“I’ll bury anything I find in the backyard,” I reply to Elliot.
“With what? And in broad daylight?”
“I’ll find a way. And I’ll do it after sundown if I must. You forget what I’ve already had to do.”
He is quiet for a few seconds. “Let me come with you,” he says a moment later. “Let me help you... do this.”
“And be responsible for implicating another person in my offenses? No. I won’t let you be part of this. This is my mess to clean up. Besides, I’ll be fine.”
He shakes his head and looks away from me. He either doesn’t believe I will be fine or is sickened that I will be. “If you’re there after sundown, you’ll miss the last train.”
“I very much hope that does not happen. I’ll sleep on a bench in the train station if I do miss it, and I’ll ask you to please tell Kat that the trains are running off schedule and I’ll catch another one tomorrow. I’ve had to sleep in worse places than a train station, Elliot. I appreciate your concern, I do. But you don’t need to worry about me. I’ll be fine.”
He is quiet after this and we say little the rest of the way.
“I’ll come back for you at seven thirty tonight,” Elliot says, when he drops me off at the depot twenty minutes later.
“If I’m detained, I’ll find a way to send a telegram to your shop,” I reply. “Please make sure Kat understands that I am all right.”
“If it comes to that, I will.” He tips his hat in farewell and I turn for the platform and the train that will take me to what is left of San Francisco and the life that I tried to make for myself there.
25
With the Southern Pacific train station on Townsend Street operational again, it takes less than an hour to return to San Francisco, as opposed to the hours-long trek we had to make after the quake. I step out onto streets that have been stripped bare of their burned buildings. I remember that the inferno that scorched this area south of Mission Street had swept its way north to join a second fire in those first few hours after Belinda gave birth. The worst burns we saw at the pavilion came from the blaze that consumed these neighborhoods. There is little left of these city blocks now to suggest what stood here before; I see only scraped slabs, oddly shaped lumps of charred metal, flattened piles of ash, and men and women with shovels and wagons, working to cart it all away. On a few scraped lots, lumber has been delivered and the framing of new structures has begun.
Street signs that might have told me where I am are gone now,and I have to ask in which direction I might find the neighborhoods near Russian Hill. A man in utility worker coveralls takes pity on me when I tell him I’ve come to see what is left of my house near there. He offers to take me in his wagon as far as Union Square. It is less than half the distance; I will still have a combination of a dozen blocks north and about that many west to get to the house, but I take him up on his offer. Twenty blocks isn’t so bad to walk, not when you have a purpose. He sets off at a slow pace and I notice his horse is a tired-looking creature whose ribs are showing through its flanks. The man sees me looking with compassion at the animal.
“We’ve had to work the horses too hard,” he says. “They all look like this. Some worse. It can’t be helped. There is too much to haul away.”
We travel through the ruin of the neighborhoods south of Market and arrive ten burned-out blocks later at what is left of Union Square. What had been so familiar to me only a few months before is now a foreign landscape. The Dewey Monument—a tall obelisk topped with the lithe goddess of victory to honor Admiral Dewey’s bravery in the Spanish-American War—still stands in the center of the square, but I recognize little else. At the base of the victory statue is a hastily constructed hotel in the shadow of its wounded parent, the looming but heavily damaged Hotel St. Francis. But all around that bit of makeshift new construction is dead grass and soot that spreads out on all four sides toward shells of buildings or single walls or open spaces cleared clean of what once stood there.
I thank the man who gave me the ride and I start north up Powell, a street I know. I pass men of all ages laboring to clear away debris or lay new cable-car track. I know that at first, menwere pressed into service because there was so much work to be done. In the early weeks after the fires, any able-bodied man still in the city was told he would assist in the cleanup efforts or leave. Only those with special tags readingdo not presshad been able to escape the call to help, and these were only doctors and others whose special abilities had been needed elsewhere. I’d wager most of these workers are now getting paid for their efforts; they are heartily laboring at the task and dressed appropriately for the work.
I turn on California Street to head west again, and I pass signs for food distribution tents and announcements for the locations of community kitchens that have been set up. I walk past one such place with long tables where soot-covered workers and mothers with little children and even men in suits are seated and eating a meal. I’d read earlier in theChronicle—which is using theOaklandEnquirer’s printing presses—that the city has been divided into sections for relief supplies, and each one is run by a chairman aided by an army officer. Within the sections are numbered food stations distributing supplies that have been sent from everywhere in the country and that are guarded by armed military so that nothing can be stolen and then black-marketed. A few automobiles rumble past me, all of them being driven by uniformed soldiers—apparently privately owned vehicles are still much under the command of the military. Most of the traffic in the street is comprised of wagons being pulled by thin, overburdened horses.
Some folks walking the streets along with me seem to be there only to view the grim austerity of this once golden city. I can tell by their clothes and manner that they’ve come from Oakland or some other place to sightsee. There are even vendors on thestreet selling these people trinkets pulled from the ashes as souvenirs.
I don’t understand the desire to view this cataclysmic destruction or to carry home a memento of it. I suppose some people simply need to see what could have happened to them but didn’t, and to have a visual reminder of it.
Eight blocks later when I at last turn to start up Polk, the immediate view up the street is an incline of alternating flatness and scattered stalwart chimneys. It is like a desert landscape lacking any hue or definition except for scattered cacti made of brick that are reaching for the sky with wounded arms. Houses and buildings that were constructed of brick and stone are the exception. Some of these still stand, but they are hollowed out, as though the home or building had been begun but then never completed. Off in the distance on the top of Russian Hill I see a small clutch of houses that somehow escaped the flames. They stand as if to remind everyone who looks at them of all the beautiful homes that stood on these streets.
A few people are out and about. Some are raking through debris in the continued search, I suppose, for the odd gem or coin that the flames did not devour. Others are sweeping, pushing, and piling the remains of their houses into piles to be hauled away and dumped in large open spaces by the marina. I continue up the street, remembering how it was to escape down it the morning of the quake.
As I ascend the last block, I can’t get a good look at where my house should be, as the home directly next door is a brick structure that is partially still standing and obstructing my view. I can see that Libby’s house across the street still stands as well, but it is missing half its roof and every window frame is charred. Mybreath is coming in short gasps as I close the distance and step ever nearer to the house I lived in. When the hulk of the house next door is no longer impeding my view, I behold what remains. It is as though a giant hand of flame had reached down and grabbed the contents of my house, held it in its blazing fingers, and then flung to the ground its ashes. There are no walls, no floors, no roof.
There is no part of the house that is recognizable except for half the chimney, the misshapen shell of the cookstove in what had been the kitchen, and twisted pipes here and there. Large chunks of blackened onyx and marble from the fallen fireplaces on the second story litter the ground floor like ancient ruins. The space the house occupied looks smaller somehow, reduced now to just its footprint on the charred ground.
There are no timbers to have to push past to get to what had been the kitchen, no heaping piles of burnt plaster, no ceiling tiles or skeletal frames of bedroom furniture. I read in the newspaper before I came that the fires had burned at one thousand degrees Fahrenheit—an unbelievably intense heat that I couldn’t imagine until now. This fire did not just burn; it consumed.
I pick my way across the pocked ground and around the fallen fireplaces, crunching down on unrecognizable charred bits, to stand at the iron cookstove. I look down at the spot where I left Martin. He was by the butler’s table and the back window, both of which are now gone, and near the door to the boiler room, now a sunken receptacle of ash and blackened metal. I bend down to poke at the gray powder at my feet with a shard of marble, but I find not a trace of Martin’s body. Not his wedding ring, not a tooth, not a fragment of bone.
I cast my gaze back across what had been the dining room,searching for a skull, a torso of blackened ribs. Shouldn’t there be a scrap of something if Martin crawled across the kitchen floor in an attempt to escape? I stand and pick my way back among the second-story fireplaces, all of them heavy enough to fall on a burning body and crush it.
As I stare at the bizarre detritus at my feet, a mix of melancholy and uncertainty overcomes me.
I wanted there to be something left of Martin. I needed there to be a recognizable shred of who he was to bury, not because he deserves it but because I do, and so does Kat. It was never my design to hurt him, nor had it been Kat’s. Still, I chose not to save him. I chose not to run back into the house and drag his broken body out. I chose to deceive Kat so that I could protect her. I chose to let her imagine her terrible father being shooed out of the house after I’d helped him to his feet rather than have her see what pushing him down the stairs had truly done to him.
It seemed the right thing to do in that moment. And when Belinda’s waters splashed down at her feet onto the heaved ground, it seemed the right thing to leave Martin and get her and Kat to safety.
