Donovan's Station (12 page)

At the convent, they were all business, clearing out the rooms to make pallets on the floor for the people who were homeless, finding clothing to cover the women and children who had lain abed too late and had to flee in their mghtclothes. Bishop Fleming was still in England but Mother Mary ensured
that everything was done as he would have directed it personally had he been there. I was hardly in through the door but the basket was taken from my hands and sent to the kitchen and I was put in charge of the youngest children, those who could walk but who were too small to help. A sad lot they were too— barefoot, runny noses and eyes, and covered with skin sores that a bit of soap and water would have soon cured. I got them into one corner, probably fourteen or fifteen of them, and began to make up stories, and when that ran out, I had them comb the tangles out of one another's hair and wipe their faces with a damp cloth until they all looked as respectable as they could manage. Mostly I was just keeping them occupied and out from under the feet of their mothers, who were wailing and tearing their hair at the loss of their few poor rags and chattels.

All this time, of course, Mother thought I was up in the garden, and every now and again she'd see one or other of the sacks I'd tied on the poles dance in the wind and she'd think it was my skirt or my pinafore. When I didn't come for my dinner, she was so annoyed she gave it to the new boy down at the wharf—he was so skinny, he'd eat an extra meal any time he could get his teeth on it. By mid afternoon the smoke from town was like a black cloud in the sky, and most people in the Harbour were packing up any blankets or clothing they could spare, for everyone had a few relatives or friends in St. John's. That was when she went to fetch me from the garden, and realized her mistake. Father was still out on the water, and she didn't even wait for him, set out instead on her own to find me.

Mother arrived just as evening was coming on, and I thank the Lord every day that she did, for I only knew enough to do as I was told and the good sisters were not as cautious as they should have been. The whole town, from Sprmgdale Street to the Hill O'Chips was gone by this time, and confusion was the only order of the day. Collapsing walls were a great menace, and piles of looted household goods stood blocking all the roads.
Down at the harbour, the fire still raged, feeding on the oil soaked wood of the pilings, and the wind was so high that the engines could not get anywhere near it. Up at the convent, we felt relatively safe. Mother Mary stood in the doorway, giving orders and repeating to whoever would listen; “Jerusalem will have a wall of fire round about, and the Lord will be the glory in the midst of her.”

I suppose we were all so overwhelmed by the noise of crying women and hungry babies, the reek of unwashed bodies and overflowing night-soil buckets, not to mention the permeating stench of the smoke from the fire, that one more smell escaped our attention. Not so Mothers. She was no sooner in the main room of the convent than she raised an alarm. At first Mother Mary thought she was hysterical, but soon I could smell it too—burning wool, like the Bishop s waistcoat a decade earlier. One of the poor refugees had brought a flanker rolled into a pile of bedding, and by the time we located the source, the entire back of the convent was on fire. We got everyone out, but the whole place was gone within an hour. The men who had been fighting the fires on the lower levels all day were too exhausted to drag their engines up to the top of Long's Hill, even if their horses hadn't been falling down in the shafts, and Bishop Fleming's beautiful convent was a pile of ashes and rubble long before daylight.

It was cold that night, much colder than one would have expected, and people huddled in the fields and streets wrapped in whatever rags they could find. The men from the Garrison set up military tents behind the Cathedral site, but there was no way room could be found for everyone in such a short time, and all the canvas was taken when we looked for shelter. We took refuge with the Mercy nuns, and in the morning we helped the sisters take what few things they had salvaged to the barn at Carpasia, the Bishop's farm. It was here that Father found us.

I will never forget that walk home the next morning. I was
sixteen, but I took my mothers hand on one side and my fathers on the other, and kept my fingers
well
laced into theirs until we had escaped the town. We climbed up to Browns field, and made our way down Military Road to the eastern limit of the fire, and then walked the length of the harbour, stepping over piles of charred wood and collapsed brick, skirting around hastily dumped barrels and boxes. Out in the Narrows, the customs officers were searching ships for looted goods and removing all unnecessary provisions in a desperate hope of feeding the inhabitants of the port through the winter. Dozens of small boats and large ships were lined up, bow to stern, waiting their turn to pass through and out of the razed city. Three times we were stopped by military patrols. All around us was a forest of chimneys.

In the ruins of one building, a group of men were pulling the bodies of two small boys out from under the remains of a chimney that had collapsed on them while they were searching for salvage. A woman, ashen grey and streaked with soot, stood dry-eyed and shocked nearby, clutching some unidentifiable metal objects in her apron. I don't know if she was their mother or their sister or what. Smoke still rose from the ruins of most buildings, and huge flakes of black soot hung in the air. Everyone, ourselves included, coughed and choked on the foul air. My throat was raw and Father could hardly speak, he coughed so much.

By the time we got to Kilbride Falls, it all seemed so remote and unreal that we could hardly believe what had happened. There was a small shrine set up near the falls, put there by the Walshes, I believe, before Bishop Mullock built the church, and we stopped there and washed ourselves as best we could. We drank draught after draught of the cold water, and Mother wet her fingers and combed the soot out of our hair as best she could, and then dried us off with her shawl. Sitting there on a bit of the bank, I finally lay my head in her lap and wept. I wept
for the poor prisoner in the gaol, for the artilleryman, for the two little boys under the chimney, for the nuns who had lost their beautiful new convent, and for myself, for I could never again sleep without some awareness of the flanker in the blanket, the seed of fire ready to devour us in the night. It was not Thomas Salter or Paddy Aylward who took away my girlhood, but an ember brought into the house by a stranger I never knew.

Weather variable, changes every five minutes. Picnic bookings up for the weekend; have had to get Mrs. Walsh to help. The girl was drying her wool stockings over the stove, directly against my orders, and dropped one. The kitchen was half filled with smoke before she realized what she had done. Mumma knocked the jug of water off her dresser to get her attention. I am in an agony over this-
—
Mumma is terrified of fire, and I know she would send the slovenly child packing back to her family this minute, but I am short-handed as it is, and the girl is hardly older than Lizzie. It is my fault, for I didn't realize the poor thing had only one pair of stockings and had been washing them out and wearing them wet. She has only half a pair now. I cannot send her home with even less than she had when she arrived, so I am obliged to clothe her, whether she stays or goes.

I've been examining my conscience and Kate is right, the girl should be given a second chance. It isn't Annie's fault she was dragged up rather than brought up to be useful and clean. But I'd been thinking about the Great Fire, and it was so vivid that when the smoke began to seep up through the floorboards I was sure it was the end of everything. At least I know now that I can move my arm if I have to. She doesn't look like good material to work with—too sallow and drab—but then I don't suppose I looked much like a farmer when I was her
age. If it hadn't been for the fire, I might never have thought to become a farmer for up until that time I'd never seen a farm.

I went back to St. Johns many times in the weeks that followed the fire, to help the Presentation nuns who, refusing the offers of their sisters in the Mercy Convent, had determined to stay and continue teaching school at Carpasia. Like me, they knew little about farming, nor did the street urchins who were their especial charge, and they often required help getting chickens or pigs away from the outbuildings they were teaching in when the weather was bad. Often I would find them in the fields, beseiged by cows they were afraid to chase off, trying to quiz their little girls in their letters and sums while at the same time quaking in their habits from the benign gaze of old Bessie or Sir Grunt who merely wanted to chew the bit of grass they were sitting on.

Carpasia had only the minimum of staff, all the others having been ordered off to help in the town, so I was able to make myself useful, which is why Mother sent me back as often as she could excuse me from my duties. The Bishop had tried to sell the estate the previous year, planning to put the money into the Cathedral he was building I don't doubt, but fortunately there was no budding gentleman-farmer on hand to pay the price the beautiful gardens and the view could be expected to fetch. I for one was glad, for it was the first proper farm I had ever seen, a farm with a horse and plow, a harrow and roller, a manure pit and a boat for cods' heads. The coach house served as an office, for the coach had long before been sold to Dr. Carson, but to one side there was a small glassed-in shed for starting seedlings, and dozens of wonderful tools, even a gadget for crushing mussel shells to feed to the hens. I was happy to help reorganize the outbuildings if only to save these things from the prying, thieving fingers of the children who daily swarmed over the estate.

The Bishop came home two months later, and I'm told that he wept when he saw his city in ruins, and wept more when he
saw the beautiful new convent in ashes, but wept most of all when he found his nuns sitting in the pig sties and manure pits of Carpasia trying to teach the little ones, and sleeping in the barn with the cows. They say this grief is what broke his health and led to his death, but I don't think so, for as always he turned and found practical solutions to many of the difficulties. Once again, I found myself at his side, taking his orders and implementing them with the assistance of a rag-tag army of corner boys and girls. We used hand-barrows and a dog-cart and quickly had things the way he wanted them so that he could go back to town with an easy conscience.

The four nuns, who had been sleeping in the barn, were quickly moved into the Bishop s cottage, where I knew he would have wanted them to be in the first place. I should not think ill of the holy women, but sometimes it seems that pride masks itself as humility. The cows were turned out of doors until a temporary shelter could be found for them, and the barn cleared out to make room for the children who came each day from the ruined town. The Bishop took two men off the work at the Cathedral and set them to erecting makeshift tables and benches in the barn, and they whitewashed the privy and built a barrier for modesty so that the children didn't have to empty their bowels in the fields where anyone might walk into it.

The men sent from the Cathedral were Italians, ship's carpenters who had been convicted on a charge of stabbing a third man on board a merchantman, and they were being allowed to serve out their sentence by using their skills for the greater glory of God. One of the nuns spoke Italian, having been to a convent in Italy when she was a girl, and she told us that these two were the devoted fathers of a large number of childen, and good Catholics as well. They adored the nuns and quickly turned their ingenuity to making the barn a cozy and comfortable schoolroom for the winter. Heat was not possible, for any fire in that building would have turned it into a death-trap, but they
stacked the hay in such a way as to keep out the worst of the wind and snow and arranged small screens to keep the drafts down. There was a water barrel and a small shrine to Our Lady in one corner, where the children said their prayers in the morning, but oh, most glorious of all, they had painted the ceiling.

I don't know if it was their idea or the Bishops but I remember walking into the barn with the sisters and the Bishop, to view the improvements, and when we looked up, there was a pale, blue summer sky with a golden sun in one peak of the hip-roof and a dark blue sky with a moon and stars in the other. I turned around and around, finding as I looked Cassiopeia and Aquarius, the Square of Pegasus and the Scorpion, the cross of Cygnus and the Pole Star, all my old friends. The Bishop laid his hands on my shoulders and turned and turned with me, until we were like two dizzy tops, and we laughed and laughed until we fell down into the straw, but the nuns simply stood there and cried. I have never understood nuns and to this day I am puzzled by those tears.

M
RS
. K
EZIAH
A
LYWARD