Ashes of Fiery Weather (26 page)

For over a year now, they'd been organizing, promoting some men, firing and hiring others, by the new training guidelines. The men kept repeating the rumors: Firemen would have to be United States citizens. They would have to be able to read and write in English, even if they'd already been on the job for years. My father would no longer be a district engineer but a chief of battalion. The company numbers were all changing. They had to, so they'd be different from companies in Manhattan and Queens and so on, but the men swore they'd never give up their name, the Glory Devlins.

I understood. The nuns at school told me, “Your name is Anne, like the mother of Our Lady.” But I was not Anne, I was Annie-Rose. If I was named for two, and I thought I might have been, I don't know who they were. My mother wouldn't say. The potatoes died. There was nothing to eat.

Annie-Rose. I liked that it was a flower, but even more that it was a verb.

Annie rose. Annie got up. Annie went away.

There'd been talk of renaming our city East New York, but as of that night, it seemed that Brooklyn would stay Brooklyn. My father said he was lucky the new department was keeping him instead of forcing him to retire. My mother said that it was hardly luck. The Fire Department of New York, or whatever the hell they would be calling it, needed him. The men in charge could complain all they wanted about the wild Brooklyn boys and fistfights at fires and drinking too much on duty, but what did they know across the river about our buildings and the way our streets ran, where the trouble happened? Exactly nothing.

Before the Civil War, the fire department had been volunteer, so of course the men all had other jobs. (My father was a carpenter.) A lot of the fire laddies were told to go to hell when the city decided it needed professional firemen who would do nothing but fight fires, but my father was one of those hired on to Brooklyn's paid department in 1865. Now, Consolidation, and he was saved again. Yet officers' families were no longer permitted to live above quarters. All visitors to the firehouse would be required to check in. Women and girls would be forbidden to go past the patrol desk.

“What are we, priests?” my father snapped when he heard this.

But the Fire Department of New York—the
FDNY
—was going to be run like the army, and we were being evicted. We didn't know exactly when, or where we'd go.

So on the last night of the City of Brooklyn, Bridie poured herself a second whiskey and sat again with a sigh. I sipped mine and tried to keep my face from contorting.

Then he was there, Jamesey Walsh, not in the room with us but on the threshold between the big room and the kitchen. He often stayed in doorways, at the tops of stairs. I never saw him, but I knew when he was there. Me, alive thirteen years, and him, dead exactly that long.

“What is it?” Bridie asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Stop fidgeting, then.”

She knew as well as I did that ghosts were real, but if I told her, she would say to stop making myself important. If he was there, he wasn't there for me.

Oh, but he was.

Jamesey Walsh died the night I was born. He didn't leap out a window to get away from a fire. A roof didn't come down on him. A floor didn't buckle and collapse, dropping him into the flames. The rig didn't take a turn too fast, throwing him onto the cobblestones, breaking open his skull. He didn't fall off and then under the rig for the horses to trample. A trolley didn't fail to stop and slam into the engine. None of the usual things.

For a penny, the midwife in the parish, Eliza Brown, would tell the children she delivered about the day they were born. On my tenth birthday, I paid the fee and sat down to listen in the flat she shared with a man she said was her cousin.

December 28, 1884, was a bitter night. Ten days earlier, the men had responded to a fire at St. John's Orphan Asylum. By the time they arrived, the nearer companies had been at work for almost ten minutes. The fire was still out of control.

A nun had fallen from the roof trying to get to the fireman's ladder. The orphan boys of the asylum were freezing in the street, having run or been pulled from the building into the cold. They were dressed at least. Had it been nighttime, it would have been much worse.

For days afterward, firemen went through the debris searching for victims. Jamesey was one of the many who volunteered to do so on their day off. The bodies were in bad, bad shape. Burned. In pieces. The dead had all been patients in the infirmary. The fire started in a room right below it. Because the boys who had been elsewhere had all gotten out, it was decided that the few who remained unaccounted for must have run away.

The funeral was held on December 27. The remains of the twenty-one dead boys fit into three coffins.

For the whole day of the twenty-seventh, Bridie Cavanaugh Devlin labored. She was forty-five and never had a baby before. She had never even miscarried; she said she hadn't.

I wasn't born until close to two a.m., December 28, and at that time, Jamesey Walsh got up out of bed and stumbled toward the firehouse pole, more than half asleep. He fell to the apparatus floor and broke his neck. The company swore to a man that Jamesey had not had much to drink that night. But since St. John's, he'd been having nightmares. They said more than once, he thought he'd heard a cry from the ruins of the building, even though it was clear after the first day that nobody was alive in there. Possibly he heard the infant (me) crying and had turned one urgent sound into another. Eliza told me about the shouts and the sound of running feet and how she thought that the firehouse itself was burning.

From her childbed, my mother sewed Jamesey's mourning ribbons. One was given to the mayor of Brooklyn, one to my father as district engineer, and the third was sent to the Walsh family in County Meath, along with a letter from my mother, dictated to one of the wives, an American girl chosen not only because she could write but also because she was barely twenty, and would have been too scared of my mother to argue with her. Bridie told the Walshes that Jamesey died of injuries suffered while saving the life of a little girl.

He had indeed pulled a child from a tenement two weeks before, and my mother sent the clipping from the newspaper. The article, which appeared the day after the fire, did not give the girl's name. That girl had died of her burns after three days, but Bridie let her live. She wrote that Chief Devlin and his wife had a baby that night. If it had been a boy, she would have been James, but since she was a girl, they'd called her after the child he'd saved. Annie-Rose.

My father was furious when he found out, but Bridie said the mother in Meath would never know the truth. It was better for her to see her son as a hero rather than as a drunk or a fool.

I thought a lot about Jamesey Walsh and me passing by each other as he went out of this world and I came into it. I think we spoke a little. I knew things about him that I couldn't have otherwise. There were two boys in his family, his older brother and himself, at either end of their sisters. He'd wanted the girl his brother married. And his older brother would inherit the farm. Jamesey didn't want his brother to die, but thought if he ever did, he, Jamesey, would wait one year and one day and go home and ask the widow to marry him. He didn't much miss Ireland otherwise, and wouldn't go back but for her.

I was not allowed on the apparatus floor, but sometimes when the company was out, I went outside to look at the plaque they'd put up in memory of James Walsh. I touched the date of his death, my birthday.

Eliza didn't take my penny. She told me to put it in the box in the church for the soul of poor Jamesey Walsh.

I sipped more of the whiskey. I was getting used to the taste. My throat was warm. I turned around again, certain tonight I'd see Jamesey Walsh, but I didn't. He was still there, though, waiting for something.

“Jamesey liked colcannon,” my mother said, surprising me.

I thought that unlike me, she could actually see him.

Bridie sipped her whiskey and said, “Maybe I'll make it for them all tomorrow.”

The men with mothers or wives or sisters went home for their meals in shifts, but at any given time in our firehouse—in any firehouse, I guess—there were Irish boys who were alone in the city. They hadn't married yet or they were the sort who never would. My mother didn't have to, she had no obligation, but she cooked a meal once a day, and they were grateful. Usually there were between four and six of them. They'd come through the door, ducking their heads as they greeted my mother, who terrified them, and they took their seats at the two tables we pushed together and covered with our second-best cloth. I helped with the cooking, but once, when I picked up a dish to carry it out, Bridie bruised the back of my hand with the spoon she was holding.

“You are not Irish,” she said. “You are not a maid.”

Often, the men had to get up and go, leaving the food on the table. They'd come back, sometimes hours later, to finish. My mother always offered to reheat the food, but they'd refuse because the odds were good they'd just have to go again. “Ah, no, no, Mrs. Devlin,” said Healy, their spokesman, “you've gone to enough trouble.”

“Colcannon?” I asked now.

“Potatoes and cabbage,” Bridie answered.

I was disappointed. It sounded pretty in the way the names of Irish towns did. “But—”

“It's all mixed together like.”

“Oh,” I said. That didn't make it any more interesting. I decided not to ask any more questions. If she did make it, I'd see then.

Then the bells went off and I ran to the front window, dizzy from the whiskey, to watch the company leave. Bannon opened the big doors and leaped on the back of the rig as Flossie and Fancy shot by him, hardly needing to be directed. I once told my friend Mary Clark at school how the number of rings signaled the area where the fire was, and the experienced horses knew where to go without being told, because they counted the rings. She didn't believe me.

I crossed myself. My father told me I'd put a dent in my forehead if I did this every time the company went out on a run. But Bridie, who understood that I was praying for the men of the Glory Devlins, not for whoever they were off to rescue, told me that there was no point in praying for firemen. They'll come back or they won't, and they know it.

“The streets must be icy,” I said before she could repeat this. The weather was a mix of rain and snow and fog.

She said nothing in response and I slipped back into my chair, reciting the Hail Mary behind closed lips. The Glory Devlins wouldn't return soon. After they put out the fire, they'd head right to Halloran's up the street. Firemen were allowed to go into any saloon they wanted while on duty as long as they didn't sit down to drink. Halloran had installed an alarm gong on the wall behind the bar so the men would know if they had a run.

My father had already warned the men that Consolidation was going to change this.

My mother looked toward the window as though considering the night. Then she turned and stared into our contained fire. I expected her to pick up the discarded sewing, but she didn't.

Instead, she told me that there was a storm on the day she was born. The wind was such that it seemed that the mountain itself might be swept into the sea.

“The mountain?” I repeated, and she said what sounded like “sleeve” and then the boy's name Kieran. Sleevekieran.

I repeated it madly to myself so I could find it on a map later, to see that it was a place in the world. The potatoes died. There was nothing to eat.

Bridie went on talking. The day was January 6, 1839, and it was said that a war was fought between the English faeries and the Irish faeries and the Irish won. That was how she knew it was a story, the Irish winning. But of course there was no war, only the worst storm to hit Ireland in centuries.

I held my whiskey, now warm from my hand, and wondered if I was dreaming. Bridie hardly ever talked of Ireland, but when she did, she used half sentences with so many possible endings that I could never guess them all.

“The sixth of January,” I said, to keep her talking. “The Feast of the Epiphany?”

She said it was that, yes, but also the day for women to rest after all the work of the Christmas holidays. “
Nollaig na mBan,
” Bridie said.

That was Irish, the old language. Bridie claimed to have forgotten all but a few words, but she and my father spoke it in the night. It had a peculiar sound, like a talking song, and moved so quickly I could never tell the end of one word from the beginning of the next. I supposed most of the time she held the words somewhere inside her, perhaps in her womb, which had produced only me, but too late for her to ever be happy. The potatoes died. There was nothing to eat.

Bridie bent over and picked up her sewing. I sat miserably, trying to think of a way to lead her back to the story.

Before I could, we heard a knock on our apartment door. It might be one of the neighborhood boys, to report that something had happened at the fire, but the Mulgren brothers or the O'Leary boy would have run up the stairs like a lunatic. Whoever was out there had arrived soundlessly.

“Is it the living or the dead?” Bridie called, as she always did to a knock on the door.

“The man in between.”

“Ah.” My mother nodded at me to answer the door. I opened it. Jarlath Reliable, the coffin maker, was the man my father used to work for.

Within a year of coming to America, my father was referred to Jarlath for work, as one Galway man to another. At first my father made deliveries, himself and his partner carrying coffins through the streets to the homes of the dead. Later, he assisted with the coffin making. My father told stories of setting coffins down in the street and running to an alarm. His partner was a fireman too. Jeremiah McGlory, from Donegal. The coffins were always there when he and Jeremiah went back for them, often set carefully aside, off the sidewalk. A coffin was a thing of bad luck, and that kept some thieves away, but it was a time when anything that could be stolen and sold would be. But Jarlath was a man respected and, even more so, feared.