The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters (Arbor House Library of Contemporary Americana) (65 page)

People around the Square knew my father was a doctor; they called him “Doc,” but they never took it very seriously. They figured him for some kind of horse doctor, or a doctor that had got in a jam somewhere. This was the only condition they fully understood. It required a shipwreck to get him started off in medicine in San Francisco. The steamship traffic was very brisk now, with big boats like the
Independence
and the
Panama
coming in every few days, carrying several hundred passengers. We were at the stand on a
morning in mid-December, a bright, sunny day after a rain the previous evening, selling off ten purses that my father had fashioned out of buckskin, when a man dashed across the Plaza, waving his hat wildly, and cried, “Shipwreck! Shipwreck! The
Liberty’s
run aground on Santa Rosa Island!”

In no time, a crowd had collected to hear the news. People poured out of the El Dorado and United States, the women looking not quite so motherly in the strong sunlight, but chalky-white and played out, and there was an ear-splitting racket of shouting and running. Then somebody down the street cried, “They’re bringing in survivors on the
City of Sacramento!”

The crowd scattered pell-mell for the wharves, my father threw our wares in the underneath part of the stand, and we picked up our heels, too. There was that awful, hurrying, white-faced air of calamity, women snatching children out of the way, dogs barking, horses rearing and men cursing because they were excited, and maybe a little scared, too.

At the wharves the
City of Sacramento
was coming down the Bay, and we could see everybody crowded to the rails; then we saw stretcher cases laid out on deck, and as soon as she steamed up within hailing, the captain came out on the bridge, holding a horn, and bawled: “We’ve got a hundred and fifty burned, half drowned and suffocated. We need carriages and blankets.”

Now a number of men on shore jumped into skiffs, turning one over, and rowed for the
Sacramento
as she came in, and you could hear women crying everywhere, and a terrible hubbub going on.

“Shore ahoy!” the captain shouted again. “Have you prepared hospitaling?”

Then I saw Mr. Edwin Bryant speak to my father and send two men running, one to the City Hospital and the other to the State Marine Hospital. And by this time, the
Sacramento
was warping close in, with lines coming onto the wharf, missing, mostly out of hurry and nervousness, then finally she was in and the gangplank rattled down in a hurry.

I heard Mr. Bryant sing out, “This way, doctor, come aboard.”
My father had his medical bag along, though he’d sold a few things out from time to time, so now he ran down the dock and was swallowed up in the crowd.

So many people were fighting back and forth, lots of them with friends or relatives on the
Liberty.
, that it looked like a regular stampede. These spectators were almost totally out of control. And then, by gum, if there didn’t rise up over everything the old familiar bullfrog voice of the Reverend Ebersohl, who’d jumped up on a barrel and begun to sing, and in just about thirty seconds, he had that crowd in hand. He had taken his hat off, and his gray-white hair streamed out behind in the breeze. “Stand back, my friends, make way, make a lane from the gangplank—no, no don’t try to go aboard, sir-Blessud Jesus, meek and mild (this last in song) Calm the wicked, rude and wild—”

He was a wonder. The people listened to him—they couldn’t exactly help it, to tell you the truth; his voice drowned everything else out; the captain tried a couple of hoots of the whistle against it, then threw in the sponge—and order was put right back into this mess, with the Reverend Ebersohl running everything on shore.

When they commenced to carry down the injured, I climbed up a rope to the deck. I wanted to see, and thought I might bear a hand, too. It was a sickening sight up there. Rows of people horribly burned and otherwise maimed were laid out almost shoulder to shoulder, covered with blankets and comforts, and their faces, some of them, turned to a kind of reddish-brown crust, like a baked ham, the hair and eyebrows all burned off.

A few were unconscious but others were moaning or screaming in pain. Somebody said that a lot more would be screaming, except that the burned cases were still in shock, and couldn’t feel a thing, the way Coulter had been, I guess. They would die, but it might take several days, and the last days, out of shock, would be frightful. The
Sacramento’s
passengers tended them all up and down the line. I saw one woman passenger throw up on deck, and a man, a steward, sat down suddenly and put his face in his hands. A little girl rose up out of her blankets, just as I arrived, and tried
to crawl to the rail, not having the slightest idea where she was. She would have gone right on over if I hadn’t caught her. One of her legs was burned all up and down, her clothes were a soggy mass of char, and her face was bandaged so that you couldn’t see any features real well.

An officer in uniform sent me below to fetch more water, and for an hour after that I was busy running errands. I watched four people die while being lifted ashore, and once I encountered my father, bending over with another doctor, white as a sheet, and remembered how he hated this sort of thing.

What had happened was, the
Liberty
struck a reef, which caused a bad leak. A sail had then been drawn over the hole and the ship headed for shore, with the idea of grounding her, a four-mile run. They made it, too, but the first boat sent ashore with a line swamped in the heavy breakers. The second made it, carrying a hawser in, but by now the water had risen in the
Liberty
to the place where her lower flues were stopped, and the fire came washing out of the furnace doors. In almost no time, a number of explosions followed, and the ship was all over fire. After that, the scene on top was a perfect nightmare. Hundreds jumped overboard, and some of these, hanging to floating spars and things, made it in through the surf. Rich men, they said, were offering great sums of money to be taken off, but nobody paid them any mind. I’m afraid the fact is that a very big proportion of the crew just minded themselves, and let the others go hang.

Before the day was out, I heard a lot of stories. As the flames crept up, a sick man begged from his cabin to be carried to the rail and dropped, but when he hit the water, he never appeared again; went straight to the bottom, and then they remembered he had a heavy metal cast bandaged to one leg. A mother drew her child from the fire, and jumped, holding him in her arms, and they didn’t come up again either. A Captain Taylor took his little boy between his teeth and his wife under his arm, and flung himself into the sea at the stern. But the shock separated the boy, which drowneded, and the wife died of injuries on shore.

Passengers that jumped clung from one end to the other of that hawser the second boat managed to get ashore, but one of the officers, thinking it might break, ordered it slackened, and everybody dipped under. Almost all of them drowned. Altogether, about a hundred and fifty died in the first hour or two, but of the four hundred and fifty total, nearly everybody was injured, one way or another.

By nightfall the City Hospital and State Marine Hospital had the bad cases under care, and my father stayed on to help. Most all the carting had been done by people at the gambling halls, in carriages tied up there; they did a bang-up job; everybody said so. And the hospitals being full, the lighter cases were taken not only to the churches but the gambling houses, too, and given a patching-up. After that, they were provided with lodging wherever it could be found.

It’s interesting how the worst scum in a city will turn to in times of emergency. Some of those gamblers hadn’t taken any exercise in years, and would have walked past a starving beggar without giving him a glance. But let a public calamity arise and they half killed themselves to help. And felt good about it. I heard men jabbering away in conversation that night who didn’t utter a dozen words on an average day. Everybody was brought together and made friendly for a while, by seeing how much worse off it was possible for them to be. No, sir, when it comes to cheering people up, and making them feel warm inside, nothing can do it like a catastrophe.

After dark I went by the City Hospital and found my father. The place was stacked up with patients, and a good-sized crowd, relatives and such, thronged around in the corridors. But the grief and commotion of the first hours had quietened down, and lots of people even were talking in whispers.

In one room, at a bed, my father was seated talking to a man who was burned all over, everywhere you could see—face, arms, feet—all the same baked-brown color, the skin hardened like a crust but unwrinkled, no blood, not much of anything except that unreal
changed color and hardness. It was impossible to tell how old he was, because the hair was gone and his skin hadn’t any look of a particular age any more. Too, it was covered over, now, with a yellowish kind of salve.

His eyes were bloodshot but open and alert, trapped undamaged in his ruined body, peering out like an animal’s from the depths of a hole.

My father tapped on the brown-red crust of his chest.

“Do you feel that?”

“No, not a thing.”

“Are you conscious of any pain at all?”

“I feel fine. Are you a doctor? I guess I got off lucky.”

“Do you remember what happened?”

“Oh, yes, very clearly. We’d put in at Acapulco and had a nice run up. Then we went aground, and after that the explosions.”

“Do you remember in your own case?”

“Not very well; it isn’t clear. I got off lucky. When will I be up and around?”

The eyes showed a sudden alarm. He tried to rise up to his elbows.

“Where’s my wife?”

My father pushed him back gently. “She’s well taken care of. You’ll be seeing her soon.”

“It’s funny—I don’t feel sleepy or anything. What happened to me?”

“You suffered certain burns.”

“Will I feel anything later?”

“You’ll notice it more later.”

When my father got up and saw me, he steered me out to the hall and said, “Go on back to the tent. I’ll be here all night.” His face was an old man’s gray, and looked shrunken.

“That man in there; he’ll die, won’t he?”

“He’s dead now. But he’ll come to life for about three days before the Almighty makes it official. He’ll spend them screaming unless there’s morphine enough.”

I stared at him, uneasy in my mind. All the promise and humbug
and good cheer seemed to have drained out of his face. In addition, he looked the way he used to in Louisville when he needed a drink of whiskey. “Maybe we should have stayed in the hills,” I said. “Away from the cities, and hospitals, and such.” I couldn’t seem to find the exact words for it. “A person has the right to do what he wants—”

“No, I don’t think so, son. I used to. I thought it was possible to run fast and leave it all behind. But running faster only completes the circle sooner. This is my job, and maybe always will be. You trot on back to the tent.”

For now, at least, all his hope was gone. I walked on out, past the quiet people talking in the halls, the ones sitting down weeping, past open rooms with the scorched patients inside, into the street and down toward the Plaza. I was fed clear up with what I’d seen and smelled and heard. The fact is, I felt older myself, and had a hard, curious itch to get rid of the misery in one quick thrust and shudder.

In the El Dorado, survivors from the
Liberty
were being arranged on shakedowns. Everybody talked in low tones, no gambling going on, the same as they talked, now, at the hospital. The women were busy fixing bandages and getting drinks of water and being motherly and good, and this one, this plump one of around forty, with the too-yellow hair, a kindly-appearing woman, rouge and powder run over from tears, and a most awfully tired expression in her eyes, came up and said, “Were you looking for someone, honey?”

I said no, I’d only stopped in because I wasn’t ready to sleep and wondered if I could find something to do. Then one of the gamblers called out, “A couple of you kids get more sheets, will you?” and she said, “Come along, honey, you can carry mine.” Things seemed to dance around as we went up the stairs, the ten-foot paintings of naked women, fat and pink, either sprawled on their bellies or seated with a gauzy something between their legs, the curlicue gold of the frames, bloody basins on the floor below, bandages, cotton, gambling tables, fiddles leaning silent against the
piano: things that didn’t go together, disturbing things, and sounds that belonged in different rooms.

She closed the door behind me, and stripped the sheets from a white-painted iron bed; then she sat down, with two tears started on her cheeks.

“I had a boy, he’d be just your age.”

The room was bothersome, I didn’t know why. Its red-checkered wallpaper, the lamp with the frill underneath, the picture of Madonna and Child, spangled clothes in the closet, white nightgowns, Bible on a stand, Teddy bear on the pillow, crockery pitcher and funny kind of chamber on the floor all spun around in a crazy revolving pattern. I felt about burst, all tightened up, and a little faint, too.

She said, sounding tearful and worn out with excitement, “I could have been your mother.” It confused me, as dizzy as I felt. I knew she wasn’t, of course, but she might have been, and besides, it had been two years since I’d seen her. Pulling me down on the bed, she slid her dress off her shoulders and put one of her great breasts in my mouth. She rocked that way for a while, and, then I don’t exactly remember what happened, but it took some little time and was a comfort to us both.

Back in the tent, late, with the lamp trimmed down and feeling very fresh and clear, I wrote: “Dear Po-Povi: I got your letter. Things have been lonely around here too. My father and I are in San Francisco trying to make our fortune, but I guess he never will. I think he’s always got to have some kind of rainbow in the sky, but I don’t believe there’s any pot of gold at the end. It came to me tonight that what he’s chasing is the rainbow itself; it’s more fun for him that way, I miss the wandering around we used to do in the woods. There hasn’t been any fun at all here lately. We had a big boat explosion here today; a lot of people were killed and hurt. I don’t know how to say it, exactly, but it sort of woke me up.