Dark Water Rising (11 page)

“Strain it through your teeth in case there’s any broken glass and put it drop by drop into little Tom’s mouth.”

Mrs. Longineau nodded, and while she did as she was told, we waited.

When I sat back down in the hall with the other men, I noticed that the water had receded. It was too dark to tell by how much, but the floor no longer sloshed beneath me.

I rested my hand on Matt’s baseball bulging in my pocket, and Josiah and I leaned against the soaked and
crumbling plaster. My thoughts drifted from little Tom to Thirty-fifth Street, from the faces of my family to Ella Rose, but they always ended up in the alley behind Butcher Miller’s house, reaching for the woman and her child.

13

A sound stirred me from my sleep, a soft cry that finally hit such a demanding note, I jerked upright. I heard relieved laughter coming from the bathroom, then from the men around me. Little Tom was awake and hungry.

I laughed then, too, and for the first time noticed that Tom’s howls were the only ones I heard. The wind had died. Someone forced open the swollen doors in the hallway, and through the missing roof in the sloping east bedrooms, I saw faint, purple signs of coming daybreak.

The storm was over.

All around me I felt men rise in the dark hall—soldiers from Fort Crockett, neighbors I barely knew, and some whose faces I’d never seen before yesterday. As if Tom’s cry had been the final call back to the real world, we pushed ourselves up from the buckled floor, then pulled up our neighbor beside us. Women slowly
crept from the bathroom, a few with candles, some with children hugged against their legs, but not a word was spoken.

Josiah helped me to my feet, and in the flickering candlelight, I could see the relief in his face. I straightened the makeshift bandage on his head, stretched my stiff back and sore legs, and heard a hoarse voice calling from outside.

“Anybody in there?”

Surprise crackled around me. We hurried down the stairs, waded through several feet of foul-smelling muddy water, and ripped away what was left of the closet doors we’d nailed up.

There must’ve been a dozen of us crowded around the splintered doorway, staring in shocked silence at a man standing in the gloom, stark naked except for a piece of mattress ticking.

“It’s me,” the man said. “Munn.”

When we finally came to our senses, Mr. Mason drew Captain Munn up the stairs, out of the muddy water, and into the candlelight.

The poor man collapsed on the upper landing, telling us how his house had broken apart all around him and how he’d clung to a mattress all night in the raging waves and rain. Then he looked at us with eyes dark and bottomless, swimming with the deepest sorrow I’d ever beheld.

“They’re gone,” he said quietly.

His words betrayed no emotion, and yet tears rolled down his face.

“My wife, her mother, my house.” He slowly shook his head. “Everyone, everything. Gone.”

I’d never seen such desolation in a man’s face, and a wave of fear for what I might find at Uncle Nate’s rose inside me.

Mrs. Mason brought a rag and tried to clean mud from the captain’s cuts, and Mrs. Vedder, who’d found a spare shirt and pants, squeezed around the crowd on the landing and set the small stack of clothing beside him.

He stared at it for a long moment, then offered a simple “Thank you kindly.”

It was then that I saw his bleak situation fully. That stack of clothing was all he had in this world. I looked around me, from face to face, and saw the same fear in almost every eye. Maybe none of us would end up with any more than the clothes on our backs, but what tore at my heart most was the misery our lives would become if we had no family left, either.

Mr. Mason gave the captain a pat on the shoulder, squeezed past him, and headed back down the stairs. Though it still wasn’t light enough to see much, he was determined to climb through a north window to see how his house had fared. While he was gone, others
decided to leave, too, wading into the dim, battered landscape, anxious to know the fate of battalions, friends, and family. I wanted to go, too, but Josiah hesitated.

“Best we wait till we got us some light ’fore we gets into all that mud.”

He was right, of course. Water was still draining back into the gulf. It would be much easier and safer if we waited just a while longer.

When Mr. Mason got back, faces turned toward him, eager for news of what he’d seen. He handed Mrs. Mason a tin of sardines and a bottle of beer.

“They were in the only corner left standing of our brick storeroom, sitting on a shelf like God himself had put his hand over them.” He laughed at the absurdity of it. “Imagine that, Virginia. Sardines and beer.”

Mrs. Mason reached for her husband’s hand and waited to hear the rest.

“It’s all gone,” he whispered, “like Captain Munn said. Everything, Virginia. Just gone.”

She slowly shook her head. “Not everything, Kearny. We’re all still here.” She pulled the key off the sardine can. “And now we’ve got sardines and beer, too.”

Uneasy laughter skittered around the hallway while she opened the tin and the bottle of beer and passed them to what was left of our group. I took a small portion, just enough to make me realize how hungry and thirsty I really was.

“The water in the cistern is salty,” Mr. Mason said. “We’ll have to do without until we can get back to town.”

Heads nodded around me, but worry showed in every face. I couldn’t even guess what we might find as we headed toward town. Every cistern left standing could very well be ruined.

When the darkness over the east bedrooms had brightened, we eased back down the stairs and sloshed through the stinking mud to see for ourselves what the storm had done.

Under a soft Sunday-morning sky, I stood in knee-deep water, staring. The Vedder house, swept off its foundation and listing to the north, was one of only three houses left standing. I looked toward Avenue R where our rental had been and saw only more debris and muddy water.

Wreckage spread in every direction. I saw piles of broken chairs and cooking pots, baby buggies and shredded bedding, soaked books and photographs, and all of it lay half-buried in the foulest mud I’d ever smelled. A sickening sludge, churned up from the bowels of the gulf, had painted most everything dark gray. I turned slowly, trying to take in the dismal landscape, already yearning for something green, but not a leaf or a blade of grass could be seen anywhere.

“Papa!” Jacob called. “Where are the Peeks?”

We all looked to the west where the Peeks’ house had been, but there was nothing left, not even the foundation. Mr. and Mrs. Peek, six children, and two servants were gone.

Just gone.

“And it was to their house,” Mr. Vedder whispered, “that I would’ve taken you all for refuge.”

The staggering truth of what might’ve been hit us all.

I saw Josiah staring past me, a wretched look on his face, and turned, trying to see what had caught his attention. A big black retriever lay almost buried in mud. Flies buzzed around his eyes and gaping mouth, but it appeared to be the piece of blue gingham floating next to the dog that had carved the painful look on Josiah’s face. Puzzled, I looked closer, and finally understood. A battered, muddy arm protruded from a sleeve. What once must’ve been sunshine hair now lay matted and strewn across a porcelain face, partially concealing glassy blue eyes and pale lips.

Josiah stepped back, but I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop staring at that tangled, yellow hair.

“It ain’t her,” Josiah whispered.

I pulled in a ragged breath. I knew it wasn’t, even if my heart didn’t, but having seen one body, now I saw them everywhere. I counted three more, and while others checked them, trying to figure out who they were, Josiah pulled me back into the house.

“We needs to wait a bit longer,” he said softly, “for the water to go on down.”

I nodded again, too sick to speak, and crawled up the stairs, out of the greasy dark mud to wait. We could do nothing else. It was impossible to bury a single soul with so much muddy water around.

With each hour that passed, the day grew warmer and the smell grew worse. The mud pushed ashore from the bottom of the gulf had its own unbearable stench, but with such intense heat, I feared something even less tolerable would soon drift in through the broken windows.

I buried my face in my hands, unable to get the picture of the girl in blue gingham out of my head. Every time I thought of her, I saw only Ella Rose.

14

By midmorning, sweat crawled all over me, trickling down my scalp and back. The children whined for water, and fear pulled at every face. We couldn’t stay in this battered house any longer. Like everyone else, I was thirsty, too, but it was the worry that pushed me back outside. I needed to know if my family was safe.

The sun had risen in a bright sky like nothing had happened, but stifling odors from mud and death said otherwise. I tried to remember the scent of fresh-cut lumber, or clover, or jasmine, or Mama’s bread browning in the oven—anything that might cut through the sick air that coated my throat and the back of my tongue.

Nothing helped.

I avoided looking at the lifeless limbs and faces, the animals that would soon be swelling in the heat, and concentrated on getting my bearings. Not a single
street or landmark was visible above the ruin that lay around us.

From the Vedders’ second-floor window, I’d seen a wide ridge of debris off to the east. It looked to be several stories high, as if a great broom had swept up everything in its path and left it there in a twisted heap. I’d wondered then how many people had huddled in those shattered houses last night, and now I wondered how many might still be there, twined inside the wreckage.

Though the water had receded somewhat, we finally decided that making our way to the beach might be best, where the rubble wasn’t quite so high and the salt air sweeter. Farther down, we might see an easier path through the ridge of debris that lay between us and town.

We must’ve been a strange-looking bunch, slowly moving over the muddy gray remains of what was left of so many lives. Captain Munn had gathered up his pants with a piece of cording, like a kid in his big brother’s hand-me-downs, and Mrs. Longineau, holding little Tom, walked beside her husband with the back of her dress pulled up over her bare shoulders, shredded underskirts rustling behind her in the breeze. All the Vedders still wore their woolen bathing suits, except for Jacob. He didn’t complain, but he’d developed
a permanent scowl at having to face the world in his sister’s petticoat. The rest of us—the Masons and Collums, Private Billings, Josiah and I—took turns carrying Francesca, Katherine, and her kitten, following along in our tattered and grimy clothing.