Good Hope Road: A Novel (49 page)

The first warnings about bad weather had appeared in the evening papers on Saturday. A ‘tropical disturbance’ had been detected east of the Bahamas and was headed in the direction of the Keys. At Sloppy Joe’s that evening, folks had talked of the approaching storm with resigned annoyance. What perfect timing, to hit the Keys squarely over the long Labour Day weekend.

Ernest ‘Papa’ Hemingway sat at the bar in a black mood, hunched over his Teacher’s. ‘He was in the middle of a story,’ Skinner, the huge, three-hundred-pound bartender explained to an amused Connor, ‘and now he can’t work until the storm’s past.’

‘Hey, Papa,’ Connor called, ‘how about I buy you a drink and cheer you up?’

‘You keep on buying drinks for folks, doughboy, and you’re going to be broke faster than I can empty this glass.’

Connor laughed. ‘It’s the end of the month, remember? Payday, Papa, I got plenty.’

He bought a round of drinks and sat beside the writer, admiring once again the mural of General Custer that dominated the wall. The veterans had become a fixture at the bar ever since the camps had opened, adopting the dark, cavernous interior, the floors slick with spilled drink and melted ice, the pool tables as their own. Papa Hemingway was here almost every evening, drinking alongside them, swapping yarns and entering friendly pissing contests in the trough that served as a urinal out the back.

He eyed Connor gloomily. ‘You staying local for the weekend?’

Connor shrugged, drumming his fingers on his glass. ‘Ain’t decided yet. Might go up to Miami for the game with a bunch of the boys tomorrow.’ He tilted the glass to his mouth, draining it empty.

Those dime-priced shots of gin and fifteen-cent glasses of whisky had a way of adding up, and as things went, Connor had found himself sufficiently depleted of funds on Sunday morning that he could ill afford the trip to Miami. A bunch of them elected to stay on in the Keys for the weekend. Some of the women from the carousing of last night had come back to the camp with them. What was a trifling storm when you had plenty of cheap booze and women to while away the hours?

At 10 a.m. that Sunday, the Coast Guard received a weather forecast that warned of increasing winds, possibly of hurricane force in the Florida Straits. They had a seaplane fly around the Keys, dropping wooden blocks that warned of the potential change in the weather to hurricane status. The pilot made several trips, even using paraffin-coated ice-cream cartons when he ran out of blocks. Assuming that the camp authorities had things under control, he did not, however, bother to drop warning messages around the veteran camps.

Oblivious that the storm they were expecting was now an impending hurricane, the veterans in Matecumbe spent all of Sunday in yet another booze-soaked blur.

It began to rain in earnest late Monday morning, the wind roaring eerily through the mangrove swamps. Still the camp authorities waited to act. The camp trucks that could have been commandeered to get the veterans off Matecumbe had been locked up for the holi day weekend. The only evacuation measure that remained was to order a special train all the way from Miami; this they were loath to do until they were certain that it was indeed a hurricane they were dealing with.

The rain poured incessantly, whipped by the wind into sheets of water that slammed with startling solidity, first vertically, then at a slant and sometimes almost horizontally, into the work camps. Finally, at 2 p.m., an order was put in for that train. A crew had to be mustered, however, a task complicated by the holiday.

By the time the train left, it was already 4:25 p.m.

Word was at last sent to the veteran camps: the status of the storm had been changed to a hurricane, and it was making straight for the Keys. The men were to wait at the railway embankment for the train that had been sent for.

The wind rose by the hour, battering the hurricane flags – red, with a black square in the centre – that had been raised all along Key West.

Connor huddled against the embankment, lying low to the ground. The barometer had steadily continued to fall, heralding the approaching centre of the hurricane, as he and the other men had thrown their few belongings together, latched the barrack doors shut and headed out. The wind was so strong they’d practically crawled to the embankment, the waves pounding so forcefully now upon the island that the very ground seemed to tremble.

The rain beat down mercilessly, shorting flashlights, making a mockery of the few raincoats they had among them as it soaked the men through and through. Connor pulled the lapels of his coat tighter about his neck. The wind gained even more speed, flinging handfuls of sand, stinging faces and hands and drawing tiny spots of blood. Connor drew his sleeve over his fingers and shielding his face with his arm, peered cautiously through the aperture, startled and not a little awed by the ferocity of the storm. An arc of lightning crackled overhead. Three trash cans were dancing in mid-air.

Every little while, someone would raise his head. ‘I hear it, I hear the train,’ he’d shout, his words all but swallowed by the storm. Each time, it was only the roar of the wind, blowing faster and faster through the mangroves, sounding cruelly like the shriek of a locomotive engine. Still they waited, as the barometer continued to drop.

29.55

28

27.5

Men began to scatter, crawling into the darkness to seek refuge where they could; in the mangroves, belting themselves to the palms. Connor stayed where he was. He began to laugh, taken by the irony of it all. The train wasn’t coming, not any time soon it wasn’t. Once again, they were on their own, just a bunch of beat-up doughboys crouched in this parody of the trenches, cowering for their lives in the sand.

He’d wanted to see a storm, he thought to himself, he’d actually
wanted
to see this! The thought made him laugh all the more.

The eight-mile eye of the hurricane drew closer still to Matecumbe, sending the wind into a howling frenzy. A sapodilla was uprooted and flung against the rocks as if it were no more than a toothpick, the roof of one of the barracks lifted clear off and was thrown, splintering, into the sea. Pieces of lumber were carried from the construction sites, and sent slamming against the embankment, as a two-hundred-and-fifty-mile-per-hour gust began to churn the beaches, turning sand into tiny missiles that flayed clothes from bodies and the skin clear off faces, the fingerprints from hands. All around Connor, men began to scream.

He tried to rise to his feet, and was knocked down by something that hit his legs. Stubbornly, he got to his knees when the wind shifted direction for a brief instant, permitting him to stand. ‘I’ll not go lightly,’ he shouted, although there was nobody to hear. ‘I’ll not—’ The wind picked him up effortlessly, shrieking in his ear as it flung him through a curtain of sand, tearing the voice from his throat.

Connor saw a wave rear up over the island, a huge body of water, dark and oily, all-encompassing, large enough to swallow the world.

Connor was right. The train never did arrive, its progress so impeded by fallen debris that by the time it reached Islamorada, the eye of the hurricane had just made landfall on the Keys. The train was blown clear off the tracks, with only the locomotive left standing.

The weather stayed so rough that it was not until Wednesday that the first rescue boats reached Matecumbe. None of the buildings of the camp remained. Veterans lay everywhere, their bodies rolling back and forth in the surf of the now calm and glassy sea, slung impossibly high from those trees that still stood, dozens found in the mangroves where they had sought shelter, the mangroves themselves brown, stripped entirely bare of their leaves.

Raydon • 1936

he Labour Day Hurricane, the press called it. It was the strongest recorded to have ever hit the United States, setting a new barometric low for all of the Western Hemisphere, of 26.35 inches.

Jim searched the lists of the dead for Connor’s name. ‘Maybe he never did go to the Keys after all,’ Madeleine said hopefully.

Maybe, Jim thought to himself. Or perhaps he had, but was lucky enough to have been away when the hurricane hit. It had been a long weekend after all – maybe he’d gone to Miami and ridden out the storm in safety there, drinking and carousing in a bar someplace.

Maybe he’d been blown out to sea, yet another veteran whose body was never recovered, their deaths never included in the final toll of fatalities.

‘Who Murdered the Vets?’ Hemingway asked in an emotional piece, calling to justice all those who’d so callously abandoned the men on Matecumbe until it was far too late. Jim recalled that brief conversation on the porch between Connor and his father, and wondered if Connor had indeed run into the writer on Key West.

‘Maybe he’ll write about my buddies and me,’ he’d wisecracked then; how he’d roar with laughter now, laugh until he was doubled over, at the cruel irony.

The rich, Hemingway pointed out bitterly in his essay, knew better than to visit the Keys during hurricane season. Why then, had veterans been sent there in droves? There was a stench that hung over the islands, he wrote, the stench of the dead and the rotting, that he last remembered from the war.

The Major studied the photographs of the carnage published in the papers. Bodies lashed together on a cart and towed behind a car. Rows of wooden boxes into which the decomposing remains had been dumped before being taken away to be burned. He pored over them in silence, raising a hand now and again to wipe away the water dribbling from his damaged eye as he took in every minute, horrific detail. The missing shoes and tattered remnants of clothing, an arm flung over a face, as if to shield it from the wind, dead veterans arranged in long, efficient rows, head to toe.

The Major’s face was expressionless as he studied the images, only the fluttering left eyelid betraying the raw despair welling up inside. Like a crack opening along an ocean floor, everything he’d kept so long unspoken, all that he’d tried so hard to keep in check, was coming loose, revealing the fault lines that lay beneath. The twitching of the left eye worsened, a trickle of water coursing steadily down his cheek. He lifted a hand to brush it away, but the fingers locked, and now the wrist, a paralysis swimming up one side of his body so that he could no more move his left arm than deny the pressure building within his chest. A centrifuge of sorrow and helplessness pulling so inexorably that the Major imagined he might collapse into himself. He called out, but the words slurred in his throat.

‘Jim,’ he managed with great effort, but it was only a rasping whisper.

He tried to rise from the armchair and fell headlong, the pages of the newspaper with their stark, black-and-white images scattering about him. ‘Jim,’ he slurred again through the one side of his mouth that he was still able to move, ‘Jim . . .’ the sound no louder than a sigh.

The Major let go, a great surge of grief crashing through him like breakers in a storm. The waters sucking him under, beyond the layers of loss and riddling guilt, down, deep under, to where there was nothing but a vast stillness. No more ghosts, no more voices from the past, just a floating, pelagic silence.

‘A stroke,’ the doctor diagnosed, and they were lucky it had been a mild one. With rest and enough time, he fully expected the rictus in the Major’s face and side to right itself. Jim nodded, trying to hide his relief; after the doctor left, he stood over his father’s bed for a long time, silently watching the rise and fall of his chest as he slept.

In the face of the outcry that erupted over the hurricane disaster, the Government launched an official inquiry. It was a hasty affair with a quick verdict: there had been no negligence. The Government had acted out of good faith; the deaths were classified as an ‘Act of God’.

Public sentiment stayed firm, however, in support of veterans and their cause. Not four months later, in the dawn of 1936, of what was an election year, the Bonus Bill was finally approved.

Blood money, Jim thought with disgust, as he listened to the news on the radio, unable to contemplate the bonus without thinking of Connor. So many like him, fallen by the wayside during this fourteen-year-long petition. He looked at his father, trying to gauge his reaction. The Major had recovered sufficiently from the stroke last September that the downward pull on the left side of his face was barely noticeable any more. Jim noticed the differences all the same, saw with bitter sadness the slow decline in the man he’d known. He watched now as the Major cut a plug of tobacco, his face completely blank as the newsreader on the radio went on. Shavings slopped from the tin on to the Major’s clothes. He seemed neither to notice, nor care.