A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [72]
Innes worked steadily, the work a buffer against fear and urgent curiosity. He had little time to think beyond the immediate, to speak to the wounded, or even to wonder at their circumstances prior to the blast. With their clothing missing and faces blackened, there were few clues to the occupation or class of the people Innes treated. He removed glass slivers from eyes and faces. He set broken bones. He sutured deep lacerations. His work was not expert; his instruments were rudimentary. Each of the patients would need to be transported to hospital for better care once a vehicle could be found.
The makeshift ward was a cacophony of moans and cries. When the morgue against the far wall could no longer contain all the dead, bodies were laid on the frozen ground outside the door. Men and women searched for relatives, indicating with a cry that a search was over. Innes was told that at St. Joseph’s School, fifty children had been killed. Nearly everyone at the Dominion Textile Factory had died. The blast had momentarily emptied the harbor of water. Ships had leaped into the air.
Innes worked until he felt faint. He was made to sit in a chair. He was brought soup, which was on the boil over an open fire at the back of the building. There was no electricity, gas, or water in the city. Innes thought about the Frasers and wished that he could go in search of them. If he had survived the blast, perhaps they had as well.
He could not imagine Hazel’s broken body.
In the late afternoon, Innes was relieved by a military officer. Innes asked for and was given directions to the nearest surviving hospital. There, he hoped to find Dr. Fraser, to assist him in his labors.
Innes left the druggist’s, happy to be away from the stench. But after a few minutes, he wished himself back inside. He found a school in ruins. A woman with her belongings in a pillowcase appeared to be wandering aimlessly. A block of houses was still burning. Odd bits lay in passageways that had once been roads: the axle of a truck, a sewing machine, a woman’s lace corset, a bread tin. Men tugged at timbers. One house, remarkably intact, still had its wash on a line on its porch. A letter, addressed to Craig Driscoll, was wedged between two pieces of wood. Innes noted the presence of soldiers, which he took to be a good sign. It was understood now that the explosion had been caused when the Mont Blanc, a munitions ship, had blown up in the harbor. Innes remembered the sailors rowing for their lives to Dartmouth.
Innes reached the hospital to which he had been directed. He announced himself to a nursing sister in a blue blouse, white pinafore, and headdress. He was greeted with relief. He was shown to a room in which doctors were dressing wounds and performing surgeries. They resembled butchers after a long day. Innes asked for Dr. Fraser but received no satisfactory answer. Innes was asked to remove his overcoat and step in for a man who had been wounded but who had been operating for hours. Sixty eyeballs had been removed, Innes was informed. He did not mention his own wound.
The number of blind was indeed staggering, the correlation between curiosity and injury striking. Later, Innes would learn that nine thousand from the city had been injured from the blast. Two thousand had died.
Stretchers came and went. Innes rendered first aid, operated on wounds, administered morphine. The baptism that had begun in the morning turned nightmarish. By evening, all of the anesthetics and antiseptics had run out. For the first time in his life, Innes was forced to operate on a patient without chloroform. If he didn’t amputate the girl’s mangled left arm, he knew, she would shortly die of her wounds. Giving the most barbaric command of his life, Innes ordered a nurse to lie across the girl’s knees. He told another