Faces all around me were creased with sadness, if underpinned by anger. The propaganda war between company-leaning papers and pro-labor bulletins, trading blame and claims of exploitation, had further ratcheted tensions. Even here on this day, hushed word spread that the man who yelled “fire” was a strikebreaker whose Citizens’ Alliance pin, as spotted on his lapel, proved his malice.

The group’s members, after all, were seen as anti-union thugs. Same went for local lawmen, allegedly prompting the sheriff to have secreted the murderer out of Michigan. Thus, charity from any of their pockets wasn’t exactly welcomed.

We no want your blood money, I’d recently overheard a mother seethe. At her apartment door, down the hall from mine and Papa’s, a suited Alliance leader looked flustered with envelope in hand. We bury our own, she’d told the man and slammed the door.

Two days after Christmas, the families were doing precisely as she claimed. Flatbed motorcars and horse-drawn carts served as their hearses. Crunching past me in the snow, each held long, black caskets, fifteen for the adults who’d perished. Many had been kin. A few had been married.

Escorting them on foot, surviving relatives used handkerchiefs to wipe streams of tears. They clutched rosaries for strength, photos for meaning. Others gripped their chests, as if to keep what remained of their hearts from crumbling.

Past the observers across the road, a local woman caught my eye. She stood back a bit with her young daughter held tight to her chest and a guilty gaze fixed on the ground, a testament to the rumors. People said that after the stampede, in a frenzy of despair, the mother carried a deceased child believed to be hers all the way home, where she found her youngster alive and well, having snuck out of the party early.

What relief the woman must have felt, only to be struck by the gravity of her error. The trek back to the assembly hall had to have been unbearable as she delivered that lifeless child to a frantic-yet-hopeful mother, shattering another’s world.

Suddenly glimpsing the parade to come, I clung to Papa’s arm.

Traveling in clusters, pallbearers carried pure-white caskets low at their sides. The dimensions of each befitted a child, the weight miniscule compared to the burden.

I squeezed my eyes shut, but briefly. Darkness brought the memory of heels trampling my body while curled on my side, defenseless as a newborn. The position, a nurse surmised, had ironically helped. For it kept my mouth uncovered and lungs inflated, as did my location somewhat high in the pile. My breathing too had likely saved me, calmly hoarding air versus squandering it in screams.

Whatever the case, I was out here. And they were in there.

Every county in the region had supplied what funerary boxes they could. No solitary town could have been prepared for seventy-three concurrent deaths, the majority of them kids.

Fifty-eight to be precise.