by John Hersey
“This whole building’s going,” Mrs. Placek said gloomily.
“Oh, dear, no, I doubt that,” Mrs. Kelley said.
In just a few minutes, this doubt of Mrs. Kelley’s was badly shaken. In full sight of Yvonne and Art Royer and Mrs. Placek—she herself, thank heavens, was not watching—a building across and up the river, the first one this side of the washed-out bridge, slowly twisted and went limp and simply fell in a thousand pieces into the river.
* * *
—
The building that had fallen was the Keywan block, in which Tex Stoklasa had had his room.
It was six o’clock, and the flood had reached its crest, which it was to hold for nearly six hours. The rain continued. Highland Lake was running over its spillways and tearing out threatening gullies right across the macadam road on the causeway on either side of them and causing terrible damage in factories and homes between the lake and the river below. All the way from Norfolk, the Mad River was brimming. Along Main Street, it was fifteen feet above its normal level, and the water was ten feet deep in the street itself. It was literally ripping up Main Street. The pavement and sidewalks were being sliced away and gutted six feet deep. The water had broken the plate-glass windows of most of the stores along the street and had ruined their stocks. Winsted Motors, a Buick showroom and service station that had straddled the river high up the street, had been completely demolished, and its new and used cars were rolling all the way downtown, and its roof had lodged itself in mid-street right in front of the Town Hall. On the second floor of the Town Hall, forty-one policemen and Civil Defense workers and the chairlady of the Winsted Red Cross were marooned. All but two of the town’s twelve bridges had collapsed or were about to. A four-story hotel at the foot of the street, the Clifton, had floated off its foundation and into the river and downstream three-quarters of a mile, and had settled on the town ball field, more or less erect but with its two lower floors worn away. The water was doing damage to private property that the town estimated at nearly twenty-eight million dollars—more than the entire grand list of assessed taxable property, for assessments in Winsted, as generally in Connecticut, were considerably under real values.
After Tex had had his drinks, he had returned to the Keywan block and sat up talking with several other men there. From time to time, they had gone outdoors to pick up news and watch the river level. After the bridge went, it appeared to them that the foundations of the Keywan block were threatened, and they had gone up to get the landladies, two elderly maiden sisters known in town as the Garrity girls, to evacuate. But the Garrity girls had long considered the building their home, and to them home had always meant safety, and they had refused to leave. After quite an argument, Tex and a friend had bodily removed the ladies, and within minutes the building had fallen. Tex had not had time to go back for his things, and into the river had gone his climbing and welding equipment: his shield, sleeves, pants, boots, belt—nearly six hundred dollars’ worth of gear.
A few minutes after the collapse of the Keywan block, the next building downriver, a fifty-year-old brick structure called the Bannon block, turned half around on its base, partly crumbled at the bottom, and leaned over at a crazy angle away from its downriver neighbor, the Capitol Products building, and toward the Keywan foundations.
Tex joined a crowd of about two hundred people on the higher ground near the railroad station and, through the gap where the Keywan block had been, watched what was now happening on the far—the Main Street—side of the river. It was quite a show.
* * *
—
Mrs. Kelley and her companions were subjected to a series of horrifying wrenches, and the Landi tenement perceptibly heeled toward the river. A large piece of plaster fell from Mrs. Kelley’s bedroom ceiling. Mrs. Kelley, who was sitting in the kitchen once more, wanted then to get that room out of sight, but she could not close the door, because the frame had been twisted and the floor was all out of kilter.
The four people in the Landi tenement had no way of knowing that the three buildings upriver from theirs, undermined by the water and battered by descending debris, were crumbling and falling, one by one. First went the four-story Petrunti block, containing Riiska’s Taxi Stand, Rocky’s Garage, and Luben’s Cleaners; then the two-story building with Pelkey & Simpson’s hardware store; then, next door to the Landi block, the two-story building that housed Jimmy’s Restaurant.
Terrified by the cataclysmic shaking in Mrs. Kelley’s apartment, and seeing the crowd across the way by the railroad station, Art Royer went out on the balcony at the back and waved to the people there and beckoned and held up four fingers, indicating that there were four people in the building to be somehow saved.
* * *
—
Tex Stoklasa saw Royer. He ran into the Capitol Products building and crept out onto the very edge of the sagging concrete floor of the plant’s press room and looked the situation over. He was about ten feet above the surface of the Mad River, down which all sorts of heavy debris was swiftly floating. The Landi building was straight across from him. The river was several feet up the wall of the ground floor of the Landi block, and of the buildings below it. At first, Stoklasa thought he might be able to throw a rope across to a balcony, if one of the people could climb down to catch it. Then he saw a double clothesline stretched on pulleys between an upper floor of the fifth building downriver from the Landi block and a wooden building belonging to Capitol Products, adjacent to the one he was in. He ran around into the wooden building and found that the pulley at the near end of the clothesline was attached to its outer wall, right next to a window.
Then, in a tenement two buildings down from the Landi block, over Pete’s Barber Shop, he saw a thin young man and a plump young woman standing at a third-floor window and apparently calling for help, though over the rushing of the river, the grinding of lumber in it, the pounding of the rain, and the whistling of the strong wind he could not hear their words. He tried to signal to them to make their way, if possible, down to the building with the clothesline—the Lentini block—but they evidently did not understand.
There were others around Stoklasa now, and someone suggested writing a message on a piece of cardboard and displaying it. Soon Tex was holding up a big card on which was written, “COME DOWN HERE,” and he pointed across at the Lentini block. The man disappeared from the window.
Tex told the people around him to try to find a length of half-inch rope and a climbing belt.
* * *
—
The young man and woman in the tenement over Pete’s Barber Shop were Billy Fields, a twenty-seven-year-old employee of Hickey’s Fur Shop, and his wife. When Fields read the sign, he at once started working his way downriver. On a stair landing of his building he found a long-unused, locked door connecting with the next building, the Serafini block; he broke it down with his shoulder. He went out onto a back porch of the Serafini block and saw that the next building downriver, the Orsi block, was only one story high, with a roof sloping back from Main Street. He ran down the fire escape to the second-story balcony of the Serafini block and there discovered that he could climb around the end wall of the balcony and drop a few feet to the Orsi roof, and he did. At the far end of the Orsi roof, he had a six-foot climb up a wooden wall to a sort of lean-to roof over the back rooms on the second floor of the Lentini block. Once he was on this roof, he was able to make his way up to the balcony from which the clothesline ran.
* * *
—
By this time, someone had produced a rope from the New England Knitting Company factory, across the street and upriver from the former site of Keywan’s, and someone else had miraculously procured a belt with a pulley on it. Tex saw that the rope, while far from new, was a sturdy half-inch line—regular nine-hundred-pound-test rope, of the sort steeplejacks are commonly satisfied to use. He tied one end of it to the upper strand of the clothesline and pul
led it across the river. Fields untied the rope from the clothesline. Tex held up a new cardboard sign: “TIE ROPE TO POST, KEEP AHOLT OF END.” Fields did as directed. Tex strung the belt pulley onto his end of the line and took turns of the rope around two stanchions inside the wooden Capitol Products building and directed men to hold the free end and keep the whole line taut. He took everything off but his dungarees. He slung the belt outside the window, backed into it, so that he sat in the loose loop of the belt facing the Capitol Products window, and pulled himself hand over hand across above the river in the pouring rain.
Stoklasa and Fields dropped to the Orsi roof, swung around the end wall of the Serafini balcony, then ran along the connected porches. Fields stopped off for his wife; Stoklasa went on to the Landi block and up the fire escapes to Mrs. Kelley and her companions. Curtly, Stoklasa directed them to follow him. Mrs. Kelley put on her winter coat and picked up her pocketbook and went out on the porch after the young man. The others came behind.
Stoklasa on one side and Fields on the other pushed and supported the women past the one dangerous point—out around the end of the Serafini porch and down onto the Orsi roof. Mrs. Kelley felt all out of breath, but she trusted the strong, half-naked young man. At the far end of the Orsi roof, Tex above and Fields and Royer below raised the women to the lean-to roof of Lentini’s block, and from there to the Lentini balcony. When they were all assembled, Tex began to explain how to ride the belt across. The rope sloped downward to Capitol Products. At its lowest point, it was about fifteen feet above the water. The lean-to roof provided a good launching platform. Whoever was going over, Tex said, should sit in the belt, facing Capitol Products, cross his feet over the rope ahead of the belt pulley, and grasp the rope with his hands and feed himself down the incline. Mrs. Kelley gasped. She hadn’t the strength for such work. An argument followed as to who should go first. Tex urged Mrs. Fields to go. She refused. Fields tried to persuade her. She wept, and finally said she would never go.
Then Tex turned to Mrs. Kelley and said, “Come on, lady, I’m taking you over.”
“Gracious!” Mrs. Kelley said. “I’m not certain I want to go over on that little rope.”
“There’s no time to lose,” Stoklasa disgustedly said to the whole group. “All these buildings may go down.”
Mrs. Kelley was surprised to hear herself say, “Tell me what to do. I’ll go.”
The next thing Mrs. Kelley knew, Stoklasa had lifted her like a doll off the porch and out onto the slanting roof. He was strong!
“What’ve you got that for, for Christ’s sake?” he said, pointing to her pocketbook. “We may go in the river.”
“I’ve got valuables in there, young man,” she said. “If I go in the river, that goes with me.”
“Throw it on the roof,” he said.
“It goes where I go,” she said.
“God damn it, throw it on the roof,” Stoklasa said. “I’ll bring it over. Take that heavy coat off.”
“Excuse me, I’m staying dry,” Mrs. Kelley said with considerable spirit. But she did put down her bag, with a great deal of reluctance. She had already let herself be separated from her insulin packet, for the first time in many years. And now her money. She kept her coat on.
“O.K., come on,” Stoklasa said roughly. “Let’s get going.”
Stoklasa sat in the belt at the edge of the lean-to roof, put his hands and feet up, and directed Mrs. Kelley to lie supine on him, tucking both legs through the loop of the belt. She found herself with her bad foot lying on the young man’s legs and the other up over the rope above his feet. Tex told her to hold the rope with both hands and keep them moving constantly, hand over hand, feeding out rope as they moved.
“Let’s go,” he said.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “I’m so nervous.”
“Don’t worry, lady, I’ll get you over,” he said. “Whatever you do, don’t look down.”
They swung out over the river. They moved terribly slowly. The rope rubbed Mrs. Kelley’s right leg. The line swayed in the wind. It was raining.
* * *
—
From the Capitol Products side, the sight of Stoklasa with the little old lady in the black coat on his belly, slowly easing down the swaying line, was so fearful that many people felt ill and some had to look away. The proprietor of the factory had to leave the building and stand on the railroad-station side.
Now someone in Capitol Products spotted an old, old man in a window of one of the buildings upstream from the rope. He had a white stubble on his chin and was wearing a hat in the house. He was watching Stoklasa and Mrs. Kelley and smiling and nodding, apparently oblivious to all peril.
* * *
—
About halfway across, Stoklasa grunted and said, “I got to take a breather. Hold up.” He stopped. “This is rough,” he said. “We ought to have a block and fall.”
Mrs. Kelley, looking steadfastly up at the leaking heavens, felt so agitated that she wondered whether she was going to be able to keep hold of the rope. At last, the young man told her to start moving again. The rope began to burn her leg. They seemed to make steady progress, but about ten feet from the far side Stoklasa stopped for another rest.
“I’m getting out of breath,” Mrs. Kelley said. “I feel as if my breathing is going to be shut off.”
“Hang on,” Stoklasa said. “It’s only going to be another minute.”
He started again.
At last, the hands of two men named DeLutrie and Shakar grasped Mrs. Kelley, and she heard one of them say, “It’s all right. I have you. You’re safe now.”
“I know it! I believe you!” she said feelingly.
Then she was cradled like a child in a man’s arms in the window. “I couldn’t have stood much more,” she said between gasps for air, and she tried to smile.
Someone drew up a wooden crate and sat her on it. How good it felt to have her feet on a solid floor! Terra firma! She still felt out of breath, and she asked if she could have a sip of water. Someone said there was no water; after a few moments she was handed a bottle of cream soda. Then an office chair with a spring on it was produced, and she was tilted back in it, and someone fanned her with the top of a carton. She began to feel more composed, and she sat up straight. She noticed that a pocket had been sheared off her coat. “Well!” she said cheerfully. “Thank goodness for my coat. I’m dry as a chip, anyway.” A woman handed her a cup of hot coffee, and she drank every drop. “That is bracing!” she said. Then, all at once, she grew terribly disturbed, for she had thought of Yvonne. “Can you tell me whether someone is about to come over on the rope?” she asked a woman nearby.
By that time, Stoklasa had gone back and both Fields and his wife had crossed safely on the belt, without Stoklasa’s help. Fields had gone first, to show his heavy wife how to manage, and she had relented from her determination never to ride that rope. Mrs. Kelley had not seen them lifted into Capitol Products.
Yvonne Brochu was on her way across, solo, when Mrs. Kelley asked about her, and in a few moments Mrs. Kelley saw her friend being helped into the window. The seventy-five-year-old woman stood up and tottered to her young friend and took her in her arms. “I’m so glad to see you, my dear,” she said.
* * *
—
On the other side, Tex helped first Art Royer and then Mrs. Placek onto the rope. Then he scrambled along the buildings to find the old man in the window. This was a seventy-seven-year-old town character named Sam Lane.
“Come on,” Stoklasa said. He was getting tired, and he was impatient. The buildings were shaking badly.
“What do you think I am?” Lane said in a cracking voice. “A tightrope walker?” He chuckled.
“You coming or not?” Stoklasa asked.
“I can’t leave Queenie,” Lane said, shaking his head. Lane had a squat, miscellaneous dog he called Queenie; h
e used to tell Winsteders she was a Spitz—she chaws tobacco and spits, he would say.
Tex climbed back and rode the rope to Capitol Products, carrying Mrs. Kelley’s pocketbook and one belonging to Mrs. Placek. He dropped the pocketbooks on the floor and walked out of the building. Someone tried to shake his hand, but he wouldn’t be grabbed. There was a Navy helicopter landing near the parking lot of the Pontiac place downriver, and Tex ran down to it. The pilot asked for a volunteer to be lifted on a harness to rescue a woman from the Burke & Navin building, which was all twisted in the current at the foot of Main Street. Tex said he’d go. The ‘copter carried him over and dropped him on the roof. He climbed down and broke a window to speak to the woman. She came at him half-crazed and asked him what he meant by breaking in the windows of a woman’s home. He said he was the fellow who had come to save her. She said he wasn’t the right person; someone else was coming for her.
“All right, you dumb jerk,” Tex said. “Stay there and drown.” He waved for the helicopter to come and pick him up.
* * *
—
In the next twelve hours, the flood abated, almost as quickly as it had come up. The building in which Lane had decided to stay with Queenie remained standing; he eventually walked out onto dry land on the arm of a policeman. The Burke & Navin building, where Stoklasa had left the woman who was expecting someone else to come and save her, was frightfully battered, but it did not fall, and she, too, walked away from the wreckage. The Landi block, in which Mrs. Kelley and her friends had lived, sagged further, but it did not collapse. Perhaps she and the others might have stayed safely in it—but who could have foreseen that?
Mrs. Kelley and Mrs. Placek were taken into the home of the man named DeLutrie, who had helped them into the window of Capitol Products. In the next few days, they and friends who visited them talked of little but the flood. Yvonne Brochu, who had been given shelter in the home of some people who lived not far from the DeLutries, went back into the Landi block and fetched, among other things, Mrs. Kelley’s green box containing her insulin packet. Often the ladies talked of Tex. Once, Mrs. Kelley spoke of how muscular he had been. “A fine young specimen,” she said. “I’ve never seen a more fearless man.” Then, with her hesitant, puzzled smile, she said, “I wonder why he did it. I don’t think it was exactly out of the kindness of his heart. He was really quite impatient with us, and, gracious, he used rough language. I guess he just did it to dare the Devil.”
