Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [101]
By way of retribution, he asked permission to halt the bureau’s climate and crop service in Cuba and to move the headquarters of the West Indies hurricane network out of Havana. He also wanted authorization “not to issue hurricane warnings to any part of Cuba so long as the War Department permits the transmission over Government lines of irresponsible weather information.”
28TH AND P
The Ring
THERE WAS A point where families knew their missing members were gone for good, although different people reached that point at different times. Children reached it last of all. There were miracles still, like Anna Delz, sixteen years old, who had been washed to the mainland and mourned for dead until a week later she finally made her way back to Galveston. Stories like this were heartening, especially if you concentrated on the joy the newfound survivors brought to their families and friends, but they also were distressing, especially for parents who knew their spouses were dead but whose children saw each new miracle as a sign that their own mothers or fathers might also return.
Isaac knew Cora was dead. He knew it on a rational, scientific level. Even so, he needed to find her, lest a part of him always wonder where she was, and a very tiny part of him always wonder whether she was even dead. He needed to find her also for the sake of his children. They still believed their mother one day would walk through the door and scoop them into her arms. Little Esther was the most open about it, wondering aloud when her mama would come home. The eldest, Allie May, tried to act adult and maternal, but Isaac knew that on some level she too believed her mother would come back. The children prayed for this. At night he often woke to hear one or another of his daughters crying in her sleep. Sometimes they cried upon wakening. Freud said, “The dreams of young children are pure wish-fulfillments and are for that reason quite uninteresting compared with the dreams of adults. They raise no problems for solution.”
At the office, things quickly returned to normal. Isaac, Joseph, and John Blagden received commendations; Ernest Kuhnel, the deserter, was dropped from the rolls. New instruments arrived and the men returned to making their routine daily observations. Pyres burned everywhere. Work crews erected scores of new homes. The Rollfings found one and moved in. The scent of fresh-cut lumber diluted the scent of death. Cotton began flowing through the port, no doubt to Houston’s dismay. Squads of men hacked away at the immense spine of debris that had come to a halt on Avenue Q. What was so striking was the quiet. The men did not have jackhammers and chain saws, of course. Only axes, hammers, handsaws, and crowbars. They burned the wreck in segments, after salvaging intact sinks, lamps, stoves, coffeepots, pans, even commodes, figuring someone might need them. The Red Cross gave out food and clothing, but found much of its supply of donated clothing unusable, either too warm for the climate or too shabby, clearly the discards of distant souls who believed survivors were in no position to be picky. Someone donated a case of fancy women’s shoes, but all 144 shoes were for the left foot, samples once carried by a shoe-company traveler. Contributions slowed. Discord rose. Barton was accused of withholding clothing from Galveston’s destitute blacks, and of squandering money in payments to members of the Relief Committee. The Palmetto Post of Port Royal, South Carolina,