“IT WAS A TERRIBLE THING TO SEE”

DOWNTOWN DAYTON – Part Four

 

JENNIE PARSONS

 continued

 

            But, of course, no boats could get out to anybody in that water.  We’d fished up a lot of shutters and planks that morning to make a raft out of, but what good would it have done in those whirlpools?  And all the time the water kept rising.

            One way we could tell this was by the steps downstairs; the water kept crawling up them, one after another.

            Then – bang! – something hit our house.  It was an old brick house, and Jack, who is a builder, had said that the only danger would be if something hit it and knocked out some of the foundation; then it would go for sure.

            Bang, bang!  This thing kept going up against the wall. We looked everywhere, but we could not see it.  Finally Jack looked out of the window on the south side.

            “Oh, Collopy!” he yelled, “look what’s here!”  It was a great iron gasoline storage tank that had come by and got caught in a whirlpool near the house.  It couldn’t knock us down, now it was in the eddy.  But it kept on banging all night.

            Then pretty soon after that there was a kind of pink glow, and we began to see each other in the room.

            “Fire,” said Jack.  “That’s what I’m afraid of.”  But we learned afterwards that it was Mr. Patterson, at the Cash Register plant, burning some old buildings so his people could have light.

            Then bump! – bump! – bump! – something else.  This time we knew what it was.  It was Mother Shoyer’s piano hitting the ceiling.  The water  had reached the top of the first floor.

            If it came further, there was no place for us to go except the roof.  We’d have to sit astride the ridgepole in that pouring rain.  And pretty soon, of course, the house would go.

            The only thing I kept thinking about was of struggling and going down, and having that awful, slimy, yellow water close over us.

            “If we only had a revolver,” I kept saying to myself, “so we could all die quick.”

            But, of course, I kept as cheerful as I could, and didn’t say anything out loud.  Nobody cried, not even the children; we all kept our courage up.

            But every now and then I kept scooping my hand down quietly on the floor by the chair, to see if I could feel that water coming.  I had kept my nerve pretty well till dawn, just as the faint light was coming, when we looked out and saw the water whirling by against the bay-window.  And then I forgot myself.

            “Oh God,” I said, “if it’d only wait till it was light enough, so they could get boats to us!” 

            I looked around right after that, and there was Buddie – poor little kid – down on his knees back of the rocking chair.

            “What are you doing, Bud?” I asked.

            “I’m praying for the rain to stop coming,” he said, “so the flood won’t rise any more.”

            As it happened, it didn’t rise much further.  We felt pretty good that day.  Things certainly seemed better.  In the morning, Jack looked down the stairway and saw a little pasteboard box.

            “What’s that?” he said.

            “Oh, grab it, Jack,” I said.  “It’s candles – the little candles for Buddie’s birthday cake.”

            The thought came to me that I could cook with them.  We hadn’t had a meal since the sardines and bread the day before.  So we fished them up, and I cooked some eggs and very thin ham over the birthday candles for the ten people.  They didn’t give out much heat, but we cooked the stuff enough so that it tasted fine.  Then, that afternoon, we made another find.  We were poking around, and some one noticed the old mantelpiece in Mr. Collopy’s room and said:

            “I bet you there’s a fireplace there.”

            We broke into a kind of sheet-iron arrangement, and there was a fireplace – grate and all – that nobody had ever know about since the Shoyers had owned the place.  So we had afire at last.  We broke up the shutters we had for the raft; and we all sat around and got warm for the first time; and we had ham and potatoes – a real meal.

            But then, when we thought the worst was over, the fire came.  About four o’clock I looked out of the front window and saw a lot of smoke about a block up the street.  It was a fire all right, and the wind was straight in our direction.  There wasn’t a thing but frame houses between it and us.  Pretty soon it was a blaze, and pieces of charcoal as big as butternuts began falling around us. 

            Mr. Shoyer was all in.

            “I don’t care what happens,” he said.  “I don’t want to hear about it till it comes.  I’ve worried all I’m going to.”

Jack took Mother Shoyer aside, then – and said to her:

            “We’ve taken this so far pretty easy – and laughed and all that.  But this is bad.  We couldn’t get out of here.  We’d either burn or drown.”

            Those pieces of charcoal would fly over, and land on the tin roof of the bay window, and break out into a flame right in the rain.

            So we women set to work, and all that evening we tore up sheets into strips.  For there wasn’t a rope in the house.  Then we tied on buckets and pans, and got everything ready for the men to draw up water if the fire came.

            But it never came, after all.  The snow saved us.  For the rain turned to snow and sleet Wednesday afternoon, and lay on the roof.  But I don’t believe that would have saved us of the wind hadn’t changed.  The night before we had sat up all night watching the water; Wednesday night we sat watching the wind and fire.  It was just as bad, I suppose; only we’d got kind of used to it – kind of numb.  It all seemed like a dream, anyhow.  Finally the wind drifted away from us, and the fire turned and went west.

            Thursday morning the water had gone down quite a little; it stopped raining some.  For the first time, boats could go through our streets.  We got some canned salmon and a little piece of bread from the first one.

            By Thursday noon the dirt on the railroad track began to show and relief parities came down from the high land along the track.  And finally the man we saved was taken off in a canoe.

            He looked back and shook his head and yelled, “God bless you!”  And that’s the last we saw of “the guy who lost his wife.”  I wonder what his name was, and whether he found her all right.

            That night – Thursday – we thought we’d get some sleep.  Nobody had slept since Monday night.  The men agreed that everybody could go to sleep, and they would take the alarm clock in their room, and set it so it would go off every twenty minutes.  For the fire was still going, up above us.

            We went to sleep, and the first I knew there was another big thump.  I looked at my watch.  It was two o’clock.  The men had set the alarm, but they had forgotten all about winding the clock.

            The noise startled me – and I suppose I was tired.  Anyhow, I fainted dead away.  And it took twenty minutes to bring me back to consciousness.

“I thought you were dead, sure,” Mother Shoyer told me afterward.

It was lucky I woke up, though.  The fire had worked around a complete circle, and was back where it had started.  All of a sudden it was worse than ever.

“It’s Lowe’s paint shop,” said Jack, looking out of the window. 

It was a fierce fire – all smoke and red flame from the paints and oils.  And with it was the worst yelling and shrieking we had heard.  The Beckel House was diagonally across from it on the corner, and the women in the hotel were yelling.  It looked as if it must go.  And it was only two short blocks from us.

The firemen were going around the fire in boats; but they had nothing to throw water with.  The only thing they could do was blow all the buildings up with dynamite, so as to stop the fire from spreading.  You could hear the explosions all night.

Well, they stopped the fire with dynamite; but there was no more sleep that night for us.  I couldn’t sleep, anyway.  Whenever I lay down, I just twitched and twitched all over.

Next morning – Friday – there was the top of the iron fence again, and by noon the lawns were showing. 

It did look good to see the ground again; and pretty soon people were moving around, visiting.

“Hello, up there,” you could hear them call.  “Everybody all right?”

            The funniest thing was that everybody had forgotten what day of the week it was.  It seemed months.  And you could hear people saying, “What day is it, anyhow?”  We had to get out a calendar to find out.

            You ought to have seen that house of the Shoyer’s on Friday, when the water went down.  The mud was up to the knees of the men’s rubber boots, all over the first floor, that filthy, gluey mud.  They had to clear paths through it, at first, just like clearing a walk after a snowstorm.  Mrs. Shoyer’s expensive pianola was all smashed up.  Her fine books were all gone or ruined.  Her new furniture just fell to pieces; the water had soaked the glue out, or something, and when they took hold of it to lift it up, it fell into boards, and they threw them out of the windows.  But that was nothing to the store.  On Friday afternoon poor Mother Shoyer came back from looking at it, with the tears streaming down her cheeks.  “We’re back just where we started from,” she said.

            Of course, there was no insurance for flood damage.  Mr. Shoyer wouldn’t even look at the store until the day after.

            When we left Monday morning, he was sieving out the mud in the bottom of the store for jewelry.  He put all the mud in ash sieves, and turned the water from a hose on it very carefully.  They’d got some cuff buttons, but most of them were plated ones.

 

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