Free Widow's Tears by Susan Wittig Albert Page A

Victorian towers, turrets, and chimney pots exuberantly rendered in shape, color, texture, and detail. The hospital was the architectural work of Nicholas J. Clayton, who was responsible for many of the grand Victorian flights of fancy that Galvestonians loved so much—so many, in fact, and so grand (or grandiose) that the period was known as the “Clayton Era.” He was “excessively fond,” one critic later said, of decorative brick and ironwork.
    At the hospital that morning, someone—a nurse, an aide—glanced out of a west-facing window toward the bay, a hundred yards away. She described the scene in a letter she was writing at that moment: “It does not require a great stretch of imagination to imagine this structure a shaky old boat out at sea, the whole thing rocking,” she wrote in her spidery hand. “…Like a reef, surrounded by water…water growing closer, ever closer. Have my hands full quieting nervous, hysterical women.” An hour later, more anxious now, she added another paragraph: “The scenes about here are distressing. Everything washed away. Poor people, trying to save their bedding and clothing…It is a sight. Our beautiful bay a raging torrent.”
    Galveston Bay—the usually placid harbor where the big ships rode at anchor—was indeed a torrent. The north wind, which seemed to become more violent by the minute, pushed the bay water over the wharves and sent it, thick as molasses with bay mud and debris, sloshing across the Strand. More than a dozen large steamers lay in the harbor that weekend, including the three-year-old, 3,900-ton British vessel
Kendal Castle
. Almost all the ships were working their engines to ease the strain on their anchor lines, their crews tending frantically to the moorings. The tide was extremely high, and the waves lifted the ships ten, fifteen, twenty feet above the warehouses along the piers, stretching the taut hawsers and anchor chains to the breaking point. Onlookers watched from the safety of the Strand, fascinated but fearful that the waves would rip the ships loose and fling them like so many toys onto the shore.
    A few blocks away, downtown, it was a different story. Augustus Blackwood, like most of Galveston’s businessmen, had more important things to do than worry about a tropical storm. To be sure, there were reports of flooding in the lower-lying areas and some intermittent power outages and news of damage to the Midway and the beach streetcar trestle. It was even said that the streetcars had stopped running at the eastern end of Broadway, where Gulf waters had pushed inland as far as Twelfth Street. But the electricity had stayed on at the bank, there was the usual pressing business to transact, and the morning had been very much like any other stormy Saturday morning. Quite naturally, financial matters took precedence over the weather any day of the week.
    By the time Augustus Blackwood prepared to go home for his dinner, however, the rain was much heavier. He looked out of his window, debating whether to stay downtown and have lunch or endure a thorough soaking on his walk home. His mind was made up when a man with whom he had done some personal business—a man from Beaumont, Texas, from whomhe had bought some land in Fayette County, as well as some highly speculative mineral rights—dropped in. Augustus suggested that the two of them take a table at Ritter’s Café and Saloon, just two blocks from the bank. He telephoned his home and spoke briefly to his wife, informing her that he would be lunching downtown. He was surprised at Rachel’s response: she begged him to come home immediately.
    â€œThe water is in the yard, Augustus!” she cried frantically. “It’s flowing all around the house! And it’s not rainwater, either. I tasted it—it’s
salt
water!”
    He was surprised at this news and somewhat concerned, since he had never seen the Gulf