Burial (32 page)

This was the time that the slaves had predicted. This was the fulfilment of the prophesy that they had brought across from Africa. We can suffer these centuries of bondage and woe; we can suffer this captivity, o Lord. Because one day this land will fall. One day this civilization will crumble. A house that is built on suffering is built on sand, that's what her grandmother used to say, over and over, and Nann had never understood what she meant, until now.

A gigantic block of reinforced concrete dropped from the building above them, twenty or thirty tons of it, but instead of shattering when it hit the sidewalk, it
vanished
. More concrete rained down; then huge panes of glass; then window-frames and ducting and zig-zag flights of concrete stairs.

A man was running along the sidewalk towards them when Nann glimpsed something flash in the dusty sunlight just above his head. It wasn't until it had actually hit him on top of the head, edge-on, that she realized it was a sheet of glass. It went down him at a slight diagonal, from the left side of his skull to his right knee, slicing him completely in half. Then it instantly disappeared, with an odd ringing noise, into the concrete flagstones.

The man continued standing in the same position for a slow count of three. His eyes were wide open, his glasses had been sheared in half at the bridge of the nose. His short-sleeved shirt and his pale gray slacks were marked with a fine toothbrush-splatter of blood.

Nann whispered, ‘Lord,' and crossed herself; and when she crossed herself the man slid in half, becoming two butchered men instead of one. His insides dropped onto the sidewalk in a glistening, profligate heap; and Nann saw his actual heart, and his ribs red-and-white like a rack of pork chops.

She grasped Trixie's hand tightly and turned around. ‘Run, child,' she said.

At first Trixie seemed to be too stunned to understand her. But Nann fiercely yanked her hand and said ‘Run!' and together they started to jog along the concrete-littered street, amid smashed-up automobiles and overturned buses. Their feet crunched on acres and acres of broken glass. It was so bright and brittle that it was like running on diamonds.

‘Come on, child, run!' Nann insisted.

‘Where are we going?' Trixie shouted. A shower of medium-sized concrete boulders rumbled into the street just ahead of them; and then a garage wall collapsed, bringing down half of the buildings on East Washington between State and South Wabash.

‘If we — can make it to the lakeshore —' Nann gasped.

They ran hand in hand; then Nann began to fall behind. Hundreds of other people were running all around them, grim-faced but peculiarly silent. Most drivers seemed to have abandoned their automobiles, but a few still swerved in and out of the traffic. Nann saw a young red-haired woman running with a baby in her arms. A green Granada came around the corner out of East Randolph Street, its tires shrilling, and hit her as she ran across the road. Nann saw her flying; saw her baby fly. She called to Trixie to stop, and she limped and panted across to where the woman and her child were lying.

The woman was already surrounded by a crowd of onlookers, but between their jostling shoulders Nann could
see that she was already dead. Her face was very white and blood was sliding out of her broken skull and into the gutter. The baby lay face-down, not moving. The driver kept repeating, ‘She practically dived into me, she practically dived into me,' over and over.

Meanwhile, all around them, Chicago was collapsing. Nann had never seen an earthquake before so she didn't know if this was some kind of earthquake or not. There was something unreal about it. Although she would have expected this overwhelming thunder as millions of tons of steel and concrete fell into the ground, she wouldn't have expected the buildings to collapse so systematically and so completely. The Prudential Building went; then the Amoco Building went; then the Rookery and the Monadnock Building; and even the Gothic-styled water tower, which had survived the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.

They all came rumbling down — huge avalanches of steel and glass — and they all vanished into the ground like subway trains vanishing into a tunnel. Thousands and thousands of people vanished with them, with no chance of escaping. Nann saw faces pressed desperately to office windows as entire thirty-storey buildings roared into oblivion. The John Hancock Building dropped to the ground, leaving a high plume of black funereal dust that hung over North Michigan Avenue for ten minutes afterwards; and then gradually shuddered its way out over the Oak Street Beach.

Nann and Trixie ran and hobbled across Grant Park until they reached the lakeshore. There were crowds of people there already — people who had been working or sailing around the harbour, or people who had fled from the tall buildings around the Loop and the Civic Center. They were all dusty; some of them floury-faced like zombies. Some of them were sobbing or shouting but most of them were silent. Chicago was still falling and there was nothing they could do but stand and watch it.

Nann held Trixie in her arms as the skyline vanished, building by building, like the targets in some huge shooting-gallery. The Dirksen Building, the Tribune tower. Then a deafening bellow of masonry as the Merchandise Mart collapsed into the Chicago River. When it was built, the Merchandise Mart had been the largest building in the world. Now it was nothing but slowly drifting dust; and a memory.

‘I never knew we could have earthquakes in Chicago,' said Trixie.

Nann shook her head. ‘I don't think this
is
an earthquake. I think this is the time that my great-grandmother and my grandmother and my mother always told me about.'

‘What time? What do you mean?'

‘I mean they always said that the day would come when the white people would get their punishment in hell, and that the ground would open up and all the white man's shining buildings and all the white man's wealth and glory would just be swallowed up, like it had never even been.'

‘Oh, come on, Momma, you can't believe any of that old superstitious talk. Look at it, this is an earthquake!'

‘Well, I'm not so sure about that,' said Nann. ‘If this is an earthquake, how come the ground isn't shaking none? Look at the lake, calm as milk.'

Trixie frowned and turned round. The surface of Lake Michigan was eerily placid, with only the very laziest of swells. In fact it was so calm that the film of dust which had fallen onto it was unbroken, except where occasional ducks had left little foot-paddled swirls. The sky over the lake was burnished and brown, the same livid saddle-bronze colour that realtors chose for their Cadillacs.

They heard another percussive rumbling; and the Wrigley Building went, followed almost immediately afterwards by Marina Towers.

Marina Towers collapsed, one floor on top of the other, like a stack of old 78 records, and then thundered into the
river in a chaos of spray and overturned boats.

‘Goddamn it, it's the end of the world,' said one old lady standing close to Nann.

‘Well, ma'am, I think you're probably right,' Nann replied. ‘Maybe we should be kneeling now, and making our final absolution. On the other hand, maybe we should be cheering and waving our arms around and shouting Hosanna!'

Nann was shocked and distressed by the deaths and injuries that she saw all around her. A staring woman was being piggy-backed towards the lakeshore by a man whose cheek was hanging open, baring his teeth. Blood was running down the woman's legs in thin rivulets, and dropping from her heels. A truck driver with a crushed pelvis was lying on the grass in an ever-widening pool of bright shining blood, and as the grass grew redder his face turned greyer. There were many children dead; children and old people. A woman in her late sixties lay on her side staring at the grass with filmy blue eyes. She was being guarded by a boy of about twelve, who told Nann to keep well clear. He had been walking with his grandparents across Federal Center Plaza when Alexander Calder's steel ‘Flamingo' sculpture had dropped into the paving stones. His grandmother had been shocked but unhurt. His grandfather had been instantly guillotined. Scarlet sculpture, scarlet blood.

In spite of these tragedies, however; in spite of seeing her home city collapsing all around her, Nann felt a fierce emotion that was something very close to joy. She stood with her fists clenched and her eyes wide, watching the towers of the wealthy and the privileged brought low. At last the cruel and the careless were being punished. At the very end, this was where their manifest destiny had led them.

The Sears Tower was apparently still intact. It stood almost alone now, reflecting the dull unburnished metallic colour of the sky, nearly one-and-a-half thousand feet high. Everybody was watching it, as if its collapse would signify not
only the final collapse of Chicago — the city of big shoulders — but of the greatest monument that men had built anywhere to their own superiority over nature and over everything.

Nann had always thought that the Sears Tower looked dead and aloof: more like a gravestone than a building. This afternoon it presided over the destruction of Chicago and didn't fall. Not yet, anyway. Nann thought she understood why.

The whole city lay in eerie silence for a while; and then the wind began to rise off the lake, and the brown sky grew thicker and browner with building-dust. Huddled by the shore, they heard sirens whooping, and after a while the
flacker-flacker-flacker
of helicopters.

‘Oh, God,' said a woman standing close to Nann. She must have been quite elegantly groomed when she set out from home this morning. Now her pale-lemon suit was smudged with dust and splattered with blood, and her pink-rinsed hair was blown awry. ‘Oh, God, my husband.'

Nann didn't know what to say to her. Instead she took hold of Trixie's hand and started to walk south through Grant Park. More helicopters flew overhead, big military Chinooks. They heard the rumble of another building falling, off to the north-west, maybe the Civic Opera House or the Northwestern Atrium Center.

Miraculously the Buckingham Fountain was still working, although the darkness of the sky had turned the water muddy-coloured and grim. Nann washed her face with her hands while Trixie stood close beside her and watched the plumes of spray from the fountain's central island, and the sparkling jets from the sculptured seahorses.

‘What are we going to do now?' Trixie asked her mother.

Nann dried her face with a Kleenex out of her purse. Then she snapped the purse shut and said, ‘Time to see your grandmama.'

‘Grandmama? What for?'

‘To make sure she's not in any trouble. And to see what
we have to do next.'

‘Momma —' Trixie protested. But Nann touched a fingertip to her lips to silence her. ‘It's time, honey, I know it's time. Your grandmama will tell you all about it, same as I should have done when you were smaller.'

Once they had passed East 26th Street they found, quite suddenly, that the atmosphere was calmer. Although they could still hear the low thunder of felling buildings and the odd throbbing noise made by scores of sirens all howling in unison, they found automobiles driving almost complacently through the streets, and people standing on street corners talking and laughing almost as if nothing were happening.

By Dunbar Park they were able to hail a passing taxi. The driver said laconically, ‘South Side only.' He looked disturbingly like a reincarnation of Sammy Davis Jr.

They climbed in. The driver had his radio on. A frantic news reporter was gabbling, ‘ —
building after building collapsing — almost the whole of the Loop devastated — people wandering the streets in a state of total shock —
'

‘Worse than San Francisco,' the taxi-driver remarked. ‘They can't even count how many dead.'

Nann said nothing but sat in the back of the taxi with her fists clenched tight. Trixie glanced at her from time to time but said nothing.

‘What I say is, Nature always has the last laugh, that's what I say,' the taxi-driver added. ‘We can build whatever we like, as high as we like, but if
Nature
don't like it, then down it has to come.'

He turned around in his seat and grinned at them. ‘Just so long as I aint standing underneath when it happens, if you know what I mean.'

Nann said, ‘Don't worry. You'll be all right.'

‘I got your guarantee?'

‘You'll be all right,' Nann insisted. ‘That's your destiny;
because of what you are.'

The taxi-driver eyed her in his rear-view mirror for block after block. Then he said, ‘You some kind of fortune-tellei, something like that?'

Nann shook her head.

‘You into voodoo, maybe?'

‘Maybe,' said Nann. ‘If that's what you want to call it.'

The taxi-driver lifted his index finger and his pinkie in the sign of the horns.

‘You just keep that Baron Samedi off my back, then, that's all. I don't care for voodoo but I respect it, know what I mean?'

‘You'll be all right,' Nann repeated.

The taxi-driver took them right to the door of the brown-brick house near Avalon Park. Nann offered him ten dollars but he refused to take it. ‘Just call it my contribution to the Baron Samedi birthday fund.'

They climbed out. Nann pressed the doorbell while Trixie stood a little way away, as if she had discovered something about her momma that she didn't understand, and which made her feel unsettled and afraid. After a while, they heard her grandmama saying, ‘
Yes? Who is it
?' on the intercom.

Her grandmama's sitting room was cluttered and gloomy; and even more gloomy now that the sky had turned to bronze. It was wallpapered in browns and crimsons, and furnished with heavy, elaborate furniture with tassels and fringes and embroidered cushions and antimacassars. The old-fashioned fireplace was no longer used as a fire, but as a religious shrine, crowded with plaster figures of Jesus and Mary and gilded statuettes of sightless angels. There were also swathes of brightly-painted papier-mache beads and chicken feather head-dresses and complicated black arrangements of nails and wire and broken glass.