by Howard Owen
Harry can see that their chances of getting across are diminishing by the minute. Only one of their group would be an even bet to make it; Naomi doesn’t mention this, and neither does anyone else. By half past 7, when they turn back, they all know they will be in the cottage when the brunt of the storm hits.
To Harry, it is almost a relief to leave the panic and return to what he thinks of, in an attack of morbid humor that makes him almost giggle, as their last resort.
Others follow their lead. Those who are left greet this day, darker still than a half-moon night, with dread.
Paul and Hank haul the life-jackets back up the stairs to the living room when they get back to the cottage. Inside, everyone tries to dry off and get warm. Tran thinks of breakfast, something to get them through a hurricane, but then the power goes off, and they are reduced to peanut butter, jelly, bread, orange juice and soft drinks. They take their meal on the floor, as far as possible from the windows Paul and Hank have tried, belatedly, to cover.
Paul sits down next to Ruth.
“Momma,” he says, “I’m sorry. But we’ll get through this. We aren’t going to let anything happen to you.”
Ruth pats him on the knee. Neither she nor Harry has any appetite. Harry slips away for more pain pills and then returns.
He has somehow nodded off when the storm hits full force. He is dreaming, and the howling that was him, wartime Harry, wrestling with Sergeant Stevens, is the hurricane, upon them at last.
He rubs his eyes and looks at Ruth beside him. She is pale, and her hand feels cold as ice, even compared to his. Harry notices that his ears have popped, and there is a briny smell even inside, as if the wind is blowing salt through cracks they can’t even see.
“Well,” he says, just to say something, “we’ll ride this thing to Mexico if we have to.”
Neither of them is in a mood for lightness or brave chatter, though. Harry is surprised, when he can rise above his own fear and pain to think about it, that Ruth isn’t running around in circles, stark raving mad.
For an hour and a half, until sometime after 10, they sit in the near-dark, saying nothing, afraid to let the storm know they are there, hiding from the bogeyman like frightened children, trying to ride it out. Water is running down the inside of the walls, coming in sideways under the molding. The roof groans for mercy.
Nobody wants to see what’s outside, and nobody wants to turn the portable radio back on. Harry sees that Leigh is crying, and he thinks Stephen might be, too. Hank, trapped in a small space with seven other people, seems to be concentrating on something in the far distance that only he can see. Naomi is too nervous even to smoke.
Then Tran remembers. She gets up and scurries into the kitchen. Paul is about to go after her, to see what’s wrong, when she comes back in, bent low in case the window is blown out, carrying something in front of her with both hands.
The cake.
Ruth’s birthday cake has 70 candles on it. Tran has in her pockets kitchen matches and a knife. She lights three of the candles before giving up, and they all quietly urge Ruth to blow them out. She manages, through her tears, to wetly snuff them.
Tran cuts a piece for each of them, and they sing “Happy Birthday” just above a whisper, so the storm won’t hear them.
They are eating birthday cake when the wave hits.
THIRTY-ONE
Harry would never know how high the wave was, but the room became noticeably darker in the half-second before it hit.
The cottage pilings are six feet high, and the building itself is another eight at least, so he figures, in the time he has to figure anything, that it must have taken a wave of 20 feet or so to snuff their already-meager light.
The impact blows out every window facing the Gulf, and water is rushing in all around them. The impact has loosened the bond between walls and roof, and in another 20 seconds there is no roof. The whole structure is partially loose of its pilings, tilting at a 20-degree angle. The cottage is moving, sliding. All the water is draining to the western, lower end of it.
Paul screams for them to get outside, on the deck. Harry wonders if this is such a good idea, but he is beyond questioning authority. Stephen has grabbed the life jackets, and Paul is trying to wrestle the boat out with him; he seems to Harry to be engaging in some kind of awkward waltz with it.
They are forced to get on their hands and knees, as flat against the wind as they can manage, willing themselves unseen the way they tried to make themselves unheard when they were inside. Paul and Tran get life jackets on their children, and Naomi and Hank manage to put one on Ruth, who seems to Harry to have turned to stone in her shock. She seems to have aged 10 years in this one morning. Paul passes the other jacket to Harry and tells him to put it on.
He says no, give it to Tran, or to Hank.
“Put on the goddamn jacket and shut up!” Paul screams over the wind and the waves. Somehow, with Hank’s help, Harry succeeds in doing this. Old people and children first, he thinks to himself.
They have no chance; Harry can see that. He glances back just as the cottage slowly separates from the deck, crumpling into the surf in slow motion, soon to be reduced to individual boards and shingles, then into smaller pieces. He imagines that eventually the cottage will be bits of colored sand under the feet of fearless future children.
But they do not sink. Somehow, perhaps from the old-timers he listens to at bait shops and the dock, Paul is aware that a deck can float.
The wave and its smaller afterwaves have driven Gulf water across to the sound. The barrier island of Sugar Beach was formed by another, nameless hurricane in the 1850s, and now the sea appears to be reclaiming it, reuniting with Wewahitchka Sound.
The deck, though, floats.
The eight of them cling to each other, to railings, to anything with a grip. Harry wonders if God is trying to find out how much they want to live.
At one point, Ruth is washed halfway off their deck-raft. Harry is afraid she will die of fright; she can’t even scream. The worst part, though, is that he is beyond being able to help her; he can only watch her terror while Paul and Hank drag her back on board, saved momentarily from her worst nightmare.
After her rescue, Ruth and he lie flat against the storm. He reaches out and grabs the hand he couldn’t reach when it mattered, and she closes on it so hard that he is sure he has broken a finger, but he has no intention of letting go, ever.
Harry has no idea how long it lasts. Paul is rolling around on the deck, trying to make sure there are still eight of them, a border collie obsessively herding his charges toward safety. The small green boat is long gone; none of them even remembers its departure.
There is no sense of direction, just wetness around and above as much as beneath, a gray continuity, a howling that fills all the space in their brains. Harry, with what strength he has left, howls to match it, and when he looks over at Paul, he’s howling, too, but now they are drowned out completely, pantomime screamers. It’s as if the wind is blowing the sounds back down their throats. Salt water burns his mouth, his nose, his eyes.
In a brief respite between bursts of wind and long, rolling waves, Harry sees something different: a swatch of red in the distance. He recognizes it and points it out to Paul. They must be moving westward, toward the one thing that stands out against the gray: the crimson roof of the Sugar Beach Inn.
Then, long after Harry has given up on the concept of breaks, when he has been hanging on for what seems an eternity out of sheer habit of living, it stops.
The calm is on them almost as quickly as the wave was. They have to remind themselves to let go a little. Now, instead of being at sea on the deck of Paul’s splintered cottage in the middle of a Force 5 hurricane, they are merely at sea on the deck.
“The eye,” Paul says. “It’ll be back.”
Harry doesn’t want to know how soon. He is so tired, but he is allowed no rest.
They are drifting to the west. He can see that the Sugar Beach Inn is much clos
er than it was the last time he looked, so close that they can see individual people on the porch that overhangs water where the beach was a few hours ago. He can make out voices in the distance. Looking around, he sees the roofs of at least two cottages farther out in the Gulf. Clinging to one of them, several hundred yards away, is a woman, straddling the top of the roof. She appears to be naked.
The beach itself has changed completely. There seems to be a channel between Paul and Tran’s cottage and the inn, the only structure still standing on the west side of the island.
The Sugar Beach Inn was built on enough fill dirt to place it 10 feet above the rest of the island, an edge the inn needed on this day. Some of the stranded islanders might have figured this out, Harry thinks, or perhaps everyone on the porch, calling to them through the gray mist, is a grateful guest.
Harry looks around at the rest. All of them are bleeding; no one has on anything resembling full clothing. Ruth and Leigh have lost their blouses, and now that the eye is upon them, they have the luxury of embarrassment. Stephen has one shoe on and is holding his leg. He and Hank have wicked-looking cuts on their arms.
Paul is looking at the Sugar Beach Inn’s bright-red roof.
“We have to try for it,” he says, and no one disputes this.
They are almost even with the building, perhaps 100 yards east and 200 yards out. Beyond that is open Gulf, and Harry knows they won’t be in God’s eye much longer.
“The water shouldn’t be too deep here,” Naomi says. She’s been swimming farther out than this.
But when she was swimming, Harry thinks, the Sugar Beach Inn was on dry land. None of them can envision the present depth of the water between them and the inn.
The respite from all the wind and noise makes Harry sleepy. He is beyond pain and beyond caring. Still, though, they won’t let him rest.
There is little time for a plan. Harry guesses Paul’s strategy is that surely, this time, they are bound to catch a break. Murphy’s law in reverse: Everything that can go wrong won’t go wrong.
Naomi tells Ruth she will swim beside her, that she will lead her until Naomi can feel the bottom with her feet.
Harry isn’t worried about Paul, or Tran. They are both excellent swimmers, and they plan to escort Hank and Leigh to safety.
Stephen, though, concerns him. The top freestyler at his school, he’s already given his lifejacket to Hank and will stay with Harry, floating and dogpaddling beside him, urging him to shore. But the way he’s holding his leg, Harry is sure he’s suffering from more than the deep cut that is starting to bleed in the saltwater.
Stephen swears he can make it, though. Paul asks him if he is sure, and the boy says yes. The look they exchange, hanging to the side of the floating deck, is one that passes between fathers and sons who have camped together, sailed together, taken small risks for large profits. It is the look of fathers and sons who will be friends. Harry can tell, in that one look, that Paul doesn’t fuss over Stephen. Harry wishes he could see, once more, his Martin.
He is sure Stephen will make it, buoyed by Paul’s confidence if nothing else. He only has to avoid getting tangled up with ancient flotsam, Harry realizes, only has to keep from being dragged down by the death grip of desperate, shameless, selfish, hopeless old age, willing to take youth with it to the bottom on the outside chance of living five more minutes.
His eyes meet Ruth’s. She looks so worn that Harry wonders if she will ever get back what has been lost this morning, even if she makes it to shore. She’s still vomiting seawater, and she says nothing when she catches her breath and looks back, but from that look Harry sees that he must look worse than he feels even. Harry and Ruth shake their heads in unison, lying on their deck-raft, hoping for strength, and Harry surprises himself by laughing. Ruth tries to smile but can’t.
Harry suddenly realizes that the pain has eased, but he is feeling nothing much else, either, except some regret. What he wants more than anything is a nap. They won’t let him sleep.
They leave their raft when they have no other choice, with the inn and safety about to slip past and the storm returning. Naomi and Ruth go first, Naomi jumping in and then pulling her mother in with her. Naomi is swimming a side stroke, holding Ruth’s life jacket with her free hand, talking to her as if she is trying to calm a wild bird trapped inside a house. Ruth’s panicky paddling succeeds mainly in splashing more water into Naomi’s eyes.
Next comes Paul, guiding Hank. Something Paul told Harry one time bobs to the surface of his memory. Paul had said swimming was the only sport at which he was sure he could beat his brother, probably because Hank couldn’t bear the momentary terror of being completely underwater. Now, Paul is trying to jolly his brother along and avoid a full-scale panic attack in the water by a large, powerful man.
Tran swims beside Leigh, speaking to her in a language Harry has never heard before but which the girl seems to understand. She nods and paddles forward confidently in her life jacket.
Stephen and Harry come last. Harry manages to roll off the raft; he had just as soon stay, to see where they wind up, but they won’t let him. His hands don’t seem to work; he is having difficulty hanging on to the orange collar that lets him float in this unfriendly sea. His swimming days seem to be over.
The others are in front of them when Harry realizes, through the mist of his self-absorption, that Stephen is in trouble. Whatever he has broken is impairing his swimming to the point that he is losing ground against the current. The others are moving away, and Harry is too weak to make himself heard by the bobbing figures ahead.
Every time Stephen kicks, he cries out. He’s trying to make it on his arms alone, and Harry can see it isn’t going to be enough. Everything his father could teach him won’t get him through this. Goddammit, Harry thinks, why couldn’t you see your son needed help? Why are you putting this on me?
There just isn’t enough, Harry sees. Not enough life preservers, time, luck, able bodies. What we’re going for here, he thinks to himself, is the best possible outcome, trying to do the best we can.
Harry wants to tell someone he’s far overdue for a nap. He giggles and swallows some saltwater.
Still, it is not an easy thing—mentally or physically—to slip the life jacket over his head and hand it to the boy.
“Here,” he says. Stephen shakes his head, swallowing Gulf water and coughing, but something makes him reach out for it anyhow. Harry summons the strength to help him slide it on.
Harry tells him, two or three ragged, breathless words at a time, that he will be alongside, that the old man is twice the swimmer he is. Just aim for the red roof, he says, and don’t look back.
Harry wishes there were time to tell Stephen the story of his grandfather, the man who swam a river to get to America.
He stays above water for some seconds, long enough to see Stephen turn and follow the other bobbing forms in front of him. He looks back once, and Harry can swear that the face he sees there belongs to a sergeant who’s been dead more than half a century. The sergeant, like Harry Stein himself, appears to be finally at peace.
THIRTY-TWO
Nov. 10, 1995
Saraw, N.C.
Dearest Harry,
We are home now.
It’s been so long since I’ve written you a letter that I hardly remember how to start.
They let me out of the hospital last week, and Paul and Tran wanted me to stay with them in Atlanta for a while, or at least they said they did. But I’ll recuperate better back here, in my very own house.
They want me to eat more, but there’s not a thing in the world that I want right now. I wish you could see me; yesterday, I walked into the bathroom, turned around and there was this starved skeleton of an old hag. I made Hank take that mirror down.
The pneumonia seems to be gone. I’m not coughing up blood any more, although they insist that I keep taking these dreadful pills for two more weeks. My wrist has healed.
But you know, Harry, it isn’t the same.
I don’t think it ever will be.
I’m resentful, Harry. This is supposed to help. The doctor, the psychiatrist they sent me to after they were able to move me from Florida up to the hospital in Atlanta, said it might. I told her about our letters on the third visit; she must have listened to me for an hour. I guess that’s what they get paid to do.
The next time, she suggested that I write you one more letter. I didn’t see how that made much sense, and I think I called her a quack. This morning, though, I got up at dawn, and I saw the first real frost, turning the dead grass from here to Kinlaw’s Hell into a diamond field in the first light. And I turned around to call it to your attention. That’s when I started thinking about doing what that psychiatrist suggested.
It’s mid-morning now. I’m back in bed, sitting up and using the lap table. The light is playing on the wall we used to face together, and the naked pecan tree is making patterns on it with its brittle old branches.
It’s a good day for writing.
Naomi swears we weren’t in the water more than 15 minutes, but it seemed like hours. Nothing has ever frightened me so, Harry. I needed a lifetime worth of courage to keep going, although I’m not sure Naomi wouldn’t have just carried me in on her back if it had come to that.
There wasn’t time to think of anything for a while. I’d swallowed so much water that when I came to, I was vomiting it and everything else up. They said Naomi gave me mouth-to-mouth. They had to carry me up the hill to the motel—I think Hank did that—because the storm was coming back.
Lying across his shoulder like a sack of flour, I was looking backward, from where we’d just come. I saw Leigh standing, looking out at the waves. Tran was at her feet, where Stephen was lying, the life jacket still around him. Two men with a board were trying to move him. I wondered why Paul was still in the water, almost neck deep in it. Tran was calling to him, and I couldn’t make out what she said at first. Finally, I understood.