Dark Tide (25 page)

Meanwhile, at about 3
P.M.
, Ralph Martin, the twenty-one-year-old teamster and driver for Dolan Meats and Provision, died from infection at the Haymarket Relief Center, his parents by his side. He was conscious up to an hour before his death, begging his mother and father for some relief from the pain.

Peter Curran, whose team of hogs was destroyed in the flood, was luckier. Despite three fractured ribs, a severely bruised thigh, a bruised chest, a wrenched back, an injury to his left eye, and what doctors described as “severe nervous shock,” he was released from the hospital at about the same time as Ralph Martin died. He would be bedridden for a month and incapacitated until May.

Chief Justice Wilfred Bolster of the Boston Municipal Court, renowned in legal circles for his sound judicial temperament, tromped through the molasses-covered debris, inspecting the ruins and surveying the horrific destruction on the waterfront with a sense of shock. The North End Paving Yard had been destroyed, reduced to a pile of kindling. The steel girders and trestles and tracks of the elevated railroad structure had been bent and broken into a misshapen mass that would take weeks, or months, to repair. Men and women, hundreds of them, swarmed over the wreckage like ants, their steps tenuous due to the dangerous footing. Some were Red Cross and Salvation Army workers assisting the rescuers, others were firefighters and sailors carefully removing wood and steel in their search for the dead, the more hopeful among them searching for survivors. Scores of other men were wielding brooms, chisels, shovels, or high-pressure hoses in their efforts to remove the molasses from the street and the wharf area. Across Commercial Street, the fire department’s hydraulic pumps were groaning as they worked to siphon thousands of gallons of molasses from the cellars of stores and tenements. In all of his fifty-two years, Wilfred Bolster had never witnessed such a scene.

As the judge who would next month conduct the criminal inquest into the terrible disaster, Bolster needed to get a complete feel for the scene. He had already interviewed the Boston Public Works superintendent and the USIA lead engineer, William Cochrane, to learn as much as possible about what had happened on Commercial Street.

Beyond his judicial responsibilities, though, Bolster loved Boston and felt compelled to see the tragedy that had befallen his city. He was a distinguished graduate of Harvard Law School, had served on the Boston School Board, and had been chief justice of the Municipal Court since 1906. Boston had been grotesquely altered by the waterfront catastrophe that had taken place this week. Bolster took this as a personal affront as much as a municipal tragedy.

As he plodded across the molasses-covered waterfront, avoiding piles of splintered wood and side-stepping the fire hoses that curled through the wharf debris, Judge Wilfred Bolster knew only one thing: Someone was responsible for what had happened here, and someone would pay.

James McMullen, the Bay State Railroad worker who had shouted at Maria Distasio for trespassing at the tank, died at approximately 10
A.M.
from infection. His wife, Margaret, who had been at his side from the beginning, said he was delirious and complained about his ferocious thirst right up until his death.

One hour later, Patrick Breen, the teamster for the City of Boston Paving Department who had been hurled into Boston Harbor by the molasses wave and rescued by sailors, died alone, from pneumonia as a result of his injuries. His daughter, Margaret, and cousin, Charles Breen, had left their bedside vigil for a few hours to get some rest.

John Barry was alive and home before the end of the day Sunday, January 19, and whereas he merely feared death while he was trapped under the firehouse four days ago, now he
wished
for it. He hadn’t been able to get a good look at himself in the hospital—each time he moved a nurse would order him to lie back and rest—and the morphine had masked much of his pain. But now he could see and feel, and he thought that death would be a welcome alternative.

The timbers and heavy water-heater that had pinned him for hours had damaged his torso, injured his back and legs, and crushed his spirit. His pain was indescribable. His entire body, from his neck down, was black from bruising. His thighs and knees were torn and lacerated, and his spine felt as though it would snap at any moment. Boils covered his arms and chest; the doctor had already visited once to slice them open and drain the pus, and he showed John Barry’s daughters how to clean the boils in the future. His girls, he knew, still couldn’t bear to look at him. Their strong, powerfully built father had, within days, become a broken, pitiful old man with snow-white hair.

As wretched as he looked and felt today, as much as he believed that dying would be better than the suffering he was experiencing now, John Barry still had no way of knowing how profoundly his life would change. His back and legs would never heal completely. He would remain bedridden for weeks, and even after he did manage to get out of bed, he would never be able to stand fully erect.

When he did return to work for the city, he would shuffle paper in the office, keeping track of the paving jobs—John Barry, a strapping picture of health, a man who had never been treated by a doctor prior to the molasses disaster, would also never again be physically able to cut stone for a living.

The molasses flood would not claim John Barry’s life, but it would claim his health, his livelihood, and, eventually, his self-worth. He had no way of knowing all of this on January 19, 1919, no way of knowing how much he would suffer in the years to come.

John Callahan, the City of Boston paver who sent his wife out of his room and confided to her cousin that he was “sinking fast” on the night of the molasses disaster, died five days later from shock and pneumonia. The time of death was 4
A.M.
John Callahan died alone—his wife, Kittie, had not yet arrived from their South Boston home.

It was just after noon, but already, it had been a long day for Martin Clougherty. His mother’s funeral had just ended, a simple, but well-attended affair. He suspected that the throngs who had paid their respects had come not so much as a testament to the family’s popularity, but more out of curiosity about the bizarre and violent manner in which his mother had died.

Now, Martin stood at the bedside of his sleeping brother, Stephen, who had been transferred to Boston City Hospital yesterday from the Haymarket Relief Station. His thirty-two-year-old brother, a man with the mind of a seven-year-old, had been a far cry from his pleasant, docile self when Martin first arrived to visit him. He had been frightened to death, begging Martin to stay with him, fearing that the hospital personnel were conspiring to harm him. “The nurses are getting ready to poison me and throw me out the window,” Stephen had cried, “just like I got thrown out the top window of our home.”

Martin had learned that sailors from the USS
Enterprise
had pulled his brother from the molasses and placed him in the ambulance that took him to the relief station. His brother’s hands and arms had been cut and bruised, but beyond that, he had no serious injuries.
Physical
injuries, Martin corrected. There had definitely been a serious diminishment of his brother’s mental condition. Normally, he could tease and joke with Stephen. But Martin had known as soon as he had walked into his brother’s room that something had changed. He could see it in Stephen’s eyes first, the sheer terror, and then his brother had begun talking about the hospital staff’s plotting to kill him. Martin had calmed him, speaking softly and gently stroking his forehead, until Stephen had fallen asleep. How he would react when he awoke was anyone’s guess.

Martin had to think about Stephen’s future. Before the accident, Stephen had handled simple chores around his mother’s house and, despite his feeble-mindedness, was enjoyable to be around. Immersed in routine and familiar surrounding, his brother could manage day-to-day living without constant care and direction. But what now? Stephen had clearly taken a turn for the worse. He was terrified and paranoid. How long would these feelings last? What if they were permanent? Stephen had no familiar surroundings to come home to. Their mother was gone. Their
home
was gone.

Martin himself had been affected by the disaster more than he had imagined possible. He missed his mother, but it was more than that. His own injuries were minor, but his nerves were on edge nearly every moment and he had not been able to sleep since the disaster. He was staying with friends, and on two occasions already, they had mentioned to him that he cried out during the night. If the tragedy was affecting Martin this much, keeping him awake at night and in a state of anxiety during the day, he could only imagine how it was affecting Stephen. His brother often had trouble separating fantasy from reality. How much would his ordeal change him? And could Martin care for him if Stephen’s mental condition became much worse?

He would have to deal with this eventually, but first things first. As Martin looked down upon his sleeping brother, he wondered how he would tell Stephen that their mother was dead.

They pulled out ten-year-old Pasquale Iantosca’s battered, molasses-covered body from behind a railroad freight car as late afternoon dusk enveloped the waterfront and a raw wind whistled off the harbor. The boy’s arms, legs, pelvis, and chest were broken and his face was disfigured beyond recognition. The molasses had driven the railroad car into Pasquale, carried them both about fifty feet, and smashed both up against the wall, the railroad car crushing the little boy instantly. Rescuers knew Pasquale was missing, and when they pulled the boy out, one ran to get Pasquale’s father, Giuseppe, at his Charter Street home.

When Giuseppe arrived, he recoiled in horror upon seeing his son’s body. He couldn’t recognize the boy’s face. His first instinct was to cover his own face with his hands and weep, but Giuseppe would not do this in front of the rescue workers. He composed himself, saw that the dead boy was wearing a red sweater, bent down, lifted the sweater, and saw the second red sweater underneath. It was Pasquale. The black corduroy pants and the high brown shoes were also Pasquale’s.

Giuseppe gently hugged little Pasqualeno’s shattered body close to him, felt his son’s broken bones squirming under the sweaters, tried to imagine the boy’s pain and fear in those last seconds. Giuseppe prayed to God that Pasquale had died quickly, that he was dead before the railroad freight car had smashed his body against the wall of the building.

In a few moments, Giuseppe felt hands on his shoulders and men pulling him to his feet. One man carefully took Pasqualeno’s body and placed him tenderly into the back of a Red Cross ambulance that would take him to the morgue. The other rescuers turned away to continue their work and give Giuseppe his privacy. Giuseppe stood motionless and watched the ambulance drive north on Commercial Street. His heart was broken, but at least little Pasqualeno was no longer lost. And his wife, Maria, would be grateful. Their son would have a funeral.

Eleven days after the tank burst, firefighters fished the body of thirty-seven-year-old truck driver Flaminio Gallerani from the water underneath one of the Bay State Railroad freight houses. He had been making a delivery to Bay State on January 15, and the molasses wave lifted him and his four-ton 1915 Packard truck into the water. The vehicle was smashed to pieces, and Flaminio drowned in a combination of water and thick molasses. Luckily, during the time Flaminio’s body was in the water, only his hands were eaten by sea animals—they had left his face alone. This made it easier for Flaminio’s nephew, Frank Gallerani, to identify his uncle’s body.

With the discovery of Flaminio Gallerani’s body, the molasses flood had claimed nineteen lives. Authorities were still reporting one man missing: a thirty-two-year-old Italian immigrant named Cesare Nicolo, who drove a team and wagon and delivered goods to the waterfront. Witnesses had seen Nicolo near the Boston & Worcester Railway freight station on the Commercial Street wharf, just before the molasses tank collapsed. His wife, Josie, had visited the scene each day since the January 15 disaster, begging in vain for news about her husband.