Then the calm shattered. The man who’d cried downstairs turned his back on the moving wall of water and ran, screaming and waving his arms. He failed to see the low roof coping. Still screaming, he stumbled, pitched into space and fell. But even such a calamity could only briefly draw Eleanor’s and Leo’s attention, so huge and horrifying was the wall of water traveling toward them at incredible speed.
iv
A few short blasts of factory and train whistles were Johnstown’s only warnings that up in the mountains, the earth dam had collapsed beneath the weight of the water behind it. The resulting floodtide, pouring down through nearly fourteen miles of river channel, had wiped out farms, homes, factories, and the Pennsylvania marshaling yards. Eleanor had no knowledge of all that. Yet she was able to understand the enormity of the disaster by looking at the rolling mountain of water—and at what it contained.
Appearing and disappearing within it she saw broken timbers that once might have supported bridges or buildings; she saw a big steel boiler with a great hole blown in its side; lengths of iron cable unreeling from tumbling drums and lashing back and forth like fifty-foot whips; the front half of a locomotive thrusting up like a great whale’s head, then sinking down again; the shingled roof of a house with two tiny human figures clinging to it; a log jam of uprooted telegraph poles; wheels from farm machinery; bricks, chunks of mortar, pieces of siding and—worst of all—once-animate things. She saw the bloated bodies of calves, hogs, and human beings. The bodies were borne along like limp dolls, sucked under by the current one moment, flung to the surface the next. There were scores of corpses in that incredible wall of water that shot off smoke and vapor as it inundated everything in its path.
The scene might have been conceived by a demented designer of theatrical effects. The water wall lifted a young woman into view; she’d been impaled through her breastbone by an iron rail and hung dead halfway between the ends. Mercifully, rail and corpse soon sank from sight.
When the flood wall encountered the somewhat greater resistance of the larger buildings downtown, the water appeared to split. One branch rushed along the Little Conemaugh toward the stone railroad bridge; the other surged into the business district. Eleanor was stupefied with terror. The water was now only a few blocks from the hotel. All over downtown Johnstown, on rooftops and in the upper windows of buildings such as the Hulbert House, people stared at the flood wall and knew, as she did, that escape was impossible.
The earth seemed to rumble and shake as the water shattered building after building and swallowed the remains. The flood wall was so high, nothing was visible behind it but a few hilltops and the sky.
One of the traveling men cried, “Run—run, all of you!” She was tempted to break into hysterical laughter. Run where? And to what purpose, with the churning, foaming apocalypse sweeping down, indiscriminately tossing on its forward crest half a barn, three Pullman cars, a dozen bodies; crushing houses and substantial buildings and grinding them together into wreckage as it roared on—
Homer Hack had grown befuddled. He was staggering toward the edge of the roof where the other man had plunged off. The sight of the dazed clerk walking to his death jolted Eleanor back to her senses.
But it was Leo who moved first. Despite his injured leg, he lunged and pulled the clerk back from the coping just a step away. “This way, Homer! You can’t stay up here—”
Hack turned his rain-drenched face toward Leo. “What? What’s that?” The young man’s eyes were vacant, his mind no longer functioning coherently. Leo grimaced at Eleanor and half-dragged, half-carried the clerk toward the head of the stairs.
By the time Leo got there, Eleanor was already shoving frightened men down the steps into the darkness. “Hurry, you’ve got to hurry—”
She could barely be heard. She looked back, and the water seemed to tower to the top of the sky. One calm question flashed into her mind: I wonder if dying hurts very much.
“Get in there!” Leo shouted, pushing her. She stumbled down the stairs, her husband and Hack right behind her.
All at once Leo lost his footing. He came crashing into her from above as the flood noise peaked, loud as a thousand trains at full throttle. The water struck the hotel and tore it whole from its foundation.
CHAPTER XIII
FLOOD TIDE
i
AN INSTANT AFTER LEO tumbled against her, Eleanor heard the incredible sound of the flood crest striking the hotel. The building immediately began to tilt, pushed from its foundations by the enormous force of the water. Simultaneously, a great yellow wave came crashing down the stairway from the roof to the lightless hall.
“Hang on to me, Leo!”
He wrapped his arms around her waist as the wave thundered over them, hurled them against a wall, and receded for a few seconds. The building kept tilting.
The water was knee high, then breast high a moment later. Men screamed, waved their arms, sank from sight. Eleanor saw a flood-borne length of steel cable flick out and touch young Homer Hack’s neck, instantly decapitating him.
The moment was forever seared into her mind: the boy’s head sailing past, mouth and eyes agape. Blood from the severed neck pattered on her hair, her cheeks—
“Don’t let go, Leo,” she screamed as the ceiling collapsed and the walls burst apart, driven outward and shattered by the water that engulfed the hotel and everyone inside.
ii
It took ten minutes for the wall of water to rage through Johnstown, smashing a three-block-wide path to the point of land where the rivers met. The flood demolished building after building, tearing them apart and mingling the debris with that from further up the valley.
In those ten minutes, courage and resourcefulness had little to do with determining who lived and who died. Some of the bravest perished; some of the most cowardly lived. Most of those who did survive the initial disaster weren’t even aware of what happened to them immediately after the flood crest struck.
That was the case with the Goldmans. When Eleanor came to her senses, she and Leo were clinging to the top of a four-drawer bureau which bobbed in fast-moving water. Rain and Homer Hack’s blood were trickling down her cheeks. The bodice and skirt of her dress were in shreds. Her shoulders ached from clutching the bureau, which had a familiar look.
Hotel furniture, that’s what it was. The flood had evidently swept the Goldmans into their room or one like it. They must have grabbed hold of the first solid object they could find. She didn’t remember.
She looked over her shoulder. The hotel was gone, and— God above—half the downtown as well. In the water she saw cupolas of houses, roofs of Pullman cars, the horns of cows, and pieces of lumber to which men, women and children clung. Some of the survivors were calm but a great many of them were screaming.
Hanging on to the other side of the bureau, Leo gasped, “Are you all right?”
“I”—she struggled for breath—“I’m alive. That’s more than I expected when the water hit.”
He gulped air and bobbed his head in agreement, trying hard to conceal his terror of the water.
iii
The current spun the bureau around and around. But the momentum seemed to be slowing. Eleanor heard a cry of alarm from nearby. Leo pointed past her left shoulder. She twisted her head till her neck ached and saw a man riding a door as if it were a raft. He cradled an infant in his arms. The man had called for help because the capricious current was rushing the door straight toward the brick wall of a half-submerged building.
Eleanor kicked and paddled, clinging to the bureau and trying to reach the man at the same time. It was no use. The man’s face drained of color as the brick wall loomed.
Without warning, the gable of a sunken house rose from the yellow water like a ship’s prow. The steeply pitched roof pressed upward from beneath the door, tipped it vertically, and hurled the man and the child against the brick wall. The gable pressed in from behind, crushing them.
When the current shifted the section o
f roof away from the wall, Eleanor saw a red paste mingled with scraps of clothing on the bricks. She vomited in the water.
“Look,” Leo exclaimed a moment later, pointing past the site of horror she’d just witnessed. “Everything’s piling up at the stone bridge. Creating a dam—”
She turned again, nearly losing her hold on the bureau. She saw sections of buildings being driven against the arches of the railroad bridge by the water whose height she judged to be fifteen or twenty feet above the Johnstown streets. More timbers, portions of houses, and chunks of wreckage impossible to identify were accumulating behind the bridge like a great log jam. Here and there the Goldmans spied people clinging to the debris, and calling frantically to others on the hillsides; the lucky ones who’d reached high ground. But far worse than the cries of the survivors in the water were the moans and shrieks of people imprisoned within partially sunken buildings.
“Leo—” Eleanor kicked as hard as she could, trying to guide the bureau. Her effort was rewarded. The bureau turned a hundred and eighty degrees, then came to rest in a patch of relatively quiet water. “We’ve got to do something. If we’re carried down to that jam, this bureau will break up like matchwood.”
“Where do you propose that we go? We can’t reach the shore—the current’s too strong.”
As he gasped the words, he kept blinking. Heavy spray blew across the surface of the water. Or perhaps it wasn’t spray but rain mingled with smoke; there was no way to be sure. But it added a murky distortion to an already unbelievable scene.
And over all of it, unforgettable as the sight of Homer Hack’s decapitated head, there were the cries.
“Help us. Help us down here!”
“My grandfather’s dying and we can’t get out—”
“We’re trapped in the attic with the red shingles. Can anyone see it? IS ANYONE OUT THERE?”
Before Eleanor could answer Leo’s question, her hand slipped off the bureau a second time. Terrified, she caught the top, raking her palm on one of the metal drawer pulls as she did so. Threads of blood trailed from her wrist into the water. It was of no importance; the current had caught the bureau and was moving it swiftly again—straight toward the pileup of wreckage at the bridge.
Between the bureau and the bridge, she suddenly saw something that offered hope. A half-sunken Pullman car formed a rampart straight ahead of them. The upper halves of its windows were visible above the water. Most of the glass was gone, but not all. Sharp fragments remained in almost every frame—
“We must get on the roof of that car,” she shouted. But Leo saw the same danger she did. A powerful undercurrent was tugging at them. It might drag them down and hurl them through one of the shattered windows. They could be torn apart on the ragged glass—
Still, the car was their only hope. Leo saw that. “All right. Let’s try.”
iv
Vision was difficult because of the spuming water and the gloom of the day. It couldn’t have been much past four, but the sky was dark and growing darker. Once more the bureau revolved in a full circle. As it turned, Eleanor saw some people struggling across floating rooftops and jumping yard-wide gaps between them, thus working their way toward buildings left standing near solid ground at one side of the main flood channel. Those people were no more than a half block from the Goldmans, but because of the current, Eleanor and Leo had no chance of reaching safety in the same way.
A glance at her husband’s face told her how frightened he was. This was turbulent, dangerous water. Deep water. Since Leo couldn’t swim it was up to her to make certain he reached the roof of the Pullman car.
They were only about fifteen feet from the car now. A whimsical current sped them toward it more quickly. For the moment, Eleanor’s side of the bureau was closest to it.
She could feel the current dragging at her skirt and undergarments as the bureau hurtled on. She gauged the narrowing distance carefully. At the critical moment, she used all her strength to lift herself to the top of the bureau. She clung there precariously, praying the bureau wouldn’t revolve again. If it did, Leo would be trapped between the side and the car.
They were lucky. Her side thumped the edge of the roof. The impact was followed by a prolonged cracking sound. “It’s breaking apart!” Leo cried.
Eleanor was already clambering from the bureau to the more substantial, if slippery, top of the Pullman car. She dropped onto her stomach, heedless of the way the impact hurt her breasts. She clung to the edge of the roof with one hand and shot her other one out over the water. The bureau disintegrated.
“Leo!”
He was already sinking. She leaned out. His wet fingers touched hers, then slipped away.
He kicked frantically, not knowing how to propel himself toward her. Three inches separated their outstretched hands.
Then four.
Five—
“Paddle, Leo! Cup your hands and pull them down to your sides!”
He understood, tried it, made enough headway to reach her wrist, seize it and pull himself to the car. Once he’d taken hold of the roof, he was able to kick against the wall below and throw one knee up and over. She slid backward to give him room.
Panting, he clambered to safety. Her arm hurt ferociously because he’d pulled so hard. That didn’t matter, though. Nothing mattered except the miracle of their survival.
The car seemed buoyant. Or perhaps it was supported from below by other wreckage. Half a dozen boards went floating by, borne toward the debris at the bridge. The rain continued to fall in the near-darkness. But at least they had a respite; a few moments in which to draw air into burning lungs, then crawl toward one another and take comfort in each other’s arms. She buried her cheek against his torn and sodden shirt.
“My God, Leo, it’s beyond belief. It’s like hell without the fires.”
But those were soon to come.
v
They rested five minutes. The screams and entreaties continued. The rain fell and the remaining light faded.
The Pullman car had already become part of the jam of debris building behind the upstream side of the bridge. Other wreckage was collecting there: gutted locomotives, twisted rails, uprooted trees. Some of the debris was literally bound together by steel cable and barbed wire freakishly tightened by the flood.
Some open water remained at one end of the car. The entire upper story of a house floated into the space. Just as the house bumped gently against the car, the Goldmans looked at each other.
“Voices?”
“I heard them too,” Leo said, scrambling to his feet and helping her up. In the panic of the last hour he had not given a thought to his injured leg.
As they rushed toward the house the voices grew quite distinct. A man’s, a woman’s, and those of several children—all pleading for help.
A gable with horizontal siding was jammed against the end of the car. Leo leaned close to it and called, “We hear you. We’ll get you out of there. Just hold on.”
He began to tear at the siding, but the nails had been well driven. Eleanor added her effort to his. Painful though it was, they managed to squeeze their fingertips beneath one length of siding. Just then something beneath the house collapsed. The gable tilted away from the car, and just as abruptly stopped. If it tilted a few more feet, those inside would find it impossible to jump to safety.
Leo’s face dripped with sweat and rain. She saw blood on his fingers where they were wedged beneath the tightfitting siding. “Pull, Eleanor!” Together they heaved backward. Then again. And a third time.
On the fourth try, nails wrenched with a metallic screech. The end of the board stood out from the wall about two inches.
Face close to the gable, Leo shouted, “Listen to me. Can you see any light?”
The man’s voice: “I can see some between the studding. Not much.”
“Well, push against the plank where you see it. All of you push. Hurry. Your house may go down any minute.”
The man inside issued ra
pid orders. Soon a series of blows drove the length of siding outward another four inches. With Leo and Eleanor pulling at the same time, the plank abruptly cracked in the middle.
The sudden breaking of the wood sent Eleanor skidding wildly backward. In a panic, Leo saw that if she didn’t regain her balance, she’d tumble into the water. He knew she could swim but that would do her little good. Behind her, at the spot where she would fall, floating strands of barbed wire waited to slash and entangle her.
CHAPTER XIV
FIRE IN THE WATER
i
THE STRENGTH AND CONTROL required for stage movement served Leo well. He lunged forward as if he were Mercutio dueling in front of the footlights, catching Eleanor an instant before she pitched into the water.
She rested against him for a moment. He could feel her heartbeat through his soaked shirt. “Don’t worry,” she gasped. “I’m all right—“ Her eyes widened as she saw something beyond his shoulder. “The house is going!”
The Goldmans rushed back to the end of the car. The people inside had battered another board halfway off. Leo wrenched it loose and flung it into the water. With frantic pushes and pulls, two more were removed, enough to create an opening between two studs—an opening in which the members of the family could brace themselves before jumping to the Pullman car.
In the gloom, Eleanor and Leo made out five people— husband, wife, two small boys, and a girl. The girl might have been twelve, the youngest boy seven or eight.
One by one they leaped to safety. Just as the last one, the smallest boy, prepared to jump, the house gave another precipitous lurch. The man shouted for his son to hurry.
The boy jumped, barely clearing the strip of water that widened suddenly as the house fell away from the car. The entire upper story quickly sank from sight.