“Let’s get away from it,” Josh said.
Ham nodded, pushing off the rocks with his paddle. Eager as he had been to get back to the Island, he spent an extra fifteen minutes working down the shore, putting distance between them and the strange, sad corpse. It was a grim omen for their arrival.
The beach here was tumbled rocks at the base of a short hill. They rested for a while on a big slab of granite, getting colder as the breeze got at their pants—if you could call their sodden rags “pants” anymore. Once Josh’s skin was dry, though, the night was nearly perfect, warm and humid.
Obviously their first order of business was to find out what had happened to Ham’s family. Then they would decide what to do next. Josh insisted that they leave the life preserver raft somewhere easy to find, in case they were still under the death penalty and had to hightail it off the Island. Ham didn’t argue the point.
From where they were sitting, the raised dike that marked the eastern terminus of Seawall Boulevard was less than a hundred yards away. They could walk along the road proper, making good time across the uninhabited end of the Island, but they would be easily visible to anyone coming along the road. “We’ll walk through the salt grath bethide the road, out of thight, and make nearly ath good time,” Ham decided.
Josh froze. “Can’t.”
“Do what you’re told,” Ham said.
“Can’t. Too afraid I’ll step on a snake.”
Ham looked at him a long time. At last he said, “We’ll take the road. Thlip down into the grath if we thee anyone.” He started up the embankment without looking back.
It turned out not to matter. They didn’t see another soul for the whole two miles up to Stewart Beach. At first Josh was elated at their good fortune, but the complete silence came to seem uncanny. “Ought to be thomeone out for flounder,” Ham muttered. “Or crabbing. Or thomething.”
“Look,” Josh whispered. They were several hundred yards shy of Lyncrest Drive, the easternmost north-south road on the Island. Streetlights here had never been a priority, but now there were none. Either the gas lines had ruptured, or gas was being rationed. Three blocks farther along, at the intersection of Seawall Boulevard and the Ferry Road, they could clearly see a large fire. Not a blazing bonfire, but a dark mound with flames flickering erratically over its surface, and cracks and fissures of embering red. A moment later a terrible smell hit them, of charred meat and hide. Josh drew a breath. “They’re burning bodies,” he murmured. “Just like after the Big Blow.”
They’d be burning the dead animals, too. As low as the water supply had dwindled before the storm hit, it would be very difficult to keep the streets sanitary, especially with the sewer systems cracked and choked in the aftermath of the hurricane. There were bound to be hundreds of wounds to clean out, from flying debris, broken glass, dropped tree branches. The lack of clean water would hurt there, too. It would be a miracle if Galveston escaped an outbreak of cholera. Josh found himself going over the supplies in his house, trying to guess what injuries and illnesses he would find waiting.
Ham shook Josh’s shoulder. His eyes were frantic. “Let’th go, let’th go!”
Josh nodded, a sinking feeling in his chest. Ham’s sister Rachel and her kids lived in a trailer park on Tuna Avenue, in the neighborhood called the Fishes. Before the Flood it had been a decent part of town, but in the first years after 2004 the deeply haunted U.T. Medical Branch had lain between the Fishes and the rest of Galveston. People with family or resources fled the neighborhood. Those too stubborn to leave saw the abandoned lots fill up with squatters, refugees, and trailer homes like the one Rachel’s family lived in. Dread began building in Josh. There couldn’t have been much between the Fishes and the hurricane except the raised dike of Seawall Boulevard.
They slipped down Lyncrest Drive. On their right the empty flatland showed little sign of the hurricane’s passing, but to their left tin roofs and plywood walls lay scattered on the ground like giant playing cards. Josh began to notice crude crosses in the ground, one, three, five—dozens of them, nailed together from broken broomsticks or two-by-fours, or twisted out of coat hangers. One small house that looked nearly untouched had five small crosses in front. Two doors down they passed a tin shed with the walls blown down and nothing left standing but a gas stove with one burner still hissing. There were no crosses in the yard. Whether that meant the occupants had survived, or simply had nobody left to mark their passing, Josh couldn’t say.
Ham was running by the time he turned onto Tuna Avenue. Back from Lyncrest, the devastation was slightly less complete. A working streetlight still twinkled at the intersection of Tuna and Ferry Road. A ghost tumbled underneath it for an instant, struggling and thrashing in an invisible tide. A wave they could not see rolled over the specter, and it disappeared.
“Josh?” Ham whispered.
“I saw it.” Joshua’s heart beat in his chest, hard enough to hurt. They shouldn’t have been able to see a ghost that easily. If word got out that he and Ham were seeing visions, the Recluse would have them gone to Krewes before a week was out.
With a couple of blocks between them and the full brunt of the storm, the little houses here looked better. There were lights in several windows, but still they had seen no living person out of doors. “Curfew?” Josh breathed in Ham’s ear. The big man shrugged and started lumbering across the road, crossing himself as he passed the spot where they had seen the drowning ghost.
In this neighborhood the Mexican houses were bright with the flicker of candles. Candles burned in their windows, on their porches, and along their garden walks; candles surrounded by paper shades or candles burning in tall magic glasses painted with images of the Sacred Heart or the Bleeding Lamb, La Virgen Sagrada or El Mano Más Poderoso, the Most Powerful Hand. There were other charms, too, in front of the black and anglo houses. Crosses and walkaways had been nailed to doors, or offerings left out on the porch—a fish, a plate of cold rice, presents wrapped in wax paper and left for any spirits who might need placating. One person had obviously dragged a heavy Texaco sign from an abandoned gas station and planted it in his yard, facing across the Bay, as if begging for protection from whatever spirits still dwelt among the eternal fires of Texas City. When the things men made could no longer protect them, they turned back to their gods and ghosts for salvation, Josh thought. It won’t be long before we’re cowering in caves again, believing every sickness to be a witch’s curse.
Ham started to run, jogging heavily along the pavement in his bare feet. Josh picked his way more slowly after, worried he would step on a piece of broken glass or a board with a rusty nail poking through. He had lost four patients to tetanus and another handful to gangrene since his mother died.
Ham stopped at the 4th Street intersection where Rachel’s home had once been. A moment later Josh joined him, and together they looked out at a nightmare. Clearly the hurricane had spun off a tornado. Bits and pieces of trailers lay smashed across a field of desolation; furniture, clothes, and dishes lay strewn in eddies of rubble. The trailers had been cracked like eggs, their contents shaken out and scrambled, then the shells beaten in for good measure. “Oh, my God,” Josh whispered. He thought of Ham’s sister, Rachel, cowering in their trailer. They would have taken the mattress off Rachel’s bed and hidden under it, and it wouldn’t have mattered a damn. He imagined the children screaming as the walls tore apart.
“Christy caught her first fish not three weeks ago,” Ham said. Christy was Rachel’s imperious curly-haired four-year-old. “A little pound-and-a-half speck’ trout. Back of my boat with a hook and bobber. Piece of shrimp for bait. I should have been here,” he said.
Josh felt the dull thudding of his heart, ten times, twenty times, thirty. “They weren’t here.”
Ham shook his head and spat.
“They wouldn’t have stayed here, with that front coming in. You saw the clouds. No way Rachel would have stayed put. She’d have moved them all. Jesus Christ, Ham. They weren’t her
e.” He could see the trailer tumbling end over end, each crunching impact. Rain driving sideways like machine-gun fire. Window casements crushed in, glass exploding like shrapnel. “They would have gone to your mom’s place,” Josh said. He knew he was babbling, but he couldn’t stop. “Ham. Ham, I didn’t mean this. Say something.” He grabbed Ham’s arm, and the big man smashed him to the ground without even turning around.
Breath caught and rasped in Josh’s chest. “They weren’t here,” he whispered.
Still Ham stood staring over the devastated lot. Across the street a row of houses stood virtually untouched. Pure chance, tornadoes. A small one might level one house to the foundation and leave the next one with the shutters still attached. All in the fall of the cards. Josh could hear the whirring, snapping sound of his father’s crisp waterfall shuffle in his ears.
“I bet they went to Mom’s place,” Ham said.
“Yeah.”
Ham turned away. A moment late Josh got up and limped after him.
They went to the house where Ham had lived with his mother and father and kid brother Japhet. It had been damaged but not flattened. Most of the windows were broken, the chicken coop out back was gone, and the little evaporative A/C unit that had been Mr. Mather’s particular pride and joy had simply vanished from the front room window where it used to hang. Ham burst through the front door into the dark parlor and was about to yell when Josh got a hand over his mouth. “There’s nobody here!” Josh hissed.
Ham slapped his hand away and stood stock-still in the darkness, shoulders heaving. His parents’ bed in the front room was empty. Josh felt his way along the wall to the kitchen. The wallpaper was wet up past his waist. In the kitchen the gas to the stove wasn’t working and Japhet’s cot was gone.
“If they’re dead I’m gonna break your neck,” Ham said.
“They’re not dead.”
“Do you swear it, Josh?” Ham’s voice was empty and terrible. “Swear it on your mom’s ghost.”
“They’re alive,” Josh said. “I swear it.”
Ham headed for the front door. “I saw a light next door at the Rossis’. I’m gonna ask.”
“Ham! If we’re caught, the sheriff will shoot us this time.”
“The Rossis like me,” Ham said. He brushed past Josh.
“At least give me the gun,” Josh said. “In case anyone tries to turn you in.”
“The gun ain’t loaded, Josh.”
“Nobody else knows that.”
Ham passed over the useless .32 and stepped through the tiny patch of ground to the Rossis’ while Josh hunkered down at the corner of the Mathers’ house clutching the gun awkwardly in his left hand. Ham banged on the door with his massive fist. One of the Rossis’ shutters opened a crack. “Git home to bed, you dam kids, before I whup your little hineys red!”
“It’s Ham Mather, Mrs. Rossi.”
“Ham!”
“Where’s my folks?”
The shutter swung open. Mrs. Rossi squinted at him suspiciously. “You’re a ghost.”
“And I’ll haunt you forever unless you tell me where my folks are.”
“No, you aren’t neither,” Mrs. Rossi said. “I can smell you from here. God bless, you big pig! They’re at Mr. Cane’s, Ham.”
Joshua thought his heart would stop.
Ham stared stupidly up at Mrs. Rossi. “Josh’s house?”
“Your mom said, ‘It’s a good tight house on higher ground, and somebody ought to get the use of it with the storm coming.’ Folks left that place alone; you can imagine what kind of ghost that Josh would make, proud as he was. But your mom said if Josh was dead then you would be, too, and you’d keep him in line. She said you’d be back, though. She’s got a lot of faith in Jesus, your mother has.”
“They’re alive,” Josh said. It was like a death sentence had lifted from him. Relief did not begin to describe it. His heart was dazzled.
Ham was already backing from the door and breaking into a trot toward Joshua’s house. Josh stood up from the shadows and came after him. As he passed Mrs. Rossi’s window he caught a glimpse of her startled face. “Boo!” he said, snickering like a schoolboy, and then loped after his friend.
A small house full of Mathers, Josh discovered, is very full indeed. Ham was so tall that even bent over to crush his mother in a bear hug his head rustled among the ropes of peppers and clumps of sage hanging from Joshua’s ceiling to dry. Mr. Mather was nearly as broad as his son, if not so tall, and his belly, thickly thatched with greying hair, eclipsed the waistband of the shorts he had worn to bed.
It was actually the kids who had woken first. After some knocking Josh heard a modest thump that turned out to be the sound of four-year-old Christy getting down from the low examination table where she and her sister Samantha had been billeted. “Shh!” she hissed through the door. “Evewybody’s sweeping,” she said sternly. Josh thought it was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard.
“Christy!” Ham said.
“Shh!”
“Christy, it’s Uncle Ham. Get your mom, honey!”
“She’s sweeping!” Josh grinned like a lunatic in the darkness, knowing exactly the pouting thrust of the lower lip with which Christy would be making her point.
This argument might have gone on all night (Christy was intractable on points of order) but fortunately the noise had woken Samantha, who was six and sensible. She ran immediately to the kitchen to get her mother. A moment later Rachel opened the door and gave a little scream. She held a hand over her mouth and tears started in her eyes at the sight of her brother. Ham reached out and hugged her. A moment later her husband, Ben, hurried in from the kitchen. Samantha was dispatched to wake up the grandparents, and Rachel fussed to light the lamp over the exam table. Christy tried to make everyone go back to bed. Ben offered Josh some of his own rice wine, the grandparents emerged from the master bedroom, Josh found another oil lamp in the kitchen, lit it, and brought it to the front room, and finally even Japhet’s untroubled slumber was broken when the resourceful Samantha pinched his nose shut until he struggled into wakefulness, coughing and blinking.
It was a joyous homecoming, marred slightly for Josh by the fear that he might be trampled in the general enthusiasm. All of the Mathers were huge: Ham, his father, and Japhet were enormous slabs of flesh and bone. Rachel’s husband, Ben, was skinnier, but well over six feet tall, with long gangly limbs that looked as if they needed extra joints to fold down to some reasonable size. What the women lacked in girth they made up for in various ways, Rachel in the bigness of her styled hair, Samantha in energy, and Christy in volume and pure will. Mrs. Mather alone seemed scaled to a human dimension, and after the first flesh-slapping paroxysms had settled down, Josh found himself with an urge to chat quietly with her, preferably in a narrow corner where none of the Mather men could fit, reducing the chances he would be squashed flat by accident.
“Now that you’re here, we’ll shift back to the old place,” Mrs. Mather said. “As low as the glass was going the day of the storm, we knew it was fixin’ to get ugly. I didn’t like to think of Rachel and the girls out at the trailer with any kind of a wind.”
“You did exactly right,” Josh said quickly, so Ham couldn’t accuse him of being mean-spirited.
“Japhet got caught out over at the Bishop’s Palace,” Ham’s mom said. “That Miss Gardner is back, you know. She’s got a whole passel of poor folk staying with Randall Denton, if you believe it. Our Japhet helped her a bunch the first night, and I’ve been lending a hand since during the daytime, though we try to get out at night. There’s only room for so many to sleep, and it’s better to leave it for those who’ve got no beds to go to, I think.” Alice Mather paused, and, charmingly, colored just a little. “Miss Gardner lets me do a little of the organizing.”
I’ll bet, Josh thought, remembering how Ham’s mother had looked after every kid in the neighborhood. The Gardners always did have a fine eye for delegating. The idea of Sloane Gardner working shoulder to
shoulder with Alice Mather tickled him greatly. Another wave of gratitude went through him, as he remembered that during their trial it had been Alice Mather who had backed him, unafraid of the staring crowd and her disapproving neighbors.
“I’m afraid a lot of your medicine is gone,” Ham’s mother said. “Two mornings after the storm that deputy came and cleaned the place out. He took everything left from before the Flood—for sharing, he said, but of course this neighborhood never had any use out of it, not with you gone, Josh. I should have taken it over to Miss Gardner, I reckon, but it seemed too much like stealing, somehow.”
“Josh.” Ham stuck his great head, shaggy with seven days’ beard, through the doorway into the kitchen. “We’re off the hook. Dad says your girlfriend showed up the day the hurricane hit.”
“There’s a parable,” Mrs. Mather said, patting Japhet on the head as her youngest son wandered blearily into the kitchen. Hunting for a midnight snack, no doubt; Ham said the kid had been on a serious growth spurt lately. Mrs. Mather shook her head. “Miss Gardner—she told me to call her Sloane, but I haven’t gotten used to that yet—Miss Gardner came back all dressed up for Mardi Gras, just like you said, Josh. The sheriff ’bout liked to arrest her, though we don’t know why. There’s revellers in the Bishop’s Palace, too. Give me quite a turn, the first time I wandered up to the second floor. But Miss Gardner’s got everyone behaving themselves. Her mother’s daughter, I guess.”
“They got a feller there got stilts instead of legs,” Japhet said. “And a woman with feathers on her face that wears dresses that show her”—he glanced at his mother—“knees.”