Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [84]
He awoke to lions. Rain came like shrapnel. He was afloat, his chest caught between two large timbers. He coughed water. He sensed burden. There was something he had to do. It was like waking to a child’s cry in the night. He sensed absence.
It came to him abruptly that he was now alone.
THE BEACH
A Light in the Window
THE SCREAM HAD been shocking enough. What Louise Hopkins saw next caused her heart to leap halfway from her body.
Her sister, Lois, red-faced from the great energy she stuffed into that scream, pointed furiously at the place where the east wall joined the ceiling. At first Louise did not understand, but as she watched, she saw the wall begin to breathe. With each gust of wind, the wall moved out from the house until Louise could see the sky; then the wall wheezed back into position. There was a moon outside. Louise saw clouds rushing by overhead.
Louise looked at her mother. Mrs. Hopkins alone seemed not to be surprised. Apparently, she had been watching all along, but had not wanted to frighten her children any more than they already were.
It was time to leave, Mrs. Hopkins resolved. The house across the way, owned by the Dau family, looked sturdy, and there was a light inside. They would go there. Mrs. Hopkins worked out a plan. They would use a mattress as a raft. The Hopkins boys, both strong swimmers, would pull it across the street with Mrs. Hopkins, Lois, and Louise aboard. Mrs. Hopkins pulled sheets from the bed and tore them into strips, which she tied around her waist and the waists of her girls.
They assembled behind the big double front door, poised to exit. Every time the east wall and ceiling parted, Mrs. Hopkins would cry, “Let’s go now.”
But in the next instant the ceiling would settle, and Lois would shout, “Wait.”
They could not muster the courage to cross. Water flowed wildly down the street. Bursts of spindrift erupted from the surface as missiles of slate and timber hissed back to earth.
The light across the way was irresistible. It offered safety, comfort, and company. “It doesn’t seem so now,” Louise said, “but there was such a consolation to know that somebody was still alive.”
But this light, this beacon of comfort, began to move. They saw it dance from room to room. It moved toward the front door. They saw Mr. Dau carry the lantern out his front door and down his steps.
Leaving—the man was leaving. Like a ship captain ignoring a lifeboat adrift.
To Louise and her family it was as if hope itself had just departed.
THREE MILES DOWN the beach, the big St. Mary’s Orphanage with ninety-three children inside was under siege. It was a fortress of brick and stone that rose straight out of the grass just north of the tide line, a lonely Gibraltar shrouded most evenings in blue mist. Now waves crashed against its second story. Anyone watching from outside would have seen the lights of candles and lanterns move from room to room toward the back of the orphanage as the frontmost portions of the building collapsed into the sea like icebergs calved from a glacier.
The ten sisters who ran the place herded all ninety-three children into the chapel. Sister M. Camillus Tracy, thirty-one years old, the mother superior, ordered the other sisters to tie lengths of clothesline to the youngest children, then tie one end around their waists. They formed chains of six to eight children each, roped