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By Root 462 0

baby, Emma, was crushed by falling rafters. Four-year-old Seth simply vanished. No trace of him was ever found, and it was never known if he had been whisked away with the roof that had lifted from the house like a hat on a blustery day, or if he had crawled under the wreckage of a nearby house that had later burned in one of the hundreds of fires that moved through the city. Honora preferred to think that he had been obliterated into atoms, about which she was learning in school, and that one day he would reassemble and fall to earth, intact and unharmed, somewhere in her vicinity — not unlike Dorothy, say, in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. In the interim, she believed, Seth was floating just beyond her reach. It was an idea that, when she was brave enough to voice it to her mother, produced a look of horror so precise in its features that Honora never mentioned it again. That the atomic-ghost Seth would have been able to emigrate back to Taft, New Hampshire, with what was left of the family shortly after the disaster was taken on faith — much as the miracle of the loaves and the fishes was, for example. Or the Resurrection.

Hundreds of people, Harold among them, were blinded by flying pieces of glass as sharp as knives. Had the Mont Blanc simply exploded outright and not sent up its enticing plume of flaming smoke, drawing half the city to its windows, many of the blinded might have been spared. But it was not, in general, a sparing disaster. Houses were picked up and smashed, and those left standing had bowed walls and rooms open to the sky. Many of the corpses were headless, making identification difficult; most of the bodies had inexplicably lost their clothing. A tidal wave of epic proportions swept over the city minutes after the blast, killing dozens of others. Later that night, a snowstorm began, blanketing the wreckage and the hidden corpses alike.

Honora and her mother were buried under a pile of wet sheets and towels, to which they owed their lives. Her mother’s right leg was broken, and it was Honora who had to go for help. She found her uncle Harold on his back on the kitchen floor, alive and dazed and not yet feeling the pain of the glass in his face and neck. Honora yelled for Seth and ran out of the house, where an astonishing sight greeted her. Horses had died standing, trees were coated with ash, and the neighborhood known as Richmond had simply vanished.

The town that Honora returned to was so unlike the city that had been leveled that for years she thought of the Halifax disaster as a kind of childhood nightmare that had no relation to the present. Her mother never spoke of it, nor did her brothers ever mention it in their mother’s presence. The small cape into which they moved in Taft, New Hampshire, had once belonged to Honora’s grandmother. It had green shutters and sat at the end of a dirt lane. It was surrounded by lilacs in which the bees buzzed in summer. A picket fence swayed in the wind, the house had only three bedrooms, and the windows in the dining room were immediately painted shut by Honora’s mother. But the smell of the earth under the porch was so evocative of a childhood that had vanished that even at eleven and twelve and thirteen years of age, Honora was unable to resist climbing under the porch, poking the earth there and inhaling its fresh scent.

There was insurance money from her father; Harold, forever chastising himself for having invited his sister’s family up to Nova Scotia in the first place, gave his insurance money to Honora’s mother. All of which lasted long enough to see the boys through high school and out of the house and off to Syracuse and Arkansas and San Francisco. From the age of fourteen until her wedding day, it was just Honora and her mother and Harold in the cape at the end of the dirt road. Uncle Harold never complained about his injuries, although he had aged so quickly that no one ever believed he was Alice Willard’s younger brother. As for Alice Willard herself, she effaced her memories with industry, selling produce from her garden in summer and making