Widow's Tears (33 page)

“I'll help,” I said. “Do you have any plywood?”

“There's a piece on the back porch that will probably fit,” Claire replied, getting up. “I'll go see.”

“I'll help, too,” Ruby said decidedly. “I saw a hammer and some nails in one of the kitchen drawers. Anyway,” she added, nodding at the lamp that had extinguished itself, “we only have one light. I'm not staying here all by myself in the dark.” If she was any the worse for wear after her ghostly experience as a voice for Rachel Blackwood, she didn't show it.

We were all three standing now, and I noticed that the quality of the air in the room had changed dramatically. It was fresher, more moist, but with an odd, sour smell—blowing into the house from that broken hallway window, no doubt. It would be a good idea to get it covered as soon as we could.

Claire picked up the lamp. “Let's all go back to the kitchen and get another couple of lamps,” she said. “Then we can—”

“Wait,” I said, raising my hand. “Do you hear something? It sounds like—” I stopped, and we all heard it. A low, ragged groan, like a creature in pain, and a dragging sound, as if—

Claire gasped. “Something's out there,” she said. Her eyes were wide and frightened, and she clutched at Ruby's arm. “It's coming down the hallway, toward this room! Do something, Ruby!”

“Me?” Ruby cried frantically. “What can I do? I can't do anything. This is
your
house!”

Claire was grim. “Yes, but you're the one who talks to ghosts. What does Rachel say about—”

She stopped. The sounds in the hallway were louder, rustlings, as if whatever-it-was was feeling its way along the wall in our direction, accompanied by that awful dragging noise and a low, keening cry that seemed to cut to the bone.

I sucked in my breath. “Come on, guys, don't panic,” I said, as much to myself as to them. “It's probably an animal that got scared and jumped through the window. A dog or a cow or—”

“A mountain lion,” Ruby moaned, and we all three huddled together.

CRASH!

On the other side of the room, the door to the hallway flew open, banging like a gunshot against the wall. A sudden blast of rain-wet cold air filled the room. A hulking, hooded figure, hardly recognizable as human, raised itself up in the doorway, dragging one leg, holding one crooked arm against its chest. In the flickering light of Claire's lamp, I gasped as I saw that its face—or the place where its face would be if it had a face—was covered with mud and slimy ropes of brown and green weeds and hanks of dark, bloody hair. On one side, the skin was hideously flayed to the bone, hanging in a bloody flap from cheek to jaw like a hunk of raw meat. I could almost see eyes, too, although they were hardly human, glaring red and wild: an animal's eyes. Water, mixed with blood, streamed over its hunched shoulders and dripped onto the floor in a bloody puddle. The smell of fetid mud and decayed river weed clung to the thing as though it had just emerged from a flooded grave.

Claire screamed and turned her face away. I was frozen, staring.

Ruby gasped. “What?” she cried. “Who…what
are
you?”

The creature made a horrible, unholy gurgling sound. Then, with a threatening wild-animal growl and a roar of rage, hate, and pain, it lurched toward Ruby, raising its one good arm, brandishing an iron rod with a wicked, spear-like point.

Beside me, Claire screamed again and dropped the lamp with a crash of glass and a splatter of lamp oil. The light went out, and the room was plunged into darkness—except for a flickering tongue of flame that began to lap hungrily at the spilled oil.

“Fire!” Ruby cried. “Fire!”

The word slashed through the dark like the jagged neck of a broken bottle.

Galveston

All Rachel could remember was the horrible, bone-shattering shriek of the house—the cry of a living thing dying in agony—as it was shoved off its foundations by the battering ram of debris. It listed sharply, and the bed, the furniture, lamps, and children slid into utter darkness. The house went down like a stricken ship. She didn't know what happened after that.

When she woke up, her long wet skirt was wrapped around her like a leaden shroud, and she was lying on a piece of wreckage that bobbed
alarmingly in the water, tilting at such an angle that she had to cling to whatever she could grasp to keep from sliding off. With her were her neighbor Mr. Cline, his three young daughters, his brother Joseph, and a little boy so terrified that he could not remember his name, neither his first nor his last. All he could do was cry for his mother, terrible cries that ripped Rachel's heart to pieces, for she had no idea whether her own children had drowned when the house went down or were clinging to wreckage in the water and crying for her, like this poor little boy.

Ice-cold and shivering, they drifted on their storm-tossed raft through the wild night, Rachel holding the weeping child tight against her, the others clutching each other and holding on to the salvation of their slab of debris as best they could. They were bombarded by flying planks and scraps of wood and the floating corpses of drowned cows and horses and even people. Buffeted by breaking waves and frozen by wind as cold as if it blew straight off the polar ice, they were swept out to sea and then—although by this time Rachel scarcely knew it—swept back toward the land again. After what seemed an eternity of howling winds, their raft beached itself at last against the half-standing wreckage of a house. Their nightmare voyage over, another nightmare about to begin, the exhausted survivors stumbled onto solid ground.

Scarcely knowing what she was doing, knowing only that she was frantic for rest, Rachel crawled under the partial shelter of a canted roof. She curled up on the wet ground, arms around the little boy, and fell into a desperate sleep. When she woke and crawled out from under their shelter, the child was gone. She never saw him again and never knew what became of him.

As the storm blew itself out, the water receded almost as quickly as it had risen. The wind had died down to a soft breeze, and when the sun rose on that Sunday morning, the ninth of September, it splashed its customary
careless brilliance across the landscape just as though nothing at all out of the ordinary had happened the day and night before. It was a beautiful day in Galveston, where beautiful days were the normal state of affairs.

But for Rachel, nothing that she saw was normal, and never would be again. Dazed, scarcely knowing who or where she was, she picked her stumbling way around and over mountains of broken lumber laced with fragments of curtains, clothing, bedsheets and blankets, electrical and telephone wires, fishing nets, and rope, all pushed up by the storm in a giant windrow that snaked across the ruined city for miles. Then she emerged onto a broad, sloping plain that reached down to the blue waters of the Gulf, bladed completely clean by the moving mountain of debris. The earth was covered with a thick layer of mud, and she recognized not a single familiar landmark until she came upon her iron gate with the ornate letter
B
in the center, wrapped around the short, broken stub of a palm tree. There was no fence in sight, and no house, just the twisted gate. But there were the twin stone lions, their ears chipped and broken, lying forlornly facedown in the mud a little distance away. And all by itself, a child's red rocking chair.

It was the sight of that empty chair that broke Rachel's heart.

*   *   *

T
HE
Associated Press began its story about the hurricane with a striking and deeply heartfelt image. “The city of Galveston is wrapped in sackcloth and ashes. She sits beside her unnumbered dead and refuses to be comforted. Her sorrow and suffering are beyond description. Her grief is unspeakable.”

And so it was. Galveston mourned as it began to gather up its dead and bury as many as possible in the local churchyards. Augustus Blackwood was among the lucky, for his body was recovered from the wreckage of
Ritter's Café, identified, and interred in St. Mary's Cemetery, with a headstone to mark the place. Other bodies, unidentifiable, would be buried without a marker where they were found—until even that terrible recourse proved impossible. Then the dead were carted to the shore, where they were piled on barges and towed out into the Gulf, to be weighted with stones and buried in the pitiless waters that had robbed them of their lives.

But the ocean, even more pitiless now, refused these flawed offerings and returned many of the dead to the shore, where the living, now desperate to quell the stench of putrefaction and the poisonous threat of disease, burned them on pyres of wooden wreckage. For weeks, the smell of smoldering human flesh hung over the city like a smoky pall, and the ash from the cremation fires drifted on the wind. The surviving citizens—now under martial law—tied camphor-scented rags over their faces to keep out the stench. The Associated Press' metaphor of a mourning city clothed in sackcloth and ashes had become real.

The number of dead on the island was at first reported to be modest, since the surviving leaders of the city did not want to confess to the world that Galveston had been destroyed. But within a day or two, the death count grew to three thousand, then double that, then eight thousand, and even (some said) as many as ten thousand on the island, not including the hundreds who had died on the mainland. Whole families were lost, entire blocks of homes razed, their occupants gone forever. Isaac Cline's pregnant wife was found in October, a month after the storm, buried under the wreckage of her house. The bodies of most of St. Mary's orphans were never recovered, but a searcher found the corpse of a small child on the beach. He tried to pick it up, but when he did, he discovered that it was tied to another child, and another. He pulled the bodies of eight children and a nun out of their sandy grave.

And as far as property values could be measured, it was reported that
nearly half of the city's real estate had been destroyed, at a cost of some twenty-eight to thirty million dollars, very little of the loss covered by insurance. As well, some 150 acres of Galveston Island's beautiful shoreline had been chewed up and swallowed by the greedy ocean. “And the beach?” lamented the
Galveston Daily News
of September 13, 1900. “That once beautiful beach with its long stretches of white sand—what had become of that? Shoreward as far as the eye could reach were massive piles of houses and timbers, all shattered and torn.”

The uncountable losses of life and property seemed to pile as high as the massive mountains of rubble. They marked for many the bitter end of Galveston's dreams, for surely no man or woman would dare to trust their futures and those of their families to such a vulnerable place. But Galveston's city fathers were determined and still ambitious. Refusing to be cowed by a mere hurricane, they set about rebuilding their city and protecting it from any future storm.

The first order of business was the construction of a seventeen-foot-high concrete seawall, almost two feet higher than the storm surge that had overflowed the island. The seawall ran for over three miles along the beach, with a second section of nearly a mile completed two years later and still more sections built over the next six decades, for a total of ten full miles. The seawall was protected by a band of riprap some ten yards wide, built of giant granite boulders. To raise the city out of the reach of another destructive storm surge, all of the new and surviving buildings, even the cathedral, were jacked up several feet and the space below filled with tons of sand dredged up from Galveston Bay and pumped onto the land. The original elevation of the city averaged about five or six feet above low tide, with the highest point at just above eight feet. Afterward, the elevation varied from eight feet along the bay to some twenty-two feet along the Gulf side. The work was paid for by taxpayers and property owners. Galveston's
hopes would be rebuilt on this higher foundation: an entirely new commercial district, with forty blocks of new hotels, new banks, new city buildings, and even a grand new opera house to celebrate the city's rebirth.

People would rebuild their houses, too, and within just a few years, the city's residential neighborhoods would be full again, although it would take another decade before the streets would be lined with lush new gardens and trees, thriving in the new soil behind the security of the seawall. Eventually the reconstruction was done, and a good thing, too, for another hurricane tested the city in 1915, with a sixteen-foot storm surge and winds of 120 miles an hour. The seawall held firm, and only eleven citizens lost their lives. In that same year, however, the rival city of Houston completed the dredging of Buffalo Bayou and Galveston Bay, creating a navigable waterway and transforming it into the famous Houston Ship Channel, now infamously polluted with industrial poisons. Rebuild and fortified as it might, Galveston's advantage as a sheltering port was lost. The city could never again dream of becoming the New York of the Gulf.