Isaac's Storm - Erik Larson [92]
FAMILIES TALLIED THEIR losses. Anthony Credo learned he had lost nine members of his family. He found Vivian’s body near the place where the family’s raft had landed, and buried her. But he learned also that his daughter Irene had died along with her new baby and her two-year-old son. His daughter Minnie had disappeared, with her husband and their two boys. So had his eldest son, William, who had spent Saturday at his fiancée’s house. Raymond lay badly injured. Soon after Ruby Credo stepped outside on Sunday morning, she saw her first body: Mrs. Goldman. The woman still wore the clothing Ruby’s mother had given her when she and her son arrived drenched at the family’s house.
Judson Palmer lay in a nun’s cell within the Ursuline convent, dressed in a shirt and skirt given him by the sisters. The sisters gave refugees whatever dry clothes they could find. Throughout Saturday night, survivors turned gratefully toward a particularly solicitous—and tall—nun, only to find themselves staring into the stubbled face of a man in a nun’s habit.
Palmer drifted in that sad, empty place where hope and grief intertwine. Later a colleague, Wilber M. Lewis, state secretary of the YMCA, wrote to Palmer’s friends to tell them the tragic news. “Mrs. Palmer’s body was found and recognized the next day.… If Lee’s body was ever found it was beyond recognition.”
As for Palmer: “He was badly bruised by floating debris, but as far as can be seen was not injured internally. His clothes were torn completely off. His mental condition is the most serious now, but we hope for the best.”
An eerie peace settled over the city. People bore their losses quietly. John W. Harris was seven when the storm struck, but remembered vividly how the mayor himself paid his father, John junior, a visit on Sunday morning at their house on Tremont Street. One of the finest homes in the city, it had weathered the storm so well that the Harrises had no conception of the devastation elsewhere in town. They were eating breakfast when the mayor arrived. “John,” the mayor told the elder Harris, “your whole family is destroyed.”
Harris had lost his sisters and their families. Eleven men, women, and children. His son saw him cry for the very first time.
When Clara Barton arrived the next week, she found the silence striking. People moved as if dazed, she said; there was “an unnatural calmness that would astonish those who do not understand it.” People grieved, but without demonstration. “You will hear people talk without emotion of the loss of those nearest to them,” Father Kirwin said. “We are in that condition that we cannot feel.”
Everyone in Galveston experienced some degree of loss; the lucky ones suffered only material damage. Dr. Young had lost his home, but his family had gotten his message and was safe in San Antonio. The Hopkins family too survived, although at first Mrs. Hopkins seemed not to appreciate her good fortune. When the sun came up, she saw that her house, the family’s main source of income, had been destroyed. The kitchen, dining room, and two upstairs bedrooms had tumbled into the yard next door. Louise Hopkins would never forget the despair in her mother’s voice. “Oh God,” her mother said, “why couldn’t we all have gone with it.”
THE LOUISIANA SURVIVED the storm with its cargo badly shifted. Captain Halsey docked briefly in Key West so that his crew could reposition the load, then continued the voyage to New York, where the ship was met by reporters anxious to learn