Under a Dark Summer Sky (26 page)

Two Years Later

Dwayne brushed the sand from Roy's pants. He had only just managed to get him dressed and already he was dirty, chasing a lizard around the yard on his powerful little legs.

The boy looked up at him with wide eyes. Noreen's eyes. He seemed to sense the importance of the occasion, even if he did not understand it. Dwayne could see Noreen so clearly in the boy's face, in the arch of his brows and the shape of his mouth. More and more of her came to the surface as he grew.

“Your momma would be so proud of you.”

He could not be sure if Roy remembered her. Sometimes he called out for her as he slept, when the nightmares came, but most of the time it seemed Dwayne was the only parent he had ever known. Of course, in a way, he belonged to the survivors of Heron Key too. So many children had been lost that those who made it through had become community property. Whenever they went to get groceries or mail a letter, it took forever because people wanted to fuss at Roy and give him treats. He had become plump and sleek on it, which was fine with Dwayne. He never wanted to see Roy as thin again as he was after the storm. His own paunch had not regained its former glory. For days and days, nothing got through until the Red Cross arrived. Were it not for the turtles that Zeke caught and the water tanker left on the tracks, it could have turned out very differently for them.

“Wanna play with Nathan.”

Dwayne smoothed the boy's springy curls. He would forever be amazed at the resilience of children. They had finally found Nathan where the wind had dropped him, nearly forty miles away and still wrapped in Missy's arms. He was almost unrecognizable from the bruising, both legs broken and nearly dead from dehydration. His heart had stopped twice on the Coast Guard rescue plane. You'd never know it now from the way he sped around the place. The only lasting damage seemed to be his somewhat bowlegged gait, a scar that bisected his left eyebrow, and an abiding fear of water. He and Roy had become inseparable.

“Nathan will be there, I told you. You can go play later, but there's something we got to do first.” It had taken two frustrating years, but the memorial was finally completed and ready to be unveiled, on the site where Jenson's store used to be.

They were ready. Dwayne swung Roy up onto his shoulders. The boy clutched handfuls of his hair and giggled with delight.

• • •

“Are you about ready?” Doc asked. “We're going to be late.”

“How do I look?” asked Hilda. She was wearing a dress of sea-blue cotton that matched her eyes. After the months of living in donated Red Cross clothes, it was the first new thing she had bought. She pulled at it where it stretched over the bulge of her stomach. At four months along, she was starting to show. “This doesn't hang right anymore,” she said. “I need to get it let out. I wish I could find another dressmaker as good as Nettie.”

“You look beautiful,” Doc said with a kiss on her forehead. “Just beautiful.” She had tried to cover her scars with heavy foundation. The makeup seemed to draw attention to the hard lines and folds left by the sutures. But it made her feel better, and he decided that was more important. She was also self-conscious about the slight droop of her mouth, a reminder of her latest seizure.

“Now come on,” he said. “It's time to go.”

“I don't know.” She fussed at her skirt. “I think I like the pink better…”

He winced as Nathan pulled at his hand. “Take it easy, Nathan,” she said. “Daddy's back is bad today.”

It was time to go to Miami for another operation, to remove yet more wooden fragments from his back. Some were inoperable, too close to the spine to be extracted. They would be with him always, painful souvenirs of that night. When the morning finally came after the storm, he could hear people searching the rubble, calling names of loved ones. He could make no sound, trapped beneath the weight of the collapsed roof. Doc knew that no one expected to find anyone still alive under the massive pile of timber. The only reason he and Hilda did survive was that the debris stopped them from being swept away by the wave, which washed through with merciful speed. But he had been able to do nothing to attract attention, pinned across Hilda's body by the fallen beams. She had been unconscious for hours, but he had felt her slight, shallow breathing beneath him. Had Henry not found them when he did, delirious with pain and thirst…well, they would have joined their friends and neighbors on the huge cremation pyres that burned day and night.

He looked around at the home that had begun to take shape. There were still times when none of it seemed real. He sometimes feared they might just be ghosts, floating through other peoples' lives, tied forever to the place where they had died. But no, he thought, ghosts do not use hammers and nails; ghosts do not pour cement. Hilda had wanted the remains of the old Kincaid house demolished. So they had built a new one, of solid construction—with a concrete hurricane shelter. Even after two years, there was still a lot of work to do, but it was a start. He had figured she would want to leave Heron Key behind forever, move up north or out west—anywhere far away. But she would never feel confident among strangers, only among the others who, like her, had survived that night.

“It's okay, Nathan,” he said. He thought he would never get tired of being called “Daddy.” Nathan seemed to have accepted him, with no memory at all of Nelson. “Put Sam's leash on him.”

Nathan clipped the leash to Sam's collar. The dog had been found by one of the rescue boats, afloat in a fruit packing crate, Cyril's claw still attached.

Hilda put some dainty gold sandals on her feet.

“Those are pretty,” he said, “but not very practical—”

She placed a hand on his chest. “Yes,” she said with a smile, blue eyes shining. “I know.”

• • •

Henry splashed some water on his face and put on a clean shirt. The morning was already hot and promised a sweltering afternoon. He had been to the memorial site early, to make double sure that everything was in order. It had taken a mighty, concerted effort to get it approved, commissioned, and delivered—all made possible by the American Legion funds, after the state government declined to contribute.

From the other room came, “Can you give me a hand, Henry?”

He went in to find Missy sitting on the bed, struggling with the clasp of her necklace. It was a gold St. Christopher, a present from Hilda and Doc in gratitude for what she had done for Nathan. He fixed the clasp and bent down to kiss her.

She looped her arms around his neck and he lifted her into the chair, her weight easy in his arms. It had taken him a while to get the hang of it—he had even dropped her once when he forgot to put on the brakes—but they now had a smooth routine. And the plans for the new Heron Key Colored School included all the necessary ramps and fittings to let her get around, even a special bathroom. Henry had made sure of that. He had also harassed the school board into donating a new set of
Encyclopedia
Britannica
too. Amazing what could be achieved, he thought, with enough moral blackmail.

The first term would start in a few months. The building would not be ready, of course, and classes would have to be held on the beach to begin with, but that was okay. It was nearly impossible to tear Missy away from her lesson plans, which were strewn across her desk under the window. The desk was one of the first things he had made for her, out of wood taken from Mama's old house.

There were times when his pride in her nearly overwhelmed him. This was one of those times. She looked so fine in her new green dress, another present from Hilda. He just wanted to stand and stare.

“You doing it again,” she said fondly.

“I cain't help it.” He still sometimes found it hard to believe she had been returned to him. The Coast Guardsmen who found her and Nathan still sent them Christmas cards. They had just been so delighted to find anyone at all still alive on that spit of sand, especially a woman and a baby. But because Nathan was in such peril on the flight back, no one had realized until they landed just how badly Missy was hurt. For the first few months in the hospital, Henry had just sat by her bed and kept watch, reading her stories, getting fresh food, until finally he brought her home, to the house he had made for them.

Sorrow shadowed her face. “She should be here,” Missy said and cast her eyes to the window that overlooked the beach. The waves sparkled in the clear morning light. “It ain't right, without her.”

“Yes,” he said. There was nothing else to say, no words that they hadn't said over the previous two years.

Another long silence while they both stared at the sea that looked so calm and inviting on this hot day. Then she curled her hand inside his. “Come on, Mr. Roberts, let's go.”

He released the brakes on her chair. “Yes, ma'am, Missus Roberts.”

• • •

They gathered in the center of town, where Jenson's store had stood for so many years. The monument was a handsome obelisk of creamy yellow stone, inset with a stylized carving of windswept palm trees. Its contours were covered by a pale drape, the hem stirred by a slight breeze that did nothing to cool the air. The sun was directly overhead, the time of day when shadows disappeared.

Henry wiped the sweat from his face. He was pleased with the final result. He and Doc and Dwayne had wanted to include a list of names on the monument, but it wasn't possible. They would never be sure of all those who died, because so many bodies were taken by the wind and the sea. Many of those found were unidentifiable, once the intense heat and the huge swarms of flies did their work. But not the carrion birds. The flies feasted on their carcasses too.

For days and days, Henry and the other survivors had collected the rotting corpses, whose flesh came away in their hands like soft cheese. He had prayed to find Missy—and also not to find her—as he looked into each face, swollen beyond recognition. The stench was overwhelming, not even dented by the disinfectant they washed in every few minutes. Some of the National Guardsmen wore gas masks, which put the final seal on it for Henry. He had thought there could be nothing worse than his time in the trenches, but this had been many, many times worse. The decomposing bodies had been robbed of their very identities.

At first, they had tried to make coffins for each but quickly realized that the scale of death required faster measures. So they began to burn them all, without pause or ceremony, in huge pyres, blacks and whites, old people and children, townspeople and veterans. Some were mangled, unidentifiable lumps of meat, and others were completely intact. The sky had turned black with the smoke, the sea stained gray with ash.

And as the burning continued, he had searched for her, inside every ruined building, under every tangled heap of wood or metal, inside every crushed car. He had found only carnage or, rarely, folks like Doc and Hilda, still breathing. It was about five days after the storm that he collapsed, from lack of sleep, food, and water and the infection raging in his wounds. Waking up in the hospital, his only thought was to go back to the search, but he could not even get out of bed. When he could finally walk again, he had trudged up and down the corridors to build his strength, and it was on one of these excursions that he heard a nurse mention a familiar name.

It seemed incredible, standing there in the gentle breeze with the glint of sun on calm water and the soft swish of the palms, that this was the same place that had resembled the worst battlefield imaginable, that had reeked of death for weeks as the town staggered back to its feet. He looked around at the few others who, like him, had lived through that night and what followed and saw the experience engraved on their faces.

Violet and Franklin stood together, unconsciously leaving a space for Abe. Even now, Violet still retained the hunched posture of grief, as if winded by a blow. Her boy had died of blood poisoning from the wound in his arm while waiting to be evacuated.

Zeke kept himself apart from the others. He looked tiny, very much diminished by Poncho's absence. It was the first time Henry had seen him wear a shirt.

The American Legion band arrived and began to unpack, their white uniforms and silver instruments flashing in the sun. Henry put a hand up to shade his eyes from the glare and spotted the Legion post commander, Leonard Goodchild. “Good to see you, Leonard,” he said and shook his hand. “A mite different to last time.”

“You could say that, Henry.” Goodchild's men had been among the first relief workers to arrive after the storm. Some of them had never recovered from what they saw during those days.

Cars and buses pulled up, disgorging scores of people Henry had never seen before. There were a lot of Florida license plates but some from out of state too. And they just kept coming.

“Who are these people?” he asked Goodchild.

“Folks who want to pay their respects. This made the national news, Henry.” He tilted his head to one side and shaded his eyes with a hand. “You look surprised.”

He had only expected a few visitors, figured the unveiling was of little interest beyond the environs of the Keys despite all the press coverage. It was astounding that such a tiny place, unknown to almost the whole country, had become a focus for national outrage over the botched evacuation of the veterans. He heard that the northern papers carried stories for months after the storm, going almost as far as accusing President Roosevelt of manslaughter. At last, it seemed there was to be a public debate about how they had been treated after the war. In death, they had achieved what they never could in life.

For a long time, Henry had followed the investigation into how they came to be abandoned, why so many had died so needlessly. But it was like trying to catch hold of smoke. Each time they seemed close to an answer, those in charge got diverted by more official hand-waving. And as time passed, so the outrage waned and the world moved on.