The Disappearance

by Philip Wylie

  “Yes, clear,” Edwinna absently said; and she said to Kate, “Do you really think—

  ?”

  “I don’t know! All I do know is, if it keeps building up, we better try to put them on the windows.”

  Edwinna pitched in.

  The children came, running through the wind and the downpour, barefooted, carrying their shoes in old newspapers. They liked it. They began to help too, lifting shutters, moving the stepladder and picking wing nuts from glass jars that had been filled with kerosene to prevent rust.

  Paula finally returned—driving fast.

  The wind moaned steadily by that time and the trees bent and surged. Rain fell in shivering white veils that swept processionally across the landscape. The copper gutters roared; their spouts erupted loudly. On the lawn large pools of water formed, dimpling and frothing in the deluge. The women and young girls trudged through the heavy weather, trip after trip, bucking the shutters that pushed against them like skaters’ sails.

  Paula parked in the car porte, checked the car windows and plunged into the rain.

  “You girls think we’re going to have a blow?”

  “Kate does,” Edwinna said. “Anyway”—she spat water—“anyway—we’re boarding up.”

  “What about the colored people?”

  Edwinna shook her head. “We’ve been too busy to investigate. I heard them pounding more stakes a while ago—”

  Paula slogged through the palmettos to the row of tents. The cleared area was not spacious. Its congested tents were tied shut. Every available rope and bit of wire led from some eye in the canvas to a tree or a rock or a driven peg. Paula yelled outside the tent belonging to Hester’s oldest daughter.

  “Margot! Oh, Margot?”

  A smiling face appeared.

  “You all right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “If it blows too hard—if it starts to damage the tents—get everybody and come to my house.”

  “Yes, ma’am. We were talkin’ about it.”

  “Any time. Now, if you want to.”

  “We got some pork an’ pigeon peas cookin’ here. We want to serve it—”

  “All right. Tell everyone.”

  Paula tramped back. The rain was beginning to hurt. By five o’clock it would probably be as dark as night. Fronds of palmetto slapped and sliced at her; their spined stems raked her. “Damn it,” she said, and rain entered her opened mouth. “Double damn it! Something every day—every minute!”

  She assisted with the last dozen shutters. It was by then all but impossible to carry them in the wind and rain, to fit them over the bolts on window frames, to climb the ladders, and to turn the nuts until they were battened tight.

  The white women and children finally assembled in the living room. Shutters placed across the huge glass doors to the porch had made it dark and Kate lighted a Single candle. In its rays, they stood about dripping and exhausted.

  “I’m hungry,” Martha said.

  “I’m shot,” Edwinna answered the child.

  “It’s not suppertime,” Paula smiled at them firmly.

  “Couldn’t we,” Kate asked, “break the rule? I mean, we’ve all got to change, and we could have a snack after that. Couldn’t we?”

  Paula wrung out her sodden, gray-streaked hair; rain dribbling from it was added to the puddles and the smeared dirt on the floor. “Oke.’

  Cold baking-powder biscuits, some honey Edwinna had bought near Homestead, and a rarity: coffee. No electricity: wires down already. A single candle’s light to permeate faintly the hot, steamy living room. Children, eating ravenously. Outside, the wind and rain.

  The hurricane itself arrived in a matter of seconds although most storms increase slowly in violence. Occasionally, as happened that day, the belt between peripheral gales and hurricane winds is narrow. Paula had not counted on that or she would have made the colored people move.

  Trees hissed and muttered in a full gale; the earth gurgled in a plunging rain.

  Then, while a person might have climbed a long flight of stairs or read a page of a book or eaten a biscuit, the thing was upon them.

  It came with a far howl and a shudder in the woods. Floors vibrated. What they said was suddenly inaudible and mouths moved incomprehensibly. The children cried out: their eardrums hurt sharply. The house was struck as if by a mallet bigger than a house. What had been a howl became a shriek, the shriek of nature suddenly put to torment—a roar, a bellow, a screaming, uncanny high sounds, rattlings, the tympani of typhoon. It seemed the strong building would fall in the lunging wind. Rain squirted under doorsills in spite of the metal stripping; the metal itself began to buzz weirdly as the tempest fiddled on its edges.

  Trees broke. Sounds of their splitting were louder than the wind. The house rejoined with a crash as the bole of a tall pine was hurled upon its eaves. The candle blew out and the children whimpered—unseen, unheard.

  Paula struck a match, put the candle on another table and yelled at Edwinna, “My God! The tents!” Edwinna, her amber eyes as steady as ever, looked at the walls, the board-covered windows, the ceiling, nodded her head and shrugged. She thinks we are going to die, Paula heard her mind saying. May be we are.

  Another crash, and a crack showed in the wall afterward. Like a wound, it bled; rain streamed into the chamber and the children backed away from the place. On the ceiling a dark spot spread quickly and dripped. Plaster began: to fall.

  The noise was now too formidable for definition.

  Paula saw, presently, that the glass doors were jerking. The hurricane was trying to walk into their precarious sanctuary. As she stared in horror through the dim candlelight, the doors separated an inch. She rushed toward them, determined to force them together again, lock them, and shut out the wild fiend.

  During that moment her sense of personification was vivid. She reached the door.

  From the calamitous wet dark beyond, a black human hand grasped at its frame. She screamed—and the scream was lost in the tumult. Then she remembered and opened the door. The candle went out. But a flashlight beam illuminated the women and the children on the porch.

  Their clothing was tom from their backs; water dribbled from the remnants and from their gleaming brown flesh—water and crimson stains. Some stood, some sat, some lay on the flooded floor. Paula flinched at the half-drowned, dazed faces, the in juries, the blood, the white end of a broken bone held by a quivering child with her usable hand. She opened the door and let them in; one by one, and the room was filled with dreadfulness.

  Edwinna had gone swiftly upstairs. One bathroom alone was accessible: the other parts of the house could be reached only by crossing the wind-struck porch where the trees were falling. She brought down all the bandages and useful drugs she could find.

  It was not possible to talk much.

  Margot managed to yell into Paula’s ear. “The tents just bust!

  The trees fell! We crawled on the road! They’s two-three kids and women got kilt!”

  Edwinna gave a hypo to the child with the broken arm.

  Paula set the bone.

  The child’s brown and white eyes remained fixed upon the crack where a tree had split the roof; in silence, she sat staring. And so time began to pass. It was nine o’clock, or thereabouts, when Alicia started to rock and hold her abdomen, abandoning the impromptu games that Martha and the other girls had fearfully, industriously organized.

  Edwinna picked up her daughter. She put her ear to the child’s mouth.

  “My tummy hurts. It hurts terrible.”

  The mother felt the abdomen; it was rigid; She thought with frenzy, appendicitis.

  In that case, sulfa drugs might have stemmed the infection. But they had been used up on the Negroes.

  Kate saw what was happening—saw Edwinna with her child, a hand under skimpy dress—saw the mother’s pallor and the little girl’s sweat of pain. Her face showed a sudden dread. She hurried across the room.

  “Sick?” she shouted
over the tumult.

  “Stomach-ache. It’s hard. Might be appendicitis.”

  “She got bitten by a spider!” Kate yelled in the listening ear. “Could have been a black widow!”

  Edwinna, with a frantic look in her eyes, clutched the child. “What do we do?”

  Her mouth said it in the din.

  Kate spread out her hands and shook her head. She went to Paula’s side. The child’s grandmother rose from attending to a minor cut of her own. With her hair streaming, her eyes glittering in the pounding room, the murk, the heat, Paula looked like a witch.

  She made a sign of giving a hypodermic.

  Edwinna nodded.

  They gave the little girl a quarter grain of morphine.

  The storm fell silent.

  Women got up. Children began to talk. Alicia’s moans became screams of pain as if, assured suddenly of audibility, she could afford to exert the energy that would compel some more effective attention.

  “Hush, darling!” Edwinna murmured.

  “It hurts! It hurts awful!” Her short legs were contracted; spasms racked her abdomen.

  “Stay inside!” Paula called. “Everybody! This is the eye of the storm. It’ll come back, instantaneously and from the other direction, in a few minutes!”

  She looked at her granddaughter attentively. “It must be—!”

  Edwinna, ghost pale, nodded. “I guess so. But what can we do?”

  Paula exhaled. It seemed unnatural, now, to be able to hear a voice, her own—

  anybody’s. “Nothing. There was some sort of antidote—but we wouldn’t have it here.

  You couldn’t get to a drugstore. Or a doctor. We’ve just got to—”

  “I know,” the child’s mother murmured. “I know.” She carried Alicia to a divan tenderly, put a pillow under her head, and watched as the child gathered herself to scream again.

  The colored women watched too. The colored children watched. Stars showed for a little while, outdoors. Then, in the distance, they heard the tumult approach. . . .

  Alicia died just as the wind blew itself out and the first drab intimations of day had shown those who ventured on the porch a shattered world, dim-seen in an easy rain.

  They made a coffin from plywood that afternoon. Edwinna lined it with the silk of an evening dress. They dug out the biggest pothole they could find in the limestone yard and buried Alicia there.

  In nearby potholes, dirt-filled funnels dissolved in the limestone by millenniums of rain, the colored women dug also for their dead.

  A doctor, with whom Paula chanced to talk some weeks later, said there was nothing that could have been done under the circumstances. The child, she had said, was undoubtedly particularly sensitive to black widow venom. Some people were—though, generally, adults recovered and children too.

  The physician had blinked large, tired eyes at Paula with what was meant for sympathy, pushed her mannish felt hat down on her white hair, and hurried away on the appalling, perpetual schedule of every surviving doctor.

  By that time they had chopped away the trees that leaned against the house. They had repaired the crumpled eaves. And by that time the hibiscus they had transplanted to mark Alicia’s grave had leafed out and was bearing bright yellow flowers.

  She had liked yellow.

  Alicia’s death was a wanton attack upon the fortitude of Edwinna, Kate and Paula; it seemed so indirect a casualty of the storm. Everywhere in the South Florida area, deaths had been numerous. Owing to the lack of all warning, the community had been victim, as in earlier times, of every hazard of a hurricane which accompanies surprise.

  Very few houses or other buildings had been boarded up. The assumption that the danger season had passed, the preoccupation of the women with urgent work, and the normal squalliness of the month—added to the absence of bulletins and advisories—had brought multiple catastrophe.

  Apartment houses, homes, hotels and office buildings spared by the fire had lost their window glass. Interiors had been flooded. Cars and trucks, caught on the streets and especially on the causeways, had been blown into the Bay or rolled like barrels down rain-slick pavement. Women—and children trying to get home from school—had been struck by flying missiles: coconuts, garbage cans, park benches, branches. They had been knocked unconscious and drowned in pools where the tempest had caught them toiling.

  They had been hurled bodily into canals. Trees had fallen on them and pinned them down. Cars had rolled over them and walls had toppled upon them. The total death list, though never accurately ascertained because of the uncertain knowledge of who had survived the first chaos and who had since moved to the region, amounted to many hundreds. Several thousand women, girls and infants were hurt.

  In the days immediately following, when the sun came out again, when the dead had been buried and the injured treated and while Greater Miami was a spectacle of furniture and bedding and clothing set out and hung out to dry, a listlessness came over the people. What they had already suffered was so formidable that this added blow found them without resilience.

  Kate blamed herself incessantly: “I should never have let Alicia ‘help’ me in that tool shed. I was even scared some old scorpion or spider might bite me. I’d have bug-bombed, but the bombs are all used up. It’s my fault.”

  Edwinna tried to be stoical. “Nothing is anybody’s fault, Kate,” she said repeatedly to the repeated self-castigation.

  And Paula, over and over, tried to give the tragedy its correct perspective. “Kate, you mustn’t! After all, you were one of the few people who did sense what was coming and did get ready. If you hadn’t boarded up, not just Alicia but all of us might have been killed. The storm wind would have come through the windows and it could have torn the house down. Things would have crashed into the rooms. We’d all have been hurt and soaked for hours. Alicia might have died of pneumonia. Don’t keep reproaching yourself, Kate!”

  But whenever any of them looked out at the yellow hibiscus, their eyes filled and work stopped awhile or went on less efficiently.

  The work itself constantly increased.

  From Washington came one command, cardinal and peremptory: food. Raise food. Start gardens. Produce.

  Parts of Europe were now starving. Russia claimed to be holding its own. There was little news from China and India: a cabled dispatch, now and then, of rout, riot, and epidemic and hunger everywhere.

  The Gaunt acres were changing under these exigencies.

  Negro women had cut up into lengths the fallen pine trees, and chopped down the rest, to build for themselves rude log cabins. These would be stronger than the tents. And, in any case, there were no more tents to be had: the Army’s stored supplies had been exhausted by the millions driven from cities.

  Hour by hour, day by day, the colored women now hacked at the prostrate tough trunks of palmettos, stacking and burning them as they were grubbed out. Every afternoon Paula, Kate and Edwinna assisted in this clearing of the land.

  Paula had a promise of a bulldozer, but it never came.

  As fast as the scrub was removed the ground beneath-here bare coral ledge, there pothole, and here, again, sand a foot deep—was planted in crops with the best promise of calories and vitamins: sweet potatoes, tomatoes, pigeon peas, beans. A cow foraged for sparse grass on the land and its milk was divided between the children and six young pigs. Every acorn from the live oaks was retrieved by the children and fed to the pigs.

  Food. There was no longer quite enough, ever, for anyone.

  Even so, Florida had one food source which gave it an advantage: fish and game.

  In this period, teams of women, taught by the wives of commercial and charterboat fishermen, put out to sea every day and brought back groupers, mutton snappers, mackerel, kingfish and other edible species. Additional teams, in rowboats, equipped with lanterns and spears, nightly coursed the immense Rats of the Bay of Florida in search of spiny lobsters, crabs and even rays.

  At first a good deal of the catch spoiled b
efore it could be distributed. But by late autumn the housewives were accustomed to long walks to market and used to queuing up for their portion of sea booty. Besides, some ice plants were in operation again.

  But there was never enough food to satisfy a nation which had constantly overeaten. With ceaseless effort, the women produced, in Greater Miami and its land-sea environs, barely enough to maintain life and energy. If only the migrants had not come pouring over the faraway border of the state, they might eventually have stabilized their food needs. But there were always more mouths, more thousands of mouths, tens of thousands more. And the arrivals, after their formidable journeys, with their heartbreaking destitution, were very seldom able to take a useful place in the community enterprises until they had been rehabilitated and trained. . . .

  That autumn Edwinna was transferred to the Hunt Section. Her twin brother Edwin had taught her to shoot and taken her many times into the Everglades in quest of doves, quail, ducks, rabbits and bigger game. Once, Edwinna had bagged a panther.

  Twice, she had shot at-and missed-bears. Several times, she had brought down a deer.

  The transfer took her away from home on the long trips arranged by her section.

  She and other women would camp out for a week or two while, by day and night, in saw grass, hammock and cypress swamp, by boat and on foot, they sought food for the hungry coastal cities. The chase not only fitted Edwinna’s temperament but was infinitely preferable to backsplitting labor on interminable rows of garden truck. Moreover, she did not have to look, every evening, in the exhausted sunset hours, at Alicia’s grave. She did not have to watch each daily step of Paula’s losing fight to maintain morale. There was danger in the chase, exhilarating danger; and it was not just the formidability of terrain, or the risk of getting lost, or the peril of diamondback rattler, coiled moccasin and night-slinking coral snake, or the jeopardy of a wounded, threshing alligator, a hit panther, a cub-defending bear.

  A new hazard lurked in the endless grasslands and the silent, pool-floored forests: the risk of a rifle shot. For some of the Seminole Indian women, dazed by the catastrophe that had taken their males, decided the event was caused by their old enemies, the near-exterminators of their tribe: white people. Furthermore, they had always regarded the Everglades as their own. The organized invasion of its deep reaches threatened resources upon which these women and their men had always depended. So, in a sullen fury, they fought back. From the center of jungle islands in the saw grass, where their dugouts had been hidden, or from behind the marching arcades of cypress trees, they would greet a group of white women and their dogs with a fusillade. Some of these would die. Some would be wounded. The unscathed would fall to the ground and shoot back.