3000 Degrees

by Sean Flynn

  Tom Levesque and Julie Ann Barnes were in jail. They'd been picked up that day, Tuesday, and arraigned earlier in the afternoon on six counts each of involuntary manslaughter. They shuffled into a courtroom only a half mile from the warehouse, Levesque gaunt and scruffy, briefly lifting his hands to shield his face, then dropping them, realizing the gesture was futile or uncomfortable or both. Barnes stood close by his side, her mouth drooping into a defeated frown, a white ribbon knotted in her mousy brown hair. They were being charged under the legally vaporous theory that their failure to report the fire made them criminally responsible for the deaths of six men. Under Massachusetts law, however, that wasn't necessarily a crime. After pleading not guilty, the judge set bail at one million dollars each. Barnes was sent to the state prison for women in Framingham, which was standard for female prisoners, and Levesque was shipped to the Middlesex County Jail in Cambridge, which was not at all standard. But it was safer. Worcester is a small city; too many jail guards knew at least one of the six dead firemen.

  At the warehouse, no one celebrated the arrests. Nothing had changed. Like Mike McNamee, most of the firemen were more frustrated than angry. Chief Dennis Budd spoke for most of them when he told the local paper he wasn't seething with rage. “I have no time for that,” he said. “I feel grief right now.” Paul Brotherton and Jerry Lucey went deep into the building because conditions allowed it and that was their job. Maybe the building wouldn't have turned so deadly so quickly if Levesque or Barnes had called earlier. Or maybe it would have. And Tom Spencer, Tim Jackson, Jay Lyons, and Joe McGuirk still would have gone in to find Paul and Jerry. Now they had to get them out, bring their brothers home.

  The search area had shifted forward, toward the Franklin Street side, and about twenty more feet toward the fire wall, into one of the worst sections of the building. When the fire was at its zenith, state police hovered above in a helicopter with a device that measured the temperatures below. Where the men were digging had been one of the hottest spots, soaring to more than 3,000 degrees. Bodies are cremated at 1,800. Cast iron melts at 2,800. Everything in the front of Worcester Cold Storage should have been vaporized.

  Then they found something. Just before eight o'clock, a hand went up, waved everyone over. Some pieces of equipment, the outer gear. Men got down on their knees and dug, determined and rapid but still delicate, precise, none of them wanting to overlook anything important.

  Bricks were lifted aside. Ashes and cinders and crumbled cork were trowled away, inch by inch. A glint of silver through the sludge. A medallion, the size of a quarter, with pieces of a fine-looped chain attached to it. An icon of St. Florian, the words stamped into the metal: PROTECT US.

  They'd found Jay Lyons. His medallion was sterling silver, which has a melting point of 1,600 degrees. Every man there knew what St. Florian had told his tormentors. If you burn me, I will climb to heaven on the flames.

  And in the cold of a December night, they believed it was true.

  20

  LINDA MCGUIRK'S EYES FLUTTERED OPEN IN THE DARK BEFORE dawn on Thursday morning. She'd slept only a couple of hours, and then only fitfully The emotional strain of the past six days were exacting a physical toll. She'd hardly eaten since last Friday night's dinner, grief and exhaustion sapping her appetite.

  She knew Thursday was going to be a long day. The memorial service for Joe and the other five men—organized by the International Association of Firefighters—was scheduled for later in the morning, and it seemed like the whole world had shown up for it. Thirty-thousand firefighters, from Anchorage, Los Angeles, Boise, Montreal, Australia, Ireland, and all over the commonwealth, had come to the city to march down Main Street and into the Worcester Centrum Centre, where the bishop would recite a prayer and President Clinton would say a few soothing words. Television cameras would carry it live.

  The cameras had been there all week, beaming pictures of the smoldering warehouse and weary firemen and teary bystanders across the planet. Since Saturday morning, a disaster in a small city in the middle of Massachusetts had been a national tragedy, an occasion for public grieving and official mourning. It was touching in a way, strangers from Hawaii and New York and South Carolina sending cards, flowers, and money, almost a million dollars already to the Telegram &Gazette's fund. Yet it was disconcerting, too, the attention, the sense that Linda's most awful moments were not, could not, be private. She'd been to the warehouse only once, the day after, and she'd left as soon as the impromptu press conference began. Everett had thrown up all the way home, and every time she pulled to the side of the road for him, Linda worried a photographer might take his picture, print an image of a distraught widow and her vomiting son in the newspaper.

  A limousine would be there by eight o'clock to take Linda and her children and everyone else to the Centrum. Linda's own mother, Ann Howe, had been staying with her, and Eddie Ryan, a firefighter who was her liaison to the department, was there as well. They would help her get the kids ready. And they would keep the press away, shield her as best they could from the cameras and the microphones.

  She felt Emily curled next to her in the bed. She was warm, almost hot. Linda reached for Emily's hands. She could always judge a fever in her children by feeling their hands. Emily's were burning. Her temperature had to be more than one hundred degrees. She gently shook her, tried to rouse her. Emily softly murmured and opened her eyes. They were glassy, another symptom Linda had learned to recognize. Emily was too sick to get out of bed, let alone leave the house.

  Linda wrapped her arms around her daughter. She heard a knock on the door, then her mother telling her it was time to get up.

  “I'm not going,” Linda said. “Emily's sick.”

  “You have to go.”

  “No, I don't.” She pulled Emily closer. “I can't leave Emily.”

  “Linda, come on. I'll stay with Emily. You really have to go. The president's going to be there.”

  “I don't give a shit,” Linda snapped. “I don't even like Clinton.”

  “But …”

  Eddie Ryan appeared in the doorway. He and Linda's mother tag-teamed her, both of them pleading with her to go, convincing her Emily would be all right, reminding her that Clinton, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, the bishop, and thousands of Joe's brother firefighters had come to honor her husband. She had to go, had to accept their sympathies, allow them to mourn with her.

  She relented after a bit, protested again when she couldn't knot the necktie that went with Everett's new suit. Eddie tied it for him. Then she had to dress herself. She decided to wear the same tailored outfit she'd worn to Joe's twentieth high school reunion less than a month before.

  The clothes slipped off, the jacket sliding from her thin shoulders. It didn't fit anymore. In six days, Linda had lost fourteen pounds.

  With safety pins and her mother's help, Linda managed to get the suit to fit, or at least stay in place. She was ready when the limo arrived. She stroked Emily's forehead, told her she'd be home as soon as she could, then kissed her goodbye.

  The procession began in Chadwick Square, a few blocks beyond the Grove Street station, an army of firefighters assembling in close-order ranks, their dress uniforms pressed and starched, black elastic bands stretched around their badges. If Jerry Lucey hadn't switched trucks Friday night, if it had been another man missing in the warehouse, he would have been in front, in the first line with the Worcester Fire Department color guard. Just two years earlier, he'd marched down Commonwealth Avenue in Boston for the dedication of the memorial to Boston men who had died in the collapse of the Hotel Vendome. And Jay Lyons, if he'd practiced for a few more months, would have been behind him in one of the seven rows of firemen playing bagpipes and drums, all of them dressed in green plaid kilts. He was going to surprise his mother once he'd mastered the pipes.

  The color guard marched south on Grove Street, past the station where Jay had driven Engine 3 out of its bay, where Tom Spencer had been working his last night on Ladder 2 with Tim Jackso
n. They walked a mile to Main Street, the dirge of pipes and drums behind them, then another half mile to Central Street, where they turned left. A block farther, in the street between Central Station and the Centrum, they stepped under an arch formed by the ladders rising from two Worcester trucks straddling the street, a massive American flag hanging from the apex. Civilians, twenty thousand of them, lined the route, standing seven and eight deep. The firefighters manning the stations stood at attention, some on trucks pulled to the curb. None of them was from Worcester. They were from Marble-head and Fall River and Leominster and other Massachusetts towns, volunteering so Worcester men could mourn their own.

  The memorial service was scheduled to begin at eleven o'clock, but firefighters continued to stream around the corner of Main and Central for nearly another hour, a river of dress blues broken by small pools of Gaelic plaid and color-guard flags. Five minutes before noon, the last of the marchers—firefighters from Buffalo, New York, and Bayonne, New Jersey, and, finally, a solitary flag-bearer from the American Legion—passed beneath the outstretched ladders and the flag.

  The Centrum only held about fifteen thousand people, barely the headwaters of the firefighters rippling through downtown. They trickled into the arena, row by row, Worcester firemen taking the seats arranged in the middle of the floor, the others filling the mezzanine and balconies. The remainder of the procession, another fifteen thousand firefighters and even more civilians, filled the streets outside, where loudspeakers had been mounted to broadcast the ceremony inside.

  Just before eleven-thirty, Denise Brotherton and three of her sons were escorted into the arena by Worcester fireman Mike Conley. The Centrum fell silent except for the rustle of all those starched uniforms, everyone rising at once, standing at attention. Denise felt the eyes upon her. The aisle blurred. Her feet tingled.

  “Oh, no,” she whispered to her liaison as she gripped the crook of his elbow more tightly. “I think I'm going to pass out.”

  Mike patted her hand. “Dear,” he whispered back, “I don't think that would be a very good idea right now.”

  Denise stifled a small laugh, felt her head clear, her nerves calm. She glanced back at her sons. All of them wore Rescue 1 sweatshirts.

  The other five families followed, each led by a Worcester fireman to seats in the front row. The clergy, union officials, and politicians filed onto the stage, in front of which stood sprays of white lilies and snapdragons and poster-size photos of Paul, Jerry, Tom, Tim, Jay, and Joe.

  At 11:34, the Most Reverend Daniel Reilly, the bishop of Worcester, strode to the podium to begin a long program of eulogies and hymns and sad poems. Eleven men spoke. Gov. Paul Cellucci compared the missing to World War II veterans. Ted Kennedy read “May They Not Be Forgotten,” twenty-eight lines by an anonymous author that begin with, “Brother when you weep for me, remember that it was meant to be.” Frank Raffa, the president of the local chapter of the International Association of Fire Fighters, could barely speak the names of the six dead men, the words catching on a lump in his throat. More than ninety minutes and three renditions of “Amazing Grace” passed before Rep. James McGovern introduced Bill Clinton, who quoted Isaiah and the Book of Kings and Benjamin Franklin.

  Firefighters wept in the balcony. Michelle dabbed at her eyes with a tissue and stroked her oldest son's shoulder. Patrick Spencer kept his arm around his mother. The Lyons family, Jim, Joan, and Jay's sister, Kathy, held each other in a tight embrace.

  But it was too much for a little boy who'd lost his father six days before. Sitting in the front row with Everett, Linda was almost relieved that Emily wasn't there. Everett had yet to shed a tear, held everything inside, close and deep. His grief came out instead in a spastic tic. His head snapped back and forth, sharp quick nods, and his throat choked out a guttural grunt. He couldn't control it. Linda could only pull his head onto her shoulder, hold it there, caress his temple until he quieted. As the ceremony wore on, the snapping and grunting increased. By the time Sen. John Kerry presented the families with flags that had flown over the Capitol on December 3, she only wanted to get him home. When two state troopers began to play taps, she leaned over and whispered in his ear. “We'll be out of here, soon,” she said. “Just a few more minutes.”

  At home, Emily's fever was already breaking. Later that night, Linda would thank Joe for visiting his daughter in the night, making her just a little warm, warm enough to stay in bed.

  Franklin Street was quiet except for a doleful trumpet sounding taps through a loudspeaker. Twenty men who'd been working the deck all morning stood at attention, somber, respectful. As the final note faded, they returned to the pile of rubble, sifting through ashes in the street, climbing over the wreckage on the deck.

  They had taken a few breaks during the morning, pausing to watch moments of the memorial service on jumbo monitors that had been set up at the site. Every so often, the faces of the men who'd died, the men they were digging out of the ruins, hovered above them on the screens, electronic ghosts. The images—Tim Jackson smiling on a spring day beneath the pergola where his yellow roses grew; Jerry Lucey in his dress uniform, his eyebrows, arched thick and black beneath his white cap, giving him a look of mild surprise; Jay Lyons with his head cocked, laughing—slowed the men, as if the great weight of the tragedy had become physically real. But only briefly. They all seemed to dig faster in the minutes that followed.

  The past thirty-six hours had been frustrating, an endless and wearying process of scooping and sifting that had turned up no trace of the four missing men. After they found Jay, the men had hoped Joe McGuirk would be nearby, that they had stayed together inside the warehouse. Apparently, they hadn't. There was a possibility that Jay had gotten badly lost, that he'd died alone. Or he had switched partners in the dark, hooking up with Tim, their bodies being separated only when the floors collapsed. That would have most likely meant Joe was with Tom Spencer. But they hadn't found him, either.

  The deck was mostly cleared between the B wall and the firewall, which was being whacked apart by a wrecking ball. Beyond it, the other half of the building was covered with ten feet of debris. Somewhere inside, small fires still burned, coughed a haze of gray-white smoke into the sky, a cloud that drifted over the interstate toward the Centrum.

  The dig continued into the night under the glare of the lights, then into the next morning, progressing foot by foot beyond the firewall. On Friday afternoon, one of the men sifting broken bricks and ash through a screen of quarter-inch mesh found Tim Jackson's wedding ring, a plain gold band with Mary's name etched inside. Tim was being waked that day. Mary would have his ring back before the funeral.

  The wreckage was being removed from front to rear, the clamshell bucket and the men working in a wide swath from Franklin Street in. Progress was maddeningly slow. As darkness fell on Friday, they were a quarter of the way in, just short of where the only door between the two sides of the building had been. The lights came on, the crane hauled away another load, men scrambled back with shovels and trowels and bare hands. After eight more hours, they'd pushed to the doorway. At one-thirty on Saturday morning, a few feet farther in and next to the remnants of the firewall, they found Joe and Tom Spencer. Their bodies were close, as if they'd groped through the doorway together. They must have been horribly disoriented, moving in the wrong direction, away from the stairwell that would have led them to the ground.

  Jerry was found next, five hours later, just as dawn was breaking. His body was near the D wall, far back from Franklin Street, almost in the rear corner of the warehouse behind the elevator shaft. When the building filled with smoke and visibility was cut to zero, he and Paul were as far away as possible from the stairs, sequestered behind a thick wall that muffled the squeal of their PASS alarms. No one could've heard them, let alone found them. Mike Coakley had been right: by the time Paul and Jerry had radioed mayday, they were already dying.

  Denise Brotherton heard about Jerry being found from a television newscast early that a
fternoon. The hope she'd clung to a week earlier had faded, ebbing a little each day. Now that Jerry was dead, now that there was a corpse, she knew Paul was, too. And he would be near Jerry. She wanted to be there when they brought him out.

  She was at the site by two-thirty. She spent most of the afternoon in a blue tent next to the freeway that had been set up for the families, part of a camp of mess halls and cots that had been erected over the past week. All day long, firemen came off the deck to hug her, the soot from their turnout gear smudging her white coat to black. They told her how sorry they were, that they were close, that it wouldn't be much longer.

  Day stretched into evening. Denise stood out on the street, watching the shadows from the work lights play across the D wall. She noticed a flicker of orange high above the deck. A piece of cork, still clinging to the bricks, had caught fire. Well, at least it's keeping Paul warm, she thought. She considered that, repeated it in her head, then quietly chortled at herself. Yeah, like Paul needs to be kept warm.

  Up on the deck, one of the dogs sniffed next to the elevator shaft, lingered, then stepped back and sat. One of the men hustled down to Denise. “I think we've got a hit,” he told her. “What should we be looking for?”

  “Dog tags,” Denise said. “Paul always said to look for his dog tags.”

  Another hour passed. Twenty minutes after nine o'clock, she told one of the men to take a beer up with him. “Put a Sam Adams on the deck,” she said. “And just yell, ‘Hey, Paul, we've got a Sam up here for you.’He'll hear that.” She managed to smile when she said it.

  She waited another forty minutes, then saw Chief Budd striding across the pavement. He ushered her into one of the blue tents. There were tears in his eyes. “This is the hardest job I've ever had to do,” he said, his voice raspy, hoarse. “But I want you to have these.” He laid Paul's dog tags in her hand, gently, as if they were fine and fragile things that might shatter.