Oleander City (eBook)

Hester

september 8, 1900

galveston, texas

The Sisters of the Incarnate Word decided to tie the girls together with a length of clothesline.

When they filed into the kitchen for tea that afternoon the sky outside the rattling windows was churning with lashing rain. The girls huddled together at the long tables with their bread and butter, watching sinuous columns of red ants winding up the plaster walls. Then the front door came off the hinges and brown water gushed in over the threshold and swirled around their ankles so the sisters moved everyone to the second floor. They tied the girls together in long lines with one of the sisters on each end so that no one would be swept away. There were ninety-three girls at the St. Mary’s Orphan Asylum, and nearly as many young boys in the boys’ wing next door.

Sister Henrietta stood in the stairwell watching the murky flood that roiled through the bottom floor. She looked back over her shoulder at the lines of children linked together by the white cord.

Girls! Listen to me now. Remember your faith!

Sister Lucy struggled to loop the cord around Hester, the last child in line—a tiny girl with a sullen face and flaxen hair.

Hester! Please hold still!

Hester ducked, again slipping her head out from under the loop of rope, and Sister Lucy said a word under her breath that Hester had never heard before. Sister Lucy had her other arm clamped around Little Cora, the three-year-old that Hester shared a bed with. All afternoon, the sisters led the girls in hymns to keep them calm, and when Sister Margaret started another chorus of their favorite, “Queen of the Waves,” Little Cora’s small tremulous voice joined the others:

The building groaned in the shrieking wind and Hester looked into Little Cora’s dark eyes then twisted free from Sister Lucy’s grasp. The next moment the floor shuddered as the foundations shifted, beams snapping with the sound of cannon fire, and the girls and the sisters were thrown to the floor. Hester got to her hands and knees as a fishing trawler passed close by the window, spinning down the street like some kind of impossible monstrous toy, the bow smashing through the second-story windows of the mercantile exchange across the way.

Pray with me, girls! Sister Henrietta screamed. Pray for absolution!

The lines of girls collapsed into each other while the sisters tried to gather around them in a protective ring. The building lurched again, the floor tilting, and it seemed to Hester the orphanage was bobbing like a cake of soap in the bathtub. The walls bowed and flexed, plaster cracking with the strain, and then the windows exploded inward in a heavy gush of glass and water and all went dark. Hester crawled against the steep incline of the floor, jamming her fingernails in the cracks between floorboards, moving toward a gray patch of light above her. Stretching out a hand, she caught the doorframe to Sister Henrietta’s study, pulling herself up as a desk, chairs, and books tumbled past. She kept climbing up toward the window on the side of the house. We are sideways, she thought. The orphanage is rolling over!

My girls! Sister Henrietta screamed in the darkness below. If this is our end let us meet our Lord in glory!

There was a terrible roaring sound and the building shuddered as half of it was torn away in the flood. Hester pulled herself up through the window and onto the side of the house. Clouds laced with flashing webs of lightning roiled just above her head and the cold rain made her gasp for air. The orphanage was on the far western side of the city, just a block from the beach, and looking east Hester saw the city of Galveston swaying and twisting as the ocean coursed through it, ripping buildings off foundations, tearing them apart. She watched houses, apartments, shops, schools, and churches disintegrate in the flood; boats, wagons, sheds, barrels, light poles, and entire trees flowing in a mad tumult down the street. Where the boys’ wing of the orphanage once stood was now a swirling maelstrom of shattered material. A woman stretched flat on her back on a delivery wagon came spinning past, her mouth open in a soundless scream. A section of roof rushed by with a half dozen people clinging to the exposed rafters. Clouds of splintered wood fired through the air at incredible velocities and Hester curled up, covering her head with her arms.

Moments later, the remaining structure of the orphanage fell apart and Hester rode a slab of clapboard siding into the rushing water. Powerful currents and battering underwater wreckage tore at her body and shredded her clothes but Hester clung to the boards until they surged back to the surface. She was vibrating from the shock and cold and all she could think was that this was surely the end of all things. She adjusted her grip on the boards, her hands and fingers numb and stiffened into claws. It must be over soon. Please, God, let this be the end. But she did not let go; the roar of wind and water filled her ears as her eyes closed and she drifted into darkness.

Hester was jarred awake when her raft of boards collided with a vast logjam of drowning longhorn cattle—hundreds of them in a mad panic, their curved horns clacking against each other as they arched their necks, bellowing in anguish. Amid the cows she saw a man with a small boy on his shoulders, trying to push a woman into the limbs of a pecan tree. As soon as she found a hold he let her go, and at that moment the logjam of cattle broke loose and they were carried away from the tree. When Hester’s raft of boards bumped along nearby, the man dragged himself and the boy onto it. They had been badly slashed by cattle horns and the man’s face was covered with blood. The boy called out for his mother, now a distant silhouette waving from the branches of the tree until she disappeared in a rush of white water. They were sucked along with the mass of dying cattle into a vicious rapid that funneled them through the mangled wharfs along the bay, several times pulling them fully under as if some petulant watery hand had plucked at the raft from below. Hester clung to the boards, pressing her forehead to the planks as the cold rain rattled down. Why won’t this end? she thought. How long can it go on?

They were pushed into calmer water and the man flopped on his back, coughing and retching. The little boy was gone. The man sat up and looked around, spotting Hester on the other end of the boards. He wiped the blood out of his eyes and stared at her for a moment without comprehension. She was used to a baffled expression when people really looked at her for the first time. Hester was six years old but looked years younger, her growth stunted from malnutrition as an infant. When she arrived at the orphanage they thought she was a newborn, until she took a bottle and bit down on the nipple with a complete set of teeth.

Then suddenly the sky was lightening, the winds stalling out and she could hear the crunching, rending sounds of the city being ground apart. Above their heads, the stars emerged so quickly that Hester wasn’t sure if it was real. Around the edge of this quiet circle in the sky, like a lens into some other world, the storm still raged. The man turned his back to her and they sat silently for a few moments. Hester opened her mouth to say something but the words caught in her throat. She swallowed and tried again, but before she could make a sound, the man slipped off the boards and disappeared under the dark water.

In the morning, Hester found herself on the sandy banks of Offatts Bayou, a couple of miles west of the city. The bayou was clogged with splintered wood pilings, smashed boats, and other debris. She was naked and covered in insect bites, scrapes, and lacerations from exposed nails, angry red furrows in her puckered skin that did not bleed but itched terribly. Her lips were swollen and blistered and the skin on her hands and feet was gray and spongy. The landscape to the east toward the city was a rolling tableau of destruction, water-molded formations of wreckage and muck, so many buildings wiped away that the bell tower of St. Patrick’s Church a couple of miles away stood alone like a broken finger. Thin trails of smoke crept skyward, bleeding into low dark clouds.

Hester began to encounter bodies immediately. Mute forms with awestruck expressions, twisted into horrible shapes amid the wreckage. She walked through a grove of pale elm trees with a dozen bodies dangling from the branches. Clouds of mosquitoes tormented as she slogged through brackish water and black mud. It was as if she had passed over into the sinister hellscapes that the sisters spoke of in their sermons. It occurred to her then that she must have died sometime during the night.

On her way back to the city, she found a dress half buried in the muck. Hester knelt and smoothed the fabric until she could see the color: robin’s-egg blue. A little doll was tied to the waist with a cord. The doll was made of feed sacking dyed a dark brown and stuffed with small seashells. Its eyes reminded her of Little Cora. She rinsed the dress in a puddle and shrugged it on, her body shaking with cold. It was too large and gathered about her ankles and wrists, but it was warm. Hester inspected the doll, fingering the small seashells inside until she stepped on something soft. Lifting her bare foot she saw the curled fingers and white palm of a small hand half buried in the mud. She backed away and ran through the flattened clumps of...