Dark Water Rising (20 page)

The
Daily News
had been reporting that an average of one hundred bodies a day were being recovered by demolition gangs dismantling the long ridge of debris encircling the city, but on Wednesday, September 19, workers uncovered 273. In the next day’s paper, I read, “It is possible, but highly improbable, that the list of storm victims will aggregate six thousand souls.”

Six thousand.

The number sank inside me, impossible, and yet I’d seen the miles of houses sitting topsy-turvy, the vast piles of debris strewn across hundreds of acres where better than three thousand homes had once stood. I’d seen the overfull morgues, the loaded barges, the smoke-filled skies.

Maybe six thousand wasn’t an impossible number after all.

Later that day, the Hodges family sent word through Ezra that a few stores in town had electric lights now and that Clara Barton, president of the American Red Cross, had arrived to offer aid to Galveston. We heard, too, that important people like Joseph Pulitzer and
William Randolph Hearst were sending help and that contributions had begun arriving from people all over the country. I was thankful, but sometimes I wished we could just leave, get Aunt Julia and Ella Rose away from the massive rubble, the smoke-filled skies, and the aching loss that bled the life right out of them. Mr. Hodges said many had done just that, begging rides on the
Juno,
the
Lawrence
—anything that would float. People gathered at the docks with nothing more than the tattered garments on their backs, and the mainland took them in, fed and clothed them, and opened their homes, hotels, and boardinghouses to them.

But I knew Papa would never leave the island. Even I had come to realize I didn’t want to go. The storm that ravaged Galveston had left behind much more than wreckage and mud and death. It had left a challenge.

With all of us working, the salvaging and building went quickly. My dream about Zach stayed with me throughout the steamy days, a reminder of all that was possible, and soon, Josiah and I fell into a rhythm of our own. Words dwindled, no longer needed, and the hot hours passed without notice.

By Thursday evening, we both knew something had changed between us. We set the ridge row on Ezra’s house, then climbed down to wash up for supper. I
reached for the soap and saw Josiah toss me a curious glance.

“What?” I asked.

He shrugged. “Strange is all.”

“Strange?”

He shrugged again. “Onliest time I ever worked like this, it be with Mr. Zach.”

I slowly lathered my hands. “Yeah, me too.”

24

Early Friday morning, I climbed up to the new ridge row to set rafters and looked out over Broadway. The morning sun had cast long shadows across the street, and from one of them, Papa and Matt stepped into view.

“Papa’s home!” I shouted at Josiah. “The bridge must be finished.” A small part of me sighed with relief, though the resentment he’d stirred in me the day he left Josiah and me at the morgue always bubbled close to the surface. I scrambled back down again, hollered through the screen at Mama, then set off down the road.

Papa’s face, scruffy with almost two weeks’ growth, looked thinner but happy, and he smiled as soon as he saw me. I hesitated a moment, then finally held out my hand. He grabbed it, pulled me to him, and hugged me hard against his chest.

It startled me. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d done something like that. I pulled back, looking at him
closely, and felt his weary smile working at the knot in my belly, untangling the bitterness I’d been carrying around with me.

“Tho-mas!” Mama hollered from the stairs.

She hiked her skirt immodestly high and ran down the steps and out into the road. Papa grabbed her up like they were both sixteen again, and Matt laughed out loud.

“Are you home for good?” she asked.

Papa nodded. “The rail bridge is finished, and supply trains will be arriving soon.”

Mama’s face shone with happiness. She wrapped her arm around his waist, and they turned toward home.

Matt followed behind, grinning.

Once inside, Papa hugged Kate and the boys, one by one, but Andy and Will seemed to hang on to him longer than any of them. I think Aunt Julia found it hard to watch. She quickly turned to the stove, insisting that Papa should have a hot breakfast, but I’d seen the pain in her eyes, that bittersweet look of joy and loss. I saw it in Ella Rose’s face, too.

Everyone in the house gathered around the table to watch Papa eat his first hot meal since before the storm. He looked achy-tired and empty, like the bridge had drained him of everything but his smile. Mama pulled Kate from his arms and sat her in the chair next to him, but she climbed right back onto his lap and
buried her fingers in his beard. Mama fussed, but he shook his head and slowly ate his grits with one arm wrapped around Kate.

Mama hurried to get a bed ready for Papa. She moved their few things from Aunt Julia’s room into Ben’s repaired room, but while she was gone, Papa stretched out on the parlor floor to play with Kate and Elliott and fell asleep. Ella Rose quietly pulled the kids upstairs to play, and Mama slipped a pillow under Papa’s head.

He was still asleep when Josiah and I came in at noon to eat. I didn’t see him again till late that afternoon when I caught him sitting on the ground near the new outhouse, freshly shaved, watching me work.

Seeing him sitting there, so very still, started an anxious flutter inside me. I couldn’t tell whether it came from fear or resentment, but I sure felt it, all prickly and worrisome.

Seems I could never tell what Papa was thinking. I tried to see Ezra’s house the way he might see it, and while I worked, questions tumbled through my head. Was the ridge row straight? Had I missed checking the crown on a rafter? I glanced at Uncle Nate’s house. Had he already looked at the roof? The front stairs?

Josiah pushed a freshly cut rafter up to me. I reached for it but fumbled my grip, and the board crashed to the ground, narrowly missing his shoulder. He gave me a puzzled look, and I cringed, furious with my carelessness.
I glanced back toward the outhouse, wondering if Papa had seen, but he was gone.

Relieved, I closed my eyes, pulled in a deep breath, and waited for the flutter to settle. I remembered my dream, that easy, instinctive flow, and as natural as breathing, I looked down just as Josiah pushed the rafter back up to me. I gripped the board, slid it into place, and picked up my hammer.

Josiah and I quickly fell into that invisible rhythm again, and I rode the current, no longer mindful of the worries that Papa’s presence had stirred in me. We worked steadily till I noticed that the lumber had taken on sunset hues. Mama would be calling us in to supper soon.

I climbed down the ladder, thinking of Papa again, and saw him sitting at the top of the stairs, bare feet dangling over the back of the landing. I didn’t know how long he’d been watching, but I was surprised that I didn’t feel the way I had before. Might’ve been because the work had gone so well, despite my clumsiness, or maybe it was the easy way he swung his feet that made me feel less troubled.

Either way, Papa had helped me learn something about myself, about the fear that seemed to always sleep inside me, and about how quickly it could strangle who I was if I let it. I glanced again toward the house, and when Papa waved, I waved back.

Papa fell asleep again, right after supper, drinking in the night like a man dying of thirst. But on Saturday morning, despite his still weakened appearance, he and Matt started on a small stable for Archer.

Papa didn’t say anything to me about the repair work we’d done on Uncle Nate’s house, but over the next few days, I did notice something different about him, something thoughtful, almost serene in the way he looked at even simple things. Could’ve been the sorrow of losing Ben and Uncle Nate the way we did, and all those long days of searching and hoping that made him surrender some of his tightfisted ways. Or maybe it was losing all he owned that had humbled him. Whatever the reason, something had shifted inside him, cracked the tough shell around that tender part of himself he’d always kept locked away. You could see it if you knew what to look for, and I guess I’d been looking for it most all my life.

Now it was there.

A softness in his eyes when he spoke to me, an ear tuned to catch every word, a hand lingering on a shoulder, and to my surprise, the last of my bitterness began to unravel. It was a welcome relief, but even as that darkness slid away, another grew.

Someday soon I’d have to tell Papa my decision about college.

Josiah and I were able to continue building through the next week, thanks to Ezra and the boys. They pulled and straightened nails, took Archer out every day, and brought back enough used lumber and slate to keep us going. Papa worked slow and easy on the stable, but even so, I could see that Matt wasn’t cut out for carpentry. He hauled himself into supper every evening like he’d just been released from a chain gang, a sure candidate for college and desk work. While he moaned and groaned, Papa never fussed once. He just grinned.

We finished Ezra’s new house that Saturday evening. Josiah and I had made every cut, hammered every nail, and I closed the door behind me feeling good about the work we’d done. But while I washed up, I saw Papa walking all around the place. Slow.

He checked the windows, the roof, looked over the new porch from top to bottom, then disappeared inside.

I felt the flutter start up all over again, mean and fierce, but I held on to my grit. I was determined not to let fear best me this time. I thought of Zach’s quiet, abiding strength, the way Josiah and I had plumbed our own depths, tapped our own strengths, and the flutter settled.

My work was clean and precise.

I was a carpenter.

25