Ashes of Fiery Weather by Kathleen Donohoe

Author:Kathleen Donohoe
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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,

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