Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [39]
Butterflies of flame drifted through the sky. One moment the air was hot with radiated heat, the next, bitterly cold from the fierce north wind. A neighbor’s house caught fire. Voelker climbed to his roof with a garden hose. Everyone else began hauling things out of the house. Louisa placed her trousseau in a trunk, which wound up on the sidewalk. The house caught fire. Trees caught fire. The trunk caught fire. Even Louisa’s coat caught fire.
That night half of Galveston burned to the ground, and with it Louisa’s trousseau—but, luckily, not her dress.
August and Louisa married on schedule. Even disaster could not dampen their spirits. “I can’t imagine anybody happier than we were at that time,” she recalled. “It took so very little to make us happy and contented.”
During one of their many walks, they spotted a small white house for rent at 32nd and Broadway, and leased it the next day. It had a front porch, back porch, dining room, kitchen, bedroom, and a picket fence that surrounded the yard. Louisa threw herself into fixing it up. She bought a bed with a red canopy. She put up cream curtains with red tiebacks and made a red-and-white bedspread. She bought a large rug, lace curtains, and a hanging lamp with prisms and colored glass. She made a drape to cover a window in the living room that opened on the kitchen, and August decorated one side with a painting of flowers, fruit, and cupids. Soon the house was awash in rich colors touched with flowers and gold. “We felt as if we had heaven on earth.”
Louisa sewed to raise extra cash, and took in more and more work. Was it too much work, she wondered forever after—too much for a woman pregnant with her first child?
Peter August was born April 8, 1888, months too soon. “He was just like a little doll and his little hand would lay in my hand.” Her doctor told her to nurse the baby every two hours, but she could not. She was sick and weak and Peter August refused to nurse. “I did not have any experience, maybe he could have been saved if I had Mother near me.”
Her son lived seventeen days.
For the funeral, Mrs. Voelker placed tiny white rosebuds over Peter’s body and one rose in his hand. Louisa was too sick to accompany her baby to the cemetery. She watched as August placed the boy in a tiny white coffin and carried him to a carriage parked out front. It was days before Louisa could go to the cemetery. “When I came the first time they had his full name laid out with little white shells, and planted violets, and they were growing, for they came every day and watered them.” August ordered the construction of a small wooden cross, then painted it himself. With ever so much care he painted his son’s name and the dates of his life on the cross-spar, in gold letters.
“Now we had a place to go,” Louisa remembered, many many years later. “It was our first sorrow.”
She could not imagine loving her husband more.
Another child followed, “our little Helen,” born fifteen months later. Louisa was fiercely proud and thought the child the most beautiful creature on earth, although in fact the baby was quite plump. “I can’t see any nose,” August teased. Louisa was furious. At night she placed Helen in a baby buggy under a big, loosely draped mosquito net. “She looked like a little fat angel.”
Two years later, another baby arrived, this one August Otto. The couple’s landlady, a Mrs. Carville, came to visit the new baby, and saw for the first time all that Louisa and August had done with the house. She promptly raised the rent. August was irate.
They moved. Then moved again, had another baby—Atlanta Anna, or simply “Lanta”—and moved again. One thing after another forced them to leave houses into which Louisa had poured her soul. But the sixth house made it all seem worth it. “We found a very nice small two-story at such a reasonable price, that I could hardly believe