Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [90]
The generals in the Kendal Castle’s lifeboat found the going just as slow, just as bleak. “I am an old soldier,” General McKibben said later. “I have seen many battlefields, but let me tell you that since I rode across the bay the other night and helped the man at the boat to steer to keep clear of the floating bodies of dead women and little children, I have not slept one single moment.”
As the schooner approached Galveston, the scent of death became overpowering. At one point Sterett looked over the side and saw a dead woman staring back, her face lit by the moon. Some passengers climbed ashore, the rest, including Sterett and Monagan, decided to spend the night aboard the schooner. The captain sailed 150 yards back into the bay and anchored. It was a night, Monagan remembered, “of horrible sounds.”
At daybreak, the schooner sailed to the foot of 23rd Street, three blocks due north of Isaac Cline’s office. Sterett and Monagan believed themselves to be among the first outsiders to enter the city. They stopped a man hurrying by who told them thousands of people had been killed, so many that disposal crews known as dead gangs had begun burning bodies where they found them.
Sterett refused to believe it. “Surely the man must be mistaken,” he told Monagan. “It is always the rule to exaggerate these calamities and he is only repeating what some one has told him.”
The two men moved on into the city.
28TH AND P
Searching
ISAAC STEPPED OUTSIDE into a gorgeous dawn, the sky like shattered china. A fast breeze blew the clouds north and brought him the scent of the sea. The morning was cool and bright, bordered to the east by a cantaloupe sky. It was, he said, “a most beautiful day.”
In the new light, he saw that the house in which he and his daughters had found shelter was one of the few still standing. A sea of wreckage spread in every direction. Houses had disintegrated. He looked for landmarks and at first saw none, but as his mind adjusted to this new landscape he began to pick out the ruins of familiar structures. The big Bath Avenue Public School, which his children had attended, stood three blocks east, one wing crushed and exposing a large classroom whose floor now hung over the street at a forty-five-degree angle, with thirty-eight desks still anchored in place.
He guessed that the house was located at 28th and P, which put it about three blocks northwest of where his own home had stood, at 25th and Q. When he looked toward his neighborhood, he saw nothing. The pretty Neville house was gone. So was Dr. Young’s. His own lot had been scraped clean. And beyond that, where Murdoch’s and the Pagoda had stood, he saw only open sky.
Behind him, the bells of the Ursuline convent rang out to summon parishioners to mass. He climbed a mound of debris. The convent, three blocks north, was still standing, but now it looked huge and strange, a feudal castle over a moor of broken wood. The bells were reassuring. With so few houses to absorb the sound, they rang with far greater clarity.
In the wreckage, he saw striped dresses, black suits, black hats, straw boaters. He looked more closely. Some of the clothing covered battered limbs. The dead lay camouflaged under bruises, mud, and shredded cloth, but having spotted one corpse, he now saw many.
Throughout Galveston, men and women stepped from their homes to find corpses at their doorsteps. Bodies lay everywhere. Parents ordered their children to stay inside. One hundred corpses hung from a grove of salt cedars at Heard’s Lane. Some had double-puncture wounds left by snakes. Forty-three bodies were lodged