Dark Tide (17 page)

Peter Curran walked his two-horse team into the Commercial Street wharf yard, the fifteen hogs he had just picked up from the New England Beef Company on nearby Clinton Street squealing and snorting in the wagon behind him. He backed the wagon carefully into the Bay State Railway shed, coaxed the hogs out of the truck and onto the platform, and presented the receiving clerk with the bill of lading. As the two men talked, Peter Curran felt the ground shake and heard a roar. The hogs squealed louder and huddled closer, becoming a single mass of pink-brown flesh jiggling on the platform. Curran turned to look, convinced by the tremor and the noise that a Commercial Street elevated train had jumped the track and plunged to the street below …

U.S. Navy gunner’s mate Robert Henry Johnston stood on the deck of the
Bessie J.
talking to two other sailors about the work the men had completed that morning. Since the armistice had been signed, the Navy—in this case, Johnston and his mates—was stripping a number of small boats of their ordnance and armaments. These smaller craft pulled alongside the
Bessie J
., and all morning, Johnston had been removing guns and ammunition so that the boats could be decommissioned. They had just taken a breather and were about to eat lunch, when Johnston, facing the Commercial Street wharf, heard a rumble and began shouting at the top of his lungs …

Twenty-year-old Walter Merrithew, a freight clerk for the Boston & Maine Railroad Company, walked under the covered platform at the Number Three freight shed on the Commercial Street wharf. He saw Ryan, the deaf mute laborer employed by the railroad, stacking crates and preparing them for shipment. Merrithew didn’t envy the fellow, unable to hear a word or make a single sound. Ryan worked hard, but could never join in the banter with the fellows on the docks and loading platforms, an activity Merrithew considered the best part of the job. Even now, Merrithew could hear boisterous laughter from the cellar of the freight shed, where other men were storing boxes and barrels that had arrived from ships and would be transported by train up and down the East Coast. It was laughter that Ryan could not hear and could not share.

Merrithew paused for a moment in the doorway, his bulk cutting the light. Ryan looked up as the shadow crossed his face. At that moment, Merrithew heard a long rumbling sound behind him, similar to the passing of an elevated train over Commercial Street, only louder.

Then something happened that Merrithew would never forget. The deaf mute, the boy Merrithew had never heard utter a sound, pointed a trembling finger in Merrithew’s direction, but
beyond
him, and let out a long, painful screech that sliced through to Walter Merrithew’s soul …

Babe Ruth was complaining again and the boys at the Engine 31 firehouse found it laughable. The Boston Red Sox star, who had led his team to a World Series victory over the Chicago Cubs in October, was threatening to retire to his forty-acre farm in nearby Sudbury if his demands for a big salary increase were refused by the team. Ruth earned $7,000 in 1918, four or five times more than most firefight-ers, for playing a
game,
Bill Connor scoffed as he dealt a hand of lunchtime whist. Plus, the Sox ace had earned another $1,100 for his winning World Series share. “We should all be so lucky,” he said to his fellow players around the table—firefighters Fred McDermott, Nat Bowering, and Paddy Driscoll—and to George Layhe and the stonecutter, John Barry, both of whom were watching the friendly card game.

The firefighters played whist almost every lunch hour, and Barry enjoyed the visits, found that the hour passed pleasantly. Sometimes he joined the games, but mostly he filled his pipe, relaxed, and talked with the guys, about sports, like today, or about politics or what was happening around the city. Today he had felt a chill outside, despite the warm-up in temperature, so he welcomed the warmth of the firehouse during the noon hour.

Connor had just finished dealing another hand when the men heard a tremendous crashing noise, a sound Barry later described as a “roaring surf” and one Connor likened to a runaway two-horse team smashing through a fence. Driscoll, who was closest to the window, jumped from his chair and looked out onto the wharf. “Oh my God!” he shouted to the other men, who were already scrambling. “Run!” …

Royal Albert Leeman, a brakeman for the Boston Elevated Railroad, stood in the front vestibule of the third car of the passenger train bound for North Station. He was working the 12:35 shuttle train out of South Station, traveling on elevated tracks above Commercial Street, a trip he had made hundreds of times before. The train, filled with midday shoppers and workers, had just made its stop at the Battery Street station and was chugging up to the big left-hand bend in the track near Copp’s Hill, traveling between fifteen and twenty miles per hour, on its way to North Station. Leeman looked out at the molasses tank and the harbor through the closed vestibule window as the train began its turn, its steel wheels screeching and straining against the rails. A moment later, he saw a black mass bearing down on him,
pushing
toward the elevated track, darkening the sky. As Leeman blinked in disbelief, his ears filled with the scream of tearing steel and, behind him, a thunderclap-like
bang!
Then he felt the overhead trestle buckle and his train start to tip …

A few moments later than she was supposed to, Teresa Clougherty tiptoed across the room and gently shook her brother, Martin, awake. He had less than an hour to get ready for his meeting. Their mother, Bridget, had lunch ready downstairs. Teresa turned away from the bed, caught movement through the window from the harbor area, and just as Martin murmured, “I’ll be right down,” she heard a deep growling sound, felt the house shaking, and was thrown to the floor …

Boston Police patrolman Frank McManus approached the call box on Commercial Street to make his regularly scheduled report to headquarters. It was the kind of day Frank McManus had been waiting for—warm and quiet. The temperature had climbed past 40 degrees, which was practically a heat wave after the previous few days. Aside from the danger of saboteurs during the war, and the noise the Italian anarchists were making even now, there was nothing he disliked more about walking the waterfront beat than the bone-chilling wind and dampness that numbed his fingers and toes, and burnished his face raw. Today, though, was like the arrival of an early spring, and there was an extra buoyancy in the activity around the wharf that McManus attributed to the unusually fine weather. Horses stepped lively as their teamsters drove them onto the wharf to deliver produce, beer, and leather goods. City workers sat outside the paving yard buildings, eating lunch and talking, and McManus heard occasional laughter carry across the street.

McManus picked up the call box and began his report to headquarters. A few words into it, he heard a machine-gun-like rat-tat-tat sound and an unearthly grinding and scraping, a bleating that sounded like the wail of a wounded beast. McManus stopped talking, turned, and watched in utter disbelief as the giant molasses tank on the wharf seemed to disintegrate before his eyes, disgorging an enormous wall of thick, dark liquid that blackened the sky and snuffed out the daylight.