Dark Water Rising (4 page)

We passed the Garten Verein with its croquet greens and tennis courts, its clubhouse and bowling alleys, and the bright, octagon-shaped dancing pavilion tiered like a massive wedding cake. In the next block, Ben pointed out the Ursuline convent, and beyond that,
Ursuline Academy, where the blond-headed girl down the street would go. Her classes would start next week.

“But that’s a whole month earlier than public schools,” I said. “I bet she’s not happy about that.”

“What? You mean you’re not looking forward to school?”

“Are you kidding?”

Ben grinned and shrugged. “Right now, I can’t think of much else.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “You’re really going to be a doctor, huh? Live a life filled with blood and guts?”

He tossed me a surprised look. “Papa told me you were planning to go into medicine yourself. Did he get it wrong?”

“Yeah, he did—for sure. My
father
is the one planning that career. I’m going to be a carpenter.”

Ben raised an eyebrow and gave a slow nod. “You’re in a fix, then, aren’t you? According to Papa, Uncle Thomas has a powerful stubborn streak. Sounds like you’ll need all the luck you can get to squirm out of this one.”

I laughed, but he was dead right.

We turned south on Twenty-fourth Street and joined a stream of families walking to the great bathhouses built on pilings out over the water. The Pagoda Company’s twin buildings lay just ahead. Their sloping roofs of striped canvas made them look more like two giant circus tents staked out in the gulf than a bathhouse. As
we neared the beach, I saw Murdoch’s, too, and beyond that, the three-story Olympia.

Voices rose and fell on the wind, and I turned east toward what must’ve been ten blocks of ramshackle buildings.

“That’s the Midway,” Ben said, pulling me in for a closer look.

The air sizzled with frying clams and frankfurters, and rang with shouts from swimmers and cries from excited gulls. Merchants hawked seashells and saltwater taffy, kewpie dolls and satin pillows, and bellowed invitations to “step right up.” We walked past swimmers with beach balls tucked under their arms lined up next to people in street clothes, waiting for a chance at the penny arcades. And farther down the beach, I spotted a trestle that stretched out over the surf and back again.

“Trolleys go out over the water?”

“Sure. Some people want to experience the gulf high and dry.” He grinned. “Not everyone’s as brave as we are.”

The way the beach looked today, I couldn’t imagine there’d be anyone left in town to take the trolley. It seemed most all of Galveston was here this evening, bathing, bicycling, or just driving carriages across the crisp-smooth sand.

We chose the Pagoda for changing into our suits and
took their long boardwalk that started at the end of Twenty-fourth Street. The steps took us high above the beach, and, once out over the surf, I stopped to look down at the crowds gathered around ropes and barnacled pilings. They jumped waves in dark wool bathing suits, looking more like fleas on a stray dog’s ear than swimmers.

All except one.

I leaned out over the weathered handrail spotted white from gulls and tried to get a better look. My stomach fluttered, then lurched hard. It was the girl with sun-bright hair. At least it looked like her. By the time I glanced up again, Ben was gone, and I had to hurry to catch up.

When we’d changed and finally gotten back to the beach, I saw Mama and waved. She looked a bit unsure of herself as she waved back at me from the door of a brightly painted portable bathhouse. A parade of these two-wheeled wagons lined the beach, waiting to be rolled out into the water a short way and hauled back in by horses, a convenience for swimmers who wanted to keep sand out of their stockings and shoes. I had to laugh, thinking of Mama inside, gripping the walls while the concessionaire pushed her toward the surf.

While Ben and I bobbed in the water and rode the waves, I watched for the yellow-haired girl. I kept an
eye on the warm surf around the Pagoda and under the splashy lettering painted across the side of the building where I’d last seen her.
A Ride on the Katy Is Like a Drive on the Beach,
the sign for MK & T Railway declared. I must’ve read those words a hundred times before the sky settled into layers of pink and purple and I had to accept that I’d missed her. I hauled my heavy limbs from the surf, feeling like a dunce for letting her tangle up my thoughts the way she had. I didn’t even know her and probably never would.

Ben and I changed back into our street clothes while sunset colors slid away. By the time we started home, there was nothing left but twinkling silver in a black umbrella sky. The electric lamps, perched high on tall pilings out in the surf, flickered on, and I heard cheers from late-night swimmers.

“Skinny-dippers,” Ben said, grinning. “They swim just beyond the light—sometimes as many as two hundred men—naked as the day they were born.”

I shook my head and laughed. It was hard to imagine.

We took Twenty-fourth Street back to Avenue N where nightfall had transformed the Garten Verein into something out of one of Kate’s fairy tales. Electric light spilled across the grounds, gilding leaves and blossoms and ladies’ white lace gowns. The open dancing pavilion sparkled through the trees like a great Chinese lantern.

I stopped to listen to the band, to the way the music mingled with the sounds of surf and the soft crash of bowling pins, and I might’ve stayed far longer if Ben hadn’t pulled me away. But it was late, and tomorrow I’d be only three days away from my future.

4

Ezra’s rooster woke me the next morning, pulling me from something soft and murmuring, dragging me back to my crowded island of mosquito netting. I pushed Matt off my arm, threw back the netting, and stumbled for the door.

Once in the hall, I ran into Mama, holding a step stool and pulling Kate behind her. She gave me a sleepy look and held a finger to her lips. “Where are you going?” she whispered.

“Out back,” I said, fully aware of what was coming next.

“Good.” She pushed the step stool at me. “Then you can take your sister for me. I’ve got to get dressed and help with breakfast.”

“Mom, I can’t.
I
have to go.”

“Well, Seth, you’re going anyway.”

I stared at her for a moment, all rumpled in her tired blue robe. I was tempted to walk down the stairs and
leave her standing there, and one day I might. But not today.

Outside, a fiery glow barely flickered on the horizon, and already the sticky-damp heat clung to my skin and sat heavy in my chest. We walked to the backyard, past the small magnolia tree near the side stairs, and swung the outhouse door open. Spiders and cockroaches scrambled for safety while Kate hid her face in my nightshirt.

“Are they gone, yet?” she whispered.

I clenched my teeth, hearing Mama’s voice plain as day in my head, saying, “She thinks you’re the only one who can get the bugs to go home to their babies.”

“Yeah, they’re gone.” I dropped the stool and kicked it close to the seat. “You can go in now.”

“Thank you, Seth,” she said, stepping onto the stool.

I closed the door and waited. “I’m through,” she called after a few moments.

I let her out, shooed her toward the house, and pushed the stool aside. “Dang-it-all,” I whispered to the walls. “How long can a man be expected to take his baby sister to the toilet?” I stepped back out, and the door slammed shut behind me. I cringed at the sound, but it quickly disappeared on the salt-damp breeze to disturb the neighbors up the street.

Before I headed back, a movement around the small frame house near the alley caught my eye. Ezra was in
his garden, cutting okra from tall stalks. A dented pan lay at his feet, already half full of the prickly harvest.

I’d heard Uncle Nate say that he let the colored man live rent-free in the two-room house in exchange for help with horses and chores. He appeared quite handy with a hammer and saw, too. The clapboard siding was bare of paint, but the windows were neatly shuttered and the gables embellished with spindled woodwork, all of which looked in good repair. So were the fences around the garden and chicken pen. While I stood there wondering if he had a wife inside waiting to cook his breakfast, his hands dropped to his sides as if he knew he was being watched. He picked up the pan at his feet, slowly turned, and looked my way.

I waved, feeling a bit embarrassed about my staring, but even more so about the stool dangling from my hand. Ezra hesitated, but only for a moment, then he gave me a wide grin and waved back.

We finished off a breakfast of ham, eggs, and grits, then packed up the few things we’d needed for the night and loaded them back into the buggy. Ezra had already left in the dray, headed for the rental.

Uncle Nate turned Archer west, down Avenue R, taking us past Woollam’s Lake. He said there were only about thirty houses in the Denver Resurvey, so Mama was pleased to find we had so many neighbors close by.

“The Masons live next door to your rental,” Uncle Nate said, “and Captain Munn, the Vedders, and the Peek family live behind you toward the beach. Richard Peek is our city engineer.”

He’d already told us about Fort Crockett, with its brand-new artillery emplacements, which lay just south of us, close to the shoreline. And about Saint Mary’s Orphanage, too, which housed ten sisters and almost a hundred children. The two large dormitories sat about ten blocks farther down the island, in the dunes right next to the beach. I couldn’t imagine what it was like to lose both your parents, but I figured that if it had to be so, then living in a place where you could go swimming and fishing every day was where I’d want to be.

We pulled up to a small, two-story house facing north, its back turned to the gulf. Like most of the homes in Galveston, it was built atop a raised basement. It had electric lights and a porch, or “gallery” as they called it here, that ran across the main floor and wrapped around the east side to catch the gulf breezes.

Mama looked excited. The house was nicer than anything we’d had in Lampasas. She and Kate climbed the steps to look it over, and Matt and Lucas ran after them. I grabbed one of the few crates left in the dray to carry up with me, but Uncle Nate put his hand on my shoulder.

“Ezra will do that, son.”

I stood there, gripping Mama’s china while Papa and Uncle Nate continued their talk. I’d always been expected to help before and didn’t see why this time should be any different. Besides, Ezra was old, and he’d already made countless trips up those stairs.

“No need a-worryin’,” Ezra said, easing the crate from my hands. “I’ll take right good care of it, Mr. Seth.”

The old man snuggled the china close to his chest and headed up the stairs, mindful of each step to the main floor. Two more trips and the dray sat empty. Uncle Nate said his good-byes and left Ezra to take Papa into town for groceries.

While they were gone, a woman named Virginia Mason came to welcome us with fresh baked bread and a bundle of jasmine cut from the trellis in her yard. The sweet-smelling blossoms reminded me of the honeysuckle that had grown outside my bedroom window in Lampasas. While I put the vines in water for Mama, I heard Mrs. Mason say that she and her husband lived next door with their three children and a servant. “And if we can be of any service in helping you get settled,” she said, “please do not hesitate to call upon us.”

The fact that so many here had colored servants seemed a curious thing to me. In Lampasas, most had been Mexicans or immigrants who spoke little English.
I never had any firsthand experience with them, though. Mama and Papa had always considered hired help to be an extravagance when they had three strapping boys to help with the heavy work. I grew up scrubbing floors, tending horses, washing clothes—whatever was needed—and it appeared that nothing would change much with this move.

All day Saturday, Mama had us doing things that would’ve made any man my age balk, dangling the chance to see the Labor Day parade in front of us like it was Christmas morning. While we helped clean the outhouse and unpack dishes, put away our clothes and make our beds, Matt and Lucas talked of nothing but Monday’s festivities. But it was Tuesday that pulled hard at
my
thoughts, the day I’d finally get to do the kind of work a man could be proud of.