Isaac's Storm (42 page)

Masses
of
lumber
appeared
along
the
railbed.
Sterett
saw
fragments
of
houses,
lace
curtains,
armoirs,
bedposts,
sheets
and
blankets.
He
saw
boats,
and
in
the
distance,
a
large
ship
aground
on
the
prairie.
A
child's
rocking
horse
stood
by
itself
on
a
low
rise,
no
house
in
sight.
"And
so
help
me,"
Sterett
said,
"I
would
rather
have
seen
all
the
vessels
of
the
earth
stranded
high
and
dry
than
to
have
seen
this
child's
toy
standing
right
out
on
the
prairie,
masterless."

Debris
and
flooding
forced
the
engineer
to
stop
the
train
just
north
of
Texas
City,
well
shy
of
Virginia
Point.
The
passengers
set
out
on
foot.
Sterett
and
Monagan
took
off
their
shoes
and
rolled
up
their
pants,
exposing
legs
so
pale
as
to
be
nearly
translucent.

Now
they
saw
things
they
had
missed
from
the
train.
Intimate
debris.
Stockings,
letters,
photographs.
Their
first
corpses.
What
was
so
striking
about
the
dead
was
their
battered
condition.
Their
bodies
had
been
stripped
naked.

At
Texas
City,
the
generals
seized
a
lifeboat
from
the
Kendal
Castle,
a
British
ship
blown
ten
miles
from
its
Galveston
pier.
They
loaded
it
with
soldiers
and
supplies
and
began
at
once
to
row
across
the
bay,
leaving
Sterett
and
the
other
passengers
behind.

Sterett
and
Monagan
spotted
a
sailboat
making
slow
progress
toward
the
city
in
a
calm
that
had
made
the
bay
"as
gentle
as
a
country
pond."
While
waiting,
Sterett
roamed
the
bay
shore.
Where
the
water
met
the
prairie
he
saw
bloated
horses
and
cows,
chickens,
cats,
dogs,
and
rats.
"Everything,
it
seemed,
that
breathed,
was
there,
dead
and
swollen
and
making
the
air
nauseous.
And
by
their
sides
were
people."

Groups
of
men
moved
along
the
bay
shore
hauling
bodies
from
the
water
and
burying
them
in
shallow
graves.
They
buried
fifty-eight
that
day.
Sterett
found
a
letter
and
read
the
first
line,
"My
Darling
Litde
Wife,"
then
closed
it
and
dropped
it
back
in
place.

The
sailboat
proved
to
be
a
large
schooner.
Monagan,
using
his
authority
as
an
officer
of
the
train,
commandeered
it
and
invited
one
hundred
passengers
aboard,
many
of
them
Galveston
residents
trying
to
get
back
home.
It
was
late
Tuesday
afternoon
by
the
time
the
schooner
set
sail
for
Galveston.
The
lack
of
wind
made
the
journey
slow
and
hot,
and
all
the
while
the
craft
moved
through
a
macabre
floe
of
debris.
Bodies
bumped
against
the
hull.
"It
must
have
taken
us
from
four
to
four-and-a-half
hours
to
get
within
a
half-mile
of
the
city,"
Monagan
said.
"It
was
dark
then,
pitch
dark."
They
saw
only
one
light
on
shore.

The
generals
in
the
Kendal
Castle's
lifeboat
found
the
going
just
as
slow,
just
as
bleak.
"I
am
an
old
soldier,"
General
McKibben
said
later.
"I
have
seen
many
battlefields,
but
let
me
tell
you
that
since
I
rode
across
the
bay
the
other
night
and
helped
the
man
at
the
boat
to
steer
to
keep
clear
of
the
floating
bodies
of
dead
women
and
little
children,
I
have
not
slept
one
single
moment."

As
the
schooner
approached
Galveston,
the
scent
of
death
became
overpowering.
At
one
point
Sterett
looked
over
the
side
and
saw
a
dead
woman
staring
back,
her
face
lit
by
the
moon.
Some
passengers
climbed
ashore,
the
rest,
including
Sterett
and
Monagan,
decided
to
spend
the
night
aboard
the
schooner.
The
captain
sailed
150
yards
back
into
the
bay
and
anchored.
It
was
a
night,
Monagan
remembered,
"of
horrible
sounds."

At
daybreak,
the
schooner
sailed
to
the
foot
of
23rd
Street,
three
blocks
due
north
of
Isaac
Cline's
office.
Sterett
and
Monagan
believed
themselves
to
be
among
the
first
outsiders
to
enter
the
city.
They
stopped
a
man
hurrying
by
who
told
them
thousands
of
people
had
been
killed,
so
many
that
disposal
crews
known
as
dead
gangs
had
begun
burning
bodies
where
they
found
them.

Sterett
refused
to
believe
it.
"Surely
the
man
must
be
mistaken,"
he
told
Monagan.
"It
is
always
the
rule
to
exaggerate
these
calamities
and
he
is
only
repeating
what
some
one
has
told
him."

The
two
men
moved
on
into
the
city.

ISAAC
STEPPED
OUTSIDE
into
a
gorgeous
dawn,
the
sky
like
shattered
china.
A
fast
breeze
blew
the
clouds
north
and
brought
him
the
scent
of
the
sea.
The
morning
was
cool
and
bright,
bordered
to
the
east
by
a
cantaloupe
sky.
It
was,
he
said,
"a
most
beautiful
day."

In
the
new
light,
he
saw
that
the
house
in
which
he
and
his
daughters
had
found
shelter
was
one
of
the
few
still
standing.
A
sea
of
wreckage
spread
in
every
direction.
Houses
had
disintegrated.
He
looked
for
landmarks
and
at
first
saw
none,
but
as
his
mind
adjusted
to
this
new
landscape
he
began
to
pick
out
the
ruins
of
familiar
structures.
The
big
Bath
Avenue
Public
School,
which
his
children
had
attended,
stood
three
blocks
east,
one
wing
crushed
and
exposing
a
large
classroom
whose
floor
now
hung
over
the
street
at
a
forty-five-degree
angle,
with
thirty-eight
desks
still
anchored
in
place.

He
guessed
that
the
house
was
located
at
28th
and
P,
which
put
it
about
three
blocks
northwest
of
where
his
own
home
had
stood,
at
25th
and
Q.
When
he
looked
toward
his
neighborhood,
he
saw
nothing.
The
pretty
Neville
house
was
gone.
So
was
Dr.
Young's.
His
own
lot
had
been
scraped
clean.
And
beyond
that,
where
Murdoch's
and
the
Pagoda
had
stood,
he
saw
only
open
sky.

Behind
him,
the
bells
of
the
Ursuline
convent
rang
out
to
summon
parishioners
to
mass.
He
climbed
a
mound
of
debris.
The
convent,
three
blocks
north,
was
still
standing,
but
now
it
looked
huge
and
strange,
a
feudal
castle
over
a
moor
of
broken
wood.
The
bells
were
reassuring.
With
so
few
houses
to
absorb
the
sound,
they
rang
with
far
greater
clarity.

In
the
wreckage,
he
saw
striped
dresses,
black
suits,
black
hats,
straw
boaters.
He
looked
more
closely.
Some
of
the
clothing
covered
battered
limbs.
The
dead
lay
camouflaged
under
bruises,
mud,
and
shredded
cloth,
but
having
spotted
one
corpse,
he
now
saw
many.

Throughout
Galveston,
men
and
women
stepped
from
their
homes
to
find
corpses
at
their
doorsteps.
Bodies
lay
everywhere.
Parents
ordered
their
children
to
stay
inside.
One
hundred
corpses
hung
from
a
grove
of
salt
cedars
at
Heard's
Lane.
Some
had
double-puncture
wounds
left
by
snakes.
Forty-three
bodies
were
lodged
in
the
cross
braces
of
a
railroad
bridge.
"There
were
so
many
dead,"
said
Phillip
Gordie
Tipp,
eighteen
at
the
time,
"you
would
sink
into
the
silt
onto
a
body
at
every
other
step."
He
had
reached
Galveston
Sunday
morning
aboard
a
small
sailboat.
"We
kept
running
into
so
many
dead
bodies
that
I
had
to
go
forward
with
a
pike
and
shove
the
dead
out
of
the
way.
There
was
never
such
a
sight.
Men,
women,
children,
babies,
all
floating
along
with
the
tide.
Hundreds
of
bodies,
going
bump-bump,
hitting
the
boat."

Isaac
first
secured
temporary
care
for
his
children
—
perhaps
through
a
friend,
or
through
his
church
—
then
made
his
way
to
the
Levy
Building.
Blagden
was
gone.
Isaac
assessed
the
damage.
Every
window
had
been
blown
out.
Debris
was
strewn
throughout
the
office.
Rain
had
warped
the
wood
planks
of
the
floor.
He
climbed
to
the
roof
and
found
it
stripped
clean
of
instruments.
He
surveyed
the
city.
Paving
blocks
littered
the
streets.
The
wharf
front
was
a
tangle
of
masts
and
rigging,
although
the
big
grain
elevator
seemed
little
damaged.
Steamships
once
tightly
married
to
the
wharf
had
disappeared.
Far
down
the
coast,
where
Isaac
should
have
been
able
to
see
the
barest
outline
of
the
St.
Mary's
Orphanage,
there
was
now
just
a
long
white
arc
of
beach.

Wagons
passed
below,
headed
north.
Limbs
protruded
from
under
canvas
tarpaulins.

Isaac
checked
the
city's
hospitals
to
see
if
they
had
survived,
and
whether
anyone
inside
had
seen
his
wife.
The
hospitals
had
weathered
the
storm
well.
He
may
have
returned
with
his
injured
daughter.
At
the
hospital
he
heard
that
a
temporary
morgue
had
been
established
on
the
north
side
of
the
Strand,
between
21st
and
22nd.
He
went
there
next.

The
scent
of
putrefaction
and
human
waste
was
at
once
sickening
and
heartbreaking.
It
made
his
loss
seem
more
definite
and
filled
him
with
sorrow.
The
warehouse
was
a
large
chamber
with
a
ceiling
supported
at
intervals
by
fifteen-foot
iron
pillars,
between
which
the
dead
lay
in
rows
that
stretched
from
wall
to
wall.
Men
and
women
moved
intently
among
the
rows
as
if
hunting
bargains
at
a
public
market.
Many
bodies
were
uncovered,
others
lay
under
sheets
and
blankets,
which
survivors
peeled
back
to
expose
the
faces
underneath.
J.
H.
Hawley,
an
agent
for
the
Great
Northern
Railroad,
saw
the
faces
of
many
friends.
Under
one
he
found
the
body
of
a
Mrs.
Wakelee,
"with
a
faint
smile
on
her
lips...
her
gray
hair
all
matted
and
streaming
in
disordered
confusion
about
her
shoulders."
He
saw
his
friends
Walter
Fisher
and
Richard
Swain.
Lacerations,
bruises,
and
bloating
distorted
features
and
made
it
hard
to
tell
people
apart,
even
whether
a
man
was
black
or
white.
The
sun
warmed
the
room,
accelerating
decomposition.
"Odors
arise,"
Hawley
said,
"making
it
most
unbearable."