Wind and Fury

I

THE poles and stands for the Labor Day celebration of the Portuguese-American Society of the Holy Ghost were still up in the big meadow behind the Arch Street sea wall, and they gave you the feeling that summer was really ended. Down the narrow street some of the festooned branches still hung, and the seven little painted figures on Mrs. Saint Peter Lemos’s wonderful windmill turned briskly. Mrs. Saint Peter would n’t leave it out long. She had brought that windmill from the Islands, and the fall rains might dull the paint. But it was part of the festival decoration, and in the Mandanos house next door the altar was installed for the year. Mrs. Mandanos’s parlor door was open, and as Mrs. Saint Peter hung the grandchildren’s clothes in her narrow, vegetable-crowded garden she could see the light touching the golden crown, the pink paper roses, the beadwork dove — Spiritus Sanctus. The low ebb churned twelve feet below the garden, and though the sky was overcast, and the wind strong south, the day was warm for the twenty-first of September.

Queerly warm . . . Mrs. Saint Peter wiped her forehead, pushing back her strong black hair, and frowned at the sight of Saint Peter’s boat, DimintineRosa, bobbing where she was tied down there to the first dock on Race Street, idle on this good day. Because Saint Peter and his friends had seen two strange coppery sunrises in succession they would not set out to-day, though the bluefish were running off Block Island. Three thousand dollars that boat had cost — two thousand paid off in the twenty years, and the last still to pay. The fishing had not been so good this wet summer that a man could lose a day for a whim. But you could n’t argue with the men. None of the boats had gone out. They lay, green and chunky, all along these two east docks, all along the big docks on the west side of the village. Old Captain Nat Taylor had agreed with the fishermen. ‘ Yeahen. There’s going to be weather. My barometer’s falling. Besides, it smells high salt, somehow.’

Captain Nat said it again at noon, standing in the doorway of his hardware and ship-chandler shop, talking to young Bill Evans. Captain Nat approved of Bill: graduated from Harvard College last spring, and came straight home to set up a boat yard and live with his father in the big white-pillared house on High Street where Evanses belonged. ‘Be a real southeaster by afternoon, Bill. Pelican on your ways now ? ’

‘Yes, Pete wants her caulked some before cold weather.’

But it was n’t cold to-day. It was warm — queerly warm. . . .

The back windows of Captain Nat’s store looked out on the west harbor. He lived upstairs, in a starkly neat apartment, with his navigator’s license framed on the wall alongside the fourmaster Hattie Z. in full sail, his good binoculars handy on the window nail. Captain Nat’s big dock, with its oil pumps and coal and ice sheds, had half a dozen boats tied on the lee side. Fanning’s dock, Miller’s dock, the centuryold Kinney Machine Company dock — reddish stone and granite bollards four feet around — had a lot of boats in, too. A couple of dozen power and sail boats moored in the harbor were rolling some, because there was quite a little sea running. You could see white water out beyond the second breakwater, towards Fishers.

Summer people were mostly gone from Fishers now. The Port was n’t a summer resort, though there were plenty above and below it, on the beaches. The Port was a town — a place to live in, and earn your living in, and always had been. There was n’t room for a lot of summer places in the Port, anyhow. The old houses were pretty well crowded in on the small peninsula. Shaped like an almond the Port was, with its broad end lying along the railroad tracks, the Harbor on the west side and Little Narragansett Bay on the east. Margin Street ran the west length of the village, to the lighthouse point, Pace and Arch skirted the east harbor. High Street cut the town in two from north to south, and the cross streets were block-long fins, raying east and west. A tight town, with the Square on one end and the sea on three sides.

The sea had built the Port. The sea still kept a good part of the village going. The fish fleet, mostly Portuguese, had long since taken the place of the clippers, and their fish the place of the whales and seals. Kinney Machine shipped mostly by truck these days, for it is a hundred years since Major George Washington Whistler built the railroad from the Port to Providence, and thirty since the Port ceased to be the main Connecticut steamboat junction between Boston and New York. But Kinney Machine was still there, squat brick on its famous dock, and a good part of the thousand residents of the Port earned their living there, or at the Velvet Mill or the Foundry. Nice place for indoor workers, the Port was. Half a block from your lathe or loom or desk to your rowboat, and the summer evenings always cool. But it was n’t cool to-day. Queerly warm, for all the wind. . . .

Jim Hale, straddling the ridgepole of the Parton house, pointing up the last brick on the chimney, began to find the wind a damned nuisance. It flicked a small tool from his work board to the lawn below, and, looking down High Street to the sea, he made it was shifting east some. Rain, maybe. Well, he’d finish setting in Hyde’s back steps this afternoon. Plenty of work in the Port. People took pride. Why should n’t they ? The old fellows who built houses like this one built to last. Something to be proud of, living in them. And money getting easier, and the Port solvent and solid as the Point sea wall. Easing himself down the roof slope, he noticed the wind was even shaking his ladder a little, and flattening his shirt to stick to his wot back. Queerly warm, it was, and his ears felt sort of deaf. Funny wind. . . .

Miss Malvina Parton nodded to him from her drawing-room window, as he went by. The window was rattling, and Miss Malvina’s twisted blue-white fingers strove to tighten the catch. The late lilies by the wrought-iron fence were blowing dangerously. A pity if so early a fall storm should flatten them. Perhaps it would be well to pick them and bring them in to fill Grandfather Parton’s ginger jars. They would be pretty for the Port Improvement Society meeting this afternoon. But when Miss Malvina turned the brass knob the wind flung the heavy white door at her. It took really a minute to close it, and was very tiring. The hall seemed hot, too. She sat on one of the little Empire chairs to rest, and was disturbed to see a small elm branch fall past the window. She had the tree surgeon’s report on her desk, ready to read to the Society. The elm directly south of Miss Malvina’s house should have two branches off, and some filling, he said. But only one tree in all the Port need come down this fall. Miss Malvina would be glad to tell the Society that — especially glad. Now that she was eighty-two she found she cared more for the trees than for most people.

The wind pushed against Miss Malvina’s door. The equinox, perhaps. But very strong. And an oppressive day, in spite of it. . . .

The Machine Company whistle blew. One o’clock. People coining out of the Company, out from the mill and the carpenter shops, were startled by the wind. It was as though the whistle had been a signal to the wind, too. It set itself due southeast, and lifted to a gale — a queer, hot, violent gale, flipping hats off, flinging paper down the streets, swaying the signs, making the girls grab at their skirts and giggle. A crate of tomatoes in front of the grocery store toppled over, and people scrambling to help Eph Turner pick them up steadied themselves against the brick walls and laughed, . . . Some blow, eh, kid? Regular hurricane. Hurricane your foot! Whad’ye think this is, Palm Beach?

Rain began to spiral on the wind. . . .

II

There was salt spray in the rain at the end of Race Street, by the Point, where the Seymours’ garden lay above the fifteen-foot sea wall. Good-sized waves were breaking on the wall now, throwing spray on the mossy herringbone brick of the walks, drenching the red chairs. There in the garden you were so near the water that all you saw was the gray tumble. But from the house windows, up the slope of the lawn, you could see the waves rolling in past Napatree from the open sea, washing the breakwater without pausing, a ceaseless parade of green-black water with spray flattening out before it. The pines that edged the garden wall glistened and bent in the wind, and Tom Seymour wrestled to set the winter covers over them, struggling with recalcitrant planks and canvas. This spray would burn them so they’d be lopsided in the spring. Behind him Mary crouched in a fuchsia bed, doing frantic trowel work, hampered by the excited attention of the black cocker. She must, she said, get the plants in for the south window this winter. ‘When it blows like this I wish we’d never made a garden.’

Tom agreed, briefly, and anyone in the Port would have known that they were lying. Twenty years ago this land had been iron slag and rubble, and now it was a garden people came miles to see. No matter how many times you came through the high board fence which hid it from the street, the sudden beauty of that place never dulled for you, blowing bright between the green lawn and the blue sea — a garden the Seymours had made themselves, from stone wall to espaliered pears. They seemed to find as much to do in it in January as in June. Below the house, by the long dock, stood the studio, the small red guesthouse wrapped in wisteria. Now that he was sixty-five, Tom Seymour said, he was willing to admit that perhaps he was not the greatest painter in America. ‘But just the same I made enough out of it to own this acre, and that’s all anybody ought to want.’

He pulled a rope around a tree cover. Damn this wind — pushing up the high September tide. Apt to lose planks off the dock, or shingles off the guesthouse. Lucky the studio skylight was north. That would n’t catch it, anyway.

The wind heaved itself farther forward, and a jar of nasturtiums slithered along a table, crashed on the flagging. The Seymours looked up to see Charlotte Adams coming from her house down the street, her slicker yellow in the gray wind, laughing, as excited as the cocker. ‘Look, tell Aunt Malvina I could n’t get there this afternoon. They’ll have to improve the village without me. I have to meet George in Westerly on the five o’clock, so I’m going to Watch Hill beach to see the storm. Be swell from there.’

The brass cock of the weather vane jerked at a sudden angle, and the wind made a high humming against the metal. Tom shouted, to make Charlotte hear him. ‘Be terribly stiff on the shore road. We’re twice as sheltered here.’

‘But it’s such fun! If my house blows down while I’m away, rescue Denny.’

The gate slammed behind her — hard.

You caught the wind’s pace somehow, and it was wild and active and unreal. Along the docks the men scurried around the boats as though they were getting ready for a race. You could taste salt on your lips. . . . Some storm. Some equinox. Blow your car right along the road for you.

The wind picked up still more. It had a strange quality of pushing. No gusts — just a great weight, like a wall, like a wall moving. The salt rain ran before it in horizontal streaks.

From his southeast window Tom Seymour watched a larger wave than the rest rear and break directly over the garden wall, dumping itself into the enclosure. Water — not spray. Even the heaviest winter storm had never managed that. . . .

Abruptly, denying the unreasonable, senseless apprehension that was stirring in him, he made himself turn on the radio. Anthony Eden was to speak at two-thirty. Two-forty now. Hell of a lot of static. The stations sputtered and crackled. Tail end of a news broadcast. '. . . crrrink . . . low pressure areas traveling . . . crrink . . . and winds of high velocity .... crrrink . . . hurricane warnings out for . . . crrrink . . . possibility . . . crrrink . . . dwellers should evacuate . . . crrrink . . .’

Damn the thing. Dead out. Power off in New London again. Hurricane warnings, eh? Those poor devils in Florida catching it, and the Port getting the spent end of it. Hurricane warnings . . . ‘Let’s get the south windows as tight as we can. Hope that stupid nursegirl at the Adamses’ has sense enough, too. Ruin their paper.’

Three o’clock. Three-thirty. . . . The wind began to confuse you. You knew if it would just stop for a few minutes there would be things to do, things to say, before it began again. . . . You could do things like getting your awnings down, like shoring a plank or so against a tree which, leaning too far, too long, drenched in the salt rain, might break. . . . You could even talk to people, sensibly, instead of shouting at them, three feet away as they might be, and seeing by their faces that they had n’t heard you at that. . . . You could decide what to do about the boats, if only this damned wind would just stop. . . . But, more all the time, the wind seemed to wrap itself around you, engulf you, make you a part of itself, so that you were alone in it, deafened in it, blinded by its wetness. It was n’t a wand — it was a state of being. It was breaking windows now, and tossing bricks off chimneys. Things were moving that could not move, that must not move. And you were alone in it, in spite of all the people who were in it with you. . . .

Saint Peter Lemos, leaning against the storm, carrying two anchors out of his house door, was angry — angry because he was worried; angry because he was mixed up, because wind did n’t blow this way, because a man could n’t be sure his boat would hold . . . even with these extra anchors . . . even with every man in the fish fleet working on the docks to steady the boats. ‘Lena!’ he shouted. ‘Keep those children in the house. Can’t you see water already breaking on our wall? Can’t you see . . . Goddam! . . . You get them in!’ He left for the dock at a dogtrot. . . .

Mrs. Saint Peter heard him . . . and did n’t hear him . . . and snatched dishtowels to cover the windmill. . . . You could n’t get it down . . . this wind. . . . She pulled the grandchildren into the house with her, roughly, away from the sight of the sea. . . . ‘You, Manny! You, Adelina! You stay outa the wet! You help me I put towels here where the rain comes under the door. You heard your grandpa?’

Four o’clock. Four-fifteen. The wind possessed the Port, and all the people in it, and all the things in it. The wind, and the rain — the warm, driving, salt-tasting rain. . . , The rain began to come through tight window sashes, to overflow deep eaves gutters, to be a brackish brook in the streets. . . . And the wind began to take things. Two elms on High Street leaned at an angle six impossible feet farther than trees can lean — recovered — leaned again, from the very roots, pushed up the roots themselves, heaved the roots against the bricks, against the curbing, against the asphalt. And, roots and all, they fell — not fast, inexorably. The first one lay square across the street and the second one crashed down on Miss Malvina Parton’s house, through the roof, shearing, all groaning branch and odor of bruised leaves, through the dining room, through the clutter which was furniture and porcelain and crystal chandelier. . . .

Four-thirty. Quarter to five. There was nothing in the world but wind and salt rain. Nothing else in your mind, nothing else to occupy you. The whole universe was just a loud whirling. People struggled over the unfamiliar clutter of their own yards, careless of the falling trees, on errands of enormous and evasive importance, seeing other people moving, but seeing them as isolated strangers. Deaf, unable to make the other deaf hear you, whirled and soaked outdoors, impotent and shaken inside houses. . . .

The colored nursemaid stood in the bright hall of the Adamses’ bright young house, holding the child, rain-soaked because she had thought a while ago maybe she and Denny ought to go to somebody else’s house — for comfort; for escape from whatever this was. The telephone was dead. ‘Hush, Denny. Ever’body’s all right. Ever’body’s—’ Folks had a right not to live on oceans like this, had a right not to leave a person alone. She watched water smear the windows, form pools on the inside sills, run darkly down the blue walls.

III

Along the docks the sea began to run so high, the interval between the crashes of the great waves was so short, that it was useless to stay any longer on the bucking boats, hopeless to try another anchor, another turn around a bollard. They would hold — or they would n’t hold. The boats had deserted you, anyhow, before you deserted them. They were not Dimintine-Rosa, not Margaret Q., not Santa Clara — just heaving, heavy, animate objects beyond your power to help or to control; things that belonged to the wind; things that were beginning to belong to the sea.

The east docks knew that first. Those waves were not just waves. They were tons of water — acres of water — water breaking and sloshing where no tide had ever reached before — waves that belonged to the wind. . . .

Race Street knew it. There was a sea straight across the Point now, existing there, wave after wave, running in high past the Seymours’ garden, spilling on the flowers, nearly over the dock, down past the Adams house, down toward Arch Street.

The wind neither slackened nor increased. One gnarled and stubborn apple tree still twisted in the Seymours’ garden, above the green rubbish of the rest. And now the roof of the studio lifted — held — lifted — and came straight away with a shower of glass that you could see. See, not hear. The roof went down the street toward the Adams house.

The child and that nursemaid! Tom pushed Mary roughly back, started into that omnipotent, implacable wind. Outside his fence, people were trailing up the street slope to higher ground, wet clothes plastered to them, in an effect of bulky nudity, pushing blindly away from the wind, from the drenching salt rain, from flying wood and glass and branches, and sand flicked sharply on your skin.

They were pushing — Tom knew it before he had taken a dozen steps in the gray, shrieking world that was Race Street — away from the sea itself. Even as he slodged along, the pound of water against wood added a new booming to the present sound, and he saw the dock of the Adams house, the whole broad porch along the sea, wash and splinter and fly high in the streaked air.

The girl stood numb and quiet in the hall, holding the child, who whimpered a little. Water ran from Tom Seymour’s clothes on to the floor, and wind raced through the house from the door he had not closed, could not stop to close. The house shook itself, rumbled. . . . ‘Come on, Matty! Step fast. Our house is higher.’ Her mouth moved, but he could not hear her. The child was warm and heavy in his arms. Hurricane . . . hurricane warnings. His own gate swung splintered, and three of his paintings plastered themselves against the fence. With the studio roof off they would all be gone, in this wind. Well, no matter now. . . .

Mary was white-faced in their living room, the shivering dog crouched beside her. Rain poured through jagged glass in the south window. Down past the Point, along the wall, came a great green wave, straight across the whole garden, ignoring and obliterating. . . .

Blankets for the kid. Out of here up to Silver Street.

Water rushing ankle-deep down the street slope, and an empty car proceeding crab-wise toward the sea. The dog ran, dodged wildly, and in one slam of tearing sound the high fence fell in a solid piece, over the place where he had been. Water lapped over the wood. . . . No matter now. Come on.

People walking with you, absorbed in their own progress, ignoring all but their own necessity to move. People crowded into the second-floor room of the Hammet house, not saying anything, looking down toward Race Street. People holding cats and children and blankets and wet useless bundles — just standing, dripping, looking down. Race Street was the sea itself, with houses standing in the sea. From the southeast a bulk of green water which was not a wave, was nothing there was a name for, moved in — paused — moved again. . . .

Curious to see the houses you knew so well, the roofs under which you had lived, tilt, and curtsy gravely — hesitate, and bow — and cease to exist.

The whole east side of the street was running up the Bay.

Saint Peter saw it, and started to run, too, thumping towards his house in his sea boots, jostling against people who rushed against him, slowing him up, barring his way. Somebody tried to pull him back, in the direction of their flight. ‘Get outa my way! . . . Goddammit, the trees to jump over! . . . Lena! Manny! You, Adelina!’ They were standing in the kitchen. They spoke. And then the sea came down on them — down — from above the door lintel, crashing, smothering. Leaden sea boots which found no floor, no ground.

Manny’s arm in Saint Peter’s hand, and the furniture, the good kitchen cabinet, tilting. . . . The whole place moving, and you with it. . . . Water in your lungs. ‘ Manny! Lena! ’

All Arch Street went, piling back in the meadow, under the water.

IV

Southeast, that wind and sea. And then, with no change in sound, with only a shifting of that great weight from one pushing Titan’s shoulder to the next, southwest. Into the Harbor, down along Margin, chewing at the docks, canting the bollards, picking up the boats, washing over the five-o’clock train from New York where it teetered on the causeway, with two cars dangling in the water, its engine’s nose against a sixty-foot trawler sprawled across the tracks.

George Adams, in the first car behind the engine, decided to swim for it. Five hundred passengers. Nobody hurt — yet. Fifty little boys in blue serge suits from Brooks Brothers, in consciously new felt hats, behaving well, torn between fear and excitement. A young master, only different from them because he was taller, shouting, ‘Quiet, boys! Just quiet!’ into the roaring deafness. George went out a vestibule door, tried for ground, started to swim. This was the main highway. The signal tower. . . . His hand touched solid metal, and he hung on to it, resting. Top of the gasoline pump at Matt’s filling station. A big boat careened by him. . . . What about Charlotte? . . . What about the kid? . . .

Charlotte knew a fingernail was dangling loose where her left hand shifted to freeze a new grip on what was left of a garage roof. Not that it mattered much. The only thing that mattered out here in the Bay was planning to breathe in the places where one wave had just broken over you and the next one was only beginning. Someone — she herself, maybe, though she could n’t be sure — was saying, over and over, in a crying woman’s voice, ‘If my house blows down while I’m away, rescue Denny. . . . Oh, if my house blows down while I’m away . . .’

Down through the Port streets the tide was turning, if this surging gray waste could be called anything so familiar and commonplace as tide; turning back along outrageous ways where no tide had ever been; rippling six feet deep over fallen trees, through the Machine Company engines; sliding over what used to be the Foundry, receding from black-wet piles of fabric in the Velvet Mill, pulling branches and chairs and life buoys with it.

On High, on Margin, on the highway across the tracks, small rowboats were floating free and men began to capture them, poling through the streets, feeling the tide ebb beneath them, feeling the wind slacken some. A crying gale now — something you could recognize for wind, and put a name to. The rain began to fall like rain.

People began to straggle along the trestle off the train, to move and speak in the blowing streets. . . . Porter drowned ... I saw a woman . . . Which way is the town? . . . Saw some men in a boat and they said . . .

Passing the mouth of Arch Street, George Adams saw men working at a mass of splintered lumber, pushing, prizing. . . . Jim Hale helped to lift out the woman’s body. A big woman, heavy and sodden and bruised in death — Mrs. Saint Peter, with a dishtowel still in her hand. ‘Whole end of the town’s gone. Whole of Race and the Point is gone.’

He ran lumbering among trees and planks, down streets so strange you might never have seen them before, out along the water’s edge. Nothing there at all, to show where his house had been, but rubble and wet sand and pieces of painted wood. ... It was still light. You could see people’s faces. ‘Your little boy’s okay, Mr. Adams.’ . . . ‘Your baby’s up to Hallets’, Mr. Adams.’ . . .

A little farther on was Tom Seymour, Walking on a small spit of tumbled slag and sand and bricks, of stone beams tossed endwise and pieces of wet rubbishy cloth. ‘Denny’s all right, George. Up at the Hallets’ with the nurse. Charlotte’s — I’m sure she’s all right. She was going to meet you in Westerly. I ’m sure —'

Carefully he avoided looking out toward the new coast line which was Napatree, or over toward Watch Hill, where you could see that two houses, at least, were still standing.

Something glittered in the wet sand at his feet and he picked up a piece of Mary’s spode teapot.

Quarter to seven. It had n’t taken long.

‘I guess Charlotte’ll be turning up any minute now, George.’

‘Yes,’ George said. ‘Sure.’

The wind was falling, and dusk was coming on.

Boats were in the tree branches, canted against the houses, spilling rope and gear through stove-in holes on to lawns and streets and fields. Three boats sat neatly on the new beach where Captain Nat’s shop had been. Captain Nat did n’t know the boats. Part of his apartment was a hundred yards down the harbor line, and a window curtain kept blowing back and forth in the wind. All the docks gone. . . . They say there ain’t a boat in the harbor. . . . There ain’t a stick of a dock. . . .

‘Yeahen. Bad. Well, boys, let’s get started. Must be plenty people hurt.’

Captain Nat found Bill Evans pinned under Pelican’s mast. The boat was jammed into the wall of Eph Turner’s grocery, half a mile inland from Bill’s yard. It took three men to lift the mast off him, but you did n’t. need to be worried about hurting him, because he was unconscious anyway.

They took him to Miss Malvina Parton’s house. It was the nearest, and the doctor was there already looking after some women off the train. Sixteen of the little boys and the young master were in Miss Malvina’s kitchen, being quiet and polite and fearfully excited, being useful about blankets and coffee made on a spirit lamp. Many more people were in the drawing-room, and the wind blew through the hall from where the dining room used to be. You would n’t dare start a fire in any house, not in this wind, with so many roofs and chimneys gone. People were beginning to get pretty cold in their soaking clothes. Miss Malvina was erect and competent — so erect that she looked brittle.

It was dark now. Some people had candles, and some people had lanterns, and you could see electric torches spotting around in the black streets. Folks off the train in the priest’s house and the Town Hall. . . . Lotta those people from Race Street up in the rectory and at the Fannings’. Have n’t got a stitch but what they stand up in. . . . Blankets . . . milk . . . shoes . . . liquor. . . . Anybody got any idea where there’s another two-handled saw in town? . . . Candles . . . lanterns. . . . Ought to be terrible careful of fire around here. Rain’s let up now. No water running in any pipes. . . .

People hacking and sawing at the trees, and digging in the mess. They found Saint Peter, with his dead hand still on Manny’s dead arm, but not the little girl. Probably up in under that stuff in the meadow. . . .

It was n’t the Port. It was just some place out of a cold-sweated dream. The sky began to get red down toward the west, and you could see a flame shoot up now and then behind the jagged horizon. Mystic? Noank? No — New London. Burning all along the water front, lighting the sky all night. It was a sort of nightmare background to the wet and the cold and the feeling of being still as confused as you had been in the wind. People meeting, and separating, and moving around, and stopping. People going into houses, and coming out again after a while. . . .

V

The sun was half an hour above a bland pink dawn when Miss Malvina walked from her bed to her window. She had not undressed, nor slept, but along about three o’clock in the morning she had felt that even though her house was full of guests she must rest a little, to be of help to them later. When she got to the window she steadied herself on the sash, and stood looking out for quite a long time. Two trees, with a few little black leaves on them. Like winter. Houses she had never in her life before seen from this window stood bald and nakedly revealed, their chimneys down, their shutters dangling. The widow’s walk on the Fanning house was broken wooden teeth. The Congregational Church steeple was an ice-cream cone mashed by a careless foot. The white paint of the houses was scummed brown, and the screens on the dirty windows were greenish and thick. A few men struggled through the littered streets, and there was a sour smell on the air.

Miss Malvina lay down on her bed again. When lists were made of the Port deaths, Miss Malvina’s was set down as of old age and a heart attack.

By noon Captain Nat had a sort of clean-up crew organized. There was talk of a volunteer militia — because strangers were beginning to turn up here and there. . . .

Looters — a new word for the Port. Sanitation squad. Red Cross station. Quicklime. Compensation. Typhoid serum. Disaster relief. Reparation. . . . They say only about one out of ten automobiles can be made to run again. . . . They say the porter off the train was found in Gifford’s garden. . . .

And the sour smell on the air. And the alien face of the harbors, blue and placid, with shore lines no one could recognize, with heavy channel beacons canted at crazy angles, without a dock along their margins, without a boat on the water, and the outer breakwater like a dam children had started to build across a brook, and got tired of.

Fifty fish boats lost, at least — some of them gone completely and some of them lying on the land. The fishermen looked at them as a man might look at his own right hand, cut off at the wrist and thrown on some rubbish heap to stink and rot. Thirty houses gone, and no house left uninjured, How did you begin again, with this?

Things turning up in the tangled mess — one shoe; someone’s piano; a part of an electric icebox; a doll; a piece of mashed gilt that was the altar crown from the Mandanos house.

People began telling each other how lucky the Port had been. Only seven drownings. And they say that at New London . . . they say that in the Westerly morgue , . . they say . . .

You got used to it, in a way, if you kept going. Plenty to keep going on. Strange to poke in filthy rubbish, trying to find your clothes, or your spoons, or maybe part of your tool chest, and turn up a painted tray nobody had ever seen before. Funny how bad the smell was, when you always thought of the sea and the sand as so clean. . . .

You even got. used to the sweep of the searchlight the Coast Guard set up off the Point. It was almost comfortable to see it, nights. They say they are cutting rings off dead fingers on the beaches . . . they say that at Charlestown . . .

They say . . . they say. . . . Rumor was like the people who began to appear with cameras and box lunches, watching you saw and dig as if you were some animal in a cheap sideshow, while you tried to pretend you did n’t see them. . . .

Lookit, Papa, is n’t that terrible? . . . They say this was all a garden. This is the worst we’ve seen. . . . Lookit, don’t those boats look comical? . . . Isn’t this just terrible? . . . They say there’s a kid’s body there they have n’t found yet. . . .

‘Yeahen,’ Captain Nat said. ‘Vultures. Well . . .’