Sudden Sea (21 page)

Osbrook Point was wooded and inky black. Brambles and fallen trees blocked them in every direction. They could not find their way. They were beyond exhaustion, stone-cold, and getting nowhere. Still, Harriet pressed them on. A herd of sheep ran by, scaring them almost to death, yet cheering them, too. Where there were sheep, there must be people.

They went a few more steps when they saw a man with two women coming down the road toward them. Harriet’s friends Violet Cottrell and Denise O’Brien had washed up on Osbrook Point, too. “That meeting was more than words can say,” Violet tried to explain later. “Each of us thought we would never see the other again.” The man with them was another Fort Road refugee, Jerry Shea, one of the carpenters who had been working on the Burkes’ house.

I see sharks. Sharks are following us!

Geoffrey Moore was shouting. He was leaning so far over their attic-floor raft, he almost slipped off. A pair of hammerheads, one slightly ahead of the other, their fins like black triangular blades, were swimming aginst the flow. Either the scent of blood on the water had drawn them or the storm had carried them in andthey were trying to stay alive. Titanic waves thrashed over the raft, pelting the Moores with the broken contents of their own home. They clung to their makeshift raft for dear life and prayed that the violent waters were not carrying them out to sea. Except for Geoffrey’s shark alarm, the children were silent. They were concentrating on their father. When he gave the signal, the girls closed their mouths and held their breath until the next wave thundered over them.

At the height of the tempest above Aunt May’s perpetual prayers, the Moores heard a familiar cackle —
Hello, Polly!
— and Cathy’s pet parrot hopped a ride on the raft. Then just to their east, they glimpsed a familiar landmark, the Dennison’s Rock buoy in the middle of Little Narragansett Bay. An immense wave of relief, stronger than anything the storm could hurl, washed over them. Instead of being carried to sea, as they had feared, the Moores were sailing across the bay. At nightfall the attic floor beached itself on tiny Barn Island in Connecticut, right beside Catherine Moore’s bedroom bureau.

“I hopped off, dragging Cathy after me,” she remembered. “The others followed like deer jumping over a wall. We had no shoes, of course, and the island was a mass of bull briers and blackberry vines. Geoffrey stepped on a nail the first thing.” They had only seconds to get off the raft, and Aunt May lost her footing. She dropped into what seemed like a deep well of water. Geoffrey reached out and yanked her onto the shore.

On Barn Island, which isn’t an island at all but a part of Connecticut, the Moores found a haystack sheltered by a stone wall, and there in the field beneath a sky full of stars they spent the night. The air was chill, and they shivered in their wet clothes.

Their teeth chattered and they tried to stomp their feet to warm up. Too tired for even that small exertion, they burrowed into the hay for warmth.

Catherine Moore described the night:

At the bottom of the haystack there was a hollow place about six feet long and three feet deep. This Jeff called the women’s dormitory. We pulled down hay in the front of this place, while the men scooped out another place a few feet away. They decided to take the two younger children with them. Andy took Margaret and kept her covered with hay. Jim took care of Cathy, and Geoffrey took care of himself. He had no shirt, and I pitied him with that briery hay scratching his skin all night, but he had no complaint to make and was as helpful as could be.

Catherine, Aunt May, Anne, Nancy, and Loretta lay side by side in the haystack cubbyhole, listening for a familiar sound — the whirr of a motor, a voice calling. Every now and then they shouted together:
Helloooooooo!
On the trip across the bay, they could barely see one another. Now the night was so clear, they could see for miles. An eerie radiance glowed like a sunset in the distance. The fire in New London was burnishing the sky.

George Chase was an odd duck. That was about the kindest thing most people had to say about him. In 1938 he was sixty, and if you happened to find yourself downwind of him, you might think he had not washed in as many years. Few knew him, or knew where he came from. As far as most people could remember, he showed up one day at the Davis farm over in Stonington — a stocky man of few words, six feet tall with a grizzly tangled beard, who dressed in bib overalls and a slouch straw hat, regardless of the season. The Davis farm spread for hundreds of acres along the banks of the Pawcatuck River, which separates Stonington, Connecticut, from Westerly, Rhode Island. How Chase happened to stop at that place, which has been in the Davis family since colonial days, is unclear. Old Man Davis was something of a character himself. He hired Chase to do odd jobs — tend the hogs, feed the hens, and the like. In exchange, Davis built him a twelve-foot-square cabin in the woods. It was furnished with a stove, a table, and a wooden bed. Chase lived alone with a one-man cat. He raised yellow-eyed beans in a cleared patch behind the cabin and picked pails of blackberries, raspberries, and strawberries in the woods. Once a week he rode into town with Old Man Davis in the Model A Ford truck, sold his berries to the Victory Bakery, and bought cans of Strongheart to feed his cat.

Local children thought Chase was the bogeyman and hid their faces when he passed. Parents kept their children away from him. But everyone on the Davis farm knew that “Old George,” though “kind of colorful,” was a “darn good man” — honest, hardworking, and quite a baker. His specialties were blueberry pie, spice cake, and great big pans of gingerbread. John “Whit” Davis Jr. remembers the time he and a hired hand stopped by the cabin. Chase was just taking a pan of gingerbread out of the oven. He cut two generous slices. Whit was maybe eleven or twelve, and he wolfed down his cake. The hired hand took a couple of bites. “Mmmm,” he said to Chase, “raisins. I like plenty of raisins in my gingerbread.” Old George took his pipe out of his mouth. It was a battered pipe with a curved stem. The end was wrapped in string to fit firmly between his two remaining upper teeth. “Not raisins,” he said. “Flies in the batter.”

As Wednesday blackened, George Chase lit his stove and settled in with a bottle of something cheap and potent. Taunting wind tore through the woods, and booming gusts shook the cabin. Chase swilled the last of his whiskey. He was lighting his pipe when the most improbable thing occurred. Someone knocked on his door. While he was considering this odd turn of events, a man — bruised, half naked, and dripping wet — burst in, sputtering an outlandish tale. Napatree was in ruins. The bay was crammed with houses. Bodies were washing up on the Connecticut shore.

George Chase snorted at the unlikely story, picked up his kerosene lantern, and went out into the storm to see for himself. The first survivor he found was an elderly lady, weak and close to death. She was Jane Grey Stevenson, proprietor of the Watch Hill gift shop. Mrs. John Warner, a Fort Road neighbor who rode across the bay on a door, was struggling to help her pick her way through the rubble on the shore.

Old George brought the women back to his cabin. “Mr. Chase gave me a cup of hot ginger tea, which burned all the way down but made me feel warm and alive,” Jane Grey Stevenson recalled. “Then he gave me his overcoat and made me take off all my wet clothes, which he hung on a line over the stove.

“Some other survivors came, men and women, about six or eight, I think, and they all got the same good care. No praise can be too great for Mr. Chase’s warm sympathy to all of us in that little house, just built to hold himself, his cot, and his stove.”

By the time he finished gathering the shipwrecked refugees from Napatree, Chase had eleven wet, filthy, battered, exhausted, and grateful guests in his twelve-foot-square cabin. Besides Jane Grey Stevenson and Mrs. Warner, there were the three carpenters from the Burke house; the caretaker Herb Greenman; and Harriet Moore and her daughter, Mary; her maid, Margaret Kane; and her friends Violet Cottrell and Denise O’Brien. Chase was not used to company and he had no food to offer, but he kept the wood fire burning and shared what he had — ginger tea, milk, and a pail of stale water.

Harriet Moore described the odd scene: “The cabin was just about a one-room job and to fit us all in, it was necessary to do no moving when we were once seated. There were three on the bed, two on the floor, two on the wood box, three on the backless stools, and Mary in one of the carpenter’s laps — just like peas in a pod. The host of the evening was most cordial in his own little way.”

When the storm ceased and the sky cleared, Chase walked through the woods and knocked on Old Man Davis’s kitchen door. With the fallen trees, the deep ponds, the heaps of rubble, and the darkness, it took a couple of hours to get to the main house and back, but about midnight he returned. John Davis followed on horseback with a loaf of bread and a bottle of apple cider or whiskey, memories vary.

While the refugees were waiting in Chase’s rude cabin, Herb Greenman told the story of the rag doll that had given him courage. Harriet Moore recognized the doll from his description. It belonged to Mary. Sometime during the cleanup period, the rag doll turned up in the bathtub full of sand and seaweed. Harriet gave it to Greenman, who named it Hurricane Sue.

After the Great Hurricane blew through New England, George Chase’s kitchen was never empty again. The unlikely hero who had sheltered fifteen or more refugees from the storm enjoyed a brief measure of local fame. As the attention faded and the survivors reordered their lives, Chase was forgotten by all except Harriet Moore.

Whit Davis, who was fourteen in 1938, remembers her visits: “She’d come down that road in her big limousine, with her chauffeur driving — and the road wasn’t paved at that time. She’d bring food to George — you should have seen that food — and she did it for six years.”

Chase died on December 1, 1944, as he had lived — alone and in poverty. But he is buried in the Stonington Cemetery beneath a handsome granite cross, inscribed with his name. As long as Harriet Moore lived, his grave was maintained with care.

Sometime after nine o’clock, four figures ventured out of the old fort at Napatree Point. Lillian, Jack, and the clammers stepped into a clear, pitch-black night and a place they had never seen before. The looming shadow in the far distance must be Watch Hill. Pinpoints of light danced around it like fireflies. Otherwise, there were no lights except the stars — huge stars, as big and bright as moons.

They began to stumble down the beach, as uncertain and disoriented as Rip Van Winkle awakening after a hundred-year sleep. The beach was as clean as a whistle. Not a sign of the road they had driven. Not a car. Not a house. Not a chunk of seawall. Not a shingle. Not a clothespin. Thirty-nine houses washed away like sand castles. A summer idyll gone without a trace.

Lillian, Jack, and the clammers were the only four to survive the storm on Napatree. Fifteen people died there on September 21. Jane Grey’s sister, Mary Stevenson, and their beloved maid, Elliefair Price, were drowned. Jim Nestor’s aunt was found still clutching her overnight case. Her two maids drowned as well. Frank Pasetti, Herb Greenman’s assistant, and Havila and Jessie Moore, who had been enjoying the spectacle of the storm from their glassed-in porch, were also lost. The letter that Jessie Moore gave to the postman that Wednesday was delivered long after her body was recovered. It was postmarked Watch Hill Station, Sept. 21, 4
P.M
. Her husband, Fred, carried it in his wallet for the rest of his life.

Lillian and Jack married within a year. Their son, Jack Jr., said, “If they could weather the ’thirty-eight hurricane together, they believed they could go through anything.”

Out at the southernmost tip of Beavertail on the island of Jamestown, churning water — half sand, half sea, the dirty yellow color of a mongrel dog — had been boiling up from the depths of the ocean and smashing against the lighthouse. Waves had broken over the granite tower and ripped out the side of the keeper’s house, exposing the original 1749 foundation.

Carl and Ethel Chellis had spent the storm frantic with worry. Their eldest son, Bill, made it home, but Clayton and Marion were not back from school. Carl had tried to reassure his wife. The teacher was probably keeping the kids in school until the storm blew over. They were safer there. The lighthouse was a dangerous place to be in a vicious storm. Ethel was clinging to that reassuring thought when a car drove up to the lighthouse and the Chellises learned that their children were not safe in school.

Carl raced down to the cove. It was empty. There was no beach, no causeway, only a single body of water and the half-submerged school bus. Thinking there was a chance to save the children, Chellis dove into Sheffield Cove again and again. He did not know then that the bus was empty. Later in the evening, sometime between eight and nine o’clock, lights began moving around the head of Mackerel Cove. Although bathhouses were floating in the bay, most islanders didn’t realize until the next morning that the lights in the cove came from searchers looking for the lost children. Along every beach on the Rhode Island shore, clusters of beams jumped and darted.