The McKinney's had left with smiles and handshakes, calling their good-byes as he and Mae had stood on the steps and watched them go up the middle of the street toward town, their bedrolls tied and carried under their arms. The house had seemed cavernous to him when he'd turned to go inside, and judging from the way Mae had stopped to look around the living room, rubbing her palms on her apron as if to dry them, she had felt it, too. Strange to think that a house with three adults and three children still in it could seem this empty. Of course it wasn't just that the bedrolls had been removed one by one as people left to take up residence in one of the tent cities springing up on the edges of town; the porch, relieved now of its corpses, was empty, too.
Paul gets up from the kitchen table and goes into the broom closet, looking for a scrub brush and a pail.
“I'm going to scrub the porch is all,” he says to Mae who hears him rummaging and comes in. “Nothing else yet. I think we should still wait a while longer to finish clearing the yard.”
Mae nods, silent, with her hands in her apron pockets.
“About the yard,” he says. “I don't think you should plan on planting much this summer. Not flowers, anyway. Just tomatoes and such in the vegetable patch.”
He's been fearful of saying this, knowing how it will sadden her. When he thinks of summer, he thinks first of Mae and her hands full of flowers. He'd been sincerely puzzled when Ruby had been born and Mae hadn't wanted to name her something like Rose or Violet. He'd even teased her a little about it. Then there are the floral fabrics she favors for her dresses and aprons. Even her hair, bobbed and wavy, reminds him of flowering vines and the tendrils on young growing things. It will cost her something, he realizes, to spend a summer without her flowers.
“There are flowers starting to come up now, all around the house. Do you want me to pull the bulbs?”
Paul shakes his head. “Maybe you can just cut them to have in vases inside once they're up.”
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Paul reasons that he and Mae are thinking alike, that it will be heaven knows how long before either of them can look at the porch without remembering the row of bodies, draped in white bedsheets. She'd been the first to say that the porch swing shouldn't go up this year, and that she didn't know when she'd be able to enjoy being out on the porch again. For Paul's part, he couldn't imagine being seen publicly to be enjoying life too soon, not tending ornamental flowers and certainly not sitting in a porch swing for every passerby to see. Same with the house and the yard, at that rate. If he'd swept the porch hard with the old broom from the garage and if he was scrubbing every inch of it now, it was only so he could stand to walk on it again, not because it was time to set things to rights.
The neighborhood is quiet, not peaceful like it's always been, but empty. No children's voices to be heard, no cars rolling over the cobbles in the streets. If there is a din to be heard, it's in the tent cities now, he supposes, although things might be somber there, too, what with waiting for the burials to begin. He'd like to go out there and have a look around one of the tent cities and see how folks are fixed. Lon and Clarence are living in those tents with their families, and Irene and her mother. Russ Meeker, too. He could probably walk over there with them after work one day soon and have a look without being too conspicuous. Just see them home, have a laugh at their all being down-the-row neighbors now, and leave. Then again, maybe not. There'd be others there he'd know, folks he'd have to greet and explain himself to and convince somehow that he wasn't there touring like the gawkers.
Paul wonders what Mae ever did with the bedsheets she used to cover the bodies out here on the porch those first few nights before the Guardsmen took them away. He doesn't suppose they'll find their way back onto any of the beds. Not any time soon. Would boiling be enough to satisfy her, he wonders? There'd be no way of knowing until you were standing there with the sheet in your hand, dry, ironed, and folded, about to snap it out over a mattress. It might be an idea to confuse things, to wash those sheets again with others from the linen closet so you couldn't know for sure which was which. It might also be an idea just to burn them. Paul drops his brush in the pail and gets up to look over the porch rail at the debris alongside the house.
He has less and less excuse now for putting off clearing the yard. Once the electricity was on again at the lumberyard, finishing the cutting of lumber for all the coffins had been quick work. They were cutting government lumber by then, sent in in boxcars, and the National Guard had simply requisitioned the use of the lumberyard as a place to build the coffins and sent Paul and his men home. With nothing to do now until those boxes are in the ground, with having to wait for shipments of lumber to replenish his own stock, and with there being no takers for the help he has to offer, he doesn't know how he can wait any longer to begin work at home, cleaning up the place.
This is the moment he has been dreading, the moment he's been delaying, hoping others on his street would spare him by beginning first. It had worked out all right at the lumberyard where he'd made Irene and the others wait until there was cleaning underway next door at the Liberty before they got started. Even then, he'd prevented them from doing too good a job. Paul saw how they were itching to clean the place; having lost everything of their own, they were that much keener to see the lumberyard restored to its old self. He'd had to say it out loud finally and explain to them all that the storm had left him walking a high wire of sorts, and that for the time being, and no matter what they were doing next door at the Liberty, his having an overly clean storefront amounted to preening. And now, because he is not needed at the lumberyard, and because everyone knows he has nothing else to occupy him at home but the yard, he will be seen as calculating if he waits. Paul empties his pail, throwing the last of his wash water out over the brown grass in the yard in a thin gray curl and says, “Damned if I do, damned if I don't.”
Mae is helping the children put on their coats in the kitchen when he goes in to get a stack of old newspapers and the matches.
“Your mother needs a rest,” Mae says. “I thought I'd take the children with me down to the relief tent today.”
“Why don't you leave Ellis with me. He can help me burn some of the junk in the yard.”
Ruby and Homer protest immediately at the unfairness of being singled out for the dull walk to town, and Mae shushes them just as quickly.
“You two can ride in the wagon all the way downtown,” she says.
“We don't both fit!” cries Ruby.
“You will if you sit sideways,” Mae says. “Now quit your complaining, or you can both walk there and back.”
Paul follows them out the back door to the garage. There is debris all around the house. He and Ellis would only make visible progress if they worked into the night, but he supposes they have no choice but to make a start. Mae sits Ruby and Homer in the wagon facing opposite directions with their legs dangling over the side and pulls them down the driveway after her and into the street.
Paul waves them off. “Help your mama get the food,” he calls. “Then you can help me outside when you get home.”
He stands there with Ellis watching them go and knows that Ellis is waiting for him to say what they need to do to start the fire. Paul tells himself that the way the yard wants clearing is not unlike the way the porch had wanted scrubbing, and that maybe all that will happen as a result is that others will start on their own property once they've seen a fire in his driveway. Then his eyes close and he hears himself exhale just like Mae and he hears a voice saying,
Nothing to rebuild, so he prettied up his yard.
They start with the downed branches and twigs lying everywhere and Ellis seems already to know how to stack the pieces, and in which order. “That's right, that's right,” says Paul, watching the boy. Once they've got the fire going in the same spot where Paul burns fallen leaves every autumn, each of them takes a bushel basket to gather more debris from the yard.
“Dump it over to the side there when your basket is full,” Paul says, pointing away from the fire toward the top of the driveway. “We'll let the fire burn down a while before we throw anything else big on.” When there's enough debris gathered to keep the fire going a good long while, they stand together and watch the fire, Ellis holding a garden rake and Paul, a shovel. “Anything rolls out of the fire, you just push it back with the rake, okay?” Ellis nods. “Anything big rolls out, we'll scoop it up like we're holding giant spoons and dump it right back on.”
“What'll we do with the stuff that won't burn, Daddy?” Ellis asks. Paul looks at the boy and sees that he's trying to keep an impassive expression on his face, pretending that neither the question nor its answer are of any particular importance when he clearly started thinking about it long before he'd asked.
“Metal and stuff like that?” Paul asks.
“Yeah. Metal and stuff.”
Paul looks away from Ellis and back at the fire to keep himself from grinning. The boy is so serious, so grave with his hands on the shaft of the rake like he's holding a ceremonial object.
“Well, now . . . ” Paul says, furrowing his brow to let Ellis know he is thinking. “What do you figure we oughta do with it?” he asks.
“We could make a pile of it. Keep it separate.”
Paul nods. “That way we could drive it all out to the dump, later.”
“Yes, Daddy,” Ellis says.
“Then that's just what we'll do.”
“Could I throw one metal thing on the fire, Daddy? Just to see what would happen?”
Paul allows himself a smile. Ellis hasn't entirely lost his serious expression, but he is beginning to look more like a seven-year-old again. “Go get yourself a good one,” he says.
“Started clearing things up, have you?” a woman's voice calls once Ellis has run off. Paul looks up to see Virginia Eberhardt looking at him from her porch next door.
“Thought we might as well get started,” Paul says, walking away from the fire to the hedge that divides the Eberhardt's yard from theirs. Virginia is still in her bathrobe. Paul looks toward the fire; Ellis is back, crouching there and peering in at whatever object he has found to throw in it. Virginia has exactly the same cleaning job ahead of her, washing mud off her house and clearing her yard of debris, but newly widowed and childless as she is, Paul has no idea who can help her. He realizes his error then and feels his stomach drop. If he had been killed downtown in the storm instead of Henry Eberhardt, Henry would have been cleaning up in Mae's yard before he touched his own. It's too late now, the first fire was lit in his own driveway, not Virginia's. If he makes her the offer, it will be an afterthought, born out of guilt and not selfless duty to his neighbor.
“Might as well,” Virginia says. “It's quite a job, and I don't suppose you have much else to do.”
“Ellis wanted to, you see,” Paul hears himself saying. “He built the fire almost by himself.” Paul's eyes dart over to Ellis and then back to Virginia.
“Did he, now? Well, I'll be.”
It's over almost as soon as it's started, ending with Virginia drifting back inside her house. Paul stands there by the hedge, unnerved by his error and by the fact that the very comment he'd feared had come, and come immediately. There is a small, cold feeling growing in his gut that feels like fear. He knows the feeling; he felt it once before, the time he'd wandered away from the farm as a child. He had been about five, the same age Little Homer is now. All he'd meant to do was walk for a while on the county road, then turn and come back again, just long enough to see if it felt different to do it alone than it had the times he had done it with Johnny. He'd walked a long ways and, when he'd turned and could no longer see the farm buildings but only the towering corn on either side of the road, he had believed himself to be lost. He'd stood there not knowing what to do, not thinking clearly enough to realize that he'd never even turned off the county road, feeling that new feeling in his belly when he'd heard his name called and seen his mother hurrying along the road toward him. He'd remembered that moment since, and the way that cold feeling began to dissolve the moment he'd seen her.
They'd gone out searching for him when they'd realized he was gone, his father and mother setting out in opposite directions, praying that he had stayed on the road and not strayed into the corn. Once they were all home again, his parents were serious but hardly scolded him at all, which had the inadvertent effect of frightening him more than if they'd simply punished him. They had agreed not to let on what a scare he'd given them and had also understood that they couldn't simply forbid a curious boy to go off wandering alone again. They'd told him instead to stop more often when he was alone, to look up and make certain he knew where he was before he went any further. Paul had taken them literally out of remorse as a child and had thereafter kept faithful track of his whereabouts, and by the time he'd reached adulthood, the incident had turned to metaphor; an illustration that he could overcome indecision or uncertainty by turning, figuratively now, to see where he stood in relation to where he had been.
Now it seems that his parent's advice belonged only to the time before the storm, before the roads around him were scoured off the map. If he feels uncertain now, it's because he is lost, as lost as any other person in town, and no simple act of turning around, literal or figurative, will right him. He sees it every day, in every face he meets. Virginia, widowed now and dressing in her bathrobe. His own mother who needs to rest mid-morning on a weekday. Mae going silent and exhaling all the time. Russ Meeker, standing in front of Paul at the lumberyard and shaking so because of Gertie's coffin.