Sudden Sea (24 page)

Lists of the dead and missing were continually revised, and the search became grimmer with each day that passed. Sometimes an arm or leg led to a body. Sometimes a smell. Sometimes the seagulls. If the birds located a body first, identification became excruciating. One ship’s captain was identified from a hardware store receipt in his pocket. Many bodies were never found.

“No one was untouched,” Arthur Raynor of Long Island said. “Everybody lost something; many, someone.”

When the bay retreated at Mackerel Cove in Jamestown, the school bus stood beaten, abandoned, and half submerged, the water splashing quietly against it. The entire town walked down to the cove to see it. According to those who remembered the sight, the bus doors were shut, the windows were unbroken, and the interior was perfectly dry. There had been nine on the school bus when it started across the causeway. Two survived — eleven-year-old Clayton Chellis and the driver, Norm Caswell.

Jamestown had never known a tragedy to equal this one. The island was a small town. Everyone knew everyone. As volunteers combed fields, roads, and shoreline, the sea gave back the children, one by one. Theresa Matoes was recovered Thursday night. Her body was washed home onto the banks of Fox Hill Farm. Her brother, Joseph, was found the next morning, a quarter of a mile north of the cove. They were buried together from the Portuguese church in Newport. The following Tuesday, Marion Chellis was recovered about a mile and a half north, and Constantine Gianitis was found at Watson Farm, near the beach pavilion roof. His brother, John, washed up on the beach a short distance from the school bus. A week after the storm the remains of Eunice, the youngest Matoes, were discovered on the west shore of Beavertail. She was identified by the baby ring on her finger. All the children were found except ten-year-old Dotty Matoes.

“God keeps one for every three he returns,” her cousin Marge Matoes Moran said. “It is an old belief.”

Dorothy Matoes was listed missing and presumed dead. One morning, after the search for her body had finally been abandoned, Ethel Chellis looked out the window of the Beavertail lighthouse and spotted something in the bay. She thought it was a red-and-white lobster buoy, until she trained her husband’s binoculars on the sight. Dotty’s new red skirt and white blouse came into focus.

By then, the Gianitises had fled from Jamestown. They buried their boys and left as suddenly and as quietly as they had arrived. Joe Matoes continued to lease the pastures of Fox Hill Farm, and Carl and Ethel Chellis stayed on at the Beavertail light. Four years later they had another child, a son whom they named Richard.

The debate over the school bus tragedy continued for years. To this day, some on the island say that Norman Caswell made a fatal choice. The children would have been safe if he had kept them on the bus and sat out the storm. Others believe they would have drowned when the bus was swept into the cove. In the days and weeks that followed, dozens of conflicting versions of the tragedy were related, repeated, and argued over.

The version given here is the most plausible scenario. But it is in part conjecture. There were three witnesses — Norman Caswell, Joe Matoes Sr., and Clayton Chellis. Each had a different memory.

The day after the hurricane, a distraught Caswell told his story to a reporter from the
Providence Evening Bulletin:

I never dreamed it could be so bad. The wind was kicking up some when I started across the beach with the bus, but even when I became stalled with the rest of the motorists, I didn’t think the danger was so great. Some of the people in the first cars got out and said they would go for help. They never came back.

As we were sitting there, the wind got worse, and then a big wave came and broke right over the roof of the bus. Then a second wave came and I decided we’d better get out or we’d drown like rats. I ran to the rear of the bus, opened the door, and told the kids to join hands. I don’t know exactly what happened after that. I know I held onto the hands of two of the kids and something struck. I went down three times, and when I came up the third time, I didn’t have them anymore. They had been screaming but now I heard nothing.

I saw Clayton Chellis swimming around, then I lost him. I saw little Joe Matoes, too. He was going after his sister and the poor kid drowned in the attempt. He had plenty of spunk.

I was awfully tired with my wet clothes dragging me down, but I managed somehow to land on the end of Fox Hill where I pulled myself from the water by the grass. I laid there and in a minute the water came and covered me up. I struggled up again and saw young Chellis. The kid had made it. I told him to run to the Matoes’ farm. I saw Matoes come down to help me but he couldn’t find me and I couldn’t yell loud enough to have him hear me. Finally, I struggled up and hung over the bars of a fence where they found me.

I still had my watch when I arrived at Matoes’ house and it was stopped at 5:35
P.M
. I guess that must have been the time the big wave hit us.

Some thirty-five years later, Joe Matoes gave a different account to Everett Allen, a New Bedford newspaperman:

In the afternoon, I got to listening on the radio about a storm coming. So, I started for the schoolhouse for my kids. They had already left on the bus, so I started to come back and when I hit the beach, the water was about four feet high. At Mackerel Cove, the waves were getting worse and worse, the wind was getting stronger, and pretty soon the pavilion went just like that, and the water was so high that my car and two others were swept into the water. I jumped overboard, my car was in a deep spot right near the cemetery, and I got ashore along a stonewall, all soaking wet.

There was a woman and a boy in a car and she drove down the hill and they were washed overboard, too, and both drowned. I was still by the wall; I saw Norman Caswell coming around the bend with the bus, and I waved him back. I don’t know if he saw me or not. I saw the school bus go over — with the kids. Caswell opened the doors, and let the kids off. Well I had two daughters on top of the roof of the bus, screaming their heads off. I saw them get swept off.

I saw something coming through the water, something moving and stretched out, so I took a chance and went down from the wall to the water. I got knocked down twice because the wind was so strong, but when I got there it was Norman Caswell. He was lying on his stomach, so I took my boot and kicked him, you know, in the ribs. He grunted. Well, I said, he’s still alive. He says, “Please let me die. I lost a whole bunch of the kids I had in the school bus. Every-thing’s gone. Please don’t move me. Let me die.”

I picked him up and threw him on my shoulder, and I walked up the road to where there was a wall to divide the roads. I said, “You stay there until I get onto the other side and I’ll take you into my house.” I put him down on the wall and he just turned over and rolled off and I had to pick him up again. Then I took him into my house. He said, “Where’s my bus?” I said, “Down there in the pond.” I gave him some dry clothes and I changed myself. He stayed until nine o’clock. Then the tide went down and we went down and looked at the bus.

Clayton Chellis’s brother Bill tells a third story. Chellis, a thirty-year navy man now retired in Florida, was a junior at Rogers High School in Newport in 1938. He caught the last ferry back to Jamestown, the same one that Joe Matoes took. Usually Bill waited at the dock for the school bus to pick him up, but on the day of the storm some friends drove by. “Hey, Bill, we’re going up to the lighthouse to look at the surf,” they called. “Want a ride?” Because of that chance meeting, Bill Chellis missed the fatal school bus trip, but this is the story Clayton told him:

“The bus started across the causeway. It was on the road behind the pavilion, when the water got so bad, it drowned out the engine.” Bill is not sure whether the children were still inside the bus, but “the waves took the pavilion and the school bus. They pushed the bus about a third of a mile into the pond and rolled it over into the water. Clayton was a seal in the water. He let the waves carry him, and he landed about three miles up the beach, just south of where the bridge is today. When Clayton got his footing, he saw the driver, Norm Caswell, in the water, too, and pulled him out.”

Given the split-second speed of events and the terror unfolding, it is understandable that memories differ. Some of the discrepancies are minor. According to Matoes, the stalled cars on the causeway were abandoned; Caswell refers to “the rest of the motorists.” But each account raises the same basic question: Where was the school bus for two and a half hours? The Jamestown schools were about a mile from Mackerel Cove. Dismissal was at 2:45
P.M
. No matter how atrocious the weather, it would not take better than two hours to drive that distance.

If we assume that Caswell had only the Beavertail group on the bus, then he could not have driven directly from school to Mackerel Cove, or he would have arrived at the causeway ahead of Joe Matoes. Therefore, we have to assume that Caswell drove to the harbor to pick up Bill Chellis. Not finding the boy waiting, he continued on to Mackerel Cove. We know that the bus left school on time, because it was gone when Joe Matoes arrived. This would put the hour of departure between 2:45 and 3:00. The bus would then have reached Mackerel Cove no later than four o’clock. An hour and a half would have elapsed between the time Matoes saw the bus approach and when Caswell’s watch stopped. Surely given such a substantial block of time, a father as good and decent as Joe Matoes would have tried in some way to rescue his children.

Since he did not, it seems more plausible to suppose that Caswell piled all the children into the bus, made the north end run, then looped back to deliver the Beavertail kids. If this was the case, he would have reached Mackerel Cove as the hurricane was peaking. But Caswell said, “The wind was kicking up some when I started across the beach with the bus, but even when I became stalled with the rest of the motorists, I didn’t think the danger was so great.”

Caswell was a fisherman. He certainly would have recognized a serious storm if he bumped into one. And if he swung through town, thinking Bill Chellis would be waiting at the ferry, the bus would have gone down Conanicut Avenue, through water up to its hubcaps, and Caswell would have seen the destruction in the harbor.

No one will ever know exactly what happened. Norman Caswell never recovered from the school bus tragedy. He died a few years later, and his wife, Annie, took over the bus route.

Across the state in Westerly, Andy Pupillo, the Moores’ handsome young handyman, never recovered from the hurricane, either. His sister blamed the Moores. She believed that Andy sustained internal injuries during the storm. The Moores believe that he was in the first stage of tuberculosis, an often fatal disease before streptomycin. Exposure in the hurricane and the chill night on Barn Island may have aggravated the TB. Andy’s condition deteriorated rapidly. He died within a year, at the age of twenty-two.

Jeff Moore was booked on a flight to Chicago in 1939. He was running late and arrived at the airport gate as the plane was taxiing down the runway. The flight crashed. There were no survivors. The next year Jeff went into the hospital for surgery. He died there of an embolism at the age of forty. Catherine Moore raised their four children alone. She never remarried.

Harriet and Cy Moore adopted a second girl, then had twin daughters of their own. When Mary grew up and married, she adopted three children.

Chapter 21

The Last of the Old New England Summers

Do you think these convulsions of nature are accompanying political disturbances like they used to in Sartonius — Remember all the phenomena that surrounded Caesar and Augustus? Lightning and statues hurled down and all those augers. Well, I don’t know — but it’s funny we have a hurricane just while Hitler is starting to march.

— Katy Dos Passos to Sara Murphy, October 8, 1938

T
he Great Hurricane of 1938 was the worst weather disaster New England has ever experienced and the fourth-deadliest storm in U.S. history. In the number of lives lost, the amount of property damaged, and the breadth of the devastation, no other natural disaster in America’s history came even close. Besides almost seven hundred lives, the hurricane claimed a centuries-old way of life.

“The greens and commons of New England will never be the same,” the Associated Press reported. “Picture postcard mementos of the oldest part of the U.S. are gone with the wind and flood. The day of ‘the biggest wind’ has just passed, and a great part of the most picturesque America, as old as the Pilgrims, has gone beyond recall or replacement. New England’s Revolutionary-rooted antiquity has been razed by the greatest nature-dealt disaster in its history.”

The hurricane cost $4.7 billion in today’s dollars. Some 93,000 families suffered serious property loss, and more than 19,000 families applied for emergency relief. Property losses were staggering, and only 5 percent were covered by insurance. Almost 20,000 buildings were wrecked, another 75,000 were damaged, and 26,000 cars were demolished.

The hurricane was an act of nature so devastating that in less than seven hours, it washed away dunes that had taken centuries to build and carved a new coastline. When the storm was over, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey warned that existing maps of Long Island and New England were useless. New charts had to be drawn. The hurricane divided Jamestown into four parts, chopped Napatree into a series of small islands, and cut an eight-foot channel through Saltaire, Fire Island. It opened seven passages on Long Island, widening the Moriches Inlet and creating the Shinnecock Inlet. For years, residents of Hampton Bays had been debating whether to cut a channel from the bay to the ocean. The hurricane settled the question.

Surveying the stricken area, James L. Feiser, vice chairman of the Red Cross, said, “I have never seen a hurricane more complete in its devastation. I cannot recall any instances where whole communities were blown away and left a pile of splintered wreckage more than a mile from their original sites.”