Falling to Earth (17 page)

M
agnolia blossoms open into pink-veined cups on ivory saucers. Pale green leaves jut on rain-blackened branches. A torn oak stump weeps its sap.

The smell of freshly cut lumber hangs in the air; sweeter than the few apple blossoms in the ruined orchards, though not so sweet as to crowd out the remembered stench of corpses. The wreckage is gone, hauled off and burned. Trains roll unimpeded in and out of town. Power lines and telegraph lines stretch again between their poles. Convalescents begin to return, aghast at the razed town.
It's gone, all gone. They tried to tell me
.

Contractors armed with their ready-drawn blueprints and assurances descend upon the town to nose out men expecting insurance settlements or Red Cross money.
A bigger, better house, that's what you can have. What do you need time to think for? You want to be under a solid roof again, don't you? A man who waits, well, he might not have a finished home before the cold sets in.

Footings are poured, foundations laid. Resentment creeps in. A man perceives that he has received less somehow than others and allows himself a furtive bitterness. He is silent at first because he knows his bitterness is a shameful thing, but once he realizes that his rancor makes him feel more alive, once he accepts it, he must begin to feed it. He broadcasts his bitterness in open conversation hoping to find companionship, hoping to foster that same feeling in his neighbors.

Did you hear about Schedler? All he had was a shack, just that three-room shack. I'll be damned if the Red Cross isn't giving him a five-room house.

Is that right?

Won't cost him a penny. Makes a body wish they never had insurance in the first place.

A man makes himself important, clothed in false dignity, by passing judgment on those made suddenly more fortunate than himself. He'll persuade himself that he is performing a kind of service this way, alerting his neighbors to the unevenness of it all, and imagine himself justified when he begins to hear similar things in return.

I heard there was a couple brothers got themselves a new truck. Said they needed a truck for their business and that committee gave 'em a truck, free and clear.

Another man consoles himself with sneering, pointing out foolhardiness where he sees it as a salve to his imagined wounds.

Jess Meagher up and left town, damn harebrained fool. Figured he'd take his relief money and start somewhere fresh. Cleared his lot and hammered a “For Sale” sign into the ground. Who in all creation he thinks is gonna buy that lot is beyond me.

Resentful men, brooding men. Dissatisfied and restless because everything has been spoiled, persuaded they are seething because those who had little now have more.

Sure is a lot of money floating around. Wish some of it would land on me. I got insurance money coming on the house, but nothing on my furniture. What am I gonna do with a brand new house and not a stick of furniture to put in it? Got to wonder why I always worked so hard. Seems like a man's better off these days without a job.

A woman will feel a bottomless rage and think herself powerless to escape it. Terrified of her anger and unable to see that it is only fear, she will imagine a purpose in it and allow herself to spoil for a fight.
You go right back down there and tell them,
she'll say to her already defeated husband
. Tell them the insurance isn't enough.
Baffled, bitter, and foundering, the men and women sink into a shriveling kind of loneliness. They begin to believe that they have failed somehow. They watch the contractors and their crews at work, they see the good foundations laid over the scars of their old houses and the wood frames beginning to rise out of them and can think only of the storm. How long before they can rest easy again? How long before a house can be a strong thing of bricks and mortar and not a stack of cards? How long before they're done being angry?

A tornado is a spasm in a thundercloud, a thing of chance arising out of nature. It might touch down, and it might not. A tornado is a ravenous thing, untroubled by the distinction in tearing one man apart and gently setting another down a little distance away. It is resolute and makes its unheeding progress until, bloated and replete, it dissipates. A tornado is a dead thing and cannot acknowledge blame. If a tornado smashes your house or takes your child, it does no good to blame it. You can even rail against God, and it will be no use. The tornado is gone, used up. You can't throw it into reverse and resurrect your house and your child by laying blame. And even after you've yanked up another house in the place the old one stood and planted flowers in the dirt where you laid your child, your fury remains as well your desire to lay blame.

 

Funny we got to give our money to Graves. Built with his lumber first time around.

No one else to give it to. 'Sides, there wasn't much left standing after the storm but stuff he'd built. I guess I'll buy me some of that luck.

Can't buy luck.

Who says? Anyway, he's the only game in town.

You can say that again. Goddamn! How lucky can one man get. He's still got everything he started out the year with, and now he's getting more.

More what?

Money, our money.

Red Cross money, you mean.

Doesn't matter. That lumberyard is a land-office business now.

So ask the man for a job.

A job? Hell, I got a job!

Well, he's got lumber and we need it. Can't hardly begrudge
a man making an honest living.

Profiteering's more like it.

Guess he is making out best of everybody.

Almost like he struck a deal with someone.

What do you mean, downstairs? Aw, come on, you don't mean that. Anyway, any man strikes a deal like that's supposed to come out with something better than just his same old lumberyard.

All right then, upstairs. ‘Sweet Jesus, send me a way to make more money, 'cause my house, my business, and my pretty wife just ain't enough!'

Careful, now. Somebody might think you mean that.

I don't give a good God damn. I'm worn out. I'm just plain worn out by the whole thing.

M
idmorning and the breeze is blowing hot. The children are racing up and down along the clothesline, slapping at each other's shadows through the white sheets, squealing when the shadow of a hand almost touches them and then slapping back at the sheet to push it away. Mae swats at the seat of Ellis's pants and tells him, “Scoot,” and pulls off the clothespins holding the first sheet to the line. The children obey and begin to chase each other in a circle around the second sheet.

“Are you taking them all down, Mama?”

“No, we'll leave you one for now,” Mae says. She drops the clothes pins into their bag and looks across the street to see if the woman is still there. Catty-corner from the house, standing there on the corner like she's waiting for something to happen, a woman is staring at them. Whether she's staring at the house or at Mae or at all of them is impossible to say, but she is staring. She's not holding anything like a handbag or even a paper sack, she's just a statue in a summer hat with her arms hanging at her sides. Mae squints back at the woman, standing stock-still herself now with her arms raised, ready to take down the end of the next sheet. Lavinia unpins her end and gathers the sheet in folds, walking toward Mae.

“Whatever are you looking at?” Lavinia says, squinting quickly in the direction Mae's eyes are fixed.

“Who is that?” Mae says. “Over there, across the street.”

“I don't know. I can't see a thing from here,” says Lavinia. She moves Mae's hand and pulls the other clothespin off the line. “We can't stand here staring all day,” she says, turning. “Here, take this end, will you?”

“I don't see why not. She's stared long enough at us.”

“Well, you look, then. My glasses are inside.”

Mae feels the sheet stretch out as Lavinia walks backward away from her and then feels it slacken again as Lavinia walks toward her to make the first fold. Lavinia has positioned herself in such a way that Mae can look past her at the woman without appearing to be staring. Whoever this woman is, she isn't a gawker like the others. Mae's seen enough of them the last few months to know by the quick little leap in her gut that she's being watched and why. When it's people walking past the front of the house and you catch them slowing out of the corner of your eye, you simply turn away from the window and go deeper into the house, where you can't be seen while they make their survey of your good fortune. You find work to do in another room; you leave your straightening or your dusting and you go into the kitchen and wipe the table again with the wrung-out cloth, and when you see another passerby coming, because the house is on the corner and they come at you from behind, too, you go upstairs where no one can see you unless you stand at one of the windows and look right back at them.

But this isn't gawking. Gawkers only slow down some and point before they move on. This woman is looking hard, like she's looking for something, like if she just stares hard enough Mae will go inside and get whatever it is and give it back. She knows what Paul would do, but can't do that herself. Can't walk across the street with a real smile on her face and ask neighborly questions until the woman goes away appeased, thinking it was her own idea to leave. I'd just drop this sheet, Mae thinks. Send the others inside and stand here like a mirror to show her how she looks, no business being there but planted there anyway. Shame her into going away. But then Lavinia or one of the children would let something slip at dinner and next thing Paul would be telling her to remember how different a thing can look if you stand next to a person and look at it with them. Mae could speak Paul's words for him now.
Don't let her be a stranger hiding under a hat.
But Paul's eagerness to see things as others see them does not always extend to Mae. He'd tell her all day long to cross that street without stopping first to imagine himself making that walk inside her skin, without stopping to understand that what Mae wants is not to know who the woman is or what happened to her in the storm that's making her stand there in particular, but only that she wants the woman to go away, to never have been there in the first place. Finding out who means taking on
why
and
what
, and Mae has no room for any of it. She can already see the only thing worth knowing without having to pretend to be Paul, and that is that this woman isn't really staring at the house or even at any of them but at some imagined or remembered thing she's laid on top of them.

Mae and Lavinia are folding in movements so practiced Mae is only barely aware of what she is doing. They could fold a double sheet together in total darkness, moving all the while away from and toward each other as if they were dancing. Paul said as much once, that they looked like they were dancing, but that had been inside the house last winter when they'd been folding bed linens dried on the lines in the basement. Lavinia had begun to hum a waltz then and Mae had risen up on the balls of her feet and begun to dance as she and Lavinia had moved back toward each other holding up the corners of the sheet they'd just started to fold. They had sung aloud together and danced and they'd waltzed that sheet into a tight square. It was only last winter, but it might as well have been a hundred years ago, for all that it was possible now. Neither of them would do that outside for all the neighborhood to see, but then neither would it occur to either of them these days to hum that waltz, if only to make the other smile.

“It's just Mittie Hoyt, isn't it?” Lavinia asks and puts the folded sheet in the basket.

“It's not. I might understand if it were Mittie standing there on her own property, but that's not her.”

The children are still racing and dodging each other, running in circles around the last sheet that's hanging half off the line now, trailing in the grass.

“Whoever she is, she might be staring because of the noise as much as anything else,” Lavinia says. “There aren't any other children outside anywhere.”

Mae shakes her head, biting her lip and frowning, as much provoked by Paul's voice in her head telling her what to do as by the woman's staring.

“She was there before we all came outside,” Mae says, turning on her heel. “She's been just standing there the whole time.” She yanks at the last sheet until it comes free of the line and the clothes pins fly into the grass. She balls up the sheet, stuffs it into the clothes basket, and snaps at the children, “Everybody inside now!”

“Land's sake, control yourself!” Lavinia says, but Mae is only listening for the sound of their feet in the grass, following her inside.

 

More and more, it's easier not to leave the house. Easier to keep the children inside and tell them it's too hot out, that they'll boil their brains if they play in the yard. Do the baking in the early morning—pies, bread, and cookies—when the windows and doors are still standing open to let in the last of the night air. Close up the house well before noon each day to keep the air inside cool. Say, “Nonsense,” when someone complains things are getting closed up earlier in the day than they used to last summer, earlier than the day before. Doors shut tight, curtains drawn, and blinds pulled down, the only light that gets in downstairs comes through the lace curtains on the windows looking on to the porch. Lavinia lets her, since she relishes people looking in as little as Mae and hasn't yet understood that when Mae pulls down each shade she's behaving no differently than a frightened turtle winching its legs and head inside its shell.