“We are clothed in sackcloth, covered in ashes. Earth’s joys grow dim,” Aunt Lida said, softly, tenderly, praying over her children. “Soothe our loss though it shall remain etched, deep-written upon our hearts. Give us each courage for the coming day.”
Will feigned sleep as she prayed first over the girls then her boys, sometimes falling into a lovely and mystical Czech. Aunt Lida then moved successively over Frank, then to Albert, before reaching Will.
“We are buoyant and prosperous also. Our beloved Frank and his poor friends delivered, resilient little Albert the Concussed, and lionhearted William.”
She lifted one calloused hand, then placed her other softly to Will’s forehead as she spoke. He heard his mother’s voice in how she pronounced his name, Will-i-am. Her prayer—brief, sincere, and coupled with this gesture—was so unexpectedly sweet that he found himself unable to move, much less speak. When she moved away, Will was left at peace, realizing for the first time in two days that he’d been both still and without fear. He soon fell back to sleep under the spell of Aunt Lida’s divine restoratives—though they did not last.
34
A DEVIL HAUNTED NIGHT
It was completely dark when Will awoke again. The power of Aunt Lida’s recent fervencies, avid though they were, could not bid him back to sleep this time. Jittery and agitated, he found it impossible to lie still. As his eyes adjusted to the room, he saw Janicka and Darja curled up, sleeping motionless in twin beds, with a long table between them on which new clothes and boots had been laid out for the boys by the resourceful Aunt Lida.
Will examined the clothes which Aunt Lida had evidently chosen for him, as they seemed to be the largest of the three sets, and quietly dressed. Janicka’s eyes opened as he rolled his socks on. She smiled at him affectionately, then nestled her head back into her pillow. Will looked around the room and settled his eyes. Detecting no further movement, he navigated his way through the labyrinth of crates, creeping downstairs in his socked feet, quietly carrying what must have been a pair of Lukas’ boots in front of him. These still didn’t fit, but were sized closer to his foot than the boots Teague had given him, even when augmented with their sock-filling.
He quietly lit the lantern on the kitchen table and opened the door slowly with no meaningful objection from its hinges. Stepping out onto the porch, the neighborhood was desolate. The sky offered no moon and there would be no electricity for many weeks. It was the darkest night he could remember. He alighted from the steps pensively, breathing in the narcotic of the city’s exhaustion. In the street, he felt a blanketing pall and the decay of its citizenry’s belief. The fears from the night before and the anxiety about what lay ahead had birthed something of exquisite dread in the sun’s deep absence. His light barely penetrated the darkness.
At the intersection of the block adjacent to the Bulnavic’s Victorian, there was a broken pipe organ with a wraith-like woman sitting atop it. He lifted the lantern but wished he hadn’t. Her haunting eyes followed him, but she said nothing.
“Ahoj,” Will offered, seeking to annul her disquieting effect on him.
She responded with something garbled that sounded like, “Give up.”
Will doubled his gait.
He sensed masses in the shadows and devils haunting the dark. Spectral demons seemed at work in the bushes and around each corner. In each uneven breeze that blew, there were unseen suggestions of opposition, notes of risk and imagined whispers of conspiracy. He was also afraid the pipe organ woman might be following him.
“Goblin-visitin’,” Will whispered, keeping his eyes fixed straight ahead with resolution. His jaw locked and his teeth ground together as he moved quickly in the dark and through his fear. The images of evil ghouls stealing jewelry from corpses, pulling survivors into the wet ground, filled his head irresistibly as he advanced toward Grace’s home.
Once a thing of austere beauty and relative opulence, he could see even before reaching her neighborhood that it would never be the same. He climbed over boards and through the mud as carefully as Lukas’ boots would carry him, as the lantern’s wire handle cut into the bends of his fingers. His feet began to sink more deeply into the soupy ground as he got closer. Birds called to each other from the ancient trees, announcing his unwanted presence. Soon, vast pools of black water all but stopped his progress. The ocean had swallowed this entire area and hadn’t yet fully regurgitated it. Galveston had, for a time last night, disappeared altogether.
Staccato yelps and peculiar whistles continued to bounce off the hedges and the ground, but he continued forward, casting trepidation from his mind with the conviction that Grace might be close. Though he had no plan as to what he could accomplish here beyond the bare verification of her residence, he tried to probe farther through the muck and dread, until he stumbled into a sign, knocking it over and into the mud. He lifted it up but couldn’t quite make it out. He blinked, brought the lantern over it, and endeavored to read it again. Will tripped and fell backward over uneven ground barely saving his light.
Looters, it advised, will be shot.
Fearing that even reading the words might be an offense, he scrambled away from the neighborhood’s invisible sentinels, their twitchy fingers and their vengeful hearts looking down on his retreat from mossy trees. Retracing his steps, he quickly returned to the relative familiarity of Broadway, regaining his balance and catching his breath. Overcoming the panic in his throat, he managed to find a therapeutic rhythm in the repetition of his steps, but it was impossible to avoid the notion that leaving his crate had been a mistake.
35
A LIVELY FEAR
Will managed to disappear into his movement. He moved off of Broadway, to the north until, near the waterfront on that side of the island, he heard the clattering sound of industry. Men were working down on the wharf, offloading the wagons with the inadequate tarps.
Retrieving the bodies from the carts, they wheeled them along inside a covered shelter, where they set them down in long straight rows. The sounds were muffled and the kerosene lighting dim, but the men worked at a deliberate pace inside a cloud of quick lime, wearing bandanas to protect their lungs against the granularity of the air. Will crept closer, carried toward the work in a powerful current of surprising fascination and a lively fear. He’d heard today that some five hundred had perished and thought that impossible, but now understood this was a vast undercount. There were several rows of bodies stacked on shelves already. Powder hovered above. The scope of the operation was as mesmerizing as it was appalling. It fixed his eyes until, at the far wall, an arm suddenly jerked upwards from a body.
Will covered his mouth as his legs yielded and he fell slowly to his knees in surrender. He put the lantern down and rubbed his hands. Rising slowly, he turned, moving south, away from the horror before stopping to rest. Laying his face flush against the sod, he scolded himself, envious of Janicka Bulnavic, safe in her bed.
36
AN EFFORT TO THE MAINLAND
Will gulped deep breaths of humid night air until he righted himself. Thousands must have died. It was impossible, yet apparent. The world was out of joint. He couldn’t see that this could ever be put right and the instinct to flee swept over him. He began to move quickly through the dark. He felt like something heavy was pressing down on his aching lungs. His breath wouldn’t reach deep, forcing him to breathe faster, shallower at each step. The faster he moved, the more acute the pain. He slowed in response to it.
Before seeing the warehouse, he thought he’d given up hope too easily. Now he knew he wasn’t scared enough. He lamented the fact he had let Albert’s faith infect him. This criticism, directed at himself, carried a certain scorching quality. He’d been told once by a surly teacher that, given his orphaned condition and all, he ought not fall into excessive cheer about his prospects or really the future of anything in particular. While his temperament was not suited to such a dark outlook, maybe
it was time to reconsider that perhaps there was no sunny side in this world. Maybe he’d been fooled by the sisters and their talk of hope and grace.
“Give up,” he huffed. Running was no use. He couldn’t see ahead, his chest hurt, and Lukas’ boots were unreliable in uneven terrain. Also, he had no destination.
Will stopped and repeated the injunction of the pipe organ woman. Unconditional surrender felt like the prudential course now. Full retreat seemed the only judicious alternative. Like an exile’s compelled belief in a pagan god, it seemed a matter of survival to renounce all hope.
He slowed his pace further to a walk, submitting to the many invectives of the night. He ought to lay down his arms. No measure of courage, heroism, or even endurance could counter what weighted the other side of the scale. He remained in motion only because he was afraid that if he rested here, he might harden and sink down into the ground.
In the stifling dark, on the far north side of the island, he approached a small mound on the ground. When he raised his lantern, it looked like another newly dug grave, but when he got closer, he saw it was a small overturned rowboat half-buried in debris next to a large pool of brackish water.
Lifting his light, he saw the pool led to an inlet, which he suspected led to the bay, which separated the island from the rest of Texas. Maybe Frank’s instinct to leave the island was right. He set the lamp down, flipped the boat over, picked up a sheared off plank nearby, threw it in, and jumped in the little skiff, launching it into the languid water with the intention of going across. Using the board to row hard, he lit out for the promise of the mainland. He pointed the bow toward a series of remote lights at the opening of the channel, aiming at to go as far inland as geography allowed.
The repetitive motion helped him absorb what he’d seen, and the feel of his oar then struck a chord in his muscle’s memory. He remembered the pleasure of holding a baseball bat. He wasn’t as powerful as William Scott on the mound or as gifted as Bobby Palmer in the field, but Will, smart and scrappy, made consistent contact at the plate, and always fielded his position well.
In the rhythm of digging at the water and in the tension of his grip, he slowly recognized himself again. A sort of calming resignation covered his soul. Breathing heavily, but now in a rewarding way, sweating, comfortable, he just kept rowing, pushing out at least half a mile before he finally brought his paddle in. It dripped onto Lukas’ boots and clothes. There was an equanimity he’d gathered in his exertions. He fell back, low in the boat, looking up high as he had done at the top of the ridge. It seemed like months since he’d climbed up to its crest, holding Albert’s hand. The stars, deep-set in their faint scattering, distant lights along a dark wall, they looked like far away windows. In the vaulting darkness, he considered the possibility that the earth had perhaps just fallen away from the rest of the universe. Maybe it could come back. Hope and fear would always struggle with one another inside him, as it does with all who examine matters fully. There was everything terrible he’d seen that was real, but there was also so much more he earnestly felt, but that remained unseen. Like Grace and how she kept entering his heart unbidden. Albert’s innocence. Frank’s hardy good nature. Aunt Lida’s hospitality. There was Sister Elizabeth’s trust in him. Henry’s sacrifice. Maybe the earth could fall back into order driven by these, its vast array of elusive invisibilities.
The mainland was no doubt safer, but it was not his home. Damn the pipe organ woman, he thought. If there was an answer to the question of whether hope was worth its salt, it could only be found here. It would be a betrayal to surrender now. He put his oar back in the water to rudder his craft around. No retreat.
As the arc of the wake of his turning vessel disappeared along the surface of the dark water, Will considered all these things and squared himself up to his future. But it was the memory of the police chief’s daughter which again persisted in the pictures of his mind, her countenance lit by its own beauty.
37
SHEET MUSIC
Monday, September 10
A lavender-blue morning light had broken by the time Will arrived back at the Bulnavic house. Aunt Lida had started a small fire in a space she had cleared in the front yard. She sat on a piano bench cooking eggs.
“Dobré ráno, William,” she said, patting the bench beside her. “You mustn’t go out like that.” Will sat down next to her. Aunt Lida was quite homely when she sat still, but her features became attractively dynamic when in motion, giving off a sense of great wisdom and appeal.
“Do you have any of those cucumbers left?”
“I’m afraid the days of vinegar and cucumbers are gone for a while, William. Help me with these eggs. We must eat them today.” Will cracked a large egg over the ancient black iron skillet and shared the fire with her. It was a simple, but pleasing, exercise. A balmy breeze fluttered through the bare branches above them, bending their reach upward lazily, then downward.
“Now, who is Maggie?” she asked, handing Will the large wooden spoon she had been using to work the eggs.
“Albert’s sister. She was lost. He talked about her in his sleep after I left, I guess.”
“No,” she said. “I had a dream about a precious little girl named Maggie. Keep the eggs moving. They’ll stick.” Will began to scramble with vigor as Aunt Lida added the last of the buttermilk. “I don’t have any plates. I had the most beautiful china from far, far away,” she said, pointing to the ground where a shard of it lay like a broken robin’s egg. It was the exact color of the changing sky. She then stood up, motioned for Will to stand as well, and lifted the lid of the bench, removing some papers. In one deft motion, she spooned a portion of his breakfast from the sizzling skillet, placing the eggs on a thin sheaf of sheet music which would serve as Will’s plate. As he ate, he read parts of the lyrics of a hymn that peeked out from his beautiful meal:
. . . sifting out the hearts of men . . . Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer . . . be jubilant my feet . . . In the beauty of the lilies . . . like the glory of the morning on the wave. . .
Will couldn’t read the rest, but the eggs were superb.
38
A FAREWELL ON THE TILTED PORCH
When they went inside, Albert couldn’t be roused for a frightening length of time. He suddenly sat up, announced that he had a tremendous headache and mumbled something about Maggie. He also said he felt dizzy when he darted his eyes about. Even following Frank’s recommendation that he not move or dart his eyes about, he seemed much worse. Will told Uncle Oldrich, who was examining Albert’s head, that as soon as Albert had some sheet music eggs, they’d be obliged to depart for the hospital. Uncle Oldrich advised against it, but eventually agreed, indicating the boy had surely been concussed.
“I wish everyone would stop saying that,” Albert said.
Frank ascended the stairs, after helping Iveta and Janicka serve the coffee his Aunt Lida had brewed for the whole neighborhood and took Will aside.
“I think I better stay here, Will.”
Frank glanced at Darja and Hana feeding the cats on the crates.
“They need you here,” Will agreed, nodding in a way that expressed his comprehension of this decision as well as his overwhelming fondness and respect for Frank. They’d known each other for five years, but now exchanged no other profound thoughts. Had Will understood that they would both live long lives, but never see each other again, perhaps he would have searched for a weightier goodbye, but neither of them knew this and nothing momentous came to mind anyway. Instead, they simply regarded each other for a brief instant among the crates and the cats and the cousins, in a way that was far more intimate than articulate. Frank then went to Albert, bent down to tie the younger boy’s new boots up tightly and whispered something in his ear.
“Me too,” Albert said. Then Frank told him something else and made a wide gesture around the room toward his charming cousins. Albert pulled back so that he could se
e Frank’s expression and nodded. They embraced and Albert smiled contagiously.
“A family,” Albert said. “Capital.”
Downstairs, as they prepared to leave, Will took up the canvas gunny sack Teague had given them which Aunt Lida had now re-stocked with provisions for the day. All four girls hugged Albert and Will fiercely, insisting that they soon return.
“William,” Aunt Lida said as they descended the crooked steps outside. “Will.” The way she spoke his name and the way she had held him close to her in the mud near the fire made him feel as if he was losing something crucial. Uncle Oldrich shook Will’s hand as he would an older man and the boys nodded, wishing them štěstí, or good luck and success. Will nodded back.
“Ahoj!” Will said to the girls. They smiled back. Hana waved the paw of the kitten she was holding at them.
“So long, then,” Albert said to all of them, waving casually. “Bye, Frank.”
Will took Albert’s hand and they turned together, setting their faces toward what remained of the city.
“I liked those people,” Albert said. “They have a knack for rescue.”
The Mourning Wave Page 9
