Dark Tide

by Stephen Puleo

  John Barry didn’t know. But as the exhausted stonecutter slipped into sleep atop the molasses-covered stretcher, he found himself hoping that the white-haired man had not suffered too much.

  Late afternoon January darkness enshrouded the waterfront when they finally pulled firefighter George Layhe’s lifeless body out from under the firehouse around 5 P.M. Earlier, workers had rescued firefighters Bill Connor, Nat Bowering, and Paddy Driscoll, all of whom suffered injuries and were taken to the Haymarket Relief Station after they were helped from the crawl space. When John Barry was finally rescued, poor Layhe lay by himself under the firehouse. The firefighter work teams had to be especially careful extricating their fallen comrade; with the weakening of the building after so much of the floor had been cut away, one false step could bring the whole structure down, perhaps killing additional men. The arrival of dusk increased the possibility of missteps and made the task even more risky.

  But the firemen helping with the rescue efforts insisted that the work continue until each of their brothers was removed from under the firehouse. They had lived and worked together in that house, and now the house had claimed one of its own, one of their own. There would be no break until George Layhe could be laid to rest with dignity.

  Now, steadying himself on a shaky plank of split wood, fire department deputy chief Edward Shallow snapped a salute as four beleaguered firemen carried George’s body across the pile of wreckage, placed it gently on a stretcher, and lifted the stretcher into the ambulance that would take Layhe’s body to the morgue. They had found the thirty-seven-year-old fire department marine engineer wedged under the pool table and the piano, his legs crushed by timbers. Layhe, unable to move, had struggled desperately to keep his head above the rising molasses, and managed to do so for perhaps as long as two hours, before his stamina gave out. He finally dropped his head back into the molasses and drowned. Chief Shallow thought that Layhe “looked like a colored man” when rescue teams lifted him out from under the firehouse, his hands, face, head, and clothing completely covered with the dark molasses. Eyes scanning the dark waterfront, Shallow knew that Layhe was one of many good men who had died today. He believed Layhe had been the only firefighter; miraculously, the others in the Engine 31 station had survived, and he had accounted for the other men in his command. But his crews were now searching the molasses and the destroyed remains of waterfront buildings for the bodies of other men, women, and children who were not so lucky. Police had already called for electric lights, deciding that the search would continue well into the night. Shallow expected to be on the scene until midnight at least, with one break in the next few minutes—when he would call Elizabeth Layhe and deliver the news about her husband.

  The fire chief turned and walked away from the ruined firehouse. There would be time to think about rebuilding, but later, much later; after rescuers had completed the grim task of unearthing and identifying the dead, and after clean-up crews disposed of the molasses and restored the face of the waterfront. It could take months. Surveying the damage, Shallow thought that it would take even longer for the shock to wear off in the North End neighborhood and across the city, for people to recover from this disaster and feel safe again, for things to return to normal.

  Firefighters tried to wash the molasses away with fresh water, but would later find that briny seawater was the only way to “cut” the hardened substance. In the background is the damaged elevated railroad structure.

  (Photo courtesy of Bill Noonan, Boston Fire Department Archives)

  As he waded through the knee-deep molasses that slathered the wharf, Shallow heard a single gunshot ring out from the direction of the city stables, its echo carrying on the cold, evening air.

  The Boston Police had put another molasses-enmeshed horse out of its misery.

  Returning to normal would take a long time, indeed, Shallow thought.

  Giuseppe Iantosca stood alone at the bottom of the stairs that led to the door of his home sandwiched between Charter and Commercial streets. He needed to gather his thoughts before heading inside to see his wife, Maria. He had no more information about Pasquale now than he did nearly four hours ago, when he started searching for his little boy minutes after the tank collapsed, minutes after Giuseppe had regained consciousness from his own fall. No one had seen their son, and Giuseppe feared that God had taken Pasquale from them. The police would not let him past their ropes, so he could not even search for his boy among the piles of splintered wood, bent metal, and smashed railroad cars. In frustration, he had spent the last few hours questioning people along the perimeter of the destruction, using hand gestures and broken English to describe Pasquale, asking whether they had seen him, begging for information about him. In the mass confusion, most onlookers were searching for news about their own missing loved ones, and had neither the inclination nor the patience to listen to Giuseppe’s halting speech and confusing questions. Many had walked away before he could finish speaking.

  Giuseppe’s own eyes had told him the horrible story. He had seen the giant wave of molasses consume his ten-year-old son; first Pasquale was standing there and then he was not. Now he could be anywhere. The molasses could have carried him under a building or flung him into the harbor. But the police would not let Giuseppe onto the wharf to find him. He had tried at several different checkpoints, but they had stopped him and ordered him roughly to go home and await news from the authorities. He felt like he had failed Pasqualeno when his son needed him most.

  Now, standing very still in the darkness outside of his home, Giuseppe listened, praying that he would hear Pasqualeno’s thin, excited voice calling to him, the boy’s enthusiastic greeting when Giuseppe returned from work. Giuseppe would give his own life to hear his son once more.

  But all he heard were scattered gunshots from the wharf as the police put down more trapped horses.

  He drew a deep breath, and thought he would faint from the overwhelming, sickeningly sweet smell of molasses that hung thick in the air. Did the disaster only happen hours ago? He felt as though he had been walking, searching, for many days. He recalled Maria’s hysterical screams after the tank had burst, her words filled with heartache, and it seemed to him as though they had been spoken a long time ago. My son is lost! Pasqualeno is lost!

  Exhausted and disconsolate, he trudged up the dark stairs and stepped into the house. Maria was waiting for him, her black eyes rimmed red from crying. Neither of them spoke—he had come home alone, and that said everything. He reached for her then and brought her close, enfolded her in his arms, whispered to her gently as she trembled like a wounded bird, felt her broken heart beating against his own, the two of them sharing the unspoken fear that, like Pasqualeno, they, too, were lost.

  EIGHT

  “I AM PREPARED TO MEET MY GOD”

  Night, January 15, 1919—The Haymarket Relief Station

  Veronica Barry clutched her sister Mary’s arm as the two women left the chaotic hallways of the Haymarket Relief Station and slipped into the quiet dimness of their father’s room. John Barry lay motionless in his bed, moaning softly, a single lightbulb near his head casting a pale yellow glow across his upper body. His two daughters inched closer, Mary leading, Veronica at her elbow as they reached the foot of the bed. Veronica heard her sister gasp, “Father! What … ?” and she felt Mary go limp against her, nearly falling to the floor, before Veronica caught her under her arms. Veronica dragged Mary to a chair next to the bed, propped her up, lifted her head, gently slapped her face. “Mary, Mary, wake up, please wake up,” she said. Mary groaned, her eyes fluttered open, she looked at her sister in horror.

  “Mary, what is it? What’s wrong?” Veronica asked.

  “Is it father?” Mary asked. “Is it father? Look at him. I don’t know him.”

  Veronica swung around then, gazed at her father, so she could see what Mary had seen, though a part of her was afraid to look. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the pale light, but within a moment, as she moved closer t
o her injured father, she saw what had shocked her sister’s system.

  John Barry’s upper torso was uncovered. His neck, shoulders, and chest were black from severe bruising, his abdomen and arms covered with lacerations. He looked as though he had been beaten repeatedly. The horrible extent of these injuries made her despair about what she could not see beneath the sheets; she knew from the doctor that her father’s legs and back were badly damaged. Veronica looked at her father’s face, now drawn and haggard. And his hair, which had been dark brown when he left the house early this morning, had turned snowy white. The strong fifty-six-year-old stonecutter looked like a broken seventy-six-year-old man, lying helplessly in the bed.

  Her father moaned, stirred slightly, but did not waken. Veronica stared at him, the man who had become a stranger since morning—his disfigured body, his aged face, his white hair. She knew rescuers had pulled her father from under the firehouse, but that didn’t seem to tell the whole story.

  “What happened under there?” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes.

  Neither Kittie Callahan nor her cousin, Mary Doherty, could ever remember seeing John Callahan cry. Now, though, tears streamed down John’s face, as the forty-three-year-old paver for the City of Boston writhed in pain from a fractured pelvis. Molasses streaked his face and congealed around his mouth. The black liquid spilled onto the pillow beneath his head, and his wife, Kittie, could see that his hair was saturated with molasses.

  “I need water to wash the molasses off,” John Callahan whispered. “Please wash me off.” As Mary Doherty moved to leave the room and get water, John said, “No, please, I want Kittie to go.”

  With his wife out of the room, John motioned Mary Doherty closer. “I am in terrible agony,” he said, “in my ribs and my body. I feel like I am all squashed. I don’t think I will make it. I don’t want her to know right now. She needs to be strong for little John.”

  “John, what happened?” Mary asked.

  “I was reading a paper before lunch when the tank burst. It came on me like a wave at the sea. It crushed me and pinned me to the ground. I was buried in six feet of molasses. I was able to clear my mouth and find an air pocket and scream. Firefighters dug me out. They brought me here. I had $10 and a set of rosary beads when they brought me in. Promise me that Kittie will get them.”

  “But, John, they may be able to do something.”

  “No. I am feeling terribly—I can’t stand the suffering much longer. I’m sinking fast. Now promise you’ll take care of Kittie.”

  “I promise, John,” Mary Doherty said.

  Twenty-one-year-old Ralph W. Martin, a teamster and driver for Dolan Meats and Provision, was hanging practically upside down when his mother and father, Catherine and Michael, visited him at the relief station. Firefighters had unearthed Ralph from beneath a pile of debris at the wharf. Now, rigged up in a traction device called a Bradford Frame, his feet were high in the air, held fast by ropes and pulleys, and his bandaged head rested on the pillow, almost as if he were standing on his head. Michael and Catherine stood on either side of Ralph’s bed, noticing the molasses on his ears and his face.

  “Please, Mom, Dad,” Ralph sobbed. “Please. The pain is terrible. You have to ask them to change my position so I can get relief.” Michael watched as Ralph clutched at his mother’s dress, gritted his teeth, rolled his eyes.

  “Ma and Pa,” Ralph said. “I guess I’ll be all right, do you think? Will I? It’s tough, but we’ll beat it.”

  Neither parent spoke, but Michael Martin thought that he had never seen a person suffering as much as his son was now. There was no way he could beat pain like this.

  Peter Francis’s son, William, raced to the Haymarket Relief Station from nearby Scollay Square in time to hear a priest from St. Mary’s Church in the North End administering last rites to his father.

  “I am prepared to meet my God,” William heard his father say. “There are other men hurt worse than I am, and I would ask you to attend to them first.” Peter Francis moaned in pain, a sure sign to his son that he was seriously injured. “He was a man who never complained,” William said. “I knew by his groaning that he was injured too badly to ever recover.” Years later, though, it was not his father’s moans that haunted William, but the grinding of the hardening molasses in his father’s clothes every time he moved.

  Peter Francis died minutes after his son’s arrival at the relief station.

  Death’s pall clung to the relief station throughout the night, as the screams of dying men echoed off corridor walls stained with blood and molasses. James McMullen, John Barry, John Callahan, and Ralph Martin, all with terrible injuries, fought to stay alive, and there were others who did the same. Patrick Breen, a forty-eight-year-old teamster for the City of Boston Paving Department, who was hurled into Boston Harbor by the molasses wave and rescued by sailors aboard the USS Nantucket, hung by a thread with pneumonia and infection that had developed from fractured ribs and a serious leg injury. Peter Curran, whose team of hogs had been crushed by the molasses, was dragged from the flood and now lay at the relief station with broken ribs, back and chest injuries, and a severe shock to the nervous system from which doctors were not sure he would ever recover.

  Others were identified and shipped to Dr. George Burgess Magrath’s North Mortuary deep into the night. William Brogan, fifty-seven, a teamster for the paving department, stayed alive long enough for his wife, Ellen, to reach him at the relief station, before he succumbed to a fractured skull. His wife’s last memory of him was the pain in her husband’s eyes as he pawed at the bandages that swathed his head, as though tearing them off could ease his suffering. John Seiberlich, sixty-nine, a blacksmith for the City of Boston, suffered a fractured skull and a compound fracture of the femur when the wave caught him about fifty feet from the tank. He died at the relief station shortly thereafter. And the oldest flood victim—even older than Bridget Clougherty and John Sieberlich—seventy-eight-year-old Michael Sinnott, a messenger who was caught on the wharf during lunch hour, died at just past 11 P.M. on January 15, from multiple injuries, including a fractured skull, a fracture of the tibia, and severe shock.

  By the time the terrible day had ended—a Wednesday that had begun with the buoyancy and high spirits that accompany a January thaw in New England—the death toll from the molasses flood had reached eleven; nine men, plus the widow Clougherty and little Maria Distasio. Another group of victims lay seriously injured and wracked with pain in the relief station, their fate hanging in the balance, largely dependent on their bodies’ ability to fight off infection.

  There was also a third group: the missing. Had they been swept into the harbor? Crushed by tons of debris? Swallowed up and drowned by molasses, their bodies trapped in ooze, the chances of recovering them were impossible until cellars and freight sheds had been pumped out. As midnight approached, the cloyingly sweet smell of hardening molasses hung heavy in the Boston air, and the waterfront rats scurried across the wreckage, looking to taste and feed without becoming trapped. Rescuers tried to work, but the electric lighting was inadequate to illuminate the area. No real progress would be made until first light.

  It would be then, too, that North End residents would witness the totality of the carnage on the waterfront.

  January 16, 1919

  News of historic proportions was on the verge of breaking on January 16, 1919, news that would change the economic and social face of America, and the world’s geopolitical landscape.

  A Prohibition amendment to the U.S. Constitution, one that would ban the manufacture, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, needed the approval of just one more state legislature for ratification. Thirty-five of the forty-eight states had ratified the soon-to-be enacted 18th amendment—one short of the three-fourths majority necessary for approval—only the sixth amendment to the Constitution since the Civil War and the first since 1913. Now the states of Nebraska, Minnesota, and Missouri were racing to become the thirty-sixth state to ratify
the Prohibition amendment, a historic achievement that was expected within a day or two, perhaps within hours.

  Half a world away, President Woodrow Wilson, who had made history by becoming the first American President to set foot on European soil while in office, was hoping to make it again outside of Paris at the famed chateau of Versailles. There, Wilson and the other “big four” leaders—British prime minister David Lloyd George, French premier Georges Clemenceau, and Italian prime minister Vittoria Orlando—were seeking to negotiate a peace treaty to end the Great War and prevent future wars. As part of the treaty, Wilson would put forth his “fourteen points,” aimed to prevent the secret alliances and treaties that had pulled the world into war in 1914. Further, in their efforts to build a lasting peace, Wilson and the other world leaders would craft, as part of the treaty, a blueprint for a new League of Nations, an unprecedented alliance of countries that would work together “to promote international cooperation and to achieve international peace and security.”

  Nonetheless, both Prohibition and the peace talks were dwarfed by the coverage Boston newspapers gave to the molasses disaster, emblazoning banner headlines and displaying large photos of the flood across their front pages and throughout their news sections, in their Thursday, January 16, editions.

  “Huge Molasses Tank Explodes in North End; 11 Dead, 50 Hurt,” screamed the front page of the Boston Post, adding in a nightmarish subhead, “Giant Wave of 2.3 Million Gallons of Molasses, 50-feet High, Sweeps Everything Before It—100 Men, Women and Children Caught in Sticky Stream—Buildings, Vehicles, and ‘L’ Structure Crushed.” The Boston Globe countered with a banner headline, “Molasses Tank Explosion Injures 50 and Kills 11,” and a graphic subhead: “Scene of Ruin and Desolation in North End …” plus, “Death and Devastation in Wake of North End Disaster … Buildings Demolished, Sticky Mass Floods Streets.” The Globe let Boston residents know what happened in this report: