The Mourning Wave

by Gregory Funderburk

  The enormous oak had tumbled inside the church, encroaching deeply into the sanctuary with a terrible beauty. He could see the bright sky through the opening it had made, casting shadows that touched each other. Birds had entered and they flitted about inside along the branches of the tree, chirping down into the space in a way that was objectively lovely. Though the floor was covered with mud, there was something in how nature and religion were communing here that reminded Will of an abandoned Eden.

  No one seemed to be there, so Will continued forward as if he was a full-fledged Episcopalian, crossing himself out of habit, finding in the gesture a subtle comfort. Just as the ancients had intended in the notion of such self-blessing, a decisive resurgence of his faith flooded forth. The flow of mud had not quite reached the altar and there were dozens of candles burning at the front already, lending a sacred air to the circumstances. Scented pleasantly by the candles and the living tree, Will relaxed, feeling almost at home. He took a lit candle and found another down the row that had gone out and relit it. As he did, a memory arose of his mother and his father at Christmastime. It delivered a further warmth into his chest.

  There was a balcony above that had apparently escaped most of the damage. He’d never been in a church with an upstairs and wasn’t sure when he’d get the chance again, so he moved up. When he reached the balcony, he looked down, surprised to see Father Kirwin had taken to the chancel. Presumably, he’d struck a deal with his Episcopal brethren and was rehearsing for this first Sabbath following the storm. Will, unsure whether he ought to reveal himself here on foreign ground, bent down as Father Kirwin stepped to the pulpit and proceeded to launch into a Sunday sermon for a congregation of invisible parishioners.

  “Between Q Street and the sea,” the priest began, “there were hundreds. Hundreds of houses. No, homes. Call them homes.” He crossed out a word in his notes with a pencil at the pulpit and scribbled down something else. He shifted from one foot to the other and picked up his preaching again. “All flattened, destroyed. Destroyed in a single blow.” He shook his head, picked up his pencil again and calmly set upon his papers. “Hammered. Hammered into a shapeless mass. The small homes were taken up like one takes up an egg. An egg? Seriously, James, no.” He paused, exhaled and wrote something else, though what he had first said was, in all respects, true.

  “The water pushed the debris ahead. One row of buildings went down. Timbers and stone hurled against the next and it went down like the first.” Father Kirwin had a kind, but stout voice, handy for the sort of effort he was preparing. “Then the debris of the two rows brought the next one down. And those three attacked the next. Thus it followed, until this mass reached Q Street, where it lurched to a stop, too heavy in weight and in sorrow to be further moved. Farther moved. Farther.”

  The priest here made a sort of grumbling sound, indicating he was either dissatisfied with his language or perhaps merely disdainful of himself. He took off his spectacles and examined them. He was not aiming to efface the present pain, but instead to consecrate it, dignifying it with hope. What he wanted to say, was that love can reach into the abyss of death and return with something other than six to eight thousand cadavers, but was unable to find a suitable means of expressing the plausibility of his thesis. Admittedly, the inscrutable notion resided in the realm of faith more than that of experience. He walked up and down the chancel thinking deeply, unsure whether his struggle was grounded in a lack of vocabulary or training or because the proposition was, in the end, simply untrue. That is to say, Father Kirwin was uncertain whether the failure was his or God’s, though he suspected strongly it was his own.

  He returned to the pulpit and put his hand at the back of his head and looked up. When he did, he saw only a giant tree inside the church. He thought of the bell that had fallen through his own sanctuary. The Episcopalians’ colored glass and adjacent brick was irreparably fractured. Their vaulted ceiling was likewise ruined. Muddy water dripped relentlessly into dozens of strategically placed, but overflowing, wooden buckets below. There were also now live birds in the church.

  Will watched as the good priest laughed subtly, barely, at this new fact. Father Kirwin next surveyed the slop on the floor and a number of shambled pews. He left the pulpit again, striding halfway up the center aisle, nudging one of the buckets forward a few inches to catch the drip at this location. If he saw Will in the balcony, he acted as if he had not. The priest then bent down at the knees in the aisle in the exact posture of a baseball catcher, except that his head remained cast downward. He rubbed the back of his neck. He remained in this position, still, as one does when in solitude. Examining the priest with keen interest, Will wondered again if he should reveal himself when Father Kirwin suddenly stood back up, turned, and made his way back to the chancel in a way that suggested something had struck him in a revelatory way. Whatever it was, it was reflected now in his stature. He stood at the pulpit in new command of both the space and his expression, though he continued to speak with his characteristic humility.

  “Meeting the resistance of its own weight,” he said. “The victims of the city’s assailant had now become its last defense.” His voice became clearer, more definitive. “Piling higher and higher, the houses, homes, the homes only lately splintered, themselves now formed a barrier, a wall against the advancement of the sea and its twin felon, the wind.” He gripped either side of the pulpit, not with authority as much as with a humble desire to reveal what had been revealed to him. “In this way, the territory lying between this wall and the bay was protected from yet greater loss and death. A bulwark made of the dead and all they held dear kept the worst of the savage winds and deathly waves from taking the rest of us.”

  Father Kirwin paused as if he was beginning to feel the words he spoke even more deeply. “They did not die in vain, but rather ransomed us,” he said, his voice choking on what must have been some specific memory.

  Will, still in the balcony, lay down—perhaps in hiding, perhaps because he was tired. But with all these convictions stirring in his mind, he fell asleep.

  80

  GRACE

  Will was awakened by church bells that evening. God was resident in the sound. He stood at the rail of the balcony to survey what was happening below. Well-dressed women entered carrying small bouquets of flowers tied with cream-colored ribbons. Men entered in suits rather than in their work clothes. Will looked down and saw Ike Kempner and several other members of the Central Committee shuffle through the aisles, finding their seats.

  Young girls wearing colorful dresses, Darja and Janicka Bulnavic among them, delivered more flowers, which had somehow survived the storm. More candles were being lit as the girls placed their bouquets in the rain buckets. Sara from the customs house carried a large green arrangement that matched the leaves on the large oak inside the church. She placed the arrangement on the altar and as she did, small white buds bloomed from the greenery. Hana and Iveta and several other girls followed, ill-shod but merry, scattering more white petals in the middle aisle along the river of mud.

  No surrender. No retreat, Will thought. It seemed wrong now to remain merely a spectator. Will descended the stairs, finding an empty upright pew about three-quarters back, near the top of the low-bending tree along the aisle. He settled in quietly as the church continued to fill. He was surprised when a clean-shaven Teague passed by him, as well as Hattie with the blisters, and the man with the cow whom Will had seen with Frank and Albert next to the Ursuline Convent. The dimming sky, blue, pure, and deep, glowed through the broken roof above. It was under the collection of these eventide hues that Will found less effort was required to embrace an avid belief in all that was hard to believe in. The Angelus bells tolled from one of the other churches down the row.

  The room now bustled, both with joy and congregants. Bamsch, Pearson, and Reece gathered a few pews ahead with their families. Will waved at Edgar sitting next to an older couple, his grandparents from out
on Virginia Point. Returning his gaze to the broken entry doors of the church, Will saw Addie Rogers and Mr. Unger appear in the doorway along with Birdy and Zachary Scott, shepherding Unger’s little ones in together. Mr. Holman, the milkman, the first survivor they had seen, excepting the Fort Crockett soldiers, came in behind them, greeting those around him affably. Then Will’s vision locked upon Police Chief Ketchum, arriving in full uniform.

  Will immediately turned back to the front, afraid to read the chief’s expression. His eyes grew wide as a wave of both lightness and fear began to pulse through his limbs. Compelled, he looked back again. The chief looked wearied, dark circles under his deep-set eyes. His wife and son emerged behind him, but Will lost his line of sight as a number of other churchgoers jostled in around them. The German man who had tried to sell his Victorian home and Miss Ruby came in one after another. They were followed by a fidgeting Duell Gould, his brother, Jack, and his sisters, Effie and Gertie, along with their folks. Will craned his neck higher to regain his view of the yawning opening where the red church doors should have been. Captain Benson appeared, also in uniform, speaking to Mayor Jones and Walter McVitie. To their left, Will glimpsed the Scotsman and Felix from the Tremont. John Sealy and Alderman Levy were to their right. Isaac Cline limped in next to Hal Mackay.

  Will, his heart coursing, fixed his eyes on the doorway. As the crowd parted, Grace Ketchum appeared, stepping into the church with an ethereal suddenness, the graded blues of the early evening sky behind her. She was like a moving painting, wearing the dark green dress from the Garten Verein ballroom, matching the divine foliage inside the sanctuary. It was all made more memorable by the distance from which he now took her in. Her hair was pulled back in a bow, an immaculate white one, a shade which Will had been certain no longer existed. Although he thought he had surveyed the complete terrain of his soul over the last several days, he had no understanding until this moment of just how tenderly he had become attached to her. It was as if all the affection and fondness he had for so many who had been lost now resided solely upon her. The light and color behind her remained miraculous as she moved forward, catching up to her family. They were seated opposite Will, many pews ahead, near the front. He breathed deeply in relief.

  A song then rose up, a hymn, its themes closely connected to a trembling hope against the day. The pews filled around him. Across from him, Althea sang robustly into the swelling melody, rising, giving voice to the strain involved in grasping, then preserving honest belief in a broken world. The congregants all sang persuasively along, their voices harmonizing, gathering momentum, fueled by a fierce sense of the exhilaration that comes as tribulation wanes. As the final and climactic refrain began, Grace turned, saw Will and smiled at him wildly. For a moment, he wondered if this was real. He thought maybe he had perished after all and was just now coming back. Her soul flashed in recognition of his and he smiled back, expressing to her everything he’d found impossible to say on the dance floor. He would never completely command the memory of how she looked at him but suspected the power of such moments must abide within something deeper than recollection.

  Grace leaned over to her father and whispered something. The police chief then looked back. Finding Will, he turned to his wife and whispered just as his daughter had done with him. Mrs. Ketchum immediately burst into tears.

  Amidst all this, a murmur ran through the congregation like a wind over long grass. Will was so enchanted with everything before him that he could barely wonder what all this latest commotion concerned. Had he the wherewithal to look back again to the rear of the church, he would have seen Daisy Thorne appear, the fluid blue of early evening framing her figure dramatically. She now paused at the empty door frame and watched as a striking young girl in a dark green dress, a blur with a snow-white bow in her hair, dart back and across the muddy, flower-strewn aisle toward Will Murney.

  “I thought you were dead,” Grace said softly, as a quartet of violinists miraculously assembled and began to tune their instruments at the front.

  “I reckon I ought to have been several times over.”

  “Can you sit with us?” She was like oxygen. He could hardly calculate on this.

  “I’m a bit ripe,” he confessed.

  She laughed unforgettably. “I don’t care a lick.”

  Her face was composed of such arresting beauty and simplicity that he couldn’t imagine how God could’ve abided its uniqueness. Grace extended her hand and Will took it. She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. Then, bringing him with her as she had done in a dream he only half-remembered, they walked down the aisle together as wedding music began. The chief of police greeted Will by name and gave him his seat. Will looked down the row and saw Aunt Lida and Uncle Oldrich, and next to them a boy who looked just like Sam Caulk, especially around the bridge of the nose, only a bit older.

  “So, who’s getting hitched?” Will whispered intimately to Grace as the music rose higher. She pointed back where the bride had begun to move slowly, casually, but somehow with equal elegance toward the front. Daisy was wearing a long white beaded dress and a light gossamer veil. Will couldn’t imagine how she’d procured such a thing.

  Daisy pulled at the waist of her dress, lifting the bottom hem a few inches to avoid it dragging in the muddy course ahead. She wore no shoes. Near the altar, Joe, her fiancé, tall and handsome, appeared as if through the alchemy of desire. Though Daisy had never gotten her telegram through, Joe had arrived from the mainland yesterday all the same. He smiled winningly, laughing at Daisy’s bare feet.

  Grace would not let go of Will’s hand. In fact, she squeezed it so tightly, he looked at her thinking she might be mad at him, when Father Kirwin stepped forward to the altar where Daisy and Joe had now reunited. The priest positioned himself between them and faced their gathered friends and community. He turned Daisy and Joe to face the congregation and blessed the couple, as well as all present. Everyone received the blessing with great thirst. They all knew there was still much to do, and this ceremony would not lessen their grief appreciably. The scars would remain. They would fall back into their wounds and revisit their many terrors, but if there was any remaining listlessness of these grieving people, this mourning wave, it was here transformed into a lively interest in the better things of life.

  Will’s eyes moved around the sanctuary. He saw the contractor, Mr. Pierce, next to Mr. Ford. They sat across the aisle from Mr. Ott, not far from Giovanna’s husband, his face still crimson from the fires of hell. More church bells pealed in the distance. When their echoes faded, Father Kirwin began to speak in a resonant voice. He assured all of them that self-giving love, like singing from a full and truthful heart, as they had all just so heartily done, is a singular thing. Such love, he insisted, is not merely durable, but everlasting. He then paused and looked out over the congregation, feeling their suffering along with his own, hoping they would hear his words as he intended. “In its purest form,” he told them with unalloyed conviction, “it is so completely rescuing, it can make even death inconsequential.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book is a work of fiction, but is inspired by the many stories which emerged from the Great Storm of 1900 in Galveston, Texas, particularly those of the Sisters of Charity who heroically sacrificed their lives trying to save the ninety-three children who lived under their care. My father introduced me to this story as a child, then gave me John Edward Weems 1957 book, A Weekend in September. Shortly after that, one of our family trips to the island was interrupted by a bad storm, which furthered my interest in the hurricane and eventually led me to focus the story on the St. Mary’s orphans.

  Linda Macdonald, director of communication for the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word in Houston, was instrumental in providing a more personal understanding of what happened at the orphanage on September 8, 1900. Linda gave me both a roster of the names of the St. Mary’s children lost and the lyrics to Queen of the Waves. Sh
e also pointed me toward an article about the boys’ common report of seeing visions of their lost friends under the waves as the storm subsided.

  I wish to acknowledge the many skilled authors who have done such outstanding work capturing the history of the storm. In addition to the Weems’ book, Patricia Bellis Bixel and Elizabeth Hayes Turner’s tremendously informative and readable Galveston and the 1900 Storm, Casey Edward Greene and Shelly Henley Kelly’s Through a Night of Horrors, Nathan C. Greene’s, The Story of the Galveston Hurricane and Paul Lester’s The Great Galveston Disaster advanced my understanding of what occurred and provided colorful vignettes related to many of the people involved. Erik Larson’s brilliant Isaac’s Storm provided not only additional facts, but color to my endeavor. I owe all of these authors a debt of gratitude for their work. More generally, both Gary Cartwright’s, Galveston, and David G. McComb’s, Galveston, A History, provided a fuller view of the island’s history, and documents from the Rosenberg Library in Galveston, as well as Texas archival material contributed additional storm survivor quotes included or adapted in the narrative. Indeed, most of the characters in the book were real people, including Will Murney, Frank Madera (sometimes, referred to as Frank Bulvanic or Frank Bulnavic), Albert Campbell, Daisy Thorne, all of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, Isaac Cline, the members of the Central Committee, Mayor Walter Jones, Ike Kempner, Father James Martin Kirwin, and Stephen and Clara Barton.

  I wish to also thank Koehler Books for their guidance and assistance in publishing The Mourning Wave, especially John Koehler, Joe Coccaro, Kellie Emery, my superb editor, Becky Hilliker, and Lauren Benesh for the photo on the back cover. Above all a deep debt of gratitude goes to my wife, Kelly, who put up with me and this project—but especially me—for many years, and my kids, Hank and Charlie, who inspire me, supplying vivid examples concerning how irrepressible boys act. Finally, I acknowledge with great affection, my father, Weldon, who introduced me not only to this story, but to the value of sitting down, staying put, and working, and my mother, Patricia, who showed me the transcendence on offer to us in patiently striving to create, simply with what we have.