Ashes of Fiery Weather (29 page)

The girls tugged the flags, and the men on top of the monument stood. The crowd, as one, took a breath, I think, at the sight of the four firemen in silhouette against the sky.

My father opened our house that evening. It was like him to skip the official reception and host his own party. Elizabeth found other girls her age, as relieved to be free of me as I was to be released from duty.

I could have hidden in my room, but the noise would have made trying to read or sleep pointless. One of the Glory Devlins, Bill Hegarty, and his brothers (his actual brothers) were Irish musicians, and they set up in a corner of the kitchen.

I went out to the backyard where it was quieter, though there were many people outside as well, smoking, drinking, talking, enjoying the warm evening. Summer was not entirely behind us yet.

I headed to the far corner, near the fence that separated our yard from the firehouse. If you stepped behind the tree there, you could not be seen from the house.

When I saw a man standing near the tree, smoking, it was too late to retreat without looking like a child running away. He was tall, with dark hair and a full mustache, indistinguishable from more than half the men filling our house, but still, I was sure I'd never seen him before. He greeted me, and I nodded.

“Nice night,” he said.

“Yes,” I said, stuttering slightly, which embarrassed me. “Especially after all the rain yesterday.”

“You're Paddy's daughter?”

I nodded.

“He gave you a name?”

“My mother did. It's Annie-Rose.”

“That's very pretty,” he said. “Jack Keegan.”

My hand twitched at my side, uncertain whether I should offer my hand to shake, but then he didn't offer his. I tugged at my skirt, then smoothed it. A silence fell. I looked around the yard, and every time I looked back at Jack Keegan his eyes were on me.

“You work in Brooklyn?” I said, desperate to fill the silence. We'd established that the weather was good. I couldn't plead a chill with any dignity. My shyness was already amusing him.

“Yeah.”

“Well,” I said, “I should get back inside.”

“Someone waiting for you?”

“No,” I answered. “It's just—late.”

He smiled. “You're not sleeping with that racket. Stay. Enjoy it with me.”

The Hegartys were playing a reel. Flustered, I looked past him, then down at the ground.

“I'm going to be twenty-nine,” I said.

I looked younger, to the point where I wasn't believed sometimes when I gave my age.

“Tomorrow?” Jack laughed.

I felt my face get hot. “No. December.”

“I've been told I was born in August.”

It was an invitation to ask what he meant. Told by whom? What had happened to his mother? I wanted to know, and at the same time understood that he was teasing me. The whole conversation, in fact, was occurring, I guessed, only because he'd been drinking (though he wasn't drunk) and he was a bit bored. He wore no wedding ring. There were probably a lot of girls here seeking his attention.

“I'm going to be a nun,” I said instead. “I'm going to enter the cloister.”

I had never said it out loud before. There was something childish about my words, and it scared me. Jack Keegan noticed, I think.

“What are you waiting for?” he asked.

“I have to wait until my parents are gone,” I said.

He frowned thoughtfully. “Most parents are happy when a girl's got a vocation.”

“They only have me.”

“You haven't told them?”

I shook my head.

“Don't. Paddy will live forever out of spite.”

At that, I laughed. I couldn't help it. “You know him, then?”

“He once tried to recruit me.” Jack nodded in the direction of the firehouse.

“What did you do to get his attention?” I asked.

“Maybe ten years ago, I got into some trouble at a fire. Not
in
the fire,” he said with a quick grin. “At the scene. The Lyons school?”

It took me a moment, but then I did remember it. The school was for Irish girls sixteen and older, and it was not run by the Church, which many did not care for. The students lived in. The temperature the night of the fire was below zero, and the firemen banged on the door of the closest house so the girls and their teachers could get inside and stay warm. The owner refused to let them in. Some of the firemen took exception. Another neighbor did open her home, and after the fire was out, some of the firemen returned to the first house.

“It was in the papers,” I said. “A fireman punched the man who owned the house when he came running out to see who was smashing all his windows.”

“That is what happened.” Jack grinned. “This gentleman went over to Paddy and told him he wanted the fireman who hit him to go to jail. Paddy told him all he had to do was identify the guilty party. He had seven of us line up, and Paddy said, ‘Which one struck you, sir?'”

“And he couldn't say.” I smiled wryly.

“Didn't even try.”

Seven mustached firemen, soot-streaked and probably still helmeted. Of course he couldn't say.

“Why didn't you come to the Glory Devlins?” I asked.

“I wasn't sure if there was room enough for both of us in one firehouse.”

I stared at him. “That's bold.”

Jack smiled.

“You were one of the men on top of the monument today?” I asked.

He'd been about to smoke but instead lowered the cigarette. “Yeah. How did you know? Did your father tell you that?”

My father once said there were some firemen who simply wanted in on the action, wherever, whatever it was. Jack Keegan seemed the type.

“No. It was just a guess,” I said. I was never
bold.

“A guess,” he repeated.

Jack's expression changed from the one of mild amusement he'd been wearing since we began talking to a frankly appraising stare. I'd surprised him. He pinched the end of his cigarette, extinguishing it.

A slow air was coming from our kitchen. I turned to look, as if I might see the notes drifting out the open window.

“Those are the Irish pipes,” Jack said. “Bagpipes are Scottish.”

“Well,” I said, backing away. “I, ah . . . Enjoy the rest of the night.” I turned and hurried across the yard.

“Annie-Rose!” Jack called.

He caught up to me and took my elbow. Last week, I'd stopped at Agnello's to buy bread for my mother, and the clerk's fingers had brushed mine as he handed me the package. I'd nearly grabbed his hand, just to hold it.

The palm of Jack's hand was warm. The palm of Jack's hand was the whole world.

When there is something to be done, there is a fireman who can do it. Whether it's building a new staircase in your house, shingling a roof, helping you move, shoveling your walkway after a snowstorm, illegally burying two little boys who died of influenza—look to a firehouse, any firehouse, in any borough of New York City.

Two of them came quietly into the bedroom carrying the coffin between them. If my father could have handled it alone, he would have, I knew. I never thought of him as old, but he was old that night. There were things he couldn't ask of Jack, the father.

Patrick Devlin knew no fireman would refuse another fireman who asked for help, not for his own sake or for the sake of his wife and children.

And so Chief Devlin went to Ryan and McGinty. Both were past fifty. One was a widower with no children, and the other was a bachelor. Their mothers had been gone a long time. My father sent them to Reliable's, where Frances and Lucy were working their hands raw to keep up with demand, but they hardly could. Their coffins were built to order, with a few kept above ground as samples of their work and quick sales for the few who wouldn't, or couldn't, wait. They'd learned the craft from their father, Jarlath, gone for years now, and kept his way of doing business.

The Reliable daughters gave Ryan and McGinty the only completed coffin they had left. It was shaped in the Irish style, with a Celtic cross engraved on the lid. Too small for a grown man but bigger than a typical child's coffin, it may have been for a child about to be no longer a child. Or a small woman. Both boys would fit in it. I would fit in it. Jack would not fit in it.

Ryan and McGinty set the coffin down in the middle of the room. Jack pulled me to my feet, away from the bed, hard enough to bruise my arms. My legs couldn't hold me, and he guided me into the chair that had been set by the sickbed, the one I'd given up for kneeling.

Bridie came into it then. The men retreated to drink in the kitchen, and she washed the boys with a white cloth dampened in water she'd heated on the stove. I was grateful. She could have used cold water. She touched the cloth to their cheeks and foreheads and noses. Nothing took the blue away. She washed the runnel of dried blood that left a trail from their ears down their necks and the one from their noses to their mouths. She ran the cloth over their hands and turned their hands over to stroke their palms, one by one by one by one. Down their legs and over the bottoms of their feet. She sent me to fetch a comb and the sewing basket. I brought them both back, and without a word to me, she took the scissors and snipped locks of their hair, tying Patrick's with green thread and John's with blue.

“J.J., blue. Paddy, green. Remember that,” she said.

Then she combed their hair, though she didn't lift their heads from the pillow to get the back. Patrick's hair always got so tangled. He was a restless sleeper. Bridie told me to pick what I wanted them to be wearing. I chose their Easter suits, which they'd worn when we had their photograph taken at the studio on Fulton Street this summer, a present for my father's birthday. They'd been about to outgrow them.

“There,” I said, fastening buttons and straightening collars after Bridie had dressed them. “There.”

Bridie called for the men.

Jack lifted them into the coffin. He laid them carefully beside each other. I put in a whistle for John, and for Patrick, one of his fire wagons. For them both, I put the rosary I'd gotten as a gift for my first communion. A full rosary. I entwined it in one hand each, binding them to each other.

The baby never stopped moving. I shoved at her, anchored when I wanted to be light, so I could follow the boys.

My mother took the comb to me and untangled the nest of my hair. I looked at it spread over my shoulders. There were gray strands. I didn't put it up and she didn't make me. She only pinned a black veil in my hair.

The half-moon night was the kind often found at the end of October, fresh and starry, threaded with both autumn and winter. Jack, my father, Ryan and McGinty carried the coffin on their shoulders. My mother and I followed.

At nearly eleven o'clock, the streets were empty. A neighbor might see and tell the police, since it was illegal what we were about to do. Nobody would, my mother said. If there was any danger at all, it was that others might ask the firemen to do the same for their children.

The procession stopped at the door in the cloister's garden wall. My mother went ahead with the key and unlocked the door. As the men carried the coffin past her, she said something I couldn't hear. They went ahead down a stone path. We followed. The air smelled of smoke. Our feet rustled the leaves littering the path. By the evergreens, where the crèche had been when I was here as a girl, they set the coffin down on four chairs that must have come from the firehouse. The men moved away and Jack came to stand beside me. He took my arm and I leaned into him, wanting him to take the weight of the baby from me.

On the way, Bridie had told me that hours ago, four younger firemen had been let in with the key by my father and they'd set to work digging. Two dug and then two relieved them and so on. They'd been asked to finish in three hours, and they had. The grave was near the stone wall beside the rosebushes, which were bare but for ladders of thorns.

Annie rose. Annie got up. Annie went away.

The four set their shovels down and came toward us. My father put up his hand and stepped forward. His quiet tone carried. He told them that he was grateful, he would always be, but they shouldn't come closer. The men retreated back to the stone wall to watch from there, their heads respectfully bowed.

We all turned at the sound of rustling leaves. They came through the dark in their black clothes and veiled faces. Around their waists they wore rosaries whose silver crucifixes shot slips of moonlight. Six nuns stopped behind us. They tucked their arms up their billowing sleeves and also bowed their heads.

My mother lifted the lid of the coffin and beckoned to my father. He stepped up and laid a hand on one chest and then on the other, as if to make sure the boys' hearts weren't beating. Then Jack touched their hands and their cheeks and then backed away, his breathing shallow. My mother stepped up and gazed for a moment and she looked at me.

I moved forward and studied their faces, so still, already unfamiliar. They lay on the small pillow, ear to ear, their faces turned up to the sky. The last the sky would see of them.

I smoothed their fine brown hair and kissed John's forehead and kissed Patrick's forehead. The baby bumped the coffin.

I retreated to Jack, who took my hand, and my mother stepped up again, to close the lid.

I thought. But then she began to sing in Irish, the first language, the lost language.

For the first time upon hearing it, I didn't let my greedy ears try to separate one word from another, to sort the vowels from the consonants, to find the beginnings and know the endings. I listened not for her secrets, but only the sound, the raw edges and soft centers.

The keen finished, Bridie gently closed the coffin lid.

Six days later, my water broke in the middle of the night. Jack was at work and my parents were one floor below. The pain presented itself, a river in which I could drown myself.