After the Fog (41 page)

“We were driving down Norman,” he said. “Heading to drop off that stuff to the Notre Dame fella. Johnny said he had to do that before we went to Webster to play. Said he’d promised you.”

Rose flinched. No. She felt her head shake as she looked back at her broken son.

“We were driving too fast, for the fog and all. We couldn’t be late for the show. Two fellas from a record label and the Julliard guy were going to be there. And, we cut over to pick up Pierpont and twisting around, near Highland Avenue, you know how that bend is.”

Rose stared, wanting to comfort Dicky, tell him it wasn’t his fault, but her anger kept her where she was.

“We couldn’t see a thing. The fog was thick as cement, the headlights reflecting the light right back at my face.” Dicky’s chin quivered and he broke down.

“John’s yammering about some science concept,” he said between sobs. “Why the lights did that. He wanted to walk in front of the car to guide us with the lights off. Said we’d do better to go slowly. He’d guide us. You know John and we were already late. He didn’t want to blow his shot with the scout or the band.”

Dicky wiped his nose with his sleeve. “So I, we…we let him do it. And another car came up, lights high and John ended up between both cars…” Henry pulled Dicky into his chest, holding him as he wailed.

Rose covered her ears, she couldn’t listen, her own voice too loud in her head.
Do what I say, Johnny then get your ass back here so I can
…how had she phrased it?
Tell you exactly what to do with the rest of your life?
What had she said? But looking at Dicky, she couldn’t let him shoulder this burden alone. “No, no, no, sweet Dicky. It wasn’t your fault.” Rose’s gaze went behind Dicky, to Dottie standing at Henry’s side.

Dicky pulled away from Henry, lumbered toward Rose and fell into her arms. Rose buckled under his weight, but she shushed him, smoothed his hair as if he were five. He curled onto her lap beside the bed, sobbing into her chest. She didn’t want him to feel guilty, but she didn’t know what to say to take away his pain.

“It wasn’t your fault, Dicky. Don’t think that,” Rose said. She wanted to scream at them all. At Johnny for being the one to volunteer to walk in front of the car, at Dicky for being so stupid to allow him. At Dottie. At Henry. But mainly, she wanted to holler at herself.

* * *

“Johnny.” Rose’s lips brushed his ear. No response.

She lay her cheek on his, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. He didn’t respond. She felt for his pulse. It was steady. She exhaled. He was breathing, but the sedative was doing its job.

“Neck and back,” she said, her voice cracking, her head going light. Her hands shook as she touched his head, without moving his neck, but checking as best she could for blood or head trauma.

“Johnny,” Rose said. She could barely fight the urge to scoop him up off the bed, to hold him. She clenched her teeth and began saying her invisible rosary, yet again.

Henry stepped in and reached for John’s legs.

Rose slapped back his hands. “Don’t touch him.”

Henry squeezed his eyes closed.

“Go do something,” she said. “Find us a way to a hospital.”

Henry glared as if his gaze could strip her mind of all the events except the one that Rose had forced John out into the night to deliver the booze and food to the scout.

Hours passed as everyone took turns dialing the phone to no avail.

Rose paced beside Johnny’s bed, watching to be sure he kept breathing. She hated herself for not coming here first. How could she not have sensed the danger? Had she been that angry at him for disobeying her? Nothing she could do would fix this. In her gut lay heavy regret, knowledge that Johnny’s accident was her fault. And for the first time in well over a decade she realized she was not the person she had wanted to be.

Sunday, October, 31, 1948

B
y 5:30 am Rose had fallen asleep, kneeling at Johnny’s bedside. Johnny stirred and wakened her. She pushed up from kneeling, feeling as though her joints had been welded into that folded position, and noticed Henry asleep beside her. Rose patted Henry on the arm, wakening him.

“Mum?” Johnny’s scratchy voice sounded. She turned and bent over, hands on knees, resisting the urge to move him or encourage him to move. Johnny tried to straighten his body.

“No, no, no, no…don’t move anything, Johnny. We’ll give you more sedative.”

Johnny squeezed his eyes shut; his face contorted in what was clearly unbearable pain.

“Shhh, shhh, shhh. Now, Johnny Pavlesic.” Rose bent her head down and gripped Johnny’s hand. She began to talk to herself. He would be fine. Just because he hadn’t moved his lower body all night didn’t mean he couldn’t. Rose would not be dolly doom, she would wait to hear what the doctors said.

“Lay still,” Rose told him. “It’s morning. Dicky’ll run for the Doc and we’ll get a truck and get you into Pittsburgh or Charleroi. Something…just don’t move.”

Johnny’s forehead wrinkled up as his breathing quickened and grew shallow. She realized he didn’t understand the extent of his injuries.

Rose tried to focus on her nursing protocols. How much sedative could he tolerate? She’d forgotten to ask Dottie what she gave him. She didn’t want to overdose him. But, she couldn’t process anything useful in terms of alleviating her son’s pain.

A barrage of feet barreling down the hall drew Rose’s attention.

Bonaroti stood in the doorway with Henry and, of all damn people, Adamchek. Why? Rose spread her hands in front of her, signaling she was ready for information.

Adamchek stepped into the room explaining he rigged his truck. Rose searched his face for some malice, for some reason for wanting to see the Pavlesic family at its worst. Instead, Rose saw concern in his eyes. She would take his offer of help, even if he had accused Johnny of throwing a game just the day before.

They quickly removed a door from the Witchey’s bedroom and in smooth, balanced moves, used the bed sheets to hoist Johnny onto the door. Everyone in the house removed his belt and used them as rope extensions to strap Johnny to the makeshift stretcher.

Rose opened the front door and poked her head into the darkness, the usual mill sounds mixed with groaning tugboats. As they exited the house, Rose noticed the smog had grown even coarser since the night before, as if it contained sand. Rose moved her tongue over the roof of her mouth, feeling the moist, graininess fill her nose and lungs.

She prayed this damn air wasn’t making it difficult for Johnny to breathe. She did not want him gasping for air, causing his spine more trauma. They all held a section of the makeshift stretcher and shuffled toward the steps, blindly feeling with their feet, moving down the steps to the truck. Rose and the others slid the door and Johnny onto the truck bed and they exhaled in unison, relieved it didn’t look as though they’d inflicted more damage.

Rose and Henry climbed into the truck bed with Johnny. Bonaroti came around the back and closed the back hatch gently while Adamchek bent over, hands on knees, huffing.

“I’m sorry it took me so long to get here, Hen, Rose.” Bonaroti met Henry’s gaze then Rose’s before reaching across the hatch to straighten the blanket over Johnny’s legs.

“Six-thousand calls in the last few days,” Bonaroti said, shaking his head. “Six-thousand sick residents. Our friends and family…yesterday’s council meeting yielded nothing—” Bonaroti coughed into his hand, his glasses flopping forward on his nose.

Adamchek straightened, but didn’t look at any of them. Of course he’d be defensive that Bonaroti was still harping on that. Rose glared at Adamchek, wanting to berate him for his idiocy. He was one of the people who spoke up for the mills at all times. But, Adamchek had lost his typical bravado, slumped around the side of the truck and got inside. Rose continued to stare at the back of his head through the window separating the truck bed from the cab.

Bonaroti’s hand covered Rose’s and he squeezed it.

“He sided with us, Rose. He wanted the mills to shut down. I sent you home before he had a chance to speak. Later I ran into him helping folks. When we got the call from Tish, well, he nearly collapsed. I thought it was his heart—all that fat finally sucking the life right out of him. Bonaroti glanced at Adamchek. “But he wasn’t having a heart attack. He was suffering from empathy. Hard to believe. Insisted on finding a way to get Johnny down to Mercy Hospital. Said he’d want someone to do it if it were his son. He’s barely spoken a word since.”

Bonaroti shouted up to Adamchek. “Ready, head on down to Mercy.” Adamchek started the engine. The truck began to pull away.

Bonaroti shouted, stabbing his finger in the direction of the mills below them. “Wait!”

Everyone turned to look, squinting into the fog.

“Well I’ll be damned,” Bonaroti said.

Rose got on her knees to get a better view. Henry craned to see. It was as if God had reached down from Heaven and pressed the switch to off, and the mills stopped. The great bursts of blast-oven fire fell back to the ground, and with that the endless sound of nails firing, metal being flattened, sheared and shaped stopped for the first time Rose could remember. Donora was silent instead of a cacophony of industrial sounds that had become part of their every day existence, background noise that passed for them, as quiet.

Bonaroti’s mouth fell open and he pushed his glasses back up on his nose. “They did it. Took the mills to a dead heat. I’ll be damned.”

With that Bonaroti took off down the hill, and finally Adamchek drove them to the hospital, inching along as if they were out on a scenic drive, working through the fog. Rose and Henry talked to John, telling him stories of the day he and Magdalena were born, his first birthday, the way Magdalena and he were inseparable until fifth grade.

Gales of wind licked their faces and lifted Johnny’s hair. Rose brushed it back as it blew back across his forehead. She locked on Johnny’s gaze, talking, hoping they’d reach the hospital before her retelling of Johnny’s life-story reached this horrid day.

* * *

Rose and Henry arrived home from the hospital a little before noon, Sunday, Halloween Day. Once their cab crossed the Donora border, the fog welcomed them like wayward children. Back inside the darkness Rose felt her environment matched her life again.

Rose, seated in the passenger seat of a taxi, churned a stew of dismay and sorrow at her son’s position, anger at everyone, God included.

“Mills are still down,” Henry said.

Rose looked out the window.

“Still foggy,” Henry said. “Maybe it wasn’t the mills.”

Rose didn’t want to hear a word about anything other than her son.

Rose rubbed her lower back as she shuffled out of the car. The voices of the doctors describing Johnny’s injuries and his protocol for treatment played through her mind. The doctor explained that while Johnny was directing Dicky’s car through the smog by walking in front of it, the second car came out of the darkness like a shot. In an attempt to get out of the way of two cars, Johnny wrenched his body at the wrong angle and Dicky hit him, compressing the spinal cord, but not severing it. The cord wasn’t severed, even when Dottie Shaginaw pulled him back out of traffic. But, it appeared to be bruised. And, sometimes that was enough to ruin a fella’s chance of ever walking again.

There was no way for the doctors to discern if the damage was permanent at this point. Paralyzed from the waist down. Rose straightened against the words—each one piercing her heart like nails firing into wood. She wanted to believe it wasn’t true, but she had to prepare herself for the chance that it was. Eventually the words would be part of who Johnny was. Until then, Rose, herself, may as well have been paralyzed.

Henry pulled Rose close, arm around her shoulder, holding her up as they moved up the yard to the side door of their stuffy little home. She was too tired to push him away. They passed the Tucharoni’s kitchen window and Rose glimpsed Mrs. Tucharoni’s coal-black hair, her grave expression telling Rose she had heard about Johnny.

On the steps outside the door, Rose and Henry stopped and looked into the sky. Rose dropped her head back, and felt it hit her cheeks. Tiny pricks of water that quickly turned to drops of rain, drenching them. Rose started to choke, leaving her to wonder what exactly she was choking on.

* * *

At the kitchen table, Rose sat, head in hands, feet sticking to the linoleum floor Sara Clara hadn’t cleaned. The smell of coffee filled her nose. She wished for a time when that smell alone was comforting, when she might have given a shit if the floor was clean.

Her body was tired, weighted down with anxiety, fear, worry. She couldn’t sleep, and the only thing that she could do was recite her rosary, and wait for the doctors to call.

Meanwhile, the news traveled around town and up the hillsides as the smog dissolved and blew out of town with miraculous winds. The weather had shifted, and lifted the giant lid off the hillside that cupped the valley, the combination of rain and wind cleansing Donora. The air was as clear as the residents had ever seen it. But, remnants of the smog still clung to the insides of people’s lungs causing calls to continue pouring through phone lines. At least people could now leave town and head to a hospital. Nearly seven thousand people were sickened over those five days; nineteen had died.