“You like the name Sarah?” I ask her, and she nods.
I turn to Belinda. “How about Sarah for now, hmm? You need to call her something, Belinda. She’s a beautiful child and she deserves a name.” I lean in close. “None of what happened the last few hours is her fault, you know.”
Belinda blinks languidly.
“Sarah means ‘princess,’” the woman who looks like Mam says.
“There you go. It’s a lovely name, isn’t it, Belinda?”
Belinda nods slightly.
As if she had been listening, the child opens her perfect mouth and a mewl comes out.
“I think our little princess is hungry,” I say.
“I don’t know what to do,” Belinda says, emotionless.
“I do,” says the woman who birthed six boys. She climbs over to Belinda’s mattress and we all watch in awe as, with this woman’s help, the babe takes to Belinda’s breast. For the next few minutes, as injured and dead are brought in and shouts rise for morphine and water, we watch. Belinda seems to soften as she looks down on her nursing infant. They are attached again, mother and child. The look of despair starts to slough off, and in its place is raw wonder. It is not joy yet, but neither is it anguish.
When the child is sated and sleeping, Belinda turns to Kat. “Do you want to hold her?”
Kat nods and I help her sit down on the mattress next to Belinda and position the sleeping infant in her arms.
Belinda is drifting off to sleep as I watch Kat hold her sister. She begins to softly sing to the baby the Gaelic lullaby my grandmother sang to me. The one I sing to her.
The moment is as beautifully perfect as a moment can be. I want it to last forever. And for five or ten blessed minutes it seems like it just might.
But then a shout rings out across the sea of mattresses, across the masses of dead and living.
The roof of the pavilion is on fire.
16
Ladies, we’re evacuating.”
The nurse who helped Belinda earlier has returned, and with her are a policeman and three Sisters of Charity in starched black habits streaked with dust. The nurse is speaking to us in a falsely calm voice. I can see that she is concerned with the enormous task of transporting so many people out of harm’s way. There must be four or five hundred injured in the pavilion now. I help Belinda to her feet while the nurse and the others assist the other women in our little group of mattresses. Belinda seems unable to comprehend what is happening. Her face is void of expression, but her eyes tell me she can’t believe that again we are fleeing danger. She is also weak from childbearing and not having eaten enough, and she begins to collapse seconds after she stands. One of the sisters reaches for Belinda’s baby in Kat’s arms and Belinda shouts for me to take her. The sister obliges and hands me the child. A policeman sweeps Belinda up into his arms and beginsto head to the exit. With the sleeping baby and Kat to attend to, I make the quick decision to abandon my travel case. After giving Kat the baby to hold for a moment longer, I shove the strongbox, the papers, and Da’s word book into Kat’s case. I hoist it in one hand and cradle the baby in the crook of my other arm.
“Hold my skirt, Kat,” I tell her. “Don’t let go!”
Kat looks up at me with fear-filled eyes but obeys. We race to follow the policeman who is carrying Belinda.
We emerge onto the street and into an orange-gold world of smoke and ash. Above us, hundreds of firefly cinders from an approaching blaze we can’t yet see are alighting on the roof of the pavilion, which is already heartily aflame in several places. I can’t see the other fires—the air all around is a smoldering blanket obscuring everything but what is right in front of me—but I can smell them, feel them, taste them, hear them. Ashes swirl about the ruin of the city hall across the street like snow.
Automobiles and wagons and trucks, every kind of vehicle that can be pressed into service, has been. These are now being loaded with not just the wounded but the bodies of the dead from the pavilion. We are told we will be taking refuge at Golden Gate Park, two miles away. Belinda is placed in a laundry delivery truck along with several other female patients in various stages of ability and health. When Kat and I and the baby reach the back of the truck, we are told we will have to find our own way to the park—there is only room for the wounded and sick in the commandeered vehicles.
“Don’t leave me!” Belinda cries out as I hand the baby to a man helping the women get situated inside the truck. The man hands the infant to Belinda as she begs again for me not to leave her.
“We’ll find you at the park, I promise!” I call to her. The door is shut on Belinda and my last view of her is her shouting that she wants out of the truck.
Another man raps on the vehicle to alert the driver to get moving.
I can’t tell which direction is west; the sun is masked by smoke. I can only follow the trucks and autos and carriages, and the masses of people doing the same. No one is heading east to the ferries now. I hear someone ask why the fire brigades are not putting the fires out and someone else says they have been trying all morning to put them out but the earthquake broke all the water mains belowground. The firemen can access no water. It is nearly laughable that as I hear these words, we are marching west on a peninsula that is surrounded on three sides by the sea. There is water in every direction but one, but no way of getting it to the streets. Those who would put the fires out can do little more than watch them take what they want.
And then I hear a boom off in the distance, and then another. The fire has gotten hold of something explosive, I am thinking, but a man in a military uniform several yards away says the army is dynamiting buildings here and there to create firebreaks and hopefully starve the fire of its food.
I look to the direction that I believe is north and I think of Martin slumped against a kitchen wall. The fires are south and west of my neighborhood. Martin is not in danger, not now at least. I consider for just a moment finding a policeman and alerting him that there is a wounded man inside my house near Russian Hill. But there is no policeman in sight who is not frantically attending to more immediate concerns, and I simply can’t haveMartin telling someone how he came to be lying at the bottom of the stairs and then abandoned, injured, in his kitchen, especially if the person he tells is a policeman.
And yet perhaps he would say it was just the earthquake that caused his fall, and then after a doctor patched him up he’d come looking for me. For all of us.
