We made our way back to the pier, I full of such fears as might have paralyzed me had I not been in thrall to the vivid young girl who held my hand with the same tenacity a starving wolf might grip with peerless jaws the flank of a vagrant deer. In truth, her grip was more memorable by double than the frigid bite of the river, which would leave me forever with fingers that only the summer sun could ever truly warm.
The crowd had grown ever larger on the bridge as word spread of our rescue effort, and as we moved onto the shore ice with our boat and our salvage, those crescive masses began struggling for greater vantage, shoving rudely among themselves, when suddenly, with a flagitious roar and an agonized whine, the old wooden span collapsed in twain, plunging a hundred or more of our citizens onto and through the fragile ice and into the deadly bath, while another hundred saved themselves with desperation leaps and wild clutchings to the fractured boards and railings; and there ensued then a mad scrambling upward and sideward by that doomed and threatened clot.
Their shrieks were the saddest sounds of my young days and instantly we all moved in our boats to help those we could. We saved about forty and lost we’ll never know how many in those first few minutes before the onset of the even greater cataclysm, which, when we perceived it (I say we by way of collecting the common perspective we arrived at in a later and calmer moment), generated in us such fear of the Lord, of nature gone wild, of cosmic, mythic rage against our vulnerable puniness that we were negated as individuals and became as grains of sand, as desiccated leaves. We survived only because we survived. There is no other ascribable reason or logic behind who was saved and who wasn’t, any more than there was logic in the way I alone of my family had come through the cholera unscathed.
The torrent came while we were frantically rescuing the drowning hordes from the bridge, roared down upon us from the northern river — a rush of ice like none in Albany had ever seen, even the eldest. It came, they later said, from the Mohawk River, careening with tumbling, tumultuous dudgeon into the Hudson, dislodging more and more of both rivers’ heat-weakened blankets of ice, crunching and cracking and pushing more and more of its own fractured surface until, reaching Albany, the glut bedammed itself, clotted the whole transverse of the river’s channel with chunks and prisms of ice in a sudden upthrust, a jagged wall built so quickly and with such superb natural engineering that had we not been hauling in the wet and the dead we would have given it the same attention we give an eclipse of the sun, for it was equivalently awesome.
The wall of ice grew from a relatively small, fencelike structure, say five feet high, across the thawed center of the river, continued building upon that fence a pyramid, a mountain, an instant Albany iceberg that never was before and probably never will be again. It rose to what some calculated as the height of ten men. Others said twenty. It grew swiftly upward with boundless force, brilliant chaos, and just as we thought it would never cease to grow, it was struck from within and below by some central power we could neither see nor understand, even now, but which exploded that mountain into a Vesuvius of crystal, showering the shores of both Albany and Greenbush with fragments, wounding an unsuspecting half-dozen people, killing two horses and a pregnant cat on the quay, and loosing a tidal wave that swept every object storehoused on the Great Pier, including barrels of coffee, piles of lumber and staves, and another dozen men, tumbling them into the torrent as if they were the river’s own algae, which they would very soon become.
That wave would raise us all, the drowning masses, the handful of salvationists, to its stunning crest, then settle us back into a trough, rocking us on a slowly rising flood tide that would, half an hour after our departure, spill over the quay and crawl into storehouses, and, worse, into the plaster works and lime kiln, there mixing with and slacking the lime into chemical combustion that would set fire to a block of stores along the quay frontage: fire rising out of flood — the gods gone mad.
Because there was such panic, such fear, I focused finally on what was possible for us alone to do: save the child, this orphan of the river, who was shivering and unable to walk when I lifted her out of our skiff onto the shore and led her up the steps to dry ground, knowing, as we threaded our way through clusters of desperation, that this frail creature would die of frozen blood if I did not soon warm her. My master, meanwhile, lifted the corpse of La Última from the skiff and plopped it down on the shore ice, far more concerned with the contents of her trunk than with the disposition of her person. Even as the child and I were saving ourselves from water, John the Brawn, under the eyes of heaven and all the bereft, was hammering at the latch of the trunk with the end of his oar: a vision of how the fear of death easily yields to the power of greed. But the trunk would not yield, and so John turned again to the dead Magdalena Colón, clutched her under his left arm, and, gripping the trunk handle with his right hand, ascended the quay’s steps, bumping both the actress’s toes and trunk on every step as he came, but rising willfully up from the water to dry turf, a Palaemonic figure bereft of sanity.
On the quay the kin and kith of the lost were loud in their lamentations, while at least twoscore people were still clinging to the far segment of the fractured bridge, some of them failing of purchase and falling through the broken ice, either emerging by splash of will and main strength or vanishing in frozen weakness beneath the rising tide of ice and blood.
John stood the trunk on its end and gave both his hands to the dead Magdalena, lifting her into a semblance of womanly order, however dead, and laying her down again so as to catch his breath and consider the immediate future. He turned his gaze to the child we would soon know to be Maud, and he asked her, “Have ye family?” Maud only stared at him as an answer, and then he cast an eye at Magdalena.
“Is that one your ma?” he asked, and that roused Maud.
“She was my aunt,” said Maud, “and vastly superior to Mother as a human being.”
“Where is your dastardly mother?”
“She is with the King.”
“Ah, the King,” said John. “She’s a queen, is she?”
“She’s the King’s companion,” said Maud.
“And which king might it be that’s keen on your ma?”
“The King of Bavaria.”
“Bavaria, a grand little place, so they say. And is the King, like yourself, stopping here in Albany for a bit of a visit?”
“They are both in Bavaria. The King has gone into exile,” said Maud, whose want of childish speech was giving me the image of myself as a tongue-tie, and I being almost fifteen, two years and three months older than she.
“Your auntie’s fair croaked and your ma’s in bloody exile. So where might your da be, then?”
“My mother always said she didn’t know for certain where he was. But she’s a liar.”
Just then, with those poor souls who were clutching the bridge’s far segment sending up their continuing chorale of dangling doom, and with the living onshore throwing themselves into furies of grief over the dead and the missing, a woman whose husband, or perhaps brother, lay inert on the quay looked at us and recognized the corpse of Magdalena, her amber plume, sodden and bedraggled (but a swatch of autumn nevertheless), still jutting markedly from that dead skull. And that woman then rose up from beside her inert man, let seethe through her teeth a single word—”Herrrr”—and, following upon this with the maddened and throaty growl of a jungle feline, flew across the space that separated us, pounced upon the courtesan’s lifeless body, sank her teeth into that pallid cheek, and came away with a blooded wad of flesh in her mouth, which she savored with a bulging smile and then spat onto the dead actress’s chest. Stiffened with loyalty to our corpse, I leaped into the tableau and yanked the toothy bitch by the arm, flinging her aside so that John the Brawn might lift our dead lady out of more harm’s way.