Ashes of Fiery Weather (25 page)

The boys lay together in their bed. Patrick was three and John was two. I was on my knees beside them when I heard the doctor's slow footsteps climbing the stairs up to us on the third floor of the house that my father bought for me, I'd later realize, certain I'd someday live there with a family of my own.

Without discussion, Jack and I moved in after we married. My parents moved downstairs and we took their bedroom on the third floor. The boys shared the room that had once been mine, the one with the view of the back of the firehouse.

My father built the whatnot that stood in the corner. I used to keep my jewelry box on it, and prayer cards, and switches of palm from Palm Sunday. Now it held the toys Patrick Devlin had built for his grandsons, the wooden trains and fire wagons, blocks with the letters of the alphabet burned into them and a baseball hit into the stands at the old Washington Park on Fifth Avenue, the one that burned when I was five. I never heard the stories of the fires, but my father told the boys, young as they were, on the day he and Jack took them to Ebbets Field, the modern stadium that was made of steel, not wood.

Only the doctor's eyes were visible above his mask. He gazed at the boys, who had been sick since day before yesterday. One hour they'd been running through the house, kept inside because of the influenza epidemic, and the next they were in bed with a fever each. I'd wanted to bring them to Kings County, but Dr. Eymrad said the hospital had no open beds and they were short on nurses and doctors. Nothing could be done for influenza anyway. We had to let it run its course.

My mother sat in a corner of the bedroom. If she wasn't mistaken, or lying, she was seventy-nine years old. The boys were the children my father had been waiting for, but I sometimes wondered if my mother even knew one from the other.

Patrick was silent in his fever, but John spoke, said words that I thought at first were gibberish but then realized were probably Irish. Had she been teaching my boy the old words?

She didn't greet the doctor or so much as turn his way. But from my knees, I put out a hand to him, like a beggar.

Dr. Eymrad said, “The next few days, hours, will be very . . . Maybe it'll be another boy. God bless.”

He was gone.

“It's a girl,” my mother said.

There had been misses after John, and we'd begun to wonder, me and Jack, if two was all we'd have. But now, heavy as I was, much as the baby punched and kicked, I kept forgetting it.

In the early afternoon, Father Halloran came. The boys were too young to receive the sacrament of extreme unction, so Father blessed them instead. We had our places, my mother in her chair in the corner, my father standing beside her. Jack stood in the doorway. I knelt by the bed on numb legs.

Father Halloran made a hasty sign of the cross over John's forehead and then Patrick's, and said, “May God bless John James Keegan. May God bless Patrick Devlin Keegan.”

The priest's hands trembled and he left right after, saying he was sorry but there were four other families in the parish he had to see.

My father and Jack retreated to the kitchen to drink.

A month ago, when it first started, I was horrified enough to read about the Spanish flu in the newspaper, even though Jack told me not to. Fever. Pneumonia. The lungs filled with fluid until the person could no longer draw a breath. A nurse was quoted: “Victims drown from the inside.”

It was called the Blue Death.

First it was a tint around their lips. Then the blue spread over their chins and cheeks. I had taken off their nightshirts, soaked with sweat and blood, they were bleeding from their noses and ears, and because they were so hot, I left them uncovered by the sheet. With each sucking breath, the little ribcages appeared.

Patrick was worse. John, content to go, I supposed, was dying more easily. I had two fistfuls of the sheet. I let go and put a hand over Patrick's mouth and nose but then snatched my hand back.

“You should,” my mother said.

“God would never forgive me,” I said.

“Mary would,” she said. “The mother. If someone had come up to her and put a rifle in her hands, don't you think she would have shot her son through the heart as he was up on the cross?”

I covered my ears and told my mother she should leave because she might catch it, even though I knew that influenza wasn't killing the old. My mother said that she'd been dead since she was a child.

John made up songs from things around the room.
Oh bed, oh shoe, oh floor,
and he sang bits of songs that he heard on the radio, in tune. He'd sing,
Ov-er there, ov-er there, 'Cause the Yanks are coming, the Yanks are coming,
and
K-K-Katy, beautiful Katy.
He said if the baby was a girl, we could call her Katy. Jack had laughed.  “And if it's a boy, J.J.?” John had no answer.

Jack could sing, but he hardly ever did except for some nights at the bar.

We knew it wouldn't be long, and it wasn't long before Patrick's eyes opened for the first time that day with the effort to breathe and he never closed them. I closed them.

Patrick liked to run halfway up the front stairs and then turn and leap down. Flying, he called it. He liked to climb the ladder in our yard to run to the firehouse. I was always turning to look for him and he was gone. He sat in the driver's seat of the engine and pretended to be speeding to a fire. He shouted,
Clang, clang, clang!

The Young Devlin, the firemen called him. Offended, I asked Jack if it was some sort of play on “devil,” and he laughed and told me that my father was nicknamed the Devlin. Didn't I know that? No. My father never said.

Jack and my father came back upstairs to find the bedroom quiet. Jack shuffled to the bed. He touched John's hand, smoothed Patrick's hair and went to stand at the window. My father came to the bed and drew the blanket over their faces as though they were strangers' children he'd pulled from a fire.

“It's my fault,” I said.

“It isn't. You only thought you were praying for them,” Jack said.

I didn't know what he meant, and then I remembered how, last week, after the newspapers began calling the outbreak of influenza an epidemic, the women of the parish went to the nuns in the cloister carrying their most carefully baked breads and their sweetest cakes. Some didn't trust their own cooking and scraped the money together to buy something.

The mothers asked the nuns for prayers in exchange for what they brought. Spare my children. Spare them. Spare
us.
As the women left, they paused before the statue of Saint Maren in the front yard. One of them kissed her little stone hand and then the rest followed. Within days, they were kissing hot foreheads.

But I was never there. Saint Maren didn't heal the sick. If you were about to drown or die in a fire, you could call out to her and she might intercede if it was God's will, but sickness she'd never been taught.

I meant that the boys were never supposed to be born at all.

If God calls you and you don't hear, then He can forgive. But if you recognize God's voice, which is not a sound but a feeling, and you know you are supposed to devote your life to Him and you turn away instead, then you are punished for that sin.

“It's my fault,” I whispered.

“You don't know who they caught it from,” Jack said.

There was something in his tone, some hint of reproach, that made me turn from the boys to look at him.

From you, I thought. From Malbone Street.

Four days ago, on November 1, All Saints' Day, a train on the Brighton line flew off the rails during rush hour as it went into the tunnel at Malbone Street. The Glory Devlins had responded, of course, and my father went too.

Jack said I shouldn't read the papers, not in my condition, but my mother told me to read accounts of the tragedy aloud to her, and I did. At evening rush hour, the train had been packed with people going home from their jobs in the city, and it was traveling way, way too fast for the sharp curve.

There was no official death toll yet. The men they were identifying by their draft cards, but the women were proving more difficult, what with only clothes and jewelry to go by.

That night, a crowd surged outside the tunnel, many terrified because a loved one had not come home, others trying to get a look at the carnage. The rescue workers had trouble fighting their way through. Jack and my father in the middle of it. The corpses, whole or in pieces, were carried out and laid in Ebbets Field, then brought by ambulance to the morgue at Kings County Hospital. When the morgue was filled, and it soon was, the dead were laid down in a laundry room.

My mother solemnly shook her head and I shuddered, even as I couldn't stop wanting more details. Not about the gore, but about the victims. Who weren't us. Not us.

My father, when he arrived home late that night, said wearily that it put him in mind of the theater back in '76. Jack, who came home the next morning, said that it was far, far worse than the Windsor.

The young Italian motorman was a BRT office worker who had hardly any training but was called on to fill in because of the motormen's strike. He'd just recovered from influenza and lost his daughter to it only a week before.

Though I didn't say it out loud—the Malbone wreck—I saw that Jack guessed my thoughts. If it was one of us, then it was you. You, in that swarming crowd. You among the bloody dead. No fire, so no smoke. No smoke, so no mask.
You.

Jack turned away from me and said to my father, “I'll go and see about arrangements.”

I clutched Patrick's arm through the sheet.

“We'll go downstairs,” my father said. “Discuss it.”

I didn't ask what there was to discuss. As soon as they were gone, I planned to pull back the sheet and look at the boys.

But my mother said we would know soon enough anyway, so he might as well have out with it. My father nodded but still spoke hesitantly. He thought I was delicate. He always had.

“The city won't allow a burial without a death certificate. Because of the flu there are too many dead and too few clerks and doctors to sign them. There aren't enough coffins, or gravediggers. Fewer people have been coming down sick these past two weeks, and so they were starting to catch up. But now, with the Malbone wreck, they're set back again.” He shook his head.

“What the hell are you saying, Paddy?” Jack said. His eyes were red, the way they sometimes were when he came home from work.

I didn't wonder if my father was right. Patrick Devlin knew everything that was happening in this city.

My father glanced at the shrouded figures. I followed his gaze and almost screamed, as though I'd just noticed them myself.

“The lads will be in the morgue for days,” he said.

“Two little boys?” Jack said. “They'll put them ahead of the—of the line.”

My father said quietly, “The Lehanes, did you know they got sick the day of the wreck and died that night? Both of them, and their older girl the next day. There's only the little girl left and the baby born last week. The girl's calling him after Dr. Eymrad. Artie's brother can't deal with that, he's been trying to get them all buried. They'll get to them, he's been told. He's got hold of himself right now, but I don't know how long he'll hold out before he puts the funeral money on some horse.”

“Three days ago?” I said faintly.

Neither of them glanced at me.

“You're not saying they're going to start tossing the dead in some potter's field,” Jack said.

I touched John's cheek through the sheet. I wanted them all to go away and leave us alone.

My father shook his head. “Last week, I would've said no.”

It was my mother's way to listen to the men go back and forth and then say what had to happen. “They need to be waked.”

December 31, 1897

On the last night of the City of Brooklyn, I was thirteen years old but already the image of my mother, Bridie Devlin, as if I'd been born from a mirror she gazed in. She poured herself a whiskey and one for me, giving me less than she served herself. A
dropeen.
We would have a wake for Brooklyn, she said, and a wake for our home. We lived in the four rooms on the third floor of the firehouse.

She'd let her sewing fall to the floor as she got up, and I eyed the pile but kept my disapproval to myself. The things should be folded and placed respectfully in the basket that sat between our chairs. She was sewing for the nuns in the cloister. My mother said everybody left apples and cakes galore for intentions, but what the nuns needed were warm socks in the winter and the plain white sheets with which they made up their beds. They needed underthings. I wondered why they couldn't sew, or did they have so much praying to do that they couldn't keep up? She said they wouldn't lift a finger for their own comfort. Once, I repeated what I'd heard about them sleeping not in beds but in coffins, to symbolize that they were dead to the world. Don't be stupid, my mother said.

My mother kicked the white fabric out of her way as she handed me the cup of whiskey, which I accepted with both hands. It was like swallowing a lick of flame. I coughed, and she cocked an eyebrow.

Bridie Devlin came over from Ireland in 1848, when she was about nine years old. The potatoes died. There was nothing to eat. My father, Patrick, didn't come to America until 1862, when he was twenty-five. He said he heard Lincoln was putting on a war, and he thought he'd get in on it. He fought under General Corcoran, the man who refused to march the 69th Regiment in a parade for the Prince of Wales when he visited New York.

My mother and me were alone in the big, warm room, and my father was downstairs in quarters with the other firemen because it was on him to see that there was no trouble. At midnight when the year turned, we would become a
borough
of Greater New York and the Brooklyn Fire Department would cease to exist. Ours along with the departments of Queens and Staten Island and the Bronx were being attached to Manhattan, swallowed up to create one huge fire department.