I stumble into the worsening storm. The city is bright with fire, houses burning like Bedouin camps, brighter than it has been in years. We’ve been living in blackout conditions since the war, but tonight, Halifax is alight.
Troops march past, garrison lorries race around the debris, horses pull carriages laden with corpses and the wounded.
Women and men lift broken houses, pulling out the living and the dead and the dying.
The blizzard settles on the city, its swirling whiteness dancing over the char-black ruins. A family huddles in a buckled house with the windows all blown out, burning their broken home to stave off the cold. Some have nailed carpets across the smashed windows to block out the worst of the storm. Most have gone to friends and family in the southend. They say Citadel Hill protected those fine houses from the explosion that destroyed the north.
“Thomas!” a weak voice calls to me. A man I work with at the refinery. I sit next to him and we warm ourselves by a fire.
“Michael. This is awful,” I say to him. He’s paler than the snow in his hair, and bright blood trickles down his face, staining his winter coat. He stares at me blankly, then points to his ears,
indicating they aren’t working. I speak louder.
He shakes his head.
“Dead, all dead. Mother, father, wife and five kids.”
“I’m sorry.”
He nods.
“Here, borrow my coat for a bit,” he says, starting to take the thick garment off.
“No, no, I’m fine.”
A wind claws my skin beneath the thin shirt I am wearing. The blast had blown my jacket off me, along with my hat and one shoe.
Michael pauses, then opens the great coat so it falls like a blanket on both of us. I thank him and we sit, starring into the fire.
A man holding a torch, shouting for his family, wakes me. The flames shine on his shattered face in the howling storm, the yellow glow flickering over his red cuts. He screams their names over and over.
“Poor man,” I say to Michael. He is silent. I look at him, but his face is still, blue, his chest at peace. Dead. Like all the others, dead. Like this whole city.
I stand, chilled to be so near death. How had I slept through it? I start off into the maelstrom, and then turn back.
I take Michael’s coat, then his boots. Everything is too small. I don’t know what to do with the rest of him, so I pull him onto the side of the road.
A horse-drawn wagon comes up behind me and stops.
“Dead?” shouts the driver. I nod. “Put him on. I’m going to the morgue and I got room for one more.”
I can’t see his face, just the wild eyes of his horse. It snorts clouds of warm air into the frozen night. I carry Michael to the back and lift him onto the wagon. I sit down next to him and the driver whips his horse into motion. There must be twenty bodies stacked in with me. The driver runs up what used to be Russell Street, past the Commons.
“Where are we going?” I shout up to him.
“Chebucto school,” he hollers back. “It’s been turned into a morgue. They learned from when the Titanic when down a few years back.”
I nod in the darkness. So that’s the scale of it. This is a poor man’s Titanic.
The windows are all punched out of the new brick school, but the walls are mostly standing. Six wagons like ours stand at a back door while soldiers unload a seventh. The drivers make low talk. I stand and walk past the soldiers, following the torches down to the basement.
It’s an orderly apocalypse down there. Rows and rows of bodies, some covered with white sheets, some not. Some have little piles beside them: a girl’s body next to some school books, a watch and keys next to an old man, a baby next to a young woman. Soldiers keep bringing corpses in. Others walk around with clipboards, compiling a list of the dead.
A young woman asks if she can help me.
“I’m looking for my wife.”
“Name?”
I tell her, and she checks her clipboard, then shakes her head. My heart stops.
“She’s not on my list. But most of them -” she waves her hand over the dead. “We don’t know
who they are.”
I notice other people down in that dank, dark basement. An old man, leaning on his grandson, limps from one body to the next. At each one they stop, and the young man pulls back the sheet.
The old man shakes his head, and they replace the sheet and move on. Collapsed souls searching among broken bodies.
“Where do I start?” I ask the young woman.
A tear sneaks down her cheek. She rubs it away. “I don’t know,” she says, and goes back to her task.
I start at the beginning and move slowly down the long aisles. I see friends, colleagues from the refinery, cousins. Strangers. Mostly sliced up bad, killed by the windows. Killed by curiosity. Crushed by walls, burned to death.
I look into the face of death hundreds of times that night, but I don’t see my wife.
I crawl out of the basement, past the wagons endlessly unloading the dead.
I walk to the Commons. The field is full of army tents. The invincible Armoury watches over them.
A few soldiers stand smoking cigarettes.
“You can sleep here, sir,” a young one tells me, offering me a smoke. I thank him.
“Where is everyone?”
“Guess folks are nervous about sleeping so close to the explosion, what with the fire and all.
But it’s perfectly safe here. A little fire might even warm us up,” he jokes. I don’t smile. I’ve forgotten how.
“Sorry sir. But please, come in and rest.”
I walk through a foot of clean snow covering the Commons, past the hundreds of tents. I find a few families, poor people who had no southend friends and whose relatives are all gone.
The blackness of the night suddenly comes over me. I lean against a tree, pulling Michael’s coat tight, but can’t stop shaking. A moan slips out of me. Evelyn. I put my love on the wind, and hope it carries it to her living ear.
(Illustration by Michelle Mersereau)