Dark Water Rising by Marian Hale

sloshed beneath me.
    I rested my hand on Matt’s baseball bulging in my pocket, and Josiah and I leaned against the soaked andcrumbling plaster. My thoughts drifted from little Tom to Thirty-fifth Street, from the faces of my family to Ella Rose, but they always ended up in the alley behind Butcher Miller’s house, reaching for the woman and her child.

Chapter
13
    A sound stirred me from my sleep, a soft cry that finally hit such a demanding note, I jerked upright. I heard relieved laughter coming from the bathroom, then from the men around me. Little Tom was awake and hungry.
    I laughed then, too, and for the first time noticed that Tom’s howls were the only ones I heard. The wind had died. Someone forced open the swollen doors in the hallway, and through the missing roof in the sloping east bedrooms, I saw faint, purple signs of coming daybreak.
    The storm was over.
    All around me I felt men rise in the dark hall—soldiers from Fort Crockett, neighbors I barely knew, and some whose faces I’d never seen before yesterday. As if Tom’s cry had been the final call back to the real world, we pushed ourselves up from the buckled floor, then pulled up our neighbor beside us. Women slowlycrept from the bathroom, a few with candles, some with children hugged against their legs, but not a word was spoken.
    Josiah helped me to my feet, and in the flickering candlelight, I could see the relief in his face. I straightened the makeshift bandage on his head, stretched my stiff back and sore legs, and heard a hoarse voice calling from outside.
    “Anybody in there?”
    Surprise crackled around me. We hurried down the stairs, waded through several feet of foul-smelling muddy water, and ripped away what was left of the closet doors we’d nailed up.
    There must’ve been a dozen of us crowded around the splintered doorway, staring in shocked silence at a man standing in the gloom, stark naked except for a piece of mattress ticking.
    “It’s me,” the man said. “Munn.”
    When we finally came to our senses, Mr. Mason drew Captain Munn up the stairs, out of the muddy water, and into the candlelight.
    The poor man collapsed on the upper landing, telling us how his house had broken apart all around him and how he’d clung to a mattress all night in the raging waves and rain. Then he looked at us with eyes dark and bottomless, swimming with the deepest sorrow I’d ever beheld.
    “They’re gone,” he said quietly.
    His words betrayed no emotion, and yet tears rolled down his face.
    “My wife, her mother, my house.” He slowly shook his head. “Everyone, everything. Gone.”
    I’d never seen such desolation in a man’s face, and a wave of fear for what I might find at Uncle Nate’s rose inside me.
    Mrs. Mason brought a rag and tried to clean mud from the captain’s cuts, and Mrs. Vedder, who’d found a spare shirt and pants, squeezed around the crowd on the landing and set the small stack of clothing beside him.
    He stared at it for a long moment, then offered a simple “Thank you kindly.”
    It was then that I saw his bleak situation fully. That stack of clothing was all he had in this world. I looked around me, from face to face, and saw the same fear in almost every eye. Maybe none of us would end up with any more than the clothes on our backs, but what tore at my heart most was the misery our lives would become if we had no family left, either.
    Mr. Mason gave the captain a pat on the shoulder, squeezed past him, and headed back down the stairs. Though it still wasn’t light enough to see much, he was determined to climb through a north window to see how his house had fared. While he was gone, othersdecided to leave, too, wading into the dim, battered landscape, anxious to know the fate of battalions, friends, and family. I wanted to go, too, but Josiah hesitated.
    “Best we wait till we got us some light ’fore we gets into all that mud.”
    He was right, of course. Water was still draining back into the gulf. It