Joseph had heard that drowning men seized anything that came near. He sat on the window casing and began swinging his feet in the water. “I had hoped that some of the trapped ones within the room might catch my feet and so be pulled out,” he said. “My efforts were wasted and I finally gave them up. I have no words to tell the agony of heart I experienced in that moment.”
THE BEACH
Ruby Credo
AS SOON AS Ruby Credo’s parents finished chopping holes into the floor of their parlor, they began preparations to evacuate to higher ground. If Dr. Cline planned to ride out the storm in his own house, that was his choice. Anthony Credo had no intention of doing likewise. He and his family were just about to leave when a neighbor, Mrs. Theodore Goldman, appeared at the door with her son, hoping to shelter in the Credos’ house. Mrs. Goldman did not trust her own house, she said. Her husband did, however, and he was still there. He refused to leave.
The Credos put on some coffee and gave Mrs. Goldman and her son some dry clothes. In that short time, the water deepened to the point where Credo saw that leaving would be more dangerous than staying.
He had built a storm shelter behind his house, a one-room chamber atop six-foot posts. He believed, at first, that his children would be safest there. He swam them over one by one. As he watched other houses in the neighborhood disintegrate, he changed his mind. He retrieved his children. If something terrible happened, he wanted his family together. His two grown daughters were with their husbands, and he presumed them safe. His son William, visiting his fiancée, was a grown man and could take care of himself. It was the young ones he worried about most—little Ruby and her sisters, and son Raymond. The shuttling back and forth to the storm shelter unnerved him. He could carry only one child at a time.
“The water was rising rapidly to the second floor,” Ruby said, “so Papa helped us climb from the outside through dormer windows to the attic bedrooms, where Mr. Goldman and his mother had moved. The water had risen so fast Mama hadn’t time to grab her cherished black satin corset from downstairs.” The family had little to do but watch the storm intensify. “We stood at the windows and watched the houses around us break up, wash away, and become battering rams to knock and tear others apart as they were hurled and swept about. The water kept rising; the sounds of the storm were frightening; the house creaked and groaned as if it were in some kind of agony.”
Night had fallen. Ruby sat on the corner of a bed opposite Mrs. Goldman and her son. The wind accelerated. A streetcar rail pierced the roof and penetrated the floor between Ruby and the Goldmans. No one was hurt.
The house began to move. The wind lifted the roof, then dropped it. Falling wreckage pinned Ruby’s mother, but Anthony Credo managed to pull her free. She bled heavily from head lacerations. Credo tore strips of cloth from her clothes to make bandages.
All this occurred in darkness.
The house eased from its foundation, slid through a shallow westward arc, then began to float. Credo gathered his family and ordered everyone out the dormer windows. The Goldmans declined to leave.
“When our house left the ground, we grabbed at anything washing by, as Papa had instructed us to do, but it was all you could do to stay on a piece of wood,” Ruby said.
Waves broke upon the family and scattered them. Credo herded them together again. The cycle repeated itself.
In darkness.
The sea pushed the family north, everyone alive, everyone more or less intact, although Ruby’s mother looked like a soldier wounded in the Spanish-American War.
They drifted. Credo shouted orders. Between waves, he kicked himself up from the water as high as he could, to count his family and keep anyone from straying. One wave drove a telegraph pole into the back of Raymond’s head. It knocked him out and dug a severe gash in his scalp. Even in the darkness, Anthony Credo could tell the fluid pouring off his son’s head was blood. Credo held Raymond with one arm and kept himself afloat with his other, struggling to hold Raymond’s head out of the water and still keep track of the rest of his family.
Credo was tired. He believed his son dead, or nearly so. Several times he considered letting Raymond go. Mrs. Credo would not let him. She was not ready. She still had hope.
The storm was more intense than ever, but for a time the Credos saw a full moon behind thin clouds. An inverted roof floated past. Credo ordered everyone aboard. One daughter, Florence, helped him pull Raymond into the roof. Credo went back into the water. He did not want to risk tipping the raft. Mrs. Credo held Raymond close.
At first the roof proved an effective lifeboat, but soon it began to break apart. Credo watched for something better. An upended porch floated near. It looked sturdier than the roof. Credo shouted for everyone to abandon the roof and climb onto the porch.
Ruby’s elder sisters Queeny, Vivian, and Ethel sat together, holding tight to one another’s clothing. The porch was so stable, some of the children fell asleep. “We could lie back on these sections,” Ruby said. “They were well-made, with no jagged nails or splinters to gash our bodies as we were tossed about.”
Everyone relaxed. Raymond still did not move, but there was hope, now. The family was together. They would find Raymond a doctor. Everything would be all right. “We floated this way for an hour,” Ruby said. “Then a piece of timber blown up by a wave struck my three sisters a terrific blow, knocking Vivian into the water and under heavy debris.”
Vivian did not surface. The porch sailed on. The moon disappeared and lightning flared, the first lightning anyone could recall seeing. Big barrels of thunder rolled among the waves, and made the night even more terrifying. To Ruby, the rain was a particular torment. It “felt like bullets.”
Ruby’s sister Pearl was sitting peacefully upon the raft when a jagged spike of wood blew through her arm, just below her elbow. She screamed. Her mother held Pearl tight as Anthony Credo pulled the spike from her arm. Pearl writhed in utter agony. Credo applied pressure until the bleeding slowed, then bandaged it as best he could.
The porch beached itself against a reef of debris twelve feet high, near an intact house. Ruby and her family picked their way over the wreckage and climbed inside. Anthony Credo carried Raymond on his back.
Credo tallied the family’s casualties: Vivian dead; Raymond clearly dying; Pearl hurt and now at grave risk of infection, fever, amputation, even death.
An unbearable list, but in fact it understated the true extent of the family’s loss.
25TH AND Q
What Isaac Did
WHEN THE TRESTLE struck, Isaac was at the center of the room with his wife and his six-year-old daughter, Esther Bellew. His baby. A wall came toward him. It propelled him backward into a large chimney. There was motion. He could not see it, but felt it all around. Things fell from the sky. Furniture, books, lanterns, beams, planks. People. Children. He entered the water. Something huge caught him and drove him to the bottom. Timbers held him. He opened his eyes. He felt the water but saw nothing. It was quiet. He could not move. He knew he would die. There was peace in this. It gave him time to think. He appraised things. The only course was to welcome the sea into his body. He did so. He disappeared.
He awoke to lions. Rain came like shrapnel. He was afloat, his chest caught between two large timbers. He coughed water. He sensed burden. There was something he had to do. It was like waking to a child’s cry in the night. He sensed absence.
It came to him abruptly that he was now alone.
THE BEACH
A Light in the Window
THE SCREAM HAD been shocking enough. What Louise Hopkins saw next caused her heart to leap halfway from her body.
Her sister, Lois, red-faced from the great energy she stuffed into that scream, pointed furiously at the place where the east wall joined the ceiling. At first Louise did not understand, but as she watched, she saw the wall begin to breathe. With each gust of wind, the wall moved out from the house until Louise could see the sky; then the wall wheezed back into position. T
here was a moon outside. Louise saw clouds rushing by overhead.
Louise looked at her mother. Mrs. Hopkins alone seemed not to be surprised. Apparently, she had been watching all along, but had not wanted to frighten her children any more than they already were.
It was time to leave, Mrs. Hopkins resolved. The house across the way, owned by the Dau family, looked sturdy, and there was a light inside. They would go there. Mrs. Hopkins worked out a plan. They would use a mattress as a raft. The Hopkins boys, both strong swimmers, would pull it across the street with Mrs. Hopkins, Lois, and Louise aboard. Mrs. Hopkins pulled sheets from the bed and tore them into strips, which she tied around her waist and the waists of her girls.
They assembled behind the big double front door, poised to exit. Every time the east wall and ceiling parted, Mrs. Hopkins would cry, “Let’s go now.”
But in the next instant the ceiling would settle, and Lois would shout, “Wait.”
They could not muster the courage to cross. Water flowed wildly down the street. Bursts of spindrift erupted from the surface as missiles of slate and timber hissed back to earth.
The light across the way was irresistible. It offered safety, comfort, and company. “It doesn’t seem so now,” Louise said, “but there was such a consolation to know that somebody was still alive.”
But this light, this beacon of comfort, began to move. They saw it dance from room to room. It moved toward the front door. They saw Mr. Dau carry the lantern out his front door and down his steps.
Leaving—the man was leaving. Like a ship captain ignoring a lifeboat adrift.
To Louise and her family it was as if hope itself had just departed.
THREE MILES DOWN the beach, the big St. Mary’s Orphanage with ninety-three children inside was under siege. It was a fortress of brick and stone that rose straight out of the grass just north of the tide line, a lonely Gibraltar shrouded most evenings in blue mist. Now waves crashed against its second story. Anyone watching from outside would have seen the lights of candles and lanterns move from room to room toward the back of the orphanage as the frontmost portions of the building collapsed into the sea like icebergs calved from a glacier.
The ten sisters who ran the place herded all ninety-three children into the chapel. Sister M. Camillus Tracy, thirty-one years old, the mother superior, ordered the other sisters to tie lengths of clothesline to the youngest children, then tie one end around their waists. They formed chains of six to eight children each, roped together like miniature climbing parties. A few older children, among them Will Murney, Albert Campbell, and Francis Bulnavic remained free. Sister Camillus led the children in hymns, including the children’s favorite, “Queen of the Waves.” The water rose. The children felt the concussion of each breaker as it struck the front of the building.
The sisters drew the children to the girls’ dormitory at the back of the building, away from the beach. They heard the crash of wood and brick behind them as the boys’ dormitory fell into the Gulf. The storm advanced through the building quickly and systematically, as if hunting the children. The chapel disappeared. Windows shattered. Hallways rose and fell like drawbridges. The children sang.
The sea and wind burst into the dormitory. In seconds, the building failed. Ninety children and all ten sisters died. Only Will, Albert, and Francis survived, all by catching hold of the same floating tree.
Later, a rescuer found one toddler’s corpse on the beach. He tried lifting the child. A length of clothesline leaped from the sand, then tightened. He pulled the line. Another child emerged. The line continued into the sand. He uncovered eight children and a nun.
Sister Camillus had hoped the clothesline would save the children, but it was the clothesline, rescuers saw, that caused so many to die, tangling them in submerged wreckage.
AUGUST ROLLFING SAT alone in his shop on 24th Street waiting for his men to come for their pay. As the storm worsened, his anxiety increased. Water began coming into his shop. The wind accelerated. It rolled up the tin roofs across the way, then hurled them to the ground like spent shell casings. Boards and glass shrapneled the street. August had money for eighteen workers. No one came.
He locked his shop and set out to join his family, with absolute faith that the driver from Malloy’s Livery had in fact done as he had asked and that now his family was safe at his mother’s house. He struggled west. He got as far as the city waterworks at 30th Street between Avenue G and Avenue H, when the wind picked him up “like a piece of paper” and blew him out of the water onto a sidewalk. He hugged a telephone pole. In a lull between gusts, he crawled to the waterworks building and entered. He found the lobby full of storm refugees.
The building seemed sturdy enough. What worried the occupants was its tall smokestack, which swayed through the sky like a giant black cobra. If it fell—when it fell—everyone in the building stood an excellent chance of being crushed. Whenever the wind paused, a group of refugees would dash out onto the sidewalk.
Rollfing left, accompanied by two black men. They went first to a grocery store, which soon became too dangerous. They moved next to a private house. A beam fell and killed a man. They moved on, until they saw a light in the window of another store.
August and his companions banged on the door. At first, the occupants refused to let them in. Finally they relented.
It was nearly dark now. In the shuddery glow of lanterns and candles, August saw that the store was crowded with about eighty men, women, and children, all standing on countertops to keep out of the water. But the water was rising fast. August found a place on a counter. Soon the water was at his ankles, then his chest. August lifted someone else’s son onto his shoulders as the water rose to his own neck.
He spent hours this way, until a man shouted, “The water is going down! Look at the door!”
The water had indeed reversed flow. The store owner pulled out a large jug of whiskey and passed it around the room. Men and women alike took great swallows and passed it on.
August wanted desperately to leave for his mother’s house to join his wife and children and make sure they were still safe. The water receded quickly, but to him its exit seemed to take forever. Rain continued cascading from the darkness; the wind seemed little changed.
At last the water level fell low enough to enable him to leave. Outside, he saw that houses had been shattered and upended. He stumbled through deep holes gouged by the current, and over all manner of submerged debris. He dodged showers of timber and slate. It was dark, no lights anywhere. He fell, got up, fell again. The damage got progressively worse. Whole blocks had been crushed, others swept clean. He knew he was heading west—probably along Avenue H—but the darkness and devastation had eliminated all landmarks.
At intervals the moon emerged. How the moon could shine amid such wind and rain he did not know, but there it was, visible through a thin layer of cloud. A full moon, no less. It gave him light; it also gave him fear, for it showed him how vast the plane of devastation truly was. Spiky dunes of wreckage blocked his path. From the top of each, he saw that only a few homes still stood. To the south was a strange black shadow two and three stories high that stretched for miles like a mountain range freshly jabbed through the earth’s crust.
At three o’clock Sunday morning he came to his mother’s neighborhood. Only her house looked whole. Everything else had been destroyed, upended, or transported toward the bay. Relief poured into his heart. He burst into the house but found only his mother.
“Where are Louisa and the children? I don’t see them.”
The question surprised his mother. “August, I don’t know,” she said. “They are not here.” When she realized that August expected them to be there, she too became afraid. “When did they go,” she asked, “and how?”
He told her about the buggy he had sent at one o’clock and the instructions he had given the driver.
“Nobody could come here at one o’clock,” his mother said. August started toward the door. “Wait,” she pl
eaded. “Wait until daylight.”
August made his way to his sister’s house. He saw corpses. The short journey—only half a dozen blocks—took an hour. The sight made him half-crazy with dread. The house stood at a forty-five degree angle. Where Julia’s kitchen had been, there was now only a jagged black hole. Every shutter had been splintered, every window broken.
But there seemed to be a light within. He pounded on the front door. The door opened. He saw Julia and her husband. He saw Louisa. He saw Helen, August, and little Lanta. “Thank God,” he said.
And fainted on the stairs.
25TH AND Q
Isaac’s Voyage
HE WAS ALONE in the water. His family was gone. He flailed his arms and reached deep underwater and kicked his legs to feel for soft things, clothing, someone alive. He felt only square shapes, planks, serrated edges. He had been inside the house; now he was outside in darkness, in wind so fast it planed the water smooth. There was lightning. He saw debris everywhere, jutting from the sea. He saw a child. He shimmied free of the timbers and swam hard. The rain stung; he could hold his eyes open only a few seconds at a time. He came to her and felt his arm grow from the water and circle her and knew immediately the child was his Esther, his six-year-old. His baby. He spoke into her ear. She cried and grabbed him hard and put him under, but he was delighted. She asked for her mother. He had no answer. The house began to break up. He swam her away.
He was elated; he was distraught. He had found one daughter but lost everyone else. His memory of them would be tinted the yellow of lamplight. He tried to place them in the room, and by doing so, to place them in the sea. His wife had been with him in the center of the room with Esther. His two eldest daughters had been near the window, beside Joseph. Why had they not surfaced too?