Monday evening, Albert’s head was finally treated. He was, in fact, concussed, and they were gravely concerned about his eye, as well. Will’s injuries were looked after, too. His wounds were more serious than he’d imagined. Some of his lacerations, when they were cleaned out, were deeper than he’d expected, and for all his concern about Albert, he’d sustained a concussion, as well, though apparently not as severe. Further, the doctors thought he might have cracked a rib, which explained his shortness of breath. After his own examination and visiting Albert, who was convalescing with a large wrap over his eye, Will was told to go to the mother superior’s office. Waiting for her, he looked out of her broken windows. The sounds of cicadas and crickets, absent the night before, could now be heard. On the street below, a woman wearing a white gown trod through the mud around a dim lantern, waving her hands in the air.
“The veil is rent,” she claimed every so often.
When she arrived, Mother Gabriel embraced Will, thanking God for his safety, and for Frank’s and Albert’s, as well, all with the same depth of grace and gratitude she might have exhibited had all the children been saved. She told Will that Albert would remain on the treatment wing, and would likely be transferred to Houston, but that Will could sleep in the prayer chapel next to the cells where the sisters resided until they made further arrangements for him.
“It will be quiet there,” she said.
They walked silently up and down corridors filled with survivors in various states of physical and pastoral need, Mother Gabriel encouraging nurses and patients alike. Each hallway they traversed overwhelmed Will further.
“Rest here,” she said when they reached the small chapel, lighting three candles at the front.
He crawled onto a wide kneeler that had been prepared as a bed for him. She pulled a rough gray blanket up to his chin and placed her palm on his forehead in a way that made him feel beloved. “God bless you,” she whispered.
Lit mystically by the flickering orange light of the candles at the altar, the mother superior started for the door of the chapel.
“Mother,” Will said. “I know I have to tell you.”
“Yes. When you’re ready.” She returned to Will, leaned down, and put into Will’s hand the small, bent silver cross she had received back from Zachary.
As soon as she had gone, Will examined the cross, placed it in his pocket and curled tightly in the blanket. Despite all he had done and all he had yet to do, he put all of it away from his mind and, because he had to, he fell asleep.
50
DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL
Will, gripped by an otherworldly chill, sensed he was vulnerable immediately upon stirring. Light felt an eternity away. He fought to remain perfectly still, but it seemed darker each time he blinked, and he was shivering keenly. The candles had burned out. He had been dreaming of the storm and seeing faces in the curls of the waves as the orphanage fell. Usually when he awoke from a nightmare, there was a sense of relief when he realized where he was. He did not have that now, but felt he was simply inside another chapter of the same forbidding dream.
Though he recalled he was in the chapel, it felt now as if he was under the shadow of a low thunder cloud or that a bird of prey was hovering silently above him. Then he heard a terrible chewing sound close by. He felt as though the bare chapel’s walls were squeezing in on him, collapsing. Will tried to regulate his breathing silently without suffocating. His rib hurt more now that he knew about it. It hadn’t bothered him much before its diagnosis. Now it hurt. There was a scent in the air, as well, first like electricity, then like tar that made his breathing even harder. It made him gulp.
He waited and calculated on his circumstances. Clement Beardshy said he once saw a ghost down the hall from his room. He said it’d given him the willies. Will had asked Clement what it looked like. Clement said he couldn’t see it, only feel it. Will could only feel this, whatever it was, but it made his skin crawl and he was afraid to look up to the ceiling. He had the willies something fierce.
The trauma of the last forty-eight hours and the images of the nightmare collected in his muscles, tensing them, causing an acute pain that burrowed in marrow-deep. His stomach felt sour and his throat burned. An hour crawled by. Then another. Sweat formed, then dried, then formed again on his brow. His joints ached to stretch. His eyes swam in darkness. A panic coiled around him. Will gritted his teeth in a way which had always been conducive to reasoning out solutions for himself, but nothing emerged now. Whatever had taken over the room, he judged utilizing the small silver cross in his pocket might be a plausible strategy against it, but he was unsure if it could be weaponized. Not moving at all seemed his best defense. Another hour passed. And another. Bewildered by time’s arrest, he repeated every prayer the sisters had taught him, but for the first time he could remember, he had no sense that God was listening at all.
“It’s not my fault,” he cried about his survival. “I was lucky.”
When dawn finally came, Will sat up, looked around, and left the chapel, unsure of exactly what had occurred.
51
SAM CAULK
Tuesday, September 11
The boy standing outside the hospital, holding a cardboard box, was about Albert’s age and was utterly alone. His face was as pale as death, but his eyes blazed great courage as he glanced about, lost. He tightened his mouth to stop its quiver as Will approached. Will asked if he wanted some breakfast.
“Sister Xavier is a good cook,” Will told him. The boy was showing the sort of desperate resolution Will recognized in children who are trying not to cry out of pride.
“I’m not hungry,” the boy finally said, looking flatly at the ground.
“Not at all?”
“I’m just tired. I’d be glad for a place to sleep. I slept in this here box last night.”
The boy dropped the box. On the ground, it looked like a small coffin.
“What’s your name?”
“Sam Caulk.”
“I’d give you my room,” Will said, “but it’s haunted.”
“That’s alright,” Sam said. “Anywhere will do.”
“I’m Will. Let me get you some water and clothes. I know all the sisters. I can get you a cot at least.”
Will took Sam inside the hospital and then left him for a few minutes to find some suitable clothes. When he returned, Sam was peering inside a room where a mother was nursing her baby.
“Here you go,” Will said. Sam looked wolfish. “I thought you weren’t hungry. We have Don’t Ask Stew and milk and bread. I can get you some.”
The boy’s eyes filled with tears. He looked down.
“What’s the matter, Sam?” Will asked.
“I can’t pay, Will. I don’t have any money. I can’t pay for anything.”
“Oh, for pity’s sake,” Will said. “Come on.”
In about five minutes, Sam had devoured his supper, eating it like a starved animal. When he was done, Will led him two flights up the stairwell. There were no rooms available, but there was a row of available cots set up along an exterior wall below a row of broken windows. Near the end of the corridor, Will found one for Sam and sat down on the cool floor next to him.
“I was in a tree all night, Will. Me and my big brother, Calvin. It was dark and the ocean came up. The rain hurt. We just hunkered down. I heard sad folks come by in boats and barrels and chunks of houses. They were yelling at one another, afraid they’d tump over any minute. Our tree rocked and bent and so on. In the morning, I was still there, but Calvin was gone.”
Will nodded his head in a way which told the boy that he fully understood. Sam maintained a look of complete resignation about what he’d said. He wasn’t looking for anything that would relieve his pain but found a modicum of comfort in how Will attended his sorrow.
“The water went down inch by inch until it all flooded back into the sea. I could see that, but
I was still afraid to get down. I didn’t want to start what all was next, so I stayed up in that tree until they told me I had to come down yesterday. Then I came over to this hospital and found that box I told you I slept in. Then I met you. Then I had some of that soup I just ate.”
Will supposed he was up to speed.
“Calvin’s your brother’s name?” Will asked him.
“Calvin.”
Sam adjusted himself on the cot and remembered something else. “When I was up in that tree, I was tired, but when I got down, something was the matter with my knees. Every time I stumbled over anything, they would kind of tremble, like this.” In mid-utterance, Sam re-enacted the shakiness he had described.
“Do you have any family you can go to?”
“No. My kin are all dead. All but my brother. A man told me that Calvin might be alive and looking for me, but the man was rhyming his words, so I’m not counting on that too much. My brother, though, was awful good to me that night. I do wish he could find me. He kept hollering for me to not get too scared and to hang on. ‘Tight,’ he kept saying. ‘Hang on tight.’ If he finds me, I’ll be glad. I reckoned a hospital might be where he’d go to look for me, or maybe a church. I’ll be glad.”
Sam said the last word between a yawn and a sigh and was suddenly fast asleep. His face became calm, like a baby’s. It made Will think of Christmas.
52
AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE
At noon, Sam was still asleep with Will watching over him. In fact, he was so still that Will kept feeling compelled to check the subtle heave in the boy’s chest like a mother watching her newborn. Down the corridor, doctors, nurses, and orderlies bustled, overwhelmed as they had been for three days and would be for the next three months ahead. Sam had slept despite the ongoing commotion and the palpable despair outside the broken windows above his cot. He must be a good soul to rest so placidly. Will’s body, even when inactive, found no ease, and his mind was beginning to continually turn to dark matters. He parried between vigilance and exhaustion, reacting to strange noises, sleeping lightly, waking easily. An asymmetric anxiety put him on edge. It put him off-balance, ready to fight unseen risks. This was unpleasant to feel and becoming persistent, but he found it preferable to trying to relax, which seemed to court the return of danger. Images of the night of doom, as Duell had called it, appeared before his eyes, as they had last night, with such frequency now that they seemed perpetual. The Charybdis, he thought. Remaining close to Sam Caulk and caring for him, Will realized, was perhaps not for Sam as much as for himself. Sam’s presence, if not Sam himself, offered solace against the oblique but resilient self-accusation hinted at in so many of Will’s lonely private dialogues.
Who was saving whom, Will thought.
Will lay down with his head against the cool floor and began to try to breathe in sympathy with the quiet rustling of Sam’s lungs. Will’s eyes closed. His chest began to rise and fall more loosely, as in the near silence, he began to hear subdued noises conducting through the tile beneath him. The building ticked and groaned in random patterns. A small crew of doctors and the sisters moved about, their shoes clicking far down the hall. There were murmurs and an ongoing hushed but complicated vocational dialogue filling in the background. Then, lifting himself up, Will heard a familiar cadence higher in the air. He checked Sam again, then rose to follow the vibrations.
“Wooden pillars or pilings, both or either, well braced . . .”
Will moved in the direction of the muffled voice. It was still vague and intermittent, as if it was behind a locked and distant door.
“. . . the ravages of wood-destroying insects and ants. The action of dampness is stemmed by the application of not less than two coats of pine tar.” Will turned to the left down a new corridor, then to the right.
“On sandy soils and in those compositions present here, brick pillars are a snare unless well set at least ten feet below the surface. Dug in dry weather.”
Will listened closely as he passed each room until he stood outside a cell, its door bolted with a sturdy metal crossbar.
“Preferably in the summer, anchored at the bottom in the sand. The force of the winds and waves wash out all the others at their present volumes. Hence the great destruction of property and loss of life.”
Will recognized the voice as that of the contractor he had met the day before, still steadily assessing damage. The contractor continued speaking without abatement for many minutes. Then, a brief but weighty silence overtook the room. Will got down on his hands and knees to see if he could see under the door, as the lack of sound took on a lengthy urgency. It reached a duration which sped Will’s heart with the thought he should go for help, when the voice quietly returned.
“Lordy, Lordy,” the man sobbed, hushed and guttural. “Lordy, Lordy.”
Will rose and put his hand on the crossbar, the blood seeming to drain from his limbs. But then he heard, slowly at first, then accelerating, the return of the contractor’s low soliloquy. “There are ample . . . ample illustrations of the superiority of deep-set, poured pilings. The Ocean Club Hotel, for instance.”
He seemed, Will thought, to have regained his balance.
“Note however, the rafters and upper floor joists were secured with twelve and eighteen penny nails. That won’t scour. Nothing less than twenty should have been used.”
Will sat back down, leaning against the door, finding something soothing in the sound. Perhaps, the contractor was gaining ground, or at least holding his own.
“Owing to this fact, not one vestige of the roof over the main building, neither the dining room nor the kitchen, remained. One and a half to twelve-inch pine plank, reaching from sill to roof, weather boarded. Sill to roof.”
Will closed his eyes, his mind finding sanctuary in the contractor’s melodic flow of syllables as he slowly reconstructed the city.
“Those buildings constructed by the firm of P.F. Herwig; Herwig’s engineers were learned in the lessons of pilings and bracing.”
At rest within his song, Will wondered what had happened to Charlie Sharkey’s two goldfish, Miguel and Athena. In his widest speculations, he liked to imagine that they had survived, plucky as they were. Perhaps, they had made new friends. Perhaps, they were swimming happily in a warm spot in the deep blue sea.
53
CHIEF KETCHUM
Even before receiving orders to collect the bodies to be taken out to sea from Alderman Levy and the burial committee, the city’s police chief, Edwin Ketchum, was already overwhelmed. He had lost many of his men and had been working twenty-four hours straight, accompanied by a few local national guardsmen and the weary soldiers from Fort Crockett.
In addition to the dead, Ketchum was focused on the public’s safety and concerned about vigilantism, given that there had been talk of summary justice against looters. A story was going around concerning hoodlums cutting fingers from bodies to collect rings and jewels. Subsequent rumors suggested they were rounded up, sugar sacks placed over their heads, and shot. While the city’s policy prescribed incarceration in such cases, Chief Ketchum, a pragmatic man, refrained from removing signs such as the one Will had seen and allowed truth and rumor to combine with one another for the maximum deterrent effect.
With respect to the dead, following Alderman Levy’s instructions, the chief, along with Father Kirwin, had been instrumental in the formation of the dead gangs, issuing orders that every able-bodied man assist in the grisly task under the threat of arrest. Whiskey was kept in ample amounts at his further direction, but still, more whiskey than anticipated was required. Given its short supply, some of the gangs were now using other mysteriously fermented beverages. Given the number of dead, even temperance men had become in favor of asking the mainland for such imports, along with food and building materials, especially as time wore on and the condition of the bodies deteriorated. Some swelled to the size of barrels, others refuse
d to bow or bend when handled. Still others turned with an appalling pliability. It was grisly work. Assignment to a dead gang was a tough beat. Whether due to the nature of the work or through the copious intake of whiskey, most who participated in these labors had, by the end of their first day, adopted the definitively glazed look which would remain a part of their countenances for weeks. Their faces grew gaunt; their complexions sallow. Some went mad. Even the rugged Fort Crockett soldiers were showing signs of imbalance.
Only Chief Ketchum was not.
54
THE BEACH
Tuesday afternoon after Sam Caulk awoke, he and Will spent an hour kicking a coffee can around the hospital grounds. Just as Will had needed to be close to Sam, now Sam it seemed didn’t want to let Will out of his sight. As such company was not in Will’s plans for the important business he had in mind this afternoon, Will left Sam and the coffee can with Sister Xavier who was serving lunch with the soup girls and told him he’d be right back, then set out for the beach.
Walking westward along the edge of the surf toward the orphanage site, he caught up to a group of men marching in the same direction under armed guard. Several of the men pushed enormous wheelbarrows, some empty, some filled with lime chalk. The rest carried shovels and pitchforks on their shoulders. Teague was at the head of the group.
“Mr. Teague,” Will called. “Where’re you headed?”
It took Teague a moment to recognize Will.
“What happened to your friends?”
“Albert, the little one that looked like a wishbone, he was concussed as I suspected. He’s getting shipped out to Houston, to St. Joseph’s Hospital, to convalesce for a piece I reckon, and Frank’s with Lukas, Janek, Darja, Hana, Iveta, and Janicka. They’re his cousins. All Bulnavics. What are you doing?”
The Mourning Wave Page 13