As he approached the breach himself, Will recalled what he’d once read in a diary of an old Texas war veteran at the Galveston Mercantile Library downtown. When the soldier wrote of a single popular man dying in a small skirmish on the picket line, he described it in the most heart-wrenching of terms, with remarks of personal sorrow denoting considerable soul searching. However, when the soldier’s whole battalion was mowed down at Sharpsburg, the words of memory the soldier penned were blunted. He described the events and their aftermath in a strictly numerical fashion. Whatever temperament created this phenomenon, a merciful numbness perhaps, Will concluded it made pressing on possible. Those trying to clear the ridge, those cooking, those gathering supplies, and those caring for the wounded here, were simply choosing industry over becoming maniacs, and it was in this movement and the gradual perception of its utility toward sanity that they remained so. It was good and merciful that pain did not congregate as people did, Will thought. Perhaps by God’s design, pain could not be summed, but must be borne individually. Comfort though, he saw here, worked on a different calculus. Comfort could be gathered, its power multiplied, as it was being multiplied here.
As the boys entered the queue then climbed higher together, they nodded, thanking those who were working, receiving in response mere nods back. But these were the only transactions. No one spoke on the way up and no one slowed on the way down for fear their eyes might be pulled down into the maw and settle on a dead body inside the craggy pile.
Will, thinking of the soldier’s diary again, resolved to fight this numbing impulse and to look down as he crossed over. He aimed at logging the details, but found in the end, he simply couldn’t. Perhaps this interior dialogue was a common instinct among all those present, for everyone’s behavior turned out the same. Surrendering, looking upwards as they all did, Will squinted into the brilliance of the cloudless sky. He set his eyes on a distant spot, finding if he kept his line of sight arching high, he could keep all the death away for just a moment as he crossed.
At the top, he took Albert’s hand and pointed downtown, toward where at least some of the buildings still stood. The scene jogged his memory as they then each began to climb down, maintaining their gaze ahead, until they returned to solid ground, at which time it fully came to him.
Dante, Will remembered. The writer was Dante.
30
VELOCITY AND SLATE ROOFS
Once over the ridge, Will’s heart sank. The wind and water had been just as formidable and lethal here as it was closer to the beach. Only brick chimneys survived on many of the homes. Only parts of walls remained on most of the large commercial buildings. Most of the island’s splendid churches were decimated. The wind velocity through the slate roofs had produced something very much like a spray of cannon shot against the interior of the city. There were endless neighborhoods full of partially demolished, crooked, and misshapen homes. In between every such structure that had barely survived, there was more kindling.
Albert, exhausted from the climb, the descent, the day and the night before, had to stop again upon reaching the ground. Will, agitated again, told Frank to stay with him while he surveyed ahead for a clear path forward.
“Don’t move this time,” Will instructed firmly.
Just a few blocks down, a stout man approached. He was one part frantic and one part controlled. These two equal parts inside the man were held suspended in fierce battle over the terrain of body and of mind. Will recognized him as a contractor who had worked at the Rosenberg School last spring at the head of a burly crew.
The contractor was moving with unusual animation from pile to pile, damaged house to damaged house, in an increasingly manic way, providing a brisk running commentary concerning each structure’s failure, issuing verbal opinions furiously in the absence of his engineering stamp, presumably lost in the storm. He was waving his arms, pointing, as if his crew was nearby.
“Studding frames here,” he stated, measuring things with his eyes. “Four by four, then sills, six by six. Plates, four by four, three and one-half feet high, lifting the floor four and a half feet above grade.” He began to give instructions to his invisible crew.
“Double open fireplace chimney in the middle of the structure. A good backbone when built of good material and well executed.” He moved from casualty to casualty deliberately, scribbling in a battered notebook he evidently kept for this purpose. Seeing Will, the man began to address him directly as if Will might have a commission to award.
“This house had several feet of water in it. Good wood, though. Oak. Double framed at each corner, shouldered into the sills at the top for support, you see.” Blueprints were spinning in his head. “Pillars spiked into the cornice work. Ungirded though, it won’t scour. Had the pillars been undergirded, perhaps the braces would’ve held,” he said.
He then moved to the next block, continuing to eulogize the homes with a mixture of regret and reproach. Inspecting a series of three houses flattened against one another, more mathematical calculations ran through his head. The contractor then looked back and saw two men coming toward him. They had long white aprons over their clothes like the ones Will had seen the orderlies wear at the St. Mary’s Infirmary downtown. Seeing the men approaching compelled the contractor to address all three houses as a unit.
“The strength of the breakers. The rapid rise of the overflow. It all pushed ashore under the force of strong winds from the southwest. It floated these homes off their foundations. Now triplets they are. Triplets in common ruin.”
Will watched as the men closed in on the contractor. “Drowned in your own homes,” he said in a sad benediction, effusive pity now breaking through in his voice. Then the contractor surrendered to the men peacefully. He extended his upward turned hands out toward them. They took him by the arms firmly, but also with compassion, even a degree of respect, moving him along the muddy streets and away. Will expected the nervous hospitals were doing a good business right now.
31
LIKE CORD WOOD
When Will returned to Frank and Albert, the sun was beginning to descend. He had seen the top of the roof of the Sealy Hospital. He generally deduced that at least in its essential particulars, it had withstood the storm. This boded well.
St. Mary’s was close to Sealy and made of sturdy stuff, he told them, but just as these words had left his lips, a parade of wagons made the corner, ambling slowly toward them, rocking back and forth. Will tried to get Frank and Albert away from the street, but it was too late. Canvas tarps covered many of the wagon beds, but they were inadequate even where present. Men walked along the sides of each of the lumbering drays with large planks which were laid down in front or behind them as they slogged through the mud. Two other men moved obstacles out of the way in front of the clomping horses. The driver stood straight up at the front clicking at the horses and shaking the reins. All around them, there were scents of death.
Arms and legs, hands and feet protruded from the tarps. The wagons without any coverings at all required the boys to look away. Though Will didn’t count, without his permission, his mind estimated twenty to twenty-five corpses on each wagon, stacked like cord wood. Some of the bodies were turned to the sky, their faces unprotected. Others were facedown, their arms hanging over the side of the wagons loosely as they bumped along, swaying one way then the other. At first, all those along the pathway of the wagons instinctively froze. Those wearing hats removed them out of respect, standing motionless in lines parallel to the street. Then, one by one, realizing such gestures couldn’t be meaningfully repeated and retain their effect, they stopped and went about their prior business. Albert was the last to gain this perspective.
“Let’s go back,” he said when the last of the wagons had passed, sitting down with his legs pulled up close to his chest, shivering, though the setting sun burned down upon all of them. The humidity of September had set back in as the storm’s tail continued northw
ards.
“We can’t go back, Albert. Where would we even go?” Will said. “I need to get you to the hospital. That’s where we’re going.”
Frank inspected Albert’s head. He had changed the bandage again while Will had been gone. Although the gauze had remained so far bloodless, after the grisly spectacle of the wagons, Frank believed Albert simply hadn’t the capacity to see anything else today. He was done.
“We must stop, Will,” Frank asserted.
“We can’t. We don’t want to be outside when it gets dark,” Will countered.
“Where’s that fort we were before?” Albert asked. “I liked that captain and those green apples they gave us.”
“Albert, we can’t go back to the blamed fort.” Will said.
“Will, he’s gone as far as he can,” Frank insisted. “Albert’s played out.”
Will’s feet sank more deeply in the mud. Being defied by both of them after he had kept them together all of last night and all of today ruptured something inside him. What was most disgraceful about what Will said next was that he hesitated and could have changed his mind, but he did not. “What about Maggie, Albert? She could be at the hospital.”
“Will,” Frank whispered intensely.
“What about Maggie? Think of Maggie.”
Albert suddenly looked heavier, almost inert, weighted with the length of the day.
“Don’t make me, Will,” Albert said barely audible. “Please don’t make me.” Huge salty tears rolled down his face and the bandage reddened in a spot on his forehead. Frank shook his head. His eyes were wet now too. Frank sat down next to him and pulled Albert close against his shoulder.
“He’s bleeding again.”
Will stood over Frank and Albert and looked down on them. They both bowed their heads. He wanted this, their submission, but now that it was his, he recognized it failed to deliver. Instead, he felt the force of his betrayal so deeply that he dropped in a heap next to them and put his head into his hands and closed his eyes. Though he could not see, he felt Frank shake his head ruefully. Will’s confused anger shifted further onto himself and he was unable to give his apology a voice.
Cursing, of course, was forbidden at the orphanage, and it wasn’t a corruption which heretofore tempted Will much, but when the last of the wagons disappeared, Will felt the overwhelming desire to rain down brimstone at them and at the sky. He was breathing hard and started to stand up, but before he could, his temper was quelled by Albert’s still, small voice.
“Just sit with me a while, Will.”
Albert waited until Will had caught his breath, then in a gesture as memorable as it was unmerited, he put his hand onto Will’s shoulder in the same manner he had done with all the others who had sought mercy this day at his hands.
32
THE BULNAVIC SOLUTION
After a long period of silence, Albert insisted he could go on.
“Let us arise and be going,” he said formally.
“What?” Frank said.
“We should go,” he said, pointing out into the gloaming, more casually. “It’s fixin’ to get dark.”
“No,” Will said. “We’ve got to think of something else for tonight. Frank’s right.”
Frank, with this vote of confidence, stood up and walked in a circuit around them. “I think I have an idea.” Their eyes followed Frank, as he made another circle. “How about my cousins?” Frank offered. “How about that, Albert?”
“Cousins?” Albert said, raising his head higher. “You have cousins?”
“A whole mess of cousins,” he said. “Nearby, too.”
“In the city?” Albert said, getting up. “Like family cousins?”
Will realized he should have thought of this as Albert voiced the obvious question.
“Why’d you live in the orphanage, Frank, and not with your cousins?”
“Here we go,” said Will under his breath.
“Because they’re the Bulnavics.”
Will had forgotten about the Bulnavics partly because he had sworn to Frank never to mention them. “My father wouldn’t want me living with the Bulnavics,” Frank explained. “They’re Bohemian. My mama’s kin.” Frank looked down the street in the direction of the wagons. He stamped his feet into a couple of puddles, then watched the late afternoon sun’s reflection regather in the water under him. “I suppose one night would be alright.”
“Seems reasonable,” Will agreed cautiously.
“Will they take us in?” Albert asked.
“I don’t see why not,” Frank responded.
“If they’d take you in now, why not before? In life, I mean?” Albert seemed refueled by curiosity.
“I imagine they would’ve if I’d pressed them on it, but being Bulnavic and all.” Frank said, trailing off.
“What’s so bad about being a Bulnavic?”
“Albert,” Will said, making a motion designed to cut off the inquiry.
“Nothing’s so bad about being a Bulnavic. It’s just I’m not one.”
“Still,” Albert argued forcefully.
As the sun fell, Frank began a lengthy narrative explaining to Albert that he was not a Bulnavic and would never be one. It had been some time, but Will had heard all this before.
“If this is the plan, could we get on with it,” Will said. “Albert’s right. It’s getting dark.”
“Sure,” Frank said. “Come on.”
As they advanced block by block, Albert interrupted the meandering course of Frank’s prejudicial explanation of his family tree with a series of pertinent questions and keen observations. Soon they stood in the falling light in front of a blue Victorian home which was, according to Frank, not where it ought to have been, but then again, wasn’t where it could have been. That is to say, the Bulnavic’s home had pivoted off its foundation and scooted largely undamaged, though slanted almost whimsically, into their neighbor’s yard.
Frank set his feet square to the front porch and put his hands to his mouth to make a miniature megaphone and called out into the evening air. “Ahoj!”
“What’d you say?” Albert asked, as the woman they would come to know as Aunt Lida stepped through the tilted threshold of the broken door and onto the crooked silt-covered porch.
The woman looked at the boys dully for a moment. Then, just as her face began to take on a look of recognition, Frank launched himself toward her.
“Jak se máš, Frank?” she cried, taking him up in her arms in a difficult bliss. “Frank Madera.”
Albert now scaled the porch and embraced Frank’s aunt, as well. She hugged the two boys at once, though certainly she had not seen Frank for years and Albert not at all. Will felt his heart swell, heave, and burst all at once as she motioned for him to join them on the porch. “Oh, in pity’s name,” she kept saying, before finally ushering them in.
Inside, mud oozed along the curiously slanted floor. The furniture, covered in silt, had all slid to one side of the room, which itself was set at an unsuitable angle. “Upstairs, upstairs,” she repeated.
The Bulnavic boys, Lukas and Janek, as well as Uncle Oldrich, descended halfway down the uneven stairs where they met Frank, Albert, and Will. They welcomed Frank like he was one of their own which indeed he now was. Upstairs, there were more breathless greetings with the Bulnavic girls, Darja, Hana, Iveta, and Janicka. They all kissed Albert several times on his broken head. There were also several cats whose needlessly complicated names are not recorded in any history. The Bulnavics had spent last night upstairs in the girls’ large bedroom. The family, working together, had also managed to move a piano up the stairs and into the room during the storm. The girls’ four ornate beds had been pushed each into the four corners and several crates which had been used as beds last night for the rest of them were stationed here and there. The piano remained in the center of the room. The girls conti
nued to fight over Albert, petting him as if he were one of their kittens, as Frank, in response to Uncle Oldrich’s questions, began to tell them all that the three boys had seen last night. As they listened, each of the Bulnavics alighted on a particular crate. It seemed they had each claimed one to their liking last night and felt compelled to remain loyal to it even in the storm’s aftermath. As Frank told his story, Aunt Lida, as she required being called by each of them, announced she could not abide the dreadfulness of it all any longer.
“Goodness,” she said. “This is dreadful. More dreadful than I can abide.”
Descending halfway down the stairs, she stopped to listen to the rest of Frank’s sad narrative, crying silently, almost uncontrollably.
“In pity’s name,” she whispered.
33
THE PRAYERS OF LIDA BULNAVIC
As a benediction to Frank’s sad story, at Uncle Oldrich’s urging, Iveta played a sorrowful song on the piano. Janicka sang along quite capably. Afterwards, Will, Albert and Frank were called downstairs by Aunt Lida, where, by the light of a small kerosene lantern, they consumed an extraordinary number of cucumbers soaked in vinegar. Decamping from the kitchen, led upstairs by Lukas and Janek, they returned to the bedroom where Hana and Darja had prepared crates for them. The windows were open and a light breeze brought a mild relief from the sapping humidity. The boys each found themselves so sore and exhausted that they could barely express their gratitude before falling fast asleep.
Around midnight, Will shifted on his crate. Its creaking awakened him, but it took him a full minute to realize where he was. Adjacent to him, Albert’s breath moved his chest up and down. Albert had been in no shape to travel even beyond the fort today. When Will had finally managed to formally apologize to him over the cucumbers, Albert had looked at him so earnestly and squeezed his hand so tightly, conveying forgiveness so completely, that, while this particular stain was removed from Will’s conscience, its lessons were left powerfully intact within the intimacies of his soul. The transaction made him feel lighter, more elevated, and heavier, more responsible, at the same time—as true mercy does. Albert, he realized, was a diminutive miracle, whispering partial thoughts of God out into the world. Will looked over at him with a painful gratitude, still worried about Albert’s wounded head, when he heard a whisper across the room.
The Mourning Wave Page 8