Galveston: Between Wind And Water (A Historical Literary Fiction Novel Filled with Romance and Drama) (32 page)

His once feathery, white hair was caked back on his crushed skull, darkened by the muddy water and his own gore. The stone-white surface of his gashed face glistened with beads of water and drying blood. 

The dead man’s eyes stared back at Philip, their violent surrender to death like the carved expression in a grotesque statue.

Verna tugged at his sleeve. “I know the Caldwells are safe, aren’t they, Mister Harper? You’ll help me look for them, won’t you?” 

A frantic smile broke across her lips. “And I’ll help you find Mister McGowan! Please sir! I ain’t got no family I know of and they’re everything to me.”

Philip put his arm around Verna’s shoulder and guided her back toward the line of survivors milling around the fire. “You got to warm yourself first, child.” He stumbled, his feet feeling heavier with each muddy step.

“Are you hurt bad, Mister Harper?

Philip wondered how long the tears had been trickling down his cheeks. He hadn’t noticed until Verna mentioned it and he did his best to hide them behind a smile. “Stand close as you can.” He guided her as near as he could.

Philip prayed as he walked, trusting God would take this grievous burden away from them before the weight crushed those already broken by something worse than any storm’s fury.

The afternoon sun blazed down on the gathered survivors staggering around the yard of the Ursuline Convent and Academy. 

Bret, pummeled, thrashed, and bloodied by the hurricane’s ferocity, stumbled toward the survivors. 
Gabrielle will be there. She must be.

After plodding only a few feet, he stopped. There, still clinging to a large, broken branch, a woman, her ghostly white face torn and lacerated, stared up at him from the mud. 

Bret stepped closer. He paused and stared at the dead nun holding a little girl. Around the nun’s thick waist, nine children were tied, each with a rope knotted to their waist. What remained of their small, crushed bodies lay scattered around her, some, their frail, broken arms still outstretched toward her.

Bret could not pray because there were no words he knew that could carry the anguish of hopelessness consuming his soul.

He dropped on his knees to the bloody mud and wept.

The massive, ten-foot high brick wall surrounding the convent school had been reduced to scattered mounds of rubble. 

The cries of the wounded and the moans of the dying filled the grounds as exhausted nuns moved among the survivors attending to each the best they could. 

Bret raised his eyes to heaven. Columns of smoke rose from the streets, clouding his view of the brilliant azure blue Gulf sky. He flinched at the stench—the ever-growing intrusive vapors of decaying and burning flesh—filling his nostrils as the blistering afternoon sun beat down on his head. 
No waiting in this heat. They’ve already started burning
. He turned and vomited.

Short of breath, Bret sat in the soggy grass, head slumped forward, feeling a craving for his medicine so deep that it seemed now to have settled into a solid, living thing in the pit of his gut. 

If not for his unwavering hope of finding Gabrielle alive—the heartbreaking desire to hold and kiss her once more—that seemed to drag his body by an unconscious force of its own, he was certain he would keel over on his side at any moment and willingly join the dead scattered around him.

Bret wiped his mouth, drew a breath, and staggered up again on his feet. “Gabrielle!” He tried to raise his hoarse voice to a yell. “Gabrielle Caldwell! Has anyone seen her?”

A half-naked man, his sickly pallor like one risen from the grave and wearing only torn shreds of black tuxedo pants, drifted by him as though walking in a trance toward some unseen beacon in the distance.

Bret recognized the ghostly face of a businessman who knew Arley Caldwell but the person’s name escaped him. He grabbed the former gentleman by the shoulders. “Have you seen Gabrielle Caldwell?” 

The man paused for a moment but kept staring straight ahead. Bret shook his shoulders. “You know Arley Caldwell. Have you seen his daughter, Gabrielle?”

“Jenny . . . where’s my Jenny? She has to wake the children.” The man continued walking like a lost soul in search of something it would never find.

Bret heard a child cough and turned. The little girl in the nun’s arms, a drooping freckle-faced girl with red ribbons on her ponytails, coughed and cried out from the dead sister’s protective embrace. 

He rushed to her side, untied the rope and carried her toward the main courtyard of the convent.

The wounded and dying lay sprawled on a few cots and stretchers while most were on the ground. The little girl with freckles smiled up at him from her cot. 

Bret stroked the girl’s wet, red hair. “You’ll be all right, darling. The sisters will take care of you now.”

The little girl tugged at his scratched and bleeding arm. “Please stay, mister. I don’t know where my friends are.”

“I know but I have to try to find mine too. Do you understand?”

The little girl looked down at the ground. After a brief silence, she nodded. “I think so. Is it someone you love?”

Bret swallowed. “Yes. Very much.”

“Is she nice?”

“She’s the most wonderful person I’ve ever known.”

“What’s her name?”

“Gabrielle.”

“Then she’s more than just your 
friend
, isn’t she?” A mischievous, missing tooth grin brought a sudden flush to her pale face.

Bret chuckled. “Do you always ask so many questions?”

The little girl stared at Bret for a few moments as though searching for something she wanted to see in his tired eyes. “My name is Emily. What’s yours?”

“I’m Bret. Pleased to meet you Emily.” He smiled and kissed her on the forehead. “So, after I find my friend, Gabrielle, we’ll come back later and see how you’re feeling. Would you like that?”

“Promise?”

“Promise.”

Emily hugged Bret with her frail arms. “And if you see my friends, please tell them I’m here.”

Bret kissed Emily on the top of her head and guided her gently back down on the cot. He rose and gazed at the haggard, wild-eyed ghosts of men and women stumbling by, their faces shocked into contortions of terror and confusion. 

He recognized several who had been quests at his party. Where a week ago it seemed he might be returned to the good graces of Galveston society, nothing remained of that life except barren stares unseeing of anything except the storm still raging in the aftermath of memory. 
Was the rig at Beaumont destroyed too?

Bret looked away. Strange, but that was the first time the thought had occurred to him. His only driving need, the only thing that could give meaning to his life now was to find Gabrielle safe and alive. 

Nothing else mattered, not even the riches he promised her that could, for all he cared, remain hidden in the Godforsaken depths of hell.

A woman shuffled past him, her eyes, like two extinguished lights, reflected death’s gray face on her drowned baby cradled in her arms. Bret turned and wove his way through the walking dead toward the dormitory facing Rosenberg Avenue.

Near the outside wall, three Ursuline nuns attended a group of young women and children huddled around a small fire. Bret approached the oldest one, her back bent over a pregnant woman on a stretcher. “Sister?” He touched her shoulder. “You know the Caldwells, don’t you?”

The nun turned around, her creased face wearied and bewildered by exhaustion. “Yes, but as you can see I’m busy.” She turned back to the pregnant woman. “The Lord’s blessings always come when you least expect them.”

“Gabrielle? Have you seen her?”

“Yes, Miss Caldwell was here, sir,” she answered without turning around. “She was still unconscious when I saw her last lying there on one of those stretchers.”

The nun pointed to a row of canvas stretchers lined up against the wall. “Ask Sister Constance. I believe she attended to her.”

Bret hurried to the younger nun. She was giving a little girl a drink of water from a wooden ladle and pail. “Sister Constance?”

The nun’s girlish face was scratched and cut, the blood still wet on a fresh wound and flecked across the white of her soaked habit.

“Gabrielle Caldwell—the other Sister said she was here.”

“Yes.”

Bret glanced down the row of stretchers. The bandaged women all looked the same. “Which one is she?”

“She was with us, sir, but now she’s gone.” The nun moved on to the next cot. She dipped the ladle into the wood pail and offered a drink to a little boy lying down. 

The child gulped at the water, letting it dribble down his bruised cheeks. “Careful, Evan,” she cautioned. “We can’t waste any. There are so many mouths—”

Bret gripped the nun’s arm. “What do you mean 
gone
? Is she dead?” The very word on his lips froze his heart. He gasped for his next breath.

“Oh no, not as far as I know. Now please, sir.”

Bret rubbed his exhausted eyes. “She fell back out the window . . . then a big wave carried us. The convent wall . . . that’s the last thing I remember . . . Gabrielle was still with me when the raft hit then she was gone . . . somehow I managed to crawl up on the dormitory roof.”

“How fortunate for you, sir.” Sister Constance yanked her arm away. “The Lord’s old stone walls saved many souls last night.”

“And Gabrielle?”

“A gentleman came for her when she was still unconscious. Her fiancé, he said, a doctor. He had been searching for hours. He said he would take care of her at his home. It must be one of the few still standing.”

Bret closed his eyes, overwhelmed by death’s clammy vapor all around him. His knees buckled for a moment and he steadied himself against the dormitory wall. He shuddered and steadied himself against the wall, breathing in short, erratic gasps.

“Sir? Perhaps you should sit down. If there’s water left after the children I can—”

Bret balled his hand into a fist. A fresh craving clawed at his heart and soul, and together with the old hunger, drove him on—vengeful and unforgiving in their pitiless longing. Bret brushed by Sister Constance toward the demolished front gates.

“Sir? Sir! Don’t you want to know his name?”

Bret hurried away from Sister Constance and the suffering toward the Gulf where one building might yet be standing. 

CHAPTER 28

Sunday, September 9, 5:00 p.m.

Along the streets, flames from the cremation pyres crackled and popped, stoking the furnace of the late afternoon sun. Dense, black curling ribbons of kerosene smoke spread out against the endless destruction that was everywhere within Bret’s sight. 

Sometimes the burning stench of flesh was too strong and he would take a different route, but every way seemed no better than the last, obstructed by the same debris, livestock, and bodies.

Shattered wood building frames lay drying on top of the muddy earth like stalks of straw. Cinder blocks and bricks were piled in crumbling heaps with the partially concealed limbs of the crushed and mangled sticking out from underneath. 

The groans of the dying were sometimes drowned out by wild shrieks of terror—the horror of discovery or the dread of not knowing—it didn’t matter. 

Every nerve and fiber of his body trembled as if the blood in his veins had stopped flowing. Each survivor’s face that he chanced upon gave mute witness to the worst fears of all.

Bret rested on a battered shipping trunk to catch his breath and get his bearings.
There would only be one place for that bastard to take her.
Glancing back in the direction of the cremation fires he saw another broken and mangled body jutting out of a pile of shattered timber.
Oh
sweet Jesus, Liam. I’m sorry.

How many of his friends had died? It might be days before he knew and there was nothing he could do for them now except say a final prayer. All that Bret had left to give was for the living . . .
for Gabrielle
. 

He looked away toward the Gulf; approximately two blocks away on his left stood the partially demolished tower of St. Patrick’s Church. The remains of the attached nave and sanctuary resembled nothing more than the rib cage of some great, extinct beast.

A curl of smoke twisted its way above the rubble. Too small for a cremation fire but enough to warm the bones of a few survivors before the night’s chill was sure to set in.
Broadway and 35th. Eight blocks south to Mechanic
. 

If anything remained of Caden’s building on 33rd, he would be able to see it. Bret took a few deep breaths and swallowed. He stood and continued his slow journey through the land of the dead.

Bret trudged up the debris-strewn steps and stood under the front arch of the Theogenesis Society Hall. Badly damaged by the whirling havoc, its doors and windows smashed apart, the hall still retained its brick foundation and walls.

He looked down 33rd Street toward the beach. The sweeping wind and water had not been merciful to anything else as far as he could see.

Dank, putrid air wafted up from the wet street in a sickening vapor that tainted his breath and consciousness with the revulsion of death’s decay. 

He cupped a hand over his mouth and stepped over the smashed door into the dim foyer of the main building, maneuvering and twisting his way over the broken furniture and smashed statues. “This is Bret McGowan. Is anyone—” He stopped and turned away, gagging.

The severed head of Edward Wallace was impaled on a broken post from Rebecca’s brass bed, his blank, white eyes—like those of a broken statue—turned upward, begging forgiveness from some distant and unmoved deity.

A cool Gulf breeze blew in through the smashed window frames. A storm shutter, still hanging on its last hinge, flapped against the exterior wall. Bret inched his way past the hellish scene. “Gabrielle!” 

He stepped into the parlor. Wood strapping stuck out of the cracked plaster walls and every piece of fine furniture had been reduced to stacks of kindling. The torn covers and spines of mangled books were strewn in piles over the debris. Bret turned and inched his way into the front hall.