The man staggers down the street through the smoking ruins, his charred
skin feathered with peels of white blisters. He is naked, except for a white sailor’s hat.
“Where am I?” he slurs through a broken face, eyes staring wildly at nothing. I shake my head, gaping at the suddenly birthed hell all around me. Buildings burn and a rain of ash falls from the smouldering black sky. I am crumpled on my side, my arm crushed under me, screaming in agony. I silence myself, but the screaming goes on. I wonder where my wife is.
A house next to me collapses on itself. Someone is stuck in the basement, under the rubble. As I stumble to my feet, the coals from the tipped-over fireplace set the wreckage alight. The screaming intensifies with the roaring of the inferno. I run to the home, joined by the black ghosts of those still breathing, but the fire devours the home like kindling and before we get far, the screaming stops.
Other voices take up the cry.
I look around, trying to see where I am. Minutes before, I had been on the harbour, heading to work at the Sugar Refinery, standing with some dockyard workers, watching a ship burn on a sunny December morning. I had seen the crash - a stupid thing, one ship sailing down the wrong side of the Narrows and cruising right into a second ship, like two people trying and failing to get out of each other’s way.
After a mighty crunch, the ships parted, one listing toward Dartmouth, the other toward Halifax. A burly dockyard worker next to me spotted the crew of the Mont Blanc rowing like madmen toward Dartmouth. He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “Run, Frenchies, run!”
Beside me hundreds of men stopped work to watch the flaming ship under a
crisp blue sky, and behind me every woman and child in Halifax pressed their noses to the windows for a better view. The rooftops were crawling with spectators as the big ship loomed in on shore like a Viking funeral boat.
I was standing next to the Patricia, Halifax’s shimmering firefighting machine. Freshly polished, she looked like the future. The old, horse-drawn engines rattled up beside us. The heat was intense. Hoses were unfurled as the ship kissed the end of the pier.
I opened my mouth to speak when the world was destroyed. I remember flying, spinning in a whirl of silence, watching a heavy anchor travel over me, thinking this was death. I remember thumping to the ground.
I look at myself. My coat is gone. So is my hat and my left shoe. Water trickles into my mouth. Tears? I send my good arm to my face and pull it away, damp. Blood. Somewhere on my head I’m bleeding, but I can’t tell where. Maybe everywhere.
A woman in a dirt-white dress crawls out of pile of burning timber across the road. Her hair is brown, same as my Evelyn’s. She gets to her feet, pressing her right hand to her face, holding a limp baby with her left. She goes the same way as the sailor. A spooked horse gallops past dragging a broken buggy, a huge shard of glass piercing the animal’s side.
A wind clears some of the black from the sky and I can see a mushroom cloud towering over the Narrows. I limp down toward the harbour.
Dazed, I wonder where the city is, imagining it has been picked up like Dorothy’s house, carried on a wind and deposited safely in some Emerald City.
I fall as I walk down a street. I land on something soft, see it is a woman twisted against a wall and start to apologize, but the woman is dead.
A man in a torn black coat runs up the hill, screaming “The Germans are attacking! The Germans are attacking!”
I want to correct him, but can’t speak.
A young man, about my age, jogs past, sees I am alive, and lifts me to my feet.
“We need all the help we can get!” he shouts, calm in the hysteria.
I run after him toward the docks. Hundreds stampede the other way.
“The magazine’s going to blow!” one of them hollers. I look to the young man for confirmation.
He shakes his head. “Let them run. It won’t blow. There’s people that need our help.”
“My name is Ben,” he says, offering me his blackened hand.
“Thomas,” I say, shaking his hand. It is bloody. His red hair is smeared with blood.
“You’re bleeding,” I tell him.
“The whole city is bleeding.”
“I need to find my wife.”
Ben’s face grows grim.
“Where is she?”
“Rector Street.”
He closes his eyes for a second. When he opens them, the sadness is gone.
“We’ll find her. She’s fine.”
Pier 6 is gone, the burning ship is gone, and so are all the people. Where it is not on fire, the
ground is damp.
“Tidal wave,” Ben explains. “The Mont Blanc blew a good chunk of the harbour into the city. Swept people back out, too.”
We pass the Patricia, or a snarled dark twin of her. No sign of the firemen.
A group of soldiers dig through the smashed wood of a destroyed building.
Ben walks up to an officer and offers a smart salute. The two exchange words, and Ben points toward me. The officer nods and dismisses Ben.
“Start digging,” Ben says. “We need every hand we can get. This is the
orphanage.”
I start picking up beams and throwing them behind me.
We dig for hours before we find a pile of mangled little bodies.
“They must have been hiding in the basement,” Ben whispers.
I’m in a fog, my brain isn’t working, but seeing the dead kids jolts me.
“I need to find my wife,” I say, tasting the kiss she left me with that morning.
Ben looks at me hard.
“Rector Street is gone. The whole north end is gone. The whole damn city is gone. What didn’t get blown up by the explosion burned to the ground. I’m sorry, Thomas, but your wife is dead.”
But he doesn’t know that. He can’t know that. I walk away from him, heading home. Rector Street is razed. Plumes of dark smoke hang over the remains. I can’t tell where it starts or ends, what is street and what isn’t, or where my house is. Was. I find a neighbour and we start digging. He doesn’t know where our homes are either, so we just dig and dig and dig.
When we hear cries, we run in that direction and dig until we find a terrified
survivor, or a corpse.
We work for hours in that cooling hell, throwing bathtubs out of living rooms, tipping over scorched beds, pulling fallen walls apart.
As the sun leaves the sky, stealing what light remains, snow begins to fall on the burning city.
My hands are raw and frozen. My neighbour has stopped digging. We’ve excavated half the neighbourhood, stacking the bodies of friends and strangers on the street. We had found our houses, but no bodies in them.
A calm busyness has taken hold of the city. Soldiers and sailors march past, telling us where we can find shelter and help.
“Come on, dig,” I tell my neighbour, pulling a scorched chair out of a destroyed home.
He looks at me.
“They’re dead,” he whispers, crying softly, and I don’t believe him. My wife is my air; I couldn’t be alive if she were dead.
I stare at my neighbour like a traitor, and turn from the ruins of my home into the growing storm.
(Illustration by Michelle Mersereau)