Dark Water Rising (19 page)

Andy and Will couldn’t keep their hands off him, and even Aunt Julia had to rub his nose and pat his neck. The big brown gelding never moved a muscle, as if he knew he was part of something bigger, part of a rare miracle that might still happen for us. If Archer could make it back, then Ben and Uncle Nate might, too. And maybe even Henry’s family.

Aunt Julia seemed to tuck that fragile hope away, and after supper, we celebrated the horse’s return by
watching the boys work on their tree fort. They hauled scrap lumber into the ash tree’s bare limbs and hammered with such gusto even Aunt Julia and Ella Rose had to smile.

On Thursday, the Galveston
Daily News
finally printed a full-sized paper and gave the first accounting of the storm. The telegraph office opened, too, and on Friday, banks were back in business.

The temperature hit a steamy one hundred degrees that same evening. From the veranda roof where I was working, I could see the gulf, green and inviting but deserted except for the fires. Not a single soul dared enter the water, and though we all longed for something other than rationed canned foods, no one would eat from the abundant supply of fish, either. As long as the dead still washed ashore, the gulf would remain an unclean enemy.

Ezra ended up making all the trips into town to pick up our rations, insisting that Josiah and I were needed at home, but I knew there was more to it than that. The army had sent soldiers, and martial law had been declared on Thursday. They brought tents and food with them, which were badly needed with so many homeless, but Ezra still worried that the militia might take us, or worse yet, that his grandson might be mistaken for a looter and shot.

What worried me most was what Josiah had been
forced to do on that barge. He’d already seen enough to haunt his every waking moment, but I’d heard him cry out from nightmares, too. I was thankful Ezra was downstairs, right there beside him to help ease him back into the world of the living.

The steamer
Lawrence
brought a hundred thousand gallons of fresh water to the island, and the
Charlotte Allen
ferried a thousand loaves of bread from Houston. The tug
Juno
went to work, too, carrying provisions and medical workers.

We moved through the days, trying to gain some sense of order in our lives, but we never spoke of the growing number of fires. There had been reports that the dead might reach five thousand. Every day the count seemed to rise as more bodies were found buried under wreckage. I wondered how long the air would smell of death and burnings, how long debris would choke the city, but mostly I wondered how, in such a short time, we’d come to accept these things as almost normal.

Saturday morning, one full week after the storm, Matt came home from the railroad bridge later than usual. His eyes were red and his mood surly. I caught him before he went inside and asked him what was wrong.

“Nothing,” he said, heading for the stairs.

I grabbed his arm. “If Mama sees you this way, you’ll be answering more questions than mine.”

He stared at me a moment, then pulled away. “Okay, okay. I’ll tell you.” He sucked in a deep breath. “Papa said I had to wake him no later than daybreak, and when I didn’t, he swore at me.”

I tossed him a sideways glance. “Did you oversleep?”

He shook his head, but pain washed across his face. “Aw, Seth, he’s been working so hard—harder than I’ve ever seen anyone work. I just thought I’d let him sleep a speck longer is all.”

“You must’ve made him really mad. I’ve never heard Papa use a swear word. Not even once.”

“Yeah, well, I have,” he muttered.

I laughed. “By this evening he’ll have forgotten all about it. You’ll see. Now go find the boys. They’ve been waiting on you to get home so they can finish up the tree fort.”

He took off, looking somewhat relieved, and I went around back to put up a new clothesline for Mama and Aunt Julia. Clean water had finally reached us yesterday, and they were up to their elbows in suds, scrubbing the grime from all our clothes and bedding.

“When we’re finished with this,” Mama said, “I plan to get myself into that tub upstairs and soak for a solid hour.”

I smiled but had to admit that after a full week of heat and mud and grime, a tub bath sounded pretty good.

The repair work on the veranda had been going well, but I’d been too busy to see much of Ella Rose. I caught myself checking windows while I worked, watching for her and listening for her voice. I rarely saw her smile anymore and worried that her loss might have become too much for her. Then something else occurred to me. Even though she had every reason to grieve, perhaps it wasn’t that at all. Perhaps she’d stopped smiling because I never talked to her anymore. She might be thinking I didn’t want to spend time with her. I shook my head. Any fool alive would want to spend time with someone like Ella Rose, but since she’d taken over full care of Kate and Elliott, and since I’d been working more than twelve hours a day, there’d been little opportunity for that. I began to wonder if there ever would be.

I hung the new clothesline and helped Josiah pick out lumber to rebuild the front stairs. Railing had been salvaged from the house next door, which promised to make the job go much faster, but the more I worked, the more I felt the tiresome weight of worry. When the rail bridge was done, Papa would be home again. He’d appraise my work, and I didn’t want to even think about what would happen if I didn’t measure up. There
would be a battle for sure, because I was danged determined to see that my future would be in carpentry.

Ezra came back from town that afternoon with good news. The electric trolleys were still inoperable, but mule cars had begun running on some of the streets. A mule named Lazy Lil would be pulling car number 66 from Market to Twenty-first, then down Broadway and back. We all smiled. Even the smallest sign of life returning to normal was a cause for celebration these days.

“Hey!” Andy shouted. “That means it’ll be coming right past
us.
”

“That be right,” Ezra said, grinning. “Caked mud on them tracks might slow ’er down, but I reckon she be coming down Broadway right quick.”

The boys ran down the street to keep watch, and soon we heard shouts and cheers as Lazy Lil pulled her car past Thirty-fifth Street to Fortieth, circled around, and headed back to town.

I shook my head. “You’d think those boys had just seen the Labor Day parade all over again.”

They came back about the time Mama stepped onto the stair landing to shake out a small rug. She caught all the satisfied grins and tossed them a suspicious frown. “What’s got you boys so happy? You haven’t been making mischief, have you?”

They laughed and ran upstairs to share the news about Lazy Lil.

Josiah hammered the last nail into the front staircase just at sundown, and we stepped back into the yard to survey our work. This was the first thing we’d built together, just the two of us, and I guess I was a touch surprised at how well we’d done without Zach. The veranda still needed paint, the water-soaked walls inside the house needed plaster, and windows needed glass, but we’d accomplished a lot in the week since the storm. The rest would have to wait till supplies could be brought in by rail.

Josiah hadn’t said much since he’d gotten home from the barge, and I still wasn’t sure what to do about it, or if I
should
do anything about it. I’d been careful not to push his thoughts back to those dark places, but I couldn’t forget how he’d protected me that day at the morgue, how he’d taken on a task that even grown men had tried to refuse, leaving me free to go home.

He frowned, looking hard at the job we’d just finished, but the corners of his mouth soon lifted. That smile was the first sign I’d seen that maybe a small portion of his gruesome night in the gulf might be behind him.

Satisfied, I walked back to the newly finished stairs with him, and we sat on the bottom step, watching the pink and orange sky turn deep purple. Getting Uncle Nate’s house repaired had made me feel that perhaps the world could still be set right, and that maybe, just
maybe, there wasn’t much Josiah and I couldn’t do if we set our minds to it.

“I’ve been thinking about tomorrow,” I said finally. “Thinking we might need to spread out just a bit, see if we can scrounge up more lumber—a lot more.” I glanced up at him. “We’ve got us a house to build, right?”

Josiah hesitated, but only for a moment, then he grinned so wide I had to laugh.

“Yessir,” he said, “I reckon we do.”

I put my elbows on the step behind me and leaned back, thinking about the look on Ezra’s face when we told him he’d soon have his house back. Josiah leaned back, too, and we sat there smiling, shoulder to shoulder, watching the twilight sky till Mama called us in to supper.

23

Mama and Aunt Julia stayed busy heating water for hours that evening, and after supper, every male in the house got a tub bath. I leaned back in the soapy water, not wanting to get out, but with all four boys banging on the door, I had no choice but to towel off and make way for them.

“It’s about time,” Lucas said.

I laughed. “Since when did bathing become your favorite pastime?”

His face puckered in a frown. “Since half the world’s mud ended up on Galveston Island.”

Later that night, I slid between crisp sheets, fresh off the line, and closed my eyes. If the scent of jasmine could’ve drifted through the windows right then instead of death and smoke, I might’ve imagined myself back in my own bed. I thought about Ella Rose lying with Kate in Will’s bed, just yards away under Aunt Julia’s
bedroom windows, and I wondered if she ever lay awake, thinking of me.

The convent bells rang Sunday morning, but out of the dozens of churches in the city, only a few could hold services. Wind and water had swept away steeples, shattered windows, and ripped off roofs. Mama insisted that I read a few verses from the Bible before breakfast. “A little something to think about on God’s day,” she said, but I was thankful she didn’t ask us not to work. With all that needed to be done, it seemed to me that God, above all, would understand.

After breakfast, Josiah and I cobbled together a sled to pull behind Archer and headed out to find usable lumber. Ezra made us promise to stay close by and to be always watchful of the militia, but with so much wreckage around, we didn’t have to go far. The hardest part was freeing good boards from the twisted rubble. The boys let loose pitiful groans when we told them we needed more nails, but they went right to work pulling and straightening, and easily kept up with us, attacking each new load of boards as soon as it arrived.

By the end of the day, we’d hauled enough used lumber to give us a good start on the house, but it was clear we’d need lots more. The two-room building would be simple, like before, a little shotgun house
sitting four feet off the ground, but if I could manage it, I planned to add a small porch under the back gable, a place where Ezra could sit in the shade and watch his new garden grow.

I glanced at the old vegetable patch, barren and crusted with salt, but I remembered well the tall stalks of okra. A big plate of fried okra would taste mighty good about now. I couldn’t recall the last time I’d had something that didn’t come out of a can. Rations of flour and lard kept plenty of biscuits and pan bread on the table, but I didn’t care if I never saw another tin of salmon or sardines.

I woke before daylight Monday morning and realized that I’d been dreaming of Zach. I’d been working with him again, side by side, drawn into that mystifying current of his. I lay perfectly still, breathing in the wonder of that, trying to hang on to the connection, that simple truth that ran like a river between us. In the end, Zach slipped away.

I finally dressed and went down to breakfast, but even while I ate and spoke with Josiah and Ezra about the house, the dream haunted me, making me feel as if I were caught between two worlds.

After breakfast, Josiah and I began work on the foundation, even though we knew we’d have to put in many more days of gathering lumber to complete
the house. When Matt got home, he surprised us by rigging the sled to Archer and marshaling the boys into the job. They even managed to pry four windows loose from the wreckage next door. Ezra cleaned away the bits of broken glass, then headed out with the boys to see what else could be scavenged.