The Eye
The cost of survival
Hello and happy September. There are countless storms to inspire stories in Florida. Storms with names, personalities and staggering death tolls. This month’s story pulls from the 1928 Okeechobee hurricane, considered one of the deadliest in U.S. history. More on that history here:
If you’re ready for some surreal hurricane stuff, check out this month’s story below.
The Eye
The lake overtook the land gradually — inch by inch, minute by minute. Maybe that’s what my father’s prayers had bought us: a trickle instead of a tidal wave.
When the winds uprooted trees and clawed at the roof, he prayed on his knees and sang a hymn like we did in church.
When the noise picked up like a train barreling through our home, he sang louder and covered my small ears.
When all the glass in the windows shattered, he rummaged in his drawers for older things (things he hadn’t used in our new home).
He was a farmer now. He wasn’t practicing or making bargains no more. He ripped off a piece of the wooden window frame. His hand coming away bloodied from the splintered wood. He tied an amulet on a cord around the wood.
Then he went outside ’bout to get blow down and dug through mud already puddling with rising water to bury that piece of wood. How could he think the piece would stay?
He was kneeling in the dark, in the muck, in our rising doom. The prayers he said then weren’t prayers. They were deals. I couldn’t hear him over the roar of the wind. I couldn’t even see his face in the dark—only an outline of a man blended between the known and unknown worlds.
And I knew what he had done. The same way I knew that the storm and the water would slice through the land and leave a sick smile carved into it. The same way I knew we was dead if we stayed inside the cabin. The water rose above his lap and he stood and raced back inside.
“You can’t,” I said.
“It’s done,” he said. “The water will come.”
“The water is here,” I said. I felt it, all darkness and death, invading our cabin before it touched me. It seeped under the door and through the floorboards.
“Here,” he said, fishing a leather cord from his pocket. He squeezed my hand and put it on the charm hanging from it. Not a charm. A ring. His ring.
“No.”
“What you sayin’ ‘no’ for?” he said. “I was gonna give it to you anyway. You’re stronger than me.”
The water covered my ankles and climbed to my shins.
“A tie to bind,” he said as he put the necklace over my head and around my neck.
“You didn’t teach me,” I said. There were memories of his work, of candles, of consults, of herbs. They drifted to me, like dreams I was wakin’ from, as I wore the necklace. I couldn’t tell if they mine or his. Maybe dreams belong to those who keep ’em.
“When this is over, I’ll teach you.” He had to shout over the noise of the storm. Somehow that loudness only amplified the lie. The water grazed my knees now. “We must climb on top of the roof.”
I squeezed his arm in panic. The tongue of water lapping my thighs.
“The house will hold. I made sure. But dat water won’t stop coming. Hurry.” He grabbed a rope off a hook on the wall and draped it over my shoulder. We moved to the broken window at the back.
The water threatened to cover the sill as we stood on the frame. The darkness covered all the land, whether water or evil there was no light to show truth. But it felt vast, endless, hungry for the little we had: our lives.
Pa held me up so I could grab the edge of the roof above me. It took a might push from him for me to hoist myself onto the roof with the wind threatening to push me off. When I turned back to look down, he was gone. The darkness had swallowed him. I screamed for him. The sound merged into the whistle of the wind whipping around me, an ear-spliting cackle creaking like the house ’bout to break beneath me. No cry I made could ever reach him.
So I cried to those who could. I ducked low, made my body flat, held the ledge with one hand and I clasped the ring hanging from my neck with the other. I called him to come back, I called upon anything lurking, seeing, hearing my pleas to bring him back by whatever means and whatever cost. Nothing happened.
Pa hadn’t wanted to be the one that town folk came to for advice, for guidance and sometimes curses. He abandoned his calling. When I told him this morning the storm would flood us, he didn’t believe because he hadn’t seen it himself. But maybe he couldn’t see anymore. I could. I would, I decided right then and there. I would guide those who came to me. My mind’s eye envisioned what I wanted and my heart said it again and again.
I peered over the edge and an arm erupted from the water below. I couldn’t see the hands that lifted him, but it seemed as though a swell of the darkness more solid than liquid pushed Pa high enough to reach the edge before receding. I let go of the necklace and grabbed his arm.
He stirred and pulled himself next to me, coughing but alive. “Hurry, we tie ourselves to the chimney stack!”
We crawled on our bellies to the chimney and he pulled the rope around it. We put our backs against the brick and knotted the rope at our bellies.
The wind raged, but the water didn’t pass the threshold of the roof’s edge. I can’t say by whose will, but I felt them, lurking, waiting for their prize. We stayed like that, hand-in-hand, for hours like days.
The winds left faster than the water did. Then it seemed like dead things came alive in the water and so much that once lived was dead. Even after the water went down, a sour musk of churned up water and death baking in the sun clung to everything. The water that left and drained into the Everglades took a lot of bodies with it. Even still, countless bloated corpses littered the land, wiped clean that a town or farms had existed.
But the fear Pa had on his face wasn’t for the destruction. He felt it. The change in the air when he was pulled from the water. He knew.
“What did you ask? What did you offer?” he finally had the courage to ask me.
We passed men on the road who were unloading dead bodies from a truck onto the dry gravel already lined with dozens upon dozens.
“Don’t worry, Pa,” I said calmly. “We already paid.”