Before she could put her plan into action, a thick tree limb slammed across her back and shoulders like a baseball bat. The impact threw her from the raft, and she plunged headfirst into saltwater.
Her limbs moved reflexively, even as her mind wondered why she fought. God help her, she was dying! Why couldn’t she accept her fate? Why couldn’t she stop fighting and end this torment?
An image of Phillip filled her senses. His face loomed over hers, so full of his need for her, his touch so warm, so real. Did he love her still, or had he truly meant his hurtful words? In that last moment, just before she fell into the waves, she’d caught a glimpse of him as he’d reached toward her. Didn’t that mean that, at least on some level, he cared?
She had to know. She would keep struggling, for if there were any chance, no matter how remote, of returning to his arms, Shae knew she’d fight her way through Hell itself to get there.
As she broke the surface and drew breath, a lightning flash lit the waves around her. In its stark glare, she saw no sign of the raft she’d ridden here, so very far from land.
It was gone, along with her last, thin chance of survival.
*
Phillip indicated the sewing room to Eva, and the small group edged its way toward its outside window. The leak there had become a fissure on a wall now slanting toward them. Water poured through it and stood up to their ankles all over the room’s floor.
He leaned over to shout beside her ear, “When it goes, we’re jumping through that window!”
She shook her head, and he noticed how her dark skin had taken on an ashen cast, despite the wholesome yellow lamplight. “Can’t swim none a us.” Her reply rose just above the ravening storm.
“Then grab something, anything that floats.” Phillip explained to her, then to both boys.
Eva nodded, but wariness was etched into her features. “Why you worryin’ about us?” she asked.
To give himself a ladder to climb out of the abyss, he thought. To shift his focus from his anguish so he could bear it. To give two boys and their mother half a chance. Yet he answered, “For Shae,” as if that would explain it.
Apparently, it sufficed. Eva nodded, and a look passed between them, as each knew and acknowledged the raw pain of the other’s loss. Acknowledged it and yet continued, unwilling to surrender one more child to this storm.
The end, when it at last came, was just as he’d imagined over and over, in an attempt to steel himself against panic. The house leaned further in the direction of the earlier impact, and then rolled over slowly, as precisely as if it had been choreographed in Paris. The sounds of Armageddon exploded all around them: the buckling of the structure, the shattering of glass, the deep roar of the wind as it tore the roof away.
As the house folded and collapsed, Phillip grabbed both boys and tumbled backward out the window. Its glass had burst and left behind a frame of jagged shards, but he couldn’t tell if he’d been cut. He was aware only of thudding backward down the slanted side. In the space of a heartbeat, he lost hold of Eva’s sons. He saw them tumbling, twisting, then sweeping off the house’s side with the same wave that lifted him.
He never saw their mother leave the window. The entire building submerged and settled, then vanished into darkness.
As debris from the house swirled about him, Phillip hoped the boys would remember to grab at floating boards before they drowned. He followed his own advice, but the first he grasped spun and sank beneath his weight. He swam toward another, lit by lightning flashes, and bumped up against a woman’s floating corpse. His hand briefly tangled in her streaming locks, and for one horrible moment he was convinced that this was Shae’s dead body. But no another flash revealed the old woman, the invalid who’d been abed inside the house.
He reached out for one end of a sturdy beam and draped his arm around it. More lightning revealed a dark head above the other end one of Eva’s two boys, though in the poor light, he could not say which. Neither did it matter; he was gladdened by the thought that someone, anyone besides him, had survived the house collapse.
But even though the two of them had come this far, it didn’t mean that they could live, adrift, upon these hurricane-tossed waters.
*
As Shae struggled to tread water in the darkness, something slammed painfully against her ribs. Her raft! Despite the deep ache of fatigue, giddy relief gave her a burst of energy. She could climb aboard the chunk of roof and rest awhile. She might survive, even ease her suffering, for a few minutes more.
Hauling herself aboard the unstable span took several tries, and even when she managed, she had to struggle to find a spot where she could, sitting, keep her head above the water. Only one narrow section of roof sufficed. No wonder she’d missed spotting it earlier, after she’d been knocked into the waves. Unmistakably, her refuge was sinking.
She couldn’t allow herself to think of it. Couldn’t allow anything but whatever brief span she had to try to rest and gather strength.
*
Phillip’s hands ached from his long death-grip on the beam. His throat tightened as a result of his shouts to the boy at its opposite end, a boy he had now determined to be Eva’s eldest, Abraham. He hoped fervently that Jacob and Eva had managed to survive as well. He wondered, too, about Mrs. Jennings, who had opened her home to so many, and about the little boy who’d had the insect lodged inside his ear.
Dead, he imagined. All of them. Just as they would be if this hellish storm did not abate.
As if to underscore his doubts about survival, the beam struck some sort of towerperhaps the belfry of a church and he lost his grip. Almost instantly, the beam was swept away. He caught just a glimpse of Abraham’s face as the boy, too, was knocked loose.
He swam through the churning waters, then caught up one arm around the boy’s neck and shoulder. But by this time, panic had seized Abraham. He struggled in Phillip’s grip until both sank as one.
Phillip managed to fight his way to the surface. He could hear Abraham sucking air when both broke the water’s surface.
“Quit fighting, or I’ll knock you senseless!” Phillip shouted in his ear. Exhausted as he was, he had little strength to spare. They’d both drown if Abraham continued struggling.
Phillip felt, rather than saw, Abraham’s head bob up and down. Thank God that he had understood. Phillip didn’t think he could leave any child, though the cost might be his life.
Even with Abraham’s cooperation, however, he wasn’t certain either of them could survive. Waves swamped them repeatedly, and he wore exhaustion like a coat of lead. More than once, fatigue pulled him beneath the surface, and he realized, finally, that all his efforts were in vain.
A wave lifted the pair, and they struck something spiny, something that bent against their weight.
Abraham was first to realize what it was. “A tree! Grab hold the branches!”
The boy followed his own advice, and climbed into the upper half of a towering live oak.
Relief flooded Phillip. At least Abraham might live. But as Phillip tried to grasp the branches, his muscles seized into knots of fatigue. He could not make his arms and hands work right.
He sank, for what he realized would be the final time. He’d join Shae, he realized, and wondered if she realized he was sorry, if, even dead, she loved him still.
Something snagged his arm and pulled him to the surface. Abraham fought to keep his balance and still drag Phillip to his perch. Reviving somewhat, Phillip regained enough control to climb up behind the boy.
Both lodged in the highest branches that would support their weight. Waves crashed not far beneath them, and their spray supplemented the torment of the stinging raindrops. But they were safe now, for the moment. Safe until the water rose again.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Here, where the world is quiet;
Here, where all trouble seems
Dead winds’ and spent waves’ riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams.
/> Algernon Charles Swinburne
From “The Garden of Proserpine”
* Sunday, September 18, 1875 *
The most insistent pain, the one that woke Shae, was her stomach. Her wretching started before she was even fully conscious. She vomited seawater into the wet sand.
The unpleasant odor made her roll away, onto her back, and her eyelids slitted open to a blur of blue and tan. Battered by wind, rain, and salt, her eyes hurt badly, but not much more than every other part of her.
Still, she forced herself to sit up, to move away from the rank odor. The breeze against her cheek felt mild, and the brightness and warmth convinced her that, incredibly, she had lived until morning. A fair morning at that. The change in weather, as much as her survival, struck her as miraculous. She breathed a prayer of thanks to God.
She tried to remember swimming or washing up on shore, but after a few moments, she gave up the useless task. The last thing she recalled was sitting on the sinking chunk of porch roof, wondering what she might grab onto next.
Movement attracted her attention, despite the blurring of her vision. As her eyes slowly focused, she realized she was watching crabs scuttle about. It took her somewhat longer to determine their frantic activity had been precipitated by the presence of a nearby banquet: the swollen corpse of a fat man. Oddly, she felt nearly as much horror at his nude condition as the fact that he was dead. Being the guest of honor at a feast of crabs seemed horrible enough a fate, but his naked sprawl stole the poor man’s last shred of human dignity.
It took her several moments to realize how narrowly she’d avoided the same fate. Certainly, the storm had nearly claimed her, and the wind and waves had stripped her right down to her chemise. She was only covered, at present, to her knees. Her drawers, too, had survived, she discovered, but every petticoat, even her corset, had been torn away. Reaching to her neck, she felt relief that by some miracle, the cameo remained there, like an emblem that her mother had somehow seen her through the night.
Aunt Alberta would be horrified by her present state of undress, unless the old woman, too, were dead. It seemed possible; she could imagine any amount of devastation as a result of last night’s maelstrom.
At the thought of her aunt and father, Shae felt a pang of fear mingled with grief. Fear, that they had been killed. Grief, that even if they lived, the last few days’ events had cut her off from them as completely as would death.
Revulsion at the scene in progress compelled Shae to her feet, though every muscle throbbed in protest. In spite of her shaky limbs, she maintained her balance well enough to brush at the sand plastered to her body. With every stroke, she uncovered bruises, some of which looked dark and angry as the late storm’s thunderheads.
Despite the throbbing of numerous wounds, only the pain of her perforated hand distinguished itself. She glanced down at the wound, which was puffy but in no way alarming. For that small blessing, she was grateful. But soon thirst overrode all other discomforts, a thirst more bone-deep than any she’d experienced before. She looked around the beach to try to determine not only her location, but where she might find something to drink.
What she saw made her heart sink. Dead animals of every description shared the beach with the man’s corpse. Among the piled wreckage of several buildings, she picked out a cow, three horses, two dogs, and several cats before she gave up the macabre accounting. Had anything but her survived this? Anyone at all?
Abruptly, her mind spun back to Phillip, and she retched once more. Phillip, who had thought she didn’t truly love him. Phillip, who might have died in last night’s hurricane. The thought of him lying exposed on some other, isolated stretch of beach brought deep sobs to her throat. An image of crabs and seabirds pecking at him nearly blinded her with tears.
Not Phillip, please, dear God! Not before she had a chance to convince him of her love! She could bear anything but that.
She had to find help quickly, not only for her own sake, but to get to him. But as far as she could see, wild dunes were piled with wreckage. There was no sign, beside the crabs, of any living thing. How far down the peninsula had the waves washed her, she wondered? Or could she have traveled to the mainland? The speed of last night’s winds and currents made anything seem possible. If someone told her she’d been blown clear to New Orleans, she’d believe it.
But she truly hoped that were not so. For she had no idea of the French words she would need to beg a drink of water.
*
“Mister! Hey, Mister, you awake?”
The boy’s voice roused Phillip from his stupor. Opening his eyes, he relaxed his grip and nearly fell out of his perch, some twenty feet up in the live oak tree. Clutching the nearest stout limb, he looked down. The oak’s broad branches and oval-shaped leaves were coated with gray-brown muck. A length of canvas sail festooned one large branch, and chunks of building debris stuck out of the discolored foliage. But what most surprised him was the fact that the floodwaters had receded and left only mud-brown puddles in place of calling cards.
“We’re alive?” Phillip knew a foolish question when he asked one. It was just that their survival seemed so very unlikely.
On a nearby, higher limb, Abraham nodded, as if his words had been quite reasonable. “Don’t seem right, do it? I thought we was done for too.”
The shredded rags the boy wore could barely be described as clothing. Salty mud, like that which coated the lower limbs, overlaid his hair. It had lightened to make him look like an old man.
“Are you injured?” Phillip asked him.
“Just stove up some. You?”
“About the same.” Phillip’s gaze swept the area. Not a block away, a huge pile of debris towered even taller that his oak refuge. Wrecked houses and buildings must have formed a massive ram, crushing block after block as it was driven inland on the waves. If it had reached this tree, he and Abraham would have lost their tenuous safehaven. Exhausted as he’d been, they almost certainly would have drowned.
Gazing in the other direction, away from the line of wreckage, Phillip saw numerous houses in this residential neighborhood in various conditions. A few appeared almost untouched, though mud stained their sides. Some had collapsed completely, and others, knocked off their foundations, appeared so badly damaged they would have to be torn down.
“I wanta thank you, Mister,” the boy told him. “I ain’t never gonna forget you saved my life.”
“You pulled me to this tree, Abraham. I would have drowned for certain.”
“Yeah, but we weren’t nuthin’ to you, just some Negroes in the same trouble as everybody. You tried to help out Jacob, too, and Mama. You think they still alive?”
Phillip heard the desperation in his question. Abraham needed to believe there might be some chance. He knew the feeling. Even though he was old enough to know Shae must have been killed in the house’s fall, Phillip still hoped desperately for that possibility, wished for the scant comfort of uncertainty. He could offer that, at least, to Abraham.
“It’s possible. We grabbed hold of something. There’s no reason to think that they couldn’t as well. Let’s climb down from this tree and see what we can find out. I want to check on my family as well. And and if Miss Rowan’s out there, alive or dead, I have to find her.”
“I hopes Miss Shae grabbed onto somethin’ too. She’s good people, even if her aunt ride Mama all the time.”
As the two climbed down the oak, Abraham’s hands slipped on the mud-slimed branches. He fell and landed on his bottom with a grunt.
Phillip reached him even more quickly than he meant to, for he followed almost the same route. He, however, landed on his back. Fortunately, the mud, though it smelled of salt decay, softened both their landings.
As they stood, Abraham stuck out his hand. “I be goin’ now. I got to find ‘em, like you said. If they alive, they be needin’ me, and if they’s passed, I got to see ‘em buried proper.”
Phillip shook the boy’s hand. “My name is Phill
ip Payton. I don’t know if you heard it yesterday.”
“Dr. Payton?” Abraham flashed a mercurial smile. “I hear you givin’ jobs to Negroes. Had some trouble for it, too. It’s mighty fine to meet you. You you think, maybe, I could get me one of them dock jobs? I big for thirteen, and I know how to work.”
“I’m not sure as I have any docks left, but you come see me at Villa Rosa. It’s on the highest street in the city. If I have a home to stay in, so do you. You hear me?”
The boy’s eyes widened in awe. “Yessir. Thank you, Dr. Payton.”
Phillip was too tired to correct him in the title. Whether or not he was in practice, people seemed hell-bent on calling him Doctor all his life.
“I’m going to go check on my family, too. Good luck, Abraham. And remember, if you need help, come see me.”
Abraham thanked him again before gazing about and sprinting off in the approximate direction of the fallen Jennings house. Phillip wondered if the boy would ever find the bodies of his family.
As for himself, Phillip decided to try St. Michael’s Infirmary first. Though the red brick building was substantial, he needed to reassure himself his sisters were both safe. Once that was accomplished, he would check on Villa Rosa. There, perhaps, he might find a change of clothing, shoes to replace the ones he’d lost, some food, and perhaps a saddle horse. There’d be no way to get a carriage through the debris-strewn streets.
The docks and warehouses were also a concern, but right now, the whole business seemed meaningless. As he walked toward his first goal, he saw people milling about the streets. Most looked dazed and wounded. Many cried out names, over and over, desperately trying to locate some lost loved one.
His heart went out to them, but he felt the task too hopeless to call out the one named that obsessed him.
Because Shae would never answer. He would never hear her voice again.
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