By the time Paul and Grandpa set out on Watch Eyes and Billy Blaze, the wind had dropped to fifty miles an hour. Yet the water from the ocean was stealthily creeping up and up as if to reclaim this mote of land and take it back to the sea. Spilling and foaming, the tide continued to rise—flooding chicken farms, schoolyards, stores and houses—in its surge to join ocean and bay.
Watch Eyes and Billy Blaze were used to surf and boggy marsh, for they had been on many a wild pony roundup. Feeling ahead for footholds they pushed forward, step by step, not seeming to mind the water splashing up on their bellies.
Grandpa, on Blaze, cupped one hand about his mouth and yelled above the wind. "Turn off at Rattlesnake Ridge, Paul. We'll stop at Barrett's Grocery first and get the news."
Paul nodded as though he had heard. He was staring, horror-struck, at the neighbors' houses. Some had collapsed. And some had their front porches knocked off so they looked like faces with a row of teeth missing. And some were tilted at a crazy slant.
Anger boiled up in Paul—anger at the senseless brutality of the storm. He rode, shivering and talking to himself: "The big bully! Striking little frame houses that can't stand up to it, drubbing them, whopping them, knocking their props out."
A street sign veered by, narrowly missing the horses' knees. 98th Street, it said. Grandpa turned around to make sure he had read it aright. "My soul and body!" he boomed. "It scun clean down from Ocean City! That's thirty mile away!"
Without warning, Watch Eyes suddenly slipped and went floundering. Paul's quick hand tightened on the reins, lifting his head. He felt Watch Eyes jolt, then stretch out swimming. "Go it! Go it!" he shouted, and he stood up in his stirrups, feeling a kind of wild excitement. This was like swimming the channel on Pony Penning Day. Only now the water was icier and it was spilling into his boots, soaking his blue jeans and the pajamas he still had on. Yet his body was sweating and he was panting when they reached the store.
In front of Barrett's Grocery two red gas pumps were being used as mooring posts for skiffs and smacks and trawlers. A Coast Guard DUKW, called a "duck," and looking like a cross between a jeep and a boat, came churning up alongside Grandpa and Paul. The driver called out: "Mr. Beebe! We need you both." His voice was a command. "Tie up your horses in Barrett's barn and come aboard."
From under the tarpaulin a child's voice cried excitedly, "Paul, how's Misty?"
And another spoke up. "Has she had her baby yet?"
Paul shook his head.
Mr. Barrett's barn had a stout ramp, and Watch Eyes and Billy Blaze trotted up and inside like homing pigeons. After Paul and Grandpa had loosened the ponies' girths and slipped the bits under their chins, they waded out to the DUKW. The passengers squeezed together to make room. Then the DUKW turned and chugged toward the village.
"Sir!" Paul asked the driver. "Could you take us up to Deep Hole to see about Grandpa's ponies?"
Grim-faced, the man replied, "Got to save people first."
As they turned onto Main Street, which runs along the very shore of the bay, Paul was stunned. Yesterday the wide street with its white houses and stores and oyster-shucking sheds had been neat and prim, like a Grandma Moses picture. Today boats were on the loose, bashing into houses. A forty-footer had rammed right through one house, its bow sticking out the back door, its stern out the front.
Nothing was sacred to the sea. It swept into the cemetery, lifted up coffins, cast them into people's front yards.
Up ahead, a helicopter was letting down a basket to three people on a rooftop. Grandpa gaped at the noisy machine in admiration. "I itch to be up there," he shouted, "lifting off the old and the sick."
Paul too wanted to do big rescue work.
As if reading his mind, the driver turned to him. "Son," he said, "do you feel strong enough to save a life?"
"Yes, sir!"
"Good. You know Mr. Terry—the man who has to live in a rocking bed?"
Paul nodded. "It rocks by electric, but he's got a gasoline generator now. Mrs. Terry was telling Grandpa last night."
"Yes, but along about midnight the gas ran low. It took the firemen an hour to get through this surf to deliver more gas to keep the generator running. He's still alive...."
"Then what can I do?" Paul asked.
"Plenty, son. The whole island's running out of gas, and until helicopters can bring some in, that respirator's got to be worked by hand."
"Oh. 'Course I'll help."
The driver now turned to Grandpa. "These folks," he said, indicating his passengers, "are flooded out. We'll take them to the second story of the Fire House for shelter. Then we got to chug up to Bear Scratch section and rescue a family with six children. Whoa! Here we are at the Terrys'."
The DUKW skewered to a stop in front of a two-story white house.
"Good luck, Paul. When the gas arrives, grab any DUKW going by, and we'll meet you back at Barrett's Store along about noon."
Paul got out and plowed up to the house. The door opened as he stumbled up the flooded steps, and Mrs. Terry greeted him. Her face was pale, and there were deep circles under her eyes, but she smiled. "You've come to man the generator?"
"Yes, sir—I mean, yes, ma'am," Paul stammered. "I'm Paul Beebe."
"Oh," she smiled again. "So you're the Beebe boy. You're the one who rescued Misty when she was a baby and nearly drowned."
"Yes, ma'am."
"And to think that now she's going to have a baby of her own."
"Yes, ma'am. Any minute."
All the while she watched Paul pulling off his boots and jacket Mrs. Terry talked to him, but her head was cocked, ears alert, listening to the steady hum of the generator in the next room.
"We've so little gas left," she said. "The doctor says I'm to save it in case relief-men get worn out." She led the way down the hall to Mr. Terry's bedroom.
Paul blanched. Hospitals and sick rooms gave him a cold clutch of fear. But the moment he saw Mr. Terry smiling there in his rocking bed he was all eagerness to help. Maybe he could do a better job than an old machine. Maybe he could pump stronger and faster, so Mr. Terry'd get a lot more air in his lungs and his face wouldn't look so white.
Mrs. Terry showed Paul how to work the controls. "He's used to just twenty-eight rocks a minute," she explained. "No faster."
"Hi, son." The voice from the bed was weak but cheerful. "It's good of you to help."
Paul bent to his work, pushing up and down in steady rhythm, twenty-eight strokes to the minute. Maybe, he thought as the minutes went by, now I can qualify for a volunteer fireman. He was glad he was used to pumping water for the ponies. And that set him thinking of Misty, and the bittersweet worry rushed over him again so that he barely heard Mrs. Terry.
"How wonderful people are, Paul," she was saying. "With their property wrecked and their own lives endangered, they are so concerned about us. And we aren't even Chincoteaguers. We just came here to retire."
Paul heard the words far off. He was thinking: Sometimes newborn colts don't breathe right away and horse doctors have to pump air into their lungs with their hands—like this, like this, like this. Down, up, down, up, down, up. Would it be twenty-eight times a minute for a little foal? Or more? Or less? How would he know? Why hadn't he asked Dr. Finney, the veterinarian from Pocomoke?
Runnels and rivulets of sweat were trickling down his back; his face and hair were dripping as if he were still out in the rain.
"Paul!" Mrs. Terry was saying, "Look! A whole beautiful tank of gas has come. And the DUKW man is waiting to give you a ride back. High time, too. You're all tuckered out, poor lamb!"
Mr. Terry smiled and shook hands with Paul. "In my book, you are a hero," he said.
In Barrett's store the smell of fresh-ground coffee and cheese and chewing tobacco was mixed with the stench of wet boots and dead fish. Paul stepped inside and closed the door.
Groups of men were standing, knee deep in water, gabbling to each other like long-legged shore birds. Paul waited by the door until Tom Reed beckoned him over.
"Yes, sir-r-r!" a man with a cranelike neck was saying, "I figure two, three pressure areas come together and made a kind of funnel."
Mr. Barrett was waiting on customers and listening at the same time. He leaned over the counter. "To my notion," he said, "this storm made a figure eight and come back again afore the tide ever ebbed."
Paul tugged at Tom's sleeve. "Mr. Reed," he whispered, "what about Grandpa's ponies up to your place?"
"Don't know, Paul. And we won't 'til we can get back into the woods. Water's too deep to walk in, and the DUKWs are too busy rescuin' people."
The storekeeper leaned across the counter, nosing in between Paul and Tom Reed. "Who's next, gentlemen?"
Paul felt in his pocket, counting his money. "I have thirty-nine cents," he said. "I can buy two cans of beans."
"If only we'd of got some notice of this storm," Mr. Barrett was saying as he spilled the coins into the drawer. "With a hurricane you know ahead, and when it's over, it's over."
"Yup," the men agreed. "A hurricane blows crazy, then it's gone. But a tidal storm sneaks up on you and stays."
Wyle Maddox, the leader of the roundup men, had been listening as he crunched on an apple. He came over now to Tom Reed. "Tom," he said, "you're blest with mother-wit. You're the one knows most about sea and sky. How do you figure it?"
The small, spare man blushed. "Pshaw, Wyle, I'm no authority, but as I see it, the storm looped and come back, and kept a-pressin' and a-pressin' the water into the bay instead of letting it go out at ebb time."
"But why is the water so high on the bay side nearer the mainland?"
"'Cause usually it's a nor'west wind that helps the tide flow back out of the bay, but this time, wind blew nor'east and the water jes' swelled up into a bulge at the narrows, and it had to go somewheres."
The door suddenly opened, letting in the sound and cold of the wind, and with it came Grandpa Beebe, looking hale and ruddy alongside the lean fisherfolk.
"What's the news?" Mr. Barrett called out.
Grandpa looked from face to face. "Bad," he said. "Government's declared Chincoteague a disaster area."
A cry of scorn went up. "Disaster area? That's no news."
"But this is! A hull fleet of heelyacopters is comin' in from the military this afternoon and we're all supposed to e-vac-u-ate over to the main."
"Evacuate?" The word dropped like a time bomb. Then the explosion.
"Why?"
"What fer?"
"Mebbe okay for sick folk."
"Yeh. Or the homeless."
"Me, I got a second story."
"Me, too."
Everyone was talking at once. Everyone but Paul. He felt a hard lump in his stomach. He would refuse to go ... unless they took Misty, too. The storekeeper rapped on the counter for silence. "Fellers, let's hear Mr. Beebe out."
Grandpa took a moment before he went on. "Tide's supposed to come up higher," he announced. "Four feet higher."
"Four feet! Why, that'll flood the whole island. Every house, every store. Even the Fire House and the churches!"
"But that's only half the reason. Government says there could be an epidemic of the typhoid, 'cause of all the dead chickens and fish a-rottin' and mebbe"—Grandpa avoided Paul's eyes—"mebbe dead ponies."
The talk ceased. There was a sudden exodus. Men sloshing heavy-footed out of the store, getting into their boats, going home to their families, figuring out how to break the news.
"Come, Paul," Grandpa beckoned.
Paul followed along. "I bought us two cans of beans," he offered, not knowing what to say.
"Ain't goin' to need 'em," Grandpa said gruffly; then he turned to look at Paul. "They might taste real good, though, come to think of it."
