They soon went to bed. Just before three in the morning, a man
who lived nearby heard a loud explosion. The force of the blast
radiated through the neighborhood, bending trees and signposts
and blowing out windows. In a Fairfax hotel, a night watchman
sitting by a window was showered with broken glass and thrown to
the floor. In another room of the hotel, a guest was hurled
backward. Closer to the blast, doors on houses were smashed and
torn asunder; wooden beams cracked like bones. A witness who
had been a boy at the time later wrote, “It seemed that the night
would never stop trembling.” Mollie and Ernest felt the explosion,
too. “It shook everything,” Ernest later recalled. “At first I thought
it was thunder.” Mollie, frightened, got up and went to the window
and could see something burning in the distant sky, as if the sun
had burst violently into the night. Ernest went to the window and
stood there with her, the two of them looking out at the eerie
glow.
Ernest slipped on his trousers and ran outside. People were
stumbling from their houses, groggy and terrified, carrying
lanterns and firing guns in the air, a warning signal and a call for
others to join what was a growing procession—a rush of people
moving, on foot and in cars, toward the site of the blast. As people
got closer, they cried out, “It’s Bill Smith’s house! It’s Bill Smith’s
house!” Only there was no longer a house. Nothing but heaps of
charred sticks and twisted metal and shredded furniture, which
Bill and Rita had purchased just days earlier from the Big Hill
Trading Company, and strips of bedding hanging from telephone
wires and pulverized debris floating through the black toxic air.
Even the Studebaker had been demolished. A witness struggled for
words: “It just looked like, I don’t know what.” Clearly, someone
had planted a bomb under the house and detonated it.
The flames amid the rubble consumed the remaining fragments
of the house and gusted into the sky, a nimbus of fire. Volunteer