“She’s smart, I think,” Albert said of the donkey.
It was a great relief for Will and for Albert when they finally set their weary eyes upon the St. Mary’s Hospital. It stood mostly intact, though the old infirmary building next to it was largely demolished. Will glanced up at Albert, knowing they were both thinking the same thing. Their minds had become so fixed on whether the building had survived, they’d failed to consider what might have happened to the sisters inside.
47
ST. MARY’S HOSPITAL
Just a block away from the hospital, at 8th Street and Market, Will put his hand up over his eyes, shielding them against the now heavy rain as he looked for movement through the openings in the building’s facade. Around him, the street thickened with still more survivors seeking care. The donkey continued to prove extraordinarily adept at handling the chaos, but it was slow-going. Albert slumped, exhausted, on her back. Holding onto the donkey’s mane, Will began to detect distinct lines of waiting people, not well-formed, but there. Through the open windows above, he saw sisters moving swiftly, their black habits trailing behind them. There was a vague sense of order unfolding before him, as the injured were sorted and treated. His eyes began to glisten. They’d been fording this river for two days and had now joined the sick and the infirm, seeking, like so many others, relief at the hands of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word. There were blankets. There was food. There was company and a solution for Albert, if not also for himself.
“Look, Albert,” Will said, pointing above to the busted-out windows.
Albert raised his head against the donkey’s neck and tried to shout out, calling upwards as Will was doing. When no one responded, Will rolled Albert down from the donkey’s back, keeping the younger boy on his feet, drawing them through the stiffening mob.
“Around back,” Will said, Albert leaning on him.
The donkey followed dutifully. As they turned the corner of the building, nestling through the narrow gaps in the crowd, using the same strategies employed recently by the donkey, Will spotted the rotund profile of Sister Mary Xavier, sitting on a small stool and tending a huge, ancient, cast iron pot that bubbled over a large fire. She ladled out bowls of soup to a half-dozen young girls who, in turn, disappeared into the crowd. One offered a bowl to Albert.
“Are we here?” Albert mumbled. The girl smiled at him, touching the bandage on his head with sympathy.
“Yes,” she said softly. “This is where you are.”
“We made it, Albert,” Will said.
“Where’s Frank?” Albert asked slurring the question.
“He’s with Aunt Lida and his cousins.” Albert nodded, maybe remembering, maybe not. “The sisters will help us,” Will said.
“Good, we need help.” Albert said, taking the bowl. “Thank you for this soup,” he told the girl slowly.
“Is that your donkey?” she asked.
“She was, at least for a little while,” Albert replied with his eyes closed. “Much obliged, donkey,” he added.
Will staggered forward with Albert to the front of the line, where one of the girls placed a bowl into his hands, as well. He stepped over to Sister X—as they called her.
“What kind of soup is this?” Will asked her.
She recognized him instantly, returning his genuine expression before breaking into a broad smile. Her eyes widened and dampened at the same time. “I call it Don’t Ask Stew,” she said.
The three-legged stool she was sitting on overturned as she leapt up and enveloped both of the boys in her arms, pushing them tightly together, still holding her ladle. They both dropped their bowls as she held them to her ample body, to the point that respiration became an issue. She handed the soup ladle to the girl who had spoken to Albert and told her she was taking the boys to the mother superior.
Yesterday, it was Mother Gabriel who had, along with Mother Superior Mechtilde, dispatched a sixteen-year-old hospital intern named Zachary Scott to the orphanage site at dawn. Zachary, a bow-legged youth with good sense and a great capacity to go without sleep for long hours at the hospital, had tried to make it to the mainland as the storm blew up, but had returned to the infirmary when the trains shut down. He had proved to be indispensable to the sisters all night. As light approached, Mother Mechtilde had wanted to go out to the site herself, but she couldn’t be spared at the hospital given the influx of patients. She and Mother Gabriel feared all that was that left of the orphanage was for the world to hear of its end, but they sent Zachary anyway.
Mother Gabriel had sent the Order’s strongest horse, Stonewall, with Sister Elizabeth on Saturday. Sunday morning she borrowed the big white horse owned by Levy Funeral Parlor & Undertakers, whose duty it was to pull the hearse. Although Zachary was skilled in the saddle, he said he’d rather take his own horse. Levy’s horse was a mass of muscle from pulling the funeral hearse, a cavalry unto himself.
“No,” Mother Mechtilde said. “Levy’s steed is as fast as God’s swift sword.”
“I know,” Zachary said. “I fear he may get there before I do.”
“Ride as fast as the horse will go. You will not fall. He will not falter.”
Mother Gabriel whispered into the horse’s ear, “Haste thy mission,” and briskly swatted it on the backside. The horse ran and Zachary held on, but when he arrived at the site, the beach was bare, except for a few small artifacts of catastrophe scattered half-buried in the eroded dunes.
“Maybe you didn’t go out far enough,” Sister Xavier responded when Zachary returned.
“I saw what was left of the salt cedar trees that stood next to the orphanage. The rest of the beach was swept as if by a broom. There were only a few pieces. Just a few pieces,” he said, presenting to Mother Gabriel the small, twisted, silver cross he had noticed catching the light in the dunes. It was the one she had given to Sister Elizabeth Ryan to offer to Sister Camillus for their safety on the morning of the storm.
48
“YOU, SIR, ARE A GHOUL.”
The previous afternoon, on Sunday, September 9 at 2 pm, Galveston Mayor Walter Jones, having been authorized to establish and then to chair what was christened, the Central Relief Committee of Galveston Storm Sufferers, called the committee’s first meeting to order. His first reaction as he took his seat at the head of the table of the ornate and remarkably undamaged Chamber of Commerce room at the Tremont Hotel was a deep gratitude that most of those indispensable to his purposes had not drowned. The committee was organized, staffed and assignments were issued. Each member, in the last twenty-four hours, had begun to gather the needed information relative to his particular task. Each man was told to report back today, Monday, to address the two most pressing issues: water and the dead. The mayor, taking up a ball-pein hammer in lieu of a proper gavel, now prepared to call the Central Relief Committee’s second official meeting to order.
To his right, William McVitie, a shipping agent, consulted with Bertrand Adoue, a round, but distinguished businessman with a goat-like beard, each making calculations on a sheet of the hotel’s gilded stationary. Adoue was in charge of reconstruction. To his right was one of their main business competitors, Daniel Ripley, who had been tasked to chair both the transportation and hospital committees. Ripley, quick-witted and barrel-chested, had yesterday volunteered state senator, the Honorable R.V. Davidson, to serve as the committee’s secretary. Davidson sat in front of his notes from yesterday’s meeting. Next, the mutton-chopped Jens Moller was tagged to lead the labor committee, accepting on the condition that Bill McConn, editor of the Labor Journal and indispensable to ensure labor support, was sent for to be added to the Central Committee, which he was, forthwith.
The mayor had also secured the attendance of John Sealy, an unmarried thirty-year-old entrepreneur and banker who looked younger than his years, due chiefly to his parting his dark hair down the middle. He would soon grow to look more like the ca
ptain of industry he would become. But for now, as head of finance, he would utilize not his own experience, but the sound management lessons he had learned from his father, to work on behalf of the city’s survivors. The Sealy family, the city’s most generous philanthropist organization, carried themselves like the beneficent titans they were, and John, at this moment, was finding his titan stride.
Morris Lasker, a publisher and businessman, had been placed in charge of correspondence. His chief concern would be to convey the city’s needs to the mainland. His biggest challenge would be that those receiving his correspondence could not know that exaggerating the damage to the island was impossible. He had sent messages today to both Austin and Washington by steamer to the mainland, then across the country, setting out in clear prose that the city lay in ruins, with untold loss of life, though not even Lasker yet knew what this really meant. Ben Levy took the chair next to Lasker. Levy, an alderman and the undertaker whose funeral home and mortuary was neighbor to St. Mary’s Hospital, would oversee burials.
Mayor Jones gaveled the meeting to order, and after the minutes were approved from the day before took up the issue of the remains.
City Recorder Noah Allen moved immediately that inquests be held prior to the interment of the any and all remains which were located. The strings of Allen’s loose white bow tie fell lazily down the front of his shirt. He also wore an ill temper which found cause for objection to most every proposal but those initiated on his own motion. A lively discussion ensued on his motion with many opinions expressed. The motion seemed reasonable and probably destined for adoption before a thin bespectacled man seated in the corner spoke up. His voice, though spare and generally undistinguished, garnered the attention of a contrarian speaking with direct evidence on a matter at the center of his field of expertise.
“It’s evident there’s a lack of understanding of what’s occurred,” the man said. “The motion is implausible. Its execution impossible.”
“There will be insurance claims. The paperwork must be done,” Allen responded, irritated. “Excuse me,” he said. “Who are you?”
“Soper. He’s a doctor,” Isaac Kempner said.
“Where’s Goddard?” Allen asked. “He’s the coroner.”
“Goddard’s dead,” Kempner said a little too abruptly. “Soper’s here. I brought him. Know him from church. Father Kirwin told me to speak with him. I did. Here he is.”
Kempner, like Sealy, was another young banker, only twenty-seven. He wore his iron-gray suit so faithfully that it had adapted itself to the rigid angularity of his frame. He sat leaning forward in his chair as he always did, his long neck and round, intense eyes routinely putting him in the middle of things. Both in the attitude of his body and in the nature of his expression, Kempner projected a calm intelligence congruent with his developing record of good judgment. If any one of them was indispensable to the island’s future, it was Kempner.
“Doctor, tell them what you told me this morning,” he said.
Soper stood and, in so doing, took on an appearance in harmony with every modern conception of an unfeeling machine. “The temporary morgues along the wharf and along the north side of the Strand at 22nd and 23rd have both filled so rapidly, that comprehensive identification before disposal is out of the question. More bodies lay beneath the rubble and debris. The other makeshift morgues are also reaching capacity. Each location began a list of the dead which extended many pages before they were forced to give up.”
“They gave up?” Allen asked. “Who told them to stop?”
“No one told them. They just stopped.”
“Under what authority?” Allen demanded.
“There is no authority in such places,” Soper said evenly.
“The authority is around this table,” Allen insisted. “Tell them to begin again immediately. We’ll soon have the families of the five or six hundred who’ve perished at our doorsteps. It must be done. This is a civilized place.”
“Your figures are inaccurate,” the doctor said distinctly.
“This is a civilized place, Doctor,” Allen repeated. “We will record the deaths properly, as we’ve always done after an overflow.”
Soper removed his spectacles and wiped them with a handkerchief. The gesture had the effect of fixing everyone’s eyes upon him, though he didn’t do this for effect, but rather because he always cleaned his spectacles at the bottom of the hour.
“I’ve been there all day and all night. I can assure you, sir, it’s not a civilized place. There will be at least ten times your figures.”
The faces around the table drained white and what followed was an annihilating silence that lasted several heavy beats until Allen spoke again.
“You sir,” he said, “are a ghoul.”
“Hear him out, Walter,” Kempner said to the mayor over the uproar which ensued, motioning to Soper to go on.
The mayor nodded and the doctor continued, first describing the scenes at the wharf and in the warehouses, then explaining in inelegant detail the dark bumps on the beach. He detailed the overnight work of the dead gangs, amidst lime, under kerosene lamps, with their camphor-soaked handkerchiefs tied around their faces. When he reached the part about the height of the stacked bodies, two of the men on the newly formed committee resigned, exited the room, then the hotel, and returned to their families.
“Six to eight thousand have perished, maybe more if you move up and down the coast and inland.” No one believed him, not even Kempner, though he’d never known the doctor to be wrong in any matter of importance.
“At least one of every six souls within your city has perished. You must burn all the remains.”
It took several minutes for the mayor to gavel those around the table back to order.
“If you are right, Doctor, swift and proper burials will be impossible even without identification,” said Henry Cohen, a rabbi whom Levy brought to assist him.
“Correct. Ordinary methods of interment are impossible,” Soper said. “Any delay will be fatal to many more. That is to say, you may do whatever it is that you may choose to do with the bodies, but eventually you will conclude that you must burn them.”
This re-instituted the disorder that seemed to follow each of Dr. Soper’s pronouncements. Allen castigated Kempner. Levy and Cohen began to do high-level arithmetic. Soper remained unmoved and Mayor Jones inflicted the damage to the hotel’s mahogany table that remains to this day.
“I’m concerned,” McVitie said, when order was restored, “I’m concerned that such a measure if pursued, even if expedient, will destroy the tenuous morale that remains.”
Lasker considered the tone of his correspondence to the outside world and agreed. “We will be portrayed as devils if we do this. It will agitate the rest of the country as well, and rebuilding will rely upon their generous donations.”
“Nevertheless,” Dr. Soper argued forcefully.
“Ike,” the mayor said, appealing to Kempner.
“The living remaining in your city will join the dead if you delay,” Soper said directly to the mayor. “It’s a matter of disease and geometric progression.”
“Even a mass burial would be better,” Adoue said.
“The earth is too saturated for a mass burial and it will take too long to assemble preparations, even if this weren’t the case,” Soper said. “The bodies will disintegrate into pieces in the heat if they are not destroyed forthwith.”
The committee, as a group, winced. When Ripley suggested burial at sea, they all turned to Soper.
“The ocean will return most of them to the shore with all dispatch,” he said, irritating even Kempner, his lone advocate.
“What if we take them far out to sea?” suggested the mayor.
Soper had calculated the mechanics of the tides already. “They will return as if a hearse had deposited them upon your beaches.”
“Perhaps if we weigh them down,” Moller said.
“They’ll be back the following day regardless.”
“Not if we weigh them down with rocks,” Ripley said.
“Or chains,” Moller offered.
“With rocks and chains,” McConn added, as the comparative utility of both means of ballast were discussed at different points around the circumference of the table.
“How far could we take them?” Lasker asked.
“Ten miles,” the mayor said. “But we’ll go that far and half again to satisfy the doctor.” Talk followed concerning the optimum distance and the prevailing currents and tides, but almost everyone around the table uttered some form of approval to this notion.
“Dr. Soper?” the mayor asked, and everyone’s eyes returned again to the bespectacled man in the corner. Secretary Davidson’s pen hung over his parchment, trembling a little.
“It pains me a great deal to say that burning them is preferable.”
The problem was that it did not appear to pain him at all to say this and another tumult ensued. Jones restored order again and Adoue made a motion and it was duly seconded. As many bodies as possible would be collected by dusk Monday night, weighted with either rocks or chains or, where available and expedient, both. They would be carried out to sea no fewer than fifteen miles, and no more than twenty miles by barge to be unloaded in the Gulf. The chair called for a vote.
Dr. Soper was not a member of the committee, did not vote, and exhibited no outward sign of agreement or disagreement with the decision. Kempner nevertheless leaned over to him, looked into his eyes and recorded the lone vote against the motion.
“Isaac, how is your shoulder?” Soper asked Kempner after the meeting was adjourned.
“My shoulder? How’d you know? I think it may be dislocated.”
“It is. Come see me tomorrow.”
49
SLEEP
The Mourning Wave Page 12