Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [91]
Isaac first secured temporary care for his children—perhaps through a friend, or through his church—then made his way to the Levy Building. Blagden was gone. Isaac assessed the damage. Every window had been blown out. Debris was strewn throughout the office. Rain had warped the wood planks of the floor. He climbed to the roof and found it stripped clean of instruments. He surveyed the city. Paving blocks littered the streets. The wharf front was a tangle of masts and rigging, although the big grain elevator seemed little damaged. Steamships once tightly married to the wharf had disappeared. Far down the coast, where Isaac should have been able to see the barest outline of the St. Mary’s Orphanage, there was now just a long white arc of beach.
Wagons passed below, headed north. Limbs protruded from under canvas tarpaulins.
Isaac checked the city’s hospitals to see if they had survived, and whether anyone inside had seen his wife. The hospitals had weathered the storm well. He may have returned with his injured daughter. At the hospital he heard that a temporary morgue had been established on the north side of the Strand, between 21st and 22nd. He went there next.
The scent of putrefaction and human waste was at once sickening and heartbreaking. It made his loss seem more definite and filled him with sorrow. The warehouse was a large chamber with a ceiling supported at intervals by fifteen-foot iron pillars, between which the dead lay in rows that stretched from wall to wall. Men and women moved intently among the rows as if hunting bargains at a public market. Many bodies were uncovered, others lay under sheets and blankets, which survivors peeled back to expose the faces underneath. J. H. Hawley, an agent for the Great Northern Railroad, saw the faces of many friends. Under one he found the body of a Mrs. Wakelee, “with a faint smile on her lips.… her gray hair all matted and streaming in disordered confusion about her shoulders.” He saw his friends Walter Fisher and Richard Swain. Lacerations, bruises, and bloating distorted features and made it hard to tell people apart, even whether a man was black or white. The sun warmed the room, accelerating decomposition. “Odors arise,” Hawley said, “making it most unbearable.”
A photograph survives. It shows at least fifty bodies. In one row, two boys lie side by side. They could be twins. They wear matching shirts. One lies in the fetal position that young children often adopt when they sleep, but his neck appears to be broken. He looks upward over his right shoulder at an impossible angle. His brother watches with a frown. No one wears shoes; no one seems at peace. Many of the dead have the same expression, as if dreaming the same awful thing. Their brows are furrowed, their mouths perfect circles. They could be gasping.
Isaac, moving systematically from body to body, saw men and women he knew or at least recognized—perhaps even some of those who had taken shelter in his house. (Of the fifty, he would learn, only eighteen survived.) He looked for his wife and Bornkessell and the Nevilles, and perhaps Dr. Young. He found none.
There was hope, still, but Isaac was a scientist. Sunday he gave Cora’s name to the Galveston News as one of the dead. The newspaper came out later that day as a one-page handbill the size of a letter, consisting entirely of a list of people believed dead. Her name was there.
Even Isaac did not yet understand just how lethal the storm had been. For all he knew, the fifty bodies in the morgue represented the majority of those lost. That morning Father