For once Walter didn’t holler and jump. It was almost as if he’d been expecting that voice tonight.
“Hey, Tom,” he said, turning around.
It was Tom, all right. He didn’t look too good—a mite more tired, more worn around the edges if that were possible. But it was the same old Tom. He put his hand down to pet Crockett, who was beside himself with joy.
“How’s Missy?”
“Oh, she’s just fine. We’re all of us fine.”
“Well, that’s good. That’s real good.”
“Where you been, Tom? We looked for you a long time.”
Tom took off his old hat and scratched his head. It must have been a new old hat—surely the other one had washed away in the storm—but it looked exactly the same. He had another shovel, too, and a gunnysack. “Oh, I been … ’round,” he said. He grinned. “I seen y’all a time or two, when you ain’t seen me.”
Walter’s mouth dropped open. “Is that right? Well, I’ll declare, Tom, why didn’t you ever stop in and say hey? We’d all have been mighty glad to see you.”
“Look like that’s what I’m doin’ now.”
“But I mean our folks’d be glad too, Tom. They’ve been lookin’ and lookin’ for you. You know, we never did get a chance to thank you properly for what you did for us. Papa nailed signs up all over, offerin’ ten dollars to anybody who could help him find you. You could come live with us at our new farm—be just like part of our family.”
Tom shook his head. “I ain’t much of one for farmin’. Got a crawful of it a long time ago, sorta lost the appetite.”
“Well, you wouldn’t have to farm if you didn’t want to,” said Walter. “You could just live with us and go on doin’ whatever you felt like—”
“Naw,” said Tom. “Cain’t live with walls ’round me, boy—make me feel cooped up, some way. Got to keep movin’, that’s all. You tell your folks I’m ’bliged, all the same.”
“Aw, Tom—couldn’t you come? You’d get used to the walls. It’s a nice house—it really is; Papa and me built it ourselves. You could have your own room and everything. And—and, well—me and Alice, we’ve missed you.”
The gold tooth flashed. “Oh, I’ll be ’round.…” He leaned forward confidentially. “Course, you may not know me for the sparkle next time—liable to be a rich man by then.”
“You still huntin’ for treasure, Tom?”
“Got the feelin’ I’m close on it, now. We done beat the devil one time, boy—you and me. He’s runnin’ scared these days.”
They were quiet for a while. The stars grew brighter.
“I got to be goin’,” Tom said at last.
“Won’t you come home with me just for tonight?” asked Walter. “Have something to eat?”
Tom shook his head. “Naw, got to go.…” He reached into his pocket. “Got somethin’ in here I been savin’ for you and Missy,” he said, holding the something between his thumb and index finger. It caught the starlight and gleamed palely.…
“The silver heart,” breathed Walter. Tom put it into his hands. It was the selfsame little heart he had showed them last summer—the silver heart that had belonged to the girl from across the ocean—the heart the pirate had given her. How on earth had it survived the storm?
“But this is yours,” said Walter. “We cain’t take this—”
Tom shrugged. “You remember the story?”
“I remember.”
“Well then, you b’long to take it, boy. I remembered a long time, but I cain’t last forever. Leastways, that’s what they tell me.” He chuckled. “Course, I don’t know—maybe I’m gonna fool ’em and be the first.… You take it, anyhow. Tell Missy she can wear it sometime, if she want to. Y’all pass on the story one day, ’fore you get so old you forget.” He gave Crockett a parting scratch behind the ears, then started to walk away.
Crockett whined.
“Don’t go, Tom,” said Walter, and his voice was suddenly choked with tears that shamed him. “Please don’t go.”
“Got to,” said Tom, grinning. “Like I say, I’ll be ’round some other time. You got eyes to see, you’ll see me.”
There never was another time. Tom died early one morning the next spring, just when the old green of the salt grass was giving way to the new, when the sun lay warm in a thousand tide pools, and laughing gulls built their nests in secret places. It was Langdon Huett who found him out on the edge of his property, over by the old Indian graveyard. He was looking for a cow of his that was due to freshen, and he found old Tom instead. Looked like he had just lain down and died easy as sleeping. His head was resting on a little pile of shells that must have marked some old grave that had been long forgotten; there were three of them, right there together, just a little way from the Indian mound. Mr. Huett had never noticed them there before, but he imagined they must have belonged to some of those old Hopkinses. A family by that name was supposed to have tried to start a sea island cotton plantation right around here way back when, but nothing had come of it. Something had killed ’em all off—yellow fever or some such. Curious, the way those shells were still piled up so neatly, after all these years.…
Well. Tom the Tramp. Mr. Huett scratched his head and wondered what on earth he ought to do with the poor devil.… Mr. Huett had been in the lighthouse when the old man had rescued Lillie Carroll and her children during that awful storm—that had been something, all right. Who’da ever thought old Tom would turn out to be a hero?
Mr. Huett stood there puzzling over the matter for a while. At last he breathed a sigh of relief. I know what I’ll do, he told himself. I’ll ride over to High Island and look up Richard Carroll. He’ll know what ought to be done with the old boy. Why, sure, that’s what I’ll do … just as soon as I find my cow.…
The Carrolls buried Tom beside little William in their family plot at the High Island Cemetery. Just about everybody on the peninsula came. It occurred to Walter that Tom was far more popular dead than he ever was alive. The new preacher, name of Needham, delivered a stirring eulogy, and all the ladies cried. Afterward, Mrs. Leola Sparks sang “Abide with Me.” She insisted that Tom would have wanted her to, as it had been his absolute favorite when she used to visit him in jail. She recalled how he had cried tears of joy every single time she had sung it.…
Walter was glad when it was all over and he had a chance to slip off by himself down to the beach. There had been a kind of dull ache in his throat all day, and nothing but the beach would soothe it.
Alice was there ahead of him. He saw her off in the distance, sitting in a miserable little heap on the sand, sobbing into Crockett’s neck. Walter started to go the other way—maybe she needed to be alone for a while. But then something wouldn’t let him go. He walked over and sat down beside her.
“Don’t cry, Sister,” he said gently, patting her shoulder. “Please don’t cry.”
“I c-cain’t help it. All them over there singin’ and talkin’, and Tom just dead as a stick.…”
“I know, Sister, but we got to think about what the preacher said—how Tom’s happy, now he’s at peace—”
“How’s that preacher know so much, anyhow?”
“He read it in the Bible, Sister, and you know that’s the Word of God—got to be true.”
Alice looked up angrily. “I don’t think much of God, anyhow, lettin’ ever’body die the way He does.”
“Don’t say that, Sister. It’s bound to be a sin.”
“Well, I don’t care—it’s the truth.” Alice broke into fresh sobs. “Shoot, Walter, he never even got to find his treasure, and he looked such a l-long t-time. Seems like God could have at least let him find his treasure.…”
Walter struggled for the right words, but none would come. Maybe there were no words. For a long time he just sat there helplessly, patting Alice’s shoulder, until at last her tears subsided, and she grew quieter.
“Walter?”
“What?”
“’Member when we were little, h
ow we used to talk about all the questions we were gonna ask God when we got to heaven? ’Member, I wanted to ask Him how to understand bird talk, and you wanted to ask why He ever made mosquitoes?”
Walter nodded. “Sometimes I still think if we knew that, we’d know everything.”
“Maybe so.…” Alice wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Well, anyway, you s’pose we could ask about Tom, too—find out the truth about who he was and everything, if that girl on the boat was really his mama and Lafitte was his papa—all of that?”
Walter shook his head. “Aw, Sister, we don’t have to wait to get to heaven to find that out. We know everything we need to know ’bout Tom already.”
“We do?” Alice sniffled.
“Sure we do.”
“Well, who was he, then?”
Walter picked up a shell and threw it into the surf. “He was our friend,” he said.
It was getting late, on toward suppertime. The sun was still up, but a lopsided moon was already rising out over the Gulf.
Alice gave one last, shuddering sigh. Crockett licked her face. “Gonna be moonwater later on,” she said.
“Looks like it.…” Walter stood up, took her by the hand, and pulled her to her feet. The ache in his throat wasn’t gone altogether, but he could stand it, now. “Come on, Sister,” he said. “Let’s go home.”
Author’s Note
Years ago, when I was a little girl growing up not far from the Texas Gulf Coast, my mother told a story that has haunted me. It was one that she had heard from her mother, a true story of Bolivar Peninsula, just across the water from Galveston, in the time of the Great Storm of 1900. Its hero was an old man, a tramp named Tom, who had risked his life walking miles through the rising water to rescue a family of children stranded in a house on the beach.
Two winters past, during a spell of homesickness, I began to think of writing a book with old Tom at its heart. But when I made a trip back to Texas with the intention of finding out all I could about him, I discovered that, while the actual facts of the story were certainly dramatic, they were substantially different from the tale I remembered and quite a bit briefer than I had hoped. In reality, two young sisters from Beaumont, Texas, were staying with a friend at the Patton Beach Hotel when the hurricane hit and the building had to be evacuated. One girl was swept into the waves; Tom the Tramp, who simply happened to be nearby, made his way to her and saved her life, then helped revive the other child, who had also nearly drowned. When the children’s father learned what had happened, he offered Tom a job as a token of his appreciation. Later, Tom was buried in the family’s plot.
That, essentially, is the whole story. As for old Tom himself, no one could tell me anything about who he really was or where he came from. This was discouraging, but elsewhere in my research I was learning all sorts of fascinating things about Bolivar and Galveston and the storm itself. Particularly compelling was the wealth of material dealing with Jean Lafitte and the rumors of buried treasure that persist even to this day. Eventually, an entirely new story with its own cast of characters began to emerge in my mind from the bits and pieces of the past I had gathered. This book is the result. Although it was inspired by an actual event, it is more the story of what might have been than of what is known for certain.
I have relied on facts whenever I could.
The history and geography of Bolivar and Galveston themselves, wherever I have mentioned them, are as accurate as I could determine from my research.
Jean Lafitte, the pirate (or privateer, as he preferred to term himself), did frequently raid slave ships and confiscate their cargo. The slaves who were brought to his Galveston Island base, Campeachy, were then sold at the price of one dollar per pound, although some of the women were kept as mistresses by the pirates.
There was a hurricane in 1818 that destroyed most of Campeachy. Afterward, because of the shortage of food and water, it was Lafitte’s decision to send all of the surviving slaves to New Orleans, where they were sold at once.
In 1844, a yellow fever epidemic in the Galveston area took four hundred lives.
There is an Attacapa Indian burial mound near present-day Caplen on Bolivar Peninsula. My husband and I saw two beautiful snow-white owls not far from there one summer night.
The National Weather Bureau forecast for the Galveston area on Saturday, September 8, 1900, as printed in the September 7 edition of The Galveston Daily News, was indeed “fair, with fresh, possibly brisk, northerly winds on the coast.…” Although it had been officially noted by the next morning that a tropical storm in the Gulf had changed its course and was heading straight for Texas, few Galvestonians were alarmed; they had all seen “overflows,” as they called them. As it happened, a strong wind blowing from the north that morning did delay the landfall of the hurricane for a time. It also swept the bay waters over the northern part of the island and, in clashing with the early storm tide, created what the editor of the Galveston Tribune called “a magnificent spectacle” for the “student of scenery of nature.” Many went down to the beach to enjoy the show. Years later the film director, King Vidor, who was a five-year-old child at the time of the storm, recalled being taken by his mother to see the waves “crash against the streetcar trestle, then shoot into the air as high as the telephone poles. Higher.”
Across the water that morning, on the peninsula, the Gulf & Interstate train was attempting its usual run from Beaumont to Galveston. It reached Port Bolivar but could go no farther, as the high seas prevented its barge crossing. Many of the train’s passengers, as well as quite a few residents of the peninsula, took refuge in the lighthouse that still stands there. The lighthouse keeper and his wife, Mr. and Mrs. H. C. Claiborne, did have to turn the machinery of the light by hand to keep it operating during the storm.
At least six thousand people died that night. In Galveston two little girls named Judith and Anne Sproule escaped the rising waters, clutching a cage that held their canary.
Between eight and nine o’clock the iron roof of the Union Passenger Station was torn away. Sometime after midnight, when the storm finally passed, a full moon shone brightly on the ravaged city.
The real Tom lies buried alongside the members of the family he saved. The inscription on his tombstone reads:
TOM THE TRAMP
He alone is great
who by an act heroic
renders a real service.
But my Tom, and Walter, and Alice, and all the others, live only in imagination.
THERESA NELSON
Katonah, New York, 1987
Bibliography
The following publications were most helpful:
The files of The Beaumont Enterprise
The files of The Galveston Daily News
Arthur, Stanley Clisly. Jean Lafitte, Gentleman Rover. New Orleans: Harmanson, 1952.
Hunter, Theresa M. The Saga of Jean Lafitte. San Antonio: The Naylor Company, 1940.
Lester, Paul. The True Story of the Galveston Flood as Told by the Survivors. Philadelphia: American Book and Bible House, 1900.
Saxon, Lyle. Lafitte the Pirate. New York, London: The Century Company, 1930.
And in particular:
Daniels, A. Pat. Bolivar! Gulf Coast Peninsula. Crystal Beach: Peninsula Press of Texas, 1985. (with special attention to William D. Gordon’s history of The Breakers).
Miller, Ray. Galveston. Cordovan Press, 1983.
Weems, John Edward. A Weekend in September. College Station and London: Texas A&M University Press, 1957.
Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank everyone who contributed to her research:
Mr. and Mrs. David Rogers Nelson, Jr.
Mr. and Mrs. David Rogers Nelson III
Mrs. C. A. Wise
Anne Reed Steinman Wynkoop
Jane Owens and all of the J. Frank Keith family
William and Suzanne Greene
Mrs. W. B. Fox, Jr.
Myrtis Lane
William Hard
y
Jane Kenamore and the staff of Galveston’s Rosenberg Library
And especially, Kevin, Michael, Brian, and Errol Cooney.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Originally published by Orchard Books
Copyright © 1987, 2000 by Theresa Nelson Cooney
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4067-9
Distributed in 2016 by Open Road Distribution
180 Maiden Lane
New York, NY 10038
www.openroadmedia.com
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