He saw stranger things with every step. Part of a ship’s rudder jutted out from under an icebox that had been thrown into the street by the force of the explosion. He stared at it in wonder. How had that smouldering piece of metal gotten all the way up here?
He looked to the sea, its shores littered with the upturned corpses of ships. The only part of the huge steamer he’d seen the day before, the Curaca, was her bow, and it was on the wrong side of the harbour. Metal from ships had flown like shrapnel, cutting into stone walls, slicing through automobiles that had rolled over and over in the street, crushing people beneath. The nearby Pier 6, which had recently been working on two massive schooners, was gone. Disintegrated. The crumpled bow of a sunken tugboat poked out of the edge of the water. Behind the pier stretched miles and miles of rail tracks, the main artery of trade and travel for Nova Scotia. Danny couldn’t see the tracks from where he stood but couldn’t miss the fact that they were empty of railway cars. How could railway cars simply vanish?
The pedestrian bridge to the side of the rail yards, where spectators had stood to cheer and point at the flaming ship, was gone.
A woman ran past him, her face and hair grey with dust, her body smeared head to foot with blood. Her eyes were crazy black, like glistening holes in a skull. Even her eyelashes were grey. She was screaming, carrying a little boy in her arms. The boy wasn’t moving. Danny stared as she ran past and noticed with an odd sense of detachment that part of a windowpane had sliced clean through the little boy’s neck.
“Mother?” a soft voice whimpered. Danny turned and saw a young girl, standing completely naked, her face and body caked with dust. She couldn’t have been more than six years old, with shoulder-length hair of an indeterminate colour. Her eyes were gone, blown clean out of her skull. Blood drew black lines from her eye sockets in a cruel imitation of a mime. “I can’t see.”
“I’m here,” Danny said, coming toward her. He touched her shoulder, and she grabbed on to him, shaking. But the trembling grew weaker by the moment.
“I’m cold,” she said. “And it’s so dark.”
“Come here,” Danny said. She clung weakly to him, and he lowered them both carefully to the ground. Glass splintered under him as they sat, but he cradled the little girl in his arms, tucking her under his wool coat, speaking softly until she died. Then he propped her up against the relatively soft mound of a decapitated horse by the side of the road. He covered her body with a plank of splintered wood and started to walk again.
Dead and dying were everywhere, their bodies tangled, collapsed, broken in any number of horrible ways. The sugar refinery had stood ten proud storeys high, built of concrete and brick. Now it was rubble. A lot of men had worked in that building, Danny thought. A lot of men had died in that building.
Richmond was gone, as if it had never existed. More fires broke out as boilers exploded in the flimsy homes along Barrington Street, igniting one after another, pummelling the air like artillery fire, and the sky was torn by screams reminiscent of so many German missiles. Danny staggered through the street, his eyes stinging, lungs filling with smoke. Chlorine gas, his mind suggested. The Jerries have sent chlorine! But no. The stink came from the burning ship, and what scorched his eyes now was the smoke, the dust, the oily black rain, and tears.
Other survivors ran past, hollering, “The Germans! The Germans! The Germans are bombing Halifax!” but Danny didn’t say anything. Just let them believe whatever they wanted. It wasn’t important what they thought, anyway.
But it was hard to keep the war separate from this. So, so hard. It felt as if the trenches had followed him here, were closing in on him, the walking dead from his dreams not far behind.
He squinted up toward the clock tower on Citadel Hill, then all around. It was easy to see why folks thought they were being bombed. The streets of northern Halifax looked like a flattened battlefield, still smoking, the ripped roots of trees sticking obscenely into the sky.
Except on the battlefield, blinded children didn’t run naked in the winter streets. Women didn’t rush past carrying decapitated babies.
Where was Audrey?
He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the question, and regretted the movement. How ironic that he still had to suffer a hangover through all this. He didn’t want to think about that, or the reason for the hangover in the first place. There was nothing he could do for Audrey now.
But here, surrounded by devastation, there had to be something he could do.
He didn’t have to look hard to find someone who needed him. One of many devastated houses down the glass-strewn street wobbled on three remaining walls, the roof and upper floor already collapsed. A desperate voice, high enough Danny knew it was a child’s, screamed from beneath the rubble, trapped in the basement. Danny leaned in and yanked out planks and chunks of rock, as well as more glass and broken bits of furniture. He was able to clear a small hole, and the moment the strange morning light pierced the black interior, small hands reached out to him. He grabbed a pair and, working carefully around the jagged edges of splintered walls, tugged a little boy outside. Though dazed, and white with ash and dust, the child appeared untouched.
Danny turned and reached for the next outstretched hand. He pulled, then let go the moment an anguished scream pierced the ashes. The hand disappeared. After a moment, five small fingers edged back out. This time Danny moved slowly, carefully, carefully sliding another little boy out. This one hadn’t been as lucky. A gash had opened the side of his face, leaving part of his cheek flapping, wet with blood and tears. One arm hung at a strange angle, probably dislocated. Danny dropped his coat and ripped the sleeve off his own shirt so he could wrap it tightly around the stricken lad’s face. The first boy ran to his brother, and Danny looked closely before realizing they were twins, probably about three or four years old. They stared around the street with incredulous eyes.
“Our house fell down,” the uninjured boy told Danny.
“It did so,” Danny agreed, nodding seriously. “A lot of houses fell down. Who else is in the house?”
“Mother and the baby.”
Danny sank his face into the hole he had dug and called in.
“Are you all right in there? Can you hand me the baby?”
There was no answer.
“Hello? Ma’am?”
A sudden yowl burst through the hole as the baby voiced its alarm, but the mother didn’t speak. Danny turned to the twins. “Is your mother okay?”
They shrugged, mute, and he thought, What a silly question to ask a couple of terrified little boys. He took a deep breath then started clearing away debris until the hole was wide enough to see inside, though it was still black as night under the collapsed house. The baby was screaming louder, and it wasn’t being comforted.
“You boys stay right here, all right?” he said. They nodded and sat.
Danny lowered himself into the hole. His hands were bleeding again, catching on glass, nails, and splinters. His peg was awkward, but he could maneuver it well enough. A loud groan twisted through the house as it shifted, and the wood on which Danny balanced slipped. He had no choice but to ride to the bottom, and he landed by the baby, who cried louder than ever, wriggling in his dead mother’s arms.
“There you are. That’s right. Tell the world what you think. That’s right.” He picked up the noisy bundle and set him against his shoulder, then, bracing the little body with one hand, he climbed the constantly shifting footholds. When he reached ground level, the healthy twin was waiting, arms stretched out for the baby.
“That’s Norman,” he explained.
“Good. Well, I think Norman’s hungry,” Danny told him.
“Where’s Mother?” asked the other twin, his torn mouth barely moving around the words.
“Your mother wants me to take care of you first. Let’s get you and your brothers cleaned up, and we’ll see what I
can do for her later, okay? Here, take my hand. That’s a good boy.”
The boys stuck to Danny’s side as if they’d been glued there. Danny could practically hear their thoughts, feel the complete trust that pulsed in the little hand. This one-legged, black-faced stranger was their saviour. They would stay by him and be safe. Danny watched buildings collapse around them, flinched at the thunder of explosions continuing up the road, tried to ignore the screams of the trapped, and prayed with all his might the boys were right in their naive assumption. The three stepped carefully over thick layers of broken glass blanketed by white ash, like a long-spring trap camouflaged under snow.
The farther south they walked, the sturdier the walls appeared to be, though survivors still stumbled from buildings that looked as if someone had grabbed them and shaken them apart. Most were women. Their men had either gone to war or to the now-levelled factories. Either way, Danny thought, if they weren’t dead already, they probably would be soon.
A crowd of women gathered ahead, layered in heavy black coats and hats. They turned toward Danny as he approached, then one of the ladies took the twins and the baby, promising comfort. Danny crouched and told the boys to go with her, saying he would be back to visit soon as he could. For now he had work to do, he explained. The boys looked doubtful but went with the woman when they heard the magic word “biscuit.” After they’d gone, Danny asked where they were taking the children.
“To the Protestant orphanage?” he asked.
She shook her head. “It’s no longer standing. There were twenty-seven children living there,” she said, her chin quivering. “Two escaped.”
She bit her lip, and Danny looked away. He tried not to imagine the sight but failed.
“We will find these poor souls a place to be safe and we’ll look for their family over the next little while,” the woman assured him, glancing at the twins over her shoulder.
“I don’t know about their father,” Danny told her quietly. “But their mother’s dead.”
Casting weary eyes over the three, she sighed and smiled weakly at Danny. “The new orphanage will be far too crowded, I fear.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
Slowly, like the first run of sap in the spring, a relief effort began to take shape, vague hints of hope whispering through the screaming nightmare. Here and there, clusters of men gathered around stacks of shredded timber that had once been homes, and they dug through, calling, always calling. A cheer went up every time someone was wrenched free of wreckage, and stretchers began to appear, carrying the injured to the Camp Hill Hospital or to private homes marked by white flags with red crosses. But the horrors kept coming.
“Whoa!” Danny cried, stumbling out of the path of a runaway milk wagon, its horse white-eyed with terror. The driver slumped dead in the seat, his body riddled with glass. Milk sloshed over the edge of the wagon bed and splashed the road.
An elderly man in a tattered wool coat sat on what must have been a yard—though little remained of the house—staring out of cataract-clouded eyes. Long white strands of hair clung to either side of his blackened face. Beside him lay a woman Danny assumed was the man’s wife. Half of her head was missing. The man kept saying, “Don’t forget the Christmas oranges, Ethel. Gotta get Christmas oranges. The kids love those oranges.”
Every step brought another abomination. Danny walked past the body of a woman whose chest had been impaled by the slivered stud of a house. Her head lolled back so she stared toward the heavens, and her bare feet dangled three feet off the ground. Beneath her lay the carcass of a dog that looked a lot like Danny’s Cecil.
“Where are you, Audrey?” he muttered for the thousandth time.
She had probably been at the Antoines’ house, warm and comfortable in their South End home. At least he hoped that’s where she’d been. His feet had aimed themselves in that direction before he’d even started coming across the injured and dying, but he couldn’t abandon the living, and at first he couldn’t look away from the dead. So he stayed with an ad hoc crew, moving from building to building, or rather from one pile of rubble to another. Sometimes it was a hand or foot that gave away the location of a victim, in which case there were very few survivors. One of the men in his group had a dog on a leash, and the animal made himself useful by sniffing for anything that might still be breathing. He unearthed some badly injured dogs and cats, but the men simply removed the rubble and let the animals fend for themselves. They couldn’t stay with the animals. There wasn’t time.
After a few hours, horse-drawn wagons began to hurry along the streets, their flatbeds loaded with blankets for the wounded or with the wounded themselves. When a different wagon pulled up, loaded more victims, then started moving in a different direction, Danny stopped the driver, confused.
“Where are these folks headed?”
“Train’s here,” the man said. “Sending some of the injured to Truro right away for help.”
Danny was impressed. “They got the trains running? That was fast.”
“Yep. One of ’em, anyway,” the driver answered. “Word is there are supplies on the way in. Guess we’ll see.” He tapped the reins on his horses’ backs, and they set off down the hill, edging around obstacles heaped on the street, rolling toward the remains of the train tracks.
A pretty young woman sat in the doorway of what had once been her house. Only one wall remained, and it stood unsteadily behind her. She seemed calm. Danny went to her, crunching over glass, and she smiled with welcome. He wondered if she was uninjured, and when she patted the ground beside her, he started to sit, relieved at the opportunity to catch his breath if only for a moment. Just before sitting, he noticed a jagged piece of glass embedded in the woman’s back, as big as a dinner plate. Blood stained the back of her filthy blue dress, pooled on the ground at the base of her spine. He wondered if he should try to remove the glass, then decided against it. Oddly, she didn’t seem in any pain at all. He wondered if she even knew it was there. He didn’t want to do something that might make it worse, but he would get her to help right away.
“Are you all right?”
She smiled again then shook her head. “I’m the only one left,” she said. Her voice was soft. Like a child’s. “I was watching the little ones for my neighbours. I had eight precious wee things in my care, and we were all watching the fire. So pretty, wasn’t it?”
Danny nodded, remembering the men standing transfixed on the docks. None would have survived.
“We were singing songs about the beautiful day, all of us dancing in a circle, holding hands. It was when I had my back to the window that the world exploded. My little angels flew through the wall like they had wings. The glass took them, and they were gone. Only one of them stayed inside with me. She had to, you see? The glass pinned her up against the wall just as neatly as if I’d nailed a picture right there.” The woman’s eyes began to glaze over, and Danny suddenly feared she was dying before his eyes.
“Hey, let’s get you on the wagon, all right?” he asked her.
She smiled again, that calm, slightly lost smile, then took Danny’s hand and stood. He led her toward a wagon stopped nearby, filling with the wounded.
“You know,” she said as he helped her up. “It’s a horrible thing to wish someone dead. But I was ever so glad to see sweet Molly was as dead as could be on that wall. The only thing worse than seeing her dead would have been to see her alive like that. What a cruelty that would have been.”
Danny wondered if he would ever, for the rest of his life, be able to get her haunted words out of his head. The relief that a child was dead.
“Watch yourself, okay?” Danny said. “You have some glass sticking out of your back. You don’t want to bump into anything or anyone.”
“Do I?” She tried to feel around behind her, then gasped when her fingers came into contact with the jagged shard. She stared at the blood on her fingers. “How can t
hat be in my back? I don’t feel it.”
Danny had wondered the same thing. “Well, I expect you’ll feel it soon enough. I imagine the doctors will take it out real easy. Get you back to normal in no time.”
She was the same age as Danny, he estimated. But she gave him a look that was so much older in that instant. “I’ll never be back to normal,” she said. “None of us will. But thank you all the same. You’re very kind.”
Danny looked away, trying not to think about the thousands of people wandering, lost and confused, over the devastated land.
“You look tired,” the girl said to Danny, as if nothing had just happened. “Come with me, will you? I’d feel better having you nearby. And maybe you could use a bit of time off your feet.”
She glanced down and saw the peg leg, splintered and scarred at the bottom of Danny’s torn pant leg.
“Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean—”
“Don’t worry, miss. What’s done is done. My name’s Danny, by the way.”
“Thank you, Danny. I’m Esther.”
“Wait here, Esther,” Danny said. “I’m just going to lend a hand there, and then I think I’ll take your suggestion and maybe sit for a bit.”
Danny and a few others lifted three more women onto the wagon, accompanied by tiny bloodied children. He made sure everyone was settled and far enough away from Esther’s back that she wouldn’t get jostled, then he spoke to the driver, who clucked his horse forward.
The shelter was relatively organized chaos. Blankets and cots had been set out in rows, and chairs stood around the edge of the room, occupied by sobbing, bleeding victims. There were uninjured there as well, moving from bed to bed, trying to comfort, wrapping injuries wherever possible, checking for loved ones. Danny was also surprised to see doctors there. He had no idea where they’d come from, but crude surgeries had been set up where they were removing glass, metal, and wood, trying to save tortured bodies. Danny took Esther’s hand and led her toward a woman dressed all in white.
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