chapter 27
Sunday, September 9, Dawn
The blood had dried on Philip’s forehead and no longer streamed into eyes as he groped his way among the staggered heaps of shattered homes and debris on the street.
Broken brick and timber lay strewn in piles from which twisted limbs and corpses stuck out at all angles. The groans of the dying were broken by the unearthly screams of despair from the living as they pulled out the bodies of those they had once held and loved.
As loud as these anguished cries were, none could drown his own voice echoing through his skull. Did they survive? Where are they? You have to find them.
Philip stumbled over the headless torso of a man. He covered his mouth and turned away. Dear God, no. They’re alive. They have to be.
He leaned against the shattered remnants of a farmer’s wagon and rested. Under the sun’s scorching heat, everything glowed in the fiery colors of a biblical nightmare, as though hell itself had risen from molten depths to claim its final dominion over Earth.
“Gabrielle Caldwell!” he yelled, his hoarse throat beyond the ache of feeling its strain. “Bret McGowan! Where are you?” He paused and listened for one of them to yell back.
The sudden crash of falling wreckage made him cower and cover his head, fearing the torrent of wind and water had returned to exact further payment from the blessed survivors who might not have deserved their good fortune. “Bret!” He lurched forward again. “Gabrielle!”
Exhausted and numb in the aftermath of the storm and his futile search, Philip’s neck and shoulders ached so much with excruciating painful it was difficult to turn his head even slightly in either direction.
His raw fingers, cracked after hours of hunting through the mounds of rubble and turning over broken, swollen bodies, made it difficult to steady his trembling hands. He only thanked God none of them had been Bret or Gabrielle.
Philip searched for a piece of dry wood. He picked up a broken baluster from someone’s staircase. He lay it on a small cooking fire as the huddled survivors around him pressed closer.
The flames rose and crackled but he didn’t feel any of the fire’s warmth or comfort amidst the heaps of destroyed buildings and lives strewn in the mud on Avenue P.
He had found the mangled bodies of many friends, neighbors, and others—like Ichabod Weems. Lorena would rest easier now knowing that filthy bastard had finally met his just reward.
“We got to be blessed, mister.” The young white boy held his shaking, muddy hands out to the fire. “Ain’t no two ways about it. I seen more rich dead than poor.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it, boy.” Philip pulled a woman’s ragged shawl around his shoulders. “We got lucky, that’s all,” he coughed, “God doesn’t play favorites when nature rolls the dice.”
The boy wrapped his hands around his shoulders and rubbed. “Maybe, but how you explain us ending up way over at 28th and Avenue P after all our homes got washed away?” He wiped the blood from the scratches on his forehead with the back of his hand. “And so close to the only house standing for blocks ’round here?”
Philip coughed and spat on the muddy street. “I don’t. All I know is, you, me, the others . . . we were lucky this time. You have family?”
The boy nodded and stared back at the mounds of devastation. “I’m still looking.”
Philip put his hand on the boy’s wet shoulder.
More drenched, half-naked survivors staggered or drifted like ghosts to the fire, staring into the flames with eyes wide, glassy, and still.
Philip stepped away from the fire to allow the others to warm themselves. He turned back to look at the only two-story house still standing on Avenue P.
For more than six hours, fifty of them had braced and barred the windows and doors with anything they could nail or hold in place.
The house had creaked, swayed, and might have collapsed at any moment, but held its ground to the end and they survived.
Maybe the boy was right.
A nearby telephone pole had snapped off its base. It looked like the storm had whipped its wires around the house, wrapping it up tight like a shipping crate, keeping it firm on its foundations.
Was that your doing, Lord? Reaching down to stop us from being swept away? Were old men and women really so much more deserving than children or Gabrielle and Bret?”
“Mister? Mister Harper?” a girl’s voice called Philip’s name from behind.
Feeling his joints stiffen with each movement, he turned around slowly to see who it was.
Verna Desmond—Miss Caldwell’s girl—stood shivering with her arms folded across her naked breasts. Her calico skirt was soaked and ripped around her bare knees and her feet were covered in the muck of the street.
“Mister Harper? Sir, I tried to walk home but . . . I think I got confused.” She glanced back over her shoulder then turned to Philip again. “I must have turned down the wrong street ’cause the house.”
She started crying. “And Mr. Caldwell . . . everybody and everything . . . oh Lord, Miss Caldwell . . .” Verna swayed on her feet, then dropped to her knees in the mud and cried.
Philip plodded through the muck and crouched down beside her. He lifted back her wet, matted hair. He took the tattered shawl off his shoulders and wrapped it around her.
“Come now, Verna, you have to stand up.” He gripped under her arms and lifted. “How are we going to help other folks if we can’t help ourselves?”
She rested the side of her face on his shoulder. “I ain’t seen no one else alive I know ’cept you,” she wailed. “Sometimes I wished it would have up and took me—”
“Hush now, child, none of that nonsense. Your spirit is too strong for that.” He held the trembling young woman in his arms. “We’re both still breathing. That’s all that matters.”
Verna pressed her fingertips into his arms. “It was the most terrible thing I ever been through. Nothing felt safe or solid anymore. Only thing I remember is reaching out for this tree floatin’ by.”
She dried her eyes with the end of the shawl. “We’re honest, God-fearing, hardworking people, Mister Harper, why would the Lord send down such a vengeance on us?”
Philip couldn’t answer. He was looking to the side, past Verna’s distraught face to a stack of broken housing timber about thirty feet behind them.
There, near the bottom of the pile he saw the naked, battered torso of Arley Caldwell, protruding through the ruination, bent and broken, face up into the blaring sun.
His once feathery, white hair was caked back on his crushed skull, darkened by the muddy water and his own gore. The stone-white surface of his gashed face glistened with beads of water and drying blood.
The dead man’s eyes stared back at Philip, their violent surrender to death like the carved expression in a grotesque statue.
Verna tugged at his sleeve. “I know the Caldwells are safe, aren’t they, Mister Harper? You’ll help me look for them, won’t you?”
A frantic smile broke across her lips. “And I’ll help you find Mister McGowan! Please sir! I ain’t got no family I know of and they’re everything to me.”
Philip put his arm around Verna’s shoulder and guided her back toward the line of survivors milling around the fire. “You got to warm yourself first, child.” He stumbled, his feet feeling heavier with each muddy step.
“Are you hurt bad, Mister Harper?
Philip wondered how long the tears had been trickling down his cheeks. He hadn’t noticed until Verna mentioned it and he did his best to hide them behind a smile. “Stand close as you can.” He guided her as near as he could.
Philip prayed as he walked, trusting God would take this grievous burden away from them before the weight crushed those already broken by something worse than any storm’s fury.
The afternoon sun blazed down on the gathered survivors staggering around the yard of the Ursuline Convent and Academy.
Bret, pummeled, thrashed, and bloodied by the hurricane’s ferocity, stumbled toward the survivors. Gabrielle will be there. She must be.
After plodding only a few feet, he stopped. There, still clinging to a large, broken branch, a woman, her ghostly white face torn and lacerated, stared up at him from the mud.
Bret stepped closer. He paused and stared at the dead nun holding a little girl. Around the nun’s thick waist, nine children were tied, each with a rope knotted to their waist. What remained of their small, crushed bodies lay scattered around her, some, their frail, broken arms still outstretched toward her.
Bret could not pray because there were no words he knew that could carry the anguish of hopelessness consuming his soul.
He dropped on his knees to the bloody mud and wept.
The massive, ten-foot high brick wall surrounding the convent school had been reduced to scattered mounds of rubble.
The cries of the wounded and the moans of the dying filled the grounds as exhausted nuns moved among the survivors attending to each the best they could.
Bret raised his eyes to heaven. Columns of smoke rose from the streets, clouding his view of the brilliant azure blue Gulf sky. He flinched at the stench—the ever-growing intrusive vapors of decaying and burning flesh—filling his nostrils as the blistering afternoon sun beat down on his head. No waiting in this heat. They’ve already started burning. He turned and vomited.
Short of breath, Bret sat in the soggy grass, head slumped forward, feeling a craving for his medicine so deep that it seemed now to have settled into a solid, living thing in the pit of his gut.
If not for his unwavering hope of finding Gabrielle alive—the heartbreaking desire to hold and kiss her once more—that seemed to drag his body by an unconscious force of its own, he was certain he would keel over on his side at any moment and willingly join the dead scattered around him.
Bret wiped his mouth, drew a breath, and staggered up again on his feet. “Gabrielle!” He tried to raise his hoarse voice to a yell. “Gabrielle Caldwell! Has anyone seen her?”
A half-naked man, his sickly pallor like one risen from the grave and wearing only torn shreds of black tuxedo pants, drifted by him as though walking in a trance toward some unseen beacon in the distance.
Bret recognized the ghostly face of a businessman who knew Arley Caldwell but the person’s name escaped him. He grabbed the former gentleman by the shoulders. “Have you seen Gabrielle Caldwell?”
The man paused for a moment but kept staring straight ahead. Bret shook his shoulders. “You know Arley Caldwell. Have you seen his daughter, Gabrielle?”
“Jenny . . . where’s my Jenny? She has to wake the children.” The man continued walking like a lost soul in search of something it would never find.
Bret heard a child cough and turned. The little girl in the nun’s arms, a drooping freckle-faced girl with red ribbons on her ponytails, coughed and cried out from the dead sister’s protective embrace.
He rushed to her side, untied the rope and carried her toward the main courtyard of the convent.
The wounded and dying lay sprawled on a few cots and stretchers while most were on the ground. The little girl with freckles smiled up at him from her cot.
Bret stroked the girl’s wet, red hair. “You’ll be all right, darling. The sisters will take care of you now.”
The little girl tugged at his scratched and bleeding arm. “Please stay, mister. I don’t know where my friends are.”
“I know but I have to try to find mine too. Do you understand?”
The little girl looked down at the ground. After a brief silence, she nodded. “I think so. Is it someone you love?”
Bret swallowed. “Yes. Very much.”
“Is she nice?”
“She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”
“What’s her name?”
“Gabrielle.”
“Then she’s more than just your friend, isn’t she?” A mischievous, missing tooth grin brought a sudden flush to her pale face.
Bret chuckled. “Do you always ask so many questions?”
The little girl stared at Bret for a few moments as though searching for something she wanted to see in his tired eyes. “My name is Emily. What’s yours?”
“I’m Bret. Pleased to meet you Emily.” He smiled and kissed her on the forehead. “So, after I find my friend, Gabrielle, we’ll come back later and see how you’re feeling. Would you like that?”
“Promise?”
“Promise.”
Emily hugged Bret with her frail arms. “And if you see my friends, please tell them I’m here.”
Bret kissed Emily on the top of her head and guided her gently back down on the cot. He rose and gazed at the haggard, wild-eyed ghosts of men and women stumbling by, their faces shocked into contortions of terror and confusion.
He recognized several who had been quests at his party. Where a week ago it seemed he might be returned to the good graces of Galveston society, nothing remained of that life except barren stares unseeing of anything except the storm still raging in the aftermath of memory. Was the rig at Beaumont destroyed too?
Bret looked away. Strange, but that was the first time the thought had occurred to him. His only driving need, the only thing that could give meaning to his life now was to find Gabrielle safe and alive.
Nothing else mattered, not even the riches he promised her that could, for all he cared, remain hidden in the Godforsaken depths of hell.
A woman shuffled past him, her eyes, like two extinguished lights, reflected death’s gray face on her drowned baby cradled in her arms. Bret turned and wove his way through the walking dead toward the dormitory facing Rosenberg Avenue.
Near the outside wall, three Ursuline nuns attended a group of young women and children huddled around a small fire. Bret approached the oldest one, her back bent over a pregnant woman on a stretcher. “Sister?” He touched her shoulder. “You know the Caldwells, don’t you?”
The nun turned around, her creased face wearied and bewildered by exhaustion. “Yes, but as you can see I’m busy.” She turned back to the pregnant woman. “The Lord’s blessings always come when you least expect them.”
“Gabrielle? Have you seen her?”
“Yes, Miss Caldwell was here, sir,” she answered without turning around. “She was still unconscious when I saw her last lying there on one of those stretchers.”
The nun pointed to a row of canvas stretchers lined up against the wall. “Ask Sister Constance. I believe she attended to her.”
Bret hurried to the younger nun. She was giving a little girl a drink of water from a wooden ladle and pail. “Sister Constance?”
The nun’s girlish face was scratched and cut, the blood still wet on a fresh wound and flecked across the white of her soaked habit.
“Gabrielle Caldwell—the other Sister said she was here.”
“Yes.”
Bret glanced down the row of stretchers. The bandaged women all looked the same. “Which one is she?”
“She was with us, sir, but now she’s gone.” The nun moved on to the next cot. She dipped the ladle into the wood pail and offered a drink to a little boy lying down.
The child gulped at the water, letting it dribble down his bruised cheeks. “Careful, Evan,” she cautioned. “We can’t waste any. There are so many mouths—”
Bret gripped the nun’s arm. “What do you mean gone? Is she dead?” The very word on his lips froze his heart. He gasped for his next breath.
“Oh no, not as far as I know. Now please, sir.”
Bret rubbed his exhausted eyes. “She fell back out the window . . . then a big wave carried us. The convent wall . . . that’s the last thing I remember . . . Gabrielle was still with me when the raft hit then she was gone . . . somehow I managed to crawl up on the dormitory roof.”
“How fortunate for you, sir.” Sister Constance yanked her arm away. “The Lord’s old stone walls saved many souls last night.”
“And Gabrielle?”
“A gentleman came for her when she was still unconscious. Her fiancé, he said, a doctor. He had been searching for hours. He said he would take care of her at his home. It must be one of the few still standing.”
Bret closed his eyes, overwhelmed by death’s clammy vapor all around him. His knees buckled for a moment and he steadied himself against the dormitory wall. He shuddered and steadied himself against the wall, breathing in short, erratic gasps.
“Sir? Perhaps you should sit down. If there’s water left after the children I can—”
Bret balled his hand into a fist. A fresh craving clawed at his heart and soul, and together with the old hunger, drove him on—vengeful and unforgiving in their pitiless longing. Bret brushed by Sister Constance toward the demolished front gates.
“Sir? Sir! Don’t you want to know his name?”
Bret hurried away from Sister Constance and the suffering toward the Gulf where one building might yet be standing.