by Megan Chance
“Not that.” He gestured to the box I’d been given in the bread line. “That.”
At first I was confused. “The line is right over there. They’re giving it away for free. All you have to do is wait.”
“Now why should I do that, when you’ve done it for me?” A quick flex of his fingers. “Hand it over.”
I did not know how to make it more clear. Again, I tried to explain. “No, no, really. You needn’t steal it. They’re giving them away to everyone—”
The knife was in his hand before I could blink. “Give it to me.”
I should hand the box over. I could stand in the line again. It was only time, and what else had I to do? I could explain it to them if they recognized me. Just give it to him.
But I was tired and hot and hungry. I had escaped an asylum, being buried alive, and fire, and suddenly I was angry. Brutally, furiously, inescapably angry that anyone might try to take advantage of me again.
Before I had a chance to think, to even know what I was doing, I kicked, connecting with his knee. He let out a grunt of surprise and went down, and I hurled myself at him, kicking him again in his crotch. He screamed and curled up, clutching himself. The knife clattered to the ground. I kicked it away. It slid beneath a pile of nearby rubble.
“Go stand in the goddamned line like everyone else,” I snarled as I picked up the newspaper and the relief box and walked away.
I had perhaps terribly injured a man for a box of Postum and a few slices of bread. I could not bring myself to feel bad about it, or even anything but awed at the way sheer rage had taken over. Perhaps it had been stupid; he could just as easily have turned on me. I shoved the dry cereal into my mouth. Nothing was as it should be now, the world upended.
I tried to squint through the smoke, to see something beyond the ghostly masts of telephone poles or looming shadows of crumbling buildings, but I could not. Impossible to tell where the fire was, whether Nob Hill had survived, or if, even now, my relatives sat in their garden among my uncle’s angels, drinking champagne and watching the city burn. Had they replaced that gilded mirror with my money, and was it even now shattered into a thousand pieces? Impossible to know if the mansion there had survived the earthquake, or if any of them had, if any of the things and people I’d known still existed, and what I should do if they didn’t—or even what I should do if they did. Think.
All around me, people went about their business, women talking and visiting, men looking restless and ill at ease, as if they’d no idea what to do with themselves. The smoke, the explosions, and the damage made nothing normal, but the thing was not yet at an end, either, and so there was no way to go on into the future because who knew what the future would be? We were all suspended. A holiday that wasn’t a holiday, but uncomfortable and anxious, with dread in every look and word and gesture.
I moved as everyone moved, with no other direction but away from the encroaching fire. At night I lay awake, staring at the simmering bronze-black sky edged with sickly green. The glowing clouds above split to show a glimpse of starry sky, orange against a dazzled greenish black, and it was so beautiful and terrible that for a moment I could not breathe for the sheer majesty of it. Strange, that destruction should hold its own kind of splendor. It nudged something in me, long dormant, but I was exhausted and everything in me said to ignore it and to rest, and I could not remember the last time I’d done that, or if I had, it was in another time entirely, and perhaps this truly was all a dream, and when I woke I would still be in Blessington, waiting for the bells to ring in the dawn.
Three days of this, of booming all night long, of waking to a sun barely visible through the pall of smoke, which pulsed a sickly pink and then a ghastly purplish red and then gray yellow. When the sun did break through—not often—it was a bright red disk.
Chinatown on fire. North Beach. The concussion of explosions wracked the air. When buildings did appear through gaps in the smoke, their windows were lurid like the eyes and leering mouths of jack-o’-lanterns, glowing from the inside until they burst into flame and then nothing. I sat with others on the slopes of Telegraph Hill, among the shanties and homes built nearly one on top of the other. Men kept kegs of wine ready to dump over their roofs to douse any embers, along with rugs to soak in wine to protect their walls. Refugees had made shelters of blankets and lean-tos out of trunks and whatever could be found. The wind picked up, sending plucked feathers, bits of paper and trash, more cinders and sparking bits of debris that people stamped out wherever they fell, and again came that raging, sucking sound, a howl like a storm. The air was muggy and hot and heavy but not still, a swirling, scorching wind, sometimes strong enough to knock people back. My lungs burned with the effort of breathing it. My eyes watered and stung.
The flames took hours to burn themselves out. Nothing could be seen but for roiling clouds and the red advance of fire. The residual heat from the coals rose. Like sitting at the edge of Vesuvius must have felt, I thought. Heat and wind and poisonous smoke.
We watched the destruction as if it were an entertainment. Someone began to sing an aria, sad and mournful, an elegy, and people all around quieted to listen. If I’d been told that I was witnessing the end of the world, I would have believed it.
Then it began to rain.
The morning brought with it a scene of such destruction that it was hard to fathom. Nothing but wasteland spreading below, blackened streets where soot and ash had become greasy mud, everything smelling of smoke and rain and sewage, a tannic, noxious mix. Gray and cold except where the still smoldering embers cast a stinking fog over the ruins.
But it was, at last, over. The fires were done, leaving behind a smoking, gasping wreck. I was wet through and through and shivering as I made my way to the nearest soup kitchen set up in the middle of the street, where they gave me hot coffee and porridge. The woman looked me up and down with such sympathy that I wanted to cry. “Are you alone, dearie?”
I nodded.
“Have you a place to stay?”
“Not yet,” I told her.
“They’re setting up relief camps everywhere. They’ll have clothes for you, and supplies. Someone to check that bandage for you. You’ll look for one, won’t you?”
I said I would, and took my meal to a counter they’d set up, where people stood and ate quickly so others could take their places. I kept my head down. It was over, yes, which meant that soon the chaos would give way to authority, and authorities would be asking names and trying to determine where someone belonged, and people who had left would be returning to see to their property. The city would go on. The question was, Where would I be within it?
I did not have to continue with the plans I’d made. I had only this bloodied wool coat and nightgown, my button and these boots with their melted soles. I could do as that woman at the soup kitchen had suggested. Find a camp. Get a tent, some clothes, some food. I could hope that Blessington had burned to the ground, obliterating all those corpses, or those who had been buried, like me, in the debris—I shuddered, thinking of those screaming as the flames took them—and that everyone believed me dead and that no one was looking for me. Change my name, leave the city, become someone else and start my life over again.
But the thought of letting the Sullivans get away with their schemes, of letting them muddy my name with murder and madness, spend my money and cheat me as my aunt had once cheated my mother by selling the family home and spreading rumors that caused my father to leave her . . . No, I could not do it. I could not do it and live with myself. My mother had believed in the ultimate goodness of my father, and in the end, she had hoped that my aunt would repent and help me. Perhaps Aunt Florence had done that; I wanted to believe she had. But I was not going to waste my life suffering as my mother had done, and trust that somehow, some way, the world might right itself. The Sullivans had tried to destroy me.
I was going to take the fact that I was still alive, despite false accusations and Blessington and earthquake and fire, to me
an that the world wanted my help in meting out justice.
The best plans I had for that were the ones I’d made in Blessington. But where were Dante LaRosa and Shin now? The Bulletin building on Kearny Street was in pieces. My original plan had been to find Shin first because she knew what had really happened that night, and she could clear my name. I knew from the newspaper that most of the Chinese were in a relief camp at Hunters Point. It was as good a place to search for Shin as any, but it was too far away; there were no cable cars now to take me anywhere, no bicycles, and too many military lines to cross. Yet I had to get there somehow.
Until the ruins cooled, no one was allowed back into the city without a pass, not even to examine their own property. The streets were full of militia and police and exhausted firemen sleeping off their exertion in the drizzling rain. Men walking were commandeered to help clear the streets. The city was a stranger. No clang of cable cars and calls of peddlers and newsboys. Instead the slow thud of carts and wagons and now and again the horn of an automobile speeding off with supplies. The crash of rubble and trash tossed aside or thrown into wagons. No birds but for crows picking among the ruins beside the rats, and pet canaries and parakeets and cockatiels that had been loosed from their cages to escape the fires, dashing bits of color flitting confusedly about the telephone poles and lighting upon the sagging network of tangled wires dangling to the street.
Every saloon had been closed. The selling of liquor was forbidden. Broadsheets bearing proclamations by Mayor Schmitz were posted everywhere, promising no risk of famine and asking citizens to comply with regulations. There was to be no lighting of fires in houses or fireplaces. Water was scarce; what there was must be boiled and should not be used for anything but cooking and drinking. Looters would be shot, as would anyone caught entering a deserted building.
The city had become as dangerous as the asylum. Men crawled through the wreckage, looking for valuables. I slept with my hand curled around the gold button. As many soldiers as there were, they could not be everywhere, and at night there was little keeping the denizens of Barbary Coast to their usual haunts, nothing preventing anyone from taking what they wanted. I found a twisted bit of metal about as long as a dagger amid the debris and tucked it into my coat pocket for a weapon. The next thing to do was to find different clothes. Many San Franciscans had left their homes with only what they wore, and so when Relief began handing out clothing and shoes, I wasn’t the only one standing in line.
When I reached the front, the woman glanced me over and picked up a skirt from a rapidly dwindling pile. “You’re so tall. This will be short on you, but—”
“What about those?” I asked, pointing to the trousers, the men’s clothes.
She didn’t argue. There was so little to choose from, and the supply of men’s clothing was greater. She handed me a pair of trousers, a shirt, a pair of boots and some thick socks, as well as a woman’s combination, and I was grateful for all of it, especially because the clothes were the perfect disguise, and more comfortable than anything I’d ever before worn.
I threw out the ruined boots with the melted soles. I transferred my uncle’s vest button—my good luck charm, my talisman—into my trouser pocket. I kept the coat. Someday I might find the water to wash out the bloodstains, and it was well made and thick. But the nightgown and underwear I took to a man standing over a fire in a half-destroyed, blackened ash can and asked him to burn them for me.
I chose a man because I knew he would not question why I would destroy perfectly good clothing, and I was right; he didn’t. I walked away before he could catch a whiff of the stink that would undoubtedly rise from the burning rags.
I felt safer dressed as a man, though no one mistook me for one, at least not after an initial glance. My walk, perhaps, or maybe my face was too feminine to hide. I wished otherwise; it might have been easier if they had, because joining a cleanup crew could buy a man a pass, and without a pass, it was impossible to move about the city.
During the day, I scouted the location of the soldiers, then, when twilight came, with its smoky greenish light, I set out. It was easy enough to hide behind the twisted ruins, to take advantage of the lack of streetlamps. At night, I managed to travel farther; I avoided soldiers and police and took on what I imagined was a confident walk, quite different than what I felt, because I was well aware of how many in the shadows had bad intentions, and as a woman alone, I was vulnerable. In the dark it was easier to be mistaken for a man. I kept my hand on my twisted bit of metal. But most only glanced at me without interest, their faces ghoulishly illuminated from the glow of ash can fires or street-improvised cookstoves.
I’d grown used to the hot, smoky, sickly stink of the city, a smell that had not belonged to it before. I’d grown used to the bodies laid out in makeshift morgues set up in vacant lots. In certain places, the sounds of gravediggers’ shoveling was constant, impossible to distinguish from the digging of those shoveling wreckage, which often contained human remains.
I turned a corner to see a horse waiting while a man knelt over the body of a woman lying in the street. Another scavenger. It was too common a sight now to raise any distress. But a horse . . . a way to get quickly to the relief camp at Hunters Point, and hopefully to Shin. A horse.
The old May would never have risked it. But I was no longer the old May, and I no longer cared for anything except what I needed. Just now, it was that horse. The woman on the ground was dead and beyond helping anyway. I didn’t know if the man had been the one to kill her. He worked over her quickly, yanking rings from her fingers, bracelets from her wrists. When he reached for her hatpin, I pulled the metal rod from my pocket and hoped that he could not see clearly in the dark. Then I cleared my throat, lowered my voice, and said, “Looting’s against the law. Did you kill her too?”
The man jerked and swung around to face me. “Who are you?”
My mouth was dry from nerves, and it roughened my words perfectly. “Get away from her. Go on. Give me the horse, and I won’t call the militia.”
He was on his feet.
“They’ll shoot without asking questions. Don’t think those rings will help you then.” I waved the metal at him and hoped he wouldn’t call my bluff, because I wouldn’t call for a soldier or a policeman even to save my life. I could not risk being found. “I’ll tell him you killed her too. Go on. Get out of here.”
He raced off. The rings and the bracelets were undoubtedly worth more than the horse. I stepped over to the woman. She was indeed dead, but someone else would come upon her soon, and the last thing I wanted was anything to do with the authorities.
The horse was half-starved and swaybacked and too weary to give me any trouble when I mounted it, which was good, because my experience was limited to a neighbor’s cart horse that I’d played upon, surreptitiously, as a girl. At a nudge, it plodded on down the street. I might get to the Chinese relief camp before morning with the horse, and my healing feet were grateful for the respite. But I’d only been on the animal’s back for a quarter hour, maybe less, when someone called out, “Halt!”
The problem with riding was that one could not really hide in shadows or burrow about like a rat.
One of the militiamen came from a doorway where I hadn’t seen him. “You there! Where’d you get that horse?”
“It’s mine,” I said.
“We need him for cleanup work,” he told me. “I’m requisitioning him in the name of the US Army.”
Desperation made me momentarily stupid. I opened my mouth to argue with him. I considered spurring the horse to a run. But I wasn’t certain it could run, or would, and the soldier fingered his gun as if he knew I might try, and in the end, I dismounted and handed him the reins.
“Wait a minute.” He stepped back to grab something, which he threw to me. I caught it clumsily. It was a tin, but in the darkness I couldn’t see what it contained. “Enjoy. Now get back to where you came from, before I arrest you for not having a pass.”
I tucked t
he tin into my pocket and walked until I found a pile of bricks to lean against, and went to sleep, given that my plan to get to the relief camp was not happening—not tonight, and not in the near future. It was too difficult. My plan would have to wait. I wanted to cry with frustration. But one good thing came from it. When I woke, I discovered that the soldier had given me a tin of tobacco, which was nearly as good as gold.
I traded some of the tobacco to an Italian man for two cans of peaches, a loaf of bread, a bottle of wine, and a sausage. I gave the wine to a doctor who cleaned my stitches and rewrapped my feet. I gave the peaches to a woman in trade for coffee and a blanket. I ate half the sausage and the bread and traded the rest for cans of tomatoes, which I traded again. It was a simple truth that someone always wanted whatever you had, and in this way, I survived until they relaxed military restrictions in the city, five days later.
Restrictions were no sooner loosened than San Francisco filled with people, not only those with property or business in town, but tourists from unburned parts of the city or from Oakland or other areas, drawn by disaster like flies to a corpse. They were everywhere, gawking. They hired opportunistic guides to fill their ears with details, the more grisly the better. They bought mementos of burned bits and shattered relics. In such a circus, rumors mushroomed, sometimes spored by nothing more than a casual question or supposition, so I didn’t know if it was true when I heard that they had set up a relief camp at Nob Hill for those rebuilding. I still did not know if any of my relatives were alive. But if they were, and there was a relief camp on Nob Hill, it was where they would be. That house had been the showcase of their wealth. They would not abandon it, even in ruins.
I went in search of a newspaper to find the truth. They were all free, at least for now, and when I saw a copy of the Bulletin for the first time since the disaster, I was almost embarrassed at the extent of my excitement. I didn’t know if he was still there, I told myself as I looked for the society page—who knew if there would even be a society page? I drifted over ads for the stores on Fillmore that had not been touched by the fire, and those that had temporarily moved to new locations, and announcements of shipments due in a few weeks. When I saw the column, I was half-afraid to see if it was still his.