15

Monday morning

After a while, J’nelle moves back to her cot and falls asleep. Ace folds up his wet cot, replaces it with a dry one, and begins to doze in and out. Around two a.m., the wind begins to slacken. A large tree falls somewhere beyond the house, and then things slowly quieten, except for the crash of waves over the dunes.

By dawn, all is eerily quiet. Even the ocean has settled. Its waves wash in and out with a healing sound. Ace takes a deep breath, moves his cot toward the middle of the bunker, and kneels on it to turn on the light bulb without standing on the wet floor. The switch clicks, the light does not come on.

He finds the flashlight, puts his shoulder to the door, and scrapes it open.

“Wait,” J’nelle says. “I’m coming.”

The dawn has a greenish, splintered hue that is charged with smells of wet sand, blasted wood, and shredded leaves. They step from under the tin roof, still in their rain jackets, and run their eyes quickly over the fallen trunks and crisscrossed limbs toward the house. It has been ripped apart. One half is askew of the other and has slipped from its foundation into the yard. Much of the other half is caved in under a large limb, split from the nearest live oak. What appears to be a second part of that limb, sent flying by the storm, has crashed through the front window and hood of J’nelle’s rental car.

“Oh, Ace,” she says. “I’m so sorry.”

He ducks back under the sheltered front of the bunker, pulls out the chain saw, and goes to work cutting his way through the trunks and limbs toward the house. She follows, helping him pull cut branches out of the way. In an hour, they’ve cleared a path that lets them through to walk around the house. The front porch roof is off, the upper deck collapsed onto what’s left of the porch itself. Most of the shutters are gone or left sagging and the windows are blown out. The dunes have vanished, washed away by the pounding waves and their backwash, leaving a small lake in the front yard.

“For some reason,” he says, “losing those dunes feels like the final blow.”

They try their cell phones, get no signal, and walk back to sit on a log by the bunker to drink Thermos coffee and eat their breakfast of hard-boiled eggs and cold bacon.

“I wonder how widespread this is,” she says.

“All over,” he says. “I’ll be amazed if the Crowbank Inlet Bridge is standing. We should fire up the chain saw after breakfast and cut our way out to the beach road and see if my car starts. Maybe we can be of some help to people.”

They eat in silence broken only by the slow, back-and-forth wash of the sea. J’nelle finally speaks.

“How are you feeling today?”

“How are the shakes, you mean?”

“Yes.”

“I haven’t noticed them for a while.”

“That’s good, right?”

“They’ll be back.”

“When I was doing my aid work with the Peace Corps,” she says, “I saw lots of people with symptoms like yours. They turned out to be all sorts of things, some not so disabling.”

“That’s what my doc says, but I think he’s lying.”

“I’m not.”

“I know you’re not.”

Before him, the broken house is backlit by the blue ocean and the reflecting glare of the morning sun. If a stranger saw the house, he wouldn’t know it from a wrecked juke joint or crossroads store.

“It’s almost like a mirage,” he says. “It’s hard to be sure that what was there before the storm was real. Along comes a big wind and takes out everything except memories, and even those seem buffeted and carried away.”

“They are not carried away,” she says. “In one form or another, they are right here.” She taps her temple to indicate his.

Her gesture points him back in time to the old days when, as a kid, he was here with his parents and sister and uncles and aunts and cousins and his grandmother and what felt like the hovering ghost of his grandfather. Then the times with Pam and his kids and later his grandkids—noisy, chaotic, jubilant days when he and Pam seemed to have dragged the best part of their everyday lives here with them. Then the times alone after Pam died. He sees himself in days past, in the kitchen, preparing his supper to eat alone, then climbing to the upper deck to watch the slow drifting headlights. It seems like months since he did that, with J’nelle no more than a puzzle headed his way.

“Escape,” she says. “You said in one of your emails that this house was an ‘escape.’”

“It was,” he says, “but to get away from the hassles of the real world, not to hang with old ghosts.”

“Maybe you see our memories of each other the same way,” she says, “as an escape from the real world.”

“I guess, maybe. Some of the time—don’t you?”

“Yes,” she says, “but they are a lot more than that. And this old house was too.”

• • •

After breakfast, Ace removes the padlock from the door to the collapsed generator shed and attaches it to the bunker door so they can lock it. He refills the chain saw with gas mix and bar oil, and with J’nelle’s help, begins to cut their way through the downfall blocking the long, twisted driveway. The beach road runs mostly through savanna protected from the sea by short stretches of maritime forest. But the backwash from the nearby sound has done the damage, ripping out swaths of pavement in both directions down the road from Ace’s driveway. What pavement remains is scattered with limbs, debris, and downed utility poles. Ace’s car is intact, but one side of it has slid into a water-filled ditch.

“We can try to start it later,” Ace says. “Charge our cell phones.”

They walk south, toward the most populous part of the island, making their way around utility pole wires and washed out places, a couple of times holding hands and wading up to their knees. To their left, in the maritime forest, treetops are twisted and broken. Pines have been stripped of their needles. To their right, over the sound, helicopters crawl like insects across the pale blue sky. Two of them are updated versions of the Chinooks Ace rode in in Vietnam. A few gulls, returned from inland, swoop over the water nearby, and above the broken treetops down the road, a drone with a TV station emblem rises and begins to circle.

“Eerie,” he says.

“Yes,” she says, “and lonely.”

They help each other through a tangle of limbs and palm branches and over a large chunk of upended asphalt.

“It’s like one of those apocalyptic scenes you talked about the other day,” he says, “the ones they used to scare us with when we were young, about the aftermath of nuclear war.”

“Except,” she says, “that the sun is shining and we’re alive.”

He nods his head toward the road before them. “Yes, but what about down there?”

“The sun will still be shining,” she says.

A mile farther on, they approach the wreckage of a cluster of shops and businesses: what was once a surfing store; the remains of a kayak rental place with no kayaks in sight; a miniature golf course and waterslide; and an old, shingle-sided motel. They all sag from their foundations. A few are missing roofs. Behind the first row of them is a wrecked trailer park. Trailers are upside down and piled against each other, roofs caved in, sides ripped off. Only the golf course appears unharmed, but as Ace and J’nelle draw closer, they can see that in places the greens and putting tracks have been stripped of fabric down to the concrete and bare wood.

Three men stand in the road in unzipped rain gear, looking about and talking. Two of them wear law enforcement uniforms, and one of them holds a hand-held radio unit. Nearby, an elderly man and woman poke about the rubble of what was once a tackle shop. Farther up the road, two groups of men in military uniforms, each with a leashed German shepherd, prowl about the wreckage of homes while another team that Ace guesses is a special unit of the National Guard, works at a transformer on a downed utility pole.

Ace and J’nelle make their way around scattered boards and part of a shingle roof to the three men who watch their approach as if the two of them are walking out of a battlefield.

Ace introduces himself and J’nelle to the men who nod politely. The two men in uniform are of medium height. They stand with their legs slightly spread. The younger of them is fit and muscular and holds a kid-sized orange football he’s apparently picked from some of the wreckage. The older one has a watermelon stomach that pokes beyond the opening in his rain gear to hang over his black service belt. The third man, dressed in a half-buttoned Hawaiin shirt and old jeans jammed into the tops of black Wellingtons has the keen look of someone who has spent his seventy-or-so years wrestling a living from the island or the sea around it.

Fisherman, Ace thinks. Part time handyman, crab and oyster man.

“We’d like to be of help,” Ace says. “Where can we go to do that?”

The older officer nods his head down the road beyond more wrecked houses and stripped trees to where a large yellow helicopter is descending.

“Old stone church down there next to the lot where the choppers are landing is a makeshift staging point,” he says. “High school farther down the road, usually our staging point, didn’t do so well. Either of you got any medical training?”

“I’m a retired lawyer,” Ace says. He nods at J’nelle. “But she taught sanitation and first aid in the Peace Corps and now does volunteer work with refugees.”

“Lawyer?” the man in the Hawaiian shirt says. “Well, you’re pretty much useless, but she might be some count to people.”

“Go on down there,” the heavyset officer says. “They can put you to work.”

The young officer tosses the football from one hand to the other and gives them a quick smile as he nods agreement.

Ace and J’nelle say thanks and start down the road. Ace turns.

“You all don’t by any chance know what happened last night with the Red Sox do you?”

“Lost one-zip,” the younger officer says, still tossing the football. “Headed to LA for game three.”

“Shit,” Ace says under his breath.

“That new ace pitcher they got—what’s-his-name, Aguilla—pulled something in his shoulder. Season’s over for him.”

“Thanks.” Ace turns back toward J’nelle. “Double shit.”

“You’re a Red Sox fan?” she says. “When did that happen?”

“A while back, mostly because I hate the Yankees.”

“That explains a lot.”

“What does that mean?”

“Boston fans think they are always getting screwed by gremlins or some other supernatural force. They’re committed pessimists.”

“So let me guess: you’re a Yankees fan?”

“Yes, but mostly I just root against Boston.”

The church is not a large building, but its cobblestone exterior seems fixed to the land upon which it sits. There is a small steeple at one corner with a white-frame cupola and a bell. The church’s roof is missing shingles, but otherwise the building seems intact.

They pick their way over and around power poles and debris and pass by search crews in military dress working on either side of the road. Four members of one team gather around a collapsed roof while a large man with sergeant’s stripes speaks through a megaphone to whomever might be inside. A military bulldozer clears debris from the road in front of the church and pushes the debris into a ditch on the other side. Over the clink of the dozer’s tracks and roar of its engine, comes the metallic scream of the helicopter from the lot beyond the church. As Ace and J’nelle draw closer, the scream dies to the slow whump, whump, whump of the chopper’s massive blades.

A scene comes to Ace: A clearing in Vietnam. The downdraft from a Chinook helicopter lays flat the elephant grass around the chopper as it sets down with that rocking motion as if feeling about to be sure of its footing. He is running with other men, his head ducked, one hand holding his helmet on, the other clutching an M-16 he carries for a wounded marine. His eyes are focused on that shiny, boot-worn threshold of the chopper’s open door. If he can just get there, get a foothold, and heave himself inside to that shadowy illusion of safety.

Whump, whump go the helicopter blades in the lot next to the church. He looks around. He has come to a halt in the middle of the road.

J’nelle walks a few steps ahead, then turns and looks back at him with that look of curious concern he first saw on their beach walk when she told him about her affair and Mason Morrel.

“Just need to catch my breath a second,” he says.

“We can find a place to sit.”

“I’m OK.”

Ace looks past her shoulder toward the church. A large black sign hangs between two brick posts in front of the church near the road. Some of its letters are missing.

Oc_an Dr_ve A.M._. _ion C_urch, it says. Rev__end Ike Hask_l. Beneath it, dangling from a hook at one end, is a hand-painted sign in smaller print.

Lifeboat Holiness Church

J’nelle turns back to Ace. “That’s the church Faye-Marie told us about, where her Uncle Ike is the pastor.”

“Yeah,” Ace says, “the same guy who talks to the Lord and predicted the storm would miss us.”

“At least his church is still there,” says J’nelle, “and look at all the people using it.”

There is a dazed atmosphere about the area surrounding the church that appears on the faces of the storm’s refugees. Some of them mill about, while others sit on the wet ground on ponchos, rain jackets and shower curtains. Nursing mothers hold nipples to babies. Parents clasp the hands of small children. A group of Latino men has gathered among the limbs of a fallen tree. A young black woman, who appears to be in charge of the scene, goes in and out of the church accompanied by two young men, one an officer in military-issue camouflage.

The tattooed woman Ace gave his water to in the supermarket sits on the steps of the church. A group of children, including her own two kids, surrounds her. A cigarette dangles from her fingers. She grabs playfully at the grinning kids with her free hand, then laughs and turns her head away to blow a mouthful of smoke. Her expression is the inverse of the expression on J’nelle’s face Saturday when she talked about Anna: one relaxed and happy, the other infinitely sad. Yet the difference between them seems fragile and razor thin.

As they draw closer to the church, they can see Faye-Marie tending to an old man in a wheelchair in the road by a ditch in front of the church. A young girl stands nearby, holding a towel. She watches Faye-Marie with studied attention, then drapes the towel about her neck and bends to help Faye-Marie with the man’s legs.

“Hello, Faye-Marie,” Ace says. “We are Ace and J’nelle. We were customers of yours at The Whale Head on Saturday.”

Faye-Marie glances up at them for a moment and says, “How are y’all,” then goes back to work.

The odor of human feces hits Ace when they are still twenty feet from the chair. It carries a suggestion of mud and the rot of death. As they draw closer, he can see the man’s soiled trousers and shoes in a heap on the pavement next to the chair. The girl lifts the man’s legs off the seat of the chair, one at a time, so Faye-Marie can scrub under them. Two metal basins of water and a plastic bottle of soap are on the pavement at Faye-Marie’s feet. Her sleeves are pulled up above her elbows.

She moves her arms gently under the man’s legs as she scrubs, then pulls her arms out and drops the shit-stained towel into one of the basins of brown, soapy water. The girl hands her the clean towel.

Faye-Marie takes it, straightens herself, and glances at Ace and J’nelle.

“Yes,” she says, “I remember you. Y’all stay safe last night?”

“We did, but our house is gone,” says Ace. He glances around him. “Just like these.”

The man’s skin is dusty brown with a deep red tint, a color Ace has never seen before, and it hangs about his old man’s frame. His head is slightly bowed on his neck and pulls taut the tendons that run from his shoulders to the base of his skull. The tendons remind Ace of roots from a large tree with deep hollows between them.

“That’s a shame,” Faye-Marie says. Her gaze catches up with Ace’s as Ace surveys the scene around them. “It’s all a shame.”

“At least,” J’nelle says, nodding toward the church, “help is here, and these people survived.”

“Have y’all heard about the new inlet?” Faye-Marie says. “Washed right through the island north of the bridge. Part of the bridge is gone too.”

“Good Lord,” Ace says.

“Worst storm I’ve ever seen,” Faye-Marie says, “by far. Looks like we’re all going to be here awhile.”

Ace shoots a glance at J’nelle, then nods toward the church.

“Can we be some help over there?”

“You can help right here,” Faye-Marie says. “This is Rosa Mendez.” She nods toward the dark-haired girl with the towels, then toward the man in the wheelchair. “And this is Byron Beethoven Burnett. He’s been on Pomeiooc Island for over ninety years. He was born in that house over there.” Faye-Marie nods down the road in the direction from which Ace and J’nelle have just come. “They got him out early this morning.”

The small house is mostly gone except for a shed-roofed room on the side.

“I need to get him up from this chair and wash off his butt and the chair seat. You reckon you can help Rosa raise him up and hold him?”

“Sure,” J’nelle says, stepping forward. “We can do that.”

She goes to one side of the chair. Ace follows and stands at the other. The feces smell smears the air, soaks into clothing, clings to the skin. Ace thinks of the smell of dead bodies zipped into body bags and stacked like cordwood in a jungle clearing in Vietnam, waiting for a chopper. Some had been there for four days cooking in the tropical sun. There could be bodies here, in some of the collapsed houses. Zip them into body bags too.

“Take him under his armpits?” Ace says.

“That’s right,” Faye-Marie says. “Rosa will stand in front and take his wrists and pull from there. Y’all raise him up on either side.”

She bends close to Byron Beethoven’s ear and says in a loud voice: “Mr. Burnett, these people are here to help you. They’re going to raise you up so I can get you clean. Don’t you try to fight ’em now. They’re good people.”

Ace and J’nelle give each other a quick glance before they bend to grasp Byron Beethoven Burnett under his arms. Mixed with the smell of feces is the sour stench of urine. And then there is that old man smell, dry and cold, that exhales from the maw of age.

Rosa grasps the man’s wrists and holds his arms out straight.

“Y’all ready?” Faye-Marie says.

“Yes,” Ace and J’nelle say together.

“I’m ready,” Rosa says.

Freeing Byron Beethoven from his chair releases even more of the odor. His legs are slack and useless. As thin as he is, he is tall, and his weight, concentrated in great lengths of bone, comes as a surprise.

When Ace, J’nelle, and Rosa have Byron Beethoven vertical, Faye-Marie kneels by the chair and goes to work, wiping Byron’s buttocks and lifeless genitals, then the backs of his long, boney thighs. She hums as she works, a spiritual Ace recognizes but cannot name, then begins to tell them about Byron Beethoven’s sideline as a blues guitar player.

“Played all up and down the coast,” she says. “That’s how he got his stage name, Beethoven. Had a good voice too. Did a lot of hammer-down—had a real knack with it. Guitar players came from all over to watch how he did it. Played until he was almost ninety, when his mind started to go. He’d prop himself on his stool and play and sing all night.”

Ace looks down at Byron Beethoven’s wide hands and slim fingers, long enough to cover five frets on a guitar neck with ease.

Faye-Marie gives Byron Beethoven’s knee a soft squeeze. “You were good, weren’t you, Mr. Burnett? You’re going to be alright. We’ll fix you up as good as new.”

She throws out the dirty water from the basin, refills it with rainwater left in the ditch by the storm, and squirts in a stream of soap. Byron’s head continues to hang forward so that for a moment Ace wonders if he has passed out or maybe even died.

Near the church, a large generator starts and fills the air around them with a deep-throated hum. An ache spreads from Ace’s left shoulder, down his arm to the hand gripping the man’s limp body under the armpit. His knuckles press hard into the man’s ribs, but Byron does not seem to notice. This is what it’s like if you make it this far, Ace thinks. Hands holding you that you can’t even feel.

Rosa’s grip is strong and steady. Her eyes focus on Faye-Marie’s hands as they work to scrub Byron. Faye-Marie finishes with Byron, dashes a basin of clean water over the chair seat, and wipes it dry.

“Thanks y’all,” she says. “Set him down easy.”

They let Byron Beethoven down into his chair. As he settles in, he raises his head, looks about at the four of them with his rheumy eyes, then looks down at his naked crotch and boney legs. His hand, hanging over the arm of his chair, starts to shake. Faye-Marie takes it in hers and gives it a squeeze.

“I’m Faye-Marie Haskell, Mr. Burnett. I’ve been knowing you a long time.” She reaches out and takes Rosa’s hand. “And this is my friend, Rosa Mendez. And these folks are nice people from the island who stopped by to help you.”

She straightens and lets go of his hand. “We need to get him over to the church,” she says to Rosa. “Take him into the bathroom where we can clean him up some more. Then we’ll find him some clean clothes and something to eat.”

“Take this to cover him,” J’nelle says. She shucks off her rain jacket and gives it to Faye-Marie.

Rosa releases the brake on Byron Beethoven’s wheelchair and begins to push him down the road around the uncleared limbs toward the driveway to the church parking lot. The breeze off the sound blows away the lingering stench.

“Mr. Burnett’s main line of work was a carpenter,” says Faye-Marie. “He built a lot of these homes.” She nods toward the wrecked houses down the road from the church. “Helped build the church too.”

She empties the basins into the weeds beside the road, swirls the soiled towels around in the watery ditch, and begins to wring them out.

“People on this island think a lot of Mr. Byron Beethoven Burnett.” She casts a glance at J’nelle and Ace. “People of all races.”

She finishes wringing out the towels and drops them into one of the basins.

“I appreciate the help,” she says. “It would have been hard for Rosa and me to do it on our own.”

“It’s kind of you to do that for him,” J’nelle says. “I suspect there aren’t many people around who would take that on.”

“I do it all the time,” Faye-Marie says. “I’m the one who sees after folks like Mr. Burnett around here.”

She reaches for Byron Beethoven’s soiled trousers and long-john underwear, rinses them as well, then drops them into the other basin. Ace notes the round curve of her back, the soft roll of flesh where her neck meets her shoulders. Her energy seems to concentrate there and feed the strength and quickness in her arms and hands.

She lifts the basin holding the towels and begins to follow Rosa as Rosa turns Byron Beethoven’s chair from the road into the church driveway.

“If y’all don’t mind, grab that other basin of Mr. Burnett’s clothes and come on; if you still want to help, there’s plenty to do.”

Ace picks up the basin with the soiled clothes, and he and J’nelle hurry to catch up. Ace speaks loudly to be heard over the revving of a nearby bulldozer.

“The people you help are very lucky to have you,” he says to Faye-Marie.

Faye-Marie stops in the road and turns toward them. Her eyes are slightly squinted as if to get Ace and J’nelle in better focus. She studies them a moment.

“I do it because I love them,” she says, “and because they are children of God. I look forward to cleaning up their messes like we did with Mr. Burnett. It gives me a chance to pass on the love.”

She holds them in her gaze. Ace’s mind races back to the scene in The Whale Head: he and J’nelle, seated at the table by the window, wrapped in their conversation about God and their beliefs or lack of belief. He can see himself sitting there, silhouetted against the window, holding his wine glass, spouting his half-baked bullshit about religion and his rejection of all things holy. How loud was he talking? Did Faye-Marie overhear him?

On the road behind him, a bulldozer, pushing a large pile of debris, guns its engine. Its steel treads squeak and clank. Ace glances over his shoulder, then back at Faye-Marie.

Her face relaxes into a smile. “Sometimes,” she says, “I get a little carried away.”

“No,” says J’nelle. “It’s wonderful—what you just said, what you do. It’s really wonderful.”

Faye-Marie turns back toward the church.

“Y’all come on,” she says. “There’s a place we can wash our hands, see who else needs help—whatever we got to give.”

Ace and J’nelle work through the morning at the church. Ace talks with adults and families, explains evacuation plans to them, tells them where the helicopters will take them if they are evacuated inland, directs them to the National Guard medical station in the yard for treatment if they are injured. J’nelle works with the medics and a volunteer civilian doctor and treats minor injuries. Faye-Marie is everywhere. She seems to see the invisible hurt in people and knows how to help them before they understand the hurt themselves. Pastor Ike Haskell wanders about, talking to the people. Occasionally he places a hand on someone’s shoulder or head and prays in a deeply resonant voice that seems to carry beyond the gathering of refugees and out over the sound and the noise of the circling helicopters.