Before mounting up, the soldier read the message the captain had entrusted to him: ‘I fear the city is destroyed beyond ability to recover. Loss of life and property appalling. – Benson.’
22
THE MILKMAN
If there had been a morbid curiosity to truly lay eyes on the first of the dead bodies, this ended immediately upon seeing them. A copse of salt cedars at Heard’s Dike held at least a dozen gruesome bodies like a scaffold. The boys tried not to look, moving quickly across the beach, staring out to the glassy sea, which gleamed a pleasant and peaceful green, belying its recent murderous past.
“Look,” Albert said pointing ahead. “A cross stuck in the sand.”
“They’re burying people where they find them,” Will said, noticing that trailing from the shadow of the cross, there were seven smaller humps in the sand leading to a larger one.
Frank looked at Will. Will set his face back to town quickly.
“Come on, Albert, let’s keep up,” Frank said, following Will’s lead, electing to leave the arising questions unanswered.
“Poor souls,” Albert said innocently. “May you rest in peace.”
Ahead, the tangled flat scrub and rippled brown sand gave way to a landscape marked with pancaked houses and splintered storefronts as they reached the outskirts of town. The oyster shell streets crunched beneath their feet as they entered the city. The path ahead was dotted with overturned boats, scattered lumber, and dozens of wandering souls sifting out intimate debris from the heartbreaking sprawl. Ahead of all this lay only more of the same.
Albert finally spoke the first words that had crossed any of their lips in an hour.
“Why’s it so quiet?”
Neither Frank nor Will answered. Just looking ahead overloaded the senses.
As they advanced toward the city, only the sound of shuffling refugees across broken boards and an occasional far off wail broke the hush, but even these sounds seemed quickly swallowed up.
“The milkman,” Will announced a few minutes later. He pointed ahead to a man whose slow path was leading to an intersection with their own. “Mr. Holman. I see him at Unger’s. At the grocery.”
Mr. Holman moved at a mournful trudge toward them, then stopped squarely in front of them. They would experience this time and time again: survivors speaking of their bewilderment, presenting and preserving their stories with little or no introduction.
An affable bachelor, Mr. Holman was known by his customers to move quickly from house to house each morning. Those in his path were also accustomed to his slow and measured way of speaking when he paused along his route, as he often did. Mr. Holman’s eyelids now trembled. He began speaking in an accelerated manner, clipping his words. The more deeply he moved into his tale, the more confused he became about what he should say next, but the gist was that his home had been carried off in the storm. The boys listened carefully at first, intent on conveying their deepest condolences, but he seemed hopelessly caught in a loop and the effect of this on his demeanor was unsettling, as it would be to anyone who knew how he ordinarily comported himself.
“I’m looking for it now,” he explained briskly. “My home. It was carried off in the middle of the night. Carried off I don’t know where. To the sea perhaps. Likely smashed to smithereens.” He pointed left and right to the neighborhoods he had traversed already. “How did St. Mary’s fare?” he asked.
Frank told him resolutely.
“Maybe they’ll find more of you,” he said in an uneven cadence. “I heard a story this morning of a little girl. A little girl they found asleep in a tree. Not a scratch on her.”
Albert’s eyes grew wide. He gripped his hands in a heart-shaped fist, but couldn’t speak. From then on, he could think of little else, very certain the little girl in the tree would prove to be his sister.
“We were stuck in a tree too,” Frank said, changing the subject in a sense. “Stuck up in a grove of trees. In a wrecked boat. All night. The John S. Ames.”
“I climbed a tree myself,” Mr. Holman said quickly attaching his story to this theme. “An old oak near my home prior to it being carried off. My house, I mean. Strong oak. I crawled and swam and clawed and floated. Finally made it back to my house. Or where it had been. But by that time, it had been carried off. To the sea perhaps. Likely smashed to smithereens.”
Holman blinked hard.
“Have you seen her?” Albert asked.
“Who?” Mr. Holman asked.
“Maggie.”
“We have to go,” Will said. “Do you know if the hospital’s still up, sir?”
“Which one?”
“St. Mary’s.”
“I don’t know.”
“Which ones do you know are up?”
“I don’t know. Do you?” he asked them.
“No.”
“My brother lives by the hospitals.”
“I’m sorry Mr. Holman, that doesn’t help me. We have to go,” Will said.
“Now, where’re you boys going again?”
“To the hospital,” Will said. “St. Mary’s,” he added before Mr. Holman could ask.
“I don’t know if it’s up, but I can’t stop you. My brother lives not far from there,” Mr. Holman said, rubbing the back of his neck.
“Yes, sir,” Will said.
“For now, I’m looking for my house. It’s been carried off,” said the milkman. He then moved along and away from the boys, speaking swiftly of the sea and of smithereens.
23
A FEARFUL LACK OF CHILDREN
As they approached the edge of the city, they heard the pealing of the Ursuline convent bells. They seemed to ring out with a special clarity, as if they traveled the distance more freely than before. It was difficult to imagine there might be more destruction than they had already seen, but looking ahead, they realized that what they had so far experienced had been only a prelude. The resort pavilions, the bright-towered bathing houses, the Olympia, Murdoch’s, the Pagoda, they no longer existed. It seemed impossible. They had stood so whimsically and proud, teeming with life every day and night of the past summer, even yesterday morning. Now the enormous structures had been crushed, pushed into a giant wedge of accumulated debris and driven inland into the city limits. Downtown, at Q Street, the collected wreckage had lurched to a stop under its own weight leaving a mountainous range of the storm’s demolition running east to west through most of town.
“Have you seen the ridge yet?” a dazed survivor would ask them every quarter mile. The boys would shake their heads and answer stupidly.
“We’re going to,” they’d say.
Albert fell behind, as he had taken to inspecting the branches of each tree they passed, then a rocking horse moving back and forth in a steely whistling wind in the middle of a street intersection. He orbited the toy horse slowly, as if he were admiring it in a store and considering a purchase. It was as lonely a sight as Will, even in this sad series of circumstances, had yet seen.
“Frank, keep him moving back there,” Will called. “Fetch him. We can’t get separated. It’s getting thick ahead.”
More men and women were milling about the streets now, aimlessly turning back and forth as if looking for many things at once. Others climbed over collapsed buildings with bleeding heads and unknown purposes. A few grieved in solitude, but only those with the stoutest of temperaments were equipped to do so. The others who did, Will noticed, had already succumbed to delirium. It occurred to Will that perhaps he and his companions must look the same as everyone else. There was a distinct lack of alternatives.
Frank returned with Albert, catching up to Will. It was still morning as they drew closer to the heart of the city. Lost souls now proceeded in waves, most in rags, others with nothing but blankets to cover themselves. Many, with nothing to protect their feet, traversed the ruins with a tentativeness that made thei
r movements seem extremely vulnerable.
Among a multitude now, Will inspected Frank and Albert in a different way, feeling both a profound sorrow and a complicated guilt. But more than anything else, he was thankful for their companionship. When he put his hand on Albert’s shoulder, it brought a faint, sad stroke to his heart. He could see no circumstance in which he would ever want to be alone again, but was uncertain whether he could ever become close to anyone or anything again, either.
Will concluded he, too, had probably taken on the same glassy look as those around him. There was simply no means to contest it. He missed home. He missed the orphanage. His friends. The sisters. He missed everything. The nature of the day and the foreseeable future was settling in, intractably. He had many problems.
Will now also realized that he missed the girl desperately. It made little sense. He had reassembled a life without his parents at the orphanage long ago, adopting a stoic temperament out of necessity to manage his innermost feelings. His concern over a girl he really barely knew made a mockery of this, revealing the thinnest spot in his cobbled-together armor. Yet none of this, it turned out, was up to him. His heart went where it went. He felt what he felt, though it was all confusing. He knew it presumed too much to even consider her. He felt like a trespasser. He’d no rightful claim to feel this way about her and had more pressing concerns, like how to reach the hospital before dark. Pragmatically, he tried to put her out of his mind, but as he did, as he looked around, he noticed something far grimmer. He turned around and looked more closely. Behind him and ahead. There was a fearful lack of children in the city.
24
DUELL GOULD
In addition to the general havoc, the fact that they had walked two miles and not seen any children at all was so distressing as to cause a growing alarm in all three of them. This was slightly moderated when the boys encountered Duell Gould. Will put his hands on Duell’s shoulders to make sure he was real. Duell was in the grade below Will at Rosenberg, and known as a fine baseball player. He had a chubby face and round eyes, but today both were set hard in an uncharacteristic way. His spiky hair laid down soberly against his round head. He was wearing nothing but a baseball cap and a long wheat-colored linen sack with the words, Dry Feed printed on it in black. Like the others, Duell began his narrative without prompting. His presence here, alone and on his own, was foreboding, given that Will knew he came from a large family.
“Mama was swept out to sea. Just whisked away,” he said, making a shooting motion with his hand as he would to describe a baseball flying over the fence. “I saw her go, clinging to a window frame. Night of doom. My pa’s out of town. Still is.”
Albert asked Duell if he had seen Maggie.
“No, but I’ve only been ten blocks from where my house was. It tumbled away like an empty barrel, come the third watch. Just whisked away,” he said again, making the same motion with his hand, but with his whole arm this time. “I got separated from my brothers and sisters. I just moved from one sinking thing to the other all night. Our house is gone. Sunken down into the hoary depths. There’s just a hole in the ground over there now.” Duell’s jaw set combatively. “Where’re y’all going?” he asked.
“Onward,” said Albert. The way Albert said it persuaded Duell to join them, talking as he walked.
“I’m going that way too. Searching for my family. I heard my brother’s about. Not sure of Mama. Not sure about Effie and Gertie. They’re my sisters. Not sure at all.” Duell sensed how the boys were looking down, reading how it said ‘Dry Feed’ on the sack he was wearing. “I was stark naked most of the night. Naked as a jaybird. I’m just now thawing out. I moseyed all over searchin’ for some duds. Mine were toted off by the flood. Where’d you get those britches, Frank? They’re original.”
“Teague gave them to him,” Albert said. “There’s no orphanage anymore.”
“Doesn’t surprise me,” Duell said. “I sat still all by myself under a cock-eyed roof praying, watching all manner of trouble float by.”
Will thought of all the voices they had heard last night when the storm diminished. He thought of the woman with the raven hair in the window and her baby. He thought of the hollerin’ of the dead.
“Doesn’t surprise me about your orphan asylum,” Duell continued.
“I suppose they’ll have to build another orphanage presently,” Frank said.
“Maybe,” Duell said with skepticism. Will looked into Duell’s eyes, studying them with purpose.
“It’d be a good idea, I expect, to start a band of children,” Frank said. “It might save them the trouble of collecting all of us altogether later.”
“Have you seen anyone else from school?” Will asked Duell.
“No,” he said, launching into a chilling explanation. The more troubling his words became, the less emotion Duell could muster. By the time he reached the part about his brother and his sisters, there was not a trace of passion in him. “Around seven o’clock, the water rose up four feet in a single bound. It was all a mad scramble. My sisters, Eff and Gert, they stretched out for Mama. Me and my brother, Jack, we just tried to grab ‘em and climb up. We were all in a frenzy. Like rats in a trap.”
Duell’s face went white, but he began to speak as if this had all happened to someone else, or in fact, a rat. He walked steadily as he spoke, and they followed him, stepping over dead chickens and cats. He concluded his horrific story without a quiver. “If you hadn’t a second floor or weren’t nearby someone who could lift you, or if you couldn’t climb up yourself like me and like Jack, you went down into the water.” He stopped and turned to them. “It was a simple matter of lack of stature.”
Duell, with this declarative, ran a few feet ahead of them, then stopped and started walking again. “Night of doom,” he said, as they watched him go.
25
THE RIDGE
They stood before the debris ridge in a row and tried to catch their breath. It was hard to say what was more arresting, the height of the mountain or the flattened city. It looked like the result of an explosion of impossible magnitude, as if an ancient bonfire had been stacked high, but had collapsed before its sacrifices could be made. Inside, there must be hundreds of homes, shops and stores, barns and sheds, churches and telegraph poles, railroad tracks and vehicles of every kind, all smashed to kindling, reduced to an unspeakable mash of splintered, tangled refuse. The city had turned in on itself, swallowed all the wood and a large fraction of the brick and mortar in its path, ground it, compressed it, and then condensed it. Most everything along the beachline was likely to be found inside this three-mile-long snaking mass, which, once assembled, had then sought to annihilate the rest of the city. There were surely scores of sodden human corpses inside lying among dead animals, crushed furniture, broken fences, machinery, and other awful artifacts of the storm. Rafters and joists jutted out from it like the quills of a giant porcupine. Higher up, there were gaping spaces into which all but the hardiest and most composed were afraid to look. In dreadful glimpses inside the yawning gaps and throughout the debris, limbs were postured hideously, like those fallen in the worst of war. It was astonishing.
The survivors here were not as stoic as those they had seen wandering before. A woman, her hair gathered loosely behind her head, had just been taken to the location of the body of her missing child—dead, maimed and imprisoned in a smaller wedge of debris. The poor woman tore at her clothes, free of reason, her utterances like a wild animal that had sustained a gunshot but could not die. Her lamentations provided no lessening of her grief. It was as frightening as anything the boys had seen. Mercifully, she fainted, and they watched as the woman was borne away.
“I want to leave here,” Frank announced. “And go to the mainland.”
“We’re going to the hospital, Frank. The bridge is down anyway,” Will responded. “Are you going to swim?”
“I can find a boat and sail across,”
he said, but even as he did, he began to quail at the notion of spending a minute more in a boat in the water. His head dropped, realizing there was another layer to his own despair. They were trapped on an island.
“Take a drink,” Will said gently, pointing at the canteen Frank had been carrying. “We’ve got to keep going.”
Albert began to cry.
26
JESSE TOOTHAKER
The boys had walked along the ridge for a quarter mile, when Will felt Frank pulling at the elbow of his shirt, then pointed ahead. Jesse Toothaker, the Rosenberg School’s most feared bully, was striding directly toward them over beams and debris with purpose. Will had always managed to stay clear of Jesse, but he could sense Frank’s apprehension. Jesse was moving straight toward them.
“Don’t worry,” Will said. “I’ll handle it.”
He couldn’t imagine Jesse’s belligerence could’ve survived the storm, but this didn’t look good.
“Frank, Will,” Jesse called out, now waving at them with animation. “You made it.”
“Who’s that?” Albert asked. “He’s wiry.”
Jesse embraced them hardily and, upon hearing their plans, congenially pointed out a crossable breach in the ridge about a mile down to the east, near the Ursuline Convent. It was, he said with solicitude, pitched at a friendlier incline for climbing and, he assured them, for then descending.
“I’ve been over. It can be broached with little peril as long as you don’t think too much about what you’re stepping over,” he said.
“Is your house in there, Jesse?” Frank asked, still a little tentative with the boy even in his new iteration.
“My house? No. My house didn’t go anywhere. It’s all wet, but it’s on the other side.”
Jesse had become a creature with a different personality. He’d discovered a quiet subtlety inside himself. He was far different than the boy who used to run Frank down between classes. He’d projected through time and now looked more like one of the workers downtown or on the docks. He introduced himself to Albert and asked about and listened with genuine concern about the orphanage, expressing his deepest sympathies before telling them of his own experience.
The Mourning Wave Page 6