The Promise (33 page)

Back inside again, I took up shoveling. Something sparkling in the mud caught my eye. I bent down and picked it out with my fingers. It was a black bead made of glass. It made me think of them fancy dangling earrings of Mrs Williams’ but this couldn’t be hers. This bead was by itself; it didn’t look to be part of anything. I rubbed it on my sleeve, then held it up. It was pretty how it caught the light, turning red and purple and blue. If there was ever a time I needed something pretty, it was now. I put it in my apron pocket.

The shovel blade hit something. I stopped and pulled out a plate that was buried. I took it outside and put it by the buckets. It could be used once it was washed. Daddy and Wiley had dug a new well, and the water was fresh enough. But nobody had done that at Oscar’s. Wasn’t no need to, not right now anyway.

I took up the shovel again, then stopped. There was a crumpled piece of paper on the floor by the icebox. Of all things. Dry, too, not falling apart like Mrs Williams’ sheet music that must have blown around during the storm, me finding bits and pieces of it in the mud. I smoothed out the paper. It looked like a letter, the way it started out with a short line of words and ended the same way on the back side. The writing slanted hard to the right, and there were blots of ink in places. This didn’t look like Mrs Williams’ handwriting, least I didn’t think so. I’d seen the letters that she’d written to Oscar this spring and summer, not that I’d been prying. Oscar had left them in his writing desk and the desk needed dusting.

I put the letter under the ink bottle. An orphanage washed away, but not a letter. Nothing about the storm made sense. Like Frank T. He was dead. There was no other way to put it. I’d tried to put it other ways – he was gone, he was in heaven – but that didn’t change the hurt. It didn’t change how much I missed him.

Wiley found him three days after the storm and we patched the story together. When the water came up in the city, Frank T. had hightailed it for Maggie Mandora’s house on the west side. That was what Maggie’s brother, Mark, told Wiley. Their house took up shaking and a wall fell in, then the roof did, too. Mark was tossed through a hole and out into the water. The only thing that saved him was a table he caught hold of. He hung on to that and fought for his life in the dark, waves crashing over him, all that rain, the wind, and him carried off to the gulf. When the water started to go down, he was swept back and landed near his house. Except he didn’t know it. He was in a state of bewilderment. Those were his words. All around him, there was nothing but rubble and pieces of houses. It was a day later before he recognized the heap that had been his home.

Frank T. didn’t die alone and that made me feel some better. A person took her comfort where she could, that was another thing this storm taught me. When Wiley, Daddy, and Mark Mandora dug him out, he was hunched over Maggie like he’d tried to spare her. That made me sorry I had snapped at him for mooning over Mrs Williams. In the end, Frank T. showed what Maggie meant to him, and she would have known that. Wiley and Daddy brought Frank T. home so we could bury him right. He was a few hundred yards east of Oscar’s house. ‘I want him on the ridge,’ Mama had said. ‘It’s the best place,’ and that time, Daddy didn’t say different.

We buried Maggie and her folks there, too. We couldn’t burn them, not like Daddy and Wiley had to do to the ones that had been in the bayou. There’d been people washed up on the beach, too, and Daddy and Wiley couldn’t build coffins fast enough; there wasn’t enough planed lumber. So Daddy and Wiley hauled the dead inland as far as they could, Jim Bowie being the only horse to pull the wagon. I didn’t ask nothing about it; I didn’t want to know. But I saw the fires. Smelled them, too.

Thousands dead, that was what people at church said. Maybe six thousand, maybe more. But I wasn’t going to think about that.

I needed to leave the hatbox alone, too. There was nothing but fresh hurt inside of that thing. Like seeing the crucifixes before I closed it. That surprised me plenty, Mrs Williams saving them. I’d seen how she’d reared back the first time Oscar said the Catholic prayer at dinner. I’d seen how she’d froze up at the pavilion when Oscar brought the nuns to her so they could meet her.

Oscar. Just saying his name made my heart knot up tight as a fist. He was dead.

There, I’d said it. Not ‘he’s missing’, not ‘he’ll be home anytime’. Dead. It’d been two weeks and two days, and there hadn’t been a word about him. We don’t know what had happened to him other than what Mrs Williams saw. After looking for him for five days, Wiley went to the morgue in the city and when he got home, his eyes all red, he said, ‘He ain’t there. That’s all I’m going to say; don’t ask me nothing about it.’

If somebody had found Oscar, he was too far gone to be recognized and there weren’t words for that kind of sorrow. Oscar deserved a burial. He should be on the ridge. The notion that he’d been in one of them fires made my heart ache so hard that I believed I’d be the next to die.

Like now. All this work that needed doing, but here I sat at Oscar’s kitchen table because my knees were wobbling and my sorrow was bigger than me. When Wiley brought Andre home right after the storm and told us how Oscar had let the horses and cows out, how Mrs Williams said she hadn’t seen him since, well, I couldn’t let myself think about him. Or about Frank T. Instead, I lit into Wiley.

‘You left her by herself?’ I’d said. ‘To wait alone? And her having nobody here, no kin? You did that?’

Wiley hung his head with shame. I got Andre settled as best I could with Mama, and left home to sit with Mrs Williams.

I found her in the pasture. She had been snakebit two times, and the venom was strong, that rattler stirred up bad from the storm. She wasn’t the only one that got bit after the storm, that was what Wiley said. Rattlers were everywhere – up in trees, inside of people’s houses, even in attics.

Leastways I got her to the house, I got her in her bed. I cleaned the bites the best I could, but her arm was streaked red and her breathing was ragged. She got worse and worse sweating, and her arm swelled big. ‘You’re doing good,’ I told her. ‘All this sweating, you’re getting the venom out.’ But I knew better and so did she. She started saying things about Oscar, how the waves carried him off, how she’d never told him what he meant to her, and how he’d saved her life.

That last part didn’t make sense to me, but I was sweating myself, trying to save her, trying to cool her fever, trying to mop up the blood pouring from them bites. She told me that Andre saved her too, but if she died, she wanted me to look after him. ‘Take care of Andre. You love him.’ Them were her very words. I told her to quit talking, I was doing all I could for her. Her breathing got bad; she was fighting hard for air, gasping and gulping. She closed her eyes and then the rattle in her breathing stopped. ‘I won’t have it,’ I told her. ‘Don’t you give up,’ but she was dead.

One more person gone. And not from the storm but from a snake. That wasn’t right, living through a big blow only to be took by a rattler. I’d sat on the bed holding her good hand and nearly bawled from the notion of it. Then, I washed her face and combed her hair. If I hadn’t, it would have hurt her bad to see how she’d looked, all slick with sweat and her face gray.

But this hatbox. The things in it were Andre’s now. I should see what was in it before I handed it over to him.

I opened it. Letters. Some were old, the envelopes yellowing, and others were newer. I saw Oscar’s handwriting on a fair number of them. His penmanship was plain and made me think of how words looked in the newspapers, even and just right. But it was the other envelopes that I kept looking at. Some had the same slanted handwriting as the letter I’d found on the floor. Others were more upright. Oscar’s family, I thought. His kin up there in Ohio.

Mrs Williams might have told me to take care of Andre, but that didn’t make him mine. I wasn’t kin. Oscar’s mama and daddy were dead, but there were others. A sister and two brothers, all of them married and living in Ohio. Bernadette had told me.

I knew what I should do. I should take the letters to someone that could read. A year ago that would have been Bernadette. Two weeks and three days ago, it would have been the nuns at St. Mary’s. Now I’d have to ask one of the neighbors to read them. If they came from Oscar’s family, someone should write to them and tell them about Oscar and Mrs Williams. And about Andre.

They’d want him. He was all they had left of Oscar. Oscar’s people would come for Andre and take him up North. They’d sell Oscar’s land and I’d never see Andre again.

I put the letters back in the hatbox right quick. I wasn’t going to think about none of that. Not today. Andre had nightmares; every day he asked for Oscar, crying. He even asked for Mrs Williams, calling her ma’am. I knew because it was me tending him, it was me rocking him. Not strangers up there in Ohio.

Work, I told myself. Put your mind to your work. I did, the raspy scrape of the blade grating some on my nerves. But marked-up floors was nothing, not when laid side by side with the notion of shipping Andre to people that didn’t know one bitty thing about him.

I carried the shovel outside and hurled the dirt over the side of the veranda. I should tear them letters up and throw them away. Or burn them. No one would know. Even Mama hadn’t said anything about finding Andre’s kin. Nobody had. Likely nobody could take the notion of losing one more person.

I went back inside. Bigger things than letters had been lost; bigger things had been burned. A week ago, Everett Calloum, one of the neighbors, took up the chore of burning the carcasses of Oscar’s cows and horses. The flood had taken his wife and their two little children, and he was in a bad way. ‘Ain’t ready to fix the house,’ he’d told Daddy. ‘Don’t know if I ever will. But I’m wanting to do something powerful.’ So Everett piled wood around and over Oscar’s horses and cows, and set them on fire.

If there was one thing I was glad about, it was that Oscar wasn’t here to see none of that. Leastways, four of the cows survived the storm; we don’t know how. We found them roaming around, nicked with cuts.

But burning letters, that was something else. These weren’t mine. And they could be from Andre’s kin.

I looked again in the hatbox. Oscar’s pocket watch was in it, so was his book about the stars. The polished wood box with the
W
was a wedding present; Bernadette had showed it to me. She had nearly busted with pride. ‘From Oscar’s family,’ she told me. ‘His sister and brothers. Think of it, Nan. Me, with hardly nobody and now I have Oscar and all his kin.’

Likely they were worried. People at church said the whole world was worried about Galveston and that relief money was coming in by the bucket from places as far away as England. They said Clara Barton, an important lady that knew the president of the United States, had come to Galveston to lend a hand. If people like her and people on the other side of the ocean knew about the storm, then people up in Ohio did too. Oscar’s kin could come looking; Mrs Williams’ could too. Hers didn’t count, though. The way I saw it, they didn’t have a claim on Andre.

It’d take some doing for Oscar’s people to get here. The train trestles and the wagon bridge that crossed the bay had blown out. The only way to get here was by boat. For now, anyway. People said the trestles would be built again. Galveston wasn’t finished, they said. ‘Galveston will be better than ever,’ the preacher on Sunday had said. ‘Put your minds to that. And your shoulders.’ Maybe that was so but as long as the trestles and the wagon bridge were down, Oscar’s kin would have a mighty rough time getting here. It could be months before the trains ran again, maybe years.

The wood box with the
W
belonged to Andre now. It’d be good for him to have it. I opened it to make sure it didn’t hold something he shouldn’t see. There was a folded paper with a seal, like Daddy’s land deed, and another paper with fancy writing. That was the one I studied. I didn’t care nothing about reading but I knew months and numbers. August 30, 1900. That was the day Oscar married Mrs Williams.

Bernadette’s wedding band was in Oscar’s box, too. I purely missed her. Then I thought of Mrs Williams’ band. She’d been buried on the ridge wearing it, not a scratch on it. ‘Andre should have it,’ Mama had said. But there was no getting the band off. Her hand was too swelled up.

I didn’t count the bundle of paper money that was in Oscar’s wood box; it wasn’t mine. But there was plenty. More than enough to send Andre to Ohio.

Or it could be used to fix up Oscar’s house and barn. For Andre. For when he was older. There were four cows; that was a start. Wiley could teach him to be a dairy farmer. Oscar would want that, so would Bernadette. Mrs Williams might have other notions, her being her. But she’d turned Andre over to me; she wanted him with me.

Mrs Williams. Catherine. I missed her too, even if I didn’t like her all that much. I’d never been around nobody like her, a woman that didn’t know one little thing about cooking or keeping a house. Her prissy ways and her fancy talk were something to behold. In the end, though, she’d done right for Andre. She took him into the stairwell and sang to him. Andre told us that.

I walked over to her piano and raised the cover over the keys. Just that quick, I heard that tune she’d played, the one that pulled Oscar away from the barn and to the house, the tune that laid bare what he meant to me. It was about the moonlight. I wasn’t ever going to forget that music; each note was deep and pretty and sorrowful all at the same time. Neither was I going to forget how Mrs Williams looked at Oscar and how he looked at her, the yearning between them a want that didn’t leave room for nobody else.

I figured they were together now, Bernadette too. I didn’t know how that would work out, but I never could figure how heaven worked. But they were up there, all three of them, Bernadette singing her swamp songs while Mrs Williams patted her mouth with her napkin but tapped her toe, wearing her shoes that were the color of butter. And Oscar, he was in the middle, with his easy smile, his broad hands with the little scars on the backs, and his way of taking care of others like it gave him pleasure.