“My angel mother saved my life,” Papa told him. “She lost her own in the process. During the great fire, she rushed to the waterfront and placed me aboard a barge. I remember seeing her bloody footprints, as she had no shoes to wear. The barge was filled with other children and elderly folk, all of us crying and panicked. My mother tied a green ribbon around my wrist and the same around her own. I didn’t understand why she loaded me aboard the barge and then rushed back into the city. Later, I always wondered if she went back to save her belongings, or perhaps another person. We saw rockets in the sky—the dynamite used by firefighters trying to stop the advance of the conflagration. City Hall was a shattered dome. The great buildings crumbled or burned to shells. Smoke was thicker than fog, and someone put a handkerchief over my nose and mouth, and my eyes stung. I recall very little after the barge was brought ashore. Impressions, really. Terror. Scattered milk cans everywhere. The dead being hauled away. Troops marching through the streets and shouting orders. Electric poles toppled every which way. Someone asked questions, leading me along by the hand. I told them my name and my mam’s name, but no one knew her. I did not know the place where I lived. All I knew was my name, and that I lived with my mam in the basement of a building with a winking sun on the roofline.

“I was taken to the great orphanage west of Van Ness. The massive building looked like a haunted castle, and since it was damaged by fire, we camped in tents. I waited and watched. I was told my name was posted on rolls around the city. So many children were joyously reunited with their families.

“But my mother never came. After the cataclysm, the unclaimed children were moved to the orphan asylum and later to the State Normal School. There was a terrible sadness. A loneliness. Those who cared for me were kind indeed, but I yearned to see my mam again, always praying she would come back, singing the songs she’d sung to me as a babe, and working so tirelessly at her drawing. She toiled upstairs from dawn until dusk, I recall, but at the end of the day, she always had time for stories and songs while she drew pictures of birds and animals, and of me.”

“Did you ever try to find out what happened to her?” Andrew once asked his father.

He still remembered the sad, haunted look on Papa’s face. “I did, when I was older. I combed the archives of the army relief operations, but I never saw her name. There were hundreds of ‘unidentified females,’ and I suppose one of them was her.” Papa looked so sad when he said this that Andrew never asked the question again.