Forgiven (24 page)

For my part, I carried several things, but the largest was my Blue Boy. As we marched up the hill, herded by our soldiers, I turned and looked back. The conflagration had reached the lower part of the street. I could see now that Miss Everts’s house would burn in the night.

It seemed that all San Francisco would burn, and it wasn’t over yet.

Chapter
THIRTY-THREE

April 19–22, 1906

 

 

 

 

FIRE PURIFIES, SO THEY SAY. ASHES TO ASHES.

I’d seen fires in Yellowstone, mostly in the late summer and fall, when things got dry. Flames would jump from treetop to treetop with the slightest spark, and burst like exploding candles. I’d seen the pillars of smoke that rose into the air, towered into the air like thunderclouds lit beneath by a hellish red. There’s no stopping a wildfire when it gets going. Only nature can bring a change that will turn the tide.

My pa, he’d pack us up and out of the forest before a wildfire. “There’s no safe place here until the snow falls, boys.”

With the mains broken, there was no water to fight the fires here in San Francisco. The weather was hot and dry and unseasonable, and the fires made their own grim weather.

There’d be no stopping these fires, not without a miracle.

We left Miss Everts’s and kept walking, until, footsore and exhausted, we arrived at the marina at the north end of Van Ness. There we set down a makeshift camp in the park adjacent. Miss Everts had brought blankets and quilts, and by scrounging for rope, the men were able to rig a tent of sorts. Every one of the refugees there with us was kind, no matter their station. It seemed that ahead of the conflagration swept an epidemic of kindness.

We all waited and watched as San Francisco lifted in flames, like a brilliant phoenix, into the night sky.

The fires crawled up Nob Hill and consumed the home of Phillipa Everts. They consumed the home and all the artwork and papers and sketches of Sebastian Gable; I didn’t know where he was, but I hoped he was somewhere safe. The fires consumed mansions and tenements, brothels and castles. They consumed the palatial homes on Russian Hill and the side-by-sides of Telegraph Hill. We watched them all burn.

When the fire reached Miss Everts’s house, or thereabouts, as we could gather, I went and held her hand. We stood together staring out over the hellish scene.

She didn’t cry or fuss.

“Well,” she said, when it seemed the whole of her neighborhood was in flames. “Well, that’s that.”

All day and into the night Thursday, the east side of San Francisco burned. It burned hot through the vile, mean streets of the Barbary Coast, sending hundreds of miserable alleys to the heavens as a pillar of smoke.

The fires burned through Market and destroyed the Grand Opera House, where I had seen Caruso sing just two nights ago, and the Palace Hotel, where he slept; though Miss Everts heard from one of the police in the camp that he escaped with his life, all his costumes were lost. Not even the rich and famous were immune to the flames.

I stood next to David, our fingers entwined.

We watched the billowing smoke in the afternoon as it approached Van Ness Avenue, that broad street that lay like a river between us refugees and the flames. Soldiers came through to tell us to be ready to move again, to the west, ahead of the flames.

We stayed ready, waiting.

We all huddled together—orphan slave girls from China, Jameson, Miss Everts, David, and me—through the night Thursday while firefighters fought with blankets and shovels and single buckets drawn from the sea to keep the flames from crossing Van Ness.

On Friday morning, we were warned again. Buildings along the east side of the avenue were dynamited. The fire crested Russian Hill, taking the largest of mansions in its ceaseless hunger. It drove for us with a vengeance.

Midday Friday they came calling for volunteers. David and Jameson leaped up. We’d all readied for another evacuation and were waiting for directions.

I would not leave David’s side. “Miss Everts . . .”

“Go.” She shooed me away. “And please, Kula. My name is Phillipa.”

David, Jameson, and I ran together toward the avenue, me with my skirts hoisted right up. The firefighters needed men to haul hoses up from tugboats moored at the docks, to pump seawater. Jameson took off with a crowd to grab a section of hose.

David and I found ourselves with a pile of rugs and linens—Oriental carpets, finely woven; silk quilts—taken from some mansion, I was sure—and now we used them to beat out the embers that flew at us from the climbing columns of smoke and ash. For several hours we worked side by side, along with so many others. I smacked my small carpet of red-and-blue geometrics against the ground over and over until my shoulders screamed and the carpet was fraying and singed black and my lungs stung from the searing smoke.

It was sometime just past noon when the wind shifted. I could smell it. I stopped beating and stood, my eyes closed, and I turned my face west amid the beating and the shouting and I lifted up my face and smelled the sea, the cool sea breeze, pushing against us from the west. My spirits lifted as the temperature dropped.

“Look!” David grabbed my arm.

I turned. The fire was backdrafting—roaring back over itself, over the areas already scorched. A cheer went up from those around us. The fire was stopped at Van Ness by our sheer will and the gift of the shifting wind.

Great sections of the city were gone. All of the area south of Market: the entire evil Barbary Coast, Chinatown, Nob Hill, Russian Hill. The stinking alleyways of abuse and desperation were gone. The business district was gone. The palatial homes built by the nabobs of the 1849 Gold Rush were gone.

Miss Everts’s house was gone, too, and everything left in it.

Many, many thousands were gone, though we didn’t know it then. And we never knew how many, exactly, buried alive, burned to ash, souls who had no voice. Slave girls and lost sailors, desperate men and sorry women. Gone, forgotten, ash and smoke.

We stood in line for water and food, side by side with rich and poor, all patient, all kindly, all those who had lost everything. The woman in line in front of me was dressed in fine linen. Yesterday she’d owned a towering mansion on Russian Hill; today she was stripped clean of everything save the clothes on her back. Yet she shrugged, laughed. The cheerful moods of each and every one were infectious.

Inside our little tent enclosure I was able to sponge off some of the grime and soot coating my hands and face and neck. Mei Lien plaited my hair again into my one long braid, and I stepped outside for air.

I sat on an upturned bucket in front of our little lean-to tent enclosure and listened to the whispers of the girls with us who spoke in their native tongue, realizing that I was hearing some of their voices for the first time. David came and sat next to me.

“It’s not over,” I said. “Not for me. I still have to find a way to help my father. He’s going to hang in a few days. If that box survived, it’s my only chance.” A heaviness drifted over me, an exhaustion more of the spirit than of the body, though my body was worn out. “Wilkie said Will had it. What if it’s gone? What will I do?”

“We need to find Will Henderson.”

My blood boiled. “Will Henderson.” I spat; I didn’t care how unbecoming it was. I was already a filthy, tattered mess. “He stole it. He stole the one thing that could save my father’s life, when he knew what it meant to me. When he knew it was killing my pa.”

David rested a hand on my arm. “Kula, I don’t think Will’s evil; he’s just rich and ignorant. We don’t know his side yet. There may be more to it.”

“How can you—” I bit my tongue. David was right. How often had I assumed one thing and been shown that there was another side? My father’s life still hung in the balance, but I knew Will was no Wilkie, no cold-blooded devil. “Fine. I’ll pretend he took it for some good purpose.”

David smiled, and I leaned my weary head on his shoulder. “Kula.” I heard him whisper my name, felt his breath as it stirred my hair, felt his arm lift over my shoulders and wrap me up.

I turned to him and kissed him then. It was a full kiss, given with my full heart.

He said, “We’ll have to wait for the morning. They’ve told us there’s a strict curfew. They’ll shoot to kill. The police chief has deputized new men all over the city, and some of them shouldn’t be carrying guns, much less making life-and-death decisions, so it won’t be safe at all now.”

I chafed, but there was no help for it. In point of fact, we were all so exhausted by the emotion and labor and the day’s doings that after a short supper of the potatoes and meats and stewed vegetables that had been given to us in the food line, we all fell to a dead sleep. Sometime in the night I awoke in our makeshift tent. After the hot days of the fires this night was chilly, and I was grateful for the warm blanket, but something had woken me.

Mei Lien, Yue, the three rescued girls, Phillipa, and I shared the tent; David and Jameson slept just outside the door, wrapped in blankets. The tent gaped, and I could see out into the night. Jameson sat up awake beside a small fire he’d set in the brazier over which we warmed our food.

He stared away from me, toward the smoldering, smoking city. Every so often he glanced toward the tent, then away again. Then he lifted his hand and opened a small portrait box, stared at it, shut it again.

Jameson looked at someone’s portrait, a portrait he treasured enough to save from the flames. A realization dawned. One that should have been obvious to me long before this.

The thoughts that flitted through my mind made me sad. I thought about my pa and what he’d lost when they took my mother away from him. About what it meant to love someone when the world thought that love improper.

The next day dawned bright, and although the fires to our east still smoldered, men were already busy clearing the streets. It seemed there was no hesitation about what must be done to bring the city back; there was no question of it. It was all anyone talked about in the camp: bring the city back. The other refugees around us were not weeping and moaning. In fact, sharing our misfortune brought us to sharing all our goods. We gave out our bread; we were given coffee. Even our girls and David were given their due.

But we still couldn’t venture into the city. Only a week remained before my father was due to hang. I needed to find Will—to find that box, if it still existed. I tried to keep busy, but my mind was never far from Pa, whose days were truly numbered.

Finally, on Sunday morning David and I were allowed to make our way back into the heart of the disaster, to see if we could find Will.

I fingered the key still hanging around my neck. So much had been destroyed in the quake, I was hoping beyond hope that the box had survived. The earthquake had opened a great gaping crevasse between my pa and me, and I had to make a leap over it now or lose him forever.

Chapter
THIRTY- FOUR

April 22, 1906

 

 

 

 

DAVID AND I WALKED DOWN VAN NESS IN THE DIRECTION of Market to the Henderson mansion. It was odd how open and visible the streets were now that we could see across the landscape bereft of trees and buildings. The sad naked exposure tugged at my heart.

It had rained in the night—too late to save much of the city—and what fires remained were now largely quenched.

The Henderson mansion itself, so recently the site of my awkward debut into society, was nothing but a set of four stone walls, all of it burned out from within, its windows now like gaping eyes framing shifting, ghosting gray ash.

We stared at the ruin in silence. I thought about the artworks that had perished, the three stories of furnishings collected from all over the world, the personal treasures, the mementoes. The Hendersons had lost so much, like everyone else. I thought about Will, and that smile.

I touched David’s hand, as if to remind myself that not every man would betray me.

As if thinking brought him to life, Will came from over the hill. He walked quickly toward us, with purpose, already lifting his hand as if to surrender or explain.

It should have been me who flew at him, but it was David. David lashed out at Will with both fists raised, facing him down with barely contained anger. “Why?”

Will spread his hands. His face was pale, his clothes tattered. Dark circles rimmed his eyes, and his hands shook. His eyes met mine, and all I saw there was grief. Nothing remained of the cocky, self-sure, rich young man I’d known.

I didn’t care how much he’d suffered. “You stole my father’s only hope!”

Will gestured, a fluttering movement. “Kula, I already told you. My father had been looking for that box for years. He said he needed it. He told me it was life or death. I had to.”

“
My
father’s life depends on that box, not yours! Did you even open it? Did you see what it was that was worth Pa’s life?” If the box had been in this house, it was gone, and my father was doomed. I kicked at a rock, sending it skittering into the remains.

“I didn’t open it. And it might have survived,” Will said softly.