An image of Daddy came into my mind, of him
whacking Mama upside the head after coming in drunk. I wondered how he could
still keep drinking after he heard about Mama. He probably didn't know. That was
it, she didn't tell him. He'd have gotten worse.
"What're you doin'
out here anyway?" asked Della.
"I was going to see
the surf. I've only seen one hurricane surf before. Waves high as a
mountain!"
"What was you doin'
coming up this way?"
"Well," I
tried to think, "I thought I'd see how you all were doing, if you were
getting away."
"Daddy says
we have to get out of here as soon as we can!" she yelled above the
screeching branches around us. "The house is too close to the water."
The wind ripped through
the trees and lifted us both off our feet and up against a wall of blackberry
vines. We were thrown forward with another slap of the wind into the mud of the
trail. Everything around us was raging so violently that neither of us realized
we were bleeding from dozens of places where the thorns in the bush had gouged
into our skin. I looked at Della. Her legs and arms were covered with what
looked like crucifixion holes.
"Come
on!" I yelled. "This is getting worse." I was mostly afraid of a
tree getting pulled out by its roots and squashing us like two ants. We hurried
along the path which was now covered by torn branches of various sizes. We got
to the back yard and everybody in the house was looking out in our direction as
if they were stuck on the spot and we were the only ones they were waiting for.
But they weren't waiting for me, they were waiting for Gregory, and when Mrs.
Rupert saw Della had come back without him, she ran out, screaming, "Where
is he? Where's Gregory?" Donnie Rupert followed her from around the front.
"He went down that way!" Mrs. Rupert pointed toward the path. "I
know he did. He was going into the woods just like he always does."
"There were trees
across the path, Mama," Della said, wiping rain out of her eyes. "We
couldn't get through."
Donnie Rupert took hold of his wife. "Now
listen, Evie," he said. "You've got to get everybody away from here! I
got the truck stuck in the high water down by the dock. We've waited long
enough. Take everybody up the hill." Donnie and Evie Rupert's
six children all stood huddled together on the porch. None of them but Della was
over ten years old.
" Baily," Donnie went on, "can you go by the
road and get Elerie to come get us? In the meantime everybody can get going up
the road. I have to find my son!"
I'd have to tell him
about Gregory. I'd have to go with him to show him where Gregory was.
"I'm
going with you!" Evie cried.
"No! It's too
dangerous now!" Donnie shouted. "Go on! Everybody start walking. Go on
up the road now!"
Donnie looked out at the
ocean and over at the horizon. You could hardly see the sky for the debris
blowing in the air. We all stood there, soaked and looking like a picture of
immigrants. "All right," he said. "Get moving. Go on!"
"Donnie," Evie
Rupert cried, "I ain't goin' without my Gregory!"
"He's in the woods,
Evie. He'll be all right! Go now. You have to go now!"
"Come on,
Mama," Della said. She pulled at Evie's arm.
"I know Gregory,
Mrs. Rupert," I said. "We've played in the woods all our lives. I know
he'll find a place to be safe in there."
"I'm going to get
him now, Evie!" Donnie said. "Get everybody and run along the road.
Go!"
Evie Rupert stood there staring at the woods. Della took hold of her
and pulled her toward the road. The children followed in a huddle and they
worked their way along. It was more dangerous out on the road but it was safer
than staying here.
"Come on!" Della yelled to her sisters and
brothers. "Daddy says to go up the road." She got ahold of the girls,
Laurel and Elsbeth Ann, and yelled at me to get the twins. Everybody started
running up the hill.
"I'm going to
cut through the woods to get to Elerie!" Donnie yelled.
"What
about Gregory?!" I yelled back.
"I have to
take care of everybody else first! You'll be targets on the road!" He
disappeared running into the woods. I had picked the twins up off the porch and
got them to put their arms around my neck. They were afraid and knew to get
ahold, but they were twice as heavy with their diapers soaked with rain and they
slipped through my arms like heavy bags. I lifted one up and pulled her diaper
off, then did the same with the other, the boy.
"Come on, Baily!" I
heard Della from some distance now. "Come on!" I picked up one twin
and tried to keep a grip on her, but a moment later something hit me flat up
against the back and I lunged forward onto the ground and dropped the baby. I
looked over at what had hit me. It looked like the tar paper roof of the
smokehouse.
I picked up the twin and brushed her off. I held her close expecting
her to start screaming, but she didn't.
Up the road
everybody was scurrying along, falling down and getting up again like some sort
of game, trying to escape the raging wind. I got ahold of the other twin and he
held me tight around the neck and starting crying, a fussy cry that turned into
full-body screaming. The rain pelted down and the wind blew it sideways into my
face. It was hard to hold both the twins up. They kept getting torn from my
arms, their soaked bodies slippery. A set of shingles flew off the roof and high
into the air like rockets. There was no guarantee that the house wouldn't blow
apart at any minute. It never had seemed very steady in the first place.
The boy
twin, James, quieted down once he got his hand securely around my neck, and they
both became oddly quiet as I started off the porch for the road. Rain ran in streams down
their faces and they blinked and rubbed their fists into their eyes. As I
reached the corner of the house I looked up the road and the rest of the family
had just reached the top of the rise. To my right about fifty yards away lay a
small hillock of sand, on the other side of which began the beach to the shore.
I turned toward the road but suddenly heard a huge roaring like when you stand
behind a giant waterfall.
I turned toward the hillock and what looked like a
wall of water was rising up above it. It looked as high and as still as the
backside of a damn. It seemed suspended, as if the row of foam at the top was
building up to reach the sky. But in the next second I could see the wave was
rushing forward with a terrible urgency, as if it were running from something
monstrous. In a moment it would overcome us. Behind me there
was a hickory tree with three trunks, the front two growing in the shape of a V.
I stepped into the base of it and leaned back against the main trunk and wedged
myself in between the two sides. I sank down so the tree could brace my elbows,
and turned the babies into my chest and locked my hands around them. If the wave
didn't tear us out of the tree, maybe we could be revived.
There was no time to
take a breath. The wave smacked against my head, and I was driven against the
tree so hard I felt nailed into it. My breath stuck in my throat. The noise, the
roaring sound of the wave was gone; I was under the water. I couldn't feel the
twins in my arms, or if they were still there, but my mind was conscious. I felt
the rushing of the water, the quick, violent pull of it, but my body stayed in
place.
It was as if I were a deep and solid object under the skin of the ocean
and that it writhed in a mad rage but could not free itself of me. A terrible pain came
into my chest. I needed to take a breath. But then suddenly there was air, and
water flowed away from me as if I was an obstacle on the shore the waves had
broken free from. As my breath came I felt a heavy weight against my chest and
realized the babies were still there, my hands clasped around them.
At the same
time, as water streamed from my face, I realized through a haze that another
wave was in front of me. I took a quick breath and was engulfed again. But this
time my throat did not hold and my breath escaped. My heart pounded in my ears
and I could not hold out against the pressure in my lungs to move. Their demand
pulled at me and pushed, struggling like a thing confined, as if I were their
captor. My mind grew dark, like a door closed on a room, and I felt my chest
heave as if a two by four was being bumped up against my back. Then there was
blackness. As my mind went blank,
my body released, and somewhere I had a feeling like a dead fish floating on top
of the water.
Then I felt my face lying on the ground, rainwater half filling my
mouth. I wiped water out of my eyes and choked. It seemed my throat was full of
salt and it gagged me. One of the boys, Walter it looked like, was patting me on
the back like I was one of his puppies, and, irritated, I pulled away and sat up
and choked again. "Goddamn, I've never seen so much water," I said.
But Evie was next to me blowing into one of the baby's mouths and Thomas, the
other boy said, "Mama, she's awake, Baily's awake!"
"Baily!"
Evie screamed. "Help me!"
"I'm helping,
Mama!" Della yelled, and went back to blowing into one of the baby's
mouths.
Just as she said that the baby started kicking and screaming. I took the
baby Evie was holding and held it face down and patted its back.
"No!"
Evie cried, "You have to blow air into her chest!" She took the baby
back and starting blowing in her mouth again. The rain came down and filled the
seal Evie made around the babie's mouth. I felt weak. My knees gave out and I
fell to the ground.
Suddenly I thought of the waves and looked toward the ocean
to see if we would all be engulfed again any moment. But there was only the sand
hillock now and the tall grass growing out of it. Then Evie's baby started to
squeal and wave its little arms.
"Oh, my God," Evie cried, and held
the child tight against her. It reminded me of some Bible story picture of a
baby getting saved from the floods of damnation. But then I realized they looked
more like something out of a dinosaur book, a mother and baby rising up out of a
primordial rain forest with no shelter, ready to be snatched up all at once as
somebody's dinner. Evie looked around to
make sure all her children were there, as if a wave could have come up and
engulfed somebody without her noticing it.
"Oh, my God. Gregory!" Evie
yelled. "Gregory's not back."
"Gregory'll
be all right, Mama," Della said. "Baily saved the babies. She saved
them."
"Oh Baily, oh my
God," Evie said, rocking the babies. "Thank you. Thank you, Baily.
That was impossible, it was just impossible. Look, look there. The waves washed
half the house away."
I looked up and Mama was coming down the hill in the
station wagon. She drove up and skidded to a stop in front of us. She jumped out
and Donnie Rupert jumped out the other side. "Come on!" he yelled.
"We have to go! We have to get out of here!"
Everybody looked at him
with gaping mouths. He didn't realize it was over. The whole ocean had already
come in and tried to wash me and the twins out to sea.
"The waves already
come in, Daddy," Earl, the older of the two boys said. " Baily sat in
the tree and saved the twins."
Donnie was looking at the house. The waves
had torn off the whole corner of the house that faced this side, away from the
trees. I could see a railroad calendar on the wall flapping in the wind and some
of the children's toys washed up against the back wall that was still there.
"Well, Jesus Goddamn," Donnie said.
Mama put her arm around my
shoulder. "Are you all right, Baily? What does he mean you sat in the
tree?"
"I was trying to
get the twins and everybody was running, and a wave came, so I sat in the tree.
In that hickory."
Somebody came running
down the hill from the road. As he got closer I could see it was Harold Evans
from Mama's office. He was carrying a camera, a jacket halfway slung around
it.
"Elerie, I got
it!" he yelled. " I got the picture! I never seen anything like it in
my life! Wait till you see it!"
"What?" Mama said.
"What Picture?
"Of Baily in the tree
with those babies and the wave hitting them. Wait till you see it! It's going to
put us on the map!"
"We still have to get out
of here," Donnie said, bracing himself against the wind. "Come on,
this isn't a picnic. Get in the car." He opened the car doors and we all
crawled in. The babies were screaming and Elsbeth Ann and Earl were both crying.
"Everybody's going to have to stop crying. Everything's going to be all
right now."
Mama got in the driver's seat.
" You want to come with, Harold? Or are you going to keep trying to get
yourself killed?"
"I'll crawl in the back.
Wait till you see it, Elerie." Harold nodded at his camera. Harold was
always taking pictures.
"What about Gregory,
Donnie?" Evie Rupert asked.
"I'm going to go look for
him. You all go on up to Elerie's. In fact keep goin' till you reach the
shelter."
I could see I was going to
have to tell Donnie about Gregory. I had planned on waiting till we at least got
away from the danger of the surf, but it wasn't going to work. There wouldn't be
any good time anyway.
I'll go with you," I
said. "I know what the trail's like. I came here over it." I got out
of the car and slipped in the muddy sand. The wind lifted my legs out from under
me, and I fell, weak from getting hit by the waves. Donnie pulled me up and Mama
got out of the car.
"No, Baily!" she
yelled. "Please! Listen, Donnie's bigger. He can get around faster."
As usual, Mama left my dignity intact, sounding like the considerations were
practical.
"You've done enough
anyway, already!" Donnie yelled above the din of the wind.
"No," I said,
"I have to go. I can help. I mean it, I'll show you!"
"Id know you can help,
Baily," Donnie said, "but I don't want you to. I want you to go with
the others. I know where he goes."
"Not as good as I do. He
has new spots. I know where they are."
"No!" Mama said.
"Donnie can look for Gregory. Come on, Baily. Please!"
"I have to go, Mama! I
have to! The thought of Gregory hanging, flying in the wind flashed in my mind
and I felt sick. The rain pounded against Mama's face. We might as well have
been in a storm out to sea. The car
**************** Page Missing (page 42)
doors were still open and the
children looked like the most forlorn beings I had ever seen. Evie Rupert sat
there crying, blowing her nose on an already soaked tissue. Sand pelted the
windshield.
"Get in the car and go," said Donnie. "I can move
faster alone. Go on, now."
"But I can't let
you go!" I yelled.
"Why not? What's the
matter with you, Baily?"
Evie got out of the car.
"It's Gregory, isn't it? You know something about Gregory! What? What is
it?"
"I don't know
anything. I just know I can help."
******* Paragraph Missing -- Page 43
"Wait! Donnie,
wait!" I pulled away from Mama. Donnie was heading for the woods.
"What is it, Baily?" Evie Rupert cried. "You know where Gregory
is?"
Harold Evans had
gotten back out of the car and stood there holding his camera against his chest
like we were going to pose for a group shot.
"Donnie, wait!" I yelled.
"Wait!" I broke away from Mama and ran toward Donnie at the front of
the path into the woods.
"Baily!" Mama yelled after me and came
running behind me. She caught my arm as I reached Donnie. "We have to get
everybody away from here!"
"Gregory's
still out there, Mama!" I cried.
Evie Rupert came running
after us, screaming, "It's Gregory, isn't it! Something's happened to
Gregory!" She grabbed me. "That's what it is, isn't it? Tell me! Where
is he? I'm going too, then. Come on! Baily knows where he is!'."
Donnie
stopped her. All of the children had gotten out of the car and were wandering
up, Della grasping one of the twins, and Laurel the other. They had stopped
crying. They looked like some sort of woodland babies, hair draped into their
eyes, their naked bodies against their sisters' hips.
"Baily, you know
something about Gregory?" Donnie said.
I hesitated.
"Everybody's got to go get back in the car and I'll talk to you about
it."
I should have known it wasn't going to be as easy as that. Evie Rupert
flew at me and knocked me down. I'd been knocked down so many times I felt like
a shooting target on a fence.
"Where is he?" she screamed. "Where
is my Gregory? Tell me! Tell me where he is!" Donnie and Mama pulled her
off, but she kept yelling, "Why didn't you say you knew before? Why hasn't
he come home? Let's go, let's go get him!" She started down the trail but
Donnie stopped her and held her by the shoulders. "Evie, you're going
to have to settle down a minute. Now stop it!"
I looked at Mama. "Please,
Mama. Help me."
She could see she was going to have to leave me to go with
Donnie, but she didn't know what to do about Evie. "Let's go to the
shelter," she said to her.
"Evie,
listen," Donnie said, "Whatever it is, I'm going to go get Gregory.
Everybody else needs you. Now please, go with Elerie and the kids. Please."
He turned her around and without saying anything, she started moving with her
huddle of children back toward the car. A tree branch dropped in front of them
and they walked around it in a little group like sheep.
"I'll go with
you," Harold Evans said, but Donnie said, "No, Harold, you've already
got your picture. Go on and help everybody get out of here, would you?"
"All right,"
Harold said, "But I'll probably kick myself for this."
"Come on,
Harold," Mama said, "Don't be greedy. You've already got the picture
of the season and it hasn't even started." She kept her eyes on me. "Baily,
are you sure about this?"
"Yes, Mama, I have
to go."
"Come on,
Harold." She tried to look at the sky through the rainwater falling in her
eyes. It seemed like the sky had let up a little, but the wind came in wild
gusts that whipped around the tree trunks and flattened the bushes on the forest
floor. "I can't believe we're standing out here like sight seers."
"We are
sightseers," said Harold. "Look at that house." He was nodding at
the hole in Donnie's house that used to be a wall.
"Come on!" Mama
yelled, and guided him away. She looked at me and smiled slightly. I loved how
Mama trusted me when she knew I didn't know what I was doing. I asked for help
when I needed it, at least when I knew enough to ask. But Mama said that's what
everybody did if they were smart. She said younger people just had different
things to learn than grown-ups. You had to learn about rules, about learning
about the lines I wasn't supposed to cross. And, she said, then you can make up
your mind about whether or not to go ahead and cross them. She said you just had
to be a good learner, and life would teach you.
She said she only really had one
thing to tell me, and that was to be a good learner, no matter how old I got. And she said I was good at that. She said not to think your way is the only way to have something figured out. That's why, she said, she didn't know everything just because she was the grown-up; that I had ways of doing things just as well. She said I helped her keep an open mind. She was always saying to keep an open mind, take things out of your mind once in a while like you drop things off at the Salvation Army.
Donnie and I watched as the children crawled into the car. Mama got in the driver's seat and switched on the windshield wipers. From the front seat, Evie Rupert had a mixture of sadness and hope on her face that I can't imagine will ever go out of my memory. If there was a look of a helpless soul, that was it. It was something beyond her herself It was a look of something outside of time, as if it had always been there and would always emerge, a face that had no place in the world, that was no face at all, and yet it was her face.
I looked at Mama and thought of her illness. Those two women, one who was going to die, and the other whose child had died. For the first time, I realized how simple and how daily a fact of life death is. It was like life is just life, and death is just death, and neither one are to be taken too seriously. I realized they weren't meant to be taken seriously. I wondered if death held on to death as hard as life held on to life. Did death have a stake in
itself? Then, I didn't have any idea what I was thinking about. Mama turned the car around and went up the road. Harold waved slowly from the back and it reminded me of someone waving from an airplane or a boat, moving out to the horizon until everything disappears as if it had never existed.
Just as if Donnie knew what I was going to tell him, he sat right down on the soaked ground and covered his face. I wished all of a sudden I hadn't let Mama go. I wished she could be here to help me, to hold me when Donnie cried. But there didn't seem to be any other way this could have happened. I couldn't let him go wandering in the woods looking for Gregory when I knew where he was. I couldn't especially let him run into Gregory hanging so pitifully from a tree branch. No, there was no way now except for me to tell him. An empty Carnation milk carton flew by in front of my face. I stood there staring at Donnie. He rubbed his hands over his short hair and water flew in a spray.
"Okay," he said, "Tell me what I need to know."
I stopped a moment, then said, "Gregory got hung in a tree. He's hanged,
dead. I'll show you where. I tried to get him out but I couldn't reach."
"Hanged?"
"Yes."
"In a
tree?"
"Yes. He must
have been playing." Even as said this, I knew it wasn't true.
"Oh, geez. Oh,
Jesus."
Donnie put his hand over his nose and mouth as if to stop himself
from breathing, to keep his pain from rushing out; then he wiped the rain off
his face.
"All right. Show me," he said. "Let's go get him
down." The rain was filling Donnie's ears and running down his jaw in a
stream. He stood up and looked at me. "Are you sure you're all right to do
this?"
"I feel okay. I
have to go. I have to show you. The main thing is getting over fallen trees. We
can do it together."
"Maybe I should go
get more help!" Donnie said up to the howl of the wind.
"Everybody's
already gone away from here, Donnie. Besides, we don't have any way now to go
get anybody!"
"Let's go,
then, if you think you can."
We started down the trail. It was filled with
brush and branches. There was a half-demolished bird's nest and I wondered if
there had been anybody in it. Maybe not this late in June, most everybody had
left the nest. I wondered about the birds, if they were safe, nestled in some
sheltered place. But overhead the seagulls swooped and careened. The seagulls
were in the air no matter what the weather was doing. I had never not seen a
seagull somewhere in the sky. I thought a seagull had to be the toughest bird on
earth, to be able to withstand the battering currents of air that fought forever
among themselves at the water's surface. Seagulls took me back in time. It was
easy to see them, for thousands of years, dipping down to pick off the leavings
of some careless creature dragging the remains of something across the sand.
We came to the first
tree across the path and fought our way fairly easily over it. Once I had
climbed high enough on one side for Donnie to reach me, he lifted me up and
over. A pine branch hit me in the face and knocked me down and my eye bled. I
couldn't tell if it was rain or blood that blurred my vision but I wiped it away
and kept going. Donnie didn't see it until he turned around to make sure I was
coming. He stopped and looked at me. He took a handkerchief out of his back
pocket.
"This has motor oil on it from my hands from the boat. You've got a
cut over your eye. What happened?"
"A
branch," I said.
"Are you all
right?" He looked for a clean place on his handkerchief. "Goddamn,
Baily, this is terrible. You already saved my little twin babies. Here, here's a
good spot." He dabbed at my eye. "Here, you'd better hold it there for
a minute. Oh, Baily, are you sure you can go on?" I wanted to tell him that
I had loved Gregory, too, but I didn't. I hadn't told anybody at all. Now, I
felt the loss of him in my lungs and my stomach. It threatened to wring me like
a sponge.
"It's just up
ahead, Donnie. For Christsake, this whole path's only a half a mile long. It's
not much further. It's beyond the next downed tree, past the stream."
We went on. The
hurricane blew the trees around us in all different directions as if they were
nothing but grass waving on the plains. My mouth was dry and I coughed and felt
burning in my throat where some of the salt water I had swallowed came up. I
tramped along behind Donnie and then stopped him and told him I wanted to go
first. I thought if I could go slower somehow when we got near and warn him that
we were there, somehow it would be easier for him. But when we actually got to
Gregory I just ran right up to him. It seemed to me the faster we got him down
the less we'd have to watch him swinging in the tree. That was the worst part.
That was an agonizing sight. There is something about seeing a living thing
hanging helplessly, its life and its self completely gone. Even Jesus had his
hands and feet nailed up. He wasn't left just hanging. As soon as I got to
Gregory I grabbed onto his feet so he couldn't swing anymore. I wanted to cover
him somehow from Donnie, so Donnie wouldn't have to see his boy like this, so
sad it was enough to tear your heart right out. I thought of all the black
people white men had hanged. No one, no living thing should have to die like
that. It was ungodly.