I liked to keep to my schedule of the early morning bike ride to the north end of the island, but Lachicotte was picking me up from Aunt Charlotte’s at nine-thirty to go to the library, and I didn’t want to seem rushed while I was at Grief Cottage. When you visited someone they could sense if you were in a hurry or had to be somewhere else after you left them. I would go in the late afternoon. After all, it was the late afternoon when I had seen him that one time.
Lachicotte brought Aunt Charlotte a lettuce and two cucumbers from his garden and some rolls, still warm, that he had baked. I had peeled two bananas for her and sealed them into plastic quart bags. The requisite uncorked bottles were ready in her studio, the ones in the kitchen discreetly out of sight. As she did not come out to say hello, I told Lachicotte I thought she was still sleeping.
“How’s she doing, in your opinion?” He asked this before the Bentley had pulled away from the curb.
“Okay, I think.”
He appeared to be pondering my stingy reply as we drove down Seashore Road. He was still pondering as he drove us across the causeway. He was expecting more, but what could I loyally add?
“She tried to paint with her left hand,” I said. “It didn’t work too well. She couldn’t control the brush and she gave up.”
“What did she do after that?”
“She slept for the rest of the day.”
He pondered some more. Though I tried not to I could hear his thoughts.
I kept quiet until we were on the causeway, passing the people fishing over the railings. “What kind of fish are they fishing for?” I asked.
“Catfish mostly. It’s also an opportunity to socialize.” A resignation in his voice indicated that he was not going to pry any further. I had let him down.
“Look, I’m not sure I can—” I had to stop; I was choking up. I looked out my window so he wouldn’t see. “I’m not sure I can keep her from fermenting.”
As soon as it came out I realized my stupid mistake. In terms of loyalty to Aunt Charlotte, it was probably the most ill-chosen word I could have hit on. “I meant to say festering,” I corrected myself. “I don’t know why I said the other.”
“They both have a certain applicability,” he remarked and left it at that.
“Did you sell the 1965 Rolls-Royce yesterday?”
“Ah, no. The minute he laid eyes on my beauty here, he fell out of love with poor Silver Cloud.”
“But you can’t sell the Bentley. You said you loved it.”
“He made me a handsome offer, but I haven’t decided. It doesn’t do to get too attached to things. But as I say, I haven’t decided yet.”
Like the middle school, the mainland library was a well-kept one-story building with extensions added on, surrounded by bright bushes in bloom. In one of the extensions there were a lot of glass windows and they were open and you could hear the commotion of children and a woman’s voice telling them to settle down.
“That’s my niece Althea in there,” Lachicotte said. “I recognize her voice. She runs the summer pre-K for the little kids. You’re going to be surprised, Marcus, at how up to date we are in our gadget room. We have the very latest in microfiche.”
The computer and microfilm room was in one of the new extensions. On the wall to the right as you entered was a large bronze plaque that read THE MARGERY LACHICOTTE HAYES WING. 1994.
“Is that one of your relatives?” I asked.
“My mother. Our family has always been passionate about libraries. I’m glad she lived to see this wing finished.”
A smiling lady in a crisp pantsuit hurried forward to meet us. “This is Mrs. Daniels, our librarian,” said Lachicotte. “Lucy, this is Marcus Harshaw, who’s interested in Hurricane Hazel.”
“I’m very happy to meet you, Marcus. We are all so proud of your aunt. We have one of her wonderful paintings above our front desk. Lash, I have all the envelopes ready. I got them out after you phoned yesterday.”
“We’re much obliged, Lucy.”
“No trouble at all, they were close at hand. Being as this summer is Hazel’s fiftieth anniversary, we’ve had a right many calls on those old newspapers. And I’ve got a new magazine for Marcus as well. This month’s State Magazine is featuring stories by people who lived through Hazel. Marcus, I expect you’ll want some help setting up the scanner and printer?”
“No, thank you. I used one like this when I was writing my research paper at school. I just need a user’s card to stick in that slot.”
The librarian was impressed and I think Lachicotte was, too. They hovered over me until I had taken the first fiche out of its envelope—being careful not to leave fingerprints on the film—and slid it into the tray, and started reading the screen. Then Lachicotte said that since I seemed to know what I was about, he and Mrs. Daniels would go and print me out a library card. “Would you like your middle name on it or a middle initial?” he asked. I said Marcus Harshaw would be enough. I didn’t have a middle name.
Left alone with my research, I became impatient then indignant at the skimpy information found on the screen. Here were the microfiches from three state papers of fifty years ago reporting on the aftereffects of Hurricane Hazel, and not one of them rendered up anything as useful as the one state paper I had pored over from a hundred and fifty years ago while researching my seventh-grade school project back in Jewel about a nearby North Carolina mountain town that had been split in half by the Civil War. One side was Confederate and the other Union and the two sides slaughtered each other.
The South Carolina state papers of fifty years ago offered plenty of nonhuman information about Hazel. The hurricane had hit on the day of October’s full moon high tide, the highest lunar tide of the year, which meant the most water damage. Hazel left Haiti as only a Category 2, but kept gathering strength as it headed up the Atlantic coast. When it hit north of Myrtle Beach on the morning of the fifteenth, it was a Category 4. The newspapers reported wind velocities and estimated the millions of dollars of property damage it left in its wake. There were some eyewitness evacuation stories, but they all ended safely. All told, Hazel left nineteen fatalities along the coast of North Carolina and one fatality in South Carolina—but there were no names. Where were the names? I scanned the film until my head began to hurt and I still never found a single name. If even the accounted-for fatalities didn’t rate getting their names in the papers, what hope for you if your body was never found?
I gave up on the fiches and paged through the “old-timer” stories in the fiftieth anniversary state magazine the librarian had left for me. Their Hazel recollections were the kind that began “Mamma and I were driving to the island to see her sister, who was a year-round resident. But when we got to the causeway, we were stopped by a highway patrolman who told us we had to turn around, everyone was evacuating …” Or “A week after the storm, when J. W. McLauren of Charleston finally crossed to the island, he found his family’s hundred-year-old island cottage with all its tongue-and-groove joints miraculously intact, only the waters had moved the house a hundred yards down the beach.”