Now And At The Hour Of Our Death

By Lily Mack

…..

When you stepped up to the window, you couldn’t know all there was to know. You couldn’t know any of it.

 Your school was on fire and there was no way out. The blaze lit up the building like a thousand candles, shooting plumes of black smoke and searing hot gases into the classrooms, devouring the corridors with flames, breathing panic into the air. You staggered to the classroom window, jostled and hemmed in by your terrified classmates, while the firemen called out from the frozen ground two stories below that they would get a ladder and rescue you all, and your parents – though you couldn’t make them out in the crowd of hysterical grownups – screamed your name, while behind you Sister Mary Edward urged everyone to pray, her high-pitched voice nearly drowned out by shrieks and cries for help. Far away, strains of The Chipmunk Song drifted from a car radio somewhere on the street as the cool December air drifted in the window along with a flurry of snowflakes, and you felt the snowflakes icy cool on your face as the heat of the fire pressed against your back.

 

You couldn’t know that an eighth grade boy would confess to setting the fire but was too young to be charged. A judge wouldn’t release the information for fear of reprisals, and to protect the reputation of the Church. The boy never said why he did it.

 

What was it like in there? Did it seem strange to be in the classroom in the dark, with smoke as thick as fog hiding Sister’s desk, the cloak room black and airless? Perhaps you could smell burning leftovers from lunch, the rancid odor of peanut butter or baloney, a leftover apple or banana rotten in the smoke, the toxic stench of searing metal lunch boxes. Perhaps you heard the tinkling sound of breaking glass as a thermos burst into pieces.

 

You stared out the window, antsy and agitated, as seconds stretched into minutes and minutes stretched into an eternity. Biting your finger nails, wiping your face on the sleeve of your blouse, clutching the hand of the girl beside you, you waited to be rescued, trusting that help was nearby, even as the cold hand of fear gripped your heart and waves of heat lapped at your back and your legs; and then you watched as the firemen discovered the ladders weren’t long enough to reach the second floor and a tear streaked the soot on your face. In a last desperate move, children around you began to jump from the window, a strange sight on that December evening – a neighbor who saw the smoke thought someone was throwing bundles of laundry out the windows. But you stayed put.

 

You couldn’t know that one of the sisters would receive a medal for heroic actions during the fire; though it would turn out she had not taken any action, heroic or otherwise. The Church would later say she represented all the sisters who had performed lifesaving measures that day, five of whom perished.

 

When the little boy behind you – your rival in memorizing the multiplication tables, the boy you had a secret crush on – broke away, shouting, “Let’s go!” and clambered up on the window sill, he turned to put a hand out. You may have meant to grab it but didn’t react soon enough – seconds were precious, the fire was advancing and he wanted to help you but he couldn’t wait. He leapt from the window and you watched as he landed on crushed gravel, crying out in pain but on the ground at last and free from the fire, while you stood frozen in place, watching the firemen prop the ladder against the building, the ladder that couldn’t reach you.

 

Perhaps you wanted to jump but were afraid to let go – perhaps the girl beside you, stricken with her own fears, held you back. You huddled with the others, your face pinched in fear as you tried to catch your breath in the overheated air, your limbs rigid. Your parents kept screaming your name, desperate now for you to get out of the building, but you couldn’t hear them with the roar of the fire in your ears and you stayed at the window and clung to your classmates.

 

You couldn’t know that the local alderman who went into the building after the fire claimed to find a whole classroom of children at their desks with their heads bowed in prayer, the teacher seated in front of the class – all of them dead. And while this was reported as an eye witness account, it never happened; though it spread as urban legend for many years.

 

You were probably too frightened to jump; you were only a little girl, barely nine; the ground must have looked very far away. Indeed it was – 25 feet down, and instead of grass, only gravel and concrete. Some of the children who leapt died from the impact. But you couldn’t know that, you couldn’t know any of it.

 

If you could have seen the future from that window, would you have taken a chance and jumped for your life?

 

You couldn’t know that only four years later there would be a Catholic president who would become a hero after he was assassinated. 

 

Or that by the time you were a teenager, you wouldn’t have to listen to your big brother’s Elvis records anymore – the Beatles would arrive and change everything.

 

Or that multiplication boy liked you, too. He would have given you your first kiss in a few years, if you had gone out the window.

 

You couldn’t know that once in college, you would have disregarded much of what the sisters taught you. The Sexual Revolution would enlist a generation and even Catholic girls would take birth control pills – you would lose your virginity because you were in love and once on the Pill, you would fall in love many times.

 

You couldn’t know about the civil rights movement and the rise of Black power, the anti-war movement and  the siren song of San Francisco;  free love, flower power, and Woodstock;  its dark counterpoint Altamont; the women’s movement, or the gay rights movement. 

 

Or that in the future it would no longer be a sin to eat meat on Friday, sisters would stop wearing habits, and the altar would be turned around to face the parishioners. You couldn’t know all there was to know.

 

Then as parents wept and firemen grimly manned the hoses, the blaze flared up in the window where you stood, flames shooting so far out of the building they curled into the dark clouded sky, and you disappeared in a maelstrom of smoke and fire. A wail went up from the crowd.

It was never clear why you didn’t jump. Your parents agonized over it, especially your mother who thought it was her fault that she should have prayed harder for your rescue. She could never erase the sight of you at the window; she saw your face – solemn, smudged with soot – when she tried to sleep at night, feeling the pain of losing you year after year, guilt eating away at her, guilt at not being able to save you.

 

If you’d had a glimpse of things to come, it might have made a difference. If you had seen the future, you might have gone ahead and jumped from that window. But you couldn’t know any of it.

 

In only one small thing were you blessed. You couldn’t know that the students who survived the fire were told by the sisters, “God only took the good ones.”

 

 

 BIO:  Lily Mack’s poetry and short fiction have been published in several other small literary magazines (including Blink/Ink), in print and online.