Path Back to Normal

Through the aftermath of the hurricane, Alex and Carli ran errands, did chores, and remained happy, uncomplaining, and relaxed in the midst of the rubble that was Belize City. As soldiers began patrolling the shopping districts, however, gangs of drunken looters armed with stolen machetes turned to prowling through damaged and empty homes. We could no longer even let the children leave the yard.

Sanitary conditions and morale sank. The seawall was being used as an open-air latrine. The danger of epidemics and fire remained high.

Within a few days after the hurricane, many families, like the Tattersfields, sent wives and children off to stay with relatives in other countries until Belize was livable again. Bucher and I first thought we could keep our family together. However, schools were closed and most of the children’s friends had left. We reluctantly decided that we should send Alex and Carli to Atlanta as their Aunt Deezy and Uncle Frank O’Neill were urging us to do.

It was the only time in my life I sent children off to visit with dirty clothes in their suitcases. We had little water for laundry. I sorted through their closets and found what I could to outfit them for fall and winter up north in the southern U.S. In Carli’s case there was the usual periodic task of letting down hems on dresses that would be suitable for school in Atlanta.

It was both lonesome and a relief to have the children safely in Georgia. We had loved their cheerful sharing of our difficult life, but had worried about them increasingly.

 

The high point of our days became each evening when we joined forces with Tom Tattersfield to fight the hurricane depression that was affecting everyone.

We three sat on our veranda, night after night, retelling hurricane stories, each of us quietly and devoutly grateful that we all had survived. Tom looked over at his fine, relatively new home, damaged but sound, then at our great, unpainted barn of an ancient structure, shook his head in disbelief, and remarked, “The termites must have held hands and formed a living chain to hold your house together.”

Bucher and Tom ran a single electric line from our house to his. This sad, frail, sagging little thread meant that if Tom timed his departure right, he could stumble through the moderated darkness to his house, avoiding debris as best he could, and get ready for bed by the light of a solitary bulb before “Betsy,” our generator, coughed and expired for the night.

 

I looked out a back window one day not long after the storm and was delighted to see British sailors busily repairing the roof on a small house standing in the middle of our block. I never had seen the house before the hurricane because it was hidden by trees and shrubbery in an inner yard, with only a path leading out to the street. Five or six young tars were removing damaged zinc, handing up new sheets of corrugated galvanized roofing, and lustily hammering it into place.

That evening I mentioned how heartening it was to see the British seamen diligently repairing storm damage. Bucher and Tom greeted my story with roars of laughter. Mystified, I waited for them to pull themselves together, then asked coldly, “What’s funny?”

“That’s the neighborhood whore house,” they chortled.

 

Tom reported that he gradually was trying to clean his house. He went into a small cupboard under their stairs to get the vacuum cleaner. Tom and Lia’s house had a closed veranda across the front, clapboard siding part way up with glass jalousies to the ceiling. The jalousies were closed tightly for the storm and had not broken, except for one slat that had been knocked out by the wildly weaving swing at the far end of the veranda. A heavy door led from the veranda into the hall. Another solid door secured the cupboard. Inside, stood the vacuum, unbelievably and totally caked with mud.

 

Bucher came home one day with a grin of success, to tell us one of the improbable stories we had learned to expect in the wake of Hattie. He had been talking with a friend, Guy Nord Jr., in his store on the corner of the lane about a block from Bucher’s freezer plant. The store had been looted, as the empty glass counters attested.

Bucher happened to glance down into the counter on which he was leaning. “That’s my General Ledger,” he shouted. He opened the sliding glass door at the back of the counter, took out the thick binder, and opened it to find his missing business accounts. It was muddy—pages were still wet and the posting, blurred. How it had washed from his office, up the lane, around a corner, into “Guy’s,” and enclosed itself safely behind glass, no one ever discovered. However, Bucher and the Income Tax Department were delighted to have it.

 

I was assigned the task of sorting through the mud-compacted bits and pieces of Bucher’s plant records and setting up new accounts. Fortunately, I had Tom Tattersfield, my handy neighborhood CPA. Tom’s way of “singing for his supper,” or more correctly, for his light bulb, was to attempt to show me the basics of bookkeeping.

My world was words, not numbers. To my own surprise, the tidiness of one entry’s balancing another began to charm me. I had some difficulty understanding why money in the bank was a debit in the books and why money we owed someone else was a credit. The process of translating bookkeeping rules so that they made sense to me resulted in my delighted discovery: “A debit is a credit.”

Tom was not amused.

 

The insurance adjusters, most of them from England, arrived and moved into Nobby Lewis’s home. After the storm, Nobbie’s wife Maizie had gone back to England along with many other British wives. Nobby lived on the other side of our block, facing Regent Street. Like storm-blown birds huddling together, he and the adjusters began coming to our house every evening after dinner to sit on our veranda for drinks, story-swapping, and commiseration. They arrived about the time Bucher turned on “Betsy” the generator.

I had one rule: everyone had to bring his own ration of beer.

Canned beer was available after the hurricane, but brands were unidentifiable because of the mud caked on the tins. Bucher started carrying a burlap bag on his bicycle so that he could bring home whatever supplies of beer he located.

I kept three pans of water for washing the tins, throwing out the contents of the first when it no longer could pretend to be a liquid. Then the second rinse became the first, until it, too, finally was a semi-solid. The final clear rinse made the print on the cans visible and the cans themselves, presumably, clean enough to be opened.

The beer was chilled in the freezer compartment of our refrigerator. Betsy’s thrice-a-day power was enough to cool the tins pleasantly. The nightly offerings from Nobby and the insurance adjusters were dumped into the first pan of water to be cleaned the following day, while I opened and served clean, chilled cans from the refrigerator. I would like to think it was Bucher’s and my charm that won the attentions of our guests, but suspect that cold beer had a lot to do with their faithfulness.

 

Every man of the group had at least one, and most often several, wonderful / maddening / funny / heartbreaking / aggravating stories to tell each evening.

Each evening one of the group would feel suicidal. Fortunately, the others would be in hilariously good spirits. Threats to throw oneself off the veranda and into the sea dissolved in the common laughter.

Nerves were frayed. The pungent mud everywhere, the destruction, the sad losses, the monumental tasks ahead, the difficulty of each step in trying to live through the day battered at everyone. Bucher and I were lucky to be able to escape temporarily with affable companions.

We were in bed each night by the time “Betsy” turned out the limited lights. As if roused by alarm clock, Bucher and I were wide awake at about two o’clock every morning. We kept a lamp near the head of our mattress on the floor where we could light it easily and read for an hour before we were able to sleep again.

 

The hurricane hit at the end of October. November ground past, and early December. Cleanup throughout the city progressed. There was a promise of electricity by the end of the month. The large stores and tiny shops had been cleaned up and gradually were restocked and opened. Little by little life became easier.

Even so, most people still suffered from remnants of shock. Bucher and I usually felt that we were operating normally, with exceptional poise and energy. Much of our vigor probably had an element of hysteria. We both were plagued by abnormal mood swings, sudden losses of strength, abrupt irritations, which fortunately aimed outward, away from each other, and focused on the situation around us. It was a strange, dream-like time when nothing was as it should be. We both were vaguely aware of our anomalous state and its cause, and were not worried by it.

 

St. Catherine’s Elementary announced that classes would resume after Christmas. We made plans to spend Christmas in Atlanta and bring the children home with us.

As mail service resumed, we had begun getting delightful letters from Alex and Carli. Aunt Deezy had signed legal documents putting herself in loco parentis and had entered both children in school. The children were enjoying being surrounded by solicitous family and making new friends. I suspect that eventually they even got tired to telling their hurricane tales.

Carli had a minor contretemps soon after she began classes. Her spelling test came back with several words marked “wrong.” Despite being in a strange school in a (to her) strange country, she marched up to the teacher to protest. Carli explained that her school used British spelling, so that for her “colour” and “honour” and “labour” were correct. Fortunately, the teacher was familiar with the differences between U.S. and British spelling. She accepted Carli’s explanation and regraded her test paper.

 

Back in Belize, our life continued in its post-hurricane pattern. Tom came over every evening. Nobby and the insurance adjusters joined us later. Gradually the adjusters began leaving the country, their work done. We were a smaller group each night.

Just before Tom was to leave for Miami for a reunion with his family and we were to leave for Atlanta, Bucher developed an abscessed tooth. He was in agony. He went to our dentist, Salvador Awe (pronounced AH-way). Dr. Awe looked at the tooth, said that it had to be pulled, and explained regretfully that he did not have any drugs to enable him to do the extraction. Bucher said, “You still have instruments and you can boil water to sterilize them. I don’t give a damn about Novocaine. Nothing can hurt worse than the tooth does now.” Reluctantly Dr. Awe agreed to do what Bucher asked.

Bucher returned mid-afternoon with as much of a smile as he could manage with his grossly misshapen face. He carried a precious bottle of Scotch, still not usually available, which he had wheedled out of a sympathetic friend in one of the stores. Bucher sat down on the veranda and had a stiff drink to go with the aspirin that I forced on him. Tom arrived around five o’clock. Bucher was on his fourth Scotch and the pain was becoming tolerable. Tom and I had our usual evening beer. I served our Hurricane Goodies; Bucher was not able to eat. Bucher had another Scotch. By the time Tom said goodnight to reach his house before “Betsy” retired for the night, Bucher had finished the bottle and, to our amazement, walked into the house, completely sober but pain-free, to get ready for bed.

The next day we left for Atlanta. The Scotch had worn off but the pain from the abscess had not. Bucher was almost paralyzed with it. I do not remember much about the trip.

That evening we were in his mother’s apartment reunited with the children and with my father, whom Mama thoughtfully had invited for the holidays. Bucher left the living room, with its happy shrieking, to telephone his cousin and dentist, Julius Hughes. He explained his problem and Julius was at the apartment twenty minutes later with expertise and antibiotics. Julius asked Bucher to relay his admiring compliments to Dr. Awe for the work he had done under unthinkable circumstances.

In a few days the pain and worry were behind, though not forgotten.

 

That Christmas was a happy time. The children were delighted to see us, despite the fun they had with Deezy and Frank. We could be gracious about their remaining in the O’Neill apartment a little longer because we all would be leaving together. We were surrounded by Bucher’s charming family, all of whom were sure we had been in far greater danger than we thought we had been. Just staying in an apartment where light switches routinely turned on lights, where water ran with the touch of a tap, where the only smells were the enticing ones of superb Southern cooking, was soothing to our besieged psyches.

Christmas came and went, as did New Year’s. We bade a warm goodbye to Dad as he returned to Michigan. It was time for us to leave. The children packed eagerly, hoping not to hurt the feelings of the aunt and uncle who had been so kind to them, but ready to return to the world they knew. Bucher and I left, refreshed, enthusiastic to face remaining problems and to rebuild our lives in Belize.