“We took a licking in town. Maybe not like y’all out on the beach, but a licking all the same,” he told the boys. “About midnight our neighbor’s house picked up off its foundations, then sluiced by, caught in the torrent. Like I said, our house stayed put, though I wasn’t sure how long it would before the Ritter Café or some other godforsaken runaway building might run us over. We had neighbors join us and a couple of cows. We moved the cattle out to the other room and did our best to assuage the sufferers and the livestock both until the water came in. Then my pa began to swear up and down in eighteen language, but mostly Hebrew. He told us all to come on up on the roof if we didn’t want to drown. We lashed ourselves to the chimney and waited it out. Sometime after that, I spotted a little baby in the water. I let out some line from the chimney, crawled to the edge and fished the tot out. Pa then reeled me back in. The tot was cold and blue, like an icicle. Eyes kind of glazed over, like your friend, Albert’s there. Mama commenced to warm it up giving it a drip of brandy every so often from her lips.”
“Boy or a girl?” asked Albert.
“Boy. Just a mite. He came to after a spell to wail at us severely the rest of the evening and into morning. Just yowlin’ away. Mama’s with the little feller now. Where you boys going to?”
“The hospital,” Will told him.
“Will, I don’t think I can make it,” Albert said.
“He can’t make it,” Jesse repeated needlessly.
“We’re going to the hospital,” Will said again. “All of us. Jesse, you can come too, but we’re going. We can’t stay on this side.”
“Will, look at him,” Frank said. “He’s beat.”
“True. He looks unwell,” Jesse observed with considerable empathy.
“He’s why we’re going,” Will pointed out. “He’s concussed.”
“I am?” Albert asked.
Albert sat down and Frank took out the green jar of the angry medication to change the younger boy’s bandage, it suddenly occurring to him that he ought.
“That looks dire.” Jesse said about Albert’s cut. “Is he alright?”
“He will be, as soon as we get moving again. I’m trying to save him,” Will said. “You coming with us?”
“Much obliged for the invitation, Will, but I’ve got to go home. Check on the tot. He’s just a mite.”
“Were you scared, Jesse?” Frank asked.
“Folks said there weren’t any time to get scared, but Holy Prophet, scared ain’t the word for it,” the boy said. “And I didn’t need any time.”
“Me neither,” Albert agreed.
“And it was something cold up there on the roof too, the wind blowing right at us. You boys ever been to the north pole.”
“No,” Frank said. Neither had Will or Albert, who shook their heads.
“Well, I haven’t either, but it couldn’t be any colder than it was up there.”
This seemed an apt conclusion to all and Jesse, begging their pardon for leaving so suddenly, reminded them of the breach ahead and waved goodbye to all of them most affably.
Will watched him go as Albert and Frank conversed about Jesse’s good nature. Will missed the old Jesse who was more himself, and Frank, still tending to Albert, seemed more content sitting and tending and talking than moving. Albert was slowing them down. Frank was scared and wanted off the island. If Will left them, he could probably reach the sisters and the hospital tonight and tell them of the fate of the others at the orphanage. None of it could wait.
“Stay here,” he told Frank. “I’m gonna look around. Albert, just rest here.”
Will shook his head, and fostering his deepening irritation, scouted ahead, moving toward the entrance of Garten Verein park where another group of survivors thronged in front of the twisted wrought iron gate. He then considered the distance he could traverse by himself and what would be required in his pace. He was certain he could make it to the hospital before dark if he just kept going, but as he passed the crowd at the gate, he heard the men and women standing there swapping stories. He couldn’t hear all that they were saying, but the tales were colored with themes of deep courage and heavy loss, all of them delivered in low and somber tones.
Their stories were the same as his—the ones he wanted to tell the sisters when he reached St. Mary’s. How Henry had furiously cut holes in the floor, moved furniture, and held up the walls as long as he could. How he’d held little children in his arms until he drowned. Henry was as sure as the stars. He wanted to tell them of how Sister Elizabeth had trusted him with her rosary. How Sister Camillus had done everything she could.
He wanted so impatiently to do something right, but what was right was right before him. Will couldn’t leave Frank and Albert.
The dead forbade it.
27
THE FAIREST OF TEN THOUSAND
The exotic, octagonal-shaped building that had stood, bright green and white, in the center of the Garten Verein was now roofless. It had famously been one of the city’s leading social clubs. Will had been enrolled by the St. Mary’s sisters in a class for manners and etiquette here last summer. The class had included dance lessons, which he both cursed and eagerly anticipated since they brought him, for brief periods, into close proximity with Grace Ketchum.
The police chief’s daughter’s eyes were set widely apart. There was a certain blooming nature to her skin—it glowed from the sun. The way she spoke to him, in hushed and measured tones, about where he should place his hand along the contour of her back as each dance began, left him in a position far beyond his capacity to respond. Yet, he also recalled how his nervousness on the ballroom floor immediately subsided when they began to move together. She drew something from him. New, but familiar. More discovered than invented. It concerned the plausibility of living in congruence with how he should. He wanted to somehow tell her she had this power, but couldn’t. He felt that probably they were meant to share this and other secrets, but he couldn’t quite speak them into being when he was with her. As they danced, Grace spoke to him, not only without condescension, but with ardent curiosity about what it was like living in the orphanage. She told him about books she was reading while coordinating their steps across the dance floor. It seemed she exerted no effort in doing so. It was like she was from a different world where everyone was effortlessly incredible. She intensified his consciousness, even as he seemed to lose it in her presence.
Standing at the center of the empty, roofless ballroom, he realized that his understanding of hope had become tied up in whether or not she was alive. He told himself he would find her soon or at least view her from afar to verify she graced the world still with the same light and beauty she had so easily shed upon it before. This, once settled, fueled him to rejoin Frank and Albert.
Will, fortified, retraced his steps back through the park, but when he returned to the place he’d left them, they were gone. Will felt his heart begin to race. His eyes darted quickly across the panorama. He repented for having thought of going on without them and dashed down the street and back to the gate before spotting them near the croquet grounds just inside the park. He exhaled and regained his balance, beginning to realize who was really saving whom in this little troop. They had taken up company with a gaunt man, hobbled by deep grief.
With visible pity, Frank and Albert were offering consolation to the man who was making low sounds that could be categorized as neither moaning nor sad singing, but somehow both. Will moved closer and began to make out his words.
“ . . . fast falls the eventide,” came the man’s muffled dirge, expressed in a tragic voice. He was well over six feet, shattered, and holding empty frames in both of his very large hands.
“What’s he saying?” Will asked Frank quietly, as Albert stepped closer and began to hum lowly along with the man. Finding a purposeful harmony, a song emerged. Albert had always had a fine singing voice.
“Swift to its close, ebbs out life’s little day . . . ”
When they finished, the tall man began to explain his circumstances as Will and Frank joined Albert.
“I was felled by a flying brick to the head. When I came to, my wife and children were forever gone. The tallest one wasn’t as high as this.” He rested one of the frames on a broken knob of the fence post at the end of the croquet grounds. “She was the fairest of ten thousand,” he continued. “And my boy was just learning to talk. He’d jabbered my name for the first time. ‘Papa’ is what he said, just last week. ‘Papa.’ My soul’s delight.”
The man lifted the other picture frame, touching its corner to his forehead on which there was a large knot and a gash not unlike Albert’s own. This gesture helped him regroup somehow. He swallowed two or three times in succession. “And my wife. My wife, she was such a tender, delicate thing. Lovely in all respects one could record. Always so easily frightened.” The man moved to one knee, where the boys could see the lines in his face more clearly as he began to wave vaguely in the direction of the sea. “Now she’s out there. All alone.”
Albert put his little hand on the kneeling man’s hulking shoulders. The man looked up to him, his face creased deeply, severely stained. He took a deep breath, finding solace in Albert’s presence. He and Albert exchanged a few more quiet words, which neither Will nor Frank could make out, something about ascending. Whatever it was, it swept the sharp edge of anxiety from the man’s brow. As he arose to his full and impressive height, the man repeated, “Safe on Canaan’s shore. Safe on Canaan’s shore. Much obliged, son. Much obliged.”
Looking to the sky with the empty frames still in his hands, he nodded his head to the heavens up and down subtly, then departed. Albert watched the man disappear, then casually walked over past his companions to the tennis courts. Frank followed. Will trailed behind, thinking back to another time, then forward to the unknown. The blurry distinction between false hope and blind faith dissolved within his mind. He quickly caught up to Albert.
“What’d you say to him?” Frank asked.
“Dangers fierce assail our paths,” Albert shrugged. “And through days of toil our hearts will fail, but this earth holds no sorrow that heaven’s ascension cannot cure. God is our stay. Our refuge. We find rest safe on Canaan’s shore, settled there like little children at home. Bathed in warm light, fadeless and pure.”
Frank and Will looked at Albert and then at each other. “Who told you that?” they asked.
“I think I made it up.”
Frank inspected him.
“Or anyway, it’s something I’ve always known,” Albert added.
“You look better.”
“Thank you,” Albert said. “It’s just when I try to control things in my mind, when I try to change them, I can’t.”
Will looked at him in depth. Albert, concussed, deep in mourning himself, had mined a new measure of resiliency from his exchange with this most sorrowful fellow. Who was saving whom, Will thought.
“We remember by thinking of love I think,” Albert said, his heart flooding warmth all over his body, giving color and life to his face. “Of how she smiled when you gave her candy. That’s all you can do. And I can do that. I can do that in heaps without even trying.”
28
SERPENT MARKS
The storm, Will concluded, had a special fondness for removing tin roofs and depositing them shining in the streets under the noonday sun. It seemed the ambition of the violent winds to have left at least one battered section of tin at every intersection and the goal appeared to have been nearly attained. There were hundreds of wandering cisterns, as well.
The next block, the boys encountered a diminutive girl between Albert and Frank’s age, whom none of them knew. She was vigorously attacking a large tree with a small axe.
“God,” she said at each blow into the tree, calling out to a deity who, she later told them, had assigned to her this very task. She explained that she had spent the whole night in this tree and had been bitten by a number of sea snakes. The boys had seen dead snakes all about and this girl, though she seemed strong and unaffected by toxins, had revolting purple fang marks on her arms and legs.
“How come you’re not dead?” they asked almost together.
“Can’t say. God, I think,” the young girl said, putting down her axe. Sweat covered her brow. “I’m just not.”
Frank inspected the small sideways ‘V’ the girl had started in the side of the tree. Unless she had just taken up the chore, she had not made much progress. Given the implement, her size, and the girth of the tree, it would be some time before the tree succumbed. Nevertheless, she seemed capable of bringing it down.
“Why is it God wants you to cut down this tree?” Frank asked, forthrightly.
“As a souvenir. He said I could have it. I’m not from around here.”
“What’s your name, girl,” Albert asked.
“Althea,” she said defiantly.
“We’re going to the hospital, Althea,” Albert said. “Do you want to come with us? They can nurse your serpent bites.”
“Can’t you see I’m busy tribulatin’ here,” Althea said, as she shouldered the axe. “Shoo. Shoo now.”
Albert, Frank, and Will nodded in assent and left Althea, her axe, and the tree. They walked in silence together for several moments.
“She has a long way to go,” Frank observed.
“True,” Albert said, “but I’d say that tree’s like to be overmatched.”
29
THE MAN AND THE COW AT THE URSULINE CONVENT
Near the breach in the ridge to which Jesse Toothaker had pointed them, they found the steps of what remained of the Ursuline Convent. A gray-haired man stood there with a black milking cow. He barely awaited their arrival before beginning to tell his story.
“I tried mightily to save my cows for the good of my family,” the man announced to the boys as they stopped before him.
“Yes, sir,” Frank said.
“At least you saved this one,” Albert said.
“At least you saved your family,” Frank said.
“Why, I did not save my family,” the man said, his bones threatening to collapse inside his skin. “They’ve all drowned.” He accepted their most sorrowful condolences before he continued. “I had planned to open my mouth and let the seawater pour into my lungs when the time came, but I couldn’t. Now I am here without my family.”
No one knew what to say next and the man eventually turned to advance down the street with his cow. The boys didn’t know where he was going any more than he did.
As Will and Albert watched him go, Frank kicked a piece of rock from the Ursuline steps, then nudged it with his foot toward Albert. Albert kicked it to Will, who kicked it back to Frank. In this way, they proceeded to the area immediately adjacent to the breach in the ridge.
The pass in the ridge was swimming with activity, dotted with little campfires where people were cooking what they could find. They gathered in little knots around the little fires drawn by something primordial, something deep inside and not fully understood. Wounds were bandaged and tended here using liniments, balms, horse salves—anything they could find to dress their wounds. It had become an intersection of importance. A kind of base camp before climbing and going over. It was a place to take a breath before moving on. A place to share stories and food and to begin sorting things out.
Frank kicked their rock into the ridge as Albert looked at the eyes of those present. Will searched for the way through. A woman gave them each a ladle of beans she had concocted into an impressive stew with celery and potatoes. She had, with her own children, gathered tin cans for the purpose of serving her offering and had commenced now to feed as many survivors as she could here.
“Thank you, ma’am. We’re half-starved, workin’ on being wholly starved,” Albert said. �
��I’m Albert. We’re from the orphanage out yonder on the beach. The St. Mary’s one.”
“Have a little more then, Albert. I’m a cook. My husband’s a builder.” She pointed ahead where a man and two boys were constructing a lean-to out of the kindling on the ground into what Will would soon hear people calling storm lumber houses.
“You boys keep looking for folks helping one another. Fall in with them.”
The boys layered their gratitude over one another in response before they moved on.
Ahead, people were stepping over the jagged broken planks and the sharp edges of tin roofs at the edge of the ridge to get to one another. What they all had in common was a shared astonishment that there was no localization of the damage. The annihilation was total.
What had been a bright and clear place only a handful of hours earlier was now, Will thought, something out of another one of the books Miss Thorne was keen on reading to them last year. Will could not recall the man’s name, the writer of the sad and sometimes angry book. Will watched as they came in waves toward the ridge, most of them with nothing, maybe a blanket or an old suitcase. It was like a series of Biblical plagues had befallen them all at once. They all trudged ahead, shook their heads, shuffled their feet and shook their heads again.
There were all manner of tears among them, as well. The most welcomed being the ones that flowed when someone thought dead suddenly showed up. But there were the awful kind too. While hope could turn to joy here, hope could also be dashed for good just as rapidly. This sense of chance produced an instability on the ground, which was reflected in the physical imbalance people exhibited as they climbed upwards, then disappeared over the uppermost spine of the ridge to then descend to the other side.
The Mourning Wave Page 7
