I begged to go to her house to see, but Father insisted on walking toward town. So we slogged west on the dirt road past animals—cattle and hogs—freely wandering and looking about, just as the people were. The slaughterhouses, most of them long sheds without foundations, had nearly all collapsed. The animals penned beside them had trampled down the fences, then wandered among the houses. A herd of sheep was gathered, trembling, beside the house of a family whose front porch had collapsed, not for the first time. A young mother stood in the doorway, holding her baby, waving and laughing as people walked by staring at her, then waving back. Her husband was already hammering, putting the planks back in place, and some men stopped to help him.
Father said that when we reached Railroad Avenue we would walk up to Army Street and take the cable car downtown. That excited me and made me willing to push on. I had never been downtown, had hardly gone past the railroad tracks, which seemed to be intact, although people were saying that the quake had ripped up the tracks to the south and north. We were on paved streets now with more buildings, some of them two and three stories, most of them badly damaged, leaning.
Railroad Avenue was covered with shattered glass from broken windows. Two buildings had slid completely off their foundations. Crowds of people stood in the middle of the road. I had never seen so many people. The entire population of Hunters Point and Butchertown was here, but as many more were from the west side of Potrero Avenue. They were the first refugees. Most of them had walked from South-of-Market rooming houses and hotels, which, they said, were in flames. They were full of other rumors. The City Hall had collapsed (true). The Cliff House had fallen into the Pacific Ocean (untrue). The whole city was burning (untrue) and there was no water (true). When I looked toward Potrero Hill I could see, from far on the other side, thin but ominous spirals of smoke.
When I remember the wild rumors of those days, I think of two which circulated some days later. One was that, when the fire swept through Chinatown, it killed the entire population. “Finally rid of the damned Chinamen,” said the drunk who passed on this rumor. “Almost worth the fire.” Later I learned that the army had evacuated the Chinese to the Presidio to protect them from men like this one. But for a day or two I believed I was the last oriental left in San Francisco. The second rumor was true. Agnews State Asylum near San Jose had collapsed, killing hundreds of mental patients. Survivors had been led out and tied to trees surrounding the ruin. The rumor provoked a dream which recurs even now so many years later—lost souls tied to trees, watching the world fall around them. In the first twenty years of that recurring dream, I was one of them.
At that moment I was more disturbed by another true rumor. Cable cars had stopped running at the moment the quake hit. A few of the people had come in horse-drawn wagons filled with their belongings. Most had walked with whatever they could carry. There would be no car ride downtown.
In the midst of this confusion a small table had been set up. I moved in close and saw, behind the table, Miss Harrington, and behind her a large handprinted sign, BOIL ALL DRINKING WATER. Another sign directed the homeless to sleeping space at the grammar school. Yet another said that a first aid station had been established at the Butchertown Library. The Butchertown Library was entirely Miss Harrington’s invention, her personal library plus donations, collected in an abandoned storefront next to a saloon. This was the first I had heard of it and the first I had seen of Miss Harrington since my mother died.
Miss Harrington stood over sign-up sheets: one for people who had space to shelter homeless; one for people who had lost their homes; one for those who could donate food or clothing; one for a volunteer patrol against looters; one for volunteers to cook meals or assist medical workers. “Hello, Mei-li,” she called. “Want to help?”
She gave me a few strips of paper, telling me to print BOIL ALL DRINKING WATER on them and nail them to corner buildings. Like other people who had walked near her table, I turned away from it with a calm sense of purpose; Hers was one of the first of the centers of order and optimism which speeded the recovery of the City. The more official committees and edicts—especially the occupation by the army—usually disrupted the order created by people like Miss Harrington.
As I tacked up my last sign, Sophie joined me, saying that Father had disappeared. We walked down Railroad Avenue until we saw him coming out of a saloon. Sophie sighed. But he walked firmly toward us.
“The cable cars aren’t running and the phone in the saloon won’t work.”
“Phone?” I had rarely seen a phone; no one we knew had one.
“To call your sister. To see if Erika is all right.”
It was the first time he had mentioned Erika since my mother’s funeral, when she told him she was going to work in a brothel. Yet he had evidently kept track of her, even knew her phone number.
Father handed us some bread with strips of beef. “The free lunch from Oscar’s Saloon.” Then he walked away again. We hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast, and it was now late afternoon. We sat on a bench that had been pulled out onto the road, chewing greedily and watching the people walking around. There was more laughter now. For the people of Butchertown and Hunters Point, the damage was slight, little more than might be caused by a winter storm. They could easily round up the livestock, prop up the ramshackle slaughtering sheds, and rebuild the fishing pier. For refugees from downtown, there was plenty of open space. Homemade wine was passed freely. It was like a picnic, or so it seemed to a child like me.
When my father came back he told us to go home. He had gotten a place in a wagon that was going downtown. No, we could not go with him. The fire was spreading. He was not sure how he would get back. We would only be a hindrance. He would find Erika and bring her home with him. We must go home and wait.
He spoke and moved with authority and purpose I had never seen in him. Indeed my father, for a brief few days, became a strong, calm center of rationality, even heroism. Unlike Miss Harrington, whose actions were appropriate to every situation, he came into full possession of himself only during this crisis. I wonder if his life might have been different if he could have lived always on the edge of physical danger, always in a crisis that could have brought him forth as this one did.
That night Sophie and I sat up late looking toward the north-west, where the sky shone red all night. Father did not return. The next day we stayed near the house. Between us, we managed to ftx the pipe from the well so we could pump water at the kitchen sink again. We pumped and boiled water, and near the end of the day we had our first request for drinking water from a family that set up camp thirty feet away. We waited up late again that night, sitting outside long after dark. To the northwest that terrible red sky continued to glow. The air was thick with smoke. Our eyes burned. The changing smells told us what buildings were burning. The smell of coffee meant the roasting plant near the Ferry Building was burning. Very late that night I smelled burnt bananas mixed with the bitter stench of burning leather. When we looked east, over the Bay, we saw boats streaming back and forth, back and forth, carrying people to Oakland, while fireboats sprayed arcs of shimmering water to save the docks from the fire.
We put a lamp in the window before going to bed. As I was lighting the lamp I heard some people walking past our house. They stopped. “That’s her, that’s her,” I heard a woman say. I recognized her voice. She was the one who had spread the false rumor about Signora Renata’s death. “I was there, I heard her describe it just like it’s happening. Little half-chinee, they call her Sy-kee, must be a Chinese name. Look, I was there, and she predicted the whole thing the night before, I swear it!”
My father returned with Erika during the night and fell asleep without waking us, without undressing, she in his bed, he on a blanket on the back porch. They slept until noon the next day, while Sophie and I tiptoed around their smoky, dirty bodies. After they awoke we heard their story. Father had gone to Erika’s