Zeitoun (9 page)

The actual conversion was beautifully simple. With Yuko and a handful of other women from the mosque present, she pronounced the
shahadah
, the Islamic pledge of conviction of faith. “AshHadu An La Ilaha Il-lallah, Wa Ash Hadu Anna Muhammadar Rasul-allah.” That was all she needed to say.
I bear Witness that there is no deity but Allah and I bear witness that Muhammad is His Messenger
. With that, Kathy Delphine had become a Muslim.

When she tried to explain it to friends and family, Kathy fumbled. But she knew that in Islam she had found calm. The doubt sewn into the faith gave her room to think, to question. The answers the Qur’an provided gave her a way forward. Even her view of her family softened through the lens of Islam. She was less aggressive. She had always fought with her mother, but Islam taught her that “heaven is at the feet of your mother,” and this reined her in. She stopped talking back and learned to be more patient and forgiving.
It brought back a purity in me
, she would say.

Her conversion might have been a step forward in her eyes, but in the eyes of her mother and siblings it was as if she’d renounced her family and all they stood for. Kathy tried to get along with them nevertheless, and her family tried too. There were times when all was good, visits were enjoyable, uneventful. But for every one of those, there was one that spiraled
into sniping and accusations, slammed doors and quick departures. There were a few of her eight siblings she wasn’t in touch with at all.

But she wanted extended family. She wanted her own kids to know their aunts and uncles and cousins, and so the relief was profound when the Odyssey arrived at her brother’s house in Baton Rouge at eleven-thirty. She unpacked the kids and they fell asleep, on couches and floors, in minutes.

Settled, she called Zeitoun.

“Winds come?”

“Nothing yet,” he said.

“I’m gonna pass out,” Kathy said. “Never been so tired.”

“Get some rest,” he said. “Sleep in.”

“You too.”

They said good night and turned out the lights.

Kathy woke before dawn and turned on the TV. Katrina was now a Category 5 storm with winds over 150 miles an hour. It was heading almost directly toward New Orleans, with the brunt of it expected to strike about sixteen miles west of the city. Meteorologists were predicting furious winds, ten-foot storm surges, possibilities of levee breaches, flooding everywhere along the coast. It was estimated that the storm would reach the New Orleans area that night.

Throughout the day, as news of the hurricane grew more dire, clients called Kathy or Zeitoun, asking them to secure their windows and doors. Kathy collected requests and relayed them to Zeitoun. Zeitoun discovered that one of his carpenters, James Crosso, was still in the city, so the
two of them spent the day driving around, rigging the houses on the list. James’s wife worked for one of the hotels downtown, and the couple was planning to ride the storm out there. Zeitoun and James drove from job to job, a quarter ton of plywood in the back of the truck, doing what they could before the winds came. The roads were still crowded, a new surge of cars leaving, but Zeitoun didn’t consider it. He would be safe in their house on Dart Street, he figured, far from any levees, with two stories, plenty of tools, and food.

Mid-morning, Mayor Nagin ordered the city’s first-ever mandatory evacuation. Anyone who could leave must leave.

All day Zeitoun and James saw people lined up at bus stops—those who planned to stay in the Superdome. Families, couples, elderly men and women carrying their belongings in backpacks, suitcases, garbage bags. Seeing them exposed like that, as the winds picked up and the sky darkened, worried Zeitoun. He and James passed the same groups, waiting patiently, on the way to their job sites and on their way back.

In Baton Rouge, the weather was dark and unruly. High winds, black skies at noon. The kids played outside for a while, but then came inside to watch DVDs while Kathy caught up with Patty and Mary Ann. The trees in the neighborhood swung wildly.

The power went out at five o’clock. The kids played board games by candlelight.

Kathy periodically went out to the car to listen to the news on the radio. The winds were smashing windows in New Orleans, knocking down trees and power lines.

Kathy tried to call Zeitoun, but the call went straight to his voicemail. She tried the home phone. Nothing. The lines were down, she assumed. The hurricane had not hit the city yet, and already she had no way to reach her husband.

By six o’clock, Zeitoun had dropped James off and was home and ready. He watched the news on TV; the reports had not changed much. The outermost edge of the hurricane was expected about midnight. He assumed that would be the end of the electrical grid for a few days.

Walking through the darkening rooms, Zeitoun assessed all the possible dangers he would face during the storm. The house had four bedrooms—the master bedroom on the first floor and the kids’ rooms upstairs. He expected leaks up there. Portions of the roof might be compromised. A few windows might break—the front sitting room, with its bay window, was at risk. There was an outside chance the tree in the backyard would fall on the house. If that happened, there could be significant damage, because nothing, then, could keep the water out.

But he was optimistic. And in any case he wanted to be in the house, on which he had spent untold thousands for improvements, to protect it in whatever way possible. His grandmother had stayed put during countless storms in her home on Arwad Island, and he planned to do the same. A home was worth fighting for.

The only thing that concerned him was the levees. Again and again the news reports warned of the storm surge. The levees were meant to hold back fourteen feet of water, and the storm surges in the Gulf were already nineteen, twenty feet high. If the levees were breached, he knew the battle would be lost.

He called Kathy at eight o’clock.

“There you are,” she said. “You disappeared.”

He looked at his phone and saw that he’d missed three calls from her.

“Coverage must be spotty already,” he said. His phone had not rung. He told her that nothing significant had happened yet. Just strong winds. Nothing new.

“Stay away from the windows,” she said.

He said he would try.

Kathy wondered aloud if there was something foolish in what they were doing. Her husband was in the path of a Category 5 hurricane and they were talking about staying away from the windows.

“Say goodnight to the kids,” he said.

She said she would.

“Better go. To save the battery,” he said.

They said goodnight.

The kids asleep, Kathy sat on the couch in her brother Andy’s house and stared at the candle in front of her. It was the only light left on in the house.

Just after eleven o’clock, the front end of the storm arrived at Zeitoun’s house. The sky was a brutal grey, the winds swirling and cool. Rain came in sheets. Every half hour brought an escalation in the mayhem outside. At midnight the power went out. The leaks began at about two or three. The first was in the corner of Nademah’s bedroom. Zeitoun went down to the garage and retrieved a forty-gallon garbage can to catch the water. Another leak opened a few minutes later, this one in the upstairs hallway. Zeitoun found another garbage can. A window in the master bedroom broke just after three o’clock, as if a brick had been
thrown through the glass. Zeitoun gathered the shards and stuffed the opening with a pillow. Another leak opened in Safiya and Aisha’s room. He found another, bigger garbage can.

He dragged the first two garbage cans outside and dumped them on the lawn. The sky was a child’s fingerpainting, blue and black hastily mixed. The wind was cooler. The neighborhood was utterly dark. As he stood on the lawn, he heard a tree fall somewhere on the block—a crack and then a shush as the branches pushed down through other trees and rested against the side of a house.

He went inside.

Another window had broken. He stuffed another pillow into it. Branches clawed at the walls, the roof. There were unknown thumps everywhere. The bones of the house seemed to be moaning under the strain of it all. The house was under assault.

When he next checked, it was four o’clock in the morning. He hadn’t stopped moving in five hours. If the damage continued at this pace, it would be worse than he had predicted. And the real storm hadn’t come yet.

In the small hours, Zeitoun had a thought. He didn’t expect the city to flood, but he knew a flood was not impossible. So he walked outside, tasting the cool wind, and dragged his secondhand canoe from the garage and righted it. He wanted to have it ready.

If Kathy could only see him now. She had rolled her eyes when she saw him come home with that canoe. He’d bought it a few years before, from a client in Bayou St. John. When the client was moving, Zeitoun had seen it on his lawn, a standard aluminum model, and asked him if he was selling it. The client laughed. “You want
that?”
he asked. Zeitoun bought it on the spot for seventy-five dollars.

Something about the canoe had intrigued him. It was well-made, undamaged, with a pair of wooden benches inside. It was about sixteen feet long, built for two people. It seemed to speak of exploration, of escape. He tied it to the top of his van and brought it home.

Through the living room window, Kathy saw him pull up. She met him at the door.

“No way,” she said.

“What?” Zeitoun said, smiling.

“You’re crazy,” she said.

Kathy liked to act exasperated, but Zeitoun’s romantic side was central to why she loved him. She knew that any kind of boat reminded him of his childhood. How could she deny him a used canoe? She was fairly certain he would never use it, but having it in the garage, she knew, would mean something to him—a connection to the past, the possibility of adventure. Whatever it was, she wouldn’t stand in the way.

He did try, two or three times, to get his daughters interested in the canoe. He brought them to Bayou St. John, put the canoe in the water, and sat down inside. When he reached for Nademah, standing on the grass, she refused. The younger girls weren’t having it, either. So for half an hour, as the girls watched from the grass, he paddled around by himself, trying to make it all look fun, irresistible. When he returned, they still wanted no part of it, so he put the canoe back on the roof of the van and they all went home.

The wind picked up after five o’clock. He couldn’t tell when the hurricane actually made landfall, but the day barely brightened that morning. It went from black to a charcoal grey, the rain like pebbles thrown against glass. He could hear tree limbs succumbing to the wind,
great exhalations as their trunks fell on streets and roofs.

Eventually he could not stay awake. Though his house was under attack, he lay down, knowing something would awaken him soon enough, and so, surrendering for now, he fell into a shallow sleep.

Zeitoun woke late. He couldn’t believe his watch. It was after ten a.m. He hadn’t slept that late in years. All the clocks had stopped. He got up, tried the light switches in three rooms. The power was still out.

The wind was strong outside, the sky still dark. The rain was coming down—not heavily, but enough to keep Zeitoun inside much of the day. He ate breakfast and checked for any other damage to the house. He put buckets under two new leaks. Overall the damage had remained at about the level it had been at before he fell asleep. He had slumbered through the worst of the hurricane. Through the windows he could see the streets were covered with downed power lines and fallen trees and about a foot of water. It was bad, but not much worse than a handful of storms he could remember.

In Baton Rouge, Kathy brought her kids to Wal-Mart to stock up on supplies and buy flashlights. Inside, there seemed to be more people than products. She’d never seen anything like it. The place had been bought out, the shelves nearly bare. It looked like the end of the world. The kids were scared, holding on to her. Kathy looked for ice and was told that the ice was long gone. Improbably, she found a package of two flashlights, the last one, and reached for it a split second before another woman did. She gave the woman an apologetic smile and went to the check-out counter.

*    *    *

In the afternoon the wind and rain calmed. Zeitoun went outside to explore. It was warm, over eighty degrees. He estimated there were eighteen inches of water on the ground. It was rainwater, murky and grey-brown, but soon, he knew, it would drain away. He looked in the backyard. There was the canoe. It called to him, floating and ready. It was a rare opportunity, he thought, to be able to glide over the roads. He had only this day. He bailed the water resting in the hull, and in his T-shirt and shorts and sneakers, he stepped in.

Leaving the yard was difficult. A tree across the street had been ripped from its roots and lay across the road, branches spread over his driveway. He paddled around them and looked back to the house. No great damage to the exterior. Some shingles missing from the roof. The windows broken. A gutter that would need remounting. Nothing too bad, three days’ work.

In the neighborhood, other homes had been hit by all manner of debris. Windows had been blown out. Wet, black branches covered cars, the street. Everywhere trees had been pulled out of the earth and lay flat.

The quiet was profound. The wind rippled the water but otherwise all was silent. No cars moved, no planes flew. A few neighbors stood on their porches or waded through their yards, assessing damage. No one knew where to start or when. He knew he would be giving many estimates in the coming weeks.

He paddled only a few blocks before he began to have second thoughts. There were power lines down everywhere. What would exposed lines do if they made contact with his aluminum canoe? Besides, there wasn’t enough water to paddle much. In some parts of
the neighborhood, there was scarcely any water at all—only a few inches. He ran aground, got out, turned the canoe around, and paddled back home.