by Ciji Ware
“You were a tiny little boy,” she said with genuine sympathy for the horrors he and Aunt Margaret had endured. “None of it was your doing.”
“The whiskey made it all disappear, Melly. That was wrong too, but the memories and pesterin’ get so bad, I have to find a way to blot it out. Your mother never understood about the cave. How cold it was. How hungry we were…” He was shivering with the fever—or was it because of the horrible memory, she wondered.
Soon he appeared to drift to sleep. Amelia was about to return to her cot when he suddenly opened his eyes.
“Did you keep those three playing cards?” he demanded hoarsely.
She patted the pocket of her skirt. “Shhh… yes, they’re right here.”
“Good girl,” he rasped. “Go back to the club. Find the other two.”
“I’m sure the club burned in the fire,” she whispered, seeing in her mind’s eye flames licking at the buildings a block away from the Bay View. “I expect everything on Nob Hill’s gone by now.”
Continuing as if he hadn’t heard, he said, “We were playing five-card stud. I had four cards up and one face down. After the call, I turned the last one over. Kemp saw me put that winning ace on the table, I know he did! He was sitting on my right side. He had to have seen it! J.D. was across the table, though, so I’m not sure if he—”
“Quiet over there!” croaked a voice from the dark.
“Shhhh,” Amelia soothed her father and glanced at the rows of shrouded cots. “We’re waking the others.”
“But, Melly—”
“You must sleep,” she insisted firmly. “We’ll talk more in the morning.” She bent down and kissed his forehead. He’d had no liquor for hours now and, sober, seemed much more like the man she’d adored as a girl.
Spent from the effort to talk, he soon drifted back to sleep, leaving Amelia to wonder forlornly what life might have been like if her father hadn’t taken to the bottle, and if the shock that followed his injuries was the cause of his wild story about drawing a rare royal flush.
She continued to kneel in the damp grass beside her father’s cot, studying his pallid cheeks. They had sunk into craters of parchment, as if death had already carried off Henry Bradshaw to an unknown land. Soon, he was barely breathing. She leaned over and kissed his forehead. “I love you, Melly…” he murmured. “Always have.”
“Good-bye,” she whispered in his ear, choking back tears. “I love you too. I’ve always loved you. God speed, darling Daddy.”
After that neither of them spoke again. By morning, he was dead.
***
On the day following the quake, Dr. McClure appeared in his office, his shoulders slumped with exhaustion. Barbary was curled up quietly in the corner, one of the luckier victims of the quake, mused Amelia. McClure greeted his patient with a sympathetic nod.
“Not a good day any way it’s sliced, is it? I’m sorry about your da.”
“Thank you,” she murmured. What else was there to say?
“’Twas peaceful, they told me.”
“Yes. At least it was that.”
A kind of gentle acceptance had come over her this morning, a sense of serenity that her father had died a loved and loving man. Now if only she could learn the fates of Aunt Margaret and friends like Julia, Lacy, and her grandfather’s nurse, Edith Pratt.
Meanwhile, the doctor busied himself removing a thin needle and something resembling thread from inside his black bag. He turned toward a white metal cabinet pushed against the wall and withdrew a bottle of whiskey, pouring a stiff shot into a glass and handing it to Amelia. “Drink it all, please. We’ll wait a minute for the spirits to take effect and then I’ll clean your wounds and stitch you up.”
“What kind of doctor are you, anyway?” Amelia asked, eyeing the needle that he was threading with a few false starts.
“I’m just an old sawbones,” McClure answered with a shrug. “I joined the U.S. Army when I got out of medical training in Edinburgh and came to this country.”
“Well, that’s reassuring.”
“What is?”
“That you’ve actually had formal medical training.”
McClure shot her a look and then appeared to recognize her weary attempt at humor.
“That’s how I know Thayer,” he explained. “In fact, ol’ Jamie and me, we met in Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, back in ninety-eight. The U.S. Army needed doctors and I sailed over from Scotland and signed up. After I mustered out, I came to the Presidio as a contract surgeon when they opened the hospital here. Used to be a Major.”
“J.D. Thayer was in the army in Cuba?” She had difficulty imagining Thayer taking orders from anyone.
“Indeed we were,” McClure said proudly.
The regiment that fought the Spanish-American War was famously staffed by adventurers and soldiers of fortune, joined by a smattering of blue bloods like young Teddy Roosevelt who’d made a name for himself during the conflict. While Amelia was finishing college at Berkeley and before departing for Paris and L’École des Beaux Arts, the treaty with Spain had been signed, giving the United States control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and—after a twenty million dollar Congressional appropriation—the Philippines as well.
The defeated combatants had promptly labeled America “Imperialistic,” but none of this had concerned Amelia. She had been so focused on her engineering studies, she hadn’t even been aware that the Presidio of San Francisco had become an important jumping-off place for American troops going overseas and, later, a demobilizing base for those returning to U.S. soil. Hence the ample supply of tents.
“What possessed Mr. Thayer to go to Cuba? He doesn’t strike me particularly as the patriotic type.”
“That’s what his parents wondered,” Angus chuckled. “They couldn’t forgive him for joinin’ up… ’specially as a foot soldier.”
“How old was he then? And why wasn’t he an officer? Surely, his family had the money and influence.”
“Wouldn’t provide one cent of support for such a daft adventure. Who could blame ’em? But ol’ Jamie was at odds with his family as a young lad, and was determined to show ’em they couldn’t run his life when he up and enlisted. We met in the battle for San Juan Hill. At one juncture, the man saved m’life and later, I did him the favor of leaving his leg on when he took a bullet. This round, I’ve put his ribs to rights, so I’m up one on him.”
“Not if you play cards with him, you’re not,” she replied, arching an eyebrow.
McClure chortled. “How right you are.” Thayer might be a boon companion of Dr. McClure’s, but Amelia had not forgotten his role in the loss of the hotel. Inside her skirt pocket, she fingered the three cards found in her father’s hand. The physician merely shrugged. “I’ve learned to limit my exposure to his gamesmanship. See, Jamie’s the reason I came out to San Francisco, as a matter of fact. Told me the new hospital was hiring ex-Army physicians, and so here I am, ready to stitch you up, my dear.”
The whiskey had done its job. Amelia felt warm inside now and couldn’t have cared less what the good doctor planned to do next.
“Now, tilt back your head, there’s a good lass,” he murmured. “Fortunately, this shouldn’t take more than a tick.”
And even more fortunately, Dr. Sawbones did quite a credible job repairing the wounds on her forehead with very little discomfort—except for a mild headache the following day.
Chapter 9
The following day, Thursday, hundreds of individual fires across some five hundred city blocks converged into one monstrous inferno fed by super-heated winds. By Friday evening, both the sun and the moon glowed a malignant blood red. A group of injured firefighters Amelia attended confirmed that, indeed, all but a few structures on Nob Hill had virtually burned to the ground and the Bay View Hotel was part of the smoking wreckage.
Amelia clung to rumors that Oakland had largely escaped the awful fate of its sister city across the bay. She hadn’t been able to gain any word of Aunt Mar
garet or glean news of the welfare of Miss Morgan and her colleagues because the few operating telephones and the telegraph office were reserved for emergency use only. There was simply no way of communicating with the people who mattered most.
The other unsettling reality in Amelia’s world was that aftershocks continued to rattle their surroundings. She began to regard the very earth beneath her feet as unreliable and the sky a hot blanket that might soon smother them all. Her emotions careened between an aching sadness over the death of her father and utter numbness in the wake of the chaos reigning everywhere. Buried even deeper was a private, raw grief about her other losses that she kept hidden, surrounded as she was by a sea of fellow-sufferers.
Henry Bradshaw had been buried swiftly and without ceremony in an area of the Presidio designated for the post-quake victims who’d survived the natural disaster, only to succumb ultimately to disease and exposure.
Towards that evening, Angus appeared at her tent and handed her a tied-up bundle.
“These are your father’s trousers and jacket that we took off him when he first arrived and needed examining,” he explained. “You’ll probably want to reuse the wool, given the shortages and all. And I’m sure you’d want this,” he added, reaching into his own pocket. “He gave it to me for safekeeping.” He placed in her palm a small watch and a gold fob dangling from a finely wrought chain. Tiny gold nuggets the size of sand grains were encrusted on the metal cover. Angus closed a fist peppered with fine red hairs over her hand as she clutched the timepiece. “A souvenir of better days, eh, lass?”
Amelia stood frozen in place, too shaken to weep. A deep melancholy and the memories stirred by the sight of her father’s pocket watch careened in her mind.
No matter how drunk or down on his luck her father had been, he never wagered his watch. To Amelia, the elegant gold timepiece represented the upstanding family man even Henry Bradshaw knew he might have been.
She wasn’t even aware that Angus had backed out of her tent as she carefully placed her father’s garments at the head of her cot to use as a pillow. Wool cloth was indeed in short supply, and besides, the possessions Angus had returned to her were all she had left to remember her father.
She slipped the watch into her pocket, next to the three cards Henry Bradshaw had claimed had been part of a royal flush. Then she stretched out on the cot and fell into a dreamless sleep.
***
From the first day of the disaster, citizens of Chinatown had been segregated at a refugee camp on the western edge of the Presidio lands and already a campaign had been launched to prevent them from rebuilding within San Francisco proper. The Empress of China immediately telegraphed Washington, offering funds to help restore Chinatown on its original site, once the fires were extinguished. All the talk at camp was that President Roosevelt declined her largesse. Her outraged ambassador reminded Administration officials that the Chinese sovereign owned several blocks in San Francisco’s Chinatown and intended to rebuild exactly where she pleased—or she would impose severe trade sanctions. Diplomats scrambled as an American disaster acquired global dimensions.
Adding to the ongoing nightmare, a few cases of typhoid and smallpox were reported in the refugee settlements. Angus alluded to suicides and mental collapses among several of the displaced populace. For Amelia herself, the mere act of recalling her narrow escape from the building on Montgomery Street was enough to make her palms moist and her mouth dry.
As for members of the state militia that had been called up, they tended to be a disorderly, undisciplined lot. Amelia had heard tales the soldiers had shot homeowners trying to salvage their own possessions and then carried off the ill-gotten booty under color of authority.
As the hours ticked by, her world as a practicing architect had taken on a dreamlike quality. Like many of the able-bodied seeking shelter at the Presidio, she was pressed into service as a volunteer nurse. Reality now consisted not of drawing buildings to scale, but of swabbing wounds and stabilizing the broken bones of quake victims until Angus McClure or another doctor appeared to treat the case.
In Amelia’s agitated state, sleep began to elude her till far into the early hours of the morning, and she feared life would never seem normal again. In a perpetual state of anxiety, she stumbled back and forth to the food tent and the open pit latrines with the other women in camp.
“Amelia? Is that you?” asked a female voice behind her in the breakfast line.
She turned. “Edith Pratt? Oh my goodness, of course you’d be here! I should have asked Dr. McClure about you.”
Nurse Pratt gave Amelia a fierce hug. Like Julia Morgan and Lacy Fiske, she’d been a classmate at Berkeley and also Amelia’s late grandfather’s caregiver in his final illness. In fact, Amelia recalled ruefully, Edith’s status as a friend in her youth had been cited by Judge Haggerty as proof of “undue influence” when it came to Charlie Hunter’s revised will granting his entire estate to his granddaughter.
Within minutes, the two friends of long-standing were sitting beneath a cypress tree sipping cups of anemic coffee and nibbling bread from the supply trains beginning to arrive from Los Angeles and points east.
“I was on another private nursing case when the quake hit,” Edith explained. “The house I was in collapsed, but because I was quartered with the servants, our back bedroom built as an addition jutting out from the ground floor was the only room left standing. Everyone in the main house died.”
“How awful!” Amelia exclaimed. “What news about your family?”
Edith shook her head. “I hear the telephone company workers are trying to get the phones up again in the Western Addition, where my parents live, but so far, I can’t get in touch with anyone. What about you?”
“The same.” Amelia gave her friend’s shoulder another squeeze. “I pray my Aunt Margaret survived in Oakland. I’ve not had word either about Julia or any of my colleagues at her architectural firm. What worries me most is if the flames aren’t soon extinguished at Van Ness Street, the Western Addition could burn too. God help us if the fire comes all the way to the Presidio.”
“Think you can swim across the bay to Sausalito?” Edith asked grimly.
Amelia offered a bitter smile. “I heard that Mayor Schmitz and his crony, Abe Reuf, are already plotting to cut down every tree in Marin County over there, and rake a profit on each one when serious rebuilding gets under way.”
Amelia was sure that Ezra Kemp had found the means to parlay his lumber business in Mill Valley into City Hall’s profitable schemes. Then the thought crossed her mind that perhaps her father had been telling the truth: what if Kemp did, in fact, see her father lay down a royal flush the instant the quake struck? And what about Thayer? How much had he witnessed that night?
Or had Henry Bradshaw been hallucinating on laudanum about a longed-for winning hand? Anything was possible.
A plan began to form in her mind. She would track down Kemp and J.D. Thayer and simply look them in the eye and ask them what really happened in the moments before the Bay View Hotel annex fell down around their well-tailored shoulders. The land on which the hotel stood had value, she calculated. If she could prove her father won it back and she, now, owned it, it might offer a way of starting over…
***
Amelia’s nursing assignments left her no time or opportunity to conference with J.D. Thayer. On the fourth day, the blessed rains came and the fires still smoldering all over San Francisco were finally extinguished, but not before twenty-five thousand structures were demolished within a four-hundred-square-block area. Equally devastating, more than two hundred thousand of some four hundred and fifty thousand city residents, now officially homeless, were told they would likely remain so for a year or two. Unless Amelia could find her way to her aunt’s bungalow in Oakland, she too would be counted among those statistics.
Thanks to Dr. McClure’s connections, Amelia finally was able to get notes delivered to Harold Jasper aboard the Berkeley to pass on to her aunt and Jul
ia Morgan in Oakland—if they were still alive. Her brief communication to each explained that she was serving as a nurse under the order of martial law and would return to Oakland when the authorities gave permission.
She had barely closed her eyes that evening when she was roused by the arrival of an orderly.
“Miss Bradshaw, wake up!” The young medical assistant glanced curiously at the other volunteer nurses trying to sleep. “Doc McClure needs you in the bone tent.”
Amelia walked across the fog-shrouded parade grounds and stepped into the large canvas ward marked MALE AMBULATORY. She peered at a row of a hundred or more cots stretched out on the damp grass. In the course of Amelia’s nursing duties, she’d often seen J.D. Thayer sleeping for hours at a time, or observed him staring vacantly into space. Edith too had remarked that like so many quake victims, his spirits seemed to be sinking, for he barely acknowledged his surroundings, or anyone in them.
Angus had already left on his rounds at the military hospital itself, leaving instructions that she was to change all dressings that needed attention in this big tent. For several hours, she worked her way down the rows of cots inside the stuffy enclosure. Then, with more than just bandages on her mind, Amelia squared her shoulders and approached Thayer’s litter.
“You’re next, I’m afraid, Mr. Thayer. Let me help take off your shirt and I’ll change your bandages.”
By now, she’d learned to forego any embarrassment at the dishevelment of the patients—or the stench. Nor did she blanch at nudity or exposed genitals, whether male or female. Most of the injured were grateful for her ministrations, but Thayer merely muttered, “I’m fine. Go help the others.”
Amelia paused and then spoke softly so his tent mates wouldn’t hear. “Not to put too fine a point on things, Mr. Thayer, you and your bandages smell. Nurse Pratt told me you declined her help yesterday, so changing them is a must today, if only to spare your neighbors.”