Devil Storm

by Theresa Nelson

  “Good-bye, sir,” he said, shaking it. “God bless you.”

  Richard wanted to say, “God bless you, too,” but he found he could not speak. He pressed Mr. Milam’s hand again, looked once more at the sleeping children, and left.

  The waters had receded amazingly quickly; there was less then a foot left on the first floor of the train station. The building looked like a skeleton, with hollowed-out windows for eyes and bare bricks and beams exposed as if they were bones. But it had stood the storm. Somehow it had survived.

  Richard splashed his way to the door and walked outside. Then he stopped in horror. Two dead men bobbed facedown in the water that still stood knee-deep in the street.

  For a moment, he stopped breathing, as he tried to control the sickness that washed over him. Then he started to run—or run as well as he could through the wreckage that filled the street. Galveston was a shambles. Everywhere he looked there were gutted buildings, piles of rubble where buildings once stood, human bodies, carcasses of dead animals; seagulls were pecking at some of them.… He passed a dead horse, still harnessed to a buggy; a drowned man sat on the driver’s seat, his face bloated, staring.…

  Bewildered people were wandering the streets, looking for their families. One old woman was walking about nearly naked, crying, “Ernest! Ernest!” again and again. Richard stopped to cover her with his coat and point her toward the train station; surely someone there would be able to help her.… He had to get home … get home …

  He made his way to the bay. The shore was littered with derelict boats and the shells of boats, and it took him some time to find one that would still float. It was just a small rowboat, but it would do. Richard thanked the owner silently, wondering if he was still alive.… It took him a while longer to find oars, but finally he was set, he was under way, he was on his way home.

  It was a beautiful day—indecently beautiful, after what he had just seen in town. The sun shone brightly on the gently rolling water. There was a fresh little breeze blowing in off the Gulf, smelling of salt and fish. Out toward the middle of the bay, porpoises leapt and played and filled their bellies. Richard’s belly was empty, but he couldn’t have eaten, even if there had been anything to eat. He was sick with dread. As he traveled around the northwest tip of Galveston Island, he saw horror after horror—half-submerged hulks that yesterday had been mighty ships; others, the lucky ones, run aground, their masts twisted, broken … and on the shoreline, not a house standing. Not a single house.

  He had to get home … get home. He was rowing with all his might, but it seemed to him that the boat barely moved. He maneuvered it between the jetties that protected the ship channel between Galveston and Bolivar, then turned and struck out north through the Gulf toward the middle of the peninsula.

  It’s a strong house, he kept telling himself, over and over. They stood a good chance in that house, I know they did—please, God, they did.…

  Every muscle, every nerve strained. The sun beat down on his head, his arms, the back of his neck. He could feel its heat through his shirt, but he didn’t bother to take it off, though sweat gushed from him. He had to get home … get home. Good Lord in heaven, why won’t this fool boat move?

  At last he could see the coast, the waves breaking up ahead on the beach.… But wait! He must have misjudged his distance somehow; this couldn’t be his beach, his coast—everything looked different.… He must be too far to the east, or the west, or—

  Lillie’s palm trees. Suddenly he could see the palm trees. They were tilted at a sickening angle away from the Gulf, but they were Lillie’s, all right, the palm trees that had always stood on either side of the house, two and two.…

  Richard stopped rowing. The oars hung idle in the water; the Gulf lapped playfully at the sides of the little boat. A mullet jumped, flashing silver.

  The house was gone.

  For a moment—or an hour; he couldn’t have said how long—he sat in the boat, unable to move, his heart a dead weight inside his chest. Then he forced himself to go on.

  The Gulf had bitten off huge chunks of the beach. The waves washed across it almost to the sand hills. Great sections of railroad track had been torn off their bed and twisted into eerie shapes that stuck up out of the surf like the claws of giant dead birds. Beyond the hills brackish water was still standing hip-deep. Here and there a fence post leaned drunkenly. The tallest of the salt grasses waved gently in the breeze.…

  Where the house and barn had stood there was nothing but scattered boards, rubble; only the wooden blocks the house had sat upon and the steps that once led to the kitchen remained in place. For hours and hours Richard searched the debris, trying to find some trace of his family, but there was nothing, nothing.… The storm must have washed them out to sea.… He had said a thousand times that their house was the safest place there was in bad weather, strong enough to withstand any storm. And they had believed him, trusted him. Why, hadn’t he built it with his own hands—his own accursed hands?

  He knew it was hopeless, but still he kept searching. At length he came upon the carcasses of the cow and the mule—poor old Jane Long and Dick Dowling—but that was all. He had no tears for the unfortunate creatures; it seemed he had no tears in him at all. He was dead inside—cold and dead. He sat down on the old kitchen steps and buried his head in his hands. Dear God, he prayed, if You had to take them, why did You leave me here? Where was the good in that?

  He heard no answer but the waves breaking on the new shoreline, the breeze whispering through the marsh, the laughter of the gulls.…

  And the crowing of a rooster. It was such a familiar sound that at first Richard paid it no mind, but then it came again … and again … until finally he lifted his head and looked up. And there was Sam Houston in the low branches of one of the palm trees. Old Sam—he made it, for a miracle. I ought to feel glad for him, Richard thought numbly.… But he couldn’t feel anything.

  He sat there for a long time, staring up at the old rooster. Finally, he realized that it was getting darker. The sky was beginning to glow with the red of sunset. Red sky at night, sailors delight.… The words whispered in his ear, mocking him.

  He couldn’t stay here. He stood up. For a moment he was dizzy—light-headed with hunger and thirst and fatigue. He had had nothing to eat or drink since breakfast the day before, scarcely any sleep. But that didn’t matter. Nothing mattered anymore.

  He steadied himself and started walking, wading through the water. At first he turned toward High Island, but he remembered that Rollover would probably still be covered with deep water, and he was too tired to swim, too tired to go back for the boat and try to row.… He turned around, confused.…

  And then he saw the lighthouse light blinking down at Port Bolivar—on again, off again, on again, off again.… So the old lighthouse stood the storm. Well. That’s something, he supposed. He would go there. It was as good a place as any. He turned southwest.

  A snake swam close by, sticking its ugly nose up out of the water. Richard didn’t even flinch; he didn’t much care whether it bit him or not. The snake saw him and changed direction. Little fish darted at his feet; he scarcely noticed them. A huge orange moon rose out over the Gulf, just over his left shoulder.… Now it was shrinking, climbing higher in the sky, fading gradually from orange to yellow to white.… As he walked, the moon followed him, spilling its light in a shining path on the water all around him.…

  But he never saw it.

  It was long past her usual bedtime, but Leola Sparks couldn’t sleep. From her perch at the top of the lighthouse, she looked at the moon and praised the Lord for allowing her to see its bright face yet again. That she owed her life to His providence, she doubted not for a second. Unbelievers could prattle on all they wanted about its being blind luck that had made her decide to take the train to Galveston for her charity work at the hospital on the very morning of the storm; Leola knew luck had nothing to do with it. It was the Lord, all the way—the Lord who had forced the train to s
top at Port Bolivar when the seas were too high for the barge to cross, the Lord who had led her to take shelter in the lighthouse, even while her own house was smashed to splinters down at Rollover—she had seen the wreckage through the spyglass this morning first thing—the Lord who had saved her, blessed be His Name forever and ever.

  And she wasn’t the only one He had saved; why, she thought, there must have been more than a hundred people huddled on the lighthouse stairs while that awful wind kept blowing and blowing and the water rose higher and higher.… The tower itself had swayed so badly that the machinery for the light had stopped working, and the lighthouse keeper and his wife had had to turn it by hand all through the night. But the Lord had given them the strength, and the Lord had seen to it that the lighthouse didn’t fall. “He is my shield, and the horn of my salvation, my high tower, and my refuge, my saviour,” Mrs. Sparks quoted aloud from second Samuel.

  She stopped abruptly and peered down at the ground—or what would have been the ground if it hadn’t still been covered with three feet of water. Mrs. Spark’s eyes weren’t what they used to be, but she thought she had seen something move.… Why, yes! There was somebody down there in the moonlight, somebody wading toward the lighthouse. Now, who on earth? Mrs. Sparks wondered.

  “Hello! Who goes there?” she called out, her voice piercing the night with its power.

  “Richard Carroll,” came the faint reply.

  “Did you say Richard Carroll?” Mrs. Sparks bellowed back. “Richard W. Carroll?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he answered flatly. Good Lord, Leola Sparks, of all people …

  “Heaven be praised!” cried Mrs. Sparks, and now her voice was trembling with emotion. “Here’s another saved!” And then she disappeared, shrieking, into the depths of the tower.

  A moment later the door at the bottom of the lighthouse flew open, and a crowd of shouting people came splashing toward him through the water. At first Richard couldn’t make out who they were.…

  And then he saw them clearly, and his heart, which he had thought was dead, nigh burst with joy.

  “Papa! Papa!” Walter and Alice were crying together, as they rushed upon him and threw their arms around him.

  Lillie was just behind them, carrying the baby. She tried to speak, but tears choked her; they streamed down her cheeks and shone like diamonds in the moonlight.

  “Thank God,” Richard managed to choke out over his own tears, as he gathered them all into his arms, “I thought I’d lost you … I thought … oh, thank God.…”

  “Dog!” cried Emily, and Crockett leaped up to lick Richard’s face, splashing water over everybody, making them all laugh—and then everyone was laughing and crying and talking all at once, the rest of the crowd, too: Audie Merle Wise and her cousin Betsy and the Langdon Huetts and Tiger Terry and a dozen or so folks from Port Bolivar and even the strangers from the train.

  One old man stood apart from the rest, watching, his arms crossed over his chest, his gold tooth gleaming. Then he slipped quietly away into the shadows.

  “Where’s Tom?” Walter cried out all at once. “We haven’t told Papa about Tom!”

  “Tom?” asked Richard, confused. “Tom who?”

  “Old Tom—Tom the Tramp—” a half-dozen voices answered together. “Where’d he go? He was here just a minute ago.…”

  “He saved us, Richard,” said Lillie, her eyes still brimming as she held on tightly to her husband’s hand. “It was Tom that saved us.…”

  “I swear I saw him standing right over there.…”

  “Well, somebody go look inside the lighthouse. Maybe he went back inside.…”

  “Tom! Where are you, Tom?”

  Chapter 18

  The rescuing party came the next day and took the refugees to the Sea View Hotel in High Island, which had weathered the storm nobly.

  “I wish we could just stay here forever and ever,” Alice sighed happily, as she licked the last smidgeon of ice cream from her spoon for the third day in a row.

  Walter shook his head. “Lord, Sister, the whole world turns upside down, and all you can think about is ice cream.”

  “Well, it’s mighty good ice cream.”

  Walter had to admit that this was the truth. Food had never tasted so good; life itself had never tasted so sweet. The simple acts of eating, sleeping, even breathing—especially breathing—were pleasures beyond all imagining.… Sometimes, in his dreams, he was back in the wind and water, in that last terrifying hour when the dark waves were breaking over his head and he thought he would never, ever make it to the light.… But then something in him had refused to give up—something stubborn, hard as old Dowling’s head.… He couldn’t have said, now, just what it was that had sustained him; already the memory of that awful night was becoming blurred, confused. He only knew that somehow, somewhere, he had found the strength to go on. He had made it, after all, to the light, to safety.…

  They had all made it, thanks to Tom. It was Tom who had carried Alice into the lighthouse, Tom who had gone back out into the storm for Mama and the baby, cussing the devil all the while, fighting him tooth and nail. And he had won. Against all odds, he had won.

  But where had he gone? And why had he gone? Didn’t he know he was a hero? Didn’t he know that the Carroll family wanted to reward him for what he had done? Not that they had much to reward him with at present, but already Papa was making plans to begin again, to plant fall crops, start work on a new house.…

  “Not down on our old farm,” he said to Mama and the children. “We’ll settle up here in High Island, where it’s safe, and we’ll have the finest farm in the county—just you wait and see!”

  Mama didn’t say much, only nodded and looked at him, her eyes full. She teared up a dozen times a day since the storm, but her tears were different now, it seemed to Walter. The old black ribbon was gone. It had been washed away in the flood—torn right off her neck—and so far, at least, she hadn’t replaced it. “Maybe it was meant to be” was all she had said.

  “Mama loves Papa again, huh, Walter?” Alice whispered to her brother, who colored and shrugged her off, wondering what age it was when girls stopped saying every single thing that came into their heads.

  Mama was so subdued for the first few days after their ordeal that Walter was almost relieved to hear her arguing with Papa over the color they should paint the new house; it sounded more natural, somehow. Papa said white, like the other one; he had got used to white over the years. But Mama said she wouldn’t have another white house; white was bad luck, pure and simple. Pink, now—that was a pleasant color.…

  It was weeks before they knew fully just how fortunate they were to have survived the storm, how dreadful the loss of life had been in Galveston and on the peninsula. It was estimated that more than six thousand people had died on the island. No one was certain, because so many bodies had washed out to sea, and a large number of the ones that were recovered had to be buried quickly in mass graves. Cousin Jack Carroll and Mary Agnes were gone, and all but two of the children; by chance K. K. and Bussy had been at a friend’s house in the highest part of the city and been spared.

  “We’ll take them in, of course,” Papa said when he heard the news, and then he broke down. He had loved his old red-headed cousin.

  “Of course we will,” Mama said simply.

  Of the small Bolivar communities, Crenshaw’s, Patton, and Rollover were hardest hit. Will Strathan and his entire family were lost, all the Atkinses, the Vincents, the Blands, even old Dr. Croombs and the Barretts—every one of those big, strong brothers.… They said that Lester was found with his arms still locked around Samson; he must have been trying to save the old monster dog at the end. Walter felt sick at heart every time he heard another name added to the list. It seemed impossible that he’d never again hear Dr. Croombs droning on about sin and salvation, never see Lester at the center of a laughing crowd down at the Landing or hear him call out, “Hey, Romeo, takin’ your girl out dancin’ tonight?” Neve
r see Fanny Kate again, either.… The Vaughans had made it through the storm miraculously by climbing to the tops of some salt cedar trees and hanging on through the night, but now they said they’d had a bellyful of Bolivar; they were moving all the way to Sour Lake and never looking back.

  Everything was changing. Nothing would ever be the same again. Walter felt like an old, old man—as if he had aged a thousand years since the summer began. Why, he practically couldn’t even remember back as far as July; surely it was some other boy who had splashed in the moonwater with Alice and seen Tom’s campfire glowing red down the beach—a child who dreamed of pirates and buried treasure and hoped the old man really was all those wild things people said he was. That boy was gone now. Walter wasn’t sure exactly where, but he was gone, sure as shootin’.…

  July 1901

  It was a warm evening, moonless, thick with stars. Walter had had a long day in the melon fields with his father and the new mule—Dowling the Second, they called him, as a mark of respect. After supper he decided to walk down to the beach to take in the evening air. He didn’t get to the beach as often as he’d like these days. It was a longer walk than it used to be, for one thing, and then too, this had been such a busy year, what with building the new house and clearing new fields and putting in new crops.… A good year, all in all, for which the Carroll family could be mighty grateful, as Papa and Mama reminded the children and each other time and again—but uncommonly busy, all the same.

  He walked to the water’s edge. Crockett trotted along at his heels, sniffing at sand crabs. The Gulf was calm tonight. Walter wondered how he could still love it so after what he had seen it do. But he couldn’t help himself. Salt water was in his blood some way, he supposed.

  He sat down in the sand and stared out at the stars. There had to be a million at least. Walter tried to count them, but he went cross-eyed after 147 and gave it up.…

  “Hey, boy,” said a voice just behind him.