Galveston (11 page)

“‘Well, it looks as though Ruth has found her love at last. He lives here but will be going back to college at Southwestern in September. She spends all her time with him, and he's certainly an attentive suitor. They've gone on hayrides together, a round of dances, and [next word unreadable], and summer cookouts. He takes her to church in his own rig every Sunday morning.'”

“How old would she be by now? Seventeen, eighteen?” Charles asked.

“Nearly eighteen. Betsey was married at seventeen, come to think of it. I hope Ruth makes a better choice than she did, when she settles down.”

“Sounds like she might be about ready to do just that.”

“I don't know. If he's going off to college in the fall, sometimes romance fades during extended absences. We'll see … listen to what else she says:

“‘I was out at the cemetery last Saturday, to check on Charlie's grave, and all looks well. I left some yellow mums and will put some flowers again when his birthday comes around.'”

I stopped reading and put the letter down. Part of me had lost him all over again when I read her words. I hadn't forgotten his second birthday would have been coming up within days, but somehow it was upsetting to see it on paper. Charles closed a rough, paint-streaked hand over mine. “Doesn't it help, knowing what good care Betsey takes of our son's grave?”

“Some, but not much,” I said, smarting at his reference.

He pulled his hand away and took a bite of sandwich, and I stared across at him, wanting at that moment to tell him everything just so he'd stop crediting himself with my son. Had we gone on sitting there, I might have told it all and changed the course of the rest of our lives, yet it was then that Dory Fitzgerald walked hurriedly along the fence and Charles looked out at him and said, “G'day, Dory, where are you off to?”

“Haven't you heard, now? The Mueller boy, Jeremy, has gotten himself lost from his buddies in the surf yonder, and a search party is bein' organized.”

“Oh, God! I'm right behind you. I'll go and get Rubin Garret.”

“Shall I go down too?” I asked.

“No, you'll only be in the way.” He hurried down the porch steps and across the yard, jumped the fence, and took the Garret front steps three at a time. He knocked and waited, knocked again and waited, and I glanced up at the shutters to see if they were closed. They were open, however.

People from up and down the block had now begun to appear, the men hurrying down Avenue L toward the beach. There was much excited chatter going on and children pleading with their mothers to be allowed to go along with older brothers and fathers on the search.

Presently Janet came walking around from the far side of her yard. She was wearing a faded calico dress, an old floppy sun hat, and work gloves, and held a bunch of flowers in one hand and a pair of shears in the other. “Here I am, Charles. What's all the commotion?”

“One of the neighbor boys is lost in the sea. Is Rubin home? I want him to go down to the beach with us.”

“Oh no! Charles, he isn't here right now. He's gone to visit Mrs. Sampler in the hospital. You go and I'll send him along as soon as he gets here.”

He nodded and hurried off, an almost comical figure as he disappeared down the block in his baggy work pants and faded shirt, with blotches of green paint dancing on the background of his old blue trousers.

Janet stood looking after him for a moment, then put the shears and the flowers down on the ground and walked over to the fence. “How awful. Who was it?”

“Jeremy Mueller.”

“Oh yes, that nice young man studying medicine with Doc Monroe. How horrible.”

“I wanted to go down but Charles said no. Want to join me in some lemonade?”

“I guess so. I suppose all we can do at this point is wait. Rubin ought to be back pretty soon. He was going to work at home today.”

A fly had discovered the uneaten food on the table and was buzzing purposefully around it like a vulture who's discovered a dead body in the lonely desert. I took the tray away and went into the house to pour some lemonade for the two of us. When I got back on the porch she was seated, and had taken her hat and gloves off and put them next to her chair. There were threads of wet hair around her face and a spot of dirt on her nose, and she was wiping her forehead with a lace handkerchief. “Even cutting flowers and doing a little weeding in the garden is exhausting in this weather,” she said. “I wish I could have as much success with my garden as you do with yours.”

“If this kind of summer means a bad storm in the fall, as it did last year, I'm afraid both our efforts at growing things will be thwarted again.”

“Oh, how I dread the thought of another one.…”

“Really? I didn't think it was so bad.”

“You mean all that wind, that driving rain, didn't scare you?”

“Oh, I was a little frightened at the time, but later my fears seemed silly. After all, look how high the houses are built up. We're safe enough.”

“Yes … yet even on this fine, sunny day, poor Jeremy Mueller's life may be in danger. It seems strangely cruel, doesn't it.”

“They might find him safe yet,” I told her, thinking that if she'd ever lost a child of her own, she wouldn't be so quick to give up hope.

She looked out across the porch toward the beach, as though she could conjure up a vision of what was going on down there. “Yes,” she said with brightness. “Maybe they've found him, revived him … oh, I do hope so. Perhaps he'll appear somewhere on the beach even, wondering at all the fuss.” Then she looked back round at me and said: “You know, Claire, I have a strong suspicion they won't find him alive.”

I opened my mouth to reply but she interrupted, a shadow creeping across her face. “I wonder if he ever thought what it would be like to grow up, marry, have children … to get old … oh, Claire, do you know that when I think about getting old and watching Rubin grow old I can't get a picture of it? It's like a fading face, do you know what I mean? Like something that isn't going to happen.”

I could have told her something about fading faces, but instead leaned across the table and said softly, “Janet, sometimes you really worry me … how maudlin you get!”

“Oh, you sound like Rubin,” she said, and shifted in her chair. “Why is it so gruesome to … to believe you won't live a long life? Doesn't the Church preach that life after death is so much better? Well, doesn't it?”

Just then Rubin appeared at the edge of the yard, hurrying toward us. “Good day, ladies. I hear the Mueller boy is missing.”

Janet rushed down the stairs and into his arms. She spoke to him rapidly and pointed toward the beach. He gave her his coat and hat, and took off running down Avenue L.

She walked back up to the porch, and gathered her things. “Think I'll be going home now,” she said. “Thanks for the lemonade.”

I watched her svelte movements as she walked back home, a queer sense of doom overtaking me. I leaned over the verandah railing and looked around. No one was to be seen except Tom Driscoll, the undertaker, who'd walked out under the cupola at the edge of his verandah and peered out around the street. Seeing me, he lowered his eyes and walked back into his house.

Much later on that Monday, when evening had fallen and the houses on the street glowed with light, the search party returned. I was sitting on the verandah when I heard them coming up the street, a slow shuffling of feet without spirit which told me even before they came within sight that Jeremy Mueller was doomed.

Charles dropped off from the group at our gate and came into the yard, “No luck then?” I asked him.

“None.” He walked up the stairs and sat down on the edge of the porch, resting his head on his knees. “Chances are slim by now, and it's too dark to look further.”

“Where's Rubin?”

“He stayed down there with the Muellers. They won't leave, they say, until he is found … Agatha seems to be in a state of shock.”

“You look done in. Come on and have a bath and some supper.”

“I'm not hungry. I just wish something else could be done to find the boy. Imagine what it would be like never to find him, never to know, to be able to say, ‘Well, he is gone. He drowned in the sea, and we found him and buried him in the earth. We know, because we saw him.'”

“Charles, you're talking nonsense. Come on.”

He didn't seem to hear me, just kept sitting there. I sat down beside him. “Was he swimming with a big group of boys? Where were they?”

“Not far from the end of L, really. There were three of them, and it seems the other boys just looked around and he was gone. We went as far down as the end of the island, where the old brush jetties used to be, in case he was sucked under down there. But we found nothing. Likely he went into a sucker hole.”

“What's that?”

“Something like a whirlpool, a hole anywhere from, say, ten to twenty feet deep—with an undertow that'll suck you down before you know what hit you. The water in that area where they were swimming isn't more than five feet deep at most. They weren't very far out.”

“Do you think they'll ever find him?”

“Tide changes, he ought to turn up. Tomorrow, day after.…”

On Wednesday the Gulf offered up the body of Jeremy Mueller and laid it gently on the shore, within a few yards of the point where he and his friends had waded carefree into the water on Monday for a swim. Doc Monroe took his flatbed wagon down and brought the body back up Avenue L.

Like the other neighbors, we watched from the porch as the wagon made its way up the street, Jeb Mueller seated beside the doctor and Agatha in the back of the wagon, above her son's head. The body was covered with a faded bedspread. This we could not see until the wagon was past, and my eyes traveled up from it to the face of Agatha. There was neither pain nor sorrow in the face; only utter disbelief.

Tom Driscoll offered his services as undertaker, and the funeral ceremony was held in the Muellers' living room on a fine, sunny afternoon. A curious custom, that: the people most awfully affected by the death of a loved one are expected to open their home to stage the most grotesque part of the letting go.

Having no particular religious affiliation, the Muellers asked Rubin to officiate. He'd been with Jeb and Agatha almost constantly since their son had been swallowed up by the Gulf, and had opened his wide arms and offered his prayers for them.

Charles attended the funeral ceremony and followed the throng of people out to the City Cemetery. It seemed the Muellers had quite a number of friends from around the neighborhood, and the Ludtke Iron Foundry, where Jeb worked, closed for a half day so that his friends could be present.

My fear of funerals had long been professed, so there was no explaining necessary when I stayed home and cooked a cake and a pot of chicken and dumplings that afternoon. Later in the evening, Charles helped me carry the food down to the Muellers', six houses away, and everyone but a handful of relatives was gone by then. An ancient woman, wizened and snowy-haired, sat in a corner of the living room in a rocking chair, her knobby hands closed around a dog-eared Bible. The other two Mueller children, both young girls, sat together at the foot of the stairs, quietly playing jackstones.

Jeb and Agatha sat huddled together on the sofa, and we first took our offering of food to the kitchen, placing it among the other foods hardly touched, then went to pay our respects to them.

Agatha took my hand and searched my face with her swollen eyes, then said, “You didn't come to services. Tom had him fixed so pretty, right over there in front of the window.”

“I, too, have lost a son.”

She nodded in apparent understanding, then added, “He was goin' to be a doctor, you know.”

“Won't you sit down, stay for a spell?” said Jeb.

“No, we'd best be getting home,” said Charles.

“I can't thank you enough, for what you did. Agatha and me, we didn't know what fine neighbors we had till this thing happened.…”

“'Twas an awful high price to pay,” said Agatha, and buried her head on his chest.

He put one long arm around her shoulders and said, “Oh, Mama, don't go to cryin' again,” but the tears were welled up in his own eyes, too, and I thought just then of the hopeless tears spent by Charles when the son he thought of as his own had been taken away from him.

Walking home we both stared silently ahead. Thankfully, Charles did not mention the parallel of the two tragedies, ours and the Muellers', as I feared he might. In the early morning of the following day, he donned his old clothes again and went back to painting. Except for the hollow feeling in my stomach and the general quiet around the street, you might have thought nothing had happened to interrupt the hazy peacefulness of the summer routine.

Chapter 11

Rubin Garret had a way of drawing people to his parish. Of a Sunday morning, when the people filed from the dark church into the sunshine, he would remember to ask after Mrs. McIntyre's aching bones, to question John Treadway about his brother's health, to inquire of Maude Patterson whether her boy Timothy's broken leg was healing properly, and to remember a host of other personal things about his parishioners that showed he cared. I would often think to myself as I watched him that he went about his duties with double the normal amount of zeal, to make up for Janet's lack of participation in the activities of the church.

By early 1879, when he'd been at St. Christopher's two years, the number of families listed as members had increased from fifty to close to one hundred and fifty, and plans were in the making for a new church school building on the far end of the three-lot tract making up the church property.

The white stone church itself was situated at the other end of the tract, and a cloistered walkway led from out its side across the grounds to a small building which had served since the beginning of the church as office and church school. Parish meetings, receptions, and other activities were held in a converted rent house on property adjacent.