This Month's Story

Despite being in October, it was hot. It would be in the 90’s in a few hours. I normally avoided coming down to the property, but Stella had asked me to go. They were talking about moving our FEMA trailer on our property (we had initially had them put it on a friend’s land in the back bay area). She wanted me to see where would be the best place to put it on our lot.

I was sitting on the beach side of the slab that was all that was left of our Mississippi house. In front of me were two live oaks that had survived the storm. They were young, barely a couple hundred years old. It looked like they would live; live oaks are hard to kill.

A tattered hammock hung from a hook in one of them. The hook had been secured to the tree for so many years, the tree had actually grown around it. During the storm, the hammock had remained secured to the ingrown hook in the tree, unable to free itself.

Beyond our property, there were other live oaks struggling to survive, their limbs ripped bare of leaves. All other trees: pines, magnolias, were dead or dying. There was no grass.

I was sitting in a barren waste land. I could see miles to my east, as far as Gulfport, and an equal distance to my west. There were no houses, just concrete slabs like ours stretching on and on.

I sat, my feet dangling in the dug out space in front of the slab. It was quiet. As I said, it was hot, in the mid nineties, and the sun indicated it to be a little past noon.

A shore breeze had started. It would get stronger as the afternoon temperature increased. I thought of the times I would take my dog, Gretal, out in our Sunfish on such a breeze. Ghosts of other days began filling the air around me. Too many ghosts.

“Are you Mr. La Violette?”

I turned. The person had come up the side street and parked, so I had not noticed him.

“Yes, I’m La Violette.”

“I’m an adjuster for your Windstorm Insurance. Can I ask you a few questions and make some measurements?”

His questions were routine: how many rooms, what they were used for, which were heated, did we have an upstairs…

I walked with him around the slab pointing out the area in the back so that he could see where the house ended and the driveway began. Much of the area was covered by bricks from the six foot high wall that had enclosed a private garden.

He pulled out a fifty foot tape.

“I’ll make my measurements from what you’ve shown me. It seems fairly clear where everything was.”

He paused.

“When you can, would you please get together with your wife and make a list of the contents of the house as well as their individual values and then send it to me. The quicker you make up such a list and send it, the quicker we will be able to file your claim.”

With that he began making measurements.

I watched him for a moment and then stooped and picked up a bent fork sticking out from between some bricks. There was a broken plate close by. I knew them both very well. The fork was part of our everyday ware; the plate was from Stella’s “good china,” part of the dowry we had had to start our marriage thirty years ago.

Even broken, the plate was a pretty piece.

I wiped the crust of sand away, and its delicate design appeared as fresh as if it were new. I’m not sure how often it had been removed from its place in the china closet we had in the dining room, maybe twenty times, maybe less. It, like the rest of our “good china,” was being saved, not used except on important occasions. Now I had a shard of its past beauty in my hand.

The fork was more expendable.

We had used it every day, three times a day, for thirty years. It had been involved in hundreds on hundred of meals that had ranged from pedestrian to good to, on many occasions, superb.

It had stood its usage during those long years very well. Now one of its tines was drastically bent. It was no longer a good dining tool.

The adjuster was calling me and I put the fork in my pocket and went to where he was standing in the back of the house.

Things were more jumbled here.

The bricks that had formed the front wall beside the house had been hurled back by the wall of rushing water and had collided with the six foot concrete block wall we had standing at the rear. Neither had survived the encounter. They both lay collapsed on one another and the clutter made an uneven deck to walk on.

“What was this room used for?”

“It was my shop.”

He nodded and, bending down, made more measurements.

There were no tools visible in the space he was measuring. Like many of the things that were in the house, they were gone or buried in the rubble of the brick and concrete block walls.

I had found my truck a quarter of a mile from the house in my neighbor’s yard near their slab. It lay upside down, crushed, its new tires pointed uselessly to the sky. My rider lawn mower was a short distance from it, equally destroyed.

We had built the house over a period of thirty years using those absent tools. The original house had been 3000 square feet. Stella and I and another friend had gradually added to it, each year adding a new room or deck, doing most of the work ourselves, arguing, sweating in the heat, until the house had become the rambling, comfortable structure it was before the storm, our home, our life.

In the spring of this year, Stella and I had redone much of the front veranda, adding new steps to both ends and a broad set of steps in the middle to form a grand entrance. We added a concrete sidewalk that ran parallel to the veranda and Stella planted flowers in the space between the sidewalk and the veranda.

In August, several months later, the water from the thirty foot high storm surge had carried away the wooden deck and had left a deep gully where it had been.

Now several months later, there were no steps.

I left the adjuster making more measurements and walked back to the front of the house. I returned to my place on the slab and, sitting down, looked out over the water, my feet dangling over the gulley.

“It was a big house.”

It was the adjuster. He had finished his measurements and had come to tell me he was leaving.

I nodded and standing up, shook his hand and watched as he started to walk across the rubble to his car.

“Oh, wait,” he stopped and came back and handed me his card. “Please don’t forget that list and send it to me. I’ll need it in order to make my final tally.”

I said I wouldn’t forget and watched him get into his car and, with a wave, drive off. He seemed nice, certainly considerate of what he was doing, measuring and tallying what had been people’s homes.

There had been twenty-one homes on our street. Now there are twenty-one slabs. Each street as far as I could see in the miles that lay to the east and west of where I stood was in similar condition.

That’s a lot of concrete slabs to measure and tally. There’ll be a lot of lists

He’ll be here for awhile.