Dark Water Rising (23 page)

I woke New Year’s Day from another dream about Zach. I’d had several dreams of him since the first, and he never spoke in any of them. We simply worked together, shoulder to shoulder. Somehow these quiet dreams of Zach had helped me get to the heart of who I was. They’d helped me carve away what I no longer needed, sand the rough parts clean and smooth. Now all I thought about was how much I wanted Papa to see what I’d become.

On this particular morning I lay in bed, trying to look at Papa the way Zach might have, trying to choose the words he would’ve chosen. In the end, it was me who rose from the bed; it was me who asked to speak to Papa in Uncle Nate’s study.

A special dinner was in the works for this first day of the year, and the whole house bustled with activity. Aunt Julia had sent Ezra for extra ice, and Mama’s baking filled the house with the warm aroma of apples and
cinnamon. I just hoped that what I had to tell Papa wouldn’t ruin our fine dinner.

It was a strange feeling following Papa from the parlor into the study. I watched him sit in Uncle Nate’s chair and seemed to watch myself be seated as well, as if a part of me hung back near the doorway, unwilling to enter. I’m not sure what was said at that point—polite wishes from Papa for a happier New Year, I think—but I do remember that shortly after, I emptied my heart and my words hung in the air between us.

“There will be no college for me, Papa,” I told him. “I’m a carpenter, and I can be nothing else.”

He stared at me, and I watched for the hard, whittled look that always came when he was displeased, the look that would tell me everything.

But it didn’t come.

Instead he rose from his seat and called for Aunt Julia. When she arrived, he whispered something to her, then closed the door and walked slowly to the window.

Uncle Nate’s clock ticked on his desk, a north wind whipped bare branches against the glass, and all my old fears and resentments—all that I thought I’d conquered—rushed toward me like a runaway train.

As usual, I couldn’t tell at all what Papa was thinking. He hadn’t shouted, hadn’t insisted. He hadn’t even asked me to leave. He’d only turned his back on me and left me waiting, tangled in the web of his silence.

A light rapping turned him around, and he crossed the room to answer it. He pulled the door wide, and in tramped every soul in the house, Ezra and Josiah, too.

Surprise jerked me to my feet. I watched, confused, while Aunt Julia and Ella Rose carried a large, cloth-draped rectangle into the room.

As soon as they’d all taken places around Uncle Nate’s desk and turned to face me, Papa cleared his throat. He spoke slowly at first, deliberately and without a smile.

“We’d planned to give you this after graduation,
but
as your mother continually reminds me, the good Lord has a reason for everything.”

His eyes twinkled, and to my surprise his mouth stretched into a sudden wide grin.

“And even a fool can tell what that is if he’ll just listen.” He laughed and pulled away the cloth.

I sucked in a breath and tossed a shocked look at Ella Rose and Aunt Julia. It was their bold and feathered script that graced the shiny black-and-white sign.

I blinked at the words. I hadn’t once thought . . . hadn’t once dared . . .

Kate and Elliott clapped like they’d just seen another fireworks display, and Aunt Julia’s and Ella Rose’s eyes glistened with tears.

I turned to Mama. Her cheeks were wet, too, and I finally realized what she must’ve known all along. Papa had already planned this day when he chose to work on that rail bridge. He’d done it for me, and all this time, Mama had never said a word. She just stood back and let me learn how to walk in Papa’s shoes.

I looked at Matt and Lucas, Andy and Will, Ezra and Josiah, and every one of them grinned so wide all I could see was teeth.

But it was Papa’s smile that made my heart leap.

I glanced at him, still full of questions, and saw nothing but answers in his face.

Galveston is fast becoming the New York City of Texas
. . . .

Several years ago my husband came home from work with an old book in his hands. “You have to read this,” he said. “It’s a full account of the 1900 Galveston Storm, written right after it happened.”

Like most everyone in Texas, I’d heard of the hurricane that devastated Galveston all my life and I’d read many articles about it through the years, but this book was different. It had been written while wounds were still tender, while wind and floodwaters still haunted dreams. I opened the century-old frayed cover, and on the first yellowed page, written in faded pencil, was a simply worded inscription as old as the book itself. “In fond remembrance . . .” it began, and from that moment, I was spellbound.

I then read dozens of volumes that related not only the horrific damage this great storm wrought but personal accounts of survival and loss so vivid, so achingly painful, I felt as though I’d experienced it myself.

What might lay beneath this rubble? How many souls?

It was this intimate window to the past that brought me to write
Dark Water Rising,
and in so doing, I wanted to honor some of the personal details that have been recorded. Among the many documented accounts of the Galveston Storm that I drew from, a grown-up Katherine Vedder related the successful efforts of her mother in saving the Longineaus’ baby, Tom. She also told how Captain Munn was found naked the next morning with only a mattress ticking to cover him, and how she’d once been the envy of their neighborhood because she’d been allowed to play funeral with her father’s hearse and his old mule, Whiskers. Her account provided me glimpses of real people such as the lost Peek family, the grateful Private Billings, the Collums with their parrots and cats, and the Masons with their
last surviving tin of sardines and bottle of beer. Much of the dialogue attributed to them was either direct quotes or inspired by Katherine’s statements.

Galveston, a small barrier island off the coast of Texas, has a long and colorful history of cannibalistic Karankawa Indians, pirates and buried treasure, Civil War battles, and spirited entrepreneurs. It is only thirty miles long and two and a half miles wide at its greatest point, but at the turn of the century it was one of the largest shipping ports in the United States, second only to New York. The city’s future was bright then, but after the historic Saturday of September 8, 1900, its path would be forever altered.

More than 3,600 homes and businesses were destroyed by the Galveston Storm, and 1,500 acres of coastland swept into the Gulf of Mexico. Among the countless financial losses, fifty thousand bales of cotton, worth more than $3 million, and better than ten thousand head of cattle never saw the market. The city was devastated, but the greatest loss, borne by every single person on the island, was more personal. Children were missing; they and thousands of mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, friends and neighbors, had been drowned by floodwaters, struck by airborne debris, swept to sea, or trapped in collapsing homes.

From one end of the wharf to the other, sailboats and tugs lay sunk or in jumbled confusion.

Hundreds of boxcars tumbled this way and that, their valuable loads of flour, grain, and cotton ruined.