Harry & Ruth (3 page)

The Crowders were the only family in Saraw living in a brick house. They wanted their son to marry well, and so Theron IV's acceptable gene pool in the town of his birth was limited. Because he was warned not to, and because of how he was, he fell in love with Belle Culbreth. In the surviving photographs, she could be Ruth's twin.

Belle was the best-looking girl in town. She was the youngest of nine children who lived with their mother and occasional men alongside Turpentine Creek, among other families of subsistence farmers and sawmill workers whose rickety pine houses were connected to each other and their respective privies by winding dirt paths where copperheads liked to sun. Some of Belle's siblings had “Father: Unknown” by their names at the county courthouse. (“Don't you dare mention this to anyone,” Ruth warned when she finally admitted that fact to Harry.)

Belle Culbreth was said to be “wild as a buck.” When she was 16, she went for a ride with her boyfriend, who stopped long enough on the way to the beach to rob a store at gunpoint. He was caught, and he claimed that Belle was the one who had planned it all and urged him on, but the jury believed her, and only the boy went to prison.

What Ruth herself knew, she came to know in drips and drabs; nobody in her family told a truly important story straight on. The ones worth remembering came from the periphery, from the corner of your eye and ear, pearls thrown aside casually in the middle of a conversation about pie recipes or gallbladder surgery.

Her grandparents were horrified when young Theron told them he was marrying Belle Culbreth. Besides the social chasm, they were both 17, just out of high school.

But Theron was wild, too. Before he was 16, around the time that Belle was (by the most charitable interpretation) a spectator and passenger in an armed robbery, he had tried to enlist in the Army during the waning days of World War I. After he was rejected because of his age, he got into a fight with two soldiers on the courthouse square in Newport and came home with a broken nose.

They were, Ruth's Aunt Charlotte would say, two of a kind, for better or for worse. They eloped.

Theron's parents tried to get the marriage annulled. T.D. threatened, then pleaded. He sent Theron's beloved older sisters to cry on the Culbreths' doorstep. Sudie, Theron's mother, shut herself in her room for two weeks, threatening to die. Finally, though, she sent for Theron and Belle and told them they could have a roof over their heads, no doubt a finer roof than was covering their shack along Turpentine Creek.

T.D., when he accepted reality and tried to cut his losses, did his wife one better. He told the newlyweds that he would build them a brand-new house, fine as any in Saraw, on the birth of their first male child.

It is an indicator of the stubbornness of Belle and Theron that they waited six years to have their first and only child, a girl they named Ruth McNair Crowder. Belle nearly died giving birth and was told she couldn't have any more children. T.D. waited three more years, obviously believing that the promise of a new house would cause Belle to will herself pregnant, whatever the physical barriers.

“I'm pretty sure,” Ruth wrote Harry once, “that Momma didn't really want to have children. Oh, she was a good enough mother, as best I can remember, but it wasn't what she was cut out to be.”

What Ruth can remember: her mother singing “Yes, We Have No Bananas” to make her laugh; the way her father's breath smelled when he'd kiss her good night, a taste she later learned was a mixture of tobacco and bourbon; falling down the stairs at her grandparents' and her mother rushing her to the hospital in Newport for stitches, then taking her to Pearson's Drug Store afterward for her first vanilla milkshake; her father carrying her on his shoulders through springtime fields, running down the furrows while she squealed in fear and delight.

And, of course, the day itself.

Finally, in 1928, T.D. brought in a crew and had the workers start on the long-promised house. Theron and Belle had lived with him and Sudie and the others for nine years already, and it is possible that he was driven by a desire for space and privacy and peace in his own house.

The footings were dug in June. By October, the house was three-fourths ready.

Fourteen years later, Harry still could see where those footings were. After the hurricane, T.D. Crowder had the same crew tear the house down and haul away the lumber and bricks.

In 1928, Theron and Belle were 26. Theron was helping run the mill, working six days most weeks, but he and Belle still had some of the wild streak that made them the life of the party and the despair of the Crowders. Only two years before, they had been arrested in Newport for “public lewdness in a motor vehicle,” which was being driven by Theron at the time.

That fall, they must have been at least somewhat content with their lives. They and their daughter would be moving into the finest house in town—a two-story brick Colonial—by Christmas. Theron's future was secure if not dazzling in its possibilities. They were said to have been the center of young married life in Saraw; if the Crowders never quite accepted Belle as their daughter, she apparently was liked well enough by her husband's peers in Saraw and Newport.

The storm came on a Wednesday. Some of Belle and Theron's friends talked them into driving to White Oak Beach for the day. Another couple was already vacationing at a cottage there, and they talked their friends into joining them for a hurricane party. It had been done before: Everyone would sit on the porch, drink and stare down an ocean. One time, two years earlier, the waves had completely surrounded the party cottage, cutting it off from the mainland. But the water receded in a few minutes, and everyone had a story to tell.

Theron had an almost-new model-T. He told his father he was taking the day off, and he and Belle both laughed at T.D.'s threats and warnings.

The old maps and the history books show how the big storms sculpted the Carolina coast, and continue to do so.

A large percentage of Atlantic hurricanes head straight for the part of North Carolina that juts into harm's way. Then, they swerve, borne out to sea by the Gulf Stream, dealing a glancing blow to a few beach towns, sometimes plowing into Long Island or the New England coast, or limping, old and broken, into the North Atlantic. Sometimes, one will hit the coast head-on, washing a few abandoned cottages out to sea. Even those, though, almost invariably weaken as they make landfall. Even those tend to hover a bit, almost stopping, before finally lumbering landward.

Once every few decades, though, seldom enough to breed carelessness, there is a storm like The One in '28.

Technically, White Oak Beach is an island. From Newport, the river is on one side and the ocean on the other. Fast-food restaurants and the cheap cottages of those not able to get closer to the sea line the six-lane road all the way to the end. At the five-mile mark, the road goes over a slight rise and the water is visible on both sides, several hundred yards away. Just before the beach itself, the distance closes until the land is bisected by a channel 200 yards across.

The channel is younger than Ruth. It is not man-made.

Theron and Belle took a bottle of whiskey with them that Wednesday, bought from a bootlegger on the beach highway who later remembered them because Theron had thrown the bottle's cap away as they drove off.

There were six other couples, all from Saraw, at the cottage that day. Most of the rest had, like Theron and Belle, driven there that morning, looking for a little excitement.

This was before much was known about hurricanes, beyond the empirical wisdom of the survivors. No one bothered to name them. Even less was known about storm surges. Still, everyone knew something was coming. Hardly a soul was left at the beach by the time Theron and Belle got there; all that remained were a few dozen partiers at a handful of houses. The cottages almost all had names; the one where Ruth's parents spent their last morning was the Sink ‘r' Swim, because it was owned by the Sink family that lived just two blocks from the Crowders, and, Ruth thinks when she considers such imponderables, because perhaps Someone has a sense of humor: Neither Theron nor Belle could swim at all.

Around 10, the sky became twilight dark, with a greenish tint. The storm wasn't supposed to hit until early afternoon, so it was presumed, according to one survivor, that the revelers had a couple of hours to drink and dance before deciding whether to ride it out.

From later reports, three bad things happened with no warning:

The storm, already rolling along at close to 110 miles per hour, suddenly strengthened, to what was later estimated to be about 140.

Also, it originally was on a path that would have brushed the coast around White Oak Beach with gale-to-small-hurricane-force winds. About 9 that morning, though, it inexplicably took what was later called a hard left turn.

When it turned, it also accelerated, from 5 miles an hour forward speed to an estimated 20–25. It roared into the cape just south of White Oak Beach like a bull charging a matador.

Even all that might not have doomed Theron and Belle except for a fourth item. Above the equator, hurricanes blow counter-clockwise. Thus, to the west of the storm's eye, the force of the wind is lessened by the extent of the storm's forward motion. A 140-mile-per hour storm, moving 25 miles per hour forward, might only have winds of 115 miles an hour, the forward motion acting against the storm winds coming around from the north.

East of the storm, the opposite is true. The forward speed of the hurricane is added to the wind speed.

The hard left turn put White Oak Beach east of the storm. Winds were estimated later to have exceeded 160 miles per hour.

There was no radio to warn them, and they didn't believe the sky. They jeered at the other vacationers and partiers as they fled.

When the storm hit, the dozen partiers at the Sink ‘r' Swim would be on their own.

Six of them, rebuked as cowards, bailed out before the ocean cut the channel that would make White Oak Beach an island for the rest of the century. By the time the others realized the extent of their folly and bad luck, they were trapped.

A storm-surge wave that one survivor said was at least 15 feet high hit the beach and washed several cottages off their foundations, including the one in which Theron and Belle were marooned. They were now hanging on to the walls of a house chest-deep in water.

The only thing standing that looked as if it might survive the storm was the White Oak Beach water tower, only a short block away. As the water temporarily receded and the wind came howling in ever harder, the remaining six tried to reach it. They were halfway there, a survivor said, hanging on to each other, when another wave separated them, and they had to swim.

Four of them reached the water tower, which somehow did not collapse. They climbed up as high as they could and used their belts and other clothing to lash themselves to the stairs on the back side, facing land.

They could see Theron and Belle down below. They had gotten as far as a yaupon tree that stood like a gnarled old man in the middle of a vacant lot. Theron was helping Belle up to the highest point that would hold her when the next large wave hit. The four hanging on to the tower didn't see it coming, because they were facing away from the sea, but they were 30 feet above the ground, and the water that roared in was no more than 10 feet from their perch.

Theron and Belle weren't washed away. The yaupon tree perversely snared them, hanging them up in its limbs, spearing them there, while they struggled to get free, screaming for help and choking on seawater. Then the tree disappeared beneath a solid wall of ocean.

It was some time, nobody knew exactly how long, before the water receded enough for the other four to see Theron and Belle, their clothes torn away, their bodies stuck like kites in the yaupon tree. That was what dominated the survivors' view for the next three hours, whenever they ventured to open their eyes.

When the winds finally subsided, the four in the tower climbed down and saw that they had chosen the only structure still standing for five blocks. The men walked through the still waist-deep water over to the tree; none of the four was wearing anything except rags by now. They were able to untangle Theron and Belle's bodies and carry them over to a brick pumphouse. One of the women found a tablecloth snagged on a piece of wood and covered them. A survivor told Ruth, years later, that their faces and bodies had been sandblasted as smooth as if they were babies.

FOUR

Bob the Driver wakes Harry with a question.

“So, your sister killing the fatted calf for you down there?”

“Maybe the fatted tofu. Freda and Artie eat a little healthier than I do.”

“Fatted tofu,” Bob barks out a laugh. “Guess that's kosher.”

Harry has regained, if nothing else, some of his appetite. For that he's grateful. The last time he visited Freda, he and Artie went out for a pork barbecue sandwich at one of his old favorite places.

His sister asked him, when they got back, as politely as she could manage, if he didn't think a man with the big toe of his left foot in the grave ought to try to walk the straight and narrow just a little bit.

No, he told her. He didn't think God would approve of such hypocrisy. Harry believes, as much as he believes anything, that Harry Stein will have to stand on his record, barbecue and all. The idea of undoing 70 years of wrongs with a single moment of remorse seems too easy to him.

“God forbid,” he told Freda, “that I should be forgiven so easily.”

Bob gets him to the Islip airport with an hour to spare. Harry used to think nothing of rushing up here 20 minutes before the flight took off. Now, on top of everything else, he's anxious, nervous.

His old friend carries most of the bags to the gate and makes sure Harry is checked and on his way south.

“Now, you make sure he gets to the right gate in Baltimore,” Bob admonishes the ticket clerk, to Harry's great embarrassment. He starts to protest, to say something sharp, when Bob the Driver grabs him and gives him a painful but sincere hug.