“Them with houses to go back to headed out the next day,” Mrs. Mather continued, “but there’s plenty as had no place to go.”
Ham squeezed into the kitchen, followed by his father. “The Recluse is dead. Shot by the sheriff, the story goes.”
“Good thing, too,” Jim Mather said. “Elsewise we’d have lost your mom by now.”
Ham blinked. Alice Mather colored. “It’s nothing,” she said.
“Angeling!” Japhet said. He scratched his belly, nodded and grinned. “I seen her myself. Two days ago this Vietnamese comes off a houseboat, sicker than a dog. Mom starts talking, he talks back, they git along—only she’s talking English, he’s hearing Vietcong! He’s jibbering away, Mom’s hearing regular American.”
“What you call your speaking in tongues,” Ham’s daddy explained.
Alice Mather shook her head, blushing furiously. “Well, here we are gossiping, while you boys must be starved half to death. Let’s get you some eats.” She began to move busily about the kitchen, not meeting anybody’s eyes.
“Good Lord almighty,” Ham breathed.
Mr. Mather shook his head. He was still smiling at his boy’s return, but Josh could see the worry returning to the deep seams and creases of his face. “We’re in for some heavy weather, with Miss Odessa gone. What this town will look like in ten years, I don’t care to guess.”
“The Lord will provide,” Alice said. And damned if there wasn’t a kind of power in her simple voice. Josh could feel her certainty enter him and calm him, like oil poured on turbulent waters.
“Amen,” Ham said, and then he added, “I could eat a good-sized buck down to the antlers. Josh owes us, Mom. What’s he got in the way of grub?”
Joshua’s pantry was as full as it had been when he left. Maybe fuller. “We tried to eat our own food, best we could,” Mrs. Mather said. “Dad’s been meaning to get our place fixed up so we could move back, but there’s been so much work to do for those worse off. Days of going through the rubble to save the quick and burn the dead. But now you’re back, we’ll get home first thing tomorrow.”
“No, please, stay as long as you like,” Josh blurted. The Mathers looked at him in surprise. “It, this hasn’t been the luckiest house.” he stammered. “I’m so glad, after everything—it means so much to me that you could be here, safe, when the storm hit. It means the world to me.”
“We were pretty tickled about it, too,” Jim Mather said drily.
After a week of scrounging for seaweed and clams, the pantry was a dizzying Pandora’s box of smells: molasses, vinegar, cheap rice wine for cooking, honey, hot sauce, canisters of chili powder and dried mint leaves and pecans, and of course jams and jellies made from mustang grapes, blackberries, mint and dewberries and choke-cherries, and pickled peppers and chowchow and garlic spread. On the kitchen cabinets sat a line of large ceramic canisters: the biggest one full of rice, another for rice flour, then acorn flour (Josh had found he could get some use out of the ubiquitous live-oak acorns if he washed and leached the flour to take the bitterness out). Then came a big jar for prepared sugar and a smaller bowl always filled with fresh sticks of sugarcane. Spices on a rack next to the stove: salt and crushed dried chili, thyme and sage.
He had nothing compared to the Fords and the Dentons, but for the first time Josh realized how much richer he was than most of his patients. Mortified, he remembered himself in court, ridiculing the jam Jezebel MacReady had brought him in payment. And he had been surprised when no one spoke up for him. He lost the thread of Mrs. Mather’s talk in a hot blush of shame.
Over a hasty meal of rice and shrimp with hot sauce—heaven!—Josh and Ham slowly caught up with the Galveston news in a babble of Matherese. The hurricane hadn’t done nearly the damage of the Big Blow; the Island had been raised ten feet since then, and the Seawall had held back the tide—almost. Still, there had been plenty killed outright; something between two hundred and a thousand, depending on who you believed. Most of the killing had been done by tornadoes spun off the storm: at least six twisters were known to have touched down on the Island. A few people had drowned, and several had been killed by wind-driven debris. Old Katie Heinrich, whose arthritis Josh had been treating for years with hot pepper rubs and willow bark aspirin, had climbed on top of her house to escape from drowning, only to be picked off by lightning.
Strangest of all had been the end of Mardi Gras, when Galveston woke up the morning after the storm to find revellers drowned in doorways or huddled among the refugees in the big Broadway mansions. “Not for long, though,” Jim Mather said. “Sheriff Denton, he started rounding them up. Wanted them off the Island and out of the way, by any means. A lot of folks have been shooting them on sight. I’ve been saving my bullets until one gives me trouble, myself. Most of ’em ran out of town, or else they’re hiding up in the Bishop’s Palace with Sloane Gardner and Randall Denton.”
“Mrs. Mather mentioned that before,” Josh said. “Do you mean to tell me Randall Denton has turned philanthropist?”
“More like a gentleman hostage,” Alice said. “Miss Gardner’s got him there, just in case the other Dentons decide to storm the house and gun down all her revellers. She’s got a soft spot for them.”
“There’s a curfew every night,” Rachel’s husband Ben said. “Sundown to sunup. Good thing you weren’t caught coming last night, or they’d have throwed you in jail all over again.”
After that the news got worse. Now sickness was the problem. Diarrhea was bad and getting worse—dysentery if we’re lucky, Josh thought, and cholera if we aren’t. There wasn’t enough clean water to go around. Many of the cisterns had been polluted by salt water, and too many buckets and barrels aboveground had been broken or blown away by the wind. Still, there had been enough rain that the first couple of days everyone had been able to find something to drink. Better yet, the thirty-six inch pipe under the Bay that brought the Island’s water from the mainland had survived the storm intact. Unfortunately, the pumping station had not. Ham shook his head, shoveling down food. He was just the sort of man who could have helped a lot in this fix.
As for Josh, the Mathers said he had been sorely missed. “It’s not that the other doctors won’t help,” Rachel said. “But they like to stick with the old stuff—”
“The real medicine,” Josh said dourly.
“Yeah. And there’s not much of it left. I know they want to use it for the worst off…”
Big Jim Mather shook his head. “A rich feller who’s got water and good food and a place to sleep, he gets over a scrape or a cough. But folks out here, they just get worse and worse.”
“We’re taking the sick in at the Bishop’s Palace,” Mrs. Mather said. And speaking in tongues, apparently! Josh thought, taken all over again with the marvel of it. “But we could dearly use a doctor, Joshua.”
“Here’s your chance,” Ham said between mouthfuls. “Those other doctors need you. I bet you could get into the Krewe of Togetherness now. They’re that short staffed, and there’s good money to be made looking after Dentons and Fords.”
Josh felt a slow burn of shame spreading across his face. “That’s not fair.”
Alice frowned. “Is there something going on between you two?”
“Not anymore,” Ham said.
He bent noisily to his food. The other Mathers looked first at Josh, and then away, embarrassed. A silence seemed to spread out from him, until nobody was talking. Only the clink and clatter of Ham’s fork broke the quiet. Many times, looking at Sloane Gardner or seeing the fine folk of Galveston filing into Jim Ford’s place, Josh had felt like a beggar, staring through a window at a party inside he could never join. Now he felt that way again, only this time it was the warmth and cheer of the Mather household that had been suddenly withdrawn.
Him caught with his face pressed up to the window, staring in.
“Ham?” Alice Mather said.
“Good eats. Mom. Goddamn, I needed this.”
Stiffly, Joshua said, ?
??Mrs. Mather, I’ll go to the Bishop’s Palace first thing tomorrow.”
Alice Mather nodded, still glancing, troubled, between Josh and her son. “Sloane will be so pleased!” Her eyes widened and she clapped a hand over her mouth. “There. I called her Sloane. We’re mingling in high society now, Jim,” she said, with a merry glance at her husband.
Josh said, “Mrs. Mather, in my opinion, you are the highest society on this Island.” He figured there was no way for her to know he had never been more serious in his life. Ham’s mother called him a rascal and slapped him lightly on the arm. It was as if her touch came from a thousand miles away. He had lost the right to feel it.
Chapter Eighteen
BAPTISM
DESPITE all Joshua’s polite protests, Rachel and Ben had given him back his bed, making up pallets for themselves on the kitchen floor. Somehow the moment Josh woke in his small dark room he knew that they and the rest of the Mathers were deeply, dreamlessly asleep. Someone was shaking his shoulder. The freezing touch stung his skin and raised goose bumps along his back.
He twisted away from the ice-cold hand and sat bolt upright. A rich woman in a white dress was standing beside his bed. “Are you s-sick?” Josh stammered.
She regarded him, amused. “No, Mr. Cane. I’m dead.”
A ghost. The hairs on Joshua’s wrist and neck prickled and rose. The ghost’s voice had the masterful confidence that only money can bestow. Even in the darkness of his room her skin glowed the dead white of a cut mushroom. She had a strong, ugly face, with a wide, expressive mouth. “Who are you?” he said.
“You have to ask? Ou sont les neiges d’antan indeed. There was a time I would have been known in this town,” the ghost said. She gave him an odd smile and curtseyed. Her dress was as white as her skin, a fantastically ornate and old-fashioned collection of ruffles and lace. She might have been dead a hundred years. “Elizabeth Brown, at your service.”
“Miss Bettie,” Josh whispered. He started to hope he was still asleep, then gave it up. Miss Bettie was not a dream. She was real. More real than he was himself, somehow. Her cold presence was so certain it made his own life seem fragile and inconstant, a candle flame flickering in the wind.
Miss Bettie held out a businesslike hand. “So you see, there’s nothing you can do for me, Mr. Cane. But there is someone else who needs your help. Come with me, and hop to it, sir!” She pulled him out of bed, her fingers like vines of frost around his forearm. There was not a creak from the rickety floorboards or a rustle in the curtains as she paced soundlessly from the room.
Josh rummaged in his closet for a pair of pants, stopping only to rub the coldness out of his forearm. Miss Bettie. The most famous ghost on the Island, the woman who had made Ashton Villa the center of Galveston society a century before the Flood. Died of—Lou Gehrig’s disease, come to think of it, just like Jane Gardner. What were the odds of that? Josh pulled on his pants with a dour smile. Well, he had finally achieved one of his aspirations: He was moving in the highest possible circle of Galveston society, a personal acquaintance of its undisputed queen. Even dead, Miss Bettie was incontestably fashionable.
He shrugged on a shirt and hurried downstairs, yawning. Miss Bettie was waiting for him in the front room. Mathers lay about the house like beached manatees, whiffling and snoring. They slept as if enchanted, oblivious to Joshua’s passage. He followed Miss Bettie outside into the warm Galveston night. As unbearable as the day’s heat had been, at night the South Texas air was soft as the flesh of flowers. Galveston lay sleeping. It was curiously private outside: No souls moved through the streets still choked with rubble and debris. If any roosters survived, they had not yet begun to wake and announce the dawn.
“Ma’am, where are we going?”
“Not far.”
“Not your normal part of town,” Josh said, gesturing around at the dilapidated bungalows and run-down tract houses of his neighborhood.
Miss Bettie gave him an admonitory look. “It is all my town, Mr. Cane.”
Josh kept from rolling his eyes. The rich were always high-handed, apparently. Even the dead ones. He followed the shimmer of her white dress along the street. Odd that Miss Bettie should be abroad, and so clearly visible, even to him. He had never shown much aptitude for magic. Thank God, or the Recluse would have packed him off to Krewes for sure. But then, the Recluse was dead, wasn’t she? Now spirits and revellers walked the street in broad daylight, at least if you believed the Mathers. He looked at the ghost ahead of him. So it began: the last long slide from civilization into total barbarity, into a world of dreams and ghosts no different from the Middle Ages. By the end of his life they’d probably be living in caves and hunting deer with clubs. Though Miss Bettie was a ghost, a miracle, she had been born in the great rational past. It was George and Martha who were the future.
They walked through the streets that he had hated and feared when he first came here to live, until Ham had given the neighborhood to him, carelessly generous. Inside the storm-beaten little houses slept the Mathers’ friends and neighbors, that Josh had never deigned to make his own. But now he had let Ham get away, somehow, and for the first time since moving here as a boy of ten, he was among strangers again, and utterly alone.
Miss Bettie led him six blocks to Widow Tucker’s house. Billy Tucker’s motorcycle lay on the front lawn. Billy kept his mother’s yard covered in car parts, usually, but the hurricane had washed some away, and thrown the rotten skeleton of a Buick Regal on her porch. The storm had smashed in all her front windows; jags and nails of glass still hung loosely from the frames, glinting. Someone had a lamp lit inside. Josh could hear a child whining as he started up the steps. Exhausted as he was, it was hard for Josh to put on his calm, clinical air. He struggled into it as he followed Miss Bettie up the walk.
The ghost stepped aside and waved him to the door. He knocked. The kid inside the house yelped. Josh knocked again. “Mrs. Tucker?”
“Is that the doctor?”
“Billy! Quiet.” A woman’s voice, hissing. Gina, Billy’s wife. Twenty-six or -seven now, big hips. Josh hadn’t delivered her kids, but every few months they came down with head lice and he would sell her a packet of louse ointment he made from sage and creosote bush. Josh didn’t have a lot of faith in the ointment, but it gave him an excuse to lend out one of his three steel-toothed lice combs.
Locks turned. The door opened an inch, still held by a brass chain. Billy looked out. “Josh Cane! Good Christ almighty,” he whispered. “You’re dead.”
“Not yet.”
Billy rubbed his face. His eyes were bloodshot and it didn’t look as if he had shaved since the hurricane. “The ghost brung you, didn’t she?”
“Lucky for you,” Miss Bettie said tartly. She hopped up on the hood of the Buick beached on Mrs. Tucker’s porch and sat there, swinging her feet, her gorgeous white evening gown faintly glowing in the darkness.
Josh stuck his left hand slowly through the crack of the door. “Feel me. Still warm,” he said.
Billy touched Josh’s fingers, lightly, then felt his palm. “All right.” He opened the door. “Hope to God Ham made it back.”
“He did.”
“Well, that’s something, then.”
Billy Tucker was a short, stocky fireplug of a man who cut cars for a living, swapping pieces from one motor to another, trying to keep the dwindling supply of generators in the ghetto running. Josh always noticed his hands, how thick the stubby fingers were, permanently black around the nails and crisscrossed with bumpy white scars from hacksaw cuts and torn sheet metal and battery acid burns. He smelled bad, of oil and mud and sweat.
A querulous child was lying on the couch.
Billy headed into the dingy interior of his mother’s house, walking with the bowlegged sway of a man who had gone hungry too often as a child. “It’s Joe,” he murmured.
“Your mother asleep?” Josh asked quietly, following.
“Mum’s dead. Hurricane got her.”
W
hy not just scrape the fucking Island clean? Sure, maybe a few of the big houses will still be left standing, but at least you’ve killed off the riffraff. Another slow burn of shame crept across Joshua’s face. He kept his head down where the Tuckers couldn’t see it so well, grateful for the dim light.
Billy’s wife Gina was kneeling on the floor by the couch where her ten-year-old son lay, his head jerking restlessly back and forth. The couch stank of mildew and seawater. Billy squatted down and put his hand on the boy’s arm. Joe flinched and cried, pulling away. “He can’t stand any noise at all,” Gina whispered. She sat with her hands on her knees, staring at her son, tight-lipped. A Coleman lantern with a repatched wick glowed dimly on an end table beside the couch. Shadows pooled and drained around Gina’s eyes as she rocked back and forth, looking at her boy.
“Turn off the lamp,” Joe whined. He had his mother’s thin face. “Turn it off!”
“We’re keeping the damn lamp on so the doctor can see, Joe Daniel.”
“Gina,” Billy said.
“You ain’t been with him for the last six hours. You ain’t listened while he—” She closed her mouth. Still rocking.
“I know it,” Billy said. He didn’t try to touch her.
Joe jerked his head away from the dull glow of the lantern. He whined again and his head came back, as if he couldn’t bear the rasp of the upholstery against his cheek. “The boy’s feeling everything,” Billy said. Josh felt the flesh on his back grow cold and begin to creep as Miss Bettie walked up behind them. Billy jerked his thumb at the ghost. “He was the first to see her.”
Hypersensitive. Josh forced himself to ignore the little shock of horror that ran down into his belly.
He tried gently to feel Joe’s forehead. The boy jerked away from his touch. Gina grabbed Joe’s face and held it still. He thrashed and screamed, high-pitched shrieks. For all his struggling he didn’t have much strength. His parents had little difficulty holding him still. Josh tried to let the screams bounce off his imaginary doctor’s coat and examined the boy. Not much fever, if any. Maybe a degree. He laid his fingers on Joe’s neck and felt the pulse racing under a paper-thin layer of skin. He pulled Joe’s eyelids open. His pupils were widely dilated. Josh sat back and signaled the parents to let go of the boy. Then he retreated to the hallway where he could talk to them without causing Joe so much distress.