by Homer Hickam
The women began to keen and the men picked up the chorus. Babies shrieked and children wailed. “Stop that!” Homer shouted, instantly regretting his harsh command.
The rescued people were looking eastward in horror. Homer pressed his face against a window. What he saw was beyond his comprehension: A wall of water at least sixty feet high was coming straight at the train.
There was nothing to be done. Homer, giving in to almighty God or fate or kismet or whatever determined the fate of all the people of the world, sat down and waited for the wave to hit. When it did, it struck the train broadside. The car was swept off the track and began to roll. Black water rushed inside and pinned Homer beneath the seats torn off their attachments. He clawed through the broken seats until he saw a flash of light and realized the car had broken apart.
The body of a woman drifted past, her dead eyes accusing him. A dead baby trailed behind her. He wanted to tell them how sorry he was, that he’d done his best to save them, but they kept moving along and, to his shame, he felt relief when both disappeared into the swirling water.
Homer swam in the direction he hoped was up and pushed through the surface, only to find the wind and water sweeping by so fast, it was impossible to breathe. A gigantic force began to turn the water all around him into a mighty, irresistible swirl and he felt himself being lifted up. For a brief moment, he was provided an aerial view of the destruction. Every car had been swept away. Only the old No. 447 locomotive remained, sitting on the only piece of track left as far as Homer could see.
The wind shot Homer away until it dropped him back into the water. He struggled for a time, but at last, completely exhausted, let the waters take him. He sank almost gratefully beneath the waves.
It was then that Albert swam past and circled back around. Why Albert was there, Homer didn’t know, but he enjoyed watching him swimming around while bodies and pieces of bodies swept by. After a while, Homer began to wonder if maybe it wasn’t Albert but something else, something that did not exist, yet had always existed and would forever exist.
Albert, or whatever looked like Albert, seemed to sense Homer’s thoughts and beckoned with a jerk of his head, then swam off, turning around from time to time to make sure he was being followed. Homer obediently kicked after him until, finally, he discovered he’d reached the surface. Gasping, spitting out seawater, Homer grabbed hold of Albert.
But it wasn’t Albert.
It was a log, a big floating log, a log with a broken branch that he could wrap his arms around. Homer did so, listening to the howl of the wind, and the roar of the sea, and the screams of the people.
42
HOURS LATER, AFTER THE HURRICANE FINALLY BLEW ITSELF out, Homer lifted his head and discovered he was lying on his back in a bed of oozing, stinking mud and putrid-smelling grass. When he struggled to his elbows and looked around, he saw what appeared to be a battlefield. Splintered and shredded, the remnants of the Matecumbe depot were strewn everywhere.
Homer got to his knees and looked for the train but there was no sign of it. When he managed to stagger to his feet he sank into a foot of mud. His shirt had been torn away and he had no shoes and only one sock. The sucking mud dragged at him as he slogged through it until he reached what he realized was the track bed. It was completely covered in muck, and absent any rails or ties. “How am I still alive?” he asked aloud but no one answered. He briefly thought of Elsie, and hoped the storm had not struck Miami. After that, he set about rescuing himself.
When he found a pair of boots sitting on the track bed, he tried them on. They fit perfectly. Why there was a pair of boots that fit him perfectly sitting there side by side while an entire railroad had been swept away, he could not imagine. He put them on anyway, then looked at the sky. Dark clouds were busily scudding away. I must find someone, he said to himself and, careful of tens of thousands of broken planks with nails sticking out of them and coils of twisted wire with ragged ends, he followed the remnant of the track bed. Before long, he saw the first car. It was lying on its side, mud spilling out of its broken windows. Then, he saw the first body, but only the first of many.
Looking for signs of life, Homer wandered among the bodies for a long time. He climbed inside the train cars and searched them, too. Only corpses were found. He tried not to look at their faces, especially those of the children, but some of them were turned in such a way he couldn’t help it. One girl, he reckoned she was about six years old, lay atop one of the cars and he supposed someone, her mother or father, perhaps, had pushed her up there. She was still dead, her eyes on the sky, where clouds were rapidly scudding away, revealing a sky the innocent blue color of a robin’s egg.
At the locomotive, he pulled himself into the cab where he found Mr. Haycraft sitting on the floor, his eyes closed. Jack the fireman was also there, his head down. “Are you alive?” Homer asked.
Haycraft’s eyes flew open and Jack raised his head. “You made it!” Haycraft erupted. “I was sure you drowned.” He looked thoughtful. “Why didn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Homer said. He lifted one of his boots. “And I found these boots that just fit. I don’t know why, either. How is it you’re sitting here and all the rest of the train got blown off the track?”
“Old number 447 is about ten times heavier than the cars,” Haycraft explained. He passed Homer a jug of grayish water, then allowed a sigh. “But I fear she will never cross another track.”
“Why not?” Homer took a long swig of the warm and slightly brackish water, and realized the hurricane had even forced seawater inside the tightly capped jug. “Won’t they build everything back?”
Haycraft shook his head. “No, it was foolish to build this railroad in the first place. Man who built it was named Henry Morrison Flagler, partner of John D. Rockefeller himself. He had more money than sense, you might say. Mr. Flagler’s gone now and everybody like him. Nobody has the guts for great enterprises anymore. We’re all out of a job, I reckon.”
“What should we do now?” Homer asked.
Haycraft shrugged. “Nothing to be done. All we can do is wait until the railroad sends somebody after us. It’ll be a few days, I would imagine.”
“I think I’ll keep looking for survivors,” Homer said.
“Be my guest,” the engineer said, and shrugged. “If you find somebody, give a shout and we’ll come out to help.”
Homer climbed down from the cab and picked through the debris around the cars. When the smell of the decaying bodies soon drove him to the water’s edge, he was surprised to find a small boat bobbing at anchor. He was even more surprised to discover one of the three men aboard it was Ernest Hemingway.
Hemingway waved at him. Homer waved back. “Hello, Mr. Hemingway!” he called. “It’s me, Homer. Elsie and I had dinner with you the other night.”
“Yes, I recognize you,” Hemingway called out. “What are you doing here?”
Homer gestured behind him. “Came on the train to rescue the road crews but the storm hit us first.”
“That’s because you came too late,” Hemingway scolded. “Why didn’t you come earlier?”
“We came as soon as we could, sir,” Homer replied.
“It’s always too damn late when it comes to looking after our veterans!” Hemingway railed. “Homer, I wish the feds could see this, see the bodies hung up in the mangroves, smell the stink just like in the Great War. I hoped I would never have to smell death again. Those damn rich bastards who start wars! They’re cranking up the war machines in Europe even as we speak and we’ll get involved, you can count on that. Those Washington, D.C., bastards will send poor men into battle, then forget them like they always do. Who left them to drown, Homer? And what’s the punishment for manslaughter now?”
Taken aback, Homer could only reply, “I don’t know, sir. The engineer said the railroad died here, too.”
Hemingway put his hands on his hips and looked around. “So it has. So it has.”
“Are you going north, s
ir?” Homer asked. “I could use a ride.”
“We’re going north for a little while,” Hemingway said. “But I’m not sure where we’ll turn around. Wouldn’t want to strand you. Somebody’ll be along to get you. Just be patient.”
“Yes, sir,” Homer said.
“I’m a Republican, you know,” Hemingway said, for no apparent reason Homer could figure.
Homer heard footsteps in the sand and was both surprised and yet not surprised to see Slick and Huddie coming his way. The clothes of both men were rags and their faces were sandblasted. “How did you two survive?” Homer asked.
“Only the good die young,” Slick said. He cupped his hands and yelled to the boat, “Hem, it’s me, Slick! We shared a drink at Sloppy Joe’s a few weekends back. Huddie’s here, too. You got room for a couple old vets?”
“We’re going north for a while, then back to Key West,” Hemingway replied.
“That would suit us both just fine,” Slick said. He jumped into the water and began to swim out to the boat. Huddie followed and both were hauled aboard. To Homer’s astonishment, Hemingway handed them bottles of beer from an ice chest, then pulled the anchor, turned the boat around, and headed north.
Homer briefly thought about waving his arms and shouting and insisting on being carried away but his awful pride and the stoicism of generations of coal miners overcame that urge. Instead, he watched until the boat was a little white dot, then walked back to old No. 447 to wait for whatever was going to happen next. When he found a ragged shirt, he sniffed it to make certain it didn’t stink too bad, then wrapped it around his face to smother as much as possible the terrible odor of the rotting bodies bloating beneath the savage sun.
It was three days before a chartered boat sent by the railroad company arrived to take away the crew of the rescue train. By then, their clothes, their hair, and even their skin were saturated with the horrific smell of death. Aboard the boat, Homer, Haycraft, and Jack cast off modesty, stripped off every inch of their clothes and dumped them into the sea. Then they jumped in, too, with a bar of soap apiece. After thoroughly scrubbing, they were welcomed aboard the boat and given some old coveralls to wear.
It would be another two days before Homer, barefoot and thumbing rides up the road, reached the railroad hotel in North Miami, there to fall into the arms of Elsie and, after holding her for a while, to pet Albert’s head and thank him for coming to save him, even if it was only in a dream. Homer was not surprised that Elsie did not sob and cry with relief. Instead, she reacted with a certain detachment, like coal miner wives so often did when a feared disaster had not materialized. What was important, what mattered, was he had not been killed.
Later that day, Homer and Elsie sat on chairs opposite one another and just looked at each other. Finally, Homer stretched out his hands and Elsie took them. “Will you go back to work with the railroad?” she asked.
“There is no more railroad, Elsie. It’s gone.”
She looked into his eyes. “Tell me what happened. Everything.”
He told her. At the end of the tale, he said, “I really felt like it was Albert who came to me during that hurricane.”
“He’s a strong boy in both body and spirit,” Elsie said, gripping her husband’s hands a little tighter. “So maybe it was.”
“You know, when I asked Captain Laird to let me take Albert home, he said maybe this journey was so I would find out the meaning of life. But, instead, it’s only created mysteries I can’t even begin to understand.”
“Maybe that’s what life is,” Elsie said. “Mysteries atop mysteries. We think we know everything but we don’t know anything, not really.”
“Wouldn’t it be strange if Albert knew? Or maybe the rooster? They know what life means and what it is for but can’t tell us except to show us.”
“And we don’t even realize they’re doing it and don’t pay any attention,” Elsie said.
“God’s little joke,” Homer said.
“No,” Elsie replied, “God’s big joke.”
As philosophizing has a tendency to do to people who engage in it, Homer and Elsie became very tired and fell silent. They slept soundly that night, then loaded up the Buick and headed in the only direction left for them to head: north.
As Homer drove, he sensed a nothingness in the air, as if everything that meant anything had been blown away, dispersed, expelled, destroyed. Outside the Buick, there was only darkness even though the sun was out. What Homer and Elsie wanted to see, they could not see and they knew it. What they wanted to see was the life they thought they were going to have before the storm. They wanted to unwind the clock, set back the calendar, cause the billions of permutations and perambulations of life to be altered just ever so slightly so that the hurricane that had so utterly destroyed the Upper Keys of Florida would have instead wobbled off to destroy some other place or destroy nothing at all but just push around a lot of wind and water.
But it was not to be. The storm had been the storm it had wanted to be and no human could change that. They could only take what the storm had wanted to give them and what it had given them was the end of a dream.
“Kismet,” Elsie whispered.
Homer heard her, said nothing, but knew she was right. The storm had been given no name but Kismet would have been a good one. Kismet, the destroyer. Kismet, the torturer. Kismet, the murderer. Kismet, the assassin, thief, and demolisher of all that was right and holy if anything ever was.
On a whim, Homer turned onto the Silver Springs road to see if the Tarzan movie folks were still there but their cottages were empty and the sets struck. Summer was over and the park itself was mostly closed, although Chuck the reptile wrangler was there. He heard their story and then looked in on Albert. “What’s to happen to him?” he asked.
Homer and Elsie looked at each other and confessed they didn’t know. “Before long,” Chuck said, “he’ll be a lot bigger and he’ll be interested in the girls, too. He needs a nice swamp if he’s to be happy.”
“Could we leave him with you?” Elsie asked.
The wrangler shook his head. “He wouldn’t fit in with some of the big old bulls that are here. They’d likely kill him. What you need to do is find a place where he could be the new fellow on the block, like someplace where there’s a new lake. Some of the towns popping up for retired folks are putting in dams to make their acreage waterfront. You might look for one of those.”
Chuck went back to work, leaving Elsie and Homer looking at each other. Elsie finally broke the staring match. “You think we should go back to Coalwood?”
Homer nodded. “I could wire the Captain and see if he’ll take me on again. I could ask him if we still have a house, too.”
Elsie put her face into her hands and shook her head. When she looked up, she had a compliant expression. “I hate the thought of it, Homer, but I will go back with you. Whatever controls us wants us to go back to Coalwood. I make no sense of it but I’m tired of fighting. Send your wire.”
Homer sent the wire from the next little town. They bedded down in the car in an alley until the answer from the Captain came: YOUR JOB AND HOUSE SECURE.
“Are you ready to head north?” Homer asked Elsie.
“Just let’s go,” Elsie said, hanging her head.
Homer felt terrible that Elsie was still so unhappy but he figured she was right. The journey was forcing them back to West Virginia. Even when he had tried something else, a hurricane had come along and blown it all away.
It was Homer’s intention to go as far north as they could go until they just couldn’t go anymore. At midnight, the sign for the Georgia border loomed. “Please stop,” Elsie said, then wiped furiously at her tears she could no longer hide.
Homer stopped and waited until Elsie got control of herself. He was afraid to hear what she was going to say.
“Turn around,” she said at length. “We can’t take Albert back to Coalwood. You heard what the reptile wrangler said. We have to find him a place to live.”
“Where should we look?” Homer asked.
Elsie looked over her shoulder at Albert, then reached out and touched his nose. In response, he stretched and made his yeah-yeah-yeah happy sound and then went back to sleep. She turned back toward Homer. “Where we’ve always been going,” she whispered. “Orlando.”
I was sixty. Mom was ninety-one. I’d just had a book published titled The Keeper’s Son, which was about a lonely Coast Guard captain on a windswept island. It was also about loss. The captain’s father, a lighthouse keeper, had lost his wife and his son, which meant the captain had lost his mother and his brother. A woman, freshly arrived on the island, had lost all hope of ever finding love. And off the coast, ships plying through the tumultuous seas were being lost to a marauding German submarine commanded by a captain lost in nearly every way possible.
“What do you know of these things, Sonny?” Mom asked as she placed her hand on the cover of the book, which rested beside her on the couch in her South Carolina home.
“What things, Mom?”
“All that death and dying in your book. You’re still too young to know about that.”
In my defense, I pointed out, “My dad’s gone and most of my uncles and aunts. I lost some friends in Vietnam. And accidents have taken away a few more.”
She shrugged. “But not everybody. That’s what happens when you get as old as I am, when loss wakes you up in the morning and puts you to sleep at night.” Her hazel eyes turned a bit misty. “You never get used to it.”
I had the sudden feeling that if I didn’t ask, I might never hear the end of the story she and sometimes Dad had told over the years. “Mom, you never told me what happened to Albert.”
She looked a bit startled. “Well, maybe that’s because it’s kind of hard to tell.”