to unclench, giving Rose the love and attention she hadn’t felt in her entire lifetime and until that moment, hadn’t really known it might be Magdalena who could deliver it.

  Leo crawled onto Rose’s lap and nestled his head against her chest, curled up like a cat. Rose wrapped her arms around him and with the conversation of her family around her, she felt loved yet wracked with pain. She would let them care for her now. Even Rose needed to be nurtured and until she found her strength again, she would let them.

  Chapter 19

  Monday, November 1, 1948

  Rose stirred her black coffee with vodka before adjusting her church hat on the top of her head. No point in not drinking. What would that prove? She carried the steaming mug down the hall to Johnny’s bedroom, wanting to put together a care package with his jeans, fresh underwear, socks, and a sweater, the length of his stay in the hospital and rehabilitation still undetermined. He was in an induced coma; the doctors hoped his immobility would allow some of the fluid around his spine to drain.

  She sipped her coffee and slid open his top-dresser drawer. Inside was the usual: underwear, socks, some baseball cards, but there were also photos of him playing in smoke-blanketed bars, somehow smiling around his trumpet mouthpiece while playing. In another, violin under his chin, he was sitting on a moonlit porch, a colored fella, presumably Louisiana Red, playing beside him.

  They were having a good time. In another photo he played his violin, his band members behind him, watching as though they’d happened upon a virtuoso instead of their childhood pal, Johnny. Rose traced the photo of him playing the violin. She could hear the music in her mind, as though he was right there in the room with her, playing the way he had the morning of his game. Yet, she hadn’t seen how good he was then. Not really.

  She bent over the drawer, crumbling the photos in her hand. Then straightening up, smoothing the photos, suddenly desperate to keep them nice, to keep those images of her son doing the thing he obviously loved most.

  For a second she felt her defenses rise. Her anger took hold, with the words why would he hide these? Reality was too heavy for her usual denial. Of course, he’d hidden the pictures. Of course, he didn’t share them with her. She wouldn’t have cared. She was the reason he was crippled. Tears brimmed with the realization that the crippling of Johnny Pavlesic had begun long before she forced him to deliver that crap to a damn football scout.

  Her throat tightened as she tried to swallow. She slid onto his bed, and curled into a ball. She wasn’t sure she could face him, face anything anymore. There was a time she thought she could strong-arm anyone or thing into her liking. But now? She knew nothing.

  * * *

  A knock on the front door startled Rose, and she sat up in Johnny’s bed. How long had she been there? She told herself to be brave. She was the mother, act like it. She pulled the door open expecting to see Jack Dunley standing there as he had agreed to taxi Rose to the hospital while Henry and Buzzy took care of Unk’s funeral arrangements.

  When Rose wrenched the door over the linoleum she found that Jack Dunley had siphoned his chauffeur duties off to Father Tom. Heavy rain pelted him, his hat brim nearly buckling under the weight.

  Rose groaned and slumped at the sight of the priest. She didn’t have the energy to discuss or repent or play whatever game expected of a parishioner in the presence of a priest. He stood there, hat in hand, then gestured toward the black parish car that would take them both to Mercy.

  Rose turned to look back into the house; Johnny’s football and trumpet case lay under the coat rack. Rose thought the ball would cheer him up. No, he hated football. She’d take the trumpet. But, what was the point? What was she thinking? He wasn’t even awake, he couldn’t even move.

  Father Tom held the door open. “Rose?”

  She took a deep breath and forced her feet to move, and followed him to the car. The funeral for Unk and many others would take place the next day and she wasn’t ready to say goodbye to Unk, not yet. She thought she’d rather spend her time saying hello to her son.

  In the car Rose attempted several times to say the rosary, but no prayers or even the microscopic movement of the beads sliding through her fingers seemed small enough for her to achieve.

  She glanced at Father Tom, waiting for him to say something, but he only sighed.

  Rose’s hand fell to the side, the rosary slipping out of it. “I don’t like God anymore. He’s my crucible. I hate him.” She waited for Father Tom to launch into an argument so she could really let him have it.

  But he simply nodded and drove in silence, sending Rose the distinct feeling that somehow he understood.

  Tuesday, November 2, 1948

  At Gilmore cemetery, Henry stood perched on the hill with hundreds of mourners. The mills were back up and running, the zinc mill below bellowing its familiar yellow plume, but the air was remarkably clean. Rain had a way of refreshing the air while muddying the crushed coal streets in Donora. The sun appeared more yellow than silvery. The sight of the yolky orb made Henry think he should have felt a rush of optimism. Instead, he simply felt wasted, like the naked cemetery hillside.

  Six of the twenty dead people were buried the day before. He moved tentatively on the steep, dirt hillside, the fine dirt making Auntie Anna cling to his arm. Rose moved slowly in front of him. She shifted her weight, started to topple, and dug her heel in, trying to get her footing on the jagged rocks that jutted from the cemetery land.

  Henry supported Rose from behind, pushing her back to standing. She stiffened and shrugged away. He knew she was hurting so he let it go. He never admitted to wrongdoing with Dottie, their focus was Johnny and Unk, and the rest of the town. Still, Rose felt betrayed and he wasn’t about to argue.

  He watched Rose gazing down the hillside to the Sebastian home and noted that smoke snaked out of each of the four chimneys. They’d been told Theresa had been doing very well since Halloween night, that Rose had saved Theresa’s life, but there was something off about the story and Henry hadn’t forced Rose to talk about it.

  He wondered if she’d had an affair with Sebastian, the way she was absorbed by the sight of the home; something in that hulking brick home had changed Rose. Maybe it was simply the loss of the clinic. Henry was too tired, too overwhelmed himself to push for answers, to ask about it even once.

  Henry had taken the message from Bonaroti for Rose, too upset about Johnny to talk. The clinic was still unfunded, for a variety of reasons. Rose turned further into herself when Henry relayed the news. Mourning her work life was just one more thing on top of Johnny’s accident, the illnesses of seven thousand people in Donora, twenty deaths including Unk, and then there was Dottie.

  Father Tom had delivered a moving mass and now offered a eulogy on behalf of the Pavlesics, complete with Henry’s poetry. Though the priest had only been acquainted with the family for a short time he spoke as though he’d known them for their entire lives. He moved among the funerals that sprung up on that part of the cemetery hill, offering kindness and warmth to the grieving families.

  But, as Henry and his family moved from Unk’s internment to
a neighbor’s and then another’s, Rose grew more agitated. It took a couple more gravesides and eulogies but she finally bolted, weaving through the clutch of funeral-goers that had gathered around Benjamin Hipler’s grave-site. Rose had always been so good at that, keeping her distance, feeling compassion without drowning in her patients or neighbors mistakes, illnesses and accidents. Henry figured she simply couldn’t manage that any longer.

  Henry called out to Rose, straining to confine his tone to a whisper. She lost her footing, and slipped to the ground. She quickly got to her knees, but Henry could tell she was disoriented. He closed in on her, seeing that she’d focused downhill toward the zinc mill, watching it sending that yellow acid into the air as though no one had died, as though nothing were wrong.

  Henry yanked Rose up by the shoulders.

  “Are you all right? What…”

  Rose squirmed out of his grip. “Just fine.”

  Sara Clara came up behind Henry and took Rose by the elbow guiding her back to the throng of mourners. “Now, you just let your family care for you the way you always—”

  Rose flung Sara Clara’s hand off and bolted toward the cars.

  Henry caught up to her near jog, but didn’t make the mistake of handling any part of her body. Sara Clara flanked her other side. Rose looked between the two of them.

  “Leave me the hell alone. For five minutes.”

  “You may hold things close,” Henry’s voice heaved with his fast pace, “You may not disclose a lot about how you feel, Rose, but one thing you never are, is alone. Patients, family, neighbors, you are never alone.”

  “Really, Henry.” Rose stopped short making Sara Clara and Henry spray some dirt to stop beside her. “That your latest observation? Why don’t you write a poem about it, or better yet, just keep a lid on it, why don’t you?”