Falling to Earth (12 page)

“We are met in this solemn moment to commend these departed souls into the hands of Almighty God, our heavenly Father. In the presence of death, Christians have sure ground for hope and confidence and even for joy, because the Lord Jesus Christ, who shared our human life and death, was raised again triumphant and lives for evermore.”

Mae has heard these words before; when she buried her mother, and then her father. That they were some comfort then and no comfort now is no mystery. She cannot look away from her children. Ellis's almost-new trousers already looking too short. Ruby's hair so fair and sleek with combing. Little Homer, the very image of Ellis at that age. She is persuaded, although they are sober, that they all look as normal as can be. What can they possibly be thinking, anyway, she wonders. Do they even understand that the front porch is clear now because men came and took away the bodies that were laid out there and boxed them up? Mae's expression is fearful; her stomach is clenched, her breathing shallow. If she looks up, she'll see the coffins again, all the coffins in their rows.

Paul stands looking down at the ground. Mae sees the sleeves of his suit coat moving slightly as his clasped hands squeeze each other, gripping in time like a pulse. His hair is sleeked down, too, as much as it will allow. How she had scrubbed the children's necks and combed and combed their hair that morning, dipping the comb into water, parting and re-parting and combing again. But none of them had complained and none had ducked out from under her hand when they'd had enough and run away to play. They had all stood still and careful in their good clothes and watched her and Paul with their small mouths tight until it was time to walk to the cemetery.

Lavinia had come down the stairs with extra hankies that she pressed into Mae's hand and Paul's, looking quickly up at Paul with her hand on his lapel, then looking down again.

“You're sure you want to walk, Mother?” Paul had asked, and Lavinia had answered, “Yes, and anyway, the roads still aren't all passable. We don't know what we'll find.”

Mae can't figure Lavinia's expression. The trembling that overtook her in the first days after the storm has stopped and her face is finally calm, as if she understands something about this day that no one else does. She buried her husband at our last funeral, Mae thinks, I suppose she'd thought till now that hers would be the next. Little Homer, Mae's Homer, is standing by Paul, staring at the faces around him. Mae can't reach him to tap his shoulder and shake her head at him to make him stop. She knows what he's looking at: the faces of their neighbors, the parents of his friends, who stand there silent with wet faces.
But men don't cry, Mama,
she can hear him saying.
My daddy isn't crying.

Mae holds Ruby's shoulders tighter. She looks down at Ruby's head. She won't look up, she can't look up. If she does, then someone, someone's mother, will be looking back at her and at her three, whole children who are standing here with her. At her husband who can still put food in their mouths in the house he built that's still standing.

“And we give thanks for the miracle of the Graves family, dear Lord, who alone among us suffered no loss of any kind,” the minister is saying. Mae's breath catches at the mention of her name. The Lord giveth.

The very air, the fine spring air has become oppressive to Mae. She feels herself pressed in against from all sides, sure that everyone is watching her to see—to see what—if she comprehends? Her narrow escape, or was it wide? The duty now incumbent on her family, her great good fortune and the shame she should feel because of it. Mae feels a tightness in her chest that only grows and grows the more deeply she breathes to make it stop. She realizes that the tightness she feels is in her heart, that she can feel her own heart; not beating, but hurting.

Mae looks away from Ruby's head at the coffins now. She blinks fast and hard to keep from crying. She looks at the coffins and feels dread. All the new boards that Paul had cut after the town had laid out their dead. The pale boards that the Guardsmen had hammered urgently into coffins. The number of the dead so great that this is only the first of many burials to be held.

The cemetery has become a peculiar sort of wasteland. Nearly all of the trees are gone, the ground has been mostly cleared of downed branches, and only splintered tree stumps remain. The largest headstones, the ones belonging to the oldest graves, lie toppled, waiting to be reaffixed to their bases. And then there is the earth, all the mounds of earth gouged out of the ground and lying humped along the trenches. Mae's own people are buried here, on the other side of the cemetery. Homer, too, in Paul's family's plot. But today is not the day to visit the family plots. They'll come back another day to check on things, although Mae knows as well as the others that everything will likely be fine. The crocuses she planted there will have started to come up, green spears surging up from the bulbs, even as the new ground had had its maw forced open to receive the dead.
Thank God it's spring,
Mae has heard people saying,
Thank God the ground wasn't frozen.

There are National Guardsmen standing behind everyone else, near the road. They are likely the same ones who dug with the steam shovel the army sent in. The steam shovel is gone, at work now in the other cemetery across town, and the Guardsmen are standing in a solemn row, no less ominous because, for the moment, they have laid their shovels aside. They come forward when the time for the committal comes, and Paul, the other men, and the larger boys lift the coffins, one by one, and whenever possible, carry their own dead to the grave. Seeing Paul carrying a coffin brings Mae back out of herself, and she begins to hear the sounds of mourning building from the women around her.

“Thus says the Lord God to these bones,” the minister calls out. “Behold, I will put my breath into you, and you shall live. And I will lay sinews upon you, and cause flesh to come upon you, and cover you with skin, and put breath in you, and you shall live, and you shall know that I am the Lord.”

A smallish woman runs toward the nearest row of coffins, and lays across the smallest one, kneeling on the ground, seeming to embrace it. Mae doesn't realize that it's Alice at first, until Nash Duttweiler comes running to her, trying to pull her away. Mae realizes she hasn't seen either of them since the day of the storm. She'd been so grateful when Nash came, so relieved that he was alive to take Alice from her so that she could concentrate on willing Paul to emerge, whole, from the ruins. And then when Paul came running home, just as Nash had, and she'd realized that all of them, all six of them were alive, she'd stopped thinking about the Duttweilers. She hadn't given them another thought, not the rest of that evening as the bodies were laid out on their porch, not in the following days when she'd had a house full of people. Nash and Alice should have been the first of the neighbors to come to them for shelter, and Mae wonders now how she could have forgotten them so entirely.

“No!” Alice is shouting, throwing Nash's arms away. She staggers to her feet, holding the tiny coffin and screaming, “Where is my coffin! Where is my baby! I have no one to bury. I want to bury my baby!”

Mae moans and holds a hand over her mouth. It was hard to know which image from the storm horrified her most: the men and women killed because they had gone running to the school to retrieve their children, or the people found, some alive, lying in the streets with objects driven through their skulls, or Alice, right across the street, thrown across her own backyard by the cloud, rising, unharmed, to discover that the cloud had carried her baby away. Mae and Paul had heard the stories told and retold around the town, as if people had to hear themselves telling what had happened to them before they themselves could believe it.

When Alice finally releases the coffin, Nash passes it slowly, reverentially to a waiting man, as if he's handing him a sleeping child. He turns back to Alice and lays his hands on her shoulders. He lifts his face as if to look upward, but his eyes are closed.

“Heaven help them,” Lavinia says at Mae's side.

“Heaven help us,” Mae whispers.

Someone says Mae's name again, and she jumps. She turns and Sally Prosser is standing there. Her face is menacing; Mae sees both mirth and outrage there.

“Graves,” Sally says again. “I hadn't thought of it before now. Your name is Graves.”

Lavinia puts her arm around Mae's waist and says quietly, but fiercely, “A person can't help their own name.”

“You've no one to bury,” Sally says. “We've all seen you now. You needn't come again.”

T
here is the fizz of sparks that goes up each time a man flings new junk into the flames, a crack that precedes the soft thud of charred wood collapsing at the fire's base, then the scratch of a voice; a rawboned older man stops to speak with his arms braced straight on bent knees. “Someone should walk around town with a box of matches,” he says. “Just set light to whatever isn't whole, and spare us the trouble of hauling it off.” A younger man claps him on the shoulder rather than reply, and they turn again to throw debris onto the fire.

The men working the burn are weary. Sweat lines run gray through the grime on their faces and necks. They don't speak much because of the bandanas tied over their noses and mouths and because of the pointlessness of conversation. These are the uninjured men, men of every age who set to hauling with trucks, wagons, or wheelbarrows, loading up the crates and bushel baskets the children filled with whatever they could lift and driving it all out to the burn.

The men know that if they keep their minds on the job at hand, on feeding the fire with the junk dumped onto the dirt out of wheelbarrows and truck beds, on breaking up the largest pieces by stomping on them or splintering them painfully across their bent knees, they will think less about what the junk is. If they stand so close to the fire that they squint from the heat and the smoke, they're less likely to see clearly the faces of the women and children standing in a ring around them. This wad of scorched paper was never a book; throw it on the fire. That bit of white-painted wood was never a window frame; throw it on, too. That smashed ladder, that bit of crate. Break the feet off that table pedestal, leave the knob on that cabinet door and let the fire have them.

The women are heedful, watching for anything that could be spared. Was that bit of fabric a tablecloth? What was that flash of color at its end, embroidery? No, it's gone now, just look away. That broken rocker, whose place did that come from? Scrutinizing turns their faces sour; resentful eyes follow the arc of every scrap into the fire. They have all picked, bitter or bewildered, through the wreckage, their houses now nothing more than giant splinters. They have learned to walk on the ruins the way you walk on new, deep snow that can't support you. And slowly, slowly, they are becoming as hard as the men who can look at a ruined thing and say it is ruined without stopping first to say,
We had that thirty years.

The women force the men to rest occasionally, carrying water buckets among them and waiting insistently until each man has tipped his head back with the metal dipper to his mouth. The men stand with their hands on their hips, breathing in and blowing out hard, and wipe their faces on shirtsleeves or with bandanas kept clean for as long as possible in hip pockets. It's almost bearable, throwing all your neighbors' wreckage on the pyre rather than burning just your own. Makes it just a job that needs doing and not such a mournful thing.

With no provisional school to attend, the children are kept all day at the burn by parents still too stunned to let them out of their sight. The women hold the children back, upwind from the fire, but still the big boys, enthralled and skittish, dart away from their mothers to throw things at the flames. They know no precedent for this type of conflagration. Not the leaf burns that smolder each fall in their fathers' driveways, nor any bonfire they've ever seen before, not even the fires the storm birthed. They watch the adults to work out what to think, but are too young to make out anything from the stony faces around them. The children tug at the unfamiliar, ill-fitting clothes their mothers pulled hastily out of the piles at the relief center. They wriggle where they stand to test the women's hold on them, ready to dart out if they see anything small they can throw at the fire.

After a while, the children begin to see the truth of the men's movements, begin to see the hatred in their stooping, turning, and throwing. They decide that what the men hate is the fire and that hatred, not determination, is fueling their movements. When they understand this much, they also understand that it is hatred that makes the women grip their shoulders so and stare ahead, silent. This pacifies the children, because they think that this is all there is to hate, and that they can do as much and hate the fire, too. They cannot fathom that the men and women hate not the fire but the storm that necessitated it; the women, because the storm has taken their past from them and the men, because it has obliged them to begin again with nothing.

What the children cannot fathom, they don't contemplate for long. Like things that should have made people glad but didn't; when folks from towns and farms as much as fifty miles away drove into Marah in the first days after the storm, laps piled up high with clothing and blankets and baskets of food to leave behind, and grown men and women had to stop and wipe their eyes.

When the women sense the hatred in the children's wiry bodies, they loosen their hold a little and then a little more until the children pull away, drawn inexorably toward the fire. They pick up sticks and rocks to hurl at it and the big boys cautiously approach the men, wary at first of being warned off, but then daring to pick up pieces of junk to fling. One of the big boys yells, “Hah!” when the scrap of wood he tosses sends up sparks and then the other boys start yelling, too, throwing whatever they can lift, mocking the fire as much as feeding it. The girls dare not venture away from the women, but they smile furtively with their eyes, gratified and admiring, at the boys' daring. The boys dance and stomp and whoop and yell, their voices joining and rising with the sparks and smoke until one man finally bellows, “That's enough!” and chops the air with an angry hand.