by Abra SW
The Great Boston Pyre, Part II
William McCormack
Beacon Hill, Boston, Massachusetts
Glasses shattered on the floor as the men dashed out.
“Conrad!” Valentine shouted.
No answer came.
They ran to the bathroom. Steam filled the room. Water overflowed the clawfoot tub and turned the carpet into a bubbling marsh. Conrad slumped back in the tub, his head lolling. A torrent of boiling-hot water jetted from the broken pipe at the foot of the bath and buffeted Conrad’s unresponsive body.
Conrad wouldn’t be enjoying a bath “like a rich man” ever again. The spout of the bath jutted out from his neck. A foamy mix of blood and air dripped onto his chest. He must have settled into the tub and leaned his head back, putting his throat on a direct-line trajectory from the faucet.
His skin hung strangely loose. The water was boiling it away from his body, William realized. The sight made him feel cold and empty and like he’d never enjoy soup again.
Even as they watched, the water sputtered, surged forward again, and then dwindled to a normal stream.
Valentine squished over to the bathtub. As carefully as if he handled a live firecracker, he reached behind the bathtub and turned the valve to shut off the water. “Luck is with you that you didn’t try the tap longer, Patrick,” he said quietly.
Patrick turned pale. “What happened?”
Grimly, Valentine said, “Something bollixed the flow. I wonder if it’s happening everywhere?”
“We should warn people!” William said.
“Because rich people want help from the likes of us?”
William frowned. “Because my mam says we’re supposed to help people.”
Valentine found that impossible to refute. “All right, boys, you heard the lad. We’ve folk to help.” More matter-of-factly, he added, “Besides, if the rich folk next door are beyond needing help, they’ll start to smell soon. Can’t have them dragging down the tone of the neighborhood.”
On the way out, Valentine paused in the entrance hall. “I wonder.” He waved them out of the house, pressed the chandelier’s push-button switch, and ducked outside. Nothing happened for a moment, and then a slow glow brightened the windows. He shrugged. “Worth checking.”
A tinkling crash sounded as the chandelier exploded, sending a sideways rain of crystal prisms through the air. The window cracked from side to side.
After a thoughtful pause, Valentine said, “Today is not a good day to be a rich man.”
The next house over, the only survivors were the butler and the cook, an Irish woman who said she and the butler were perfectly fine, thanks much for the warning. She insisted on feeding them cheese and biscuits before they left.
At the house after, the owner still lived. Beyond that, they found out nothing. The owner seemed to agree that it wasn’t a good day to be a rich man, but being a rich man, he took it as a personal slight. He answered Valentine’s knock at the door with a rifle in his hands and a cornered-rat look in his eyes.
“Good day,” Valentine said. “We’re looking to see if there’s any as need help. Are there wounded here?”
“I don’t need help from any damned paddies!” The owner waved his rifle. “Get off my property! Your kind isn’t welcome here.”
William pushed forward. “Sir,” he said, “we just—”
“Off!” the man bellowed. The boom of the rifle near-deafened William. A cloud of dirt kicked up in front of his feet.
Panicked, he bolted. Valentine’s men skedaddled after him, but their legs were longer than his. They rounded the gate first.
The rifle boomed again, splintering the gatepost beside him. Pain shredded William’s shoulder. He stumbled and fell, clutching his arm.
Valentine looked over his shoulder, saw the fallen boy, and ran back. He pulled William up and along to safety. They stopped when they were out of sight.
“Let me see your arm, little man,” Valentine said, with a gentleness that worried William.
William bit his lip. He let Valentine pull back his shirt to look.
Valentine blew out his breath and smiled. “You’re all right. A large splinter hit your arm, but it’s right under your skin. It’ll only be a minute to get it out.”
After the impromptu operation—William was very brave and didn’t complain, even though it hurt—Valentine sat back, a jagged four-inch splinter of gatepost in his hand and a dark look on his face.
“Shooting at a wee lad! That motherless son! Fine. If that lot don’t want our help, we won’t try. Let’s go back to our mansion.”
William pressed his palm against his injured arm. A slow, stubborn anger rose in him, fed by days of walking, looking for any job that would have him. Fed by the way the rich ladies pulled back their skirts when he came by, as if he were an animal. Fed by how tired his mother looked when she came back from the factory job that she was so grateful to have. Fed by endless meals of soup that his mother “stretched” with more water when they had nothing else to put in the stew pot.
Why help the rich?
The question echoed through William. He looked up to find Valentine watching him with an odd expression.
“What’s wrong?” William asked.
“This is usually where you chime in and insist we help someone.”
William looked away. He tried to shake off his anger. His mam had told him time and again that anger and bitterness weren’t the way to a better life. “Accept what is, and work for what will be,” she’d say, “and a brighter tomorrow will come along.”
A brighter tomorrow didn’t seem likely, though surely it couldn’t be worse than today. He hoped. After the terrible topsy-turvy day, he could rely on nothing. The world pressed down on him, and he was about as much use as a pebble underfoot.
“Come along, lad.”
William trailed after Valentine, his insides knotting more with every step.
He wished he could make his mam feel better, like she always did for him when he sickened. She’d get out the nice wool shawl she’d brought over from Ireland, wrap it around his shoulders, and sing him to sleep. Maybe she’d like to have the shawl now? He could bring it back for her. And the precious tintype photo of his mam and his da when they first arrived off the boat, all wide eyes and bright hopes, himself a bundle in his mam’s arms. And their papers and letters, and his mam’s church dress, and the two patchwork quilts they huddled together under when it grew cold, and his mam’s best ladle, and—it wasn’t much, but it was more than one small boy could carry.
“Valentine, would you help me get a few of my mam’s belongings, to make her feel better?”
“Sure and I would! But not tonight.”
William thought of the people who shared the one-room apartment with him and his mam: the Tienkens, a newly arrived German family. Mr. Tienken had died on the boat, leaving Mrs. Tienken with four children to tend to. The youngest’s nightly cabbage-inspired symphony might irritate William, but the girls were okay, for girls. They helped William’s mam with mending and such.
The oldest boy, Robert, was better than okay. Robert had been able to get a job as a newspaper boy, because everyone knew that Germans were hard-working and trustworthy, but Robert said the other newspaper boys were boring. William and Robert stood up for each other when anybody tried to bully one of them. When Robert found a starveling puppy, he brought it home and—with many tears and even more promises that it wouldn’t be a burden, that it could live off rats and the scraps of scraps—persuaded the mothers to let him keep it. Robert’s puppy grew into a fine spaniel who made the children laugh and their mothers smile and kept their feet warm in the winter.
William hoped they were still alive.
As he thought these things, William followed after Valentine and his gang. By the time he reached the mansion, he’d come to a conclusion. He stopped in front of the porch steps. The men kept going into the house. Valentine only noticed the boy when he turned around to close the door a
nd found William still outside.
“Going back to see to your mam?” Valentine asked kindly.
“We should go to the slums and help the people there,” William said. “They won’t turn away our help.”
Valentine blinked. “Ah, that’s a fine idea, but—” he looked at the sky, “—it’s coming on sunset. Tonight is not the night for small boys to be out in the street. And we’ve a nasty job to do here. I brought Conrad into this house, so I owe him a decent burial.” He patted William’s shoulder. “You should not see it. Your mam must miss you by now.”
William stuck out his chin. “We have to help them! Nobody else will, you know that! You have to help them!” He stared at Valentine and Tommy and Patrick and the other men accusingly.
“They’ll be fine ‘til tomorrow or they’ll die anyway,” Valentine said. “You go on back to your mam.”
Unhappy, William bit his lip. He couldn’t help on his own, and he suspected his mam would agree about boys staying in tonight.
Seeing his distress, Valentine softened. “Tomorrow morning we’ll go down to the North End, all right? But now you should be going along to Dr. Fallon’s house. You and your mam will be fine there, with that great lot of people you gathered.”
Valentine had the same stretched look William’s mam got when he’d pestered her past bearing, so William reluctantly agreed.
He walked down the hill with many reproachful looks over his shoulder. But Valentine had closed the door, and if anybody watched him from the windows, William couldn’t tell.
He reached Dr. Fallon’s home safely, but the night was not made for sleeping. He curled up in a chair beside his mam and listened to her breathing. Dr. Fallon’s laudanum let her sleep through the night, but not him. William would drift off easily enough, but then he would wake with a start, convinced his mam had stopped breathing. He had to hold his breath and wait until his heart stopped racing before he could hear her soft exhalations. He lost track of how many times he woke in the night.
The people camped on Dr. Fallon’s lawn also slept poorly. Some woke screaming from their sleep, which set all the babies crying. Farther away, shouting and the sound of breaking glass and screams bore out Valentine’s warning. William hoped that none of the troublemakers would bother the men who’d rescued his mam.
~ * ~
William rose when the first fingers of dawn stretched under the door. His mam slept on, her breathing even and undisturbed. He kissed her on the forehead and slipped outside.
Most of the people outside had fallen into a restless sleep. Here and there, a person or a pair sat and watched the sun rise. The forgiving golden light of earliest morning washed across the survivors on the lawn. It erased worry lines and cleansed grime-coated skin. The red-gold sun rose, promising new hope and new beginnings.
Except.
Thin rivulets of dark smoke trickled up into the sky across the city, putting the lie to sunrise’s promise. Fires had broken out overnight—though they did not seem to be spreading.
William gathered his courage and walked back to the mansion that Valentine and his lads had taken over. The streets were quiet, but it was a listening-for-danger quiet. Windows had been smashed out in many of the mansions that lined the street. A dead body lay on the lawn in front of the house that they had been rebuffed from the evening before. It wasn’t the owner. Gas lights flickered and flared and died behind windows. Water oozed out from under one door and streamed down the hill. William crossed the street to avoid walking in it.
When William entered the blue and white mansion, he noticed a hodgepodge of precious things that hadn’t been there the previous day. They didn’t seem to match the furnishings of the house, but he supposed they might have been found in the attic.
The men who were awake greeted him with cries of “Ho there!” and “Hey!” and “There’s our little man!”
Valentine sprawled across the parlor sofa. The shouting roused him. His eyes opened. He yawned and scratched his balls and waved his hand in greeting.
Tommy walked down the stairs wearing a very satisfied expression. A woman with disheveled hair and a shawl wrapped around her bare torso leaned over the balcony and called, “Mind ye be careful out there, Tom!” Seeing William, she added, “I beg your pardon, I didn’t see the lad,” and retreated back to the bedroom.
Patrick ambled out of the kitchen with a napkin full of biscuits. He offered one to William. William would have politely refused, but his stomach answered before he could. Noisily. Patrick laughed and gave him two biscuits.
A black eye bloomed gloriously on Patrick’s face. Tommy and Valentine both had split knuckles. Yet they all seemed to be in a fine humor.
“Can we go now?” William asked, as soon as he’d devoured the biscuits. “To help the people in the North End?”
“If there are any left in the North End,” Patrick mumbled.
“Patrick speaks true, lad,” Valentine said. “Most of the North End has left for finer surroundings.”
“All the more reason that we should help the ones who are still there!” William looked up at the men. “And I’d like to take a few things to my mam, but there’s too much for me to carry on my own, and—”
“Of course we’ll be helping you!” Tommy said. “You’ve brought us our good luck!”
“But first we’ve to empty our bladders and fill our stomachs,” Valentine added.
They all avoided the water closet. The men went into the back garden and pissed over the fence, making sport of a grim situation. It embarrassed William. His mam had always insisted he wait to use the outhouse, though there was only the one for the whole building, and filth crusted its floor. The other boys pissed in the alley, “like the animals they call us,” his mother said. “My son will not.”
Before leaving, Valentine and his gang—and William, too—breakfasted well on smoked ham and the last of the cornbread the cook had made before her final encounter with the stove.
Walking through Beacon Hill, the men strode down the street six abreast, as if they owned it. Even the bruises added a certain flair.
When they reached the warren of tenement houses in the North End, however, they slowed down and bunched together. Valentine hefted the shillelagh that he’d acquired overnight.
In the slum, the evidence of disturbances was more—disturbing. Windows had been broken from the inside. People’s belongings were strewn out into the street like rubbish. Somewhere, a baby cried weakly.
Mounds of bodies lurked in the alleys, waiting to catch an unwary glance. Most had the arched bodies and bloodied faces of those who had died in the storm, but a few bore wounds from knives, guns, or fists. A few wore clothing too fine for the North End. William saw one young man whose arms were extended, his fingers curved into claws, as if he’d been trying to pull himself out of the pile when he died. Stains patched the street. Dead animals lay in the gutter, cats and dogs and rats forming a peaceful kingdom in death.
The rats who survived ate well.
“This way.” It came out in a whisper. William cleared his throat and tried again. “This way!” He led them into the tenement house he and his mam lived in.
Once, it had been a fine house for a family. Then their landlord bought it and divided it up into rooms-to-rent with partitions that preserved the appearance of privacy, but nothing else. Everybody heard the fights between couples, and the making-up after. One colicky baby could ruin everyone’s rest, though the residents learned to sleep through the tromping of feet up the stairs as workers returned from the night shift. Everybody smelled everybody else’s cooking. (All the residents agreed that Mrs. MacDougal was the best cook.)
Mrs. MacDougal’s closet-sized room was on the first floor. Her door was ajar, and the smell of burnt scones hung in the hallway.
The hinges squealed as William pushed the door open.
The room appeared to be empty. William let out a pent-up breath—and then he saw the foot. A single, naked foot poked out from under the mound of
Mrs. MacDougal’s bedding. He stepped closer.
Patrick put out a hand to stop him. “Here now, lad, there’s no need for you to see this. We can—”
The bed exploded with a screech. A tangle of blankets flew through the air and resolved into a sullen-mouthed girl wrapped in one of Mrs. MacDougal’s quilts. She pressed a fitful babe to her chest.
“Get out!” she yelled.
“Where’s Mrs. MacDougal?” William asked.
A little sympathy came into the girl’s expression. “She’s dead now, isn’t she? Died in the storm.”
“And you just moved into her room?”
“She wasn’t using it, was she? And the baby fussed so much that my brothers threatened to throw me out in the street if I couldn’t quiet him.” She shuddered. “‘Twasn’t a good night to be in the street.”
“Where’s her—” William swallowed. “Where’s her body?”
The girl jerked her head to the window that looked out over the alley..
“You tossed her out like trash!?” William sputtered.
The girl stared at him, open-mouthed. “What else can we do? We’re not the ones in charge.” Her baby started squalling, and she put him to her breast.
“Come along, lad. Let’s leave the colleen be.” Valentine pulled William into the hallway and gently closed the door on the girl nursing her babe.
“It’s not how it ought to be!”
“No, that it’s not. But she had the right of it when she said we’re not the ones in charge. We can hardly bury all the North End’s dead. There’s not enough stones in the city to make a cairn big enough.”
William looked at the narrow, dark hallway and the small, unlit rooms. “It’s a cairn already.”
“The bodies will cause disease if they’re not taken care of proper,” Patrick said unexpectedly. “When they rot.”
Valentine raised an eyebrow.
“That’s what Dr. Fallon said. Fire or earth, that’s what it takes to keep disease from rising among us and killing even more.” Patrick’s face did a funny thing, as if it were trying very hard not to allow a smile to escape. “She’s awful clever.”
