She walked behind me in a trance, refusing my offer to pull her in the cart, for which I was glad. The way up was ridiculously steep. With the fissures in the road two, sometimes four feet wide, and the bricks and boards and all kinds of debris blocking our path, we made our way slowly, step by awful step. The dust was fearsome, and the smoke too.
By now the whole city was on the move. Folks just like us were fleeing their busted or burning houses. They dragged their few possessions stacked atop wheelbarrows and sofas with casters and carts of all shapes laden with trunks of china and candlesticks rattling atop barrels and framed portraits of dead ancestors and needlepoint chairs and sewing machines.
We nodded in solidarity, a quick lift of the eye, as we passed. Soldiers and police with whistles were already on foot throughout the city, soon to be joined by several ships of soldiers from the navy. In the meantime, all able men were being commissioned to help with the impossible task of burying the dead and clearing the streets.
As we passed a woman wearing three coats, we overheard her explaining to her son, who was likewise dressed in layers, why they couldn’t return to their house, since all of downtown was ablaze.
“Excuse me,” I said, “is it true? Downtown’s on fire?”
“What isn’t flattened,” the woman said.
“Along Market Street?” Pie asked.
“And well past,” the woman replied. “South of the Slot is burning, and on this side too. There must be, oh, dozens of fires,” she went on, stroking her son’s head. “It’s as if hell is burning, and I don’t mean to be cussing, but that’s where we are—hell.” She looked at us with bloodshot eyes.
We walked on, too troubled to speak. The smoke and dust had lodged in Pie’s lungs. Her coughing forced us to stop. “I wish… I wish I had just a little water,” she gasped.
“Here, Pie.” I guided her to a stone wall fronting a house that was tipped on its side. I peeled the orange I had put in my pocket for Ricky, and she sucked on a slice, closing her eyes.
“James,” she said.
“I know, Pie. But it can’t be that every building is on fire.”
“Can’t it? You heard Mr. Heffernan. How… how are they going to put it out when they don’t have water?”
“I don’t know, Pie. I don’t know. I keep thinking: What if Rose stayed last night at her place downtown? What if she’s—”
“Dead?” Pie slipped another wedge of the orange in her mouth and, with her eyes shut, gave voice to my nightmare. “What if she refuses to take us in, or what if someone should see us taking shelter in a madam’s house? How… how could I ever explain that to James?” Pie dabbed her bloody head between coughs. “No one of good society would allow—”
“Oh, stop your yattering,” I said. Society, as far as I could tell, didn’t exist anymore. “Are we really in any position to turn up our noses at a bed or a glass of water from Rose?”
Pie answered by refusing to go another step.
Across the road from where we stood a family was just leaving their broken house. Having shrugged off its foundation, the house was tipped to one side, like a dozing drunkard. The windows in the bays, even the thick panes in the double front door, were broken.
The wife was in labor, cradling her enormous belly in her hands and moaning. As we looked on, her husband settled her in an old wheelbarrow and with every movement she gasped. Her three young children stood on either side of the wheelbarrow, holding on to a fistful of their mother’s skirt. A small dog was harnessed to a cart, the cart stacked with a few belongings. It was the eldest child’s job—he couldn’t have been more than six—to hold fast to the dog’s collar.
“What a god-awful day to be born,” I whispered.
The husband turned to the house and, as if addressing a mirror, donned his hat. He took his time putting on his gloves.
“Cyrus, mind you, lock the door,” his wife called between contractions.
Her husband looked from her to his busted door and back again. Its matching panes of ornamental glass were shattered. All a person had to do was reach in and turn the knob.
“Cyrus!”
He did as she asked. He fished in his pocket, removed a key, and turned the lock. It was a gesture so futile and civilized, it struck me hard. As did the dog, a mutt, half the size of Rogue, who shouldn’t have been pulling a cart but was pulling it anyway, and the older boy stuffed like a sausage man in too many layers of clothes.
The husband walked to where his family waited and, turning back, latched the iron gate. As he hoisted the wooden arms of the wheelbarrow, his wife cried out in agony.
We watched them make their way to the bottom of the hill. Then Pie climbed to her feet.
“Don’t scoff,” she said. “You aren’t married; neither am I. And we don’t have Morie to… help us.” Her voice sounded distant and hollow. “I mean, when this is over, who are we?”
“Pie, look around you. My God, if Rose doesn’t take us in, we’ll be searching like everyone else for a pot and a patch of grass.”
She nodded, but I knew she didn’t believe me. In those first few hours, it was possible to think that just over that hill, everything was normal.
From under the tarp covering his cage, Ricky let off a string of Swedish curses. “Vad fan, vad fan, pretty svenska!”
“Who are we?” My voice sounded bruised and hollow too. “We’re a stuck-up Swede, a madam’s bastard, a mutt, and a foul-mouthed bird. How’s that?”
“Don’t be crass,” my sister replied. “We’ll tell James that we’re Rose’s distant relations. Will you agree to that?”
Rose’s House
If there was ever a morning when
