Authors: Ann Weisgarber
It happened different in the city. Hundreds of houses close to the beach were washed away. Folks were killed; roofs fell in and crushed them flat. Others were swept out into the gulf and never seen again.
Then there was the story that Mama’s middle brother told. Before he married a woman from North Carolina and settled there, Uncle Ned was a sailor. When I was little, he stayed with us when he had shore leave. ‘It’s a wall of wind,’ he said about hurricanes. ‘A wall you can see coming from far off. The black clouds get to swirling and the air turns green. That wall pushes the waves and turns them the size of mountains.’ I’d never seen a mountain but the way he said it made me clutch my elbows. ‘And our schooner feeling like nothing but a scrap of wood,’ he said.
I knew how to swim, and that was a comfort. Daddy had taught me. He believed anybody, even girls, that lived on an island should know something about how to save themselves if they ended up in the water. When I was seven, Mama skimmed me down to my underclothes and Daddy took me to the gulf. ‘Paddle with your arms and kick your feet,’ he said, and showed me how. ‘Keep your head up and look over your shoulder. Watch for the wave coming up. If you get caught in a riptide, don’t fight it. Let it carry you on down the beach. It’ll run itself out; you’ll be just fine.’
That wasn’t always so. Oakley Hill, the first man I was to marry, drowned on a clear day, not a storm in sight. All it took was for him to get his feet tangled in rope while he trawled for shrimp. The rope was still wrapped around his ankles when he washed ashore. Nobody can say for sure but it was figured he lost his balance, hit his head, and fell overboard. The gulf didn’t care one little bit that Oakley was a good man. Or that he was only nineteen. It took him like he didn’t mean nothing to nobody.
Mrs Williams wouldn’t know none of that, her not being here and thinking that an Ohio storm was as bad as it could get. But I knew better. Big blows didn’t have laid-out plans; each one had a mind of its own. They came from the gulf and didn’t stop until they hit land and killed people. And here we sat on a narrow bar of dirt and sand, water on all sides.
The corn pone was burning. I smelled it from the veranda; I’d forgotten all about it. That was what came from watching Mrs Williams as she made her way to the barn to tell Oscar about the water at the sand hills. I hurried inside. Smoke billowed out when I opened the oven door. I grabbed a pot holder and got them pans out quick as could be. But it was too late: the pones were black on the top. I tipped them onto cooling racks and covered them up with a towel. I’d feed them to the dogs when they’d cooled, nobody needed to see what I’d done. I stuck the pans into the wash basin to soak and went back out onto the veranda.
A little ways from the house, Andre poked at something in a puddle with a stick. As for Mrs Williams, she was at the barnyard gate, her closed umbrella under her arm so she could work the latch with both hands. The bottom part of her skirt was so wet it had stretched long and dragged around her feet. She opened the gate, then closed it behind her. She’d no sooner got the umbrella back up when it turned inside out and flew off, a white bowl-shaped thing with a long wood handle. It tumbled in the air, cleared the barn fence, bounced down, then flipped its way toward the sand hills where it landed in a pool of water. The wind to Mrs Williams’ back, she nearly skipped across the barnyard. She took the plank walkway that sloped up to the barn door and I couldn’t see her no more.
My mind was a jumble. There were things to do but I couldn’t think what. I walked from one end of the veranda to the other, the rain splattering me and the bottoms of my stockings getting wet again. Inside the house, I peeled off my stockings and went from window to window and closed the ones where the rain blew in. I got a dish towel and mopped up water from the sills and floor. In Andre’s room, the wind had blown his spare shirt and pants off the wall peg and onto the floor. I hung them up and they fell down again. This time it wasn’t the wind; I’d closed the windows. It was the shake in my hands.
I should boil rice for noon dinner. I should call Andre in for his bath. I should bring in more firewood to keep it dry. I should fill the lamps with kerosene. I went out onto the veranda. Andre was squatted close to the ground, peering at something. Overhead, there were them fast-moving black clouds. At the sand hills, water kept coming through the passes, the thin pools of it spreading out and pushing inland, maybe a hundred feet from us.
Mrs Williams was on her way back to the house from the barn. Her hat was gone and her hair whipped around her face. I could tell she tried to hurry but them boots of mine slowed her down. She stumbled some, and one time she slipped, her feet churning on the muddy path, but she held on and kept going. And here I was, a tangled web of nerves.
‘Miss Nan,’ Andre hollered. He was wet down to the skin. His clothes were mashed flat, but he didn’t care. He grinned as he pointed at something on the ground, then he hollered again. I shook my head: I couldn’t hear him over the rain. With both hands, he picked up a turtle the size of a dinner plate and held it high.
‘I see it,’ I yelled back, but that mud turtle gave me a quivery feeling. It wasn’t right. It belonged in the bayou, not in front of the house. The bayou was a mile from here and turtles, they weren’t big walkers, not unless they were laying eggs and even then they didn’t walk a mile. Not mud turtles.
‘Look!’ Andre hollered. He put it down, jumped to a nearby puddle and got himself another turtle, him grinning in the rain and me feeling slippery like the floor was tilted. Something bad was happening at the bayou, something more than it coming a little ways out of its banks.
The dogs were gone. That notion hit like a rock to the chest. I didn’t know when I’d last seen them. They weren’t playing with Andre; they’d run off. Critters knew: they sniffed the air, they felt things folks didn’t. Dogs hid, and turtles showed up where they didn’t belong.
I went inside and everything came at me: the gloom, the puny glow from the lamps, the closed windows, the heat, the laundry washtub and how the water in it sloshed from side to side, the floor that jittery from the wind.
I hurried back to Andre’s bedroom, and my heart nearly quit. Out the rain-streaked windows, I saw what had carried the turtles. The back pasture was under water. Lapping water, rippling water, water that moved. Not rainwater. This was a living thing. It was the bayou, here, a stone’s throw from the house.
‘Miss Ogden.’
In the pasture, the bushy limbs of the salt cedar tussled in the wind. The lower branches dragged in the water. Little white-capped waves split as they rushed around clumps of bushes, just the tops of the plants showing. A fluttery feeling whooshed through me. Mama. Daddy. Our house by the bayou.
‘Miss Ogden.’
It was Mrs Williams. She was in the doorway and before I knew it, I got myself to move, my bare feet hurrying. ‘Andre,’ I said.
‘He’s in the kitchen.’
My legs wobbled out from under me. Mrs Williams caught ahold of my arm. Water, all this water. Like in ’86. Wiley in the current, Daddy and Frank T. going after him.
‘Miss Ogden.’ Mrs Williams’ hand was tight on my arm. ‘It’s an overflow. You said it yourself. Five inches deep. Oscar measured it. Five inches. That’s all.’
Andre’s dogs gone. The bayou a mile out of its banks. Mrs Williams’ hair undone and dripping wet. Nothing was where it should be; everything was in the wrong place.
‘Look at me.’ Mrs Williams’ voice was sharp. Red spots flared on her cheeks. Them spots danced.
‘Miss Ogden. Look at me.’
That voice of hers, it carried a slap, it made me do what she said. Her eyes were rings of blue, each ring a clearer blue than the last. Without a word she looked into me and saw how scared I was. Don’t you go falling apart, her eyes said. Do not even think about it. An overflow. That’s all.
Mrs Williams said, ‘Oscar’s hitching the wagon. He’s going to get your mother and father and bring them here. It’s safer on the ridge.’
Them words, they were another slap, but this time they made me draw up my shoulders, they made me shake off her hand from my arm. We were island people; nobody told us what to do. Daddy built our house to hold up. He’d laid the wide studs in the walls crossways like how old-time ships were built. We were close to the bayou but the pilings were six feet high. If the bayou came inside, we’d go up in the loft. We didn’t turn tail and leave the hog and chickens; we took care of our own. That was the lesson learned from the storm of ’86. Oscar didn’t know that, him not from here, him from Ohio. Daddy didn’t need nobody to tell him what to do. If Daddy thought him and Mama needed to be on the ridge, they’d be here by now. If Daddy thought it was safe to stay home, it was.
I said, ‘I’m going with Mr Williams. Mama and Daddy, they won’t want to leave.’ That was how I put it, the words just coming to me. I let her think I was riding with Oscar so I could talk them into coming back. But that wasn’t so. Oscar was taking me home, and I was staying there. Us Ogdens, we were Texans. We didn’t turn yellow and run.
Mud sucked at my boots, the rain was bitter sharp, and I had to walk to the barn with my head down and my eyes half closed. My bonnet was mushy, and my poncho was of no more account than that fancy coat of Mrs Williams’ had been. There weren’t no words for my shame, me getting so scared and her knowing it. Leastways I had found my grit; I wasn’t scared no more. Up ahead, Oscar had driven the wagon out of the stable yard and was coming my way. When I met up with him, the horses all twitchy and rolling their eyes, I hollered up to Oscar and said how I had to come with him since talking Mama and Daddy into leaving wasn’t going to be no easy thing.
‘Climb on up,’ he hollered back, and that was what I did, my conscience not overly prickly for telling him a half-truth. On the buckboard, I hunched down. The bottom of the floorboard was filled up with rain, but I put my feet flat in it. Beside me, rain ran from Oscar’s wide-brim hat and down his waxed poncho. He had taken down the buckboard canopy; likely it had buckled and scared the horses. They were plenty skittish as it was, sidestepping like they wanted to break loose and run back to the stable, but Oscar wouldn’t let them. He bore down and held on tight to the lines.
He kept that tight hold as we went by the house, Mrs Williams and Andre still on the veranda, her holding Andre’s hand but leaning out against the railing. Oscar looked over me and up at her. This thing between them was its own kind of lightning; I felt it, her blue eyes seeing nothing but Oscar, and a wave of yearning coming from him. It was a powerful want for the other that no amount of water could dampen. It made me hunch down all the more, me witnessing something so naked, and then we were past the house.
Me and Oscar headed west down the island. We stayed on the ridge as long as we could, the horses splashing through pools of rainwater that were a few inches deep. I gripped the sideboard, me and him rocking against the other when the wheels fell into mushy spots. My thoughts skipped from the feel of Oscar beside me, to that wife of his, then to Andre and how he was likely scared. After that, I thought about my brothers in the city somewhere and how Mama and Daddy had to be bracing for the big blow. From time to time I lifted my head and tried to see, the rain making it hard. Up ahead but close to the sand hills, the two tall buildings of St. Mary’s rose up in a fog of gray, and then I thought how it was a foolish thing to store orphans so close to the beach; they should be on the ridge. But the land had been given to the nuns and likely they didn’t know all that much about big blows, them not born here. When we got closer to St. Mary’s, I cupped my hands around my eyes and there it was, the gulf rushing under the buildings.
Seeing that brought a sharp pain to my insides. Them poor little orphans. And the nuns. They had to be scared to the bone. The buildings were on stilts, six feet up, and that should be plenty high. But the water was eating up the sand hill passes, widening them, the water coming like rivers. Them orphans would be all right, I told myself. The nuns talked directly to God, and God looked over every little sparrow. He wouldn’t let nothing happen to them, not to little children that had already lost their mamas and daddies.
At the outbuilding, what the nuns called the barn though it was too small to be called such, water lapped against the lower part of the walls. A grown man, one of the caretakers likely, and two boys made their way to the outbuilding, their heads bent into the wind. The boys shuffled and that told me the water must be up to their knees. Beside me, Oscar strained forward.
‘Should we stop?’ I hollered. ‘Help them?’
‘On our way back,’ he yelled. That was a poke to my conscience, but I didn’t say nothing about me staying with Mama and Daddy. Oscar called out to the horses like they could hear him and he took up the lines, steering Maud and Mabel toward the right. Oscar had a time doing it; they didn’t like it; we were leaving the high point on the ridge. The wind hit face on and with each step, the water got deeper and the soil turned mushier. Oscar gave them horses some slack, he let them toss their heads, but his knuckles were white, he held on that hard. This rain, it was like sewing needles coming at us and I wanted to close my eyes but didn’t, not all the way. I kept my gaze fixed on the front legs of the horses, the water to their ankles, then over their ankles and riding up to their shins.
A little black kitten swept by. It was on a board, wet and crouched down, and I couldn’t bring myself to watch. The horses kept stopping, the wagon hard to pull. Oscar called to them and they started up again, straining. The wind had gone cold, and my teeth chattered. I clamped my jaw tight but I couldn’t get the shaking to quit. I nearly lost heart; I almost told Oscar to turn back, we were going to lose a wheel, this water was too strong. But Mama and Daddy weren’t yellow; they weren’t running away. Finally, I heard Oscar holler something and there, up ahead, was home.
It was the prettiest sight ever. Didn’t matter there was water under the house, not one bit. It wasn’t but to the third step, and Mama and Daddy were on the back veranda, both of them with a lantern held high. They’d been looking for me, I was sure of it. Likely they were looking for Frank T. and Wiley, too. Daddy took to waving Oscar off, his way of telling him not to come closer, it was too deep. Nobody had to tell the horses that. They’d come to a stop and nothing Oscar said or did could change their minds. Oscar took up waving to Daddy to come on, calling that he wanted to take Mama and Daddy to his house. ‘We’re dry,’ Oscar hollered.