Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [102]
Throughout September, bodies emerged from the wreckage at a rate of over one hundred per day. Two hundred seventy-three bodies came forth on September 19. The next day’s News speculated, “It is possible, but highly improbable, that the list of storm victims will aggregate 6000 souls.” As the days passed, identification became impossible, unless the dead happened to wear some clearly distinctive piece of jewelry or clothing.
Toward evening on September 30 a demolition gang assigned to help dismantle the spine of wreckage that still stretched from one end of the city to the other began working in the vicinity of 28th and Avenue P. They took on only a small portion at a time. To think in terms of the whole was simply too disheartening. They saw the world not in acres, but in cubic yards.
As they dug through the rubble the now-familiar scent of decomposition became stronger. None was surprised by this. The spine had proven from the start to be a rich seam of corpses.
The wall of a house had come to rest here. They disassembled it and stacked the reusable lumber and siding in a great pile. Underneath they found a dress tangled in the debris, and within the clothing, the remains of a woman. The woman wore a wedding ring, and a diamond engagement ring.
What happened next is unclear. It is possible something in the debris signaled to the men that the house had belonged to Dr. I. M. Cline, the weatherman, and that the men then dispatched someone to bring him to the scene. It is also possible Isaac was already there, waiting, having long ago considered the possibility that his wife’s body might have come to rest near where he and the children had floated to safety. By then Isaac would have established a routine that he followed every day, a scientific approach to the search that began with the News, and ended each evening with a tour of likely places where his wife might have lain. He probably justified it as good exercise.
Isaac recognized the ring. Something closed in his heart and a kind of peace rose within him, like a flush of embarrassment. “Even in death,” he wrote, years later, “she had traveled with us and near us through the storm.”
The work crew did not burn her body—further evidence that Isaac was present during or soon after its discovery. The body was transported to the city’s Lakeview Cemetery. On October 4, 1900, as the weather began to cool, Isaac and his daughters, and Joseph, gathered on the cemetery’s grounds, at Block 47, Lot E, ½ of 3, and watched as a coffin bearing Cora May Bellew Cline was lowered slowly into the earth.
Isaac kept the ring, had it enlarged, and wore it himself. It was this ring that gleamed like a beacon from his photographic portrait. He wore it also on December 31, 1900, when Galveston prepared to enter the twentieth century. The city looked new. Its streets were clear, the pyres gone. The civilized smoke of steamships now drifted over the city. And the glad scents were back, of coffee and fresh wood, and horses. Music rang from the restored Garten Verein, and from the banquet hall of the Tremont Hotel, and the dance parlor of the Artillery Club. Sad men made love that day in the house across the alley. Beer flowed everywhere, and there was laughter. Children ran along the beach as their parents followed, anxious as always about the sea. And then the rockets came, arcing over the black water of the Gulf in bursts of yellow, red, and gold. Isaac was there with his baby and Allie and Rosemary. Joseph was gone, in Puerto Rico. There was Judson Palmer, alone but among friends. There was Louisa, with August senior and junior and Helen and little Lanta. There was Mrs. Hopkins and her children, and Anthony Credo and his children, Raymond alive, Pearl’s arm nicely healed. Voices came next, Isaac’s tenor merging with August’s and a thousand other voices