The Mourning Wave

by Gregory Funderburk

  “Look,” Zachary said, pointing to the formerly beautiful esplanades of Broadway. The oleander bushes had been stripped bare, but it was more than that. Will looked up at him.

  “No grass,” Zachary said. The grass had been blown from the ground and carried away, like most of the city’s other possessions. “People don’t decide everything, do they?” he added.

  Up one street and down the next, they didn’t see a great deal of activity, but there seemed to be a great deal of preparation for activity.

  “Things are afoot,” Zachary said, waving at the old YMCA building. “I used to watch boxing matches over there. I saw Jack Johnson there once. Sometimes a fighter gets knocked down. He shakes his head back and forth to get his wits about him before he tries to get up.”

  “Of course, sometimes they don’t get back up,” Will said.

  “True, not against Jack Johnson.”

  It was certainly the case that the work forces clearing the streets were more organized this morning given that they were falling more fully under military direction, but Will also noticed something else. While one encountered fewer bodies simply laying in the streets, the dead were now being handled with much less delicacy than in the first days. The soldiers, overseeing the dead gangs, were making haste in loading the human remains on drays. It was said they were no longer bound for the ocean, but would be burned. All of them. Will couldn’t decide if this was necessary or a transaction that dispatched all of their souls, his included, irretrievably. It was demoralizing news. The soldiers were also using torches to set fire to the carcasses of dead horses and livestock. A great volume of smoke and soot now filled in the air, and a terrible, sugary odor began to invade everyone’s senses.

  Will had no desire to observe any of this work up close, but he and Zachary reached an impasse at the ridge near 43rd where a drama unfolded in a way that marked his memory with a lasting scar. The young man at the center of the event was someone who Will had seen before. Someone he’d passed on the street on occasion. Or perhaps his looks were so ordinary to have made him seem familiar when he was not. Whatever the case, he was not much older than Zachary and, by temperament if not age, this work should not have been his to do. He, like many others, wore a handkerchief doused with camphor about his nose and mouth as he labored, but what stood out about him was how he was swatting fanatically at the swarming flies around him when they arrived. This and the handkerchief gave him the appearance of a bandit being tormented by retributive spirits. The ground beneath his feet was giving way and his flailing soon caused him to stumble. To arrest his fall, he stabbed his shovel into the mud, but it fell flat and he tripped over it, tumbling to his hands and knees. On the ground, the young man removed his gloves and handkerchief such that his pale hands and face stood out starkly against every remaining inch of his mud-splattered body. He blew his nostrils out, one, then the other, then brought his hands up to his ears as if to keep the day from seeping inside. Lifting his head to the blue sky above, in a voice that mixed resolution and exhaustion, he made a noise that gave evidence to the notion that his youthful constitution was inadequate for this task.

  “You can’t make me do this no more,” he said bowing his head then repeated it more loudly and emphatically again. He next turned his head to the side and heaved. His body wrenched and shuddered, but there was nothing inside of him. “No more,” he gasped, shaking.

  The lead soldier, a Federal with a three-day beard, stepped toward him, a hand on his holster. The soldier, a head taller than everyone else on the crew, moved aggressively toward the disintegrating youth.

  “You can shoot me if you want,” the boy told him. “I will not do this anymore. I can’t.”

  The soldier bent at the waist and examined him as he would a bad dog. He grabbed a shock of the boy’s wet hair and jerked his face upwards, looking into his eyes as if he was measuring something specific on which to make a judgment. With a word, the lead soldier called his uniformed regiment into formation. Six soldiers sent their own shovels slashing deep, straight into the wet mud. The men, formidable, moved together in unison, then took up their rifles, which were stacked upright in a conical fashion nearby. Metal clicks sounded as they shouldered their weapons and assembled tightly around their human target sinking into the ground. The lead soldier was not measuring anything anymore. All latitude was gone. He unholstered his own pistol and with his men now encircling the kneeling figure, he issued his order.

  “Load ball cartridge.”

  Another series of metallic clicks.

  Will and everyone else held their breath.

  The young man’s head fell further, his forehead touching the ground. He seemed just a child now.

  “Take aim!”

  Will couldn’t look, but heard someone call out, “Stand down.”

  Everyone looked around except for the boy.

  “Step aside, sir,” the soldier told Chief Ketchum.

  “He’s the chief of police,” someone in the crowd said.

  “I don’t care. Step aside.”

  Chief Ketchum removed his blue cap and placed it under his arm at his side.

  “Stand down,” he said again at a lower volume, but with more gravity.

  “This is our island,” shouted another in the crowd.

  Behind the chief, the boy put his hands flat on the ground for support and began to unsteadily arise. He next put his hands on his thighs, stood up, and looked at the soldiers around him with an extraordinary mixture of pity and hatred. Will and Zachary watched as he reached his hands forward as if begging the referee to stop counting, like one of the stunned YMCA boxers they’d talked about earlier.

  “Just give me a drink,” the young man said, gasping for breath, spitting on the ground, then taking up his shovel. The chief and the soldier regarded one another tensely for a moment before the chief stepped back, allowing the soldier to save face. Responding in kind, the soldier motioned for a bottle of spiked wine and holstered his pistol. Chief Ketchum nodded respectfully at all the Federals making peace, then removed a crust of bread from his pocket. He next took the wine from the soldier, nodded again in a gentle fashion and moved toward the young man he had saved, handing him first the bread and then the wine.

  59

  A SCRAP OF CLOTH

  The events involving the young man, Chief Ketchum, and the Federals left Will and Zachary without words for some time. As they quietly moved into town, Will decided to ask Zachary more about what he had seen out at the orphanage site.

  “Just gone,” Zachary responded, adopting an apologetic posture. “Little things in the sand, but I didn’t have the heart to sift them all out.”

  Zachary saw he wanted more.

  “Just some clothes,” Zachary added. “Part of a dish. The little silver cross I gave to Mother Gabriel. She had given it to Sister Elizabeth the morning of the storm for protection.”

  Will felt it, heavy in his pocket. Knowing Sister Elizabeth had carried it, if only for a while, seemed to transmit to it an additional weight.

  “I heard someone found a chalice on the mainland across the bay,” Zachary said. “They think it’s from the orphanage, but I didn’t see anything like that. When I turned that big horse around, that was the worst part.” Zachary swallowed hard. “Going back. Knowing I had to tell them.”

  Will started to say something about the cross but was afraid he was going to cry and thought better of it. Zachary put his hand on Will’s shoulder in a way that both steadied and broke him at the same time. Will took a deep breath and shook his head.

  “Look, here comes Mr. Ford,” Zachary said.

  Many of those wandering here along the edge of downtown near the ridge had still not surrendered to the scope of what had happened. Fathers searched amid the ruins. Children were waiting at corners looking closely at the faces of those who passed by on the backs of the wagons. Will had taken to calling
these folks, searchers. They paced the streets, their heads moving all around. Most found no answers, and those who did stumble into answers were almost always devastated again. Upon finding the body of a loved one or a neighbor, they most often looked straight down, moaning with harsh, guttural sounds in the language of primitive grief. In other formulations of the same vocabulary, sometimes they remained purely silent, but their shoulders shook. Other times a sharp wail escaped from the depths of their lungs and rang up into the sky.

  In most cases, the efforts of the searchers collapsed under their own weight. The vigils of mothers did likewise. The anxiety of terrible suspense was beginning to give way to the desire for any tenable excuse for closure on the question of who had survived and who was gone. This seemed especially the case once word emerged that the bodies were to be burned.

  Mr. Ford was a middle-aged English professor who Will had seen at the hospital yesterday with supplies for the infirmary and many questions. Today, he was bringing food and drink to the dead gangs, utilizing the brief moments of their restoration to ask them about his lost son, Early. His methodical search had yielded nothing thus far, but yesterday he’d caught sight of a ragged shred of cloth in the oily mud that was vaguely reminiscent of the jersey Early was wearing the night of the storm. Mr. Ford had announced that should he not find his son today, it was his intention to bury the scrap of cloth tomorrow, as proxy for his son’s remains, in the cemetery next to the church in which he and Early had worshiped. He had already commissioned Mr. Ott, the city’s premier stonecutter, to craft and set a polished stone within the churchyard to mark both the occasion of the burial and the grave efforts he had made to find his boy. Industry of this sort had continued to prove merciful in fording the mind and heart across the torrential river of pain, just as plausible fictions helped mourners avoid the atrocious obstacles between the questions that remained and the lack of answers available.

  “Do you boys need some water?” Mr. Ford asked Will and Zachary. They both held up and shook their full canteens in response.

  “Much obliged,” Zachary responded. “But save it for those doing the hard work.”

  Mr. Ford came over and opened a book in which he kept a photograph of Early, and showed them both the picture and the segment of the clothing he’d found.

  “We’ll look for him, Mr. Ford,” Zachary said. “We’ll keep looking.”

  “Thank you, boys,” he said, replacing the photo back in the book and closing it. Will saw the title of the volume he carried. It was the book about the white whale that little Clement Beardshy had placed on his chair each evening to reach his food on the dinner table at the orphanage.

  “Faith, like a jackal,” Mr. Ford recited, “feeds among the tombs. From these dead doubts, she gathers her most vital hope.”

  “Yes, sir,” Zachary said.

  The professor moved forward toward the next dead gang.

  “He looks a little better than he did yesterday,” Will observed.

  60

  DOWNTOWN

  Downtown merchants were sweeping the streets in front of their spaces in an exercise that seemed almost luxurious, almost humorous given the devastation all around them, but the spirit of commerce was breathing life back into the city. The return of routine staunched the effect of the calamity like the clotting of blood. Deeper into the business district, sheets and bedspreads of every color hung from clotheslines. Carpets and curtains were pinned up along damaged streetlights as if some amateur theatrical production was about to begin. The citizenry could just have easily become a collection of primitive tribes battling each other for the scarcity of supplies available. Instead, things like extortion, because they were almost entirely unseen, did not work where they were practiced.

  Zachary entered the butcher shop and found Mr. Knight, who received Sister Xavier’s long list of needs with equanimity. Despite his limited supplies and ability to collect more on the desperate open market, the burly butcher folded, as he typically did under the sister’s demands. He was a good and generous man. Meanwhile, Will wandered the neighborhood outside.

  Mr. Hardin, the grocer whose shop was situated next to Knight’s Fine Meats, was selling what he marketed as ‘surprise’ canned goods for a penny a can, as their labels had washed away. Will moved farther down the street, curious about what sort of buildings had withstood the wind and water and which ones had not. Artillery Hall, stoutly built, stood largely undamaged. The Hebrew synagogue was damaged moderately but stood firm. The Baptists had not fared so well. Rabbi Cohen had given his Christian neighbors permission to worship in the synagogue on their Sabbath, as it did not coincide with his own. Ball High School had shed its roof and the Grand Opera House was largely destroyed. The Bath Avenue School would require extensive repairs and City Hall was unusable. Many of the telegraph poles around town still stood though askew with their wires down. Restaurants, even those with little fare, were open. Hotels, even those which had sustained considerable damage, were full.

  The Strand, which had been the commercial capital of the state, now resembled an enormous common market. Every open space was occupied by books of records and other papers drying in the noonday sun. Scrappy businessmen and clever industrialists made ad hoc partnerships to pool resources, share space, and split future profits in uncommon ways. Each acted independently but correspondent with what he viewed as advantageous to his prospects. Will, listening to the commerce, feeling its energy as he walked, gazed down the length of the city and watched the future appear right in front of him.

  61

  REECE, BAMSCH, AND PEARSON

  During summers, Will shined shoes at the Tremont Hotel and when he had money to spend, traded at Pearson Mercantile. Mr. Pearson stocked useful apparel and had a son, Edgar, who was in Will’s class with Grace and Miss Thorne. Approaching the entrance, Mr. Bamsch, a plumber, stood astride shards of broken glass in front of Pearson’s blown-out storefront. Pearson and Mr. Reece, a brick mason, thick-limbed and patient, as was befitting his trade, were at work nearby, hammering out a bent metal sign which currently read, . . . rson Mercantile. Whenever a carnival was in town it was either Reece, Bamsch, or Mr. Ott, the stonecutter, who would battle the butcher, Mr. Knight, to win a ridiculous prize celebrating their prodigious strength. Will picked up on their conversation in mid-course between hammer blows.

  “He brought the family he saved into the Tremont,” Reece told the other men. “Then he climbed out a window and leapt back into the water to rescue more.”

  Reece identified the man he was talking about as Nelson Pierce, a popular contractor who had, after this leap, continued on his mad flight throughout the city, saving an untold number of its inhabitants.

  “He swam a web of ropes across a dozen streets for people to hang onto. He saved scores.”

  “Where’s he now?” Pearson asked.

  “Still at large, I imagine. Heard he’s all about town. Lost his mind, babbling about how the engineering won’t scour, saying the city could’ve withstood the wind’s velocities had it been built more strictly to code.”

  “I saw that man,” Will interjected. “He’s at St. Mary’s. In the nervous wing.”

  “Will!” Pearson embraced him robustly. “We heard the orphanage collapsed. We feared you dead.”

  The other two men patted Will’s shoulders with the sort of tender emotion that a week before was wholly uncharacteristic of them but had now been adopted within their natural range of expression.

  “Where’d you get those boots?” Pearson asked. “You’re mis-shod.”

  “Aunt Lida gave them to me. I think they’re Lukas’s.”

  “Wait here,” Pearson said and disappeared into his wrecked store.

  “I go to school with Mr. Pearson’s son, Edgar,” Will told the mason and the plumber.

  “Pearson’s boy and family survived. He hasn’t heard from his parents though. They’re infirm. Live out at V
irginia Point.”

  Pearson returned with a box. “Take these, Will. I’ll tell Eddie I saw you. He’ll be much relieved.”

  “Thank you,” Will said, opening the box to find new trousers, a shirt, and new boots, as well as a pair of socks—all a little damp to the touch.

  “Have you heard anything about Miss Thorne?” Will asked.

  “No,” said Pearson. “Nothing.”

  Unable to speak to Chief Ketchum earlier after the drama downtown, Will wanted to circle around and ask Mr. Pearson about the police chief’s family too, but found he could not. Instead, he promised to pray for Mr. Pearson’s parents and pay him for the gifts as soon as he was able. Pearson adjusted his glasses, waving off the offer for payment and acknowledging his appreciation for the sacred prayers with a subtle, but explanatory nod.

  62

  THE RED CROSS

  Will could have returned to Zachary at this point, but instead turned toward the four-story warehouse at the corner of 25th and the Strand where the National Red Cross had established its headquarters. It buzzed with activity as the Central Committee’s next meeting was scheduled here for two o’clock. Believing it imperative that he make a record of what had become of the orphanage, Will pushed his way through the throng of refugees coiling around the building in tightening reticulations. They pushed against the doors, tapped on the windows, and sought entry at every conceivable point of ingress. Each member of the teeming crowd apparently felt a similar urgency with respect to his or her own personal petitions and grievances. At one window, a sunburned woman called Hattie reported to Will that she had floated far out into the Gulf, halfway to South America, only to return to shore, all on part of a ceiling from a house.