Sunrise at Night

*Sensitive Content: historical racism/ slurs

Sunday

September 8th, 1901

from the desk of Lydia Leaning

Galvez Hotel, rm. 201

Last year I saw the ocean stand up and eat everything.

~

As I write this, I can almost smell the great pyres, the mounds of tangled flesh, entire lifetimes twisted together like string and shoved into the surf. I know it is ridiculous to think this way, to dwell. The fires stopped burning many months ago, the horrid smells have been pushed away by the Gulf breeze, the human wreckage paved over in concrete and forgotten – the numberless nameless now sealed forever beneath my feet. I am alone now. This is my first time in Galveston alone. Daddy is sulking across the bay in Texas City, sitting silent and angry in a castle that once glowed so warmly. Now for me it rises from the ground like a single white bone sticking up through the soil.

Aunt Edna and Uncle James drowned. Daddy pulled them from a pyre three days after the storm, somehow managing to rescue them before the flames made them unrecognizable. Cousins Lilly and Flora are still missing. Daddy still thinks they might be found. Every morning he stuffs his pipe, straightens his glasses, and scans the personal columns in the Galveston Daily News. He remembers last autumn, when the hopeful messages sometimes still whispered softly amongst the screaming ink. “Jetta, I am here. 2002L. Come at once.” “Fred, if alive, come to 24th and Church. Your brother Ben is here.”

I have known for a year Lilly and Flora are somewhere out in the Gulf, but it would be cruel of me to dissuade him from his morning ritual. I am no better. Sometimes I find myself still clinging to memories of Thanksgivings and Christmases at my aunt and uncle’s house, my little cousins screaming with excitement in the window as our family crunched its way across the Oyster-shell street toward their glorious house on stilts. We would rise up the stairs to the veranda and pass into a cloud of smells too sweet to try and remember now – roast partridge and turkey, garlic on string beans, pine needles, the fishy must of cherrystone oysters, and, in the evenings, coffee, hot chocolate, and whisky. And the noise, the noise! Chatter about business at the cotton exchange, bloody and boisterous stories from the war driven into hushed tones by the women seeking to shield our young ears, the snap of logs in the black stove, amused wheezing and table thumping at the jokes Daddy would make about “monkeys” running through the streets and playing in the surf like savages, jokes I never understood.

In those days my cousins and I inhabited an entirely separate world of phantoms. We had our own little table for meals, draped with a wide length of white lace curtain from the spare bedroom. Unattended it looked like a crouching ghost to me. The top two floors belonged to us and our stories. The stairs were a ladder into the clouds, the hallways underground tunnels, the bedrooms caves spilling over with jewels, the gas lamps fairy spirits lighting our way forward, and the entire house, its lumber groaning in the winter wind, a pirate ship sailing rough waters into the sunset.

Somewhere, as I write this, Lilly and Flora are being slowly picked apart by fish. The feast has moved out to sea, but the world had begun to grow quiet for me in the last years before the storm. The girls had started to winter in Dallas and San Antonio with their fiancées. We saw Edna and James only at Easter and Independence Day. Edna talked only of weddings and expenses. James talked of his headaches and the lights he would see behind his eyelids every night as he slept. My mother and I would feign laughter as he tried to amuse us with stories which always seemed to fade into nonsense and cursing at the end. Daddy would grumble with embarrassment and ply him with whisky until he fell asleep in his armchair. Then he would push us toward the door, kiss Edna on the forehead, and promise her that next summer we would all be together again.

~

My earliest memory is of the 1885 fire. I was four, being pulled from the sweetest dreams into a cold November night. I remember fighting daddy and crying as he carried me toward the front door, all the while telling me there was something he needed to show me. I screamed and beat his chest with my little fists because I felt he was tearing me away from a better world, my chubby fingers clinging desperately to the fading images like a favorite toy. I had dreamt of snow flurries melting in the panic grass around our house, Aunt Edna’s sugar cookies, heaps of presents under the biggest tree in the neighborhood, all of them for me, and of the big boot print Daddy would put into the fireplace ash every Christmas eve with his old cavalry boots. I’m sure I smiled a little smile in my sleep, knowing the next morning Daddy would hoist me up into his arms and point to where Santa had come down the chimney. I was still fighting as he swung open the heavy oak door. An unseasonably hot wind blew hair into my eyes, making me cry even more. Then I turned my eyes up to the house.

My father always has always called it “the castle.” His hoarded fortune from the Houston slave market built it in 1878, as a wedding present for mother. Done in the “ruins” style so popular then, even more so now, it consists of a main structure of poured concrete and oyster shell, only the second of its kind in the United States at the time, with cast stone and iron columns, a haphazard mix of Greek and gothic flourishes, gabled dormer windows above, and thick rectangular bay windows below that are split into three sections like the leaves of a Japanese folding screen. As family and fortune grew, this stolid exterior began to give way to an interior womb of ever-increasing comfort - gas lighting on all three floors in 1880, electrical light in 1886, and heated water for four bathrooms in 1890, all equipped with vast porcelain canopy baths. Every room and hallway was perfumed with my mother’s patchouli and my father’s pipe tobacco. He likes to sweeten it with apple cores. My early years bounced upon custom knit quilts from the island, Parisian-silk pillows, Armenian rugs, and Turkish couches, enveloping my rambunctious, giggling girlhood in an imperial cushion. As I’ve grown older, I’ve fancied the house is my father’s self-portrait, its old-world shell masking a rich interior warmth. The thought grows sillier the longer I contemplate it. It almost makes me laugh.

That night I looked up and the castle had transformed. On a clear night, when the moon had reached its full height, the house always shone bone white. When it was overcast, a spectral blue. Now it was a beautiful orange candle! It was as if the warmth inside had bled through the castle’s skin. The white concrete was phosphorescent and alive like the belly of a great firefly. Through wet eyes I saw the windows beaming out long prismatic glints, sharp arcs that stretched across the stars. I followed them past the dark shadow of Daddy’s head and turned toward Galveston. The glow on the horizon was incredible. My child’s mind thought the sun was beginning to rise at night.

~

Underneath that glow was incredible suffering. No death, not yet, but still, suffering: nearly six hundred houses eaten down to the ground, two thousand families left in the streets, and a black belt of total destruction stretching across the island between Avenues K and O. And yet, I am ashamed to admit, in times of distress and loneliness I hold that glow to my heart as closely as the Thanksgivings and the Christmases, because it still feels like a miracle, like the world was careening over faster than it should have, bringing the sun up before anyone could ready themselves for it.

All of my summers since 1887 have been spent in Galveston. An impenetrable tyranny of heat and humidity descends on Texas every April, its reign stretching from the panhandle all the way down to the Mexican border. Until the first cold fronts of November come to the rescue, only the languid waters of the Gulf offer relief. We would arrive early on a sweltering morning in early July, check in to the largest available suite at The Galvez, have an enormous breakfast at Gaido’s, and then walk over to the beach. Daddy would release me onto the hot sand, and I would run, and run, and run toward the water. On the way I screamed, I jumped, I somersaulted. I was a rodeo horse set loose. Then I plunged into the surf, saltwater filling my nostrils and mouth. Rising from a swell I would cough and spit, and then go back down again. The burn in my face felt good, almost purifying. Scrapes and cuts from playing at home would crust over, the briny water sluicing over my skin, stinging the wounds shut. Even the furious sun rashes are pleasant to recall. After a few weeks convalescing back home at the castle, soaking in warm baths and being rubbed with oil by mother, the redness would fade and the skin would peel away in sheets, and I would emerge from the chrysalis of summer newer and stronger.

It was the summer of 1895 when I met little Charles. My family and I were attending Sunday service at Trinity church on 22nd and Winnie, and by the age of fourteen I had already grown bored with the thudding regularity of the hymns and supplications. This particular Sunday the service was longer and more boring than usual, and I had caused a minor scandal in the congregation by bringing a book with me into the church: my much-loved, and, until that day, quite secret copy of Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper, which a classmate had passed me the year before. Daddy grabbed my arm and hissed into my right ear, “You’re embarrassing us in front of half the island!” In his anger he sent me outside with my book, to think on my sins.

Sitting on the high curb outside was a little boy, maybe six or seven, crying, his little boots not reaching the pavement as they swung nervously back and forth against the concrete. It was concerning to see such a tiny person alone in a place of such rich and confusing enormity, so I went over and sat next to him. I held his little hand and asked him what the matter was. He pointed over to a beautifully dressed young lady a few yards up the sidewalk, buying a string of sand dollars from a street vendor. “I want to go home, but mommy won’t listen to me! The water is coming to get us!” In those days you could stand on the Strand and look straight up the street to the Gulf, the uniform flatness of the island making it look as if ships were going to come sailing right down the avenue. This never used to frighten me. Swells from the Gulf of Mexico didn’t break with the thunderous anger of ocean waves. They simply arched their backs and melted against the sand like sleepy house cats settling down for a nap. I asked him why such a tame and peaceful body of water frightened him so. As long as I live, I will recall his words exactly. “I feel like we’re in a giant bowl looking up at the ocean, and any moment now it will come pouring down upon us.”

“Charles, get over here at once!” His mother barked, and I quickly kissed him on the forehead and told him not to worry. He smiled dubiously while rubbing away tears and joined his mother up the sidewalk. True life embraced me again as I walked back to the church and sat down on the steps. I heard the clop of horse hoofs on wood-block pavement, smelled coffee from the roasters on Mechanic street, heard the shouts of children playing in the surf as they echoed unimpeded over the impossibly flat terrain. A city ordinance, seeking to prevent another fire from jumping gleefully house to house like it had in 1885, had ordered all the roofs in Galveston resurfaced with slate. I breathed the humid air and opened my book. A drop of sweat fell from my forehead and onto a sentence. The ink began to swell and run, making it unreadable. I closed my book and looked back up and saw new black roofs blazing angrily in the sunlight.

~

Daddy does not approve of young David, who lies sleeping behind me as I write. He is “just another smelly Yankee negrophile.” It is all true. And yes, David does smell. The Cotton Exchange is, somehow, still thriving after a third of it was bashed into useless piles of torn lumber. Every morning David joins the screwmen at the docks and presses bales of white fluff into ships with an enormous jackscrew that has always looked to me like some nightmarish medieval weapon. He comes back every night with a vast coat of lint clinging to his sweat, and his boots generously smeared with mud and sand. He smells of work, of the sea, and all the musts of a world still working and sweating as if nothing has changed. I love it. I love him. Every day he works, but Sundays are just for us. No work, no church, just good food, good talk, and other things.

Daddy and I spent the night at James and Edna’s on the eve of the storm, September 7th, 1900. Mother was back home with a nurse and a ravenous summer cold. The vacation had been lean and disappointing, excursions cut short by telegrams to and from home, last-minute business luncheons at Ritter’s Café, and Lilly and Flora bickering with their parents over their inexplicable decision to have their weddings occur in the same month of 1901. All night I had been jolted from sleep by thuds rising up the house’s stilts and into the guest bedroom. The Gulf seemed to be knocking at the door, an angry house guest demanding at last to be acknowledged, growing angrier the longer it was kept waiting. Morning brought a strange Northerly breeze and cold rain that raced against the skin with the force of a thousand tiny needles. In matters of money and comfort, Daddy has always had a profitable sense for the future, and after a single glimpse of the weather he rushed us home on the first train to the mainland. We stepped into the car at approximately nine in the morning. By then water was already sloshing against the steps and running in between the seats. The locomotive made rude haste from the island, leaving several folks rushing for the train stranded at the Santa Fe Union depot. Daddy and I took our seats, and I remember cold water seeping up through the seat of my dress. I cast a parting glance back toward Galveston. Rain lashed the windows in sheets, and through the glass everything looked as if it were melting away.

One of David’s books lies open on the desk in front of me, and he has circled a passage in furious pencil. “The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.” From our room the Gulf can no longer be seen. The jackscrews from the docks have been repurposed, and teams of men are swarming the island, lifting every building up into the air and away from the sea. Some homes still stand sad and naked like defeathered chickens. Months after the hurricane I was still hearing stories of people being shred into bloody, screaming heaps as the wind stripped slate from the rooftops and sent the razor-sharp chunks racing through the streets in deadly black hives. And, for the second time in my life, the sky was lit up at night, this time with the glow of burning flesh.

I am looking up toward the book again. Another underlined passage, “the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” Strange symmetry. I wonder which version David and I are occupying. The memories I’ve laid down in these pages bring me less and less comfort every day. The glow of that November night is cooling, the thrill of the miracle gradually being filled in and built over. It is selfish of me to think that David will reignite it. He is a whole person. I mustn’t use him as kindling for a dying childhood. Where shall I go now? Mother and father will no longer have me, Daddy's cash is running out quickly, and the only thing I see out the window is a sky washed clean of everything. I think I will lay down beside David and sleep a little. Perhaps, in my dreams, I will find a third sunrise to carry into this new century.