Harry & Ruth

by Howard Owen

  “I’m going to see you Friday night,” she said, smiling and shaking her head.

  “Write me,” he said again. “Tell me everything you can think of about yourself. I want to know everything.”

  “I don’t have that much time.… OK, Harry Stein. I’ll write you, then. I just hope it gets there before I see you again.”

  And she turned and left, jingling as she disappeared into the darkness.

  By the time Harry got back to the car, the girl with bad teeth was leaving. She seemed offended.

  Olkewicz had a reddish mark on the side of his face.

  “Can’t we give you a ride?” he asked, undiscouraged.

  The girl did not look back.

  “Jeez,” Olkewicz whined, “I wish you coulda waited a little longer, Stein. I almost had her going.”

  Harry Stein said nothing, and they departed in what he thought was silence. About halfway back to camp, his traveling companion thought to ask him how his evening had gone.

  Pretty well, Harry said, all things considered.

  “I thought so,” Olkewicz said. “You’ve been whistling ever since we left that damn church.”

  THREE

  On a warm fall night, the sixth of October, Harry Stein and Ruth Crowder went to White Oak Beach, where they’d had their first actual date. They parked a hundred yards past the last inhabited houses and went over the dunes to the water.

  Ruth preferred to stay along the boardwalk, where the ocean was only background noise and a cool, salty breeze. But there might not be a night this perfect again until spring, and she did want to please Harry Stein, so she wore her bathing suit underneath her dress.

  At Virginia Beach, where Harry went as a child, it might already be too late for swimming, but here, it was perfect. The water was cooling more slowly than the air; it felt warmer than it would some days in July. Farther off into the darkness, a Tommy Dorsey tune was playing.

  Harry went rushing in, as he always did, diving headfirst into a wave. When he surfaced and looked back, Ruth was still standing where he’d left her, going no farther than the very tip of the tide’s boundary. She reminded Harry of a little girl at the ocean for the first time, fearful every time the water crept up to her. She was so beautiful in the white one-piece bathing suit. For the rest of his life, string bikinis and clothing-optional beaches notwithstanding, no girl on any beach would stir him so. She had the kind of tan that she accepted as her birthright, merely for living that far south and being young. On that night, in that place, he thought perfection had temporarily been achieved.

  The spell lasted a few seconds. Then, dragging her into the water seemed like the only thing to do. But when Harry came out, grinning his intentions, stooped in front of her and lifted her over his shoulder, then started walking back into the water, she went suddenly and completely berserk. Before Harry could put her down, she had managed to give him what would turn into a rather impressive black eye.

  “I can’t swim!” she kept screaming, and by the time he put her down, she was crying so hard she could barely catch her breath.

  Harry knew people who couldn’t swim. In Richmond, no summer passed without some luckless child diving into the river on a dare and never again touching dry land. He himself learned in stages, with his father’s hand growing lighter and lighter every time they tried at a lake or the pool. One day, the water was holding him and he was moving forward, all of 20 feet.

  “See, Harry,” his father had said, putting a sunburned arm around him while he used the other to keep his cigar from getting wet, “now you can swim. Now you’re a big boy.” Old Harry had even smiled.

  “Can’t swim” did not properly describe Ruth’s relationship with water, though. Harry was just beginning to fully understand that she feared it the way other children feared fire.

  In a letter the next day, Ruth apologized, and tried to explain.

  “More than anything else,” she wrote, “I remember the day of the big hurricane, the one in 1928. You see, it hit on October 6. I should have told you about it before, but it gets treated like some deep, dark secret around here. We don’t talk about it among ourselves, even on October 6. When I was a little girl, I would ask my grandparents about it, or one of my aunts, and they’d shut up tight. If you asked Uncle Matty, he’d start to cry. After a while, I stopped asking.

  “That day, I remember my grandfather arguing with Momma and Daddy, trying to keep them from going to the beach. It was windy, but the sun was shining, and I was crying because they wouldn’t take me with them. After they left, Grandma let me help’ her make biscuits, and by the time we were finished, late that morning, it had gotten very dark. Granddaddy wouldn’t come away from the window. He was looking toward the ocean …”

  Before he fell in love with Ruth Crowder, before he became immersed in a girl and a family and a place to which only a war could have led him, Harry was unfamiliar with the concept of family secrets.

  Among the Steins, there were no secrets, no subtext. Until the day she died, Harry’s mother was liable, at any family gathering, to launch into a monologue about what exactly went wrong between Harry and Gloria, with aunts and uncles and cousins freely volunteering their opinions, pro-Harry and con.

  The Crowders, though, not only could keep a secret, they had trouble letting go of one—provided it was important enough. With the trivial ones, they have proved themselves, even at this late date, to be completely untrustworthy.

  The party for Ruth’s 70th birthday, meant to be a surprise, had no chance whatsoever of remaining one. Her younger son, Paul, must have known that when he enlisted Hank’s aid in luring her down to Florida under the guise of an ordinary week at the beach. It took Ruth all of five minutes to worm the truth from Hank. But she still agreed, somewhat hesitantly, to go.

  “Paul,” she wrote to her younger son, “thank you for thinking of me, but I just don’t like surprises. I have never gained much pleasure from them.”

  Three weeks after they met, Harry told Ruth about failing to get into law school, and about his lukewarm plans to try again after the war. He told her not to tell anyone else. Three weeks later, he stopped at the small general store in Saraw, beside the river, to buy cigarettes. The store owner, a man who (Harry thought) didn’t even know his name, said, in his most conspiratorial tone, “Don’t worry, son. You’ll get into that lawyers’ college next time for sure.”

  With the important and central mysteries, though, such as the story of Belle and Theron Crowder and The One in ’28, information was not so easily obtained. Some of this reticence might have grown from an inability or unwillingness to deal with trouble and heartache, a fear of the uncomfortable. Or it might have had its seeds in the belief that knowledge is power, that if you know the old, old stories and no one else does, you have something of value, something not to be given away to every meddlesome stranger.

  Once, when Harry expressed his theories on Crowder secrets in a letter, Ruth wrote him back that all it was, was good manners. Sometimes, though, it was maddening to her as well. What would the South be, she asked Harry once in another letter, without its idiosyncracies? He wrote back: Sane.

  Harry did, though, before the spring of 1943 took him away, hear most of the story of Belle and Theron and the One in ’28.

  Theron Crowder IV was a handsome man. He had a brooding, unflinching, angular look, even in the wedding picture, not hungry-seeming like some underfed tenant farmer but more the haughty, high-cheekboned look of the country patrician, king of an undemanding hill. He was the last of three children, born in 1902 into what passed for a well-to-do family in a small North Carolina town. His father owned the lumber mill and turpentine works that were the only reason the Saraw and Wallace Railroad, all 34 miles of it, was built. Timber was shipped from the forests farther inland to the mill. Lumber and supplies went back up the same way, or down the Saraw River, before it silted over. Young Theron’s father, whom everyone called T.D., was a stubborn man when Harry knew him. In his prime, bef
ore The One in ’28, his inflexibility was his strength.

  Theron IV had two older sisters, Charlotte and Jane, and it is still accepted dogma among older Saraw residents who remember the stories that he was “spoiled rotten.” (Harry has a theory: There are approximately six times as many boys whose siblings are all older sisters as there are girls with all older brothers, or at least there were at that time and in that place. The husbands made their wives keep having babies until they either died or produced something on which a Roman numeral could be hung.)

  The Crowders were the only family in Saraw living in a brick house. They wanted their son to marry well, and so Theron IV’s acceptable gene pool in the town of his birth was limited. Because he was warned not to, and because of how he was, he fell in love with Belle Culbreth. In the surviving photographs, she could be Ruth’s twin.

  Belle was the best-looking girl in town. She was the youngest of nine children who lived with their mother and occasional men alongside Turpentine Creek, among other families of subsistence farmers and sawmill workers whose rickety pine houses were connected to each other and their respective privies by winding dirt paths where copperheads liked to sun. Some of Belle’s siblings had “Father: Unknown” by their names at the county courthouse. (“Don’t you dare mention this to anyone,” Ruth warned when she finally admitted that fact to Harry.)

  Belle Culbreth was said to be “wild as a buck.” When she was 16, she went for a ride with her boyfriend, who stopped long enough on the way to the beach to rob a store at gunpoint. He was caught, and he claimed that Belle was the one who had planned it all and urged him on, but the jury believed her, and only the boy went to prison.

  What Ruth herself knew, she came to know in drips and drabs; nobody in her family told a truly important story straight on. The ones worth remembering came from the periphery, from the corner of your eye and ear, pearls thrown aside casually in the middle of a conversation about pie recipes or gallbladder surgery.

  Her grandparents were horrified when young Theron told them he was marrying Belle Culbreth. Besides the social chasm, they were both 17, just out of high school.

  But Theron was wild, too. Before he was 16, around the time that Belle was (by the most charitable interpretation) a spectator and passenger in an armed robbery, he had tried to enlist in the Army during the waning days of World War I. After he was rejected because of his age, he got into a fight with two soldiers on the courthouse square in Newport and came home with a broken nose.

  They were, Ruth’s Aunt Charlotte would say, two of a kind, for better or for worse. They eloped.

  Theron’s parents tried to get the marriage annulled. T.D. threatened, then pleaded. He sent Theron’s beloved older sisters to cry on the Culbreths’ doorstep. Sudie, Theron’s mother, shut herself in her room for two weeks, threatening to die. Finally, though, she sent for Theron and Belle and told them they could have a roof over their heads, no doubt a finer roof than was covering their shack along Turpentine Creek.

  T.D., when he accepted reality and tried to cut his losses, did his wife one better. He told the newlyweds that he would build them a brand-new house, fine as any in Saraw, on the birth of their first male child.

  It is an indicator of the stubbornness of Belle and Theron that they waited six years to have their first and only child, a girl they named Ruth McNair Crowder. Belle nearly died giving birth and was told she couldn’t have any more children. T.D. waited three more years, obviously believing that the promise of a new house would cause Belle to will herself pregnant, whatever the physical barriers.

  “I’m pretty sure,” Ruth wrote Harry once, “that Momma didn’t really want to have children. Oh, she was a good enough mother, as best I can remember, but it wasn’t what she was cut out to be.”

  What Ruth can remember: her mother singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” to make her laugh; the way her father’s breath smelled when he’d kiss her good night, a taste she later learned was a mixture of tobacco and bourbon; falling down the stairs at her grandparents’ and her mother rushing her to the hospital in Newport for stitches, then taking her to Pearson’s Drug Store afterward for her first vanilla milkshake; her father carrying her on his shoulders through springtime fields, running down the furrows while she squealed in fear and delight.

  And, of course, the day itself.

  Finally, in 1928, T.D. brought in a crew and had the workers start on the long-promised house. Theron and Belle had lived with him and Sudie and the others for nine years already, and it is possible that he was driven by a desire for space and privacy and peace in his own house.

  The footings were dug in June. By October, the house was three-fourths ready.

  Fourteen years later, Harry still could see where those footings were. After the hurricane, T.D. Crowder had the same crew tear the house down and haul away the lumber and bricks.

  In 1928, Theron and Belle were 26. Theron was helping run the mill, working six days most weeks, but he and Belle still had some of the wild streak that made them the life of the party and the despair of the Crowders. Only two years before, they had been arrested in Newport for “public lewdness in a motor vehicle,” which was being driven by Theron at the time.

  That fall, they must have been at least somewhat content with their lives. They and their daughter would be moving into the finest house in town—a two-story brick Colonial—by Christmas. Theron’s future was secure if not dazzling in its possibilities. They were said to have been the center of young married life in Saraw; if the Crowders never quite accepted Belle as their daughter, she apparently was liked well enough by her husband’s peers in Saraw and Newport.

  The storm came on a Wednesday. Some of Belle and Theron’s friends talked them into driving to White Oak Beach for the day. Another couple was already vacationing at a cottage there, and they talked their friends into joining them for a hurricane party. It had been done before: Everyone would sit on the porch, drink and stare down an ocean. One time, two years earlier, the waves had completely surrounded the party cottage, cutting it off from the mainland. But the water receded in a few minutes, and everyone had a story to tell.

  Theron had an almost-new model-T. He told his father he was taking the day off, and he and Belle both laughed at T.D.’s threats and warnings.

  The old maps and the history books show how the big storms sculpted the Carolina coast, and continue to do so.

  A large percentage of Atlantic hurricanes head straight for the part of North Carolina that juts into harm’s way. Then, they swerve, borne out to sea by the Gulf Stream, dealing a glancing blow to a few beach towns, sometimes plowing into Long Island or the New England coast, or limping, old and broken, into the North Atlantic. Sometimes, one will hit the coast head-on, washing a few abandoned cottages out to sea. Even those, though, almost invariably weaken as they make landfall. Even those tend to hover a bit, almost stopping, before finally lumbering landward.

  Once every few decades, though, seldom enough to breed carelessness, there is a storm like The One in ’28.

  Technically, White Oak Beach is an island. From Newport, the river is on one side and the ocean on the other. Fast-food restaurants and the cheap cottages of those not able to get closer to the sea line the six-lane road all the way to the end. At the five-mile mark, the road goes over a slight rise and the water is visible on both sides, several hundred yards away. Just before the beach itself, the distance closes until the land is bisected by a channel 200 yards across.

  The channel is younger than Ruth. It is not man-made.

  Theron and Belle took a bottle of whiskey with them that Wednesday, bought from a bootlegger on the beach highway who later remembered them because Theron had thrown the bottle’s cap away as they drove off.

  There were six other couples, all from Saraw, at the cottage that day. Most of the rest had, like Theron and Belle, driven there that morning, looking for a little excitement.

  This was before much was known about hurricanes, beyond the empirical wisdom
of the survivors. No one bothered to name them. Even less was known about storm surges. Still, everyone knew something was coming. Hardly a soul was left at the beach by the time Theron and Belle got there; all that remained were a few dozen partiers at a handful of houses. The cottages almost all had names; the one where Ruth’s parents spent their last morning was the Sink ‘r’ Swim, because it was owned by the Sink family that lived just two blocks from the Crowders, and, Ruth thinks when she considers such imponderables, because perhaps Someone has a sense of humor: Neither Theron nor Belle could swim at all.

  Around 10, the sky became twilight dark, with a greenish tint. The storm wasn’t supposed to hit until early afternoon, so it was presumed, according to one survivor, that the revelers had a couple of hours to drink and dance before deciding whether to ride it out.

  From later reports, three bad things happened with no warning:

  The storm, already rolling along at close to 110 miles per hour, suddenly strengthened, to what was later estimated to be about 140.

  Also, it originally was on a path that would have brushed the coast around White Oak Beach with gale-to-small-hurricane-force winds. About 9 that morning, though, it inexplicably took what was later called a hard left turn.

  When it turned, it also accelerated, from 5 miles an hour forward speed to an estimated 20–25. It roared into the cape just south of White Oak Beach like a bull charging a matador.

  Even all that might not have doomed Theron and Belle except for a fourth item. Above the equator, hurricanes blow counter-clockwise. Thus, to the west of the storm’s eye, the force of the wind is lessened by the extent of the storm’s forward motion. A 140-mile-per hour storm, moving 25 miles per hour forward, might only have winds of 115 miles an hour, the forward motion acting against the storm winds coming around from the north.

  East of the storm, the opposite is true. The forward speed of the hurricane is added to the wind speed.

  The hard left turn put White Oak Beach east of the storm. Winds were estimated later to have exceeded 160 miles per hour.