Falling to Earth (7 page)

“I'll get up with you,” she says.

“No, don't. You can wait a little.”

“Wait for what? They'll hear you downstairs, and I'll have to get up anyway.”

“I'll be quiet.”

Mae shakes her head and gives him a rueful smile with her eyes. “No, you won't,” she says.

 

They're there when he opens the door. Lon, Clarence, Irene. Only Dennis is missing and in the shouts that follow Paul's crossing the threshold, someone manages to say that he went out on a train to Carbondale with his injured wife. Paul can do nothing but stand there while they clap him on the shoulder and beam at him, feeling relief run through him slowly, moving out from his core like warmth on a winter day when he's come back inside to a fire in the fireplace and knows he'll get warm and stay warm for the rest of the night. Paul sees the other people in the back of the room, smiling shyly at him.

“We slept here,” Clarence is saying. “Our places are all flatter than flat, so we all just came back here. There was the heater and plenty of floor space and the sink in back.”

Clarence's voice recedes as if he's walked into another room. Paul hasn't seen these people for a good while, and has rarely seen them here at the yard, but he's looking now from face to face and back again: Lon's wife, Clarence's wife and teenaged son, even Irene's mother. Clarence is still talking. He's normally taciturn, the one they rib because of his one-word replies. Now he's rattling on apologetically about something, twisting a piece of cloth in his hands.

Paul smiles at him, and everyone laughs when he says, “Took a cyclone to loosen your tongue.”

“We'll pay you back for the coal, or you can take it out of our pay—”

“I'll do no such thing.” Paul's eyes are stinging again, he hopes he can keep the shake out of his voice. “I wish there was room for you all at my place, but we're full up. This sure as hell isn't much, but I suppose four walls and a roof is better than flat. You did right, coming back.”

It's almost like seeing family after a long period apart. Paul can't imagine he'd have felt any differently if he'd come through the door to find his brother John waiting for him there with his wife, Dora, and their two boys. Maybe he didn't come back after the storm, he can't ever change that, but he can't see that they blame him for it, and the lumberyard he and John built was there for them to come back to. What would John say if he walked in here right now and saw the men they hired together still here. Irene, too, still at the first job she'd had coming out of secretarial school in Carbondale.

“I was just headed out, hoping to get some word about you,” Clarence says. “We didn't know what to think. Or more like we knew what we thought, and we were trying not to think it.”

Serious again, Paul is jolted back to the storm. Irene is looking at him like he's performed a miracle right out of the Bible.

“You were right outside,” she says, pointing toward the door. “I saw you there on the sidewalk, right outside and then you disappeared. ”

What must you all have seen since then, Paul thinks. He'd walked the long way down White Street all the way to Union to get to the lumberyard, right down the middle of the street, or the closest he could come consistently to the middle, having had to walk around and climb over debris the entire way. He had not been alone out in the streets this morning as he had been late last night, when there had only been the wreckage and the moonlight and a burnt smell hanging in the air for company. There were people out all along the streets, walking gingerly on the wreckage, searching in the daylight now for whatever they could save. Ragged things fluttered from the trees wherever there were still trees. There were the same kinds of clattering sounds that had woken Paul earlier, coming intermittently when someone threw aside a piece of wood. Paul even saw a woman sitting on a piano stool on top of a flattened house. He had imagined if he'd walked up and asked the woman, she would have told him,
Yes, the storm set this stool right here on top of my house. So I'm sitting on it.
The daylight had been unforgiving. There was no longer even the sense that it had all just happened; it seemed as though it had been this way for the longest time and that everything would stay this way for years.

Paul says, “I can hardly believe it myself, but that's what happened. I just took hold of that pole and somehow or other I managed to hang on and here I am,” wondering how many times he'll be telling this story again in the coming days, how many more incredulous faces he'll have to meet and convince. He sees the faces before him, rapt, while they try to picture him out there, belly to the sidewalk, riding out the cloud by just wrapping his arms around a pole, amazed that he'd been out there the whole time just feet away when they'd taken it as read that he'd been carried off in that first moment. He's beginning to see himself that it is all astounding, not just the telegraph pole and the lumberyard. They're still fixed on the image of him hanging onto the pole and haven't remembered he must also still have a house if he's said it's already full of people. How strange, Paul thinks, he's the only one of them standing here who hasn't lost a single thing.

Someone has contrived to make coffee on the heater and odd bits of food are shared around while they finish the job of clearing the floor of bedding. When Irene's mother, Mrs. Dower, finds the broom, Paul knows better than to stop her giving the floor a going-over. They all seem perfectly normal to him, aside from the timidity they're still trying to banish because he came in and found them standing among their bedrolls. Their homes are gone, and yet they seem pleased to be here and pleased to see Paul. Not one of them looks as tired as Paul feels, although they must certainly have spent yesterday in much the same manner he did. Paul finds that he feels timid himself, having interrupted their rough housekeeping when he walked through the door and turned it all back into a place of business. He finds he hasn't the words to ask what they did in the first moments after the storm or in the long hours that followed, because asking will take them back to those very moments when they didn't know, when they couldn't know yet who had survived.
Flatter than flat
, Clarence had said. You can't ask a man for details when those details will leave him standing in front of his ruined house again in his own mind, when he'll be forced, then, to say something about it and you will be forced to reply.

He wonders how long they can continue with this kind of chatter. How long they can smile at the fact that they're all still there, that there's hot coffee and that Irene's mother pulls a quick broom. None of them will be the one to break this mood, Paul is certain. The bell on the door will be the thing to do it, because when it rings, when the next person opens the door and comes in wanting something, that something will be wood for a coffin. Paul needs to ask Lon and Clarence both what they think, how they should go about it, but he can't force himself to ask them into the backroom with him to do it. They've sold lumber intended for coffins before, though never so many as they will need now, and never so many for children. But what he can't do for himself, Lon and Clarence are doing for him. He sees first Lon, then Clarence moving toward the backroom, slowly, with their hands in their pockets and their mouths gone into thin hard lines, because the reason for it is unpleasant. Clarence looks up at him before he goes through the doorway, waits for Paul to show that he will follow before he goes through himself. And even then, knowing that they are waiting for him, Paul enters the room not knowing how to begin to talk about the lumber they will need to measure and cut, over and over again, to sell for coffins, and the coffins that they will likely have to build themselves, to sell ready-made to undertakers and to new widows, and everything sold on credit because the banks were hit and no one can get at their money.

The little room is still dark; hardly any light can get through the muddied windows. It puts Paul in mind of waking in the blue air with Little Homer breathing deeply beside him in the bed.

“I dreamt that every last thing was gone,” he is mumbling nervously to Lon and Clarence. “My house was ruined and my family was gone.”

There had been varnished woodwork everywhere and the kind of carving he'd always wished he'd learned to do, carpets everywhere riding on long, gleaming floorboards, velvet curtains on tall windows. He'd heard his name then, someone calling his name from outside, and when he'd gone outside the house, the city he lived in was gone. The other houses around his were entirely gone. There was no sign that they had ever been there, nor were there people anywhere. Just pale, flat earth as far as he could see, parched and cracked by a hard wind. He'd turned then to escape it, to run back into his house and lock its door against the wasteland, but when he turned, the door was hanging crooked on its hinges, and the paint on the clapboards was faded and flaking. The curtains were torn and flapping out of jagged window glass. He'd known then that Mae and the children were no longer inside the house, that they had disappeared just as the people in the town had disappeared to a place he would never find. The sound of a shutter banging on the house had been the last thing he heard before he woke.

He sees them standing there and sees a new expression overtaking their faces as they look at him. He hears his own voice, and although he has already begun to regret it, he continues. “I had nothing.” He knows he should have found a way for them to speak first and tell him what they saw, and though he knows it clearly, as clearly as he still sees himself standing in the wasteland in his dream, as if he is the only one among them who could have dreamt it, he says again, “I had nothing.”

E
ach night after the storm, the men come out to wander the streets, surveying the damage as if the ruined houses will tell them something new. They set out determined, intending to take in what they will see as nothing more than an implausible exhibition dreamed up for a World's Fair. They vow to go further afield this time, to gain a broader view of the devastation in order to place their own losses in better perspective. Each man hopes the present quietness will allow him to view his neighbor's tragedy as if he is a tourist, but the horror embedded in each inconceivable sight shrinks them into shuffling old men.

Those men among them who are deputized bear arms: rifles and pistols removed from their own wrecked homes before looters could find them. Even without the firearms, the deputies would be recognizable by their gait, the particular stride conferred by their jurisdiction. Unlike the other men, they are imperturbable, having been given a purpose, and they have the luxury of empathy, their dignity restored by their office.

The deputies learn to read the faces of the men they meet and tailor their questions according to what they see there. If a man has an angry look, they'll ask,
You had trouble with looters?
because anger is a concrete thing and means the man has not stopped fighting. If a man has a bewildered look, they are mindful of his dignity and of what he has likely lost. They'll venture to touch a man like this, to lay a hand on his shoulder and say,
We'll dig out, you know
. And if a man's face is still convulsed with grief, they are as tender with him as if he were a child.
You know they're giving out tents downtown, don't you? And camp beds and cookstoves, milk and bread?
If the man nods, they'll ask,
How many beds you need?
as a way of inquiring how many of his family were taken by the storm.

Until the looting started, no one thought of needing deputies. The first cases defied belief in most of the people who heard of them, and in their disbelief they repeated the stories until they began to take the shape of storm lore.

Taking the rings off corpses, I heard. Going along from porch to porch where the bodies were laid out and yanking the rings right off their fingers.

I heard there was a stranger coming through and cutting off fingers to get the rings. Heard he got himself shot.

The men wander the streets each night, their own at first and then the surrounding blocks. They marvel at the houses pushed over sideways, the houses without roofs, the holes in the ground that are just the wound of a basement, ripped open and full of junk. Here, concrete steps and a metal railing leading nowhere; there, someone's yard with the grass entirely gone and an old tree torn clean in two. Sometimes they see folks with cameras, taking pictures of kids in front of ruined houses.

Just stand there a minute. No, you can't go climbing up, it's just a pile of sticks, it's not safe.

At first it's just town folks, taking pictures of their own places to send to relatives. The men understand that this is born of the need to witness and record the devastation. Pictures like these will be sent in letters to relatives in other states; they will be put into albums to show to grandchildren in years to come. But now it's folks from out of town coming in their clean clothes and their polished cars, gawking and taking snapshots of their children like they're standing at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The men walk past, shaking their heads, and some of them mutter their dissent loud enough to be heard.
We ain't a sideshow, you know.

A man who has been in a stupor since the storm will see a family of tourists perched on a ruin, children posing for their father's camera, and his breathing will fall into shallow stabs, and his hands will shape themselves into loose fists as he glowers his defiance at the father. He will mutter something and clench his jaw, and then mutter it louder until he is shouting
You got no right!
and other men passing will take his arms and pull him away with them, speaking to him in the low, confidential tones of a parent calming an angry child.

When it falls dark each night, the men gather around fires they light in the middle of the streets from the downed branches and debris all around them. News can be had here, stories exchanged, and a man can warm himself while talking to his neighbors. A man deep in mourning is welcome the same as a man who is only angry. Here the grieving man is not expected to meet his neighbors' eyes. He can bring his face out of the shadows into the orange-yellow light knowing that he'll be allowed to stare into the fire alongside the others and unburden himself of his sorrow or not, as he chooses. It may be that some of the other men were there when the grieving man failed to find his children alive. It may be that the other men's hands are also torn from ripping at the beams and crumbled bricks of the school, and dragging out the bodies of the children.