Ashes of Fiery Weather (44 page)

Sean was always so pleased with himself for having defended her that she never told him she didn't much care what the boys said about her. The boys would pick on you and the next minute let you play ball with them. The girls smiled when they said cruel things and they never turned kind.

You're from Ireland, right? How come you don't have a brogue? Where are your real parents? Are you an orphan? Is your hair the reason for your temper?

Temper. They were only repeating what the teacher said.

“Eileen O'Reilly, you have to learn to control your temper!” she'd shout when Eileen whirled around to shove a girl who pulled her hair.

She hated the girls. They were the reason for the “outbursts,” as the principal called them.

Two weeks ago, she had been shoved on the stairs by a girl from another class. She had turned, snatched the books out of the girl's arms and tossed them over the banister.

Eileen had been suspended for three days. Her mother told her that when she felt herself getting angry she should count to ten. By the time she reached ten, she would be calmer. Eileen tried to explain that when she got mad, there was no time to count. For three days, she sat with Nathaniel in his store, listening to his stories of Poland before the war. He spoke of his teenage sisters, who were so pretty, boys waited outside their house to see them. He spoke of his little brother, who learned the names of flowers and trees from a book and had Nathaniel take him on walks to look for them in life, refusing to listen when Nathaniel tried to explain that he was searching for things that didn't grow in their village or anywhere in Poland. Eventually, Nathaniel kept quiet and let Miko search.

Sean looked at John, and Eileen could see him fighting the urge to shove him for shoving Ally, and the need to hear what he had to say.

“Body parts—who told you that?” Sean asked.

“My dad was there this morning,” John said. “There were shoes with feet in them. He almost puked.”

Eileen knew that John's father was a cop. Probably he wasn't lying.

Sean turned and looked back at the scene. He'd forgotten his hat, and his ears were bright red. Her neck, his ears. She hoped their mother didn't find out about the scarf and the hat. Their mother was always saying they couldn't afford pneumonia.

Eileen hunched her shoulders. So many firemen were walking around the wreckage that it looked like they were the only ones there, though she knew there were still cops working, because of all the police cars parked on Flatbush.

“The Glory Devlins are there too,” Sean said.

“Oh yeah?” John said. “And which one of them's your real father?”

Eileen flinched. She would never ask Sean, but she thought he probably did wish one of them was his dad. O'Brien and McAleer were his two favorites. Both of them were married, though, with kids older and younger than Sean. The guys who were still single were too much younger than his mother, who had turned forty-two in November.

Neither could recall when Delia first told them about Luke and how he left. They'd always known the story. Luke O'Reilly met a lady in England during the war and decided, after he'd been back in America a few years, that he would be happier with her. It was that simple, and they weren't to make more of it and they weren't to listen to the neighbors' gossip. He was never coming back. Sean and Eileen were not to talk about the English lady.

When Sean was first due to start at Holy Rosary, their mother had said she and Sean's father were separated. Unsatisfied with this answer, Sister Mary Alice, the principal, went to the monsignor. He had told the nun to let it be. Yet if talk of a divorce got around, parish gossip would force him to kick both children out of Holy Rosary. Then they'd have to go to public school. Eileen knew her mother didn't care if they had religion as a subject, like math or English. She just thought Catholic school would keep them both out of trouble. But Sean had a theory about Luke. Maybe he was Eileen's father too. Maybe he'd been a spy during the war and the Germans were still after him. He met the Englishwoman and the two of them had Eileen and then had to go on the run, so they sent her to America to be Sean's sister. Eileen didn't want the Englishwoman to be her real mother but she liked the idea of being Luke's daughter, because that made her and Sean blood relatives.

Lately Sean had stopped telling the stories. Eileen tried to reignite his interest. Maybe the Englishwoman was a spy too. But Sean would shrug like it was a game he'd grown bored of playing.

Sean grabbed Eileen's sleeve. “Come on. We can see better from over there.”

John didn't follow them. Eileen had been hoping to go home. It was cold and would soon be getting dark. She stood shivering beside Sean, watching as two firemen carried a stretcher covered with a green blanket out of the middle of the street.

Sean nudged her. “That's a dead body.”

Eileen turned away quickly and saw Amred Lehane standing behind a barricade, taking a picture. She tugged on Sean's sleeve and pointed.

Sean looked, then called, “Amred! Hey!”

Amred lowered his camera and dropped the strap around his neck. As he walked over to them, he took a loose cigarette out of his pocket and lit it. He extinguished the match between his fingertips and dropped it on the wet ground.

“Whatta you hear?” Sean asked.

“Bad business,” Amred said. “This plane collided with another that crashed out on Staten Island.”

“That's true?” Sean said.  “All day we were hearing different stuff. The teachers wouldn't tell us anything except to pray for the boy who survived.” He pointed down the block. “Did anybody survive on the other plane?”

Eileen waited hopefully. The boy who lived was eleven years old. They'd taken him to Methodist Hospital. Her class, and she guessed all of the classes at school, had prayed for him and were told to do so again when they said their bedtime prayers. She and Sean didn't say bedtime prayers, but tonight, Eileen might. The boy was burned. Burns, Sean had told her on their walk over, burns were bad. If you got burned deep enough, it didn't hurt, but that meant real trouble. Your nerve endings were all dead.

Amred shook his head as he exhaled a stream of smoke. “No. They were all killed. But they got lucky—it went down in a field. Here, there are people missing from the neighborhood. They don't got a number yet, or they're not telling. I talked to Tommy Galton. He said two guys who were selling Christmas trees on the sidewalk are gone. Nobody in the apartment buildings so far.”

“Are they sure?” Sean asked.

“I don't know. That's the cops' job. They're talking to the residents, making sure nobody was caught in one of the fires. The caretaker of the church is dead. They know he was in there. Pillar of Fire Church. How about that?”

“How many companies responded?” Sean asked.

“No numbers yet. Mayor Wagner will be talking to the newspapers again tomorrow morning. Probably Commissioner Cavanagh too. It went to five alarms. They're saying a hundred, two hundred off-duty firemen came in on their own. Heard and ran in. I'm thinking this is the biggest thing in Brooklyn since the theater fire in 1876.”

“Yeah? Wow.” Sean nodded, his eye fixed on the scene. “When did you get here?”

“About twenty minutes after it happened.” Amred patted his camera.

“Were there body parts on the street?”

Amred dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and ground it out. “Yeah. Everywhere. I don't take pictures of that stuff. I'm no ghoul.”

Eileen scanned the scene. What used to be the plane now looked like chunks of garbage all over the street. It wasn't good enough. She wished she'd been suspended from school this morning. She and Nathaniel would have heard the plane's engine roaring, and they'd have run out of his store in time to see the plane hit the church and the church burst into flames. She wished she could have watched the whole thing, from its start to the terrible end. She didn't want to see the deaths. She was no ghoul either. It was instead a need to know exactly how such a thing unfolded. Eileen wanted to be the plane itself and the boy who lived.

“I wasn't asking that. Somebody said it. I was seeing if it was true,” Sean said.

“It's true,” Amred said. “The guys're not stopping because of the dark. They're bringing in lights.”

“But they don't think there's a chance anybody's alive?”

“There can't be,” Eileen said.

“You don't know—” Sean started to say, but Amred shook his head.

“Eileen's right. They're staying for the dead.”

Then Amred said he was going to try to sneak into one of the nearby buildings to get some shots from the roof. He put his finger to his lips and slipped away.

The gray sky was getting darker. Eileen had given up holding her coat closed in favor of keeping both her hands in her pockets.

“Sean?”

“Huh?” He looked at her.

“Mom's going to be home soon.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Let's go. We can come back tomorrow.” He stopped. “Hey, I bet the Christmas party gets canceled.”

“You think so?” Eileen asked.

The Glory Devlins company party was tomorrow afternoon. They were always invited. The last two years, Delia had sent them by themselves.

“The guys will probably all be here.”

“Well, maybe next Saturday.”

“That's Christmas Eve, dummy.” Sean stopped walking. “Wait! That's Hugh.”

Eileen saw the fireman coming toward them. Hugh McAleer.

“You two! Your mother's looking for you,” Hugh called as he got close. Hugh had six kids, mostly boys, and one was in Sean's class. The McAleers' house was one of the places Sean went without her.

“Mom's at work,” Sean said.

“She didn't go in,” Hugh said. “The girls are at your house, mobilizing.”

“Mobilizing?” Eileen repeated. “The girls,” she knew, meant the wives of the firehouse.

Hugh looked at her and his face lost the mad look. “Getting stuff together for the families who live here. Clothes, shoes.” He nodded over his shoulder. “Maureen and her just came down here with some of the stuff, and your mom asked me to look for you. They're at the church on St. Johns.”

He recited directions: Go down Flatbush to Eighth Avenue. Make a right onto St. Johns Place. Walk all the way down the block. The church was on the corner.

“Get your tails over there,” he said.

“How'd she know we were here?” Sean asked.

“You kidding? Your mom's no dummy,” Hugh said. “And Sean, listen, you should know better than to bring your little sister here. Something like this. Got it? Go on, go.”

Sean's face was already raw from the cold, but even in the falling darkness, Eileen saw his color deepen. He hunched his shoulders and began walking so fast she had to nearly run to keep up.

Sean wiped his eyes on the cuff of his coat. Eileen looked away so he wouldn't know that she'd seen him. She waited until they'd turned onto Eighth Avenue.

“What does he know!” Eileen said. “I'm not some little kid.”

“I know. But if I do come down here tomorrow, maybe you shouldn't come with me,” he said.

Eileen stopped short but Sean kept walking. He noticed but pretended not to.

She ran a few steps to catch up and shoved him from behind. He stumbled and turned.

“I'll wear a disguise,” she said. “I'll hide my hair under a hat.”

Sean gave her an appraising look. “That could work.”

December 1960 was already a month the guys would be talking about for ages.

Three days after the planes crashed in Park Slope and Staten Island, killing everybody on both planes—even the little boy who initially survived, plus six people on the ground—an aircraft carrier caught fire in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, two miles from the Park Slope crash. All the same companies responded.

The ship also caught fire in the morning, but there was no announcement over the loudspeaker at school. Some kids who went home for lunch brought the news back. Marian Clark, who was in Eileen's class, told her. Marian was the other girl nobody much liked, and she thought it made her and Eileen friends. Eileen ran to find Sean, who never stayed with her in the schoolyard. Marian followed. She found him in a cluster of boys. They already knew. Disappointed, she turned and walked away. Marian, with a last look at Sean, did the same.

After school, Eileen anxiously waited for him at the schoolyard gate. When Sean arrived, he told her that right before the final bell rang, he'd been called to the principal's office. Their mother was on the phone. She told him that the ship was still burning. He was not to go down there. A street corner was one thing, but the navy yard was another. He would not get close. If he didn't listen, she would no longer let them stay alone after school. She'd send them to Nathaniel's store, or she would make them come to work with her and sit on folding chairs behind the cash register.

“Do you think she means it?” Eileen said.

“Yeah, I'm pretty sure,” Sean said. “Amred's probably there. He'll show us the pictures later.”

They entered the silent house and changed out of their uniforms. They were supposed to do their homework before watching television, but they never did.

Sean was restless, pacing the house. There was no news on. Eileen thought of the radio. Their mother listened to music when she was cooking, but they never touched it. Sean turned the dial until he found the news, and before long they learned that the aircraft carrier, the USS
Constellation,
had been under construction. The fire was still raging.

“The dog!” Sean said. “The guys have been gone since this morning.”

Both of them put their coats on and went into the kitchen.

On a nail near the phone hung the short string of rosary beads and the key to the backdoor of the firehouse, left over from the days of Jack Keegan. Sean took the key and led the way to the backyard. He went up the ladder first. Eileen waited until he was over the fence before she went. The ladder wasn't the sturdiest. Sean unlocked the backdoor and they stepped into the kitchen.