Going into the water after Richard was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, for the water was over my head and I had to hold onto the boat while I reached for him. I was unable to get out again until Father heard my cries and came to find us. I couldn’t stop shaking after, even when Father had changed my clothes and put me by the stove with the mats over my shoulders. I’ve never been so cold in my life. Mother was in shock, I think, for she just went about dressing the body and doing what had to be done as if she were in a trance, but Father took the whole thing in immediately, understood right to his core that his only son was gone, and I could see him trying to control the wild grief in his eyes.
That night, Mama collapsed and he had to carry her to the bed and send to St. John’s for a doctor to come in the morning. He got Mrs. Martin, the Protestant school mistress, to sit with me so that he could tend to her himself—he didn’t trust anyone else, and all the Irish women were in the other room wailing over the beautiful boy, but he still found a moment to speak to me. He lifted me into his arms and held me tight, and then he said “Keziah, if I lost one hand I would still have another and I would cherish it all the more because I had only one. If I lost an eye, I would care doubly for the other.”
“I tried to get him out,” I wept into his ear. “He was too heavy.”
“He’d hit his head and was already gone when you found him, I swear there was nothing you could do.”
I wept all the harder, trying to believe him. “Nothing at all?”
“Keziah,” he said, “what can’t be cured must be endured. This thing cannot be undone. All we can do now is help one another endure as best we can. We must both look after your mother, for she is in very deep distress, but we must not forget to comfort one another as well. For the moment, she has forgotten that we need her too, but she will remember it eventually and she will come back to us again.”
From that day I have regarded the sea with terror and disgust. On the sunniest morning it looks black and greasy; during a storm it foams at the mouth like a mad animal, and in winter it is a treacherous field of ice over a bottomless abyss. The greedy maw of the sea swallowed Richard in two minutes and then spit him out again to lie in God’s small acre with Mrs. Cadigan’s baby. He probably escaped a worse death, and I’m sure he escaped a worse life, for the sea was all he wanted and for most of the people in Petty Harbour, the sea provided nothing but poverty and misery.
5:00 pm
Dermot—
There is a loose board on the front step that has
needed fixing for the past week. Do your job.
Miss Elizabeth Power
6:00 pm
Dear Miss Lizzie,
If a certain young snip spent more time in the kitchen helping her Aunt Kate who was up all night with Mrs. Donovan, and less time reading the trashy romance she has hidden behind the harmonium, I might be able to do my own work instead of hers.
Respectfully,
Mr. Derm. O’Dwyer
When I opened my eyes just now and saw the red reflection on the ceiling, I thought it was fire and my heart was halfway to the door before I realized that my body was going nowhere. It’s only the sun setting and if the pounding of my heart would quiet down I will be able to tell the time from the noise in the kitchen below. It’s such a warm day, Kate has put the shutter over the grill in the ceiling to keep the heat out of the room but I can still hear enough.
I don’t suppose I’ll ever lose my fear of fire—worse even than the dread I have of the sea, although none of mine have ever been burned, nor have we even lost a stick of furniture or a bit of clothing if you don’t count the boots Paddy burned fighting the big fire just before he died. That was when the stands of trees on the Southside Hills finally went, and haven’t grown back yet, it seems. Their roots were destroyed—the soil was too thin to protect them. Paddy fought that fire with all the other brigades, and then afterwards went wandering up through the ruins of the hills where I used to get the spruce tips for the beer, walking back and forth through the smoldering ruins of the woods, until when he finally came home he’d burned the shoe leather right off his boots and singed his feet so badly that he could hardly hobble around for a week. He put the boots in the window, nothing but uppers left to them, to show what a big man he’d been, chasing around with the brigade.
I don’t recall what started that fire. A Camphene lamp? A candle left burning? It could have been any one of a hundred things. It was a glue pot set off my fire, glue left on a stove in a carpenter’s shop on George Street, and a pipe dropped in a pile of hay started Min’s. I suppose every one of us is doomed to trial by fire: “As the fire devoureth the stubble and the flame consumeth the chaff, so their roots shall be as rottenness.” It was one of the reasons I hated living in town—the bells from the Garrison going off every night or two and the acrid stink of the smoke lingering and keeping you nervous for clays after.
My fire had already started when I set out from the Harbour to visit the nuns. I’d told Mother I was going to go into town if I got the garden sorted out in time, and she went on down to the flakes. When she saw the smoke from St. John’s rising like a pillar in the air, she walked halfway up the path and saw I was still in the garden, so she went back to her work. I wasn’t there, though. I’d been restless, not able to settle down to my work, and the crows were tormenting me, so I found some old rags, bits of brin and old sacking, and tied them to sticks in the ground to keep those nasty birds off my new little plants. Then I collected a few pounds of butter, and I packed a dozen fresh eggs into a basket of moss, and added a piece of salt salmon, and started out the path to town. I was halfway there when I saw the smoke, so I took the road away from the river, heading more towards the Freshwater Valley, and turned down when I got past Flower Hill. I was so green—I just thought it was all an inconvenience, something I would have to work around.
Long’s Hill was a good way from the fire, but it was still quite frightening to look down and see the flames whipping up in the wind, and when the vats of seal oil went up at Bennett’s I very nearly gave up and ran home, for I thought it was the new gas works at Riverhead. That’s when the wind changed. The smoke was blowing away from me then, so I went on to the convent thinking they’d need a bit of extra food for the people who were burned out. Even then I didn’t realize how bad it was.
From the top of the hill, in the convent, you could hear the roar, like a gale of wind or a cataract, as the fire leapt from roof to roof, and then the crash as the roofs fell in. When the men from the Garrison blew up Stabb’s house, the flankers exploded and reached as far as Circular Road and they even ignited the sails on the ships in the harbour. Two thousand houses were destroyed, they say. I heard after that an artilleryman was killed, and a prisoner they forgot about at the courthouse was burned to death in his cell. To this day I shudder to think of that poor man, trapped inside those stone walls with no way out. I don’t think I have ever been so frightened, before or since.
At the convent, they were all business, clearing out the rooms to make pallets on the floor for the people who were homeless, finding clothing to cover the women and children who had lain abed too late and had to flee in their mghtclothes. Bishop Fleming was still in England but Mother Mary ensured that everything was done as he would have directed it personally had he been there. I was hardly in through the door but the basket was taken from my hands and sent to the kitchen and I was put in charge of the youngest children, those who could walk but who were too small to help. A sad lot they were too— barefoot, runny noses and eyes, and covered with skin sores that a bit of soap and water would have soon cured. I got them into one corner, probably fourteen or fifteen of them, and began to make up stories, and when that ran out, I had them comb the tangles out of one another’s hair and wipe their faces with a damp cloth until they all looked as respectable as they could manage. Mostly I was just keeping them occupied and out from under the feet of their mothers, who were wailing and tearing their hair at the loss of
their few poor rags and chattels.
All this time, of course, Mother thought I was up in the garden, and every now and again she’d see one or other of the sacks I’d tied on the poles dance in the wind and she’d think it was my skirt or my pinafore. When I didn’t come for my dinner, she was so annoyed she gave it to the new boy down at the wharf—he was so skinny, he’d eat an extra meal any time he could get his teeth on it. By mid afternoon the smoke from town was like a black cloud in the sky, and most people in the Harbour were packing up any blankets or clothing they could spare, for everyone had a few relatives or friends in St. John’s. That was when she went to fetch me from the garden, and realized her mistake. Father was still out on the water, and she didn’t even wait for him, set out instead on her own to find me.
Mother arrived just as evening was coming on, and I thank the Lord every day that she did, for I only knew enough to do as I was told and the good sisters were not as cautious as they should have been. The whole town, from Sprmgdale Street to the Hill O’Chips was gone by this time, and confusion was the only order of the day. Collapsing walls were a great menace, and piles of looted household goods stood blocking all the roads. Down at the harbour, the fire still raged, feeding on the oil soaked wood of the pilings, and the wind was so high that the engines could not get anywhere near it. Up at the convent, we felt relatively safe. Mother Mary stood in the doorway, giving orders and repeating to whoever would listen; “Jerusalem will have a wall of fire round about, and the Lord will be the glory in the midst of her.”
I suppose we were all so overwhelmed by the noise of crying women and hungry babies, the reek of unwashed bodies and overflowing night-soil buckets, not to mention the permeating stench of the smoke from the fire, that one more smell escaped our attention. Not so Mothers. She was no sooner in the main room of the convent than she raised an alarm. At first Mother Mary thought she was hysterical, but soon I could smell it too—burning wool, like the Bishop s waistcoat a decade earlier. One of the poor refugees had brought a flanker rolled into a pile of bedding, and by the time we located the source, the entire back of the convent was on fire. We got everyone out, but the whole place was gone within an hour. The men who had been fighting the fires on the lower levels all day were too exhausted to drag their engines up to the top of Long’s Hill, even if their horses hadn’t been falling down in the shafts, and Bishop Fleming’s beautiful convent was a pile of ashes and rubble long before daylight.
It was cold that night, much colder than one would have expected, and people huddled in the fields and streets wrapped in whatever rags they could find. The men from the Garrison set up military tents behind the Cathedral site, but there was no way room could be found for everyone in such a short time, and all the canvas was taken when we looked for shelter. We took refuge with the Mercy nuns, and in the morning we helped the sisters take what few things they had salvaged to the barn at Carpasia, the Bishop’s farm. It was here that Father found us.
I will never forget that walk home the next morning. I was sixteen, but I took my mothers hand on one side and my fathers on the other, and kept my fingers well laced into theirs until we had escaped the town. We climbed up to Browns field, and made our way down Military Road to the eastern limit of the fire, and then walked the length of the harbour, stepping over piles of charred wood and collapsed brick, skirting around hastily dumped barrels and boxes. Out in the Narrows, the customs officers were searching ships for looted goods and removing all unnecessary provisions in a desperate hope of feeding the inhabitants of the port through the winter. Dozens of small boats and large ships were lined up, bow to stern, waiting their turn to pass through and out of the razed city. Three times we were stopped by military patrols. All around us was a forest of chimneys.
In the ruins of one building, a group of men were pulling the bodies of two small boys out from under the remains of a chimney that had collapsed on them while they were searching for salvage. A woman, ashen grey and streaked with soot, stood dry-eyed and shocked nearby, clutching some unidentifiable metal objects in her apron. I don’t know if she was their mother or their sister or what. Smoke still rose from the ruins of most buildings, and huge flakes of black soot hung in the air. Everyone, ourselves included, coughed and choked on the foul air. My throat was raw and Father could hardly speak, he coughed so much.
By the time we got to Kilbride Falls, it all seemed so remote and unreal that we could hardly believe what had happened. There was a small shrine set up near the falls, put there by the Walshes, I believe, before Bishop Mullock built the church, and we stopped there and washed ourselves as best we could. We drank draught after draught of the cold water, and Mother wet her fingers and combed the soot out of our hair as best she could, and then dried us off with her shawl. Sitting there on a bit of the bank, I finally lay my head in her lap and wept. I wept for the poor prisoner in the gaol, for the artilleryman, for the two little boys under the chimney, for the nuns who had lost their beautiful new convent, and for myself, for I could never again sleep without some awareness of the flanker in the blanket, the seed of fire ready to devour us in the night. It was not Thomas Salter or Paddy Aylward who took away my girlhood, but an ember brought into the house by a stranger I never knew.
June 30
Weather variable, changes every five minutes. Picnic bookings up for the weekend; have had to get Mrs. Walsh to help. The girl was drying her wool stockings over the stove, directly against my orders, and dropped one. The kitchen was half filled with smoke before she realized what she had done. Mumma knocked the jug of water off her dresser to get her attention. I am in an agony over this-—Mumma is terrified of fire, and I know she would send the slovenly child packing back to her family this minute, but I am short-handed as it is, and the girl is hardly older than Lizzie. It is my fault, for I didn’t realize the poor thing had only one pair of stockings and had been washing them out and wearing them wet. She has only half a pair now. I cannot send her home with even less than she had when she arrived, so I am obliged to clothe her, whether she stays or goes.
I’ve been examining my conscience and Kate is right, the girl should be given a second chance. It isn’t Annie’s fault she was dragged up rather than brought up to be useful and clean. But I’d been thinking about the Great Fire, and it was so vivid that when the smoke began to seep up through the floorboards I was sure it was the end of everything. At least I know now that I can move my arm if I have to. She doesn’t look like good material to work with—too sallow and drab—but then I don’t suppose I looked much like a farmer when I was her age. If it hadn’t been for the fire, I might never have thought to become a farmer for up until that time I’d never seen a farm.
I went back to St. Johns many times in the weeks that followed the fire, to help the Presentation nuns who, refusing the offers of their sisters in the Mercy Convent, had determined to stay and continue teaching school at Carpasia. Like me, they knew little about farming, nor did the street urchins who were their especial charge, and they often required help getting chickens or pigs away from the outbuildings they were teaching in when the weather was bad. Often I would find them in the fields, beseiged by cows they were afraid to chase off, trying to quiz their little girls in their letters and sums while at the same time quaking in their habits from the benign gaze of old Bessie or Sir Grunt who merely wanted to chew the bit of grass they were sitting on.
Carpasia had only the minimum of staff, all the others having been ordered off to help in the town, so I was able to make myself useful, which is why Mother sent me back as often as she could excuse me from my duties. The Bishop had tried to sell the estate the previous year, planning to put the money into the Cathedral he was building I don’t doubt, but fortunately there was no budding gentleman-farmer on hand to pay the price the beautiful gardens and the view could be expected to fetch. I for one was glad, for it was the first proper farm I had ever seen, a farm with a horse and plow, a harrow and roller, a manure pit and a boat for cods’ heads. The co
ach house served as an office, for the coach had long before been sold to Dr. Carson, but to one side there was a small glassed-in shed for starting seedlings, and dozens of wonderful tools, even a gadget for crushing mussel shells to feed to the hens. I was happy to help reorganize the outbuildings if only to save these things from the prying, thieving fingers of the children who daily swarmed over the estate.
The Bishop came home two months later, and I’m told that he wept when he saw his city in ruins, and wept more when he saw the beautiful new convent in ashes, but wept most of all when he found his nuns sitting in the pig sties and manure pits of Carpasia trying to teach the little ones, and sleeping in the barn with the cows. They say this grief is what broke his health and led to his death, but I don’t think so, for as always he turned and found practical solutions to many of the difficulties. Once again, I found myself at his side, taking his orders and implementing them with the assistance of a rag-tag army of corner boys and girls. We used hand-barrows and a dog-cart and quickly had things the way he wanted them so that he could go back to town with an easy conscience.
The four nuns, who had been sleeping in the barn, were quickly moved into the Bishop s cottage, where I knew he would have wanted them to be in the first place. I should not think ill of the holy women, but sometimes it seems that pride masks itself as humility. The cows were turned out of doors until a temporary shelter could be found for them, and the barn cleared out to make room for the children who came each day from the ruined town. The Bishop took two men off the work at the Cathedral and set them to erecting makeshift tables and benches in the barn, and they whitewashed the privy and built a barrier for modesty so that the children didn’t have to empty their bowels in the fields where anyone might walk into it.
Donovan's Station Page 9
