The Mourning Wave

by Gregory Funderburk

  “Talk to him about what?” Jesse asked, lifting one foot and starting to hop.

  “About what Clara Barton looked like.”

  “How would he know? He wasn’t even there.”

  “Then why did you . . .”

  “Baker always remembers how folks look. He’s got a real eye for it.”

  “Jesse, be careful. Do you know how to get through the roadblocks and the soldiers and into that neighborhood up yonder?”

  “I know everything,” Jesse said, leaping the gap and onto the other side of the roof.

  “How?”

  “I don’t know, I just do.”

  “No. How do you get in?”

  “Over there,” he said, pointing again from on high, but now on the other side. “About two o’clock. That way, then over a block. There’s a giant tree down there. Hop over the tree. It’s easy. Nobody’s there.”

  “Easy. Thanks,” Will said.

  “Baker Toothaker,” Jesse laughed, climbing down from the split house and disappearing just as quickly as he had arrived.

  72

  THE RUMINATIONS INCIDENT TO WANDERING

  The Ketchum’s immediate neighborhood looked like every other neighborhood. Partly flattened, partly jumbled, a layer of black soot over a layer of gray silt on top of a layer of dark mud. The house was more or less intact but curved on one side as if the wind had blown so continuously that it had left the house in this memorialized form. No one was home.

  The Ketchum’s house, located at 1605 33rd Street—Will knew, having obliquely investigated it before—was originally owned by Michel B. Menard, the founder of Galveston. It was a big, beautiful Greek revival, but now its front columns were damaged, and its windows blown out. It was missing its second-floor porch—its finest feature, in Will’s estimation, not counting its youngest resident. All the home’s appurtenances, like the shed and small stable out back, were completely gone and three other homes had infringed on the property’s metes and bounds.

  Will stood squarely in front of it, not knowing what to do next as the day dimmed. He began walking the neighborhood in concentric circles, returning to the Ketchum residence multiple times. He felt not just alone, but overwhelmed by the sort of ruminations and deep speculation commonly incident to those who wander. Once, he almost ascended to the door to knock, but didn’t. There seemed to be no activity in, around, or anywhere near the house. Touching the door seemed to open up an array of possibilities from which he couldn’t fashion a positive outcome, so he reluctantly departed, though leaving even the empty house broke his heart. Frustrated again and feeling foolish, he headed back to the hospital, drained.

  Ascending the stairs, finding his cot next to the sleeping Sam Caulk, Will found his extreme fatigue was misaligned to the vibrations that promoted sleep. He found himself stuck awake, as Clement Beardshy used to say when slumber evaded his deer-like eyes. Will shifted in his bed uncomfortably. His muscles crawled and his ears rang, and through the open window, the fires lit up the night sky again, as the question of Grace’s fate bore into his bones.

  73

  MOTHER GABRIEL

  Will was lying quietly on his cot late Thursday night, watching the movement of the fiery shadows on the ceiling, when Mother Gabriel came down the hall to see him. Will was still guarding Sam Caulk’s cot with singular vigilance. He sat up in his cot and crossed his legs. She could tell by Will’s bearing that he had no inclination to leave the boy’s side, so she came around and knelt on the other side of Sam’s cot. With Sam asleep between them, she spoke in a low voice and Will responded likewise.

  “Will,” she asked, “how are you?”

  “I’ve wanted tell you what happened,” he said, “but I have some opinions first. I don’t want them to be just in my head.”

  “It’s hard for them to be just in your head.”

  “Yes ma’am,” he began. “It takes up too much space.”

  She saw he was ready to launch out into the deep and nodded for him to go on.

  “You know how people say God teaches us lessons,” he said.

  “Yes. People say that.”

  There was a short silence, but it had a comfort and a rhythm to it.

  “I’ve done some thinking on the notion. It don’t rate,” Will said, then looked up. “No offense, Mother.”

  She was quiet, but there were subtleties which conveyed that she probably agreed. He looked at her with a suggestion of surprise but couldn’t call up an expression for anything this complex. That all this happened for no good or identifiable reason and that he didn’t have to search for one was oddly comforting. In his cot, Sam remained in perfect stillness, as if he agreed, adding to the peace at hand. Will looked back down at the boy’s face. It catalogued tranquility. He celebrated Sam’s survival so much more readily than his own.

  “The children sang,” Will whispered, wiping his eyes with his sleeve. “They were tied together and they we were singing, but the wind just got stronger. You should’ve heard them sing, Mother Gabriel. They did nothing wrong.”

  It was a question of accountability.

  She turned her head, looking at Will with great tenderness. She had been through the epidemics. Yellow fever. Smallpox. She’d lost all those who’d come across the Atlantic with her. She knew dreadful possibilities were diffused without fairness throughout the purported order of life. She was eighty years old now and was only just beginning to form the sort of imagination required to see that she, this boy, this world, all were a bare whisper of a work whose finished form she could scarcely comprehend. Her eyes told him it was safe to go on.

  “God’s not fit,” Will concluded softly.

  He thought again she would come to God’s defense. Instead, her silence laid out only a path of understanding for him to continue when he was ready. Sam stirred, sighing quietly. The three of them steeped in Will’s verdict for a long time as he felt a current of sorrow lift him then settle him back down like a wave. Her company was a cleansing tide. His heresy sank back in, absorbing back into his bloodstream to begin to do the righteous work of honest lamentation.

  There was another slow silence.

  “Will,” she finally said. “It’s a storm-driven place we live in.” The corners of her eyes were beveled with age and desperate kindness. “There are hazards in place and time. There is so little we can do about such things. A storm-driven place,” she repeated. The way empathy formed her words revealed she knew the terrible and lovely risk of living in it. “It’s not without its sacred enchantments, all the same,” she added. “They arise mysteriously with the clouds.”

  Will exhaled. It felt good to hear this, but there still seemed to be a great deal of explaining to do. Sam continued to sleep between them. The weight of it all forced Will’s own stinging eyes closed. It was hard to work out, if it could be worked out at all. He recalled asking Mrs. Rogers in math class if some equations simply couldn’t be ciphered. Things with no answer. Problems for which even showing your work didn’t help it make sense. She said it was probably the case that everything had an answer, but we just didn’t quite know how to get there yet. We didn’t know all the variables, she had said. Will thought of Ashby Rogers going back for the trunk. There was no figuring some things out. He thought back to the night and opened his eyes again.

  “Sister Elizabeth told Katy Faulkie, ‘don’t be trapped by what your eyes tell you,’” Will said. It had sounded crucial to him at the time but lacked utility until this moment. Will remembered the silver cross he had given to the old woman at the Tremont. Its shape. Its weight. Its meaning. There was flesh and blood. Then there was this.

  “I just don’t ever want to forget any of them,” he said.

  Mother Gabriel was about to say something else—that love is not only given by God, but sustained by God—but just then Sam Caulk turned over, coughed, and mumbled quietly. They both leaned impercep
tibly toward his cot.

  “. . . it’s a wild and wooly world,” he said, though it seemed he was still peacefully asleep.

  Mother Gabriel smiled; her mouth turned down at the sides in the way an invisible God sometimes expresses grace to us.

  74

  THE GOSPEL OF ALBERT CAMPBELL

  Friday, September 14

  “Good news,” Sister Xavier said as she shook Will awake in the morning. “Splendid news of Albert.”

  Will sat up on his elbows. He knew the sisters had taken Albert to the St. Joseph Hospital on the mainland. They were to meet a sister from another order at the train station in Houston. She was to accompany him to the hospital with instructions. “At the station, a woman named Kuhlman, from Houston, spotted him with the sisters. She knows Albert’s family in Kansas.”

  Will brought his legs around so that his feet were steady and flat against the tile floor.

  “She’s friendly with Albert’s older sister in Topeka. Can you believe it?”

  Will remembered now Albert did have an older sister. He had said they’d been separated and that she lived in an orphanage in Kansas. “His sister’s now eighteen and she’s getting married next year. She’d contacted Miss Kuhlman on Monday after the storm. She knew only that the telegraph lines to the island were down and that our orphanage was gone. She was worried sick.”

  Will leaned forward with a cautious expectation of joy.

  “Albert was simply walking through the crowded train station with that large wrap on his head, but something drew Miss Kuhlman to him.” As Sister Xavier recounted the rest of the miraculous story, Will felt an emergent place opening up in his chest. “Miss Kuhlman said, ‘Is that boy Albert Campbell?’ She asked Albert if he recognized her. Albert fell right into her arms as if he expected something like this to happen.”

  “He’s like that,” Will said. “I bet he did.”

  “Albert wouldn’t let her go.”

  “He’s pretty strong. He pushed me down once and I’m a good deal bigger.”

  “Miss Kuhlman announced she was a nurse and wasn’t leaving without him.”

  Will blinked hard. “They let him go with her?”

  “No one knew just what to do. They took him to St. Joseph’s to be examined. The doctors said he had recovered well enough to go if he waited a day. Albert himself apparently made the case forcefully that legal technicalities and paperwork over proper custodianships would have to be overlooked, if we were to undo what the storm had done. No one had the heart to disagree.”

  “Albert can be very persuasive,” Will said, remembering his friend’s positions on the burial of animals.

  “So today Albert will be with his family in Kansas. The Union Pacific said his passage was free.”

  “Free?”

  “Free as grace. Our affliction, Will, does not bereave hope. It recruits hope.”

  Will remembered the note in his pocket. “Sister, will you help me make a list of all the things we need here most. Food, supplies. All we need.”

  “Whatever for, child?”

  “I’m recruiting more hope.”

  She smiled and they put together a short list. He thanked her for the news of Albert, placed the list in his pocket with the stranger’s note, and checked on Sam, who was still asleep. Before dressing and helping the sisters with breakfast, Will closed his eyes and smiled with a clear picture in his head. One of Albert Campbell gazing out the window of a train pulled northward by a mighty locomotive, click-clacking toward Topeka on Union Pacific rails, completely free of charge.

  75

  INTREPID

  For Will, maybe it was the story of Albert Campbell. He couldn’t say what it was for anyone else, but a change had occurred, and no one could refrain from remarking on it Friday morning. The day before, the streets were mostly quiet. Thursday, the city labored with solemnity in near silence, but those whom he met on the city’s corners on Friday had begun to speak more about their recovery than of their losses. Women talked of putting things right. Men discussed the future. It was said that angels of mercy that day went through the army of sufferers whispering cheer and encouragement all over town.

  “Earlier this week,” Zachary told Will over breakfast in front of the hospital, “I wouldn’t have given you ten dollars for this whole place. Today I’d give a lot more than even before the storm. It’s just a pile of sand and not a very big one, but it’s a stout-hearted place. Its men, dashing. Its women, winsome and indomitable.”

  People began to talk of their own vim. They sang in emerging voices and creative harmonies a compelling mix of hymns and drinking songs, sharing their food among one another. Zachary communed pleasantly with the breakfasting crowd around him. They congratulated each other for the grit they all displayed.

  “The world will say we withstood it well. Hurrah! We are intrepid,” he concluded. There was nothing wildly optimistic in the way his face was set. It simply had no break in it.

  Leaving Zachary, Will headed to the beach to watch the orange sun come up over the water, as he had done the day before and would almost every day from now on. On the way back, Will came upon a group of soldiers crowded around a ziggurat of debris. As he joined the onlookers, Jesse Toothaker suddenly appeared behind him again.

  “They heard a melody from inside the ridge,” Jesse whispered, getting Will up to speed. “A homeless, feathered creature,” he said quietly as everyone else held silent. “Orphaned in the storm.”

  The brusque sergeant who had burned Giovanna was in charge. His name, Will learned, was Labott. He approached the task at hand, not with the rigidity he’d displayed earlier in the week with the dead woman’s poor widower, but with a remarkable tenderness.

  Labott walked carefully over the forty-foot pile, pointing, giving orders for his men to dig. Then, in strict alignment with his instruction, the soldiers pulled and shoveled with abandon for a full minute until Labott stopped them, called for silence and listened again. He repeated this exercise in succession three more times. Each time they stopped to listen, the bird raised its carol higher. Sergeant Labott then told the unit to dismount the pile and he began to dig alone just as tenaciously as his men had done before. As the other soldiers scampered down, he stopped and put his ear down into the gap he’d excavated and listened again as the bird’s song increased in pitch and in energy, as well as in rhythm. Now alone, high on the debris, Labott moved to a point where he judged himself altogether closer to the sound, then asked below for two small hand axes. A soldier scrambled upwards with the requested implements and, handing them over to his officer, watched as Labott chopped furiously into the timber with the twin axes. Having made a satisfactory hole, the sergeant wedged the blades of the tools into a single plank and climbed downward, disappearing from view.

  As those on the ground rose to their toes in suspense, Labott, in less than a minute reappeared, lifting aloft a small, silver cage housing a tiny, bedraggled canary. The soldier who had fetched the axes took the cage from him and ambled down, carefully holding it upwards like a lantern. Those present shook their heads favorably and in unison as he made his way to the ground. Labott scuttled down himself and wiped his brow. By his expression, all could see that he considered this act as profound as any he had accomplished this terrible week.

  Back on the ground, he put his index finger and his thumb up to the bridge of his nose and took his handkerchief out to wipe his brow, dabbing at his eyes as those present congratulated him on his superior efforts. No one had any objection to his suggestion that he take the tiny yellow bird home to his little girl.

  Will looked at the canary then surveyed the ground. The landscape seemed to take on a different and more brightly lit aspect. Many in the congregation around him were newly snow-crowned with age, but it was not weariness that defined them now, but rather the sort of grateful wisdom one hears from those who report nearly dying. Likewise, L
abott’s men, as they departed, marched in a firmer array than they had done before.

  Jesse slapped Will on the back. Will slapped him back, but with less vigor, for this gesture was not one he commonly employed.

  “What time is it, Jesse?” Will asked, reaching into his pocket to retrieve Sister Xavier’s list and the stranger’s note.

  “Almost ten o’clock,” Jesse said. “In the a.m,” he added, needlessly.

  “I’ve got to go.”

  “What for?”

  “Business at the customs house.”

  76

  THE CUSTOMS HOUSE

  When Will arrived at the customs house at Winnie and 25th, he held measured doubts concerning both his business here and the stranger who presented the note to him a few days ago. At the same time, caught up in the spirit of the day, he felt carried along by the flywheel of civic momentum which had begun to spin. He pushed forward inside the crowd until he was a near the front, a short distance from an exceedingly tall and graceful woman wearing a light blue dress. Watching her as the crowds ushered forward on their own, it was as if her part in this process was choreographed in an elaborate European ballet. She moved from table to table just inside the entrance, solving problems with little effort and a distinct elegance of purpose. The density of the crowd around her was no match for her supple movements and efficiencies. Her lightly distributed mass almost disappeared whenever she turned and moved in a new direction.

  “Ma’am!” Will called out, “I have an appointment.” He unfolded and waved the paper tentatively. She saw it immediately as if its content had been telegraphed to her directly. The fact she heard him over the din was not nearly as impressive as how she responded in her beautiful and sonorous voice.

  “Will.”

  Will pointed to himself as if she was speaking a lost language.