Orphans by William Hammett
Originally Published in Rose
and Thorn Journal
Copyright William Hammett 2008, 2022
All Rights Reserved
The
indifferent gray clouds had rolled away twelve hours earlier, leaving a
blinding, blue, unreachable sky in their place. I paddled slowly through the
toxic soup, dipping the splintered oar soundlessly so as not to create even the
smallest splash if possible. Oil, gasoline, and a thousand chemicals normally
kept under kitchen sinks created rainbow slicks on the floodwaters, horrible
impressionist paintings lumped together on a canvas a hundred miles wide.
Katrina was gone now, but she had marched through Louisiana like a scorned
woman, kicking in doors and uprooting trees with her high-pitched, demonic
howls.
The
steep pitch of roofs was evident everywhere, the homes they covered submerged
in the smooth, new lake. The V-shaped gables jutted above the water like small
black army tents. Most were uninhabited, but a few arms waved lethargically
from broken attic windows. Occasionally, a man or woman could be seen sitting
on the apex of a roof, balanced precariously as the sun beat mercilessly on the
gritty tar and fiberglass shingles.
I
kept my small wooden fishing boat, able to hold two more people, away from any
signs of human life. There were hundreds of stranded individuals, some clinging
tenaciously to weeping willow branches, attempting to stay a few feet above the
waters of Lake Ponchartrain, waters that had filled the gaudy, drunk, forsaken
Crescent City as soon as the weathered, decaying levees had been breached. But
who would be saved and who would die from weakness, starvation, or dehydration?
I'd already seen a small pleasure boat attacked by a desperate family that had
jumped from a third-story window of a suburban apartment building. The six
family members had ruthlessly thrown the three occupants of the boat overboard,
swamping the craft in the process. Flailing arms created wavelets as curses
broke a silence palpable as the death that hung over the inundated city.
I
drew my conclusion early on: salvation would be an arbitrary matter, and only
God, assuming he still watched over the urban hell before me, would be able to
judge whether my actions were righteous or cruel. It was that simple.
My
boat bumped into a corpse as I backed away from a row of homes where a dozen
people, having chopped through roofs with axes to escape their windowless
attics, urgently waved shirts to attract my attention. The old black woman in
the water had been dead at least thirty-six hours judging from the bloated
condition of the corpse. Her belly had already split open, her eyes rolled back
in their sockets, lifeless white orbs staring at the sky. I pushed the body
away and then twisted the paddle between the palms of my hands, as if starting
a campfire, in order to shake the maggots from the broadest part of the wood.
I
was moving into Chalmette – the ninth ward – where Katrina had slammed houses
and businesses until they stood at a forty-five degree angle, like a stadium
crowd leaning to see if the fullback has made it over the goal line. Some
structures were crushed altogether-billboards, fences, street signs, and tool sheds.
Ahead, the roots of an oak stuck out like a claw, the two-hundred-year-old tree
having been plucked from the sod and dropped on its side like a feeble giant.
I
paddled around it, and that's when I saw the head of the waif: a little
red-haired girl, no more than seven. Her dirty face protruded from the top of a
chimney. She said nothing, only stared as my skiff quietly glided up to the
bricks that constituted her temporary home.
"Climb
in," I said.
She
stared at me blankly, saying nothing.
"Are
you alone?"
She
remained silent, which was just as good. I instinctively knew the answer to my
question. Answers were everywhere, written in rubble and debris and nine feet
of water. Of course she was alone.
"Get
in the boat," I instructed as I stood, my arms extended. "You'll be
safe."
The
orphan didn't move, so I gently lifted her from the chimney and placed her on
the narrow rectangular seat behind mine. She clutched a stuffed, waterlogged
animal that could have been a teddy bear, a monkey, or a dragon. It, too, had
died.
"We're
going someplace safe," I told her.
One
hundred yards farther on, I saw an old black man sitting cross-legged on a
wooden palette that had obviously drifted through the doors of a warehouse. He
played a cheap Stella guitar, and his gravelly voice sang of a woman who had
left him for a rich man in New York City.
"Need
a ride?" I asked, not intending to be glib. He was free to join the girl
or float along and play the blues, for which he was more than qualified.
"I
suspect I might," he said. "Not much of an audience left."
"No,"
I said. "Not much."
He
handed me his guitar and carefully climbed into the boat, sitting next to the
girl.
Overhead,
a Coast Guard helicopter sped northward, its plump orange and white body
plainly visible in the midday sun. I knew it was headed for a rescue station up
ahead, though its distance might be two miles or a hundred.
I
paddled faster, passing more than a dozen people pleading for me to stop and
offer them transportation. A dog barked as he swam toward the boat. The black
man pulled him over the edge, where he shook his wet fir, sending a spray of
foul water over my adopted crew. He wouldn't threaten our survival. A metal urn
flew over my head and landed in the water ten feet to starboard, commentary
from someone I was forced to pass up.
Three
hours later, the gray water grew shallow as I saw a hundred men and women
planted on high ground, little fence posts forming an irregular line of
survival. The black man continued to sing his down-and-out blues as we approached
a section of levee that had somehow withstood the twenty-foot tidal surge. A
woman in an orange life vest – unmistakably Coast Guard – helped the girl and
the old man from the boat. The dog jumped out and ran down the levee,
disappearing in the odd assortment of survivors, their faces as blank and
unfeeling as the girl's.
Gently,
I backed the skiff away from the levee.
"Don't
do it, mister!" the woman in the orange vest warned me. "It's not
safe out there!"
No,
it wasn't safe, but life hadn't had anything to do with safety since the
cyclonic white clouds had swirled across the Gulf of Mexico two days earlier.
In less than a minute, I was twenty-five yards from the levee. The woman had
turned away, uninterested in the actions of a fool like me.
Strains
from the black man's cheap guitar floated over the water while the little girl
raised her hand and waved goodbye, her arm as limp as the appendages of her
stuffed animal.
It
was morning of the first day, and God had breathed over the abyss. Dry land had
yet to completely take form, and salvation was years in the future. A new
testament between the Creator and his people could not be imagined as I once
again threaded my way through cypress trees and people waiting to be born.
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