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.