After the Fog (38 page)

Dave Delrio’s name was called over the loud speaker, instructed to head home. His father was ill.

“And paging nurse Pavlesic.” The scratchy sound of the speaker cut off Rose’s self-pitying thoughts. “Head on down there with our boy, Delrio. Doc Bonaroti says you’re up.”

Rose looked toward the huddle on the field, to where Johnny was giving orders to his teammates, and throwing a game. Rose was disgusted at the thought. Rose left the game, pushing back her sadness, moving toward the job she was required to do.

R
ose wove her way through the fog, behind the Delrio boy. Each time he passed under a streetlamp there was enough light emitted to reveal a splash of his orange uniform, but even as Rose yelled for Delrio, she knew she wouldn’t catch up with him until they reached his home. The darkness forced her to move slowly, to put her hands up in front of her to be sure she didn’t step off the sidewalk, and run into someone.

By the time she wound down Castner Avenue to Norman, feeling her way along the porch rail, to retaining wall to porch rail, she found fireman Bill Hawthorne and Doc Schubert were consoling the Delrio’s. Rose couldn’t believe another person had died.

“He’s not dead,” Hawthorne said. “He fell out, took a heart attack, maybe. But, we gave him some oxygen and he’s hanging in there.”

Mr. Matthews arrived shortly after Rose. He’d been told there was a death and had rushed there, wanting to remove the body since he happened to be so close. He was out of breath, his face, tomato-red, his hair in disarray as though he’d never brushed it. His shirt sleeves were blackened and pushed up well past his elbows, tie askew.

Matthews was a serious man who normally arrived at homes looking as though he were headed to a wedding more than to prepare a body for burial. Rose raised her eyebrows at his disheveled appearance then shoved a chair under him as he collapsed, gasping for air.

Hawthorne draped a sheet over the undertaker’s head and pushed two oxygen cylinders underneath to form a makeshift oxygen tent. “Just crack the valves and we’ll give him fifteen minutes. He’ll be good as new,” Hawthorne said.

“Asthmatics. They never fare well in the fog,” Dr. Schubert said.

“He doesn’t have asthma,” Rose and Hawthorne said at the same time. They all stared at each other, while the Delrio family fussed over Mr. Delrio, their sobs, punctuating the thick silence. Blue smoke swirled around the room, forcing everyone to clear their throat if not outright cough and choke.

Hawthorne coughed into a balled up fist. “It’s this damn fog. Yesterday at three in the afternoon we had eight hundred cubic feet of oxygen. Now? Nothing. We’ve borrowed from Monessen, McKeesport, Charleroi…this is more than—”

“Eleven!” Matthews yelled from under his oxygen tent.

“Pipe down, Matthews,” Hawthorne said. “That O2 is worth its weight in gold right now!”

“Ah, screw it, I’m fine,” Matthews said ripping the sheet off his head. Hawthorne closed the valves, and Matthews rested his hands on his knees, breathing heavy but not wheezing.

He leaned back against the chair, staring at the worried Delrio family “No disrespect meant to you folks, talking this way, but I’m shoveling up body after body all night and I get back to the funeral home after nine bodies and I find out Roberts and Calucci both have a body each. Ten A.M. and eleven bodies later, I’d say we have a problem. And it’s not just because we’re out of caskets.”

Rose folded the sheet into a tight square. “But, no one even knows. No one said a word at the game.”

Hawthorne nodded. “Every house I go to, the folks inside think they’re the only ones sick. No paper on Saturday, no information. Eleanor’s working the Red Cross angle, setting up some emergency aid station at the Donora Hotel. The Irondale’s filled with bodies I can’t take. Eleanor should have oxygen, beds, and adrenaline at the aid station by late today. Something’s wrong, folks, whether we admit it or not.”

The silence that followed nauseated Rose as much as the fog itself. What was happening? She remembered the smoke pouring out of the train stack, but that evidence that something was very wrong in town didn’t change the fact she needed to get back out there and help her neighbors.

Dan Peterson banged on the front door. He needed Rose and Hawthorne to head to his house. His father, Mr. Peterson, needed them. He was a rickety, slim fellow, always suffering from a wet, hacking cough.

Rose pushed ahead. She loved that stinky bastard and didn’t want to see another dead person in Donora. If they could just get some rain, some hard winds to blow away the stagnant, filthy air. Rose was sure a good harsh downpour would cleanse Donora and reveal the steel blue sky’s underbelly once again.

She and Hawthorne were about to enter the Peterson home when a wailing woman drew their attention from the opposite direction. Linda Rvsevich screeched like a rabid raccoon. It wasn’t until Rose and Hawthorne dragged her into the Peterson home that Linda produced her five month-old baby from inside her trench coat.

The baby was grey and wheezing. But, before Rose managed to check the infant at all, Sonny Rvsevich appeared saying he’d procured a vehicle and was driving his wife and child to the hospital in Pittsburgh.

Rose and Hawthorne argued with them the entire way down the stairs to their car, telling them they’d have an accident in this fog. But the Rvsevich family just plodded on, set on their path.

Back inside the Peterson’s, Rose found Doc Schubert treating Peterson, and she and Hawthorne threaded their way through town heading upward and around the snaking streets, going wherever they heard someone was ill.

They headed south and Rose remembered the drawing she’d seen in a textbook of a lid spanning the mountain-tops, capturing industrial smoke, pressing it back down for all in the valley to breathe. She couldn’t get the image out of her mind. She thought of the football field where the people at the top of the bleachers couldn’t see the field and the folks further down had a better, though still gritty view.

Rose realized then they had to get as many weakened people as possible to their cellars. It had helped Mrs. Cushon the day before and she remembered Henry saying Bonaroti suggested it for Unk, but Rose hadn’t really understood its importance at the time.

Rose and Hawthorne found Mrs. Dunaway straining to breathe in her living room, her son at her side, her face blue and eyes full of fear. Hawthorne and Rose began to move the woman to the cellar, and she pushed them away, punching helplessly on Rose’s chest. “You’re gonna shove me in the cellar and let me die? It’s easier to have me closer to the ground for burial?” Mrs. Dunaway wiggled and flopped as they carried her downstairs.

Her son stood mute then followed them down the stairs.

“Bonaroti said this was poison,” he said. “But no one listened. And now, you of all people are going to just let my mother sit in her cellar and suffocate? They’re piling bodies up in the Hotel, for God sakes!”

Once safely down the stairs, Hawthorne administering a shot of oxygen, Rose gripped the boy’s shoulders, making eye contact. She didn’t have time to explain.

“Run up stairs—grab blankets, water, chairs—anything to make it comfortable in the cellar, then you’re going to sit and wait for this fog to clear. Your mother will recover her ability to breathe.” Rose’s voice was calm, and steady and commanding. “She’s never had trouble before. Make her comfortable, play cards, distract her and you’ll see. This won’t last forever. But, do not let her go back upstairs.”

In the cellar the woman wheezed and hacked like a clotted smoke stack, but the oxygen was lessening the duration of the coughs. Rose headed back upstairs looking over her shoulder, seeing a desperate son comforting his aching mother as they waited for something—the fog to clear, or for her to die.

Upstairs, after delivering a shot of oxygen, Hawthorne placed as many calls as the clogged lines would allow, making a list of people who needed help. Alice, the phone operator, informed him that Doc Schubert had received word the mill hospital was taking on ill citizens—and not just employees—while the Donora Hotel took morgue overflow. Caskets were nowhere to be found and Bonaroti’s suggestion to leave town was much too late to heed. Rose scanned the list for patients she knew.

They waited for Alice to phone back with more details, and Hawthorne impatiently tapped his pencil on the table. “Normally thirty people die here all year, Rose. You know that. Sixteen deaths since yesterday. The caskets. We’re in trouble.”

Rose looked back over the list trying to discern a pattern. Were the sick people concentrated in one spot?

“You work your way up the list, I’ll work my way down,” Hawthorne said. Rose was relieved to see Theresa’s name was absent from the paper.

“Everyone on your half of the list,” Hawthorne said, “is located close to your house so you should be able to stop home for dinner with that scout. John deserves it. Can’t let a little fog keep one of our own from making it to the big-time.”

“John?” Rose said.

“Yeah. John, your son?” Hawthorne raised his eyebrows at Rose. “Young buck is growing up.”

Rose’s face crumpled into confusion. What did renaming him have to do with growing up? Truth was, Johnny was behaving like a five-year-old when it came to his future.

But, this was the way things worked in Donora—–a neighbor, like Hawthorne, wanting to make sure Rose had dinner waiting for Johnny’s scout. No matter the trouble, you kept on with your plan, your life. Rose pretended to study the list some more.

The game. Rose hoped Johnny had managed to refocus on the game and make the kind of plays he was known for, the kind that made a gaggle of scouts rush to have him sign on the dotted line.

“Wait,” Rose said. “What about the council meeting? We should be there. We need to back up Bonaroti. The mills are going to have to shut down. If the smoke won’t disperse up above—if the air is stagnant and won’t release itself into the atmosphere, then we have to stop the smog at the source down below. The mills. It’s the only answer. Bonaroti knew it and we all ignored him.”

Hawthorne and Rose split up, went to the homes on their list, dividing it vertically instead of horizontally so they would both work on opposite sides of town, meeting on Meldon where they would speak at the meeting.

Rose moved efficiently through the names and downward through town. The intensity of care allowed her to push away her problems and toil in the isolated moments of other people’s pain, one patient, one home at a time, and avoid her own.

R
ose did her best not to rush through patients even though she needed to get to that meeting. She finished up an exam—stomach flu rather than respiratory distress—at the Huggins home and then moved on toward Meldon Avenue where all the leading citizens of Donora were meeting with the mill’s higher-ups.

She’d never seen the streets deserted on a Saturday. The hush that had settled as people hid in their homes was disconcerting. She moved past Thompson, then McKean, to Meldon. The steady hum of the mills, the flying shear and nail mill punctuating the grinding machinery, were all that seemed familiar. She thought of the ever-plodding mills, their indestructibility and the people she’d seen that day. People certainly didn’t come with the same guarantee as a good blast furnace.

Rose entered the council building and was surprised to see Bonaroti was not in the meeting, but standing outside the room, looking through the small window in the door. Rose laid her bag by the wall and went onto her toes to peer through the window, too. She couldn’t believe he wasn’t in there. He was the chairman of the board of health.

Bonaroti shifted to make room for her. “I’m just letting them warm up before I drop the hammer. Go on home,” he said. Inside the room sat over a dozen men in suits, perky hats on the table beside their pens and notebooks, each in some way connected to the mill or borough council.

Rose wasn’t about to leave, especially after hearing their voices rising, claiming, fog or no fog, they couldn’t shut the mills down. If they did, a man said, the furnaces would cool then crack, and they’d lose money. The cost to rebuild the cracked furnaces would mean they just start all over somewhere else, in some other town where they understood what the mills meant. If they had to shut down the mills, the town would suffer. Every business in Donora depended on the mill workers to spend their wages in their establishments.

Bonaroti picked up Rose’s bag and handed it to her. “Look, it’s not the official meeting. They’re not gonna shut ‘er down until they’re sure there’s no other way. They won’t decide that ‘til Fliss gets his ass here for the meeting tomorrow. This is just a bunch of blowhards belly-aching. Your kid’s having that scout over. You have a meal to prepare.”

Rose wasn’t listening, too focused on what they were saying in the meeting, regarding the recent deaths. Most of the deceased had a prior respiratory issue. They didn’t seem to care that thousands of residents—healthy and otherwise were ill.

They talked as if they weren’t breathing the same thick air as the victims were, as though they were watching the events unfold in a movie. Rose shook her head in disbelief. The mills took precedence over everything.

To her surprise Adamchek appeared at her side, jockeying for a view through the window to the room.

“Yer son threw that game. They lost 27-7. He played like an asshole.”