At the corner a broken water main gushed like a Maybeck fountain.
“Ah, damn,” said Heffernan. “No saving the city now.”
His wife was combing the plaster out of their youngest girl’s hair. “What is it?”
“The water mains, Bess. If they’ve all busted like that one, there won’t be anything for the fellas to use to fight that fire.” Heffernan pointed toward Nob Hill, where the first lacy tendrils of smoke were rising, marring a fine, clear sky.
Pie lifted her head. “Downtown’s all right, isn’t it?” She was thinking of James. As I was thinking of Rose.
“Look there.” Mr. Morris, our neighbor on the other side, pointed to a second plume rising to the south.
“Market Street?” I asked.
Murmurs and nods. The stockyards, fisheries, the factories and warehouses. As we looked on, the clouds turned from puffy white to gray to black.
“Feel that wind,” Mr. Heffernan said. “Blowing this way.”
Around us, folks were tending to their cuts and broken bones; they were gathering up bits before the next shaker or the next one took down their houses. Topography would determine one’s destiny in every part of town, but more so on Francisco Street, where our homes had been built on sand.
Our neighbors were hauling their valuables into the street. Sewing machines and pianos pulled clumsily down busted stairs—a cornucopia of bourgeois life being dragged into the broken, dusty street. In the mayhem of that first hour, mistakes in importance were made. Would a silver picture frame be more useful in the days ahead than a knife? Mrs. Smythe, across and down, brought out her wedding dress and a small framed oil painting of flowers. Her husband waited at the curb to receive the next load, which he dumped into a pile. Their four children stood beside him. None of what Mrs. Smythe carried would feed her family of six—not the fox stole thrown across her shoulder, not her hat. Mr. Smythe’s pockets were stuffed with cigars.
“Stay,” I commanded Rogue, but I meant it for Pie too.
A couple of minutes—that’s all I gave myself to run back inside. It was just enough time to stuff Lars’s old valise with a change of clothes for each of us, a nightgown and some underthings, the tortoiseshell combs James O’Neill had gifted Pie on her birthday. I seized Pie’s good hat and my straw boater. I grabbed Pie’s new silk coat too, and her old black. But I was happy to leave my Caruso dress forever in a heap. At the last moment, as I swung out the door, I took Ricky, whom I could not bear to leave. That’s how I honored Morie; I took the goddamn bird in his too-heavy cage, Ricky squawking Swedish curses as I hauled him to the door. To be sure, I slid an orange, his favorite treat, into my pocket for him to peck on later, and a blanket on top of the cage, so the smoke and dust wouldn’t kill him. And I piled it all in our two-bit coal cart and dragged that into the street.
Pie and Rogue were where I’d left them, though Pie was hiding, burying her face in her hands. It took me a beat to see why. Standing in the road opposite our house was the Haj. Unlike our neighbors, he was fully dressed in a black coat and bowler. His back arched as he leaned on his cane, favoring a foot that must have been hurt in the quake. The Haj looked like a wretched crow.
When he saw me approach with the cart, he said, “Where’s your mother?”
When I refused to answer, when I pushed past him, he followed me.
“Get on with you, Volosky,” Mr. Heffernan barked. “Can’t you see their mother is dead?”
The Haj looked from our house to Pie, back to me.
“Mark this, Volosky!” Mr. Heffernan balled his fist and swung it in the air.
The Haj ignored him. Meeting my gaze, he nodded. A shiver ran down my spine, as I understood he was issuing me a promise. “Bad luck,” he said. Then he tipped his hat with the knob of his cane and moved on.
It was nearly six thirty in the morning, an hour and a bit since the first shake.
“We have to go, Pie.”
She had such fear in her eyes. “You mean, find James, right?”
I tried to think of an answer. The smoke from downtown was filling the sky. In the days ahead, the advantage would go to a person who kept her wits—despite her suffering over Morie, or her fear of the Haj—despite it all. A person who thought to grab for herself and her sister not their best dresses but sensible wool and thick-soled boots.
Mayor Schmitz had been granted his miracle, and what kind of twisted miracle was this?
“Sure. We’ll find James,” I promised, and I coaxed Pie to her feet and made sure she was solid enough to stand. But instead of heading toward downtown and the flames, I pulled her behind a fence and changed her out of her soiled clothes. I changed too, then I started walking us in the opposite direction from downtown.
Pie gasped, as the notion dawned on her—as she followed the familiar path of my gaze up and up to that house of twenty rooms on top of the hill.
“No, V, no—”
Behind the smoke, in the east, the sun was rising, same as ever. It would be another freakishly warm spring day.
PART TWO
Up the Hill
Pie would say: What choice did I give her but to follow my unyielding backside
