The Promise (32 page)

‘Have to get you home,’ Nan said. ‘But you have to help. Can’t do it by myself.’

My legs were sprawled out before me. A rattlesnake. Two bites. My teeth chattered, the cold water from the ground seeming to creep into my skin.

I gritted my teeth to stop the chattering. ‘Oscar,’ I said. ‘Has there been any word of him?’

‘Now you stand up. You hear me? I know all kinds of people that have been snakebit and they’ve walked home with no complaint. So get up. Now.’

She heaved me to my feet. Spots danced before my eyes. ‘You can lean on me,’ she said. ‘Never said you couldn’t. Lift your foot. Now the other.’ She turned me around so that we faced the house. It was far away and seemed to float on top of the stilts.

‘Is Andre all right?’ I said.

‘He’s with Mama. Now walk, Mrs Williams. Walk.’

‘I’m not going to die, am I?’

‘For pity’s sake, put some starch in your legs. I can’t hold you up much longer. Now walk. One foot in front of the other.’

I willed myself to do as Nan said. I’ll be fine, I told myself, the tingling in my arm now a burn. I had to be fine. Oscar and I had so much to do.

‘Have you heard anything?’ I said. ‘About Oscar?’

‘Walk, Mrs Williams. I can’t carry you. You ain’t as light as you look.’

I tried to shift my weight off of Nan. I can do this, I told myself. But my chest was so tight, my lungs squeezed as though crushed.

On and on we walked, the rusty sound of my breathing loud in my ears. Blood ran from the bites. My skirt was smeared with it; Nan’s was too. My eyes kept closing; I fought to keep them open. The stench of the cow was again overpowering and I was all at once gagging, sick, Nan holding me.

‘Don’t you give up,’ she said, wiping my chin with her fingers. ‘Won’t have it.’

I will not die, I told myself. Oscar needs me. Andre does too.

‘We’re almost there,’ Nan said. ‘All you’ve got to do is get up these steps.’

‘What did you say about Andre?’

‘I said he’s with Mama. Now you’ve got to help me get you up the steps. Come on now, you can do it.’

The steps were so high, too high, but her grasp on my waist was firm. ‘A few more,’ she said. ‘You’re doing good.’ We stumbled against one another; pain ricocheted through my arm.

‘Now the veranda, almost there.’

‘Miss Ogden, I’m concerned about Oscar.’

‘You’re slopping your words. Good Lord, this bed is a pretty sight even if all this mud ain’t. Here now, turn around so I can get you in and tucked up.’

‘My skirt,’ I said.

‘What?’

‘The hem. It’s filthy. And all the blood.’

‘It don’t matter.’

‘It does matter.’ My voice was shrill. ‘The bed needs to be clean. For Oscar. He’s hurt.’ I started to reach around to the buttons at the back of my skirt. Pain tore through me.

‘Mrs Williams, let me help you with that. Here.’ She took my good hand. ‘Hold on to the bed post. You ain’t altogether steady.’

I wrapped my fingers around the post as she worked at the skirt buttons. Nearby, the tattered ends of the torn canopy over the bed rose and fell in the breeze, and the wardrobe seemed to be at a peculiar slant. ‘You’re quite sure that Andre is all right?’ I said.

‘He’s with Mama. Like I said.’ My skirt slipped off of my hips and onto the muddy floor. ‘Now sit on the bed so you won’t trip.’

She steadied me as I sat and then she unbuttoned my shoes and got me into the bed. My arm was sticky and hot. I shook; everything now so cold. Nan held up my wounded arm and pulled the quilt to my chin. Tears sprang to my ears. I squeezed them away. ‘I’m worried about Oscar,’ I said.

She didn’t say anything.

‘He let the cows and the horses out of the barn and the water carried him away.’

‘I wish you’d stop all this talking. You’re shaking bad and I need to clean your arm.’ She paused. ‘And don’t you worry, no good comes from that. Mr Williams, well, he knows how to swim: Daddy showed him. Likely he’s on his way home, could be he’s helping somebody out. You know how he is. Can’t turn his back on nobody.’

She dabbed at the wounds with a piece of cloth. I bit my lip to keep from crying out. When the pain subsided a little, I said, ‘Oscar’s helping someone? Was that what you said?’

Nan mumbled something, then said, ‘I need to wash this.’ She turned away and went toward the dressing table.

‘But he’s on his way home?’

Her back to me, she stopped, her shoulders drawing up. Her form blurred and there were two of her. I blinked, and Nan was again one person who now stood over me. ‘Mrs Williams,’ she said. ‘That man of yours.’ She put her hand on my cheek. Her touch was light and cool. She glanced down at my arm and then she looked into my eyes. ‘He told you he’d get on home? After he saw to the cows? And the horses? Was that what he said?’

I nodded.

‘Have you ever known Oscar Williams to let a person down?’

The boy who had attended my recitals. The one person who responded to my letters this spring. The man who knew the truth but believed me to be a better woman than I was. ‘No,’ I said. ‘Never.’

‘Well, then.’

Yes, I thought, now seeing an image of Oscar. He was on the platform at Union Station. He wore his suit and he held his pocket watch, checking the time, waiting for me.

I closed my eyes and gave in to the pain.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The House

It was a sorrowful time; there wasn’t no other way to put it. What the storm did to us was cruel, and I won’t never forget it. Or forgive it. The storm did what it wanted and then blew itself out, leaving us to try to put things right. But some things can’t be put right.

Like St. Mary’s, the orphanage. I couldn’t keep from thinking about it when I walked through Oscar’s back pasture a little while ago, stepping around the piles of black ashes and charred bones of the cows and horses. There weren’t words for what happened at the orphanage. Them poor little children. I didn’t like thinking how scared they likely were when the waves mashed the sand hills and flooded both buildings. The nuns had taken the orphans to the boys’ dormitory, thinking it was the safer of the two. That was what Bill Murney said when Daddy found him wandering by the bayou wearing nothing but a tattered pair of pants. He was one of the orphans that helped out at the dairy on Sundays. When the water came in the dormitory, Bill said, the nuns herded everybody to the second floor. They all took up praying but God didn’t pay them no mind. The roof blew off and the walls caved in, crushing them. What the wind didn’t do, the water did. The whole place washed away.

Maybe if the nuns had taken off them headpieces that covered most of their faces or if they’d shucked the heavy rosary beads they wore around their waists, they might have had a chance. But they wouldn’t have no part of doing that. Leastways that was what Bill told us. ‘I caught ahold of a board,’ he said, him glassy-eyed, and his hands and feet cut and bleeding. ‘Caught ahold of my brother, too. Him and me washed into a tree, don’t know how we got there. I held on to him the best I could, I did, that tree thrashing. But then a big wave hit us, bigger than the others.’ He looked at us then. ‘Have you all seen Joe anywhere?’

I could hardly think about it, him being in a tree during a big blow. Out of all them nuns and those children, only three orphans lived, Bill being one of them. But not Joe. We didn’t find him. We didn’t find James either, the red-headed foundling that worked at the dairy too.

It’d been two weeks and two days since the big blow but time didn’t heal, not one bit. I don’t know who came up with that notion but it was flat-out wrong. It was work that pulled a person through bad times. Even sorrowful work like what I did now, shoveling dried mud out of Oscar’s house. There was nothing easy about this work, the mud breaking off in sheets and turning to powdery dirt. And there was nothing easy about being here today. I hadn’t been back since Mrs Williams was snakebit. But this morning, I woke up ready. ‘The house needs seeing to,’ I told Mama. ‘If you can spare me.’

I dumped the dried mud with pieces of window glass in it over the side of the back veranda. I hadn’t figured on shoveling mud, but when I walked up from the pasture, there was a shovel close to the back steps. It was like Bernadette had left it there for me. ‘Ahhh, Nan,’ I could hear her say. ‘I knew you’d be the one to take care of my house.’

I worked and as long as I kept moving, I was all right. My mind on work, I didn’t have to think about the mattress in the bedroom that was stained with blood. When my hands were busy, I didn’t think about all the dead people that washed up in the bayou by our house, and how they were swelled up and most of them stripped naked. The wind ripped off their clothes, that was what Daddy figured. As long as I stayed busy I didn’t have to think what Daddy and Wiley had to do with them poor dead people.

The shovel scraped the parlor floor and it hurt me to mark up the wood, but we’d had to do the same in our house; there wasn’t no other way. Oscar’s house stank bad from all this mud that had footprints in it going every which way. Some of them prints were mine, and the narrow ones were Mrs Williams’. I figured the big ones were Wiley’s, and I knew the little footprints were Andre’s. Tracks were here too, and not all of them were the dogs’. ’Coons and ’possums had been inside; likely they’d climbed up the stilts looking for food. The front door needed to be boarded up, same for the windows. There wasn’t nothing I could do about that, not today, so I kept on trying to get the dried-up mud out of the house, sorrow wrapped around my heart and me fighting it.

That wasn’t all I fought. When I’d first come into the house, the door that went to the attic stairwell was open. It bothered me and I couldn’t say why, other than it was one more thing that wasn’t right. I started to close it, the dried mud sticking to it, and when I did, I saw something halfway up the stairs. A hatbox. Of all things. There was no counting for the peculiar things the storm had done, but that hatbox, I knew, hadn’t been carried there by the water. Mrs Williams, I thought. She’d saved one of her fancy hats. If that wasn’t like her, I didn’t know what was.

But when I opened it, there wasn’t a hat in it but other things – the crucifixes, letters, and Oscar’s wood box with the
W
on the lid. I closed the hatbox quick. It was like looking at Mrs Williams’ fear when the water came in, Oscar gone, and her gathering what had to be saved. Me and Mama had done the same. We’d filled a wood crate with the family Bible that nobody could read, a few photographs, my fiddle and bow, Daddy’s deed to our land, and money. The dollar coin that Oscar gave me the night of the dance was some of that money. I’d carried the crate up into the attic, the water on my heels. I was plenty scared, I don’t mind saying. Anybody would be.

I put the hatbox on the kitchen table, telling myself that it wasn’t for me to look at the things inside it. If this storm had taught me anything it was this: once it was over, keep your eyes closed. And if you have to keep your eyes open, don’t let your mind think.

I should have worn blinders when I went to the city last Sunday. I had felt a powerful need for church so I’d made the walk. We were down to just one horse, that being Jim Bowie, and Daddy said he needed a rest. Wiley had ridden Jim every day since the big blow, bringing home food supplies that came by boat from Houston. So I walked to the city, getting closer to the sooty smoke from all the fires in Galveston. I tried not to think about what those fires were burning but I knew. The stink told me.

There was another stink in the city. Lime. Houston sent it by the barrel, and people in the city covered the streets with it. It was supposed to ward off sickness, and if there was one thing we didn’t need, it was sick people. When I finally got to our Baptist church, the one on the west side of town, the roof was mostly gone but that didn’t stop the preacher. He talked about courage, about doing the best that you could, and how there was no need to wonder why the storm took some but not us. ‘Remember the dead,’ he preached. The pulpit had fallen over and busted so he had to stand in front of us like a regular person. The church was filled, us all sitting shoulder to shoulder on benches that were warped from being under water.

‘Mourn the dead,’ the preacher said. ‘But take care of the living.’

His words shored me up but what I saw in the city made me sorry I’d come. There was block after block of uprooted houses lying on their sides with caved-in walls. The floodwater had carried some of the houses away from their lots and when that happened, they’d plowed into other houses and knocked them down. Then there were the places near City Cemetery where there’d been houses, but now they were gone, not a thing left. And that cemetery. I didn’t want to think about how the coffins came out of the ground and washed away. I didn’t look to see if that had happened to Bernadette’s grave; I couldn’t bring myself to. It was bad enough seeing the long rows of rubble in the city that were as high as two-story houses. It was sorrowful enough that dead people were still being found under all of that.

There were carcasses, too. Horses, dogs, and cats, all of them bloated and stinking. After church, when I was leaving, I saw something I won’t never forget. An overturned piano was pushed up by a dead horse on top of a heap of wood, and under the piano, a hand stuck out. A man’s hand. I looked long enough to see if I knew it but I couldn’t tell. The skin, gray, was starting to fall off of the bones.

In the kitchen, I moved one of the benches so I could shovel where it’d been. A pen and bottle of ink were on the table, and that was another peculiar thing. It was like Mrs Williams had been fixing to write something after the storm. But that didn’t make sense, not even for her. Nobody would sit down and scratch out a few words, not when people were missing and needed looking for. But then, there was no making sense of a lot of things. Like the sand hills. They were gone and without them there wasn’t nothing between the beach and the land. Everything ran together, all flat. The gulf was flat, too, not a wave nowhere. It looked like it couldn’t hurt a fly.

I took the buckets that were on the floor and stacked them on the back veranda. The buckets could be washed out and used again. Most things couldn’t. We had to start over with next to nothing. Other than a cup and a platter, all of Mama’s dishes broke. Somebody’s skiff landed on our front veranda but Daddy’s was still missing. Oscar’s traveled clear from the bayou and was sitting not more than a few yards in front of his house. Our hog drowned but we saved four of the piglets. One of the hens lived; it rode out the storm on a crossbeam in the attic. The other hens and the rooster had gone into the attic too, but they’d died. ‘Their hearts likely gave out,’ Daddy said about them. ‘They’d been that scared.’