Dark Water Rising

by Hale, Marian

  I liked seeing this generous side of Henry, and I guess Aunt Julia was impressed with him, too. Once outside, she smiled her gratitude and invited him to fetch his four-year-old brother and stay with us, but he refused.

  “But Henry,” Ella Rose argued, “you get on so well with Seth, and Spence would have Kate to play with. Won’t you just think about it awhile before you say no?”

  He shook his head. “I have a debt to pay, Ella Rose. The Dobsons pulled me and Spence through a window during the storm when I thought we’d drown for sure. Now they need my help to rebuild their house.”

  She glanced up at him, and though I could see she’d finally accepted his decision, Henry wasn’t through. He reached for her hand. “Why don’t you come back with me?”

  My heart clenched tight at the awful prospect of being without her. I held my breath and waited while she grew still, thinking about his offer.

  Finally, she shook her head. “It’s the same for me,” she said. “The Braedens have been good to me, and I don’t want to leave the children.”

  He nodded. “Then you should stay.”

  “But you will come visit as often as you can, won’t you, Henry? And bring Spence?” She wrapped her arms around him. “I couldn’t bear it if you didn’t.”

  “I will, I promise.”

  He slid from her embrace, grabbed the handle on the empty wagon, and glanced back at me. “Can you walk a ways with me, Seth?”

  I nodded, curious about the look he’d tossed me. He gave Ella Rose a last wave, and when we were out of earshot, he told me about finding Mr. Farrell tangled in a tree Sunday morning, drowned, about five blocks away from his home.

  “If it hadn’t been for the gap between his front teeth,” Henry said, “I’m not sure I could’ve recognized him.”

  I shook my head. It was a great loss. “Mr. Farrell was a good man and a fair boss, and I would’ve liked working for him again one day.”

  Henry nodded.

  “What about Zach and the rest of the Judsons? Any word of them?”

  “They’re gone, Seth. Ever’ last one of them, along with their house.”

  The news sank inside me, and for a moment, I felt surprise that Zach’s passing had hit me so hard. I didn’t really know him. Or his family. But thinking back on it, I knew I’d seen something uncommon in this quiet man from the beginning, something that pulled me in, made me care what happened to him. During those few days of working with him, Zach had probably taught me more about myself and what I wanted in life than anyone. Even Papa. If the Good Lord had a reason for bringing this man into my life, that had to be why.

  “You knew about the order to barge the bodies out yesterday and bury them at sea, right?” Henry asked.

  “Yeah, they made Josiah go.”

  “Well, they took them eighteen miles out all right, but even with the weights, hundreds of those bodies washed up on the beach this morning.” He glanced up at me. “They’re still washing in.”

  I stopped and stared at him, remembering the fires I’d seen from the rooftop. “They’re burning them now, aren’t they?”

  He nodded. “Workers dug trenches at first, but now they’re burning them where they find them, just piling the wreckage on top of them and torching it. It’s a terrible sight, Seth, terrible. But with this heat, the bodies are coming apart and there’s worry about disease, so what else can they do? With your uncle and cousin still missing, I just thought you’d like to know so you can find a way to tell the women.”

  Henry looked as sick as I felt. It didn’t sit well with either of us knowing that our missing family would most likely help feed those fires. And telling Aunt Julia was something I didn’t want to think about, but I nodded all the same. “Thanks, Henry. If there’s anything I can do . . .”

  He shook his head and shrugged. “There’s nothing much any of us can do.”

  I thanked him again for the food, wished him well, and left him to make his way back to the Dobsons.

  After Ezra and Josiah ate and rested a bit, they began work on the veranda while I finished up the roof over Ben’s room. Ezra had been told about the fires, but I still didn’t know how to tell Aunt Julia what I’d learned. More plumes of smoke dotted the city, and I worried that she might’ve already seen them from the upstairs windows and figured it out.

  I fixed the last shingle to the roof, climbed down the ladder, and went to the kitchen. I found Mama working on Papa’s food basket, and in a hushed voice, I asked where Aunt Julia was.

  “In the parlor, scraping mud.”

  I nodded and pulled a chair from the table. “Can you sit for a minute? I’ve got something I need to tell you.”

  “What is it?” She wiped her hands and sat down.

  “The bodies Josiah helped bury at sea began washing onto the beach this morning.”

  Her hand flew to her mouth.

  “They had to start burning them, Mama. I saw the fires from the roof. Henry said they didn’t have a choice.” She stared at me till I had to look away. “We might not have to tell the boys yet, but Aunt Julia needs to know.”

  For a long moment, she said nothing, then she leaned across the table and put her hand on mine. “We’ll do it together, right after supper,” she whispered.

  I nodded and glanced at the basket. “Are you almost through with Papa’s meals?”

  “Almost. Why?”

  “Matt needs to be told, too, before he heads off to the railroad bridge.”

  Her face crumpled in pain. Like me, she no doubt wished she could protect him from what he’d see, but it was unavoidable. Unless . . .

  “Mama,” I said, “let me take the basket to Papa tonight.”

  She looked up at me, hopeful, but quickly shook her head. “You’re needed here. Matt’s old enough to understand, but Seth, please tell him not to speak of it to the rest of the children, won’t you? Not yet.”

  “Yes, ma’am. Just send him to find me before he leaves. I’ll be out front, working on the veranda.”

  I headed for the door and felt Mama’s hand on my shoulder. I turned, and she wrapped her arms tight around me.

  Aunt Julia’s eyes glistened with tears when Mama and I told her what was taking place all over the city, but she quickly gained her composure and dried her eyes. Ezra had been right in his assessment of her. She refused to share her grief, choosing to keep it locked up tight, as if some precious part of Ben and Uncle Nate might fly away if she opened her heart.

  When she went upstairs to bed, I crept off to the roof, too full of misery to stay in the house any longer. From thirty feet in the air I saw at least a dozen fires set at intervals along the beach and throughout the city. The sky blazed, and stars disappeared behind an increasingly sick-sweet smoke.

  Before long, I heard the ladder rattle against the eaves. Without a word, Josiah joined me on the dark roof, where we sat like ghosts, watching Galveston burn its dead.

  Chapter

  22

  Mama found Sarah Louise’s name carved on the board wedged in the magnolia tree. I knew it was bound to happen, but I hadn’t wanted to speak of her, hadn’t wanted to tell anyone that we’d been forced to leave her in that awful place. Something in Mama’s eyes seemed to unlock the words, and like an overturned glass, the story spilled out of me. Later, I found one of Mama’s white paper flowers tacked to the carved board.

  Days blurred one into another, filled with repair work and heat from dawn to dusk and marked only by the Daily News that Ezra had begun to pick up for us every morning. Aunt Julia and Ella Rose always sat together at the table, head to head, poring over the dead list. Occasionally I’d hear them call out names they knew, or breathe a sigh of relief that a friend they’d searched for wasn’t there. Ben and Uncle Nate would never be on the list. None of us could bring ourselves to report them dead. Seeing Aunt Julia’s face when she read their names would be more than any of us could bear.

  With so little fresh water available, Mama and Aunt Julia had a difficult time cle
aring the mud away, and tub baths and laundry had become a luxury we couldn’t afford. But by Wednesday evening, we heard that the city mains had been opened. Cheers rang throughout the house, even though we knew it might take a few days for clean water to reach Thirty-fifth Street.

  To our amazement, Archer, Uncle Nate’s horse, ambled into the yard that evening, too. A frayed rope dangled from his neck, and Ezra said that he’d likely been found by the militia and used to pull dead wagons. Archer dropped his nose to the ground, snuffling along the salt-crusty mud, searching for something green. We’d have to see about getting a ration of grain and hay tomorrow.

  Andy and Will couldn’t keep their hands off him, and even Aunt Julia had to rub his nose and pat his neck. The big brown gelding never moved a muscle, as if he knew he was part of something bigger, part of a rare miracle that might still happen for us. If Archer could make it back, then Ben and Uncle Nate might, too. And maybe even Henry’s family.

  Aunt Julia seemed to tuck that fragile hope away, and after supper, we celebrated the horse’s return by watching the boys work on their tree fort. They hauled scrap lumber into the ash tree’s bare limbs and hammered with such gusto even Aunt Julia and Ella Rose had to smile.

  On Thursday, the Galveston Daily News finally printed a full-sized paper and gave the first accounting of the storm. The telegraph office opened, too, and on Friday, banks were back in business.

  The temperature hit a steamy one hundred degrees that same evening. From the veranda roof where I was working, I could see the gulf, green and inviting but deserted except for the fires. Not a single soul dared enter the water, and though we all longed for something other than rationed canned foods, no one would eat from the abundant supply of fish, either. As long as the dead still washed ashore, the gulf would remain an unclean enemy.

  Ezra ended up making all the trips into town to pick up our rations, insisting that Josiah and I were needed at home, but I knew there was more to it than that. The army had sent soldiers, and martial law had been declared on Thursday. They brought tents and food with them, which were badly needed with so many homeless, but Ezra still worried that the militia might take us, or worse yet, that his grandson might be mistaken for a looter and shot.

  What worried me most was what Josiah had been forced to do on that barge. He’d already seen enough to haunt his every waking moment, but I’d heard him cry out from nightmares, too. I was thankful Ezra was downstairs, right there beside him to help ease him back into the world of the living.

  The steamer Lawrence brought a hundred thousand gallons of fresh water to the island, and the Charlotte Allen ferried a thousand loaves of bread from Houston. The tug Juno went to work, too, carrying provisions and medical workers.

  We moved through the days, trying to gain some sense of order in our lives, but we never spoke of the growing number of fires. There had been reports that the dead might reach five thousand. Every day the count seemed to rise as more bodies were found buried under wreckage. I wondered how long the air would smell of death and burnings, how long debris would choke the city, but mostly I wondered how, in such a short time, we’d come to accept these things as almost normal.

  Saturday morning, one full week after the storm, Matt came home from the railroad bridge later than usual. His eyes were red and his mood surly. I caught him before he went inside and asked him what was wrong.

  “Nothing,” he said, heading for the stairs.

  I grabbed his arm. “If Mama sees you this way, you’ll be answering more questions than mine.”

  He stared at me a moment, then pulled away. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Papa said I had to wake him no later than daybreak, and when I didn’t, he swore at me.”

  I tossed him a sideways glance. “Did you oversleep?”

  He shook his head, but pain washed across his face. “Aw, Seth, he’s been working so hard—harder than I’ve ever seen anyone work. I just thought I’d let him sleep a speck longer is all.”

  “You must’ve made him really mad. I’ve never heard Papa use a swear word. Not even once.”

  “Yeah, well, I have,” he muttered.

  I laughed. “By this evening he’ll have forgotten all about it. You’ll see. Now go find the boys. They’ve been waiting on you to get home so they can finish up the tree fort.”

  He took off, looking somewhat relieved, and I went around back to put up a new clothesline for Mama and Aunt Julia. Clean water had finally reached us yesterday, and they were up to their elbows in suds, scrubbing the grime from all our clothes and bedding.

  “When we’re finished with this,” Mama said, “I plan to get myself into that tub upstairs and soak for a solid hour.”

  I smiled but had to admit that after a full week of heat and mud and grime, a tub bath sounded pretty good.

  The repair work on the veranda had been going well, but I’d been too busy to see much of Ella Rose. I caught myself checking windows while I worked, watching for her and listening for her voice. I rarely saw her smile anymore and worried that her loss might have become too much for her. Then something else occurred to me. Even though she had every reason to grieve, perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps she’d stopped smiling because I never talked to her anymore. She might be thinking I didn’t want to spend time with her. I shook my head. Any fool alive would want to spend time with someone like Ella Rose, but since she’d taken over full care of Kate and Elliott, and since I’d been working more than twelve hours a day, there’d been little opportunity for that. I began to wonder if there ever would be.

  I hung the new clothesline and helped Josiah pick out lumber to rebuild the front stairs. Railing had been salvaged from the house next door, which promised to make the job go much faster, but the more I worked, the more I felt the tiresome weight of worry. When the rail bridge was done, Papa would be home again. He’d appraise my work, and I didn’t want to even think about what would happen if I didn’t measure up. There would be a battle for sure, because I was danged determined to see that my future would be in carpentry.

  Ezra came back from town that afternoon with good news. The electric trolleys were still inoperable, but mule cars had begun running on some of the streets. A mule named Lazy Lil would be pulling car number 66 from Market to Twenty-first, then down Broadway and back. We all smiled. Even the smallest sign of life returning to normal was a cause for celebration these days.

  “Hey!” Andy shouted. “That means it’ll be coming right past us.”

  “That be right,” Ezra said, grinning. “Caked mud on them tracks might slow ’er down, but I reckon she be coming down Broadway right quick.”

  The boys ran down the street to keep watch, and soon we heard shouts and cheers as Lazy Lil pulled her car past Thirty-fifth Street to Fortieth, circled around, and headed back to town.

  I shook my head. “You’d think those boys had just seen the Labor Day parade all over again.”

  They came back about the time Mama stepped onto the stair landing to shake out a small rug. She caught all the satisfied grins and tossed them a suspicious frown. “What’s got you boys so happy? You haven’t been making mischief, have you?”

  They laughed and ran upstairs to share the news about Lazy Lil.

  Josiah hammered the last nail into the front staircase just at sundown, and we stepped back into the yard to survey our work. This was the first thing we’d built together, just the two of us, and I guess I was a touch surprised at how well we’d done without Zach. The veranda still needed paint, the water-soaked walls inside the house needed plaster, and windows needed glass, but we’d accomplished a lot in the week since the storm. The rest would have to wait till supplies could be brought in by rail.

  Josiah hadn’t said much since he’d gotten home from the barge, and I still wasn’t sure what to do about it, or if I should do anything about it. I’d been careful not to push his thoughts back to those dark places, but I couldn’t forget how he’d protected me that day at the morgue
, how he’d taken on a task that even grown men had tried to refuse, leaving me free to go home.

  He frowned, looking hard at the job we’d just finished, but the corners of his mouth soon lifted. That smile was the first sign I’d seen that maybe a small portion of his gruesome night in the gulf might be behind him.

  Satisfied, I walked back to the newly finished stairs with him, and we sat on the bottom step, watching the pink and orange sky turn deep purple. Getting Uncle Nate’s house repaired had made me feel that perhaps the world could still be set right, and that maybe, just maybe, there wasn’t much Josiah and I couldn’t do if we set our minds to it.

  “I’ve been thinking about tomorrow,” I said finally. “Thinking we might need to spread out just a bit, see if we can scrounge up more lumber—a lot more.” I glanced up at him. “We’ve got us a house to build, right?”

  Josiah hesitated, but only for a moment, then he grinned so wide I had to laugh.

  “Yessir,” he said, “I reckon we do.”

  I put my elbows on the step behind me and leaned back, thinking about the look on Ezra’s face when we told him he’d soon have his house back. Josiah leaned back, too, and we sat there smiling, shoulder to shoulder, watching the twilight sky till Mama called us in to supper.

  Chapter

  23

  Mama and Aunt Julia stayed busy heating water for hours that evening, and after supper, every male in the house got a tub bath. I leaned back in the soapy water, not wanting to get out, but with all four boys banging on the door, I had no choice but to towel off and make way for them.

  “It’s about time,” Lucas said.