The fire was part of fifty to seventy-five separate fires that merged, fanned by winds of seventy miles an hour. Within a fifty to one hundredmile radius of Duluth, two thousand square miles burned. The fire left four hundred dead, two thousand injured, and thirteen thousand homeless. It was an incredible disaster. Cloquet suffered heavily. Five people died and most of the residential and business areas were destroyed.
Phil Bellefeuille, my Grandmother Poling’s nephew, remembered the Cloquet Fire. As of September 1998 he was still living in Seattle at age eighty-nine when he wrote the following description:
I was staying with them [Grandma and Grandpa Desilets in Cloquet] and going to school. Grandma took me to a show and coming out in the afternoon the sky was smoky and the sun was like the yoke of an egg. After supper all the whistles blew. Grandpa went to find out and came back then we had to go to the [rail] depot. There we had to climb up and into a gondola car [flat car with sides]. Ladies climbed up, the youngster was handed to her and buggy cast aside.
While waiting I remember seeing a burning branch or something floating through the air. I suppose the heat of the fire kept it up, then it would fall and start another fire. The depot was on the river flats and the town was on a hill.
And I remember after we got going one lady had several kids that got sleepy. One laid down, another on him and so forth as that the standing area made the sleeping area. The train was so crowded that we could not have fallen down.
Dad found us with some friends of theirs. [He came] to take me back and while waiting in Carlton this nosy kid [Phil] had to open this door in the depot, looked in and there on the floor covered with cheesecloth were several black corpses. This kid shut that door quickly.
In Cloquet, the depot was next to a sawmill and where they had lumber stacked high, air drying, it was now but a black prairie. The concrete block buildings had some of the walls standing. Grandpa had some rifles and guns in the woodshed — their barrels were now pretty crooked.
The only buildings saved were on the island in the St. Louis River and that was mostly saloons and maybe another business?
I will never forget Oct. 12, 1918. It was a school holiday they called Columbus Day. [It was in fact Columbus Day, but it was a Saturday.]
Phil said the Desilets moved to Superior, Wisconsin then. When he arrived there he had only a shoe in one pocket and a statue of St. Anne with the Virgin Mary in another.
In my grandmother’s house, there was an old photo of two women holding babies in arms while wading in the river and watching the flames. I heard that that was my grandmother holding my dad and his sister. The picture is long gone and we’ll never know all the truth now. Certainly fire was burned into the family memory, and I couldn’t look at the picture without imagining my mother and my friends’ mothers standing in McVicar Creek while the fire I set consumed the neighbourhood.
Later that summer we again heard the scream of an emergency vehicle on an urgent mission. This time it was an ambulance and it came directly to 402 Dawson Street. Inside, Isidore LaFrance felt ill after dinner and began pacing between the living room and dining room, rubbing his left arm and left chest with his right hand. I paced behind him, thinking it was a new game. Down to the walnut cabinet that contained the radio receiver around which we gathered at night, then back past the dining room table and down to the Queen Anne chair from which I had taken my first steps. He was grey in the face. The pain took his breath away and suddenly he collapsed from what we later learned was a stroke.
He had retired less than a year earlier, walking away from the big black locomotives that he had tended or drove for just weeks short of fifty years. His railroading days were replaced by sitting and talking at Louise’s bedside and taking us kids out for car rides to Boulevard Lake. The grey-striped engineer’s cap and overalls were set aside for suits and shirts and a fedora. No matter what he wore, he always looked massive, a neatly-dressed Paul Bunyan. And, whatever the clothes, one pocket always carried treats: hard candy for the grandchildren, Sen-Sen liquorice mints for himself.
Now he was on the floor, a huge immovable bulk. The big man who had lifted me so effortlessly into the cab of the hissing locomotive only months previous for his retirement run from Fort William to Port Arthur refused to respond to my little hands shaking his shoulders or my pleas for him to wake up. The ambulance took him away, and I never saw him again. Within a day, Isidore LaFrance was dead in a hospital at sixty-six.
For Veronica, it was more than the death of a father. It was the end of a fairytale existence in which a once childless couple devoted their lives to shielding their unexpected treasure from life’s cruelties.
5 — CURRENT RIVER
Isidore’s death opened a stress fracture in our lives at 402 Dawson Street. It widened as the reality of his death took hold over the following months, then became an abyss that we struggled to cross every day. He had been our bridge to a better life.
Louise’s condition worsened, partly because Isidore’s support was gone. She was no longer able to come downstairs to join us for meals on holiday occasions or to listen to a special radio broadcast. Her trips down the hall on crutches to the bathroom became more painful and use of a bedpan more frequent. At night, she cried out from her bedroom next to mine. I could smell wafting down the hallway the sweetness of wintergreen mixed with the sharpness of rubbing alcohol and other potions used to alleviate her pain.
The car with the Bourkes Drug Store logo came to the house more often. So did the doctor, hustling urgently into the wide front bedroom where Isidore often had stood at the windows staring into the street when Louise slept. Veronica became a full-time nurse, receiving some help from the Victorian Order of Nurses, saints who came a couple times a week and made life easier for us all. She had a second child now, Barbara, who was three when Isidore died. The heavier workload strained the household and created tension that pushed aside the easy living atmosphere our family had enjoyed.
With Isidore’s full pension gone, Ray became the only breadwinner for the household. He worked as a grease monkey on the streetcars and new electric buses at the municipal transit barns on Cumberland Street near the lake. He was not certified as a mechanic and the work was not permanent or well-paying enough to support an extended family.
The pleasantness of family life dissipated. We missed my grandfather for the Sunday afternoon car rides, the nostalgic trips to the CNR roundhouse, the candies that appeared magically from his pocket and the humorous strength that pulled us together as a family. He had helped care for my grandmother and when he wasn’t actually physically helping, just his presence helped to ease her pain. He was an anchor that held us in a calm, safe, and comfortable harbour well shielded from the misfortunes that touched other people. That’s what he had always been for Veronica, and that’s what he was for her family.
The strain of his absence showed on my father. He became irritable and did not eat well. He was impatient and one Christmas week when we were decorating a magnificent floor-to-ceiling balsam, he blew up and began throwing things. Not long after the doctor told him he had ulcers. The halcyon days at 402 Dawson Street, which included sitting around the radio at night listening to Lux Theatre, turned into times of worried looks and thin tempers.
More bad luck arrived not long after Isidore’s death. Veronica became pregnant and miscarried. A doctor injected her with penicillin and she reacted violently. Her throat swelled shut, and she nearly choked to death in bed. I watched as a doctor slammed his car door shut on College Street and raced into the house and upstairs to her bedroom. I followed and peeked through the doorway as he worked on my mother and talked to my father. Doctors did house calls then, and this one was a regular visitor to our place because he looked after Louise. He had come once for me in the middle of the night, thrusting fingers down my throat and pulling loose a suffocating blood clot that formed after a tooth extraction.
My father, looking relieved, escorted the doctor from my mother’s room and down the stairs. I crept in to look at her and ran from her room, terrified by what I saw. She