Sudden Sea (19 page)

At the U.S. War College in Newport, Captain C. W. Magruder was not so sure. The navy brass had been taking its cue from the D.C. Weather Bureau. “Everyone expected the storm to pass well clear of Nantucket and we would have our usual rather heavy but not serious northeaster,” Magruder said. By three o’clock, he was questioning the forecast. An east-southeast gale and torrential rain were pummeling the islands. Houses on the east shore of Mackerel Cove were drenched in spray.

By four o’clock, cars and boats were bobbing in the harbor like apples in a tub. The chain of stores built on pilings by the wharf broke up. Bunny Ellis’s barroom and Old Man Sheehan’s tailor shop were torn to pieces. The coal trestle ended up at the Bayside Inn, a quarter mile away, and the White Nook restaurant, a favorite with ferry riders, crossed Conanicut Avenue and settled down on Mrs. Bowen’s front porch.

The ferry slip was going, too. The ferryboat captains decided to make a run for the comparative safety of Newport, where the harbor was deeper.
Beavertail,
the last of the old paddle wheelers, left first with only captain and crew aboard. She was halfway across the channel when the hurricane caught her. It pushed her four or five miles north up the bay, and discarded her on a jagged rock, her wooden hull pierced, her engines and boiler ruined. All hands scrambled to safety.

A few minutes later, “with three blasts of her horn, black smoke pouring out of her stack and under a full head of steam, Jamestown’s pride, the
Governor Carr,
moved out of her ferry slip and disappeared in the blinding rain.” The passengers and cars that had boarded for the three o’clock trip were still aboard. A couple of hundred yards out, a hawser tangled in the propeller and the
Governor Carr
lost power. The big boat drifted in the high seas until wind and wave drove her back toward Jamestown. Lifted on the surging tide, she leapfrogged rocks and seawalls and came to rest on Webster Weatherill’s lawn, up the bay and across the road from the dock. The beached ferry was listing at a 45° angle but otherwise unharmed.

Joe Matoes left the Jamestown school yard alone and turned his milk truck down North Road. Rain like sheet metal slanted off the bay, reducing visibility to zero. Matoes scrunched over the steering wheel, peering through the clear half circle the wind-shield wipers made. He had a fireplug build — short, square, and powerful — yet he had to grip the steering wheel with both hands to hold the truck on the road. Branches were cracking. Outdoor furniture, weather vanes, bicycles — everything that wasn’t nailed down — was winging across the island, turning the road into an obstacle course. The wind sharpened. It stripped the leaves from the trees, slashed them into bits and pieces, and splattered them against the houses, painting white clapboards green.

Matoes’s truck was shaking and swerving. He crawled down North Road, every yard gained with difficulty, and turned right onto the causeway. Beavertail and his farm lay at the end. Mackerel Cove was on his left, Sheffield Cove on his right, and between them only the narrow milelong sandbar, one hundred yards at its widest point, nothing more than a sandy path through the sea with a strip of macadam poured down the middle. The bay was breaking across it. Three or four other cars were scattered along the road. They were empty, their drivers nowhere in sight.

Matoes’s truck flooded in the rising water. He abandoned it and struggled along the road. Billy Ordiner and his mother passed him on their way back from seeing the surf at Beavertail. Their car stalled somewhere along the causeway. The wind screeched through Mackerel Cove, obliterating every other sound. It lifted the roof off the beach pavilion in one piece and sent it sailing. Like an enormous hat, the roof flew across the road, up over Sheffield Cove, and out of sight. The next morning, it was found whole and unharmed in a pasture on the Watson Farm, a couple of miles due north. No one will ever know for sure whether the same gust that lifted the roof off the pavilion also picked up the Ordiners’ car with Billy and his mother inside.

Joe Matoes’s clothes were soaked, his face blistered from the biting wind. He couldn’t hear the slosh of the water as he splashed through. When he finally reached the edge of his fields, Fox Hill Farm was in darkness, as if locked up for the night. He looked back. Through the mire, he could just discern the bulk of the school bus crossing the causeway. There were eight children still on board. Four of them were his. He waved his arms frantically, trying to signal Norm Caswell to turn back.

At Napatree all the Fort Road houses were gone, except Jeff and Catherine Moore’s. Most of the homes were those wonderful weathered-shingle New England summer houses. But the Moores’ place was a huge barn of a house, three stories high, painted yellow with brown trim and built like a fortress to withstand any weather. It was anchored in cement and to further protect it, on the ocean side, there was a thick, deep seawall.

At first Jeff and Catherine thought they could hold back the hurricane by barricading their home with extra doors and shutters. But the wind taunted and trumpeted, hurling tons of water against the house. Doctor’s orders forgotten, Jeff pressed against the front door, trying to hold back the Atlantic Ocean single-handedly. The living room window shattered. The dining room windows caved in next, casements and all. By 4:30
P.M.
, all the downstairs doors and windows were gone. The Moores’ only chance was to let the ocean run through the first floor and wait out the storm upstairs. If the water didn’t undermine the foundation, they would be safe.

Catherine got the girls and Aunt May out of the Buick and rapped on the window of the other car: “Geoffrey, come out. We’re all going upstairs.”

The boy sat in the backseat with his arm around Major and did not budge. “Why?” he yelled over the static blare of the car radio and the baying wind.

“Because the house is going to collapse,” his mother shouted back. She thought that would scare him into the house.

Carrying Margaret, she led the children back inside, splashing through knee-deep water to the staircase. The entire household gathered upstairs in a second-floor bedroom — Jeff and Catherine, their three daughters, Aunt May, Andy, Nancy, who couldn’t swim, and Loretta, who kept crying, “Oh, Mrs. Moore, my baby! I have to get my baby.” Catherine went to work getting everyone organized. She was piling sweaters and coats on the bed so everyone would be warm through the cold, heatless night when she realized that her son was missing. Andy Pupillo ran back downstairs through the mounting water. He found Geoffrey still sitting in the station wagon, trying to soothe his frightened dog. Major would not leave the car, and Geoffrey would not leave Major.

Persuasion requires time, and it took a considerable amount of persuasion to convince the boy that Major would be safe in the car. The dog was a powerful swimmer, strong enough to pull a dory. By the time Geoffrey agreed to go into the house, the water was waist-deep. It was flowing in the front door, through the first floor, and cascading down the back steps like a waterfall. He and Andy had to fight their way inside. They crawled through a hole in the kitchen door, slunk along the back hallway, and climbed over a snarl of tables and chairs at the foot of the stairway. Finally, they reached the temporary safety of the second floor.

At the other end of Napatree, three shared a single narrow back step. Harriet Moore was hugging her daughter, Mary, in her arms, the child white with fear, too frightened for tears. Their maid, Margaret Kane, just a girl herself and certain she would never see her own mother again, was praying to God, to the Blessed Mother, to every saint she could remember, for a miracle.

A tremendous uproar drowned out her prayers, and a third wave swept in, flinging volumes of water over them.

“Gracious, there goes the kitchen stove,” Margaret cried.

“Yes, and the icebox, too,” Harriet sputtered.

A fourth wave followed fast on the third. The house surrendered, and the three were cast into the bay like a single, tangled creature — Mary wrapped around her mother’s neck, Harriet and Margaret clutching each other. Eyes and ears, mouths and nostrils filled with salt water. Margaret grabbed a piece of roofing floating by, and they wriggled onto it. The makeshift raft was good-sized, about as big as a bed, but they had trouble staying on. Shingles were sliding off, causing them to slide, too.

The younger Moore children were weeping. Through the bedroom window they had watched the house next door blow down. They saw Ann Nestor step outside, wrapped against the weather in a scarf and hat. A huge wave came, and suddenly she wasn’t there. All at once, the storm was not fun. It was frightening.

Eight-year-old Cathy was crying to her mother, “We’re all going to die. I don’t want to die, and I don’t want you to die.”

“You won’t die” — her mother tried to calm her — “but you might have to swim.”

Margaret began to sob. “I don’t want to swim.”

In the midst of the wailing, Aunt May got down on her knees beside the bed and began reciting the rosary aloud. Refusing to be drowned out by a nasty storm, she prayed at the top of her lungs.
Hail Mary, full of grace. The Lord is with thee.
Catherine tried to join in but was distracted. Undeterred, Aunt May continued. She was on the second Sorrowful Mystery when a wild-eyed boy burst into the bedlam. He was tall and lanky with thick curly black hair that was plastered over his skull like a bathing cap. Jim Nestor, naked except for his B.V.D.s, collapsed on the bed and sank into the mound of clothes Catherine had collected. He had been fighting off a bad cold all week. Now he was breathless, heaving, and barely coherent. Jeff asked him where the others were.

Jim gasped, “Gone. They’re all gone. What are we going to do?”

“There’s not much we can do. The most important thing is to stay together. No matter what, stay together.”

Until then, Catherine Moore had been focusing on the details — Geoffrey was wearing only faded corduroys. He should put on a shirt … Cathy needed to take off her sandals … Margaret should drink some milk. As she looked at Jim, the full horror of their situation gripped her, and she began to lose hope. The next few minutes would determine their fate. They all took off their shoes, and the girls took off their dresses in case they had to swim. The room was rocking like a dock. They waited, praying constantly — sometimes silently, sometimes aloud.

The house took a sudden swing and began to collapse beneath them. They raced down the hall and up the stairs to the third-floor attic. Behind them, the second floor dropped like an elevator. Catherine looked back. At the bottom of the stairs where her daughters’ room had been, the Atlantic Ocean roared. As she watched, her pink curtains washed out of the linen closet into the sea. Then the water started up the third-floor stairs.

The Moores’ attic had a maid’s room and a bathroom. There were windows at either end, which might break at any time, a floor that could easily give way, and a V-shaped roof. Jeff punched out the bathroom window so they would have an escape hatch, cutting his hand in the process. There was blood everywhere. A torrent of water poured through the jagged hole.

Ten-year-old Anne volunteered to swim for help: “If you get a rope, you can tie it around my waist. Shall I go, Daddy?”

“Don’t go, Anne,” her father said.

Just then most of the roof blew off, taking with it three walls of the maid’s room. All that remained was the floor, which made a perfect raft. A pair of iron pipes stuck up through the flooring. Catherine caught hold of one pipe and sat down with Cathy on her lap. Jeff sat down and wrapped his leg around the other pipe. He had Margaret in his arms. Aunt May sat between Catherine and Jeff, holding his arm in a grip of iron. Anne wrapped her arms around her father from the back. Geoffrey sat in front of his mother with Andy. Jim held on to Loretta and Nancy. With the remaining portion of roof serving as a sail of sorts, they were launched into the hurricane sea.

At 6:15
P.M.
, Bob Loomis staggered into the Westerly police station. He had stumbled through the storm for more than two hours. Loomis, always a snappy dresser, was as handsome as a matinee idol, and he cut quite a figure in his motorcycle police uniform and shaded goggles. Now, though, his face was raw from the lash of the wind and the sting of the salt and sand it carried. His sodden clothes were as heavy as a suit of mail and plastered to his body. Shaking from exhaustion and from the horror he had witnessed, Loomis blurted out the freakish story. Westerly, located on the banks of the Pawcatuck River, was experiencing hurricane winds and flooding, but nothing as terrible as the storm surge that engulfed Napatree, and Loomis had to convince the incredulous police chief that his story was neither a crazy fantasy nor a reckless exaggeration. It was the simple truth. Fort Road had ceased to be.

Mackerel Cove is the gentlest spot on Jamestown, a deep half circle between the main island and Beavertail. Generations of children have learned to swim in its gentle waters. Even in stormy weather, the cove doesn’t menace. No rough surf. No undertow. No riptide. Just the occasional jellyfish, translucent and slippery, and the seagulls, foam white and slate gray, fat, cocky, and bold as brass. If swimmers leave their lunch unattended, the seagulls will march right over and help themselves.

On this Wednesday, though, even Mackerel Cove was treacherous. By the time the school bus reached the causeway, beach cabanas were floating in the bay and waves were breaking over the road. Once Norm Caswell started across, there was no turning back. The water was up to the hubcaps of the bus. Caswell plowed through. Midway across the causeway, the bus stalled. He tried to get it started again, but the engine would not turn over. Caswell went out into the gale. The wind was probably a hundred miles an hour, and the bus was rocking like a dinghy caught in a tanker’s wake. Breakers were crashing against it. Caswell edged along behind the bus, pressed against it, head down, body hunched, trying to protect himself from the volleys of wind and the shingles that were shooting across the road from the beach pavilion. By the time he reached the back door of the bus he was winded. He rested against it to catch his breath, then pried it open. Caswell was afraid the children would be trapped inside. Leaning against the door to keep it from slamming shut, he began to help them out.