Hector

Hector became a local celebrity by accident and pretty much against his druthers. When Carla came barreling down the Gulf in September of 1961, its surge put his house under water, at least up to the floor, although he and his brother, Victório, and his father, Ismaél, lived 15 miles inland. But the Valley’s highest point is only a foot or two above sea level, and what isn’t sea level─as almost every square acre of it is─is in the minus category, which probably their house was.

The day after the hurricane, there were groups of people all over the Valley surveying damage, interviewing victims, sight-seeing, taking pictures. Ismael had stripped off every stitch of clothing and gone out hunting in water up to his waist for any of his critters that might have survived. Victorio and Hector joined him in every respect. Their timing was perfect. A photographer from one of the papers spotted them and took several pictures, a single one of which ran in the next morning’s edition with Hector's name in the cutlines; most of the photos couldn’t be used in those days.

Hector was fifteen that year, Torio was thirteen. Neither one remembered his mother, or knew his father all that well either, for that matter. They’d been raised mostly by their grandmother, who died five hours after Ismael came home from Korea with bad lungs, after ten years in the service, including a year in WWII. In 1961, Ismael was not forty yet, and publicity was what he’d least expected and wanted even less. He was on the run from the health department for having fled the sanitarium where he’d been institutionalized with a killer case of tuberculosis.

Five days after Carla, men in white coats and face masks came for Ismael. Heck and Tory were left by themselves in what has to be the most desolate spot in the Valley─the so-called Culébra grant, just west of San Juan de Carricítos─the last remaining Cavázos maybe of the line of the original grantees, and maybe not. Even after the courts (litigation having been brought not by Ismael but by a party who claimed blood kinship with him) decided who had legal ownership of it, they never bothered to chase the boys away because the land wasn’t worth anything.

Heck had dropped out of school right after the sixth grade but Tory was still going. A bus came and picked him up every day and took him to the nearest high school twenty-five miles away. It’s hard to assess what the greater miracle was. But Tory collapsed in gym class one day, with “a hole in his lung the size of a silver dollar”, Heck said. After emergency care, Tory was taken to the same hospital that his father was being kept in with much cajolery and not a few threats. Then a strange thing happened: Ismael found religion and a job in town; Tory dreaded going back home and the hospital folks liked him so well they trained him and gave him a job. Tory and Ismael took good care of Heck, but they never could talk him into leaving the Culebra.

Six years later, Heck was forced to wait on Beulah all alone. There were no more critters on the place now except for two dogs, and he brought them into the house. He figured they could fight the coyotes and the snakes together, and whatever varmint Beulah would drive toward shelter. But Ismael was there before Beulah hit. Heck went to sleep lulled by a driving rain, convinced by Ismael that this storm was no more than an autumn shower. In the morning, Heck found Ismael’s shoes and clothes in a pile on the front porch, too wet for the five foot rattler curled up beside them to sleep on. The water was scarcely an inch from pouring into the front door. Heck then stripped down to bare skin and went off in search of Ismael. He returned home half a day later by himself and was dressing on the front porch when a newspaper photographer took a picture of his backside--again. Later, when the men came looking for his father, Heck just said, “He’s gone.”

Eight years later, Heck faced Allen, too, all by himself. He didn’t have anything by then that any hurricane would want, but the photographers did. Heck’s fame had grown. Not wanting to disappoint anybody, he stripped down to nothing and went out wading through the aftermath of the greatest storm to ever hit southern Texas and had his picture taken. Later that day, when Tory went to check on him, Heck said, “Dad was here.”

“Dad was?”

“Yeah.”

“Where?”

“Out there,” Heck said, pointing toward the Gulf.

Heck waited eight years. By then Texas had put in a freeway not a quarter of a mile from the house, and the land had become valuable. People wanted him gone. Gilbert took care of that for them. There wasn’t a trace left of either the house or of Heck the next day, and if you were a superstitious man, you would believe that Gilbert dipped into the Valley just to pick him up. The photographer from the paper didn’t even go out into the field this time. Maybe he was just getting old. He ran a stock photo of Heck’s backside in the next day’s edition. That’s just how much faith some people had that Heck would always do his part.

A hurricane makes a cleaner cut than a judge’s blade. There was never any arguing with Gilbert’s decision, nor Carla’s, or Beulah’s or Allen’s. In the end, we all know who the land really belongs to. A man who has lived in the path of the storm all his life knows what it’s like to sleep in his own grave.

Tory disappeared from the hospital on the 21^st of August of 1999. Brett slammed into the Texas coast on the 22^nd.

Noe.