Galveston Between Wind and Water - By Rachel Cartwright Page 0,99
he didn’t feel any of the fire’s warmth or comfort amidst the heaps of destroyed buildings and lives strewn in the mud on Avenue P.
He had found the mangled bodies of many friends, neighbors, and others—like Ichabod Weems. Lorena would rest easier now knowing that filthy bastard had finally met his just reward.
“We got to be blessed, mister.” The young white boy held his shaking, muddy hands out to the fire. “Ain’t no two ways about it. I seen more rich dead than poor.”
“That’s got nothing to do with it, boy.” Philip pulled a woman’s ragged shawl around his shoulders. “We got lucky, that’s all,” he coughed, “God doesn’t play favorites when nature rolls the dice.”
The boy wrapped his hands around his shoulders and rubbed. “Maybe, but how you explain us ending up way over at 28th and Avenue P after all our homes got washed away?” He wiped the blood from the scratches on his forehead with the back of his hand. “And so close to the only house standing for blocks ’round here?”
Philip coughed and spat on the muddy street. “I don’t. All I know is, you, me, the others . . . we were lucky this time. You have family?”
The boy nodded and stared back at the mounds of devastation. “I’m still looking.”
Philip put his hand on the boy’s wet shoulder.
More drenched, half-naked survivors staggered or drifted like ghosts to the fire, staring into the flames with eyes wide, glassy, and still.
Philip stepped away from the fire to allow the others to warm themselves. He turned back to look at the only two-story house still standing on Avenue P.
For more than six hours, fifty of them had braced and barred the windows and doors with anything they could nail or hold in place.
The house had creaked, swayed, and might have collapsed at any moment, but held its ground to the end and they survived.
Maybe the boy was right.
A nearby telephone pole had snapped off its base. It looked like the storm had whipped its wires around the house, wrapping it up tight like a shipping crate, keeping it firm on its foundations.
Was that your doing, Lord? Reaching down to stop us from being swept away? Were old men and women really so much more deserving than children or Gabrielle and Bret?”
“Mister? Mister Harper?” a girl’s voice called Philip’s name from behind.
Feeling his joints stiffen with each movement, he turned around slowly to see who it was.
Verna Desmond—Miss Caldwell’s girl—stood shivering with her arms folded across her naked breasts. Her calico skirt was soaked and ripped around her bare knees and her feet were covered in the muck of the street.
“Mister Harper? Sir, I tried to walk home but . . . I think I got confused.” She glanced back over her shoulder then turned to Philip again. “I must have turned down the wrong street ’cause the house.”
She started crying. “And Mr. Caldwell . . . everybody and everything . . . oh Lord, Miss Caldwell . . .” Verna swayed on her feet, then dropped to her knees in the mud and cried.
Philip plodded through the muck and crouched down beside her. He lifted back her wet, matted hair. He took the tattered shawl off his shoulders and wrapped it around her.
“Come now, Verna, you have to stand up.” He gripped under her arms and lifted. “How are we going to help other folks if we can’t help ourselves?”
She rested the side of her face on his shoulder. “I ain’t seen no one else alive I know ’cept you,” she wailed. “Sometimes I wished it would have up and took me—”
“Hush now, child, none of that nonsense. Your spirit is too strong for that.” He held the trembling young woman in his arms. “We’re both still breathing. That’s all that matters.”
Verna pressed her fingertips into his arms. “It was the most terrible thing I ever been through. Nothing felt safe or solid anymore. Only thing I remember is reaching out for this tree floatin’ by.”
She dried her eyes with the end of the shawl. “We’re honest, God-fearing, hardworking people, Mister Harper, why would the Lord send down such a vengeance on us?”
Philip couldn’t answer. He was looking to the side, past Verna’s distraught face to a stack of broken housing timber about thirty feet behind them.
There, near the bottom of the pile he saw the naked, battered torso of Arley Caldwell, protruding through the ruination, bent and broken, face up into the blaring sun.