Widow's Tears (28 page)

“I wish Rachel would stop writing nursery rhymes and song lyrics on the board and just come out and tell us what we're supposed to know,” Ruby grumbled.

“Rachel again,” I said plaintively. “Is anybody going to tell me who this Rachel person is and why you think she's haunting this place?”

Ruby and Claire traded looks, then nods. “This calls for some of that pecan pie you brought,” Claire replied. “No coffee, but we do have milk. How about some hot chocolate?”

Outside, there was grumble of thunder and we could hear the rain beating against the windows.

“If we're going to be telling ghost stories on a rainy night,” I said, “pie and hot chocolate would be a big help.” I paused, remembering something we'd skipped over. “You said that this afternoon's message contained a date, didn't you, Claire? But you didn't say what it was.”

Claire took down a box of chocolate mix from a shelf. “September eighth, I think. There was a year, but I don't remember what it was.”

“It was 1900,” Ruby said. She looked at me. “I keep thinking I know what that is, but I can't quite get it. Does that date mean anything to you, China?”

September 8, 1900.

“Yes,” I said. I closed my eyes. “I'm afraid it does.”

Claire got the milk out and went to get a pan from the rack to make our hot chocolate. As she touched the rack, the pans began to dance.

Galveston
Early evening, September 8, 1900

The Galveston Hurricane of 1900 was thought to have begun life as a tropical wave moving off the west coast of Africa around the middle of August. It strengthened as it slowly crossed the sun-warmed Atlantic, breezed past the Windward Islands on August 27, skipped through the Leewards on August 30, drenched Cuba as it grazed the south shore and bounced across its midsection on September 3, and emerged into the Florida Straits two days later, weakened by its tussle with the Cuban mountains.

From that point on, the storm gathered strength and momentum, setting a steady track for the Texas coast. The Gulf waters had been warmed by the extraordinarily hot summer, the wind shear was light, and the steering currents were favorable, all of which made the Gulf a perfect nursery for the adolescent hurricane. What's more, a huge low-pressure area was building in the center of the country from Canada to Texas: a giant vacuum pulling everything, irresistibly, into itself.

Propelled by these energies and growing to an almost supernatural size and strength, the storm barreled straight across the Gulf basin. It made landfall on the southwestern end of long, low Galveston Island, and its right front quadrant—the most powerful part of the storm—smacked into the city like a balled-up fist, striking at a straight-on 90-degree angle, propelled by all the pent-up ferocity of its long passage. Its trajectory thrust the wind-powered waves straight into the low-lying city, whose highest point was only 8.7 feet above sea level.

But the storm's route and the size of what modern meteorologists call its wind field would create another deadly outcome. All day Saturday, the winds had blown out of the north, produced by the counter-clockwise circulation around the approaching storm. By noon, they had reached gale force, prying the roofs off downtown buildings (like Ritter's Café) and pushing the water out of Galveston Bay and into the city, flooding it from the northwest. Then, around seven in the evening, the winds shifted to the southeast, blowing at an incredible 150 miles an hour with gusts much higher than that. They shoved a fifteen-foot storm surge onto the Gulf side of the island. The bay waters met the Gulf waters over the heart of the drowning city. The barrier island that was Galveston was completely submerged.

It had earned the name given to it by the unhappy Cabeza de Vaca when he was shipwrecked on its sandy shore.

Malhado.
Misfortune.

*   *   *

T
HREE
miles west of the city, rising like a brick-and-stone stronghold above the beach, was St. Mary's Orphanage. Like St. Mary's Infirmary in the city, it was in the charge of the Sisters of Charity of the Incarnate Word, who were deeply dedicated to the care of orphaned children. At first, the children lived at St. Mary's Infirmary, at Tenth and Market Streets, but after a time an orphanage was established on a beachfront property on the estate of Captain Farnifalia Green—a healthy location, it was thought, open to the sky and the sea, remote from town and the omnipresent threat of yellow fever. The facility consisted of two large, two-story dormitories with open galleries facing the Gulf and rows of windows to catch the cooling ocean breezes. It was protected from storm tides by a natural barrier of sand dunes, anchored in place by beach grasses and salt cedar. In September of 1900, the orphanage was home to ninety-three children and ten sisters.

The summer had been abysmally hot, and the sisters must have been miserable under their heavy habits and veils of coarse black serge. Saturday morning's north wind had been very welcome, and anyone listening to their pre-dawn prayers that morning might have heard them thanking the good Lord for sending the cooler weather, even though it seemed that He was sending a storm as well. After breakfast, Mother Superior Camillus sent Sister Elizabeth Ryan with a wagon to get supplies from the infirmary in the city. The weather was indeed growing stormy, and Mother Gabriel, at the infirmary, tried to persuade her to stay until it cleared. Sister Elizabeth refused. Mother Superior was expecting her, she said.

The beach road often flooded, but this morning it was worse than usual—in places, entirely underwater, so that Sister Elizabeth had a great deal of trouble getting back to the orphanage with the supply wagon. By
the time she finally returned, the waves were eating away at the dunes “as though they were made of flour,” one of the older boys would say later. Soon the dunes had disappeared and the orphanage was completely surrounded by water, so that even the youngest novice could see that the storm would pose a significant peril by nightfall. The sisters prayed, consulted, and decided that God had given them no other choice: they had to remain where He had put them and trust to Him and the Blessed Virgin to keep the children safe.

In mid-afternoon, Mother Superior and the nuns herded their charges into the chapel on the first floor of the girls' wing, the newer and stronger of the two buildings, where they led the children in prayer and in song—one of their favorites, an old French hymn called “Queen of the Waves.” But the wind and the waves battered the building relentlessly, and by six that evening, the rising water forced them upstairs. Still trusting the Blessed Mother but knowing that they had to do the best they could for the children, Mother Superior sent one of the workers, Henry Esquior, to collect all the clothesline he could find. With that, the sisters tied the children together in groups of six and eight. Then they tied one group to the cincture each sister wore around her waist, promising never to let go.

The sisters were gathered in a protective circle around the children when they heard a great, bone-rattling crash. The boys' wing had collapsed and some of the debris had struck their building. Frightened but firm in their faith—and “very brave,” one of the three surviving boys would say later—they continued to sing.

They were still singing when the building broke apart and the children and the sisters were flung into the wind-driven deep.

*   *   *

A
UGUSTUS
Blackwood had built well. His house stood on sturdy piers that rose eight feet above the island's sandy surface, its walls were stout, its slate-covered roof was firm. At least, that's what Rachel Blackwood told herself as she and Colleen (in such a dire circumstance, they could hardly be Mrs. O'Reilly and Mrs. Blackwood) and Patsy retreated with the children to the nursery, which overlooked what had once been the garden and was now a surging, foam-flecked sea. The room was at the rear of the second floor, away from the Gulf, and seemed somehow safer, although the gallery that had been wrapped around the back of the house had gone the way of the front gallery, ripped off almost playfully by the giant hand of the wind.

Before they fled up the great staircase, Rachel and Colleen had chopped holes in the floors of the dining room, the drawing room, and the music room, then opened the front and back doors to relieve the pulsing pressure of the water. Now, they were standing at the second-story window, looking out across the neighborhood. There was still enough light so that Rachel
could see the houses on the street behind them breaking up and washing away, the wreckage turning into battering rams and demolishing other houses as it was swept about by the waves. The Nevilles' house next door had been among the most splendid in the city: large, three-storied, sided in an intricate pattern of shiplap boards and fish-scale shingles, painted in a colorful medley of greens and blues with red trim. But the piers on which it was built were several feet shorter than those beneath the Blackwoods' house. Now, the Nevilles' first floor was completely underwater, every slate stripped from the roof, the widow's walk torn away by the wind. Rachel shuddered, wondering what their own roof looked like—and what horrors she would see from their widow's walk, if she were able to stand there now.

Colleen clutched her arm. “Look!” she whispered. Just below them, past the window, a woman lashed with a rope of bedsheets to a wooden door was being whirled along by the waves. She lay limp and lifeless, her long hair trailing in the water like Ophelia's, and Rachel knew she must be dead. Behind her was the body of a dead horse, grotesquely rolling over and over like a barrel whirled by the flood. For an instant Rachel wondered about Augustus. If he were alive, surely he would have braved even the worst of the wind and flood to come to her. He would not,
could
not abandon her and the children to face these terrors alone.

Then, just at that moment, Matthew ran from the hallway door and flung himself at her. “Mama, Mama!” he cried, clutching her around the waist. “The water has climbed to the top of the stairs! It's coming across the floor!”

Rachel held him as tight as she could, her heart in her mouth. To the top of the stairs? How much farther would it come? How fast? The windows rattled and the floor shuddered under her feet, bricks from the chimneys were thumping down onto the roof, and wooden blinds slammed
against the casements of the broken windows. Around her, the house was creaking and groaning, crying out as if it were in agony—as it was, she thought despairingly, as they were, as
all
were on this island, on this horrible night.

For Rachel, seeing that horrid black water sloshing across the upstairs hallway in her lovely house, the house that held everything that was dear to her, it was as if all that was good and true and beautiful in this world was being washed away.

The clattering pans stopped dancing when Claire took one down and poured milk into it. She put it on the gas stove and turned on the burner, stirring it to keep it from scorching while Ruby took the pecan pie out of the box and got out three small plates and forks.