Widow's Tears (8 page)

and he walked a crooked mile

“Rawlings.” The man straightened. “Miz Conway shoulda told me you were comin'. You got a problem with the car?”

“I…I just stalled it,” Ruby said, feeling that she had been reprimanded for bad driving. “I'm sure it's okay.” She turned the ignition key and, to her relief, the motor sparked into life.

He found a crooked sixpence

“Well, at least you didn't flood the damn thing.” Rawlings slapped the roof of the car with the flat of his hand and stepped back. “I'll let Miz Conway know you're here. Drive on around the back of the house and park beside the garage, then go on to the kitchen door. Leave your bags by the car and I'll bring 'em in for you.” He paused, adding pointedly, “When I get around to it.”

“I can manage,” Ruby said distinctly. “I wouldn't want to trouble you.”

“Suit yourself.” The man turned abruptly and headed toward a faint path, like a narrow game trail, that led downhill in the direction of the house.

As Ruby put the car in gear and started off, she looked back over her shoulder. To her relief, the woman in the gray dress was gone. But the windows of the crooked house, like sad and empty eyes, seemed to follow her as she drove cautiously down the hill and across the low concrete bridge over the gravel bed of the creek.

Galveston
Midday, September 8, 1900

As far as the Blackwood children were concerned, it was the most wonderful of mornings. After breakfast, the three boys and even Ida, who was usually a perfect little lady, had begged to put on their oldest clothes and go out and play in the warm rain. They were so excited that their mother felt she had to let them go, even though she was increasingly uneasy about the threatening weather.

Rachel had lived in Galveston only since her marriage to Mr. Blackwood some nine years before. She had little experience of tropical storms. But her cook-housekeeper, Mrs. Colleen O'Reilly, was one of the survivors of the hurricane of 1886, which had roared ashore a hundred miles to the south, turning the thriving port of Indianola—a rival of Galveston—into a ghost town. This morning, she was visibly apprehensive, which gave Rachel another reason for concern. Mrs. O'Reilly, who was not yet thirty,
red-haired and with a generous sprinkling of freckles across her cheeks, had a touch of the second sight.

Rachel might not have believed this if she hadn't witnessed it for herself. One bright summer afternoon, the two of them had been in the drawing room, laying out tea for the Ladies' Guild. Mrs. O'Reilly had glanced out the drawing room window and seen Mrs. Neville, the Blackwoods' next-door neighbor, crossing Q Avenue in front of the house. And then Mrs. Neville suddenly vanished from view—simply vanished, as if she had never been.

Mrs. O'Reilly had burst into tears and turned to tell this to Rachel, crying out in her rich Irish brogue that she feared for Mrs. Neville's life. Scoffing to herself (she wasn't in the least superstitious), Rachel had soothed her and sent her back to the kitchen. But two days later, Mrs. Neville was struck down in the street by a runaway horse. She died on the very spot where Mrs. O'Reilly had seen her vanish.

When Rachel told Augustus what had happened, he had shrugged, then smiled indulgently. “Another reason to canonize our Colleen,” he'd replied mildly. Like Rachel, he had a special fondness for Mrs. O'Reilly, who had become a mainstay in their home. Not only was she an extraordinarily competent cook-housekeeper who could (as Augustus said) work miracles with the loaves and fishes, but she loved the children in the same warmly protective way that she loved her own young daughter, Annie, whom she often brought to play with the Blackwood children.

This morning, visibly anxious, Mrs. O'Reilly had hurried through the preparations for the noon meal: meatloaf and mashed potatoes with green beans and cabbage and carrot slaw. That done, she hurriedly frosted Matthew's birthday cake, added ten candles, and made sandwiches for the afternoon birthday party.

Then—even though it was not yet eleven, with the rest of the day's
work yet to be done—she took off her apron and announced that she was going home.

“Sure 'n this storm is goin' to be a bad 'un,” she said. “I will be takin' me mother an' Annie to the Ursulines.” The convent was a strong building just a few blocks from the small frame house where Mrs. O'Reilly lived with her mother and three-year-old daughter. She tilted her head with an oddly intent and listening look. After a moment, she added urgently, “Ye must come, too, an' the children, Mrs. Blackwood. We'll be safe with the sisters.” She paused, fixed her gray-green eyes on Rachel's face, and repeated: “Truly, ye
must.
I know it.”

A little frightened by the young woman's intensity, Rachel hesitated. But the rain had stopped, and the wind—that peculiar keening wind that whistled so eerily in the eaves—had abated somewhat. She summoned her courage and smiled. “Thank you for your concern, Mrs. O'Reilly, but Mr. Blackwood will be home for lunch. I shouldn't like him to find an empty house.”

Pulling on her waterproof, Mrs. O'Reilly had nodded gravely. “Mayhap ye'll change yer mind. If ye do, come. The sisters will give ye shelter.” There was something in her eyes that frightened Rachel. She added, with an emphasis she had never used, “
Please come
.”

When she had gone, Rachel's courage began to fade. Mrs. O'Reilly had known of Mrs. Neville's accidental death, which could not have been foreseen. What if she was right about the storm, too? Rachel went to the telephone, rang the operator, and asked for 214, the number of the Weather Bureau. Mr. Cline was the bureau chief and her neighbor—he would be honest with her. There was a lengthy wait, but when at last he came on the line, he assured her that there was no need for worry.

“Your house and mine,” he said confidently, “are built well above any possible overflow. People in low-lying areas should go to higher ground,
yes. But you need not trouble yourself, Mrs. Blackwood. You'll be fine.” She was not quite reassured, but she thanked him before she hung up.

The other mothers in the neighborhood did not seem to share Rachel's concern. The children were out in force, splashing joyfully through the water that was surging up from the beach. The heavy brown waves were laden with fascinating flotsam and jetsam—shells and seaweed, jagged scraps of signboards, a bundle of rags, a broken beach chair. A salvaged wooden pallet made a fine raft for Matthew with a broom handle for a mast and a handkerchief for a pennant. There was even a curiously woven basket that Ida rescued and took to her mother, to be used in the garden.

And the toads, oh those toads! The tiny, brown freshwater creatures were everywhere by the thousands, the millions, hopping frantically for higher ground, away from the salty sea water. Ida and the twins caught a bucketful and then got bored with the effort and let them all go free, turning instead to collect the hermit crabs that were being tossed up by the waves. When the storm was over, they promised their mother, they would return the little creatures to their homes on the beach.

For other observers, there were even more interesting sights to be seen at the Midway, a ten-block stretch of souvenir peddlers, grimy shacks, boardwalk shops, and food stands selling boiled shrimp and beer, all just a few yards from the sandy beach. A large crowd of onlookers had gathered, muttering at the sight of the giant swells as they thundered like great brown dragons, mounting higher and higher on the shore. The watchers had come mostly by the electric streetcar, although the conductor had stopped the car several blocks away. He'd had to, for the street railway trestle that ran along the beach was being battered by the waves. It might have been demolished at any moment.

Some of the watchers had come to be amazed, for word of the mammoth waves, greater than any that had ever been seen, was spreading
around the city. Others had come for fun and were dressed in bathing costumes to enjoy the surf. But no one now dared venture into the water, for the waves had become too powerful. The rain was coming harder, like shotgun pellets flung by the wind, and the dragon-breakers were beginning to swallow the Midway shops and splinter the flimsy bathhouses. As the spectators gawked, the waves destroyed even the giant Pagoda Company Bath House with its twin octagonal, pagoda-roofed pavilions, built at the end of a nearly four-hundred-foot boardwalk that rose sixteen feet above the beach. Hastily retreating to safer ground, the spectators found themselves wading through surging water up to their knees.

On Strand Street at Ninth, in the narrow upper part of the island, stood John Sealy Hospital, an imposing stone-and-brick edifice only ten years old, studded with picturesque Victorian towers, turrets, and chimney pots exuberantly rendered in shape, color, texture, and detail. The hospital was the architectural work of Nicholas J. Clayton, who was responsible for many of the grand Victorian flights of fancy that Galvestonians loved so much—so many, in fact, and so grand (or grandiose) that the period was known as the “Clayton Era.” He was “excessively fond,” one critic later said, of decorative brick and ironwork.

At the hospital that morning, someone—a nurse, an aide—glanced out of a west-facing window toward the bay, a hundred yards away. She described the scene in a letter she was writing at that moment: “It does not require a great stretch of imagination to imagine this structure a shaky old boat out at sea, the whole thing rocking,” she wrote in her spidery hand. “…Like a reef, surrounded by water…water growing closer, ever closer. Have my hands full quieting nervous, hysterical women.” An hour later, more anxious now, she added another paragraph: “The scenes about here are distressing. Everything washed away. Poor people, trying to save their bedding and clothing…It is a sight. Our beautiful bay a raging torrent.”

Galveston Bay—the usually placid harbor where the big ships rode at anchor—was indeed a torrent. The north wind, which seemed to become more violent by the minute, pushed the bay water over the wharves and sent it, thick as molasses with bay mud and debris, sloshing across the Strand. More than a dozen large steamers lay in the harbor that weekend, including the three-year-old, 3,900-ton British vessel
Kendal Castle
. Almost all the ships were working their engines to ease the strain on their anchor lines, their crews tending frantically to the moorings. The tide was extremely high, and the waves lifted the ships ten, fifteen, twenty feet above the warehouses along the piers, stretching the taut hawsers and anchor chains to the breaking point. Onlookers watched from the safety of the Strand, fascinated but fearful that the waves would rip the ships loose and fling them like so many toys onto the shore.

A few blocks away, downtown, it was a different story. Augustus Blackwood, like most of Galveston's businessmen, had more important things to do than worry about a tropical storm. To be sure, there were reports of flooding in the lower-lying areas and some intermittent power outages and news of damage to the Midway and the beach streetcar trestle. It was even said that the streetcars had stopped running at the eastern end of Broadway, where Gulf waters had pushed inland as far as Twelfth Street. But the electricity had stayed on at the bank, there was the usual pressing business to transact, and the morning had been very much like any other stormy Saturday morning. Quite naturally, financial matters took precedence over the weather any day of the week.

By the time Augustus Blackwood prepared to go home for his dinner, however, the rain was much heavier. He looked out of his window, debating whether to stay downtown and have lunch or endure a thorough soaking on his walk home. His mind was made up when a man with whom he had done some personal business—a man from Beaumont, Texas, from whom
he had bought some land in Fayette County, as well as some highly speculative mineral rights—dropped in. Augustus suggested that the two of them take a table at Ritter's Café and Saloon, just two blocks from the bank. He telephoned his home and spoke briefly to his wife, informing her that he would be lunching downtown. He was surprised at Rachel's response: she begged him to come home immediately.

“The water is in the yard, Augustus!” she cried frantically. “It's flowing all around the house! And it's not rainwater, either. I tasted it—it's
salt
water!”

He was surprised at this news and somewhat concerned, since he had never seen the Gulf send waves so high as their street. But his client was an important man and he had already made his plans. “Surely you're not afraid of a little water, are you, my dear?” he teased. “I'll tell you what. I'll be at Ritter's for the next hour or so. If the storm doesn't let up by the time I've eaten, I'll come straight home. The bank can manage without me for one afternoon. And tomorrow, when the storm is over, we will all go down to the beach and see what the tide has left for us. The children will enjoy that.” His voice softened. “And we'll take a picnic, my dear. What do you say to that?”