Dark Tide (23 page)

Now, standing very still in the darkness outside of his home, Giuseppe listened, praying that he would hear Pasqualeno’s thin, excited voice calling to him, the boy’s enthusiastic greeting when Giuseppe returned from work. Giuseppe would give his own life to hear his son once more.

But all he heard were scattered gunshots from the wharf as the police put down more trapped horses.

He drew a deep breath, and thought he would faint from the overwhelming, sickeningly sweet smell of molasses that hung thick in the air. Did the disaster only happen hours ago? He felt as though he had been walking, searching, for many days. He recalled Maria’s hysterical screams after the tank had burst, her words filled with heartache, and it seemed to him as though they had been spoken a long time ago.
My son is lost! Pasqualeno is lost!

Exhausted and disconsolate, he trudged up the dark stairs and stepped into the house. Maria was waiting for him, her black eyes rimmed red from crying. Neither of them spoke—he had come home alone, and that said everything. He reached for her then and brought her close, enfolded her in his arms, whispered to her gently as she trembled like a wounded bird, felt her broken heart beating against his own, the two of them sharing the unspoken fear that, like Pasqualeno, they, too, were lost.

EIGHT

Veronica Barry clutched her sister Mary’s arm as the two women left the chaotic hallways of the Haymarket Relief Station and slipped into the quiet dimness of their father’s room. John Barry lay motionless in his bed, moaning softly, a single lightbulb near his head casting a pale yellow glow across his upper body. His two daughters inched closer, Mary leading, Veronica at her elbow as they reached the foot of the bed. Veronica heard her sister gasp, “Father! What … ?” and she felt Mary go limp against her, nearly falling to the floor, before Veronica caught her under her arms. Veronica dragged Mary to a chair next to the bed, propped her up, lifted her head, gently slapped her face. “Mary, Mary, wake up, please wake up,” she said. Mary groaned, her eyes fluttered open, she looked at her sister in horror.

“Mary, what is it? What’s wrong?” Veronica asked.

“Is it father?” Mary asked. “Is it father? Look at him. I don’t
know
him.”

Veronica swung around then, gazed at her father, so she could see what Mary had seen, though a part of her was afraid to look. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the pale light, but within a moment, as she moved closer to her injured father, she saw what had shocked her sister’s system.

John Barry’s upper torso was uncovered. His neck, shoulders, and chest were black from severe bruising, his abdomen and arms covered with lacerations. He looked as though he had been beaten repeatedly. The horrible extent of these injuries made her despair about what she could
not
see beneath the sheets; she knew from the doctor that her father’s legs and back were badly damaged. Veronica looked at her father’s face, now drawn and haggard. And his hair, which had been dark brown when he left the house early this morning, had turned snowy white. The strong fifty-six-year-old stonecutter looked like a broken seventy-six-year-old man, lying helplessly in the bed.

Her father moaned, stirred slightly, but did not waken. Veronica stared at him, the man who had become a stranger since morning—his disfigured body, his aged face, his white hair. She knew rescuers had pulled her father from under the firehouse, but that didn’t seem to tell the whole story.

“What happened under there?” she whispered, tears welling in her eyes.

Neither Kittie Callahan nor her cousin, Mary Doherty, could ever remember seeing John Callahan cry. Now, though, tears streamed down John’s face, as the forty-three-year-old paver for the City of Boston writhed in pain from a fractured pelvis. Molasses streaked his face and congealed around his mouth. The black liquid spilled onto the pillow beneath his head, and his wife, Kittie, could see that his hair was saturated with molasses.

“I need water to wash the molasses off,” John Callahan whispered. “Please wash me off.” As Mary Doherty moved to leave the room and get water, John said, “No, please, I want Kittie to go.”

With his wife out of the room, John motioned Mary Doherty closer. “I am in terrible agony,” he said, “in my ribs and my body. I feel like I am all squashed. I don’t think I will make it. I don’t want her to know right now. She needs to be strong for little John.”

“John, what happened?” Mary asked.

“I was reading a paper before lunch when the tank burst. It came on me like a wave at the sea. It crushed me and pinned me to the ground. I was buried in six feet of molasses. I was able to clear my mouth and find an air pocket and scream. Firefighters dug me out. They brought me here. I had $10 and a set of rosary beads when they brought me in. Promise me that Kittie will get them.”

“But, John, they may be able to do something.”

“No. I am feeling terribly—I can’t stand the suffering much longer. I’m sinking fast. Now promise you’ll take care of Kittie.”

“I promise, John,” Mary Doherty said.

Twenty-one-year-old Ralph W. Martin, a teamster and driver for Dolan Meats and Provision, was hanging practically upside down when his mother and father, Catherine and Michael, visited him at the relief station. Firefighters had unearthed Ralph from beneath a pile of debris at the wharf. Now, rigged up in a traction device called a Bradford Frame, his feet were high in the air, held fast by ropes and pulleys, and his bandaged head rested on the pillow, almost as if he were standing on his head. Michael and Catherine stood on either side of Ralph’s bed, noticing the molasses on his ears and his face.

“Please, Mom, Dad,” Ralph sobbed. “Please. The pain is terrible. You have to ask them to change my position so I can get relief.” Michael watched as Ralph clutched at his mother’s dress, gritted his teeth, rolled his eyes.

“Ma and Pa,” Ralph said. “I guess I’ll be all right, do you think? Will I? It’s tough, but we’ll beat it.”

Neither parent spoke, but Michael Martin thought that he had never seen a person suffering as much as his son was now. There was no way he could beat pain like this.

Peter Francis’s son, William, raced to the Haymarket Relief Station from nearby Scollay Square in time to hear a priest from St. Mary’s Church in the North End administering last rites to his father.

“I am prepared to meet my God,” William heard his father say. “There are other men hurt worse than I am, and I would ask you to attend to them first.” Peter Francis moaned in pain, a sure sign to his son that he was seriously injured. “He was a man who never complained,” William said. “I knew by his groaning that he was injured too badly to ever recover.” Years later, though, it was not his father’s moans that haunted William, but the grinding of the hardening molasses in his father’s clothes every time he moved.

Peter Francis died minutes after his son’s arrival at the relief station.

Death’s pall clung to the relief station throughout the night, as the screams of dying men echoed off corridor walls stained with blood and molasses. James McMullen, John Barry, John Callahan, and Ralph Martin, all with terrible injuries, fought to stay alive, and there were others who did the same. Patrick Breen, a forty-eight-year-old teamster for the City of Boston Paving Department, who was hurled into Boston Harbor by the molasses wave and rescued by sailors aboard the USS
Nantucket
, hung by a thread with pneumonia and infection that had developed from fractured ribs and a serious leg injury. Peter Curran, whose team of hogs had been crushed by the molasses, was dragged from the flood and now lay at the relief station with broken ribs, back and chest injuries, and a severe shock to the nervous system from which doctors were not sure he would ever recover.

Others were identified and shipped to Dr. George Burgess Magrath’s North Mortuary deep into the night. William Brogan, fifty-seven, a teamster for the paving department, stayed alive long enough for his wife, Ellen, to reach him at the relief station, before he succumbed to a fractured skull. His wife’s last memory of him was the pain in her husband’s eyes as he pawed at the bandages that swathed his head, as though tearing them off could ease his suffering. John Seiberlich, sixty-nine, a blacksmith for the City of Boston, suffered a fractured skull and a compound fracture of the femur when the wave caught him about fifty feet from the tank. He died at the relief station shortly thereafter. And the oldest flood victim—even older than Bridget Clougherty and John Sieberlich—seventy-eight-year-old Michael Sinnott, a messenger who was caught on the wharf during lunch hour, died at just past 11
P.M.
on January 15, from multiple injuries, including a fractured skull, a fracture of the tibia, and severe shock.