by Anita Shreve
“Tell William there’s plenty of work in the foundry,” Harold had written. “There’s a war on up here. Halifax is the busiest harbor in the British Empire.”
Honora’s mother had said to her husband, “It’s a way to save for a house of our own.”
Honora and her mother were still in the basement, holding wicker wash baskets of wet sheets and towels, when the Mont Blanc exploded with a force that blew apart her three thousand tons of steel. The shock was felt in Cape Breton, two hundred and seventy miles away.
A thick gravy smoke rose high above the city. The blast leveled three hundred and twenty-five acres, wounded nine thousand, and killed sixteen hundred, including Honora’s father, who’d gone to the foundry earlier that morning to catch up on paperwork. As for Harold, he was blinded by shards of glass that blew inward from the window. The baby, Emma, was crushed by falling rafters. Four-year-old Seth simply vanished. No trace of him was ever found, and it was never known if he had been whisked away with the roof that had lifted from the house like a hat on a blustery day, or if he had crawled under the wreckage of a nearby house that had later burned in one of the hundreds of fires that moved through the city. Honora preferred to think that he had been obliterated into atoms, about which she was learning in school, and that one day he would reassemble and fall to earth, intact and unharmed, somewhere in her vicinity — not unlike Dorothy, say, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the interim, she believed, Seth was floating just beyond her reach. It was an idea that, when she was brave enough to voice it to her mother, produced a look of horror so precise in its features that Honora never mentioned it again. That the atomic-ghost Seth would have been able to emigrate back to Taft, New Hampshire, with what was left of the family shortly after the disaster was taken on faith — much as the miracle of the loaves and the fishes was, for example. Or the Resurrection.
Hundreds of people, Harold among them, were blinded by flying pieces of glass as sharp as knives. Had the Mont Blanc simply exploded outright and not sent up its enticing plume of flaming smoke, drawing half the city to its windows, many of the blinded might have been spared. But it was not, in general, a sparing disaster. Houses were picked up and smashed, and those left standing had bowed walls and rooms open to the sky. Many of the corpses were headless, making identification difficult; most of the bodies had inexplicably lost their clothing. A tidal wave of epic proportions swept over the city minutes after the blast, killing dozens of others. Later that night, a snowstorm began, blanketing the wreckage and the hidden corpses alike.
Honora and her mother were buried under a pile of wet sheets and towels, to which they owed their lives. Her mother’s right leg was broken, and it was Honora who had to go for help. She found her uncle Harold on his back on the kitchen floor, alive and dazed and not yet feeling the pain of the glass in his face and neck. Honora yelled for Seth and ran out of the house, where an astonishing sight greeted her. Horses had died standing, trees were coated with ash, and the neighborhood known as Richmond had simply vanished.
The town that Honora returned to was so unlike the city that had been leveled that for years she thought of the Halifax disaster as a kind of childhood nightmare that had no relation to the present. Her mother never spoke of it, nor did her brothers ever mention it in their mother’s presence. The small cape into which they moved in Taft, New Hampshire, had once belonged to Honora’s grandmother. It had green shutters and sat at the end of a dirt lane. It was surrounded by lilacs in which the bees buzzed in summer. A picket fence swayed in the wind, the house had only three bedrooms, and the windows in the dining room were immediately painted shut by Honora’s mother. But the smell of the earth under the porch was so evocative of a childhood that had vanished that even at eleven and twelve and thirteen years of age, Honora was unable to resist climbing under the porch, poking the earth there and inhaling its fresh scent.
There was insurance money from her father; Harold, forever chastising himself for having invited his sister’s family up to Nova Scotia in the first place, gave his insurance money to Honora’s mother. All of which lasted long enough to see the boys through high school and out of the house and off to Syracuse and Arkansas and San Francisco. From the age of fourteen until her wedding day, it was just Honora and her mother and Harold in the cape at the end of the dirt road. Uncle Harold never complained about his injuries, although he had aged so quickly that no one ever believed he was Alice Willard’s younger brother. As for Alice Willard herself, she effaced her memories with industry, selling produce from her garden in summer and making quilts in the winter to support the unlikely family of three. String was saved, bathwater was reused, and everything that ripened was preserved in glass jars that had been slowly emptied during the previous winter. Honora learned thrift and stoicism at an early age, though she was often baffled by her mother’s need for silence.
Honora’s fondest memories of her childhood home are of the nights when she and her family would all play Michigan poker using Diamond matches for chips. Some mornings, she would awaken and discover that a gentle fog had blanketed the mountain hamlet. Her mother would have left the bedroom already, and from the kitchen the sound of eggs sizzling in grease would be floating up the stairs. Honora would dress and leave the house and stand at the end of the lane near the swaying picket fence. She would look down through the tunnel of trees. The air would be soft and milky, and if the fog was just right, it would leave the lane visible but obliterate all the world beyond it.
Alphonse
Alphonse waits on the corner where he met the man in the blue shirt four weeks ago. Every Sunday he has stood here and hoped that McDermott would come and take him fishing. He waits on the corner because he thinks that if he stays in the apartment the man won’t bother to come up the stairs. And besides, Alphonse doesn’t want his mother or Marie-Thérèse to talk to McDermott because they will have a million questions and the man will naturally get sick and tired of answering them and then he will never ever come back for Alphonse and that will be that.
Probably the man won’t come today anyway because it’s too foggy to go fishing. The fog is so thick that he can’t see the end of the block. It moves through the streets like smoke, and Alphonse pretends the Germans are right around the corner and that the smoke is from the guns and the bombs. Pow. Pow, he says. Bam. Bam. He raises his arms as if he had a rifle in them and goes into a crouch and swings the gun wide.
The man puts a hand to his chest and staggers a step or two and then goes down onto the sidewalk.
Oh, Jesus, Alphonse thinks.
“You got me,” McDermott says.
Alphonse quickly lowers his arms. The man gets to his feet and says hello and Alphonse says hello back.
“You ready to go fishing?” McDermott asks.
“Sure,” Alphonse says.
McDermott crouches down in front of his face. “Hey,” McDermott says, tilting Alphonse’s chin up. “Remember you have to look at me? Otherwise I might not know what you’re saying.”
Alphonse wonders how old McDermott is. Probably not as old as his mother.
“I would have come before,” McDermott says, “but my sister Eileen has been sick, and I’ve had to take care of the kids. My brothers and sisters. They’re a handful.”
“So are mine,” Alphonse says. And isn’t that the truth.
“I’ve been down to the river to have a look,” McDermott says. “I left my gear down there. You can’t even see to the other side of the river, but, hey, the fish don’t know that, do they?”
McDermott chuckles at his own joke, but Alphonse, even though he thinks the joke is kind of funny, can’t quite manage a laugh. McDermott stands up and cocks his head in the direction of the river.
McDermott lights a cigarette as they walk. “Have you been waiting here every Sunday?” he asks.
“Yes,” Alphonse says. “But I didn’t mind.” He has hardly thought of anything else since the man first mentioned fishing the Sunday that all the men went into Arnaud�
��s father’s house. Arnaud said that the men were planning a union and that it was a big secret, but if Arnaud knew a fact it couldn’t possibly be secret anymore, could it?
“I should have sent one of the boys to tell you,” McDermott says. “I’m sorry about that. It’s been pretty chaotic for a few weeks.”
Alphonse shrugs. He knows all about household chaos. He takes a quick look at his feet. He polished his shoes and stole the laces from Marie-Thérèse’s boots and he’s hoping she won’t notice until he gets back.
“Have you always lived here in Ely Falls?” McDermott asks.
“No,” Alphonse says. “We used to live on a farm in Quebec.”
“What kind of farm?”
“Mostly blueberries. We had some chickens.”
“You miss it?”
“Yes,” Alphonse says. “But the farm went bad. That’s why we had to come here.”
Alphonse can remember the sick, hollow feeling inside his belly. All the kids crying for food — even, to his great shame, himself. His mother crying while she was nursing Camille. His father standing in the open doorway just staring out at dead fields.
But before that, before the farm went bad, Alphonse remembers being happy. He didn’t know it was happiness and couldn’t have put a name to it then — in fact he’s pretty sure he never even thought about it — but now he knows that it was happiness. He would fish in the river with his father and collect eggs from the henhouse for his mother and hide with his dog in his fort under the front porch.
“My dad grew up on a farm,” McDermott says. He lights another cigarette and stubs out the first on the sidewalk. They are at the bottom of Alfred Street now, away from the mills and the mill housing. Alphonse turns his head for a quick look. He can hardly see the clock tower because the fog is so thick. Without the mills and their thick smoke, the world looks almost beautiful.
“It was in Ireland. Do you know where Ireland is?”
Alphonse thinks he might know but he isn’t too sure. He lifts his shoulders.
“It’s on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean,” McDermott says.
“Oh,” says Alphonse. “What kind of farm?”
McDermott has on a beat-up leather jacket with stains on it and a gray sweater underneath. There’s a hole in the sweater just below the neckline. He puts his hands in the pockets of his pants.
“Dairy farm,” McDermott says. “They had cows. The farm was on the ocean. The fields were high above the water and, Oh, wasn’t that a beautiful sight! my father used to say. You could walk across a field and just look out at the sky and the water, he said.” McDermott looks down at Alphonse. “He was almost your age when he had to leave. His farm went bad too.”
Alphonse nods. Almost everyone he knows came from a bad farm.
“When did you leave school?” McDermott asks.
“Last year.”
“How old are you really?”
“Eleven.”
“Thought so,” McDermott says.
* * *
“I’ve just the one pole,” McDermott says, putting a worm on the hook. “You start. When you get tired, I’ll take over.”
Alphonse takes the pole from McDermott’s hand. It isn’t too fancy a pole and it’s more or less like the one his father used to have. He wonders what happened to that pole. Probably his mother sold it.
“There’s a little hillock over there,” McDermott says. “You could sit on that, lean against that stump.”
Alphonse does as he’s told, but he feels uncomfortable holding the fishing pole while McDermott sits empty-handed to one side of him. Truth be told, he’d be content just to watch McDermott fish. Alphonse struggles to think of something to say, something that won’t make him seem stupid, but after a time he has to give up on that. McDermott hums occasionally or lies back and looks at the sky. He lights one cigarette and then another. The man smokes a lot.
“Your mother works the night shift, doesn’t she?” McDermott asks finally.
“Yes,” Alphonse says.
“I sometimes work the night shift myself. Not too often, though. Who takes care of all of you when she’s away?”
“We all kind of take care of ourselves,” Alphonse says, though that isn’t quite true. Camille can’t and of course Marie-Thérèse won’t. A family of ducks swims out of the fog in a line and then goes back into the mist again.
“You ever think about what you’re going to be when you grow up?” McDermott asks.
Alphonse shrugs. He hates this question, he just hates it. Sister Mary Patrick used to ask it of him all the time, and he would try to think up something noble and worthy. One time he said a doctor and she nearly fainted with happiness, and then another time he said a priest and he could see he had gone too far and that she didn’t believe him and because of that was probably having doubts about the doctor too. And then he had to be sure to remember, in confession, that he had lied about the doctor and the priest, neither of which was remotely within the realm of possibility.
“Probably a weaver like my mother is,” Alphonse says. “She said she would teach me.”
Right away Alphonse knows this is the wrong answer, because McDermott sits up. “You don’t want to make the mill your life,” he says. “You want to get more out of life than just standing at a loom all day. One of these days, you’re going to have to try to go back to school.”
Alphonse doesn’t have the heart to tell McDermott that going back to school is pretty much out of the question now. “If I could do anything I wanted to,” Alphonse says, revealing a fact he has never told anyone, not even his mother, “I would fly.”
“Be a pilot, you mean.”
“Yes.”
“Well, that’s a good idea. You have to go to school, though, to be a pilot. Did you know that?”
“Why?” Alphonse asks. He’s shivering, but he doesn’t want McDermott to know because the man might decide Alphonse should go home, and he would hate having to go home before he’s even had a nibble. He wishes now that he’d worn something warmer than just his cloth jacket. He should have taken Marie-Thérèse’s sweater, even if it does have a ruffle.
“You have to know all sorts of things like vectors and wind velocities and how to work the instruments,” McDermott says. “You have to know a lot of math. Why do you want to be a pilot?”
Alphonse has an image of flying and struggles to describe it. “You’d be up in the sky all by yourself,” he says. “And you could go where you wanted to and get there fast and when you got there you’d be a hero, like Charles Lindbergh.”
McDermott thinks a moment. “Those are good reasons,” he says.
Alphonse feels a distinct tug and his heart does a little skip of excitement. He yanks the pole like his father taught him to — not too much, just a bit, just enough to snag the fish. If you tug at it too hard, you’ll tear the hook right out of the fish’s mouth.
“Easy now,” says McDermott, standing beside him.
The fish takes the line out so far that in the fog Alphonse can’t see the end of it. It’s a strange feeling, not being able to see the end of the line. Like having a ghost fish.
“Reel it in nice and slow,” McDermott says. “And give a small hitch every once in a while just to let him know who’s boss.”
Alphonse wants McDermott to know that he can do this. He reels in slowly, and the fish springs out of the water.
“Jeez,” says McDermott. “It’s a big one.”
Alphonse is excited now and reels in a bit faster. In the gray water he sees a flash of fin. In the distance the clock tower rings three bells.
McDermott takes off his shoes and socks and goes into the water to grab the line and the fish. He starts prancing with the cold. “Holy Joseph,” he says, “it’s freezing in here.” He wraps his shirt cuff around his hand and catches the line. “It’s a beauty.”
McDermott brings the fish to shore. Alphonse thinks he might pass out with joy.
“You take the hook out,” McDermott says
. “If you catch a fish, you have to know how to take the hook out.”
Alphonse takes hold of the bluefish, which is still wiggling. He always hates it when the fish is alive, and he wishes that this one would die soon. He pushes the barb all the way through the fish’s cheek the way he has been told. The fish flops on the bank. It won’t last too long now, Alphonse thinks.
“Thirty-two inches, anyway,” McDermott says. “You want to take it home?”
Alphonse nods. He thinks of his mother’s face when he walks in the door. Fresh bluefish for a Sunday-night supper. She will fry it in butter and make fish cakes for the rest of the week. Just thinking about it makes Alphonse hungry.
“You know how to clean a fish?”
Alphonse shakes his head. His father always cleaned the fish.
“Okay,” McDermott says. “Watch me carefully.”
Honora
Honora makes Sexton’s favorite breakfast of tomatoes with cream and sugar. He has a trip and won’t be back for eight days. As she always does before he goes away, she has a bath and washes her hair and puts on lipstick, so that when he is gone, he will remember her in a pretty dress and not in her apron. She has on the marcasite-and-pearl earrings.
Sexton shakes out the newspaper, and from across the table, Honora reads the headlines. BLACKEST DAY ON WALL STREET IN MANY YEARS. Selling Orders Swamp New York Market. Billions Quoted. Values Fade.
“Sexton?”
He cocks his head around the paper.
“What’s happening with the stock market?” she asks.
He frowns slightly, as if reminded of a dentist appointment later that day. “A panic,” he says. “It’s nothing. It will pass. The stock market goes down, everybody sells, but they’ll start trading today like crazy. You’ll see.”
“How much do we have in the bank?” she asks.
“About thirty-five dollars. I’m due to get my commission check tomorrow. It won’t be too much, though. Not after the mortgage payment.”