Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [40]
But it was not. Something was wrong. Someone else apparently had poured a soul into this house, but this soul had not yet departed. Evenings, after Louisa had put the children to bed, she sat alone until about ten o’clock, the time when August usually returned from rehearsing the amateur musicals in which he sang (sang, perhaps, alongside Isaac Cline, another tenor). She would settle in the living room to sew or read, but always she was seized by the same strange feeling. “It always felt as if something was looking over my shoulder; when I looked around there wasn’t anything.”
One night August felt it too. “I was alone,” he said, “and still wasn’t alone; there was something creepy around me.”
They resolved to move yet again. “I was awfully disappointed,” Louisa said. “Everything was so pretty and I was tired of cleaning and fixing.”
They found another little two-story house, at 18th and O½, about ten blocks from Isaac’s house and only two and a half blocks from the beach.
That summer—the summer of 1900—little August disappeared. It was a Sunday afternoon. The children were out playing. Louisa called them in for dinner. Helen and Lanta came, but not August. They had dinner, and still August did not come, and Louisa and her husband began to worry. The beach had always been an anxiety for Louisa, as it was for most parents in Galveston’s beach neighorhoods. “I went east and August went west,” she wrote. She walked the sand until exhausted, but did not find the boy. When she turned the corner onto her street, she saw that a crowd of children had gathered on the sidewalk in front of her house. She knew the worst had happened. She wanted to run to the house, but could not. Her limbs felt so heavy. She could hardly move.
She saw no one on the first floor. She climbed to the second and there found her husband. She said nothing, asked nothing. Soon her husband told the story—how little August and a friend had wandered to the beach, and walked and walked without realizing the distance. The walk back had taken forever.
Louisa served her son his dinner. Then the rest of the family, including young August, set out for an evening stroll. Louisa stayed back for a little while, in the warm light of dusk. She cried. And when she was done, she too walked to the beach and caught up with her family. It was a lovely evening, the sea so peaceful and edged in the gold of the setting sun, the mist blending all the blues and golds and the black and white of the hundreds of people who strolled also along the beach, none aware that for a few moments that afternoon she believed her heart broken for all time.
On Saturday, September 1, August made that last payment on the piano. Next, he resolved, he would find a piano teacher for Helen.
“If we had known what the future had in store,” Louisa wrote, “we would not have had any pleasure in anything we did enjoy so.”
THE LEVY BUILDING
Isaac’s Map
AT THREE O’CLOCK in the morning, Tuesday, September 4, a lightning strike knocked out the incandescent-lamp dynamo at the Brush Electric Power plant in Galveston and cast the city’s public buildings into darkness. The blackout showed how quickly people had grown dependent on electric lights, how willingly they abandoned the bad old days of gas jets, lamp oil, and kerosene.
At the police station, officers scrambled to find some means of lighting the station and its jail cells. A witness found an eerie scene: “A large assortment of miscellaneous lamps and lanterns shed faint gleams of light that were distressing to behold.” The police had scavenged two calcium-carbide bicycle lights from the department’s two patrol bicycles. Two old “bull’s-eye” lamps dating to the 1870s “cast a flickering yellow ray of light within a radius of