The Promise (25 page)

Galveston was my home and you won’t catch me saying one bad word against it. But I remembered from my school-going days the map of the United States. It was pinned up on the wall by the chalkboard. Texas was big, like it deserved to be. It outshined every other state by a mile. But a person had to look hard to find Galveston. It was off to the side of Texas, just a sliver of land in the Gulf of Mexico. From that, a person wouldn’t know it was twenty-seven miles long and up to three miles wide in the middle. They wouldn’t know it held buildings and people. Sitting at my desk in the back row, I’d raised my hand and after a while the schoolteacher, Miss Marquart, called on me.

‘What’s keeping us from floating away?’ I said.

‘God’s will.’

‘That’s all?’

I got a whipping for asking a disrespectful question about God, and I figured I deserved it since what I’d said came out wrong. After that, I didn’t raise my hand no more. I tried to quit looking at that map: it was a disturbance. But I was drawn to it. Mama told me later that Galveston had long roots and at the time, I took that to mean it was attached to the bottom of the gulf. That had eased my mind, but we were still a lowlying island with water on all sides. Maybe Mrs Williams didn’t understand that, her not being from here. But ignorance didn’t change nothing. The bayou and the gulf were high, and Wiley said a big blow was coming. It might not hit us directly but somebody was in for it. What was out there in the gulf wasn’t no Ohio storm.

This rain, it worked on my nerves and made my skin stand up. Twenty men banging away on the tin roof with hammers couldn’t be louder, and it didn’t help none that the air steamed more than ever. The clock on the mantle showed half past ten so I put my hands to work and made corn pone for noon dinner. I took care as I measured out the cornmeal and baking powder but when I mixed in the lard, I couldn’t remember if I’d added salt. Mrs Williams didn’t know nothing about cooking but I was glad she wasn’t here to see me nibble the dry mixture, tasting for salt. She was on the front veranda, the house still blocking the wind. She probably hoped to catch sight of Oscar, that being her favorite thing to do of late. Andre, barefoot and his short pants rolled up above his knees, played in the rain. He was jumping off the veranda steps and landing in puddles, making a mess but having a grand time.

I added a half-measure of salt, stirred in the milk, patted the dough into cakes, and laid them in greased baking pans. I’d bake them, I decided, instead of frying. I didn’t have it in me to stand over a hot skillet with sizzling butter popping every which way. I worked the kitchen pump to rinse my hands, its squeak setting my teeth on edge, adding to the rain, the wind whistling around the corners of the house, and the drafty sound in the chimney. I didn’t know how many times I’d told Oscar the pump needed a good dose of oil but them ears of his plugged up when it suited him. I’d have to tell him again. Then it came back to me, how I wouldn’t be here after tomorrow.

It startled me, this forgetting. But it wasn’t a real forgetting, not with this ache fixed in my chest. It was like I was between two places: what used to be and how it was now. Maybe this was because I never thought it would end like this, me packing my apron and turning this house over to another woman. Not after all that had happened, not after all I had seen.

Nearly a year ago, on the first day of October, Sister Camillus and Sister Vincent from St. Mary’s washed Bernadette in the bedroom while Mama tried to talk Oscar out of burying her in her wedding dress. ‘Oscar honey,’ she’d said, ‘Bernadette wouldn’t want you seeing her in it, not this way.’ Neighbor women from all directions were here and had gathered on the veranda. They’d brought platters of ham, cakes, and pies, and I’d laid the food out on the kitchen table. ‘It’s a mighty grievous thing,’ I heard Aunt Mattie say. I was inside, and her words came to me through the windows. ‘Especially when there was a baby on the way. And Mr Williams, well, that man carries a shine for Bernadette, marriage hasn’t dulled that one bit.’ They all agreed and said how it broke their hearts to think of it. That wasn’t the only thing that broke their hearts. There was Andre, motherless at four years old. All that sadness, and in the hallway, I heard Oscar say to Mama, ‘If I have to do it myself, I want Bernadette in her wedding dress.’

Leastways, Andre didn’t hear none of them, him staying at St. Mary’s. But them words of Oscar’s stuck in my mind as I polished the cookstove from top to bottom. When I finished that, I washed down the walls and then the windows.

Without Oscar coming right out and asking, the morning after Bernadette was laid to rest, I rode with my brothers to this house and at the foot of the veranda steps, I climbed down from the wagon and let myself in. I cooked and cleaned, and saw to Andre. After two weeks, I found an envelope on the kitchen table. There were ten dollar bills in it. That money surprised me; I’d been helping out, not working for pay. But the big surprise was what was printed on the envelope. I didn’t care nothing about reading but I knew what the letters spelled. Miss Ogden. Until then, I was Nan. I put the envelope in my pocket and that night I showed it to Mama. ‘Bernadette’s gone and won’t be coming back,’ she said when she opened it and saw all the bills. ‘But Oscar can’t say them words, not yet. But he knows it, knows he needs you. This is his way of saying it.’ Mama pointed to the printing on the envelope. ‘And this here is his way of setting the terms. You understand what he’s saying, don’t you, you being a young woman and him a widower. He don’t want no gossip. That’s why you’re Miss Ogden and honey, he’s Mr Williams now.’

Oscar was hollow-eyed and unshaven during the first three months. He didn’t sleep good. I made up the bed in the mornings and them scratchy-new sheets were a tangled mess. I figured he sat up most nights, because every morning I found an old coffee can on the back veranda with the burned-down ends of cigarettes in it. Every day I threw out the cigarettes and put back the can. Oscar had Frank T. and Wiley bring home bottles of beer along with the usual supplies, but I never found the empty bottles. Likely, Oscar buried them somewhere. At noon, him, me, and Andre ate dinner with nobody saying much. But when it was just me and Andre, I kept up a chatter. That little boy needed to hear a lively voice. Me, too. Without Bernadette, this house had lost its heart.

I guessed it was the nuns at St. Mary’s that reminded Oscar he had a child to see to. I didn’t know what happened but on the second Sunday in January, he came home from church and it was like he started to try again. Somebody at St. Mary’s had trimmed his brown hair so that it didn’t hang over the back of his collar no more. He had a smile for Andre and one for me. He told the three orphan boys he’d brought back with him that he’d see them in the barn; he had something he had to do first. Oscar went into the washroom and shaved his face and neck clear down to bare skin. He even shaved off his mustache that he’d had for as long as I’d known him. Without it, he was a different man, younger somehow. When it was time to load Andre in the wagon for their trip to the cemetery, Oscar swung that little boy so high that it set Andre laughing. It was such a pleasing sound that Oscar laughed too, a rusty sound at first. I was on the veranda and he glanced my way. There was a lightness in his eyes but when he saw it was me, that light dimmed. I wasn’t Bernadette. I thought he’d fall back into his sorrowfulness but Andre, sitting on the buckboard, wouldn’t let him. ‘Daddy!’ he said, and that word was a bubble of shiny happiness. It lifted Oscar, I saw that. He gathered himself a lopsided smile and got up on the wagon.

Now, outside the window, the gulf was riled and the dark clouds moved fast. Things could get bad. But this time tomorrow, it’d be over. Storms did that; they moved on and went someplace else. Like I had to do.

I shook off my low feeling and put the corn pone into the oven. I gritted my teeth against the squeak in the pump, filled pots with water, and hauled the pots to the stove. Andre was still outside having himself a high time in the rain. Noon dinner wasn’t too far off and he was going to need a bath whether he liked it or not. And he wasn’t having it in the washroom; he’d track mud all over this house if I allowed that. No, sir, he was going to have his bath right here in the kitchen and he’d take it in the laundry washtub. I had just emptied the first pot of hot water into the tub when Mrs Williams came in from the veranda.

She got herself a cup from the shelf and poured some tea from the teakettle, my brother finally bringing her some from the city. She’d made this pot earlier but likely it was lukewarm. I’d set it off the stove a good while ago. She didn’t say nothing about it, though. Neither was there the first question about all the water simmering on the stove, she didn’t ask about the laundry washtub on the floor by the table. Her mind looked to be elsewhere; her plucked-thin eyebrows were all knotted up. It was like she didn’t even know I was there. A tight feeling started up in my belly.

Mrs Williams put the teakettle back on the counter, and got the milk pitcher out of the icebox. She gussied up her tea with the milk, then added a teaspoon of sugar from the sugar bowl on the table, some of the sugar spilling around the cup. She didn’t look to notice that circle of splattered sugar. Her gaze was fixed on the front windows.

Something told me I should look out the window too. Something bad was happening out there. But I couldn’t get myself to look.

Mrs Williams didn’t sit down. She kept standing, stirring the tea, her spoon clinking from side to side. ‘From what I understand,’ she said after a while, ‘the house is on stilts as a precaution.’ Her voice was flat; it gave me the shivers. She said, ‘The ridge has never flooded.’

‘Other than the time it did,’ I said.

She gave me a sharp look.

‘It came up in the storm of ’71.’ My mouth had gone as dry as a rock. I swallowed. ‘Mama and Daddy, they saw it.’

‘But you never have?’

‘No.’ I needed to look out the windows but I couldn’t get my head to turn. My neck was froze up.

Mrs Williams kept stirring her tea. She said, ‘I just saw a rather unusual thing. Or at least it is for me. It happened while I was on the veranda. At first I thought my eyes were playing tricks; I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. But it wasn’t a trick.’ She tapped her spoon two times on the lip of the cup. She said, ‘Streams of rushing water are coming through the sand hills. Through the passes, I mean. From the beach.’ She put her spoon on the counter. ‘Miss Ogden? Should we be concerned?’

My neck came unstuck. Out the window, through the rain and past Andre stomping in mud puddles, I saw water from the gulf fan out on our side of the sand hills. It mashed down the grass, coming this way.

‘Miss Ogden?’

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

‘I see,’ Mrs Williams said. ‘I’ll let Oscar know.’

All that water streaming through the sand hill passes made my heart gallop right up into my throat. Wiley’s big blow, it was closing in. Didn’t matter that the wind still came from the mainland. Didn’t matter that the wind should push the gulf back and that the tide should be low. Big blows did what they wanted; we weren’t nothing to them. On a map, we weren’t but a sliver of land.

Wiley said it would hit tonight. Hours and hours from now. There was time to get home; there was time to get ready. I smothered the racing in my chest, and if Mrs Williams’ heart was knocking hard, it didn’t show. She went off to the barn wearing a fancy pearl-colored raincoat with three shiny black buttons. That coat didn’t even come close to covering the bottom part of her skirt. She had on a rain hat, too, or what I took to be her idea of one since it didn’t have feathers on it. Mrs Williams wore my boots too, them already being muddy. That had been my idea. I’d figured she’d turn down my offer, my boots not being pretty, but she took right to it. Probably she wanted to spare her shoes.

She’d laced my boots tight, them being too big for her. That done, she held up her skirt and turned her feet from side to side. She studied my square-toed boots with clumps of mud stuck on the sides and laughed. It was a raggedy laugh. Then she sobered up and thumped down the veranda steps with her white umbrella held to shield her backside. Andre, still in the yard playing, started to go with her but she stopped and told him something. He stood in the rain, splattered with mud and his little shoulders slumped. Mrs Williams pointed to a big puddle and off he went, kicking his way through the water. She turned and headed for the barn, her skirt blowing sideways.

I had taken her for the kind of woman that got all lathered up and scared silly. Instead she went the other way and pulled a tight rein in on her feelings. As for me, I was pinned down with nerves. I stood on the veranda and everything I knew or had heard about big blows rushed through my mind. I was eight when the storm of ’86 struck. It could have happened yesterday, it was that fresh in my mind. The gulf came through the passes at the sand hills but them hills slowed the water and kept it off the ridge. Things were different, though, for us close to the bayou. That water came out of its banks and marched its way to our house. When it got to the middle veranda step, Mama said it was time to clear out and go the mile down the island to my uncle Bumps’ house. He lived on the ridge then. ‘It ain’t safe here,’ she told Daddy. ‘Three children, Frank. Even if they ain’t babies, we have to think of them.’ Daddy said the horses couldn’t pull the wagon since the water was too deep and the ground was too mushy. ‘We’ll walk,’ Mama said.

The water came to my waist. The day had turned dark, the wind fought us, the rain was needle sharp, and the current was so strong that Daddy had to carry me.

We nearly lost Wiley, I ain’t never going to forget that. He was eleven and bean-pole thin. He stumbled; the current knocked him off his feet and carried him away. Mama screamed, and Daddy gave me to her. I wrapped my arms around her waist, both of us staggering, the water trying to take us, too. The stinging rain in my eyes, Wiley was nothing but a dark shape in the water. He kept trying to stop himself in the current, his arms going every which way, but the water was strong. Daddy and Frank T. went after him and the only thing that saved him was he caught hold of a branch on a salt cedar. Daddy got to him, and when we finally made our way to Uncle Bumps’, Wiley fell down on the floor and went to sleep, he was that worn out. He didn’t care that his hands were cut and bleeding, his arms and legs, too. He slept so hard that he didn’t hear it when the wind lifted a corner of the roof and ripped part of it off. The next morning, the sun came out like nothing had happened. We went home, and the storm had taken some of our roof, too. Inside, the mud and sand were ankle deep on the floor. ‘Would have been better off staying,’ Daddy said, pointing to the brown line on the walls. ‘Water didn’t come but a foot inside the house.’