Falling to Earth

Europa Editions
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2013 by Kate Southwood
First publication 2013 by Europa Editions
All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.
Cover Art by Emanuele Ragnisco
www.mekkanografici.com
ISBN 9781609451103

Kate Southwood

FALLING TO EARTH

For Aksel, Maren, and Inger

T
he cloud is black, shot through with red and orange and purple, a vein of gold at its crest. A mile wide end to end, it rolls like a barrel, feeding on rivers and farmland. Tethered and stabled animals smell it coming and lurch against their restraints. Swollen with river mud, it moves with a howl over the land, taking with it a cow, a cookstove, a linen tablecloth embroidered with baskets of flowers. A section of fencing, a clothes hanger, a coffee can. A house lifted up and dashed to earth. The side of a barn.

The people in the town scatter; some find shelter. The men and women running through the streets are mothers and fathers, desperate to reach their children at the schools. There is no time; the cloud is rolling over them. The men and women screw their eyes shut tight and some scream, but the wind screams louder and flings metal and wood and window glass though the streets. A Model T and its driver are hurled through the window of the hardware store. Telegraph poles snap and sail like javelins into houses. An old oak rips in two like paper torn in strips. Grass is torn from the ground.

The school, the town hall, the shops at the rail yard fold in on themselves and the people inside. And as the cloud passes, the fires begin, lapping at the broken town.

M
ae pulls the lace curtain aside to look out the window and up at the sky. “It's awful dark out there,” she says.

“Come away from that window,” Mae's mother-in-law, Lavinia, says. “I'm not afraid of any rainstorm. If we were back out on the farm, I might be persuaded, but this is different. A town is different than wide open spaces.”

“A funnel's a funnel. It doesn't know the difference between the country and a town,” Mae says.

“Yes, but you don't hear town folk talking about funnels, now do you? It's the people out on farms who see them.”

Lavinia pulls her glasses down on her nose and tilts her head back to look at her work. “Hand me another dark blue,” she says to her granddaughter Ruby and points to the basket of wool scraps on the floor beside her chair. Ruby spins around on her knees and takes a long scrap off the top. “Like this?”

“Thank you, snookie. I bet you're not sorry to be missing school.” Lavinia smiles at Ruby over her glasses and waits for Ruby to smile back at her. “I know I'd hate to have to walk home in this weather. Do you want to try braiding with me?”

Ruby looks at the basket and the braided wool snaking from Lavinia's lap onto the floor. She wrinkles her nose in answer. “I'm bored. Why couldn't I just go back to school today?”

“Land sakes, child! You'd rather be out in this weather than home with us?” Lavinia is laughing, inwardly gratified that Ruby would rather be at school.

“You know you can't go back until your scabs are falling off,” Mae says. “Chicken pox is catching.”

“But I feel fine!”

“You don't look fine. Go look in the mirror. They'd send you home right away if you tried.”

“Why'd Ellis have to go and get dumb chicken pox anyway?”

“It wasn't my fault!” Ruby's brother Ellis says, “Whole bunch of kids got 'em.”

“Well, now you'll be done with it, all three of you,” Lavinia says. “All done with the polka dots. Why, I should be calling you Dot now, shouldn't I? And Ellis, you could be Spot.”

Lavinia sees that Ruby is annoyed by the joke, but five-year-old Little Homer is smiling, waiting for her to name him.

“Ruby, don't look at your Gran like that,” Mae says.

“Oh now, I didn't mean to hurt your feelings, snookie. You just go on with your marbles.” She turns to Little Homer and says, “What do you want to be? There's not much left after Dot and Spot.”

“Poke.”

“Dot, Spot, and Poke?”

Little Homer nods, smiling at her and waiting for her to get the joke, then laughs with her when Lavinia slaps her knee and yells, “Poke-a-dot!”

“I don't want to be Spot,” Ellis says, “Sounds like a dog.”

“Well, fine, you and Ruby can just be Ellis and Ruby. Right, Poke?” She winks at Little Homer, who nods again, pleased that he's the only one playing the game.

Lavinia laughs at Ellis, stretched out flat on his belly, half under the davenport. “Lose one?”

“Got it.” Ellis sets the marble with the others he has clustered outside the ring of twine and picks up his shooter. “How many twisters have you seen, Grandma?”

“Me? Oh, I thought I saw one once. Far off in the distance, though, so I couldn't be sure. Grandpa Homer teased me and said I just wanted to see a real one so badly, I imagined it. I've been in plenty of storms, though, down cellar, waiting them out with a lantern. That's no fun, wondering what you'll find when you come out again.” Lavinia stops braiding and sits looking at the opposite wall with her hands in her lap.

“They used to tell you to close all the windows in the house if a cyclone was coming, but then someone figured even if the funnel didn't skirt your place, the winds would blow the glass out, so they started telling us to open all the windows.” She laughs and slaps her knee. “All that got us was a dirty house, I'll tell you. Why, we no more had all that black grit cleaned off of every surface before the next storm came up and we were flinging open the windows and running for the cellar again.”

“You ever seen a twister, Mama?” Ellis asks.

Mae shakes her head. She has not once looked away from the window. She's exasperated by Lavinia's cheerfulness, by her refusal to do a thing as simple as look out the window.

Little Homer goes to stand with Mae and asks, “What are you looking for, Mama? What's one look like?”

“I've never seen anything but pictures, but they look like long, twisty cones, sort of bendy and fuzzy gray. They're wide at the top and skinny at the bottom where they touch the ground and stir things up.” Mae draws a quick circle on the top of Little Homer's head and remembers to smile at the boy with her eyes.

“Daddy says if you want to know when there's a storm coming, you can listen for the birds and watch what they're doing,” Mae continues. “If they're all twittering and fussing and the leaves on the trees start to spin so you can see their undersides, then you know a storm is coming. But if the light outside turns green and things seem kind of eerie, that's when you know you've got cyclone weather.”

Mae turns back to the window, shakes her head and glowers out. If only her husband Paul were here to talk sense to Lavinia––not that he outranks his mother the matriarch, but at least then there would be two of them she'd have to listen to. “You should really have a look, Mother. I don't like this,” she says.

“I can see from here, and what I see doesn't look like cyclone weather. I think we're in for a walloping thunderstorm, but we don't have to be chased down a hole like scared rabbits.”

“Maybe it wouldn't hurt to go down for a little while,” Ellis says. “Just a little while.” He's sitting up on his knees, and he's already dropped his marbles back into their fabric bag.

“Mae, come away from that window right now. You've got Ellis spooked. It's not even the right season for it. The newspaper didn't say anything but that we'd get a good soaking today.”

Mae exhales, drops the curtain and goes to sit on the davenport. It's only a little after two o'clock, and they've got every lamp in the front room on. She shakes her head again, thinking of Paul and wondering what the others will be able to see on her face. Lavinia continues her rag braiding, tying on new scraps as she reaches the ends of old ones. The room is quiet; not even the children are making any noise. Lord, if Ruby and Ellis were in school, Mae thinks. That many more to worry about.

They've never yet taken shelter down in the cellar, but this is why Paul built it, she thinks. He'd had to take a little ribbing for it down at the lumberyard when he was building the house. Overkill, they'd chuckled at him, enjoying themselves. He'd just laughed along with them and kept smiling when he explained that if he had the ground, a shovel, and the lumber to make the cellar doors, why, he figured he could spare a day's labor. The children have only ever looked into it now and then when Mae has gone down to sweep it out and check for damp. They've never ventured down; they know its purpose and somehow that's made even the boys always shudder at the dirt floor, littered as it always is with pill bugs, and at the spiderwebs stretched everywhere like sails.

The lamplight seems brighter as the sky darkens. Little Homer is the first to go to the davenport and sits right up against his mother. When Mae takes Little Homer on her lap, Ruby and Ellis go to sit on either side of her. Lavinia stops her work and they all look around the room, at the clock and the windows, without looking into each other's faces. The rain, which has been falling steadily all day, washes over the windows in sheets. The sky is black. There is a terrific crash of thunder, and they begin to hear sounds they have never heard before, and Mae says loudly, “Mother!”

When Lavinia stands, they all bolt. Mae shoves the candlesticks from the dining table into Ellis's hands and snatches the box of matches from the sideboard.

“Go, go!” she shouts at the children who run for the kitchen.

“I need an umbrella!” Ruby says. Mae pushes her toward the door, “You can have a towel later,” she shouts at her, “Go!”

They run huddled in a knot around to the side of the house, shielding their eyes from the rain, soaked when they reach the storm cellar. Mae yanks at the cellar doors, holding one open and Lavinia holding the other. The children go down first, then Lavinia, then Mae, who pushes back against the wind on the doors until she is all the way down and the doors slam shut behind her, and she drops the crossbar into place. Mae strikes a match and pinches hold of it tight to stop her trembling. “Let's see how wet those candles got,” she says.

“I held the wicks inside my hand, Mama,” Ellis says. He holds out both candles to her. “I guess I dropped the candlesticks.”

“Better the candlesticks than the candles. Good boy.” Mae takes one lit candle and lets Ellis keep the other. “Let's all sit down. Are there enough crates?”

Lavinia looks up at Mae from her seat on a crate, then down again. “I'm sorry, Mae. I'm sorry,” she says, shaking her head. “Lord, what if they hadn't been home sick?”

“We're all here now,” Mae exhales and tries to smile. She sits down and holds Lavinia's hand in her lap.

“Not Daddy,” says Ruby. “What about Daddy?”

Mae looks directly at Ruby. “You know that Daddy is downtown at the lumberyard.”

“We didn't open the windows,” Little Homer says.

“No,” Lavinia shakes her head.

The children are frozen, too frightened to move closer to one of the women. The sound they heard while still in the house has advanced, roaring its way above them. There is a crash against the storm door, and they all scream, ducking with their arms held over their heads. Ellis drops his candle, and in the weak light left from the candle Mae is still holding, she sees his terrified face. Ruby is crying. Lavinia has Little Homer's face pressed into the front of her dress as if she can shield him by blocking his sight. Mae reaches out her arms, and Ruby and Ellis come to her immediately. She blows out her candle and drops it so that she can hold both children tight against her. In the darkness, Lavinia cries, “Dear Lord! Oh, dear Lord!” Then the roaring moves on, like a train careering over their heads. The sound recedes, and eventually even the wind seems to subside. When there is no longer any sound except rain on the cellar doors, the children hold utterly still, waiting to see what will come next.