Falling to Earth (6 page)

By the time he'd walked into the house, he'd had the last of the day's bad surprises and was able to look at the group of people gathered in his living room as if he'd been expecting them, because he had been. He had been certain Mae and Lavinia would offer up every extra bed, every chair, every inch of floor for people to sleep on in his absence. Now they were there with their bundles stacked in neat piles in the corners of the room, waiting, polite as invited guests, for him to come home before they spread out all over the floor for the night. The problem of it, Paul had thought, closing the front door slowly behind him, lay in how to greet them. How does a man greet people he's known all his life when they're standing in his house because they've lost something, lost everything perhaps, and he has not. How do you stop the black joke entering your head,
Welcome folks, sorry about the electricity and the stiffs
, and get past them all without their feeling they have to thank you, because all you want to do now is to get behind a closed door with your own family. How do you look at neighbors and former schoolmates when you know that, tomorrow morning, they'll be buying wood from you for coffins.

There had been no way of knowing what he was looking at when he'd finally turned and met their eyes; a child without a brother, a man without his wife, a woman without her child? What could he say to them, now that happy commonplaces were impossible, now that
That boy of yours has sure shot up
had become
Where is your son?
In the end, it had been a statement and not a greeting that was spoken first, and he'd realized to his shame that what was unpleasant for him was impossible for them. It was Vida Long who'd spoken first, who'd come toward him to take his bandaged hands in hers and had simply said, “You were at the school.” He'd looked at her eyes, swollen, red, long past crying now and seen that she'd found a way to thank him without saying the words, and that what she was thanking him for was not the roof over their heads. She was a tiny woman, a few years younger than Mae, and knowing then where her children were, he'd thought,
Now she'll always look older
. But standing there with her tender hands holding his, wearing the same navy-print work dress she'd had on when the storm hit, she had seemed to tower over him somehow, humbling and magnificent, holding in all there was now to hold inside her.

 

It's past midnight now. Outside, it's still. Maybe no more so than any other chill night in early spring before the windows can be left cracked open and the sounds of insects and birds can come into the house, but it feels unnaturally quiet, as if the storm's roaring voice has frightened everything into silence. Inside it's hushed. The occasional sounds that reach them from the rest of the house are the sounds of stifled grieving, and are hard to bear. The children's eyes have finally closed. Time to peel them off Mae, put Ellis and Little Homer to bed on the floor, and Ruby in with Lavinia in the next room. Suddenly, Paul wants to wake them instead, to shake each of them so that he can see their eyes again, and take hold of them so hard he risks crushing them. He's never felt any particular way toward the Almighty, but he's shaking now with gratitude and Mae is crying and he hears himself saying thank you and thank you and thank you.

T
hree and a half hours. Three states. Two hundred and nineteen miles. Well over two hundred dead in Marah alone, and counting.
Started over in the Ozarks, they're saying, jumped the Mississippi into Illinois, hit the Big Muddy and Little Egypt, petered out somewhere across the border in Indiana
. News circulates, and the good fortune of the living is thrown into bare relief.
They found out who that little girl was out in Harrington's field. The one who wouldn't talk. Someone finally recognized her, and they sent her out on the train to her grandparents in De Soto. Can you imagine?
People stand in lines at the grain elevator downtown, waiting for the Red Cross blankets and donated clothing to be had there. Each arrives with facts and particulars to trade, hoping to talk more about others than about themselves. There is solace in greeting friends and occasionally even relief to be had in the absurd.
I heard Opal Tolliver still won't come out of her bedroom closet. Her son's tried telling her its foolish, her squatting in a closet when the rest of house is lying flat around it like playing cards, but she won't listen. Figures it saved her life, and there he is, stuck bringing food to the closet every day.

Newspapers from surrounding cities make their way in on the trains and the people read, amazed and gratified, the many accounts of the storm and the messages of sympathy and condolence that President Coolidge has accepted on their behalf.
Will you look at that. They heard about us all the way in Italy and Japan.
The wondrous news multiplies with reports of aid streaming in from the state, from neighboring states and towns, the nation. Drives for donations in aid of the survivors of March 18th spring up from St. Louis to Chicago with churches, schools, even newspapers organizing seemingly overnight.
Folks aren't careful, they'll be needing aid from us pretty soon.

The men and women visit cautiously with each other while they wait in the lines, surprised by life's pulling them forward and wary of moving too quickly, like a widow flirting over her husband's grave. They feel the ruined town spreading out behind them and beyond it the endless ruined farms and the dead livestock still lying in the fields. Each fears the day and the night that will follow; the snow or rain that will fall, the cold, the uncertain food. The newspapers have told that the National Guard is mobilizing. They are coming, they are coming with tents and food, and although each person can imagine sleeping in a tent, each wonders how long they are meant to live in them and how exactly a hunk of canvas and a handful of poles can form a bridge back to employment and a solid roof.

The aid workers, doctors, and nurses streaming into town, housed and fed in sleepers and dining cars sent in by the railroad. The grim lists—dead, injured, missing, found—revised and stuck again to the doors of the library. The men and women huddled in front of the doors, jostling for the place in front, impatient fingers trailing down the lists, and the wretched faces of those pushing their way back out of the crowd.

A
scraping sound wakes Paul, scraping and wood being thrown on top of wood. Like something at the lumberyard, the clatter of plank against plank. Little Homer has climbed into bed with them again, although Paul can't remember when. He's coming slowly out of his dream, a dream he's glad to be leaving. He can hear Little Homer's breathing, a dry open-mouthed rattle just this side of snoring. Mae is lying as she always does, on her side facing out toward the wall, and Little Homer is snug up against her back with his hand on her shoulder. It's still dark in the room. It's past six-thirty, but the alarm never went off and the curtains weren't left open as they usually are to let the morning light start to wake him even before the jangle of the alarm. Paul remembers then; he feels his body remembering the storm even before he can finish the thought in his head. His dry mouth and throat, his bruised arms, his injured hands. He breathes in deeply and exhales, feeling his heart beat faster with dread of the coming day. There is a ribbon of daylight all around the curtains. The air in the room is blue. Paul has never thought of the air as having a color before. He's assigned colors to the sky or to clouds before, but never the air itself, having only thought of air in terms of light before, whether it is bright or dark and how it changes with the movement of the sun. But the air around him now is blue, a deep, palpable blue that looks as if it would smudge if the daylight weren't already hurrying it away.

Paul wonders if he isn't the only one awake in the house. It's been a handful of hours since everyone went to sleep, and although there are the occasional sounds from people outside already beginning to pick through the rubble, it's quiet inside the house. He won't move yet, he thinks. He won't even stretch. Let them get all the sleep they can. There were enough disruptions after midnight, people crying out in their sleep at intervals throughout the house, the few children mumbling loudly through nightmares, never waking entirely, just fighting in confusion until a hand on their chest and a low voice in their ear settled them again.
Try to sleep
, he'd said to Homer and Ellis, touching their faces. His boys had lain there, eyes wide and listening, and Paul was sure Lavinia and Ruby had also lain awake. Paul exhales again. He's not sure what there is for people to get up for, what jobs there are left to go to, and Lord knows when there will be a school again. People will try to salvage what they can from their houses, he supposes, without having any place to put things. Each day's efforts will surely seem pointless, like being told to move a heap of boulders from here to there only to learn that the next day's labor is to move them back again.

Paul's stomach is tight. He will have to get up, and soon. Getting out of the house again may even be worse than coming home was last night. He can wash and dress quickly as usual, he can even leave through the kitchen door, but he will not be able to avoid seeing in all those eyes the knowledge that, unlike him, they have no place to go to. He realizes he's still thinking about the lumberyard as it was yesterday, as it was before the storm. Yesterday morning had been Wednesday. Just Wednesday, pleasant and indistinguishable from any other working day. He'd been up early and out the door with the smells of coffee and eggs and bacon still in his nose, the children sleepy at the table, Mae and his mother already distracted by the coming day's work. The customers coming and going under the bell on the door, the sounds of the saws, his routine with all the weight of the familiar. Greetings and small talk, the occasional car passing outside the windows. Only the talk about the weather was bitter now, the jokes they'd made about forgotten umbrellas, and,
Hurry, get where you're going before it starts to rain
.

But he'd left the lumberyard without locking up yesterday, without doing anything more than looking back, astonished, at the front of the building before he took off running for the school. He hadn't given it another thought the rest of the day, not even when he'd taken his keys and coins out of his pocket and laid them in the dish on the dresser. Up till this moment, he hasn't given a thought to the people who work for him, to which of them was inside when the storm hit and who was still out back in the yard among the stacks of cut lumber. He hadn't seen them again, not even later that day, downtown or at the school.

He'd neither seen nor thought of Irene after he'd left her inside the store, sitting behind the counter at the adding machine. He'd only gone outside to stand on the sidewalk to see why the sky had gone so dark, why the wind had picked up and there were so many dead leaves flying by the windows suddenly. He'd intended to have a look and then go right back in, to laugh and tell Irene they were in for a good soaking, and then to call the other men inside the store.

He'd meant to go back in but he'd been frozen there, looking down Union Street in the direction of home when he'd seen the cloud. He could see nothing else, no sky at its edges, no space below or above it, just the seething black cloud rolling towards him, swallowing the street. The screams behind him had brought him back to himself, and it was then he'd thought to grab the telegraph pole because he was two steps closer to it than he was to the store, and he'd fallen with his arms around it the way he used to fall on the football in high school.

Now he's lying on his back with his arm across his face, gasping like he's been running.

“Paul,” Mae is saying, “Paul!” She's up on her elbow, pulling his arm away from his face. “What is it?”

Homer hasn't woken, he's lying there rolled over on his back now, still sleeping with his mouth slightly open. He'll wake and remember the storm soon, too.

Mae is cupping his cheek with her warm hand, kissing his temple.

“I never went back,” he says. He's sobbing now and trying to stop, but he's making more noise having to breathe through his clamped teeth. Mae moves her hand to his shoulder. He knows she's watching him, waiting. If she gives him time, he'll be able to explain, he'll be able to tell her that he's not talking about the school. He knows he's confused her, and if she asks again he won't be able to control himself at all. But she isn't asking, she's waiting. He's finally able to take his hands away from his mouth, but he can't look at her yet, he can only look up at the ceiling. The air has lost its color. It's just a dull half light now, waiting for someone to push the curtains back.

“The lumberyard,” he says in a whisper, as if he's only trying not to wake the boys. “I never went back to the lumberyard yesterday.”

Mae is still silent. He's sure she knows that he's talking about the people he left there and not the place, and that she won't try to reassure him that if the one escaped unharmed the others would have as well. Mae has never asked him to justify any feelings of responsibility before, and she won't make him defend remorse and shame now. Just as she let go of him when he set off running back to the school the day before, she'll send him off again this morning without complaint to do whatever it is he has to do, and she and Lavinia will run things at home. Funny that the day can, in this one respect, be so much like any other.

“I have to go.” He looks at her finally, but now she's not looking at him. She's breathing slowly and looking down at Homer, mostly to look at something other than Paul. She hasn't taken her hand from his shoulder, but he can see she's unhappy, that she's trying hard to keep anything she's thinking from showing on her face. Her eyes flicker up briefly and then down again and she nods. Paul sits up and pulls Mae up to him and holds her with Homer lying between them.