to walls, mix-ups that ensued. One of her own sons had been required to answer the phone when he worked as a shipper. Now he was an inspector for the railway, and lived in Toronto. Her other son had worked at the coal chutes until his lungs began to suffer from the black dust. After the Great Fire, he looked for another job and left to keep the books at the new mill built in Tweed. It was said that the Purdy family might be interested in buying the mill.
Grania is watching Mamo’s lips for words she knows. “The flour, Mamo.” The word flour comes out high, as if she is singing.
“The mill burned.” Mamo’s fingers become flames.
“Because the spark…”
“You’re getting ahead. It was the day you decided to be born. The steamer called—”
“ Reindeer! ”
“Yes, its name was Reindeer. It was close to the long shingle dock and a man said that it threw a spark and the cedar shingles caught fire and the fire began to spread. But the next day, the captain of the Reindeer said the spark did not come from his steamer at all.”
Whatever the cause, there had been stacks of wood everywhere the eye could see—hardwood lumber and shingles and railway ties. And the wind was fierce, blowing from the southwest, when at three-twenty in the afternoon, the whistle sounded the alarm. That was when the cricketers stopped their game and made a rush towards the cedar mill.
Mamo’s flame fingers waggle forward now, and side to side. The flames crossed the railway tracks and Water Street, and after that many buildings burned, more than a hundred, including the beautiful Catholic church that was built on the hill three years after she moved to the town. A man climbed up into the spire when a burning cinder lodged on the outside and took hold. He tried to smother the fire from inside but could not, and he had to get out. Within hours, only the spine of the building was left to show that it had been there at all. Father Hogan was the priest at the time, and he had been out of town that day. When he returned on the four-o’clock train there was nothing he could do but witness the burning. Prayer would not stop the flames. Mamo, remembering, crosses herself and then she makes a steeple with her fingers.
“The church burned, the lumber burned, all that good lumber out on the docks.” Grania cannot hear the sorrow that is overflowing, now, from Mamo’s voice. There had been other fires in the town, earlier and later, oh yes. But that day, even some of the refuse burners had burned.
“Our house didn’t burn, Mamo.”
“Not ours. We lived in another corner of town then, back from the bay. That was before your father bought this house and the hotel. Before he moved the family to Main Street—and I moved with you. But your mother, she was bothered by the smoke that night, and that’s when you made up your mind to be born.”
Mamo falls silent and contemplates the miracle of new life in the midst of destruction. Not only the mill—she considers the waste of flour, Crown Jewel flour, the unbaked bread, cakes and pies—but also the bran house, the cedar mill, the wheat-filled elevator, they too yielded to the flames. The winds were fierce; the air crackled with flying debris and chunks of cinder and shingle and wood. The docks burned to the water’s edge. High menacing flames were seen for miles. Black smoke whistled upward and there was a vast red glow across the sky. The Rathbun fire hoses were used for thirty hours without a single section bursting. Napanee sent a fire engineand men; Belleville sent members of its fire brigade; Kingston sent men and a Chatham engine. But with all of this help, with streams of water directed on the mill and the boilers and the chemical works, with men and women of the town using buckets of water in attempts to contain the fire, it was only when a heavy rain began that some of the larger fires were put out. Even so, piles of cordwood burned all night, illuminating the sky. And sodden,
Tim Lahaye, Jerry B. Jenkins