The Mourning Wave

by Gregory Funderburk

“Working,” he said. Teague looked like he had been marching like this since Will had left him. He hadn’t shaved or bathed or perhaps even eaten.

  “What for?” Will asked, not completely sure if he was even allowed to ask.

  “Burn the bodies. Sections Sixty through Seventy.”

  “I thought they took them all out to sea last night.”

  “They came back.”

  Will sat down in the wet sand. The men marched on ahead a quarter mile. In the brush along the beach, he saw the dark motionless figures his mind hadn’t allowed him to see before. Though another dead body brooked no alarm in him at this point, there was something more chilling about these which had been buried at sea the day before and had now returned. Bumps along the sand. They washed in and out on the tide again just like the ones he’d seen along the beach before ever meeting Teague. Will put his hand to his throat. Whatever remained of his childhood departed. Dispirited, a hot wave cast itself over him as he lifted himself off the sand.

  This latest version of a dead gang now a half mile yonder began scooping up the bloated bodies with shovels and pitchforks, covering them with lime and loading them into the wheelbarrows. Will caught back up to Teague, feeling compelled to point out the half dozen bodies tangled in seaweed, tumbling in the tide along the shallows that Teague’s men had just passed.

  “You’re missing some,” he told Teague, who kept marching ahead to the next set of bumps and tangles.

  “Those back there ain’t ours,” a man pushing one of the wheelbarrows said. He had a bandana around his face. “We’re Sections Sixty to Seventy. We ain’t doing nobody else’s work. We’ve been up all night out in the Gulf on the barges with these very same bodies.”

  “I don’t see how they could come back,” Will said, falling into step with them.

  “You ought to go back to town, son,” an older man with a shovel told Will as he covered the contents of the wheelbarrow with a blanket.

  “We went out nearly twenty miles to consign these bodies to the depths,” the younger man pushing the wheelbarrow continued. “But when we got there, it was too dark to work. Pitch black. They made us anyway and poor Rosey fell overboard. Rosey was my little cousin.”

  “Don’t tell the boy your stories,” the man with the shovel said.

  “Poor Rosey. His feet caught in the chains in the pitch dark. We had to weigh the bodies down with both rocks and chains. The bodies, they were in a state. We had to sweep them off the barge with these here shovels. These very ones. They brought a preacher along to say grace. I didn’t close my eyes ‘cause you had to mind your feet. Poor Rosey didn’t mind his feet and got pulled down with all the jetsam. Down to the bird-less fathoms.”

  “Quiet!” Teague called out from ahead as they continued to march.

  “Lord, have mercy. The bird-less fathoms. Poor Rosey. These bodies now come close to beatin’ us back in. Now we’re to burn ‘em up. It’s a sin. Lord, have mercy.”

  At 62nd Street far west of town, the men dumped the decomposing bodies into a large pile. By the time they poured kerosene on them to start the fires, Will had fled, running far ahead. Between 62nd Street and 70th, Teague’s crew started three more fires. The burning of bodies would continue for the next six weeks both day and night.

  55

  A MODEST MEMORIAL

  Near what was left of the salt cedar trees that had grown near the orphanage, Will found poignant relics half buried in the sand, as he understood Zachary had reported. He picked up a number of loose rosary beads along a sloping dune, then gathered up a painted piece of the statute of the Christ on the cross which had sat in the entrance to the main building, a light brown chip perhaps from his pierced side or outstretched arms. There were a few articles of children’s clothes, a shoe, half a hairbrush, and a soggy linen bag with something inside. Will retrieved it and shook it off. Stitched into the bag with green thread right below a knotted drawstring were the words, Clement’s Marbles.

  Will looked down the beach and his shoulders sank.

  The fires of Teague’s dead gang bloomed skyward in black and orange behind him. There was only the blue-gray and browns of the beach negotiating with the sea ahead to the west. The now familiar acrid scent of burnt flesh wafted over him, filling his nostrils—as it would until mid-November. Will picked up an assortment of pebbles as he walked. About a hundred feet inland, he chose a suitable spot a few feet above sea level along a small plateau of light-colored rocks, which formed a little raised delta among the modest dunes in front of Green’s Bayou, still within earshot of the rolling and crashing tide. It was almost impossible to believe this was the same place where he had lived and slept and run on the beach.

  Will laid out the rosary beads, the marbles, and the pebbles in straight rows along the little plateau, then sat immobile on his haunches in the chunky sand, clenching and unclenching his fists, staring at them in their well-ordered columns. He felt no inclination to offer a prayer, but there was a heavy hope in his chest that what had been lost in childhood innocence earlier, might be regained in courage and fortitude in this undertaking. Perhaps he could balance out this equation and it would square. He resolved to show his work.

  With the shard of the statute, he scrawled a word on the surface of the flat rock with the best craftsmanship this tool and the surface would allow. He then arranged the beads, Clement’s colorful marbles, and the pebbles, one hundred and one of them, around the lonely word he had written. One tiny object for each child, each sister, and for Henry. None of it would last. He just wanted to make the effort because they all deserved something.

  “What’s that for?”

  Sam Caulk stood behind him.

  “Thunder. For pity’s sake, Sam,” Will said. He wanted to be mad at the boy but couldn’t summon the harshness needed for reproach.

  “What are you doing, Will?”

  “Nothing.” This was somehow an acceptable explanation for Sam.

  Will didn’t know why he said this. Perhaps, it was that the monument was so inadequate. He was caught between the feeling that this should be a private moment and the desire for Sam, as proxy for the rest of the world, to know and feel the quality of life that had been lived here for the many seasons it endured and as it ended last week.

  Sam moved closer and inspected Will’s modest memorial with earnest appreciation. The boy had a great faculty for expressing wonder and belief. Accordingly, Will saw and recognized that his young friend found his endeavor a most noble thing. Sam proceeded to touch each of the beads, each of the marbles, and each of the pebbles one by one softly and with great veneration, as he read quietly, over and over, the one word Will had written: Brave.

  There was something in the way that Sam kept saying it that sanctified the effort. There was something in the repetition, his inflections, and the power of his grace that told Will that, as little durability as there was in what he had constructed, he had accomplished both something eternal and the very thing he had set out to do.

  56

  GIOVANNA

  By the time Will and Sam had returned to the city, it seemed governed by pyromaniacs. An enormous fire blazed between 25th and 30th Streets, just south of Broadway. A huge crowd had gathered, but what drew Will and Sam’s attention, as well the eyes of everyone else, was the terrible angst of a young Italian man. As long and tall as a plank, he was yelling in his native language at the leader of a dead gang and a number of Federal soldiers. The man had a horse-like face and gangly arms, which he employed to further clarify his urgencies, protesting all of what was happening. Then, switching languages, through tears, he presented to the spectators a steely argument in broken English that the soldiers had cruelly and unjustly taken his wife’s body away from him. He had searched for her for several days, he explained. He had now found her. Giovanna was her name. Her body lay at the soldiers’ feet near the edge of the bonfire. She was a slim, light-haired woma
n wearing a blue skirt. She had a rope around her waist like someone had been trying to pull her to safety. They had announced summarily that they would now burn her. Her husband claimed curses would fall from heaven like rain if matters proceeded as they were headed.

  “No,” he repeated and made a series of chopping motions with his long fingers. He then lifted his strong hands to the sky in supplication. “Not right,” he said, but the soldiers continued to work as if he wasn’t there and were, in any event, immune to his curses. Falling to his knees with his hands at either side of his head, he begged the soldiers to stop. He reached his hands high into the blackened sky. “Why no listen?” he pleaded. “Why no hear?” As he cried, his torso bent backwards so that his shoulders touched the ground behind him. “Giovanna, Giovanna!” he exclaimed, as if it were a covenant.

  The soldier in charge, a gruff sergeant with a thick mustache, finally snapped back to both the Italian man and the gathering audience that he had to discharge his duty regardless of any special circumstances of devotion. In reply, Giovanna’s husband arose from the ground and waved his arms exactly as one imagines the deeply demented do in distress. His limbs were like long vines. A member of the dead gang, one who apparently knew the Italian man, approached him and tried to offer a more personal solace. This citizen’s efforts made it appear for a moment that the matter would end sadly, but calmly, until the Italian suddenly pulled away from him, bolting from him and toward the fire in a bound.

  “Giovanna!” he shouted again. He reached for the woman’s body at the edge of the flames. The soldiers, responding almost as quickly, pulled him away, but he struck out from them again, returning to her. They were able to separate them once again, but only amidst great struggle and only for a short time. As the flames licked at his neck and shoulders, the Italian man fought with renewed ferocity each time they pulled him away, until he was making his last stand over her, landing terrific roundhouse blows against anyone who got too close to Giovanna.

  In the end, he lost. He was torn away and two men lifted her body from the ground. As if she were a log, they tossed her into the flames with the others. Giovanna’s husband screamed of her splendor and his sorrow and how they mixed together. As the fire began to consume her, he continued in his frenzied efforts to escape the half dozen soldiers who’d now pinned him to the ground twenty feet from the blaze. He shrieked her name again and again. Once the body was no longer recognizable as distinct from the fire itself, they released him. Unleashed, he sprinted with ungainly strides toward the flames. At this moment, Will heard a voice behind him. It breathed heavily a single word.

  “Go.”

  The word entered Will’s ears as an evil hiss, a rasp. There was now a mania in the air. Will grabbed Sam Caulk’s hand instinctively, reactively, as one grabs the closest thing when riding a roller coaster at the fair. He connected the unholy voice to the presence from the dark chapel a few nights before. In solidarity, the boys both found strength to join those yelling for the running Italian man to stop. Still, all of them seemed overmatched by the chilling whisper that had urged him to go. The Italian’s limbs, torqued and extended, moved in obedience to its instruction as the fire reeled him in. It all seemed scripted in cold terror with a deep inevitability. Will gripped Sam’s hand even more tightly as black smoke poured over Giovanna’s husband, near the edge of the pyre. Then something in the flames, Giovanna perhaps, fell. She vanished, changing the nature of the man’s proposed act from one of love to betrayal and he stopped abruptly, then turned back to face the world.

  Will looked over his shoulder. In fact, many in the crowd did so, but the voice that had urged him to go was gone. When they turned again to the fire, Giovanna’s young widower stood in the midst of a swirling wall of smoke with his hands to his head again. Things can be altered so fast, Will thought. Like a switch at a railroad track. The man’s face was blistered black and red and his clothes were singed. One of his sleeves was actually on fire. The soldiers, though likewise spent, pulled him away from the heat as one would save a friend. The local man who knew him extinguished his fiery shirt. The Italian man then fell to the ground and wept. They tried to get him up, but he was just a bag of bones. His joints turned at peculiar angles, forsaking him as if he had no feet at the end of his long legs. When he made it to his knees, they stood back as his long torso swayed like a willow tree. His arms then stretched out, exhibiting his extraordinary wingspan. He reached impossibly high and twisted, as if in the wind, before his head fell low, as low as the human condition allows.

  “You do not know what you have done,” he repeated. “You do not know.” He said it again and again, not for the soldiers, but, each person present knew, to God. Will turned Sam away and put his arm around the smaller boy’s shoulder.

  “Try not to remember that,” Will said, pushing them out of the crowd as his own heart—pieced together over the last five days with a multitude of elaborate fictions about the survival of Miguel and Athena, the police chief’s daughter, and with memorials constructed of marbles and lost rosary beads—tore asunder once again.

  57

  HOPE AT NIGHT

  It was dark before they got back to the hospital. From the third floor, Will could see fires on the beach at roughly three hundred-foot intervals. It was no longer necessary to walk with a lantern at night. The sky was lit fantastically in all directions. Blazing whirlwinds dotted the horizon like bivouacs for an army of demons. The churning smoke choked the glow of the evening stars and blotted out the slender crescent of a silver moon rising in the late summer night sky. The fugitive instances of bright consideration which had characterized the day earlier had fully departed, replaced with the scent of fire, the elegy of Giovanna’s husband, and the remembered sound of the raspy voice they’d heard. It all left Will, and with him Sam, disoriented.

  Will learned in the coming days that it took several hours for a body to burn. The remains left on the ground at the end of the process were less a soft powder and more a coarse gravel. The ash in the air now all the time was brought home daily in one’s clothes and in one’s hair. Will imagined that from the mainland it looked like the city was bleeding into the sky. On the island though, it all became such a common spectacle that it created no comment. Even so, it continually weighed on both the communal mind and the collective soul most heavily. Those working the fires said little or ever would about their work. Their memories were more absorbed than received, and these men no doubt lost the sense of what they were doing after the first few days, as their duty collided with what made them human. With them, woeful patients from the hospital remarked, sometimes most shrilly, about the end of the world.

  Having returned Sam to his cot, Will turned away from the window and pulled the hospital blanket up over the boy’s shoulders to secure him. A few minutes later, thinking his young companion was sound asleep, Will was startled when Sam quietly spoke up.

  “Will?”

  “Sam.”

  “Will, can you help me make one of those rock decorations like you did out there on the beach?” he asked. “Calvin was brave to me.”

  Will felt the muscles around his mouth tighten. “Sure, Sam. Yes, I will.”

  “And I’ll try not to recall such things as those bodies coming in on the tide and that string bean fellow. But my memory’s careless. It tends to ponder on its own.”

  “Mine too.”

  “Do you ever feel bad for being alive?” Sam asked.

  “Yes.”

  Sam turned to him and Will felt fully inspected.

  “I’m glad you’re my friend,” Sam said as he turned back over.

  “I am too, Sam.”

  Will sat on the cool tile floor with his knees up to his chest while Sam’s breathing slowed and regulated. About twenty minutes later, he was certain Sam was fast asleep.

  “Will?”

  “Sam.”

  “Did you hear that raspy fellow behin
d us at the fire?”

  “I did.”

  “I was afraid. I didn’t look back, but I heard him whispering for the string bean fellow to jump on into the fire.”

  Will didn’t speak.

  “I think somehow he’s behind all this.”

  Will felt this too.

  “He’s gone now. It’ll be alright.”

  “Yeah, he’s gone now,” Sam repeated. There was a peace inside the silence that followed, a peace that rippled deeply into Will’s spirit, like a stone dropped into a well. “I figure someday,” Sam said “fine things can happen too. Just not for a while.”

  Every time Will had thought his sadness could not become worse, it had. And it had been a long day. So, this notion from a remarkable child who had seen the very worst under the sun, somehow provided purchase for his soul to rest upon at least for the night. In this brief respite, Will arose, turned back to the broken window and put both hands on the sill. He felt both the grief and hope of the present and the coercion it asserted over his body. Looking upwards, he saw a slice of the moon through a silent eddy of distant clouds. It lit the twisting channels of smoke thinly hovering over the beach and city in such a way that if you kept your eyes high up in the air just so, it looked as if the sky had just been filled with fireworks.

  58

  A LASTING SCAR

  Wednesday, September 12

  By Wednesday morning, the beaches bloomed with white tents. Federal troops had begun to arrive and refugees filtered through the tents the rest of the day and night, seeking rations and other supplies conducive to their continued survival. The hospitals were no less burdened.

  To combat her stew’s further incoherence as food supplies grew low, Sister Xavier instructed Zachary Scott to scout for essentials downtown. She considered the army rations to be for the truly needy and the less resourceful and refused them. Will, who had spent a restless morning with Sam inside the hospital, accompanied Zachary into town. Zachary, who had seen the clean sweep of the shoreline at the orphanage site regarded Will as God-touched, and readily assented to his company. They moved out together in the early morning.