Falling to Earth (5 page)

In the night they falter, fearful of the next step, mistaking fear for uncertainty. They have always done for themselves and find that they must now contract a debt. They haven't yet understood that the very people who are waiting to help them are anxious themselves, worried that the help they offer will be thought too mean. A man making his painstaking way through the streets weighs what will injure him least: asking a man he has known for years for space on the floor and a supper scratched for his children, or being greeted by strangers with government uniforms and government cots who have arrived on trains for the sole purpose of giving aid. Any meeting will be precarious. The men begin to realize that what is truly unbear­able is what they risk seeing in each other's eyes. A man who must beg shelter for his family draws himself up tall in front of another man's door, summoning his dignity before he knocks, knowing full well that his eyes will still betray him. The man who opens the door, if he now possesses only that door and walls and a roof, finds that his eyes fall hungrily on the other man's children and that he is the poorer of the two. And the sympathy of a stranger, however earnest, becomes intolerable if the stranger is careless in veiling his relief that he will leave soon on another train.

The women watch as they walk, making note of every possibility, ready if the men should waver to say carefully,
I thought I saw a candle back a block or so
. They watch and they worry lest the children tire and begin to fret about their bellies, or ask
Where are we going to go?
not yet realizing that the children won't complain because more frightening to them than hunger or even the storm is the possibility that their mothers and fathers will allow themselves to be defeated by it. The children see the fear the adults are too weary to conceal. They see without understanding that their fathers and mothers are working out if they can trust their beating hearts, figuring just how much of the self is lost when a house is smashed or a child is snatched up into the air.

The children do not doubt the evidence of their own bodies. They see what the adults cannot: that one is responsible to a beating heart, that the simple act of walking means moving forward in more than just the literal sense, and that even the act of reaching into the wreckage of a house to save a book or a tea kettle is a kind of beginning.

The sight of a lantern outside the one church that was spared will stop a damaged man cold, knowing as he does that it means he is welcome to spread out his bedroll inside on a pew. He will stand a moment in the street with his remaining family, watching the flickering light outside the doors, feeling hardness overtaking his face and anger balling up in his gut.
Hell no, not in there
, he'll say, frightened suddenly of where he is laying blame. A woman damaged in the same way will turn inward and simply take the first shelter she finds, keeping a stupefied silence throughout the night, fearful of uttering any sound lest she become deranged.

Not everyone remains in the town. Proud men who find themselves alone will go out into the fields where fires built by other men like themselves signal a space cleared for sleeping. There they'll wrap themselves in the blankets and rugs they've scavenged and share what food they've managed to find. It will occur to some of them that this was the boyhood idyll: to sleep in the open air with one's fellows, to have no clothes other than those you wore on your back, no responsibility to anyone but yourself or to anything but the fire. They will spend the night repeating the horrors of the day, unable to sleep because of the coldness of the ground and because of the terrible beauty of the night sky above them. Still others will leave Marah entirely, fleeing on foot along the train tracks or driving out in automobiles or wagons they've managed to wrest from the wreckage, putting a long and permanent distance between themselves and the town.

None of them can know yet that aid will come from every possible source and that even poor people far away will hear about the storm and find they have something to spare. Without discussion or formal assent, the people of the town act on a simple, instinctual code: that a door knocked upon is a door opened, that food is not to be hoarded, and that succor can be found wherever a bonfire or a candle are lit. The living fan out across the town and come to rest. The end of the first day.

D
eath had come by stealth when Paul's father, Homer, had been found out in the field, taken by a stroke. There had been no long illness to give warning, no opportunity for leave-taking, but his death nonetheless had a quality of inevitability about it and had been the kind of shock you could expect to recover from reasonably quickly in everyday ways. Now, because death had come in a ravenous cloud, Paul, Mae, Lavinia, and the children are sitting in candlelight, with the curtains drawn and the bedroom door shut, trying to give some privacy to the other families who have taken shelter in the house. Mae, sitting up with a pillow between her back and the headboard, has an arm around Ellis on the one side and Ruby and Little Homer on the other. Little Homer lies closest to her, half on her, his head on her belly and a leg and an arm draped across her lap. For once, they're all lying still, not vying for the place closest to their mother. They are so still you might believe that they had fallen asleep there, that someone would lay a finger over their lips and shush you if you entered the room too quickly, but their eyes are open, every one of them. They're staring, seeming not even to blink. Something about their eyes suggests that they might spring up at any moment, despite the heaviness with which they lie against Mae. Ellis seems to be looking at the closed door. Ruby is watching Lavinia, who sits in the corner in an armchair brought up from the living room, worrying an earlobe with a trembling hand. Little Homer, like Mae, is looking directly and alertly at Paul. He realizes that none of the children has spoken since he came home.

Paul looks at Ruby and Ellis and remembers the careful, pleased way his father had held them both as blanket-swaddled babies. And after both their births, when there had been three generations of them sitting there together, he had looked at Lavinia who was smiling at them all and realized she was savoring it, too, gratified at their increasing. That Mae had been pregnant with Little Homer when his father had died was a comfort in its way. He'd known, at least, that the last one was coming.

It had been Mae who'd named the baby, though he supposed most people thought it had been him. She'd taken his hand at the funeral supper in the church basement and pressed it against her belly for him to feel the baby's heel pressing hard from its side. “Doesn't that hurt?” he'd asked, and she'd smiled and shaken her head no, but pressed back anyway with her fingertips to tell the baby it was time to stop. “It's a boy,” she'd said and smiled at him in a way that told him she was right. “We're going to call him Homer.”

Life goes on
, Paul had thought at the time. So many things at once. His father, dead, abruptly. The farm, his mother's to decide about now. A boy, another son, and his name. It was all right, though, not being in control of everything. He could settle again into his own life now and do the things he needed to do to keep moving forward. That his and his brother John's debt from starting up the lumberyard was repaid was a comfort, too. They had gotten to see their father's damp, proud eyes when they'd handed him the last envelope of bills, their loan paid in full and ahead of schedule. “Well, I'll be,” he'd said and shaken both their hands.

Paul wonders how much of the day the children can have comprehended. What began as a miracle for him has more likely seemed like magic to them; the destroying wind brought only rain and strange airborne treasures into their yard. They can have seen the other houses around theirs, they can be told that well over half the houses in town have been smashed, that an as-yet-unknown number of their schoolmates are dead, without their being able to attach any particular meaning to any of it. What was horrifyingly concrete for him would remain hazy and indistinct for them for a time, and perhaps should remain so for as long as possible. He knows that meaning and consequence will continue to filter into his own consciousness as well, that it might take the rest of his life to make sense of this.

Soon enough he'd be the one to tell his children which of their friends were lost. Knowing that had made him avoid looking too closely at the children laid out at the school. Certain knowledge now, right now, was still too much. Holding the crushed body of a boy of twelve or thirteen had been too much. And in the end it wasn't really grief for the boy that had overtaken him but a sad kind of joy at knowing that he'd still hear Little Homer and Ellis's voices break one day; that he would see his sons grow taller and faster than he himself had ever been.

Now his children are lying, all three of them, heavy and warm, against their mother. It's a temptation to look at them all and try to erase them, one after the other, from the scene, to imagine other ways the day might have ended. But the occasional sounds coming from the rest of the house, the sounds of grieving that draw a moan out of Lavinia each time they hear them, tell him quickly, shamefully, that that is folly. It's late, getting on toward midnight finally, not twelve hours yet since the storm, but it's time for sleep.

The weight of the coming day should make it impossible for him to sleep, but it won't. He could sleep right here in this chair all night, probably without moving even once. He thinks of John and his wife, Dora, again as he has off and on throughout the day, and again, without any whiff of the old rancor. He thinks that their moving to California was providential. He hasn't seen it for himself but has heard from others that the houses on their old street were hit hard, that there's nothing left except the odd black tree trunk sticking out of the ruins. He hasn't yet told any of this to his mother, although he knows it's possible she's already guessed.

What can have been in those children's minds in the last seconds before the school collapsed, he wonders. Had any of them, any one of them, understood what was about to happen? There hadn't been any such moment for Paul. He'd known somehow as he sank to the sidewalk with his arms around the telegraph pole and laid there on his belly to wait out the tearing wind that he'd done the right thing. And knowing now that he hadn't just been lucky, that if he'd stayed inside the store he would have been safe there too was terrible to bear. He was fine. He would have been fine no matter what.

 

The night had turned heartbreakingly clear, and when there was nothing more he could do at the school, he'd walked home in the moonlight. The first relief trains had pulled in by then, as close as they could come to the shattered depot. Doctors and nurses had come in on those trains, and the worst of the injured had gone out on them when they'd pulled out again. Medical supplies were beginning to flow into town, and he'd heard reports that surgeries were in full swing in the undamaged parts of the hospital and the high school. He'd been offered a blanket, which he'd declined, and hot coffee and a doughnut, which he'd accepted. His hands had been bandaged, and while he'd sat there on the ground, he'd slowly taken in the blood-red crosses on the nurses' still-spotless white uniforms, and had found himself close to weeping at the wave of relief, the miraculous relief that had come when he'd surrendered to their care.

As he had walked home, he'd laughed a little at the moon's consideration, illuminating the ruins around him as it had, making the giant splinters shine where they lay so that he could safely pick his way home without streetlight. He'd felt nothing in the air. If he closed his eyes to the wrecked houses around him, he'd wondered, would he feel a weight in the air, a heaviness or any whisper at all of what had happened that day? He had looked up instead, past the few bare trees at the blue-black sky and the moon, but there had been nothing, only the lingering smell of burning, and looking far up above himself, he could let that remind him of other pleasanter things.

His street had been strange and still; he'd met no one at all while walking its length. It might have seemed that everyone but him had been blown right out of Marah except for the small flicker of candlelight in the windows of intact houses. There would be candles lit at home, too, he'd thought, and when he realized that he was almost there, he'd slowed. It had surprised him how quick his walk had been, but then his landmarks were mostly gone, and it had been like walking the street for the first time. He'd stopped half a block from home to look from a distance at the Duttweiler house on the far corner. He had seen it earlier in the daylight, but he'd been preoccupied then and hadn't given any real thought to it in comparison with his own house. It had, after all, been only one of a long string of bizarre, sad things he'd seen in the first hours after the storm. Standing there in the moonlight it had seemed terrifying and comic in equal measure; a freak of a giant's dollhouse. On the corner opposite his own house, the storm had slung the Duttweiler house around as if it weren't even fixed to its underpinnings and ripped off one side entirely, only to cross the street and do nothing more than dirty his house and the next few after his.

He'd finally seen his own car pointing the wrong way in the driveway then. It had surely been like that when he'd run home the first time, but desperate as he was to see his family safe, he hadn't seen it. Spun around, just spun around in the same place he had left it parked there on the driveway between the sidewalk and the garage. It had stopped him cold when he'd finally seen it, the one funny thing he'd seen all day, and he'd felt the ache it left in the bottom of his stomach and stared a while before he went up the walk to the house, where he stopped again when he saw the sheeted bodies laid out along the front porch. Not yet, not yet. He'd thought he was prepared for that; he'd known they would be there as they were on the other porches he'd passed on his way home, lined up tight, like matchsticks. Paul had closed his eyes then in resignation, knowing as he suddenly did how Mae and Lavinia had been occupied since he'd kissed them in the yard.