“Don’t be trapped by what your eyes tell you,” she told Katy Faulkie. “There is much more than this.” Katy nodded back to the sister in a way that conveyed trust. The girl took a few deep breaths and began to check her rope and that of the little boy in front of her, then the smaller girl behind her. Sister Elizabeth moved on to the next child and the next. She moved angelically, each child hearing in his or her perfect tongue. Coming to Clement, Elizabeth spoke closely into his ear, her whisper calming his wild eyes and restoring his normal demeanor. He looked like the familiar Clement again as he shook his head seriously, but agreeably. Albert Campbell sat nearby with his little sister, Maggie. He was offering her small pieces of hard candy. For every one that she put in her mouth, she’d take another from him and put it in the pocket of her smock. Maggie’s eyes, usually sparkling jewels, were dull agates. She was shivering in rapid fits. He tried to keep her warm, wrapping the blanket more tightly around her every few moments.
“It’s alright, Maggie,” Albert said, rocking her gently in his lap, responding to her when she spoke. Maggie had asked what the Queen of the Waves looked like. “She has a beautiful dress and a necklace with emeralds,” he replied. “A crown of jade and silver’s around her sweet head. Her voice is a chime. She’s the prettiest woman in all the realms of glory. She cares for us all the while.”
He grasped his sister tightly as Sister Elizabeth bent down to hug her. “You are beloved,” Elizabeth said to Maggie. “Dear girl, what do angels always tell us?”
She looked perplexed and turned to her brother for the answer.
“They say, ‘Fear not,’ right Maggie?” Albert said.
Maggie kissed Sister Elizabeth before she pulled away. Elizabeth brushed Albert’s face with her hand and looked into his blue, lightning-lit eyes, as if she was seeing his future. “It sometimes falls to us to give meaning to the meaningless. Don’t flinch from this. In this act is where the true meaning arises.”
“Yes, Sister,” Albert said earnestly. “I know.”
Sister Elizabeth then sat down and tightened the cord around her. She took in the quality of all present in the spare light. Sister Evangelist stood in the center of the room, tending the remaining lantern, gathering her nine close to her. Sister Vincent led the final chorus. She sang in her native French, the children in English.
Then joyful hearts shall kneel around thy altar,
And grateful psalms re-echo down the nave.
Never our faith in thy sweet power can falter,
Mother of God, Our Lady of the Wave.
The air was thick with a dense current. It was difficult even to take a deep breath. The building was shedding vital parts of itself into the storm on the crest of each successive wave. It wouldn’t divide though without protest. Reverberating deeply in a low, bass register, another low grinding followed. The faces of the women were grave, but those of the children remained serene, like St. Stephen before he was stoned.
6
SISTER ELIZABETH
Sister Elizabeth thought she had absorbed all the fear that death could carry. She had felt her faith and devotion strengthen her as she was speaking to the children, but it now ebbed. The floor wrenched under her. “I’m not ready,” she said quietly to herself. Her arms extended around her little family as the structure pivoted slowly, like a tooth tearing from its roots. An old chest of drawers began to slide slowly across the floor. Part of the house seemed to be moving one way, the other in another direction. The torque began to pop the walls like firecrackers. Water spewed from the openings, spitting cold streams of rain at the children on the edges. Large gaping wounds coursed open along the moldings. The building leaned backwards, shuddered, then righted itself again, but the exercise left them all rattled.
Sister Elizabeth pulled her children closer. She felt in her throat the primitive sense of being trapped. Cedar shingles sheared off above them, ripping away in sheets, as if a mechanical machine or destructive giant was doing the work. The walls shuddered. Another high-caliber crack sounded. The south wall peeled back, revealing a dark and open sea. Everyone reached for something that might hold them. Wind and wave seemed to be one. Some of the children began to disappear into the void. Elizabeth reached out her arms, tightening them around the shoulders of the children closest to her, leaning into them. Her hands reached, fumbling for others at the limits of her grasp in a series of quick maneuvers, the kind one makes around the neck of a bolting horse. She tried to keep all of them close, under her control.
Stay calm. Move quickly, she thought. Shorten the reins. Brace a steady hand on the horse’s neck. Hold one rein low and tight. Grab the mane. Raise the other rein up to the shoulder. And pray.
The house, corpse-like with rigidity, rumbled again as it tugged forward. Then an avalanche of noise fell upon them. The wind hit them as if generated from an array of artillery. There was a strange and curving nature to its sound. It started low, like a hand siren, increasing fiercely in pitch, accelerating like a battle scream. Gusts whipped up with stunning focus. The threat of detonation surrounded her. The roar muffled the piercing cries of children. The lightning flashes and crashes of thunder fell one on top of the other. Elizabeth gathered and pulled her children into a tight corner that offered protection against the worst of the wind, but the rising water was now threatening to swallow them. In the powder flashes of lightning she could see the other groups fall away in nines and tens, tumbling into yawing cavities.
The roof caved down onto Sister Vincent’s children. It took Elizabeth’s breath. She pulled at the clothesline around her waist, bringing her children back into her tightening corner, instinctively trying to count them. They were being hunted. The wind shifted and rain rushed now directly against them, as the water rose again and grew more violent. Lightning sheets lit the sky in a swift sequence of days and nights. The building twisted. Maybe they were still upright. It was hard to tell. Between the strikes and sheets, there was now no light at all, only motion. Cold water rushed into her children’s faces in torrents. They knocked her down. Limbs and torsos flashed by in the curls of waves. She reached for those attached to her, but they rotated away, and she spun around with them. More vanished, folding into the churning water. Flying timber shot by. Shingles and framing rolled away. The remaining floor rippled. The locomotive careened overhead again. Three quarters of the crashed in roof folded back and disappeared into the locust-colored heavens. The remaining structure thrust upward with all its helpless passengers, each one now sensing the coming fall, the one from their most harrowing nightmares.
7
WILL MURNEY
A few of the older boys had freed themselves from the clothesline and were climbing upwards, their silhouettes lit by a climactic sheet of lightning in the asymmetric sky. When the roof fell away, they disappeared into the dark. Will reached for the smaller ones around him. The next sheet of lightning enabled him to see only that there were more he couldn’t reach. He thought he saw Henry, holding a child in each arm, as the building collapsed. Will tumbled and slid along a fragment of framing, then was under water. Breaking the surface, he was surrounded by wreckage, but there was no inside anymore, everything was breaking up.
The rain stung. Will was without means to contend with the velocities of the wind and rain. No one was around him anymore. In the midst of lumber and crumbling walls, he felt the rising sensation of the sea, then spiraled down at the speed of an explosion in the utter darkness. He took the sort of quick breath linked with going deep underwater and hit the surface again with the brutality he assigned to fatalities.
The cold water fueled the immediate pumping of his arms and legs. The second he broke the surface, the sea fell over him again, stealing back the breath he’d stolen. He found the surface somehow again, his neck taking a knife each time he inhaled. His hearing had shut down. In the next lightning flash, he thought he saw something, maybe a distant section of framing. Near it, he also saw what
looked like the tops of trees. The framing, almost like a raft, seemed to be scudding down the back side of a black wave. Each succeeding wave brought Will closer to whatever it was.
The storm thundered around him, pushing him toward the object which he now saw was not a remnant from the building, but something stuck in a motte of submerged trees. In the valley of a wave, he grabbed at a tree trunk, but missed, managing only to hold firm to some bare branches. His hands bled as the branches dug into them. The wind and rain continued to overwhelm him. He felt like he was being filled with wet cotton. Up and down he was flayed against the bare tree branches but continued to hold on. After a few minutes, Will found he could make small adjustments to his body between the gusts, recalibrating where his strength was focused. He breathed in short painful bursts and his ribcage hurt. Concussions of thunder filled the air and his eardrums were bursting. Planks, walls, and cedar shingles slashed through marbled waves around him like sharks, then disappeared. Everything had a clarity here: everything wished to kill him.
On one of the objects, a chunk of roof, he thought he glimpsed another boy, but if it was a boy, he looked more like a helpless insect balancing atop a broken toy in a violent river. Maybe someone else had survived. He felt the urge to help the boy, but the elements were hard set against the notion. Will continued to hang on, reacting to his diminishing strength with small, but innovative calibrations of his grip. Clinging to the tree branches, he rode the storm over the next few minutes with concentration. He saw his survival would be a question of agility and intensity. His time in the water advanced his understanding of its motion. Will began to see ratios and relationships in how the waves broke. He counted them as they came and went. He found an aptitude for comprehending both sides of their equations. Within the quick slices of time he could look around, he saw a metal bolt in the structure he was holding onto, then another and another. He was on the deck of what was left of a boat.
8
Frank Madera
Frank Madera whispered the name of Jesus quickly over and over again into the long wooden beam on which his life depended. It was a chunk of roof from what had been the highest point of the building. Spinning timber cut through the air and sea around him, missing him barely in mathematically impossible ways. He had survived the collapse of the building by holding firm to the pitch of roof on which a golden cross, the symbol of hope on which the orphanage’s mission was based, was affixed. Bent at a heretical angle, the cross seemed to have lost its salvific properties and the roof itself was becoming nothing more than just a loose congress of sticks. Holding on, Frank felt like a spider on a piano string during a lively concert. Unless this beam was fortified with an unknown alloy, it’d soon splinter in his hands. He scanned the waves. He didn’t know what he was looking for. Children and the sisters aboard an elaborate rescue vessel, a big ship with life preservers and warm blankets, he supposed. This was wishful thinking, a waste of the concentration he’d need to stay above the waterline.
During a sheet of lightning, he thought he saw the tops of trees. Perhaps it was only his mind seizing on hope, but he deserved some hope. He was entitled to some hope. The possibility fortified him as he looked over the waves again. There was human movement in the next crack of lightning. A shadow in the flare near the tree tops some fifty feet away. Another boy perhaps. A boy crawling hand over hand in the rain, clambering up something caught in the branches.
When a waterlogged mattress whirled by, Frank thought of transferring himself to the mattress, but questioned how he would achieve the transition. In his hesitation, the mattress flipped over and submerged. Jagged boards broke the water like dorsal fins where it had been as if it had been consumed. The rain stung him like ball-bearing shot. He spit out saltwater and moved his legs to stay on the roof, but the sea tore at him, attacking him like the jaws of a beast.
There were trees ahead. And they were close. Too close. His section of the roof was thrown against the sharp claws of their bare branches and he reached out for them. These must be the salt cedars behind the orphanage. He couldn’t calculate what this meant other than conclude the whole earth must be covered with water. He thought of Noah, but then white water punched him in the stomach. His back wrenched badly, and he felt serrated branches ratchet across his face. He could hear nothing but a dull roar. He scrambled and reached for anything to hold him in place, his numb hands hunting friction. The chaos of the storm seemed to shake an angry finger at him for presuming he had found sanctuary and the branches slipped through his grasp.
The next wave lifted him upwards, free like a circus acrobat. He twisted, reaching for a non-existent trapeze. Speed and force denied him, throwing him down into the maelstrom below again. It did what maelstroms do. It swallowed him up, keeping him beneath the water for what he knew was too long. Then the water rushed at him again, but in the other direction. He pulsed upward and his nose and mouth barely broke the water.
He thought he heard someone shout. The wind took the sound and flung it away, but the possibility that he wasn’t alone renewed him. He urged himself toward the voice, but there wasn’t enough oxygen in the air. It was like breathing through a bucket of water. Frank felt he was going under again, when something grabbed him by the midsection, tackling him hard, like in a football game on the beach. Pulled into the quill-like branches, he reached out and touched inexplicably, a pole. There were iron bolts through the wood and nail heads. Another wave rushed over him hard, but it didn’t crash. It just ran by as the wind tore at his clothes. The storm’s fury diminished slightly, and Frank gathered himself around the pole as tightly as he could. It was the broken mast of a boat. He was in a boat, or at least the wreckage of a boat, lodged fast at an angle within the branches of a clump of submerged trees. He looked up as more lightning lit the sky.
There was a second mast forward and above him rising out of the branches. The stern of the boat was in the air above the treetops. The bow behind him was below the water. A large wave rolled over him, but the broken vessel held. He grabbed at the branches and released the mast, making for the second mast in the branches, higher up out of the water. The water rose around him again, but its motion pushed him upward and along advantageously. He felt like a spider crawling along its web as he reached the second mast. The water receded once more, and he inched himself now along through the branches and down the second mast toward the slanted deck of the boat. Though damaged and pelted with rain, it was out of the water. Grabbing at the higher tree branches and rigging, wood, whatever his hands could find, he moved upward and aftward along the angled deck, until he managed to find purchase close to the highest point of the marooned ship.
Just then thunder boomed down and Frank ducked instinctively. A blue bolt of lightning cracked the sky nearby, giving off a sizzling electric scent. He looked up again into the shimmering sky to see, perched a few feet above him near the stern, another boy.
“How’d you get here?” Will shouted down to him.
Frank had never been happier to see anyone.
9
THE EYE OF THE STORM
Unsynchronized with the more distant thunderclaps, the lightning popped and peppered above them like a series of almost continuous flashes. The work of the storm seemed now higher in the heavens. Rippling, hidden like an enormous blue-green lantern behind the rolling clouds, it illuminated the sea periodically like a tin roof in an angled sun. The rain let up, moving now in sheets rather than a single blinding curtain.
Will and Frank could now assess their situation better. The boat was a small double-mast schooner, wedged at a twenty-five to thirty-degree downward angle, its bow under the water, its stern held in place amidst a group of sturdy salt cedars. The boat was maybe thirty feet long, but it was hard to tell in the dark with so much of it underwater. Maybe ten to fifteen feet of it remained above the rolling waves jammed securely in the trees. There seemed to be three separate trees, each of marginally different heights. The boat was
caught three quarters up to their tops and seemed to be fixed where it was for now. It was hard to see where the rigging stopped and the branches began, and hard to find a secure perch on the broken and angled deck, but this was their provisional home for now. Will wondered if the boat were to slip out of its peculiarly arbor-locked position, it would right itself and float or sink. He hadn’t the information to assess the variables and could do nothing about it anyway, so instead he aimed to prepare to ride out the other side of the storm with Frank here.
“Is it over, Will?”
“No. There’ll be more.”
“Is it safer in the water hanging onto the ropes and branches or above the water up here on deck holding onto something. It’s awful slanted. We could get blown away up here if the winds come back.”
“Depends if you’d rather drown or be carried away by the squalls. Probably somewhere in between. Let’s look.”
Frank followed Will, crab-like, as they moved deeper into the spiny web of quills and wet, weathered ropes, back toward the water, holding on to the branches around them. They had advanced about as deeply as they could go, when they heard another voice.
“Save Maggie,” it said. “Save Maggie.”
Will pulled at obstinate branches in front of him in a frantic digging motion, pushing his face into the space he’d made, feeling his way toward the sound until he sensed more than saw the small battered face of another boy in the water, his head and shoulders amidst the dark branches.
Will turned back up to Frank behind him and shouted.
The Mourning Wave Page 2