by Mary Karr
For two days before the storm came inland, folks had been getting ready. Weather reports got scarier. Windows were boarded up with sheets of plywood. Bags were packed. The supermarket had runs on batteries and candles and canned beans. Higher ground was just about anywhere else, and people were heading for it. Transistor radios repeated over and over that this was a Class Four hurricane. Nobody wanted to ride that out. A lot of families took time to root around in their attics to rescue special photographs and papers like marriage licenses from the tidal wave that Cattleman Bill was calling inevitable. I remember Carol Sharp’s mother wrapped her baby shoes up in tissue paper to take along.
We did none of these things. Daddy tended to shrug about a storm. “Shit, if it hits here, it’ll take the house,” he said. He didn’t figure there was much point in scrabbling around, since a direct hit would wipe us out anyway. Which attitude didn’t go far toward reassuring me. While other fathers were taking sick leave and folding up their lawn chairs and storing special furniture high in their attics, Daddy just kept plodding off to the plant and coming home long enough to refill his mess kit with food and plodding back. Eventually, he didn’t bother coming home at all.
It’s odd to me now how easily I let him leave our lives that fall at such an ugly time. Maybe he’d been slowly backpedaling out of the daddy business since Grandma came. Things just ran smoother without him around for the old woman to carp at. Maybe his absence was inevitable as we got older.
In fairness to Daddy, we at that point had plenty of time to evacuate, so it’s not like the storm threatened our lives or anything, just our property, which didn’t actually amount to much dollarwise. Plus the Gulf Oil Corporation kept those men who hadn’t run off with their families working more or less nonstop, at double overtime, trying to get the plant battened down. Daddy would have felt like a fool turning that down. Still, I wonder why we loosened our grip on him so easy. Having Mother take care of us without him meant that—with the right amount of whining—we could talk her into buying nearly any toy, article of clothing, or treat. She saw us as grossly underprivileged. We were practically urchins, by her standards. So, in her care, we did things things that Daddy, with his forty-acres-and-a-mule sense of thrift, wouldn’t have stood for: cutting up a sheet over a card table for a playhouse, say, or painting murals on the garage wall with oil paints. Daddy had an extravagance of heart. He pretty much indulged us in a way neighbors found shameful. But he drew a hard line at anything that seemed to waste money, which was where Mother started to overtake him in our hearts.
The first day that he didn’t come home at all, Lecia and I called him a bunch of times. I always imagined our voices snailing through the telephone lines in an intricate pattern of stops and transfers trying to get to him. “Gulf Oil. Hep you?” was how the operator answered at the first ring. “Extension 691, please,” we’d tell her. Lecia and I would stand nearly ear to ear in the kitchen, each one trying to squeeze the other off the receiver. Our forearms, on this day, got covered with little half-moon bruises where we’d pinched each other trying to hog the whole receiver. He would always talk as long as we wanted, but he wouldn’t come home, no matter how we whined or begged. I remember his saying, “You take care of your momma,” and my asking who was going take care of us. (Which I don’t remember his answering.) Right before he hung up, Lecia suggested that he talk to Mother himself—maybe hoping he’d get the idea that she didn’t quite have both oars in the water. At that point, he claimed somebody was calling him and just hung up.
By that afternoon, the town was emptying itself of people, and still we didn’t leave. The news reports were getting real specific. They showed the tidal surges that wiped out the beach road. They showed the cars bumper to bumper heading upcountry over the Orange Bridge. People evacuated with their headlights on in daylight like it was all some town-wide funeral procession.
The next morning, the front page of the paper carried a shot of palm trees snapped off at Crystal Beach. School got closed, so Lecia and I sat around the house making puppets from paper bags and watching endless TV: I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver, all family sitcoms where the dads walked around in suit jackets and the women wore heels to vacuum all day.
Cattleman Bill himself had disappeared from that morning’s news. In his place stood the stout and sweating sportscaster wearing his button-bulging suit and skinny tie. He told us that the front end of the storm would hit us by noon. “You are advised to seek shelter,” he said. “Repeat. You are advised to seek shelter.” He had that terrific sort of self-importance in making the announcement, like Barney Fife on Andy Griffith pretending he was some tough-guy detective instead of a small-town deputy in charge of the school crossing. About half an hour after this newscast, they set the tornado sirens blowing.
Some of the local church folks had been preaching the world’s end in that storm. Carol Sharp gave me all the details in her front yard before her family evacuated. We were standing under the mimosa tree at the time. Its pink hairy blossoms were falling all around us in the wind, and her daddy and mother were roping down a tarp over the roof of their Chevy. Carol described how the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse would come riding down out of the clouds with their black capes flapping behind them, and how the burning pit would open up in the earth for sinners like me, and how Jesus would lead her and her family right up a golden stair to heaven. Some evangelist had put his hand on her forehead the day before, and that very instant a seed wart on her right thumb had up and vanished. I had personally done surgery on that wart, picking the seeds out of it with a straight pin not a week before, and sure enough, there was no trace of it that morning. Which gave me pause. But I was spiteful enough to tell her that I didn’t much want to sign up with any god who sent tidal waves crashing down on trailer parks but took time for her old wart. (Despite my breathtaking gullibility, I was able to spew out such random hunks of elementary logic sometimes.)
Back home, the light in our windows was gradually turning a darker and darker shade of charcoal. Mother was hanging draperies over the big picture window, and through that window, I could see the Sharps’ Chevy backing out of their driveway, tarp and all. What if old Mr. Sharp’s right about God and Jesus? I must have said out loud. Or maybe I suggested we pray just in case—I don’t remember. What’s dead clear now is how Mother lifted her middle finger to the ceiling and said, Oh, fuck that God! Between that and the tornado sirens and the black sky that had slid over all our windows and Grandma stone deaf to that blasphemy because she was tatting those weensy stitches, I began to think we’d be washed out to sea for all our sins at any minute.
Lecia must have gotten scared too, because she started lobbying for us to get in the car and drive to Aunt Iris’s house right away. Daddy’s sister lived sixty miles north in the hills outside Kirbyville. “Let’s just go,” she kept saying. I remember she argued that the big traffic had already died down. She even tried to talk to Grandma, who was lost in her lace-making.
Daddy called about then, and Mother surprised us by picking up the phone herself. I remember that she had a dish towel in one hand, and she sounded pissed off that he was calling at all. She told him that the car was running outside, that we were walking out the door that very minute. In fact, she hadn’t even hauled her daddy’s Gladstone bag out of the closet yet. The TV was blaring Dennis the Menace. I was sitting on the floor with Lecia, cutting fringe on a paper-bag Indian costume, when Mother slammed down the receiver.
Now I know that she needed him there that day, and her fury was the closest she could get to an invitation. Daddy was lost to us in that fury. The line was severed, and in the mist that occupied my skull that morning, he floated away, getting smaller and smaller. I looked over to Lecia, who shrugged and went back to cutting her fringe with a sick precision. At that instant, I knew we should have evacuated long before. The slow psychic weight of doom settled over me.
Mother later explained to us that we would have gone at sunrise, but Grandma for some reason ref
used to leave. She got it in her head that there was only a little rain shower coming. It was as if her lifelong terror of storms had imploded somehow and left her believing that a Class Four hurricane moving directly across our house couldn’t budge her. Even the nice young Guardsman in the camouflage suit who came to stand in our living room with his bullhorn at his side didn’t rile her up. “We appreciate your stopping by,” she said, trying to herd him out of the house by bumping the backs of his knees with her chair wheels. By this time, Mother sat at the dining table sobbing and wiping at her face with that dish towel. The soldier finally threatened to pick Grandma up physically and tote her to the car, to which she said okay, she’d go, but she had to take a bath first. He said that he reckoned they’d already stopped water service, but Lecia got the water running, and Grandma wheeled herself in there and shut the door.
It was when that door clicked shut that Lecia decided to call Daddy to come get us out of there. Right that minute. But the phone line had gone dead. I saw the shock of this fact on her face before she even handed me the receiver. (Lecia was nothing if not cool in a crisis. She learned to drive at twelve, at which age I once saw her convince a state trooper that she’d just left her license at home because she was running out to get her baby milk while he was still sleeping.) But her expression that morning with the black phone at her ear betrayed her age. Her eyes got shiny for a second. She was really only nine, after all, and what with the tornado sirens wailing the way our music teacher had warned they would only when the Russian missiles were launched from Cuba, and the phone line to Daddy snapped dead, Lecia looked ready to give up the grown-up act altogether.
She handed me the phone. She didn’t want to be alone in knowing how alone we were, so she handed it to me, so I’d know too. And that flat silence right up against my ear brought it all home to me. You never notice how hooked up to everybody you feel when you hear that rush of air under the dial tone, as if all the world’s circuits are just waiting to hear you—anyway, you never notice that till it goes away. Then it’s like you listen, expecting that faraway sound, and instead you get only the numb quiet of your own skull not knowing what to think of next.
It was the National Guardsman who wound up getting us out. He came back about when the rain had started to blow sideways against all the windows with a sound like BB pellets. Grandma’s bath had wound up taking too long. Mother let him force the bathroom door with a screwdriver, and there Grandma sat unmoved from her chair, all her attention honed to that shuttle of hers manufacturing lace while bathwater poured over the edges of the tub and onto the floor.
He did have to pick her up, finally. He swooped her up in his arms like she was a bride. Her good leg hung down normally enough, but her stump kept slipping down past his elbow and starting to dangle. Lecia and I had a giggle fit over this on the porch, because Grandma’s legs kept splaying open in a way she would have found unladylike.
Outside, the wind had set the phone lines to swaying. It had already started to tear loose some shingles that were blowing up the street. Plus gusts somehow squirmed into the window cracks to make a high-pitched whistling that seemed to get louder by the second. Lecia and I ran for the car, a distance of ten yards, and got drenched to the skin. Getting in the car was like leaving the first big noise of the storm and sitting in a cold bubble. We could barely see the Guardsman through the water streaming off the windshield. He seemed somehow to be trying to move in a more gallant or stately way, what with Grandma’s leg slipping down every other step and all. Anyway, he was slower than we had been, which made us laugh. But we stopped giggling pretty quick when Mother slid behind the wheel.
You could see by her eyes in the rearview that she wasn’t crying anymore. That had come to be a bad sign, the not crying. Her mouth turned into a neat little hyphen.
I watched the Guardsman climb back in his jeep; then the gray and the rain sort of gobbled up everything but a big olive-drab smear that was moving out of our driveway behind us. I had this crazy urge to roll down my window and poke my head right out into the storm and holler to him to come back. But the wind would have eaten any words I yelled. So I watched the smear of his jeep get littler. Then it was gone, and there was just rain and sirens and Mother’s cold gray eyes set smack in the middle of that silver oblong mirror.
The drive from Leechfield to Aunt Iris’s house in Kirbyville would normally have taken an hour. That’s in the best weather conditions. “Sixty minutes, door to door” was what Daddy always said climbing out of his truck cab or stepping up on their porch. (I once made the trip dead drunk on a summer morning in a souped-up Mustang in forty-five minutes, and I never got under eighty, slowed for a curve, or stopped for a light.) This particular day it took fifty-five minutes. Lecia timed it. That’s in blinding rain, rain so heavy the wipers never really showed you the road. They just slapped over the blur and then slapped back to reveal more blur. Sure, we must have had wind at our backs. Still, I figure that Mother drove through the first onslaught of a hurricane with the gas pedal pressed flush to the floorboard, without a nickel’s worth of hesitation. Maybe she knew that her mother was close to dying and just didn’t care if we made it to high ground in one piece or not. We were late enough leaving town that there were no other vehicles on the road, which was good. Doubtless we would have hit them had they been there. Only shit-house luck kept us from sliding sideways off the narrow blacktop and into one of the umpteen jillion bayous we passed. For a good five miles out of town, you could hear the sirens getting littler, so the roar of the wind got bigger. That made it seem like we were heading into the storm instead of away from it.
When we hit Port Arthur, Texas, Mother started to sing under her breath. It was an old song she liked to play on our turntable when she was drinking. She had a scratchy recording of Peggy Lee or Della Reese, one of those whiskey-voiced lounge singers:
Oh the shark has zippy teeth, dear,
And he shows them pearly white.
Just a jack knife has his teeth, dear,
And he keeps them out of sight…
Nobody in my family can sing a note. The few times we went to church with neighbors, Lecia and I had the good sense to lip-synch the hymns so it wouldn’t be too noticeable. My mother, too, had a bad voice—wavery and vague. She was a natural alto who’d probably been nagged into the higher ranges by overfeminine choir teachers. So she sang the wrong words in a ragged soprano under her breath that morning, whispery and high. The car seemed to pick up speed as she sang, and the fear that had been nuzzling around my solar plexus all morning started to get real definite when I saw, dead ahead of us, the gray steel girders of the Orange Bridge.
The Orange Bridge at that time was said to be the highest bridge in the country. Your ears popped when you drove over it. The engineers had built it that tall so that even tugs shoving oil platforms with full-sized derricks on them could pass under with room to spare. The Sabine River it ran over wasn’t very wide, so the bridge had easily the sharpest incline of any I’ve ever crossed.
Not surprisingly, this was the scene of a suicide every year or so. Jilted suitors and bankrupt oilmen favored it. Those who jumped from the highest point of the bridge broke every bone in their bodies. I remember Mother reading this fact out loud from the paper one time, then saying that women tended to gas themselves or take sleeping pills—things that didn’t mess them up on the outside so much. She liked to quote James Dean about leaving a beautiful corpse.
Anyway, it was this bridge that the car bumped onto with Mother singing the very scariest part of “Mack the Knife.” She sang it very whispery, like a lullaby:
When the shark bites with his teeth, dear,
Scarlet billows start to spread.…
The car tipped way back when we mounted the bridge. It felt sort of like the long climb a roller coaster will start before its deep fall. Mother’s singing immediately got drowned out by the steel webbing under the tires that made the whole car shimmy. At the same time—impossibly enough—we seemed
to be going faster.
Lecia contends that at this point I started screaming, and that my screaming prompted Mother to wheel around and start grabbing at me, which caused what happened next. (Were Lecia writing this memoir, I would appear in one of only three guises: sobbing hysterically, wetting my pants in a deliberately inconvenient way, or biting somebody, usually her, with no provocation.)
I don’t recall that Mother reached around to grab at me at all. And I flatly deny screaming. But despite my old trick of making my stomach into a rock, I did get carsick. The bile started rising in my throat the second we mounted the bridge, which involved the car flying over a metal rise that felt like a ski jump. We landed with a jolt and then fishtailed a little.
I knew right away that I was going to throw up. Still, I tried locking down my belly the way I had on the Tilt-A-Whirl. I squinched my eyes shut. I bore down on myself inside. But the rolling in my stomach wouldn’t let me get ahold of it. I wouldn’t have opened my window on a dare. And I sure didn’t want to ask Mother to pull over mid-bridge. Lecia was in charge of all Mother-negotiations that day anyway, and she had opted for the same tooth-grinding silence we’d all fallen into. Even though she was normally devout about watching the speedometer and nagging Mother to slow down (or, conversely, Daddy to speed up), she kept her lip zipped that morning. Anyway, at the point when I felt the Cheerios start to rise in my throat, I just ducked my head, pulled the neck of my damp T-shirt over my nose and away from my body a little, and barfed down my shirt front. It was very warm sliding down my chest under the wet shirt, and it smelled like sour milk.
Mother responded to this not at all. Neither did Grandma, who had a nose like a bloodhound but had turned into some kind of mannequin. Really, she might have been carved from Ivory soap for all the color she had. Lecia would normally have seized the opportunity to whack me for being so gross. Maybe I even wanted whacking, at that point. Surely I wanted to break the bubble of quiet. But Lecia just tied her red bandana around her nose like a bank robber and shot me a sideways look. I knew then it was one of Mother’s worst days, when my horking down my own shirt didn’t warrant a word from anybody. Lecia watched Mother, who watched some bleary semblance of road.