Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [83]
The house began to move. The wind lifted the roof, then dropped it. Falling wreckage pinned Ruby’s mother, but Anthony Credo managed to pull her free. She bled heavily from head lacerations. Credo tore strips of cloth from her clothes to make bandages.
All this occurred in darkness.
The house eased from its foundation, slid through a shallow westward arc, then began to float. Credo gathered his family and ordered everyone out the dormer windows. The Goldmans declined to leave.
“When our house left the ground, we grabbed at anything washing by, as Papa had instructed us to do, but it was all you could do to stay on a piece of wood,” Ruby said.
Waves broke upon the family and scattered them. Credo herded them together again. The cycle repeated itself.
In darkness.
The sea pushed the family north, everyone alive, everyone more or less intact, although Ruby’s mother looked like a soldier wounded in the Spanish-American War.
They drifted. Credo shouted orders. Between waves, he kicked himself up from the water as high as he could, to count his family and keep anyone from straying. One wave drove a telegraph pole into the back of Raymond’s head. It knocked him out and dug a severe gash in his scalp. Even in the darkness, Anthony Credo could tell the fluid pouring off his son’s head was blood. Credo held Raymond with one arm and kept himself afloat with his other, struggling to hold Raymond’s head out of the water and still keep track of the rest of his family.
Credo was tired. He believed his son dead, or nearly so. Several times he considered letting Raymond go. Mrs. Credo would not let him. She was not ready. She still had hope.
The storm was more intense than ever, but for a time the Credos saw a full moon behind thin clouds. An inverted roof floated past. Credo ordered everyone aboard. One daughter, Florence, helped him pull Raymond into the roof. Credo went back into the water. He did not want to risk tipping the raft. Mrs. Credo held Raymond close.
At first the roof proved an effective lifeboat, but soon it began to break apart. Credo watched for something better. An upended porch floated near. It looked sturdier than the roof. Credo shouted for everyone to abandon the roof and climb onto the porch.
Ruby’s elder sisters Queeny, Vivian, and Ethel sat together, holding tight to one another’s clothing. The porch was so stable, some of the children fell asleep. “We could lie back on these sections,” Ruby said. “They were well-made, with no jagged nails or splinters to gash our bodies as we were tossed about.”
Everyone relaxed. Raymond still did not move, but there was hope, now. The family was together. They would find Raymond a doctor. Everything would be all right. “We floated this way for an hour,” Ruby said. “Then a piece of timber blown up by a wave struck my three sisters a terrific blow, knocking Vivian into the water and under heavy debris.”
Vivian did not surface. The porch sailed on. The moon disappeared and lightning flared, the first lightning anyone could recall seeing. Big barrels of thunder rolled among the waves, and made the night even more terrifying. To Ruby, the rain was a particular torment. It “felt like bullets.”
Ruby’s sister Pearl was sitting peacefully upon the raft when a jagged spike of wood blew through her arm, just below her elbow. She screamed. Her mother held Pearl tight as Anthony Credo pulled the spike from her arm. Pearl writhed in utter agony. Credo applied pressure until the bleeding slowed, then bandaged it as best he could.
The porch beached itself against a reef of debris twelve feet high, near an intact house. Ruby and her family picked their way over the wreckage and climbed inside. Anthony Credo carried Raymond on his back.
Credo tallied the family’s casualties: Vivian dead; Raymond clearly dying; Pearl hurt and now at grave risk of infection, fever, amputation, even death.
An unbearable list, but in fact it understated the true extent of the family’s loss.
25TH AND Q
What Isaac Did
WHEN THE TRESTLE