Galveston (4 page)

Charles found me there when he came home, and rocked me in his arms. Oh, what a useless source of comfort.

Chapter 4

We spoke of moving after that.

Charles said he wasn't going to have me upset by unkind remarks from Janet Garret or anybody else.

“Back to Grady?” I asked hopefully, thinking of Betsey and Ruth.

“No. Somewhere else on the island,” he told me. Then, noting my disappointment, he said, “Living in Grady is professional suicide for me, Claire. You know that.”

“Never mind then, I'd sooner stick it out here than move around the block. Besides, we can't be sure Janet meant me harm.”

“Yes … and remember, from what her husband told us, she apparently has some problems. The poor girl probably deserves a little understanding.”

It was deliciously cool that night as we sat on the moonlit verandah, and I was able to escape a reply by leaning my head back and taking in a breath of fresh air. Finally he said, “Of course we have lots of other neighbors we haven't even gotten to know yet.”

I nodded, thinking this a pleasant prospect.

It was several weeks later we learned there was to be an oyster roast for the people on Avenue L. “Would you and your man be able to come?” said Agatha Mueller one day. She was small for a German woman, yet sturdy-made with big shoulders and hands. “It's goin' to be down to the beach next Saturday night. All you have to give is a quarter. That'll help buy the oysters and the rest will be taken care of by the ones of us plannin' it.”

I told her I guessed we would come.

“And the preacher and his wife next door, 'ya know … I stopped at the gate but saw the shutters drawn. Has there been a death in the family or sump'm?”

“No, nothing like that. Sometimes Janet—the wife—prefers them shut. Here's fifty cents. I'm not certain the Garrets will be able to come, but just in case.”

“Oh, I do hope so. When we used to live further down toward town, the block parties were always a big event.”

“You've lived here in Galveston a long time?”

“Since before the war. Seen the reconstruction days from here, and survived one yellow fever epidemic and a bad hurricane or two.”

She looked proud. These were the badges of her station. She was stepping carefully, sideways, down the stairs. “Till Saturday then,” she said. “My boy Jeremy and course my man, Jeb, will go down early to dig the trench and start the fire. You and the preacher—all four of you, I mean—come along around seven or half-past.”

When Agatha Mueller was gone, I shaded my eyes and gazed up at the yellow house, and thought for the first time what a burden it must be for a clergyman to be married to a woman like Janet.

On the afternoon of the roast, Janet surprised me by asking if she and Rubin could walk down to the beach with us that evening. “If you like,” I snapped, with a twinge of satisfaction, and turned away.

Oh, could I have only seen, the coming pattern of our lives was winding around me like thread on a spool! On the way to that cookout which seemed so trivial and incidental, yet held so much portent for all of us, Janet and I walked behind Rubin and Charles, Janet stopping now and then to smell a honeysuckle vine growing along a fence, or pausing to consider the sound of a cricket.

“Lovely evening,” she said, inhaling deeply, her face upturned.

I walked silently along, not about to appear the groveling fool I'd been the first day we met. I believe as we drew nearer to the beach, she sensed my feelings and decided to act a little more friendly. She asked about Charles's family and mine, and when I told her all our parents were dead and we had few relatives between us, she shook her head and told me she was lucky both her parents were alive, and that she had one sister living in Virginia. “My folks are getting on in years, but both of them are as spry as ever,” she said. “Dad wrote in his last letter that his tobacco crop is good this year, so he's in good spirits. Curing begins pretty soon now.…”

“It must have been fun, growing up on a farm.”

“Oh, it was,” she said. Then her face clouded and she said more softly, “Most of the time.… Now, tell me, where did you grow up?”

“In Grady—that's in the northwest part of the state. After my father died, my mother remarried a man who owned a general store, so I spent a lot of time helping out and the rest of the time going to school.”

“Oh? Does your stepfather still have the store?”

“No, he died long before my mother. And later she sold—almost gave—the store to my cousin Betsey. That was how I met Charles. He wrote up the purchase contract for Mother, and made everything legal. It was just paper work really, but Betsey wanted it that way.”

“Charles seems such a fine man, you're lucky to have him. Of course, I'm fortunate to have Rubin, the most patient man ever …”

He'd have to be, to put up with you, I thought, and it was just then we reached the party.

Eight o'clock and growing dark. In my memory of the first oyster roast there is a long bar of fire on the beach, its smoke rising through the iron grate and around the craggy oyster shells. The young boy, Jeremy Mueller, stands by importantly, holding his shovel at one end of the trench. His face is aglow from the fire. He might be Satan, the shovel on which his arm rests a pitchfork, the fire below, his kingdom. Jeb Mueller is at the other end supervising, and calls to his son that he has a batch beginning to pop. The tall, skinny boy runs to the other end and scoops up a bunch of hot shells, heaves them onto a big wooden table behind.

Agatha Mueller is not to be disappointed, for there is a crowd of people milling around. Andrew Jeffcoat, restaurateur, has furnished ears of yellow corn and butter. Helen North has brought tomatoes and cucumbers from her garden. Bonnie Fitzgerald has made a dozen loaves of bread. Someone else has furnished cold watermelon. There is a keg of beer, and everyone is happy.

Everyone is curious about everyone else. Holding forth with a dripping ear of corn, a young-looking man, red-haired and red-bearded, with small hands and feet, introduces himself as Dory Fitzgerald. He eyes the four of us. “I know you. You live near the center of the block. And you're a preacher,” he says to Rubin. “Episcopal, is it? I'd have known if you were Catholic. I know all the Catholic priests around. What's your trade?” he asks Charles.

“I'm a lawyer.”

“Ya don't say? I think you're the only lawyer on the street. Got a banker, though, have you met Arthur and Helen North? A charmin' couple indeed! And an undertaker. Have you met Tom Driscoll?”

“No,” Charles tells him. “We just got here, and haven't had a chance to get acquainted. By the way, what do you do, Mr. Fitzgerald?”

“Oh, I drive a hack, and call me Dory. Everyone does. Don't forget to try the bread. My Bonnie made it. One taste and you'll think ye've died and gone to heaven.”

We fill our plates and Charles brings a mound of oysters in their shells on a piece of newspaper. It is difficult negotiating the oyster from its home, and I eat only three in the course of the evening. Rubin and Charles drink generously of the beer. Rubin, who wears no clerical collar tonight, holds his head back and quaffs his from the mug as though he drinks beer often, and I envision how he must look in his priestly robe on Sundays, delicately serving wine. The two impressions are so incongruous that I smile. He looks across at me, sees the smile, lowers his eyes.

After the beer is gone and the food eaten, we all sit on logs around the remains of the roasting fire. It is cool, and Rubin wraps a shawl around Janet's shoulders. Charles leans forward and lights his pipe.

A man sitting near us on the log asks Charles for a light. He is a man whose balding head is just a size too large for his body. “Alex Monroe,” he says. “Most people just call me Doc.”

“Oh, are you a real doctor?” I ask.

“Yes.”

“What a comfort, having a doctor nearby,” says Janet. “Where's your office?”

“At my house. This is my wife, Sheilah.” A pale face, plain but warm, smiles at us. The wife's face is older than her husband's.

There is talk around the fire of who lives in which house. Several people remark on the handsomeness of ours, and I stifle an urge to tell them the house in Grady was much larger. I ask instead for someone in the group to tell me about yellow fever. It is a subject much on my mind because I have heard it spoken of in tones of icy fear, and, there being no such disease in Grady, I am anxious to learn all I can about avoiding contact with it here.

“My brother died from it back in the epidemic of '67,” says Claude Stillman, who works for the Galveston Wharf Company. “I'll never forget how that poor boy suffered … he was delirious at the end, and had the black vomit. Lucky none of the rest of the family caught it from him.”

My eyes widen and a finger of fear trails up my spine like a blaze through a forest. I am like a child who's begun to hear a ghost story: so afraid I want to close my ears, yet so fascinated I cannot stop listening.…

“Hogwash!” says Doc Monroe. “Yellow jack isn't contagious, and anyway, we rarely have cases of it anymore.”

“That's right,” Jeremy Mueller speaks up, the firelight playing on his young face. “I've studied all about it. That's why our cisterns are filtered nowadays, to keep the yellow fever mosquito from getting into our drinking water and breeding.”

Agatha Mueller looks over and pats Jeremy's forearm. “My son's going to be a doctor,” she says proudly.

“Is that so?” says Doc Monroe. “Come around sometime, Jeremy. I've got some books you might find helpful, and maybe I can show you some things.”

“Thank you, sir.”

After that exchange, everyone relaxes and is soothed again into fire gazing and idle chitchat about the general state of affairs in Galveston. It seems the evening will soon have a pleasant finale, until Tom Driscoll shifts a bit and says, “About the only thing we have to worry about now is the Octopus of the Gulf.”

The remark has a queer silencing effect on the crowd. The people look uncomfortable, and some whisper to one another. “What is it?” I whisper to Charles. “You mean there's a giant octopus out there?”

“No, no. The term refers to the Galveston Wharf Company. I'll tell you about it some other time. Stillman works for the Wharf Company, and I think Driscoll is just now finding that out.”

I look across at Mr. Stillman, who is getting up and preparing to, what? Leave? Assault the cheeky undertaker? But Driscoll speaks quickly. “Nothing personal meant by that. Lots of fine people at the Wharf Company.”

“Sure as the world there're at least a few good folks in the undertakin' profession, too,” says Stillman. “However, it is getting a shade late. Come on, Blanche, where'd Carl go off to?”

Soon after, everyone else gets up from his spot on the logs, and the oyster roast is over. Once I know there is to be no skirmish between Driscoll and Stillman, I lose interest in the Wharf Company, and forget to ask Charles what is meant by “Octopus of the Gulf.” It seems a question of little importance at the time.

The people of Avenue L walked back home that night in odd groups and pairs, our way lit by lanterns and what faint light was provided by the slice of moon and scattering of stars above. Janet hurried her normal pace to keep up with Doc Monroe and Jeremy Mueller, and Charles walked with the Driscolls, perhaps in an attempt to mediate the differences between Tom and Claude Stillman. Rubin appeared at my elbow just at the edge of the beach, and I couldn't explain the way my heart jumped as I realized he intended to walk home alongside me.

Soon he said wistfully, “Oh, how nice it would be to have a cookout for the church … it would be such a help in drawing the parish together.” I told him he ought to do it, but he shook his head and said, “No, I don't think Janet …”, then changed the subject by telling me that before becoming a servant of the Lord he'd been a hard-drinking wrangler involved in a number of brawls and had even spent a night or two sobering up in jail.

“Did you know Janet then?” I asked him.

“Heavens no,” he said. “I met her later.”

I was anxious, of course, to learn how this new and surprising information about the shady past of Rubin Garret had reconciled itself with Father Garret, man of the cloth, shepherd of foundering souls. I also wondered whether the warm feeling reminiscent of being courted that I'd felt as we spanned the distance between the waves licking peacefully at the shores of the Gulf and the front gate of our yard was shared by him, as I'd suspected when he said, “I can't remember when I've had a more pleasant walk.”

It was these curiosities that led me to awaken Charles early the next morning and tell him we'd put off visiting St. Christopher's long enough. Although I was not yet willing to allow anyone to take the place of Damon Becker, it was soon after we'd seated ourselves under the dark, narrowly arched ceiling of St. Christopher's and watched Rubin Garret rest his big arms on either side of the carved wooden pulpit that I thought of how Damon must have looked as he stood on his ship's bow, watching the landscape as he neared the harbor.…

Then the truth struck me that part of the former man Rubin Garret remained in the present one, and I realized as rays of color from the stained-glass windows played on his face and shimmered on the folds of his white vestment that this man might somehow bring my second chance for what I'd been cheated of when the sea took Damon from me.

Yet I was not too blind to see that what Damon took lightly Rubin Garret would hold dear, and that I might have to content myself with small flatteries and special looks from him now and then, and stirrings inside should he touch my hand or offer his arm when I descended a flight of stairs.

As though to confirm the truth of my instinctive feelings, out in the morning sunshine after the service, he welcomed Charles and me with an arm on Charles's shoulder and an extra tight squeeze of my extended hand, looking directly at me as he said, “So glad to see you here.”