by Hale, Marian
A light rapping turned him around, and he crossed the room to answer it. He pulled the door wide, and in tramped every soul in the house, Ezra and Josiah, too.
Surprise jerked me to my feet. I watched, confused, while Aunt Julia and Ella Rose carried a large, cloth-draped rectangle into the room.
As soon as they’d all taken places around Uncle Nate’s desk and turned to face me, Papa cleared his throat. He spoke slowly at first, deliberately and without a smile.
“We’d planned to give you this after graduation, but as your mother continually reminds me, the good Lord has a reason for everything.”
His eyes twinkled, and to my surprise his mouth stretched into a sudden wide grin.
“And even a fool can tell what that is if he’ll just listen.” He laughed and pulled away the cloth.
I sucked in a breath and tossed a shocked look at Ella Rose and Aunt Julia. It was their bold and feathered script that graced the shiny black-and-white sign.
I blinked at the words. I hadn’t once thought . . . hadn’t once dared . . .
Kate and Elliott clapped like they’d just seen another fireworks display, and Aunt Julia’s and Ella Rose’s eyes glistened with tears.
I turned to Mama. Her cheeks were wet, too, and I finally realized what she must’ve known all along. Papa had already planned this day when he chose to work on that rail bridge. He’d done it for me, and all this time, Mama had never said a word. She just stood back and let me learn how to walk in Papa’s shoes.
I looked at Matt and Lucas, Andy and Will, Ezra and Josiah, and every one of them grinned so wide all I could see was teeth.
But it was Papa’s smile that made my heart leap.
I glanced at him, still full of questions, and saw nothing but answers in his face.
Galveston is fast becoming the New York City of Texas. . . .
Author’s Note
Several years ago my husband came home from work with an old book in his hands. “You have to read this,” he said. “It’s a full account of the 1900 Galveston Storm, written right after it happened.”
Like most everyone in Texas, I’d heard of the hurricane that devastated Galveston all my life and I’d read many articles about it through the years, but this book was different. It had been written while wounds were still tender, while wind and floodwaters still haunted dreams. I opened the century-old frayed cover, and on the first yellowed page, written in faded pencil, was a simply worded inscription as old as the book itself. “In fond remembrance . . .” it began, and from that moment, I was spellbound.
I then read dozens of volumes that related not only the horrific damage this great storm wrought but personal accounts of survival and loss so vivid, so achingly painful, I felt as though I’d experienced it myself.
What might lay beneath this rubble? How many souls?
It was this intimate window to the past that brought me to write Dark Water Rising, and in so doing, I wanted to honor some of the personal details that have been recorded. Among the many documented accounts of the Galveston Storm that I drew from, a grown-up Katherine Vedder related the successful efforts of her mother in saving the Longineaus’ baby, Tom. She also told how Captain Munn was found naked the next morning with only a mattress ticking to cover him, and how she’d once been the envy of their neighborhood because she’d been allowed to play funeral with her father’s hearse and his old mule, Whiskers. Her account provided me glimpses of real people such as the lost Peek family, the grateful Private Billings, the Collums with their parrots and cats, and the Masons with their last surviving tin of sardines and bottle of beer. Much of the dialogue attributed to them was either direct quotes or inspired by Katherine’s statements.
Galveston, a small barrier island off the coast of Texas, has a long and colorful history of cannibalistic Karankawa Indians, pirates and buried treasure, Civil War battles, and spirited entrepreneurs. It is only thirty miles long and two and a half miles wide at its greatest point, but at the turn of the century it was one of the largest shipping ports in the United States, second only to New York. The city’s future was bright then, but after the historic Saturday of September 8, 1900, its path would be forever altered.
More than 3,600 homes and businesses were destroyed by the Galveston Storm, and 1,500 acres of coastland swept into the Gulf of Mexico. Among the countless financial losses, fifty thousand bales of cotton, worth more than $3 million, and better than ten thousand head of cattle never saw the market. The city was devastated, but the greatest loss, borne by every single person on the island, was more personal. Children were missing; they and thousands of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, had been drowned by floodwaters, struck by airborne debris, swept to sea, or trapped in collapsing homes.
From one end of the wharf to the other, sailboats and tugs lay sunk or in jumbled confusion.
Hundreds of boxcars tumbled this way and that, their valuable loads of flour, grain, and cotton ruined.
“If the bodies aren’t moved by sundown, they’ll have to take them out in pieces tomorrow. So they’re barging them eighteen miles out . . . and giving them to the sea.”
The official death count hovers at eight thousand—six thousand lost in Galveston and two thousand on the mainland—but the actual figure can never be known. Historians insist that twelve thousand is more accurate, pointing to the many who quickly left the island without reporting missing family members, and to the families who were washed out to sea, leaving no one alive to do the reporting. Then there were some, like the Braedens, who had no bodies to bury and found themselves unwilling to give up hope and report their loved ones dead.
By daybreak Sunday morning, September 9, 1900, even as families all over Galveston waded from damaged homes for their first glimpse of the ravaged city, the mighty storm continued its destructive, two-hundred-mile-wide path, devastating dozens of Texas towns and sweeping into Oklahoma, Kansas, Iowa, and beyond. Six loggers were killed on the Eau Claire River in Wisconsin. Hurricane-force winds lashed Chicago and Buffalo, downing telegraph lines and halting communication across the whole Midwest.
Houses and buildings left standing . . . tilted crazily, and many lay tumbled topsy-turvy, kicked over like toy blocks.
The storm moved across Michigan and the Canadian province of Ontario, destroying a million-dollar fruit crop ready for harvest, then sent the steamer John B. Lyon and the schooner Dundee to the bottom of Lake Erie, along with thirteen men.
By the twelfth of September, four full days after Galveston’s destruction, the storm gained strength again as it approached the Canadian Maritime Provinces. Prince Edward Island reported eight small fishing schooners and thirty-eight men lost, and off Newfoundland, eighty-two schooners were sunk or driven ashore, another hundred damaged, and seventy-five men were missing. The fishing fleet of Saint-Pierre et Miquelon lost nine schooners and 120 men, leaving fifty children without fathers.
Everywhere we looked, we saw men . . . picking up bodies.
The storm that ravaged Galveston had left behind much more than wreckage and mud and death. It had left a challenge.
On September 13, the mighty storm finally surged northeastward across the North Atlantic Ocean, curved over the top of the world, and is believed to have disappeared above Siberia.
Back in Galveston, not a single life or business had been left unchanged, but even before the dead were at rest, men gathered in storm-damaged buildings to discuss how to rebuild their great city and find a way to prevent such devastation from happening again.
A proposal to erect a seawall was soon drafted and submitted to the state legislature, and on September 19, 1902, work began. Along six miles of beach, men pounded creosoted pilings forty feet into the sand and formed a concrete barricade sixteen feet thick at the base and seventeen feet above mean low tide. This wall stood behind a barrier of granite boulders that extended twenty-seven feet toward the gulf.
The seawall was completed on July 29, 1904, but that wasn’t enough for the citi
zens of Galveston. They wanted the city raised to prevent the massive flooding that had taken so many lives, and each property owner agreed to bear a share of the cost. Soon streetcar tracks, fireplugs, water lines, and even trees and shrubs were removed. One by one, more than 2,100 homes, churches, and businesses were jacked up, some as high as thirteen feet, and sand sucked from the floor of the gulf was pumped onto the island to fill in under all the buildings, covering up roads and grass and flowers. During the eight years it took to raise five hundred city blocks, residents were forced to use long wooden walkways to get to their homes and through town. They suffered immense inconvenience, but with memories of the storm still fresh, there were no complaints. The raising was finished during the summer of 1910, and at last Galvestonians breathed easier.
Since then, the seawall has been extended six times and now covers one-third of Galveston’s gulf beaches, and yet the shadow of the Great Storm remains. You can glimpse it in the historic homes and smell it in their tangled gardens of jasmine and magnolia. You can taste it in the salty gulf breezes and hear it, unfailingly, in the rhythmic rush of waves.
It was time to move on . . .
On September 8, 2000, the city gathered for a centennial tribute to the victims of the Galveston Storm, a ceremony that had been two years in the making.
“Hurricanes haunt,” said Texas native Dan Rather, keynote speaker and now-retired news anchor. “Galveston will never forget what happened here.”
Nor will I.
Marian Hale
ROCKPORT, TEXAS
SEPTEMBER 2006
Acknowledgments
Heartfelt appreciation to my talented writing friends Barton Hill, Julie Hannah, Woody Davis, Kay Butzin, and Heather Miller; to my generous and exceptional editor, Reka Simonsen; my treasured and resourceful parents, June and Robert Freeze; my most ingenious adviser, Wendel Hale; my bright and shining children, Allison, Micah, and especially Aliisa, for candid feedback, invaluable suggestions, and unshakable support; and always to the Rockport Writers Group for their magnificent cheers.
And my deepest gratitude to Katherine Vedder Pauls and all the survivors of the 1900 Galveston Storm for providing windows into their enormous personal loss and Herculean efforts to rebuild the great city of Galveston.