Falling to Earth (15 page)

“Did you tell them there'll be more?” Mae asks in a low voice.

“No, I kept to the ones we know for sure.”

Paul turns and holds out a hand to Mae. “Come with me,” he says and leads her into their bedroom. Mae sits in the rocking chair by the window, and Paul sits on the edge of the bed, facing Mae and her mouth that's gone into a straight line and her hands that are ready to turn into fists.

“You know that we went to the World's Fair when I was twelve and Johnny was fourteen,” he hears himself saying. “Mother and Dad had left Arthur Coffman to run the farm for a couple of days so we could go to St. Louis, and on the morning of our second day, when we were walking to the fair from our hotel, I saw an old man sitting on a city bench on a busy sidewalk, tearing at a piece of cooked chicken with his bare hands and stuffing his mouth with the meat.

“I suppose I'd seen beggars before that, but he wasn't a beggar. He wasn't a hobo, either; he was just an ancient, broken man who'd found a sunny spot on a busy sidewalk to eat his breakfast. I stopped cold in my tracks when I saw him. I don't think I could have moved or stopped staring if I'd tried. Not even if he'd looked up and stared back at me. I could see the grease on his fingers and the black around his nails, even from a distance. He had on a sour old suit that was this side of going to rags, and he sat there in plain sight of every passerby, watching those bones come clear as he tore away the meat.

“Mother and Dad got half a block away before they realized I wasn't with them, and when they turned back and found me there, they tried to comfort me. They thought I was frozen there in shock or pity. Dad laid a coin on the bench next to the man and mumbled something to him, and I remember Mother shaking her head and putting her arm around me to lead me away. They mistook me completely, and I was too young to put words to what I was feeling, so I didn't say anything. Years later, I understood that what I had felt that day was admiration, even envy, because that man had been so badly broken and had still decided that there was no need for shame, no need to hide himself—his real self—from anyone at all.

“Dad spent a whole quarter on a box of fairy floss that day at the fair, and we four stood there, pinching off wads of the stuff and holding it up so it trailed in the breeze. I remember the others were laughing and talking about what they still wanted to see before we left to go home, but I was stuck again, standing there staring at a pinch of spun sugar because it reminded me of that man and the way the breeze had lifted up his hair and floated it around his head.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“To tell you that I decided that day that I would never hide. I would never hide, no matter what happened to me when I was a man.”

Mae's eyes close in a grimace and she shakes her head. “I don't understand you, Paul.”

“To ask you not to hide.”

“Just say it.”

“They found Bess.”

Mae's skin blazes red and then white in the space of an instant, and when she smothers her expression, even as it's taking shape on her face, Paul knows that this is what he will see from now on—this vanishing of emotion, a magician turning solid things to air.

“The hospital in Carbondale finally sent a list of people who got sent there on the first trains out after the storm. She was buried there last Sunday. They sent Stuart's coffin out on a train so they could be buried together, husband and wife.”

Mae still won't look at him. Her breathing has gone quick and shallow. Paul feels reckless, continuing to speak words he knows Mae is struggling not to hear. He says, “Stuart died first. They pieced enough together to fill a coffin. They did their best.”

He's on his knees in front of her, holding her fists in his hands. He feels as if all the heat and air have gone out of the room and that Mae is no more present than her image would be if he were looking at it projected up on a movie screen. He would shake her and shout that she cannot hide, that this is no way to be. He would say that he carries an image like a photograph of Bess as a child in his head, put there by the stories Mae has told him. That he sees her standing in the school yard in a sailor dress with her hair twisted into braids, smiling and crooking a finger at Mae, inviting her to play when the others thought Mae too quiet, too strange. He could say that he sees this as clearly as if it happened to him, that he has always been grateful to Bess, grateful for Bess. Paul would insist that Mae show herself to him, and he would take her face in his hands and tell her that exactly nothing will happen if she cries or even if she screams, but it's already too late and instead he says, “They say she died that first night,” before he goes back into the hall and closes the door behind him.

A
baseball cracks hard against wood, and someone whoops in answer. Faces turn up to follow the ball's flight, eyes screw up tight against the white spring sun. The ball is lost for a moment in the bright sky, and then a startled girl cries,
I got it! I got it!
Cheers and hollers and,
That's three!
The girl is swung up high by a Guardsman yelling
Atta girl!
and the teams change sides.

No one in the tent city can ignore the joyful din. Some, sitting on camp beds inside their tents or on kitchen chairs set out in the grass, purse their lips in irritation. Too much noise, they think.
Children should be schooled in the middle of the day, not let to swat at balls.
Others, who sit on blankets on the ground, watch the game with cautious smiles, grateful that the Guardsmen can abandon themselves, childlike, to the game.

The ruined town refashions itself in the tent cities. The rows of tents mimic the town's streets and makeshift signs appear at crossings: Illinois Avenue, 5th and Poplar, Hattie's Way. Paths wear into the grass. By day, washing strung out on ropes between the tents lifts and settles in the breeze. Women fetch water in pairs, carrying the sloshing washtubs between them. A man offers coffee, boiled fresh in an enameled pot, to his neighbors. In the afternoons, children clutching jam sandwiches shout promises to stay clean and dart away to the fields and the riverbanks to search for storm-borne treasures. And in the evenings, identical woodstoves in each tent send up identical curls of smoke, and people make a haphazard supper from the food they have been given in the day's relief boxes. Those who have kitchen chairs set them in the grass outside their tents to sit and watch the twilight a while before lighting their lanterns. Girls hoping to catch sight of a particular boy promenade arm in arm along the rows.

If the evening is fine, the men build a bonfire in the field beyond the tents and settle on crates and chairs in a ring around the fire to work out what will happen next.

Claims adjusters be coming through soon.

That's all right for them as had insurance.

Red Cross is coming, too.

Coming? They're already here!

No, I mean new ones coming with money. I heard they're gonna give out money to rebuild.

Rebuild? Huh.

Yeah, rebuild! You planning on staying in that tent forever? I say rebuild quick before another tornado gets us in these tents.

And if the next tornado gets us in our new houses, we're right back here in these tents.

Another one like that comes through, we're lucky if we end up back in these tents.

Maybe I don't want to rebuild here. Red Cross gonna give me money to go somewhere else?

Where the hell else would you go but here?

Someplace. I dunno.

You wait. You'll see. Any time now, the whole town'll be crawling with claims adjusters and insurance men and contractors just begging you to let them put up a new house for you.

Place'll be hoppin' then.

Hoppin', sure. It won't ever be what it was.

They kick dirt over the dwindling fire and go early to their beds. The dawn comes quicker here, with nothing but canvas walls to shut out the birdsong. A widowed man lies on his cot, still dumbfounded that he is sleeping alone. A woman chafes her hands against her blanket to stop them remembering the warm feel of a child's head. In the morning, the children will be the first out of the tents, running to the latrines and then among the tents to pluck at the guy ropes and snap them free of the night's accumulated dew. Women will linger to look at the dawn before calling the children to their breakfasts of bread and cold potatoes. Faces will be washed, necks scrubbed, nails scraped clean with paring knives. Wheelbarrows and wagons will be taken again into town to collect food staples and gather firewood from the wreckage of the houses. The children will set off into the fields and forget the day's new promises to stay clean. Smoke will issue again from the chimneys, plates will be wiped after the evening meal, and lanterns will be lit one by one along the rows of tents.

The men and women will settle again on their crates and chairs around the evening's bonfire. They will be unable to stare impassively at the fire, made as it is of their own broken clapboards and chair spindles and other junk that hisses and pops as it crumbles. Their mouths will tighten and resentment will steal over their tired faces. The children, seeing the adults' faces, will find themselves compelled to goad them, to test their mood and see if it will spill over on to them. A small boy will leap out behind a man seated on a crate, roar a lion's roar, and dart back to safety among the other children. When the next boy jumps out with a roar, the man will turn quickly and catch him by the shirttail. He'll pull the boy toward himself to thrill the children who wait wide-eyed for the walloping, then he'll bare his own teeth, growl, and make a lunge for them, sending them gleeful and shrieking back toward the tents.

There will be soft laughter around the fire and then a woman's sigh.
Will you look at that,
she'll say looking toward the glowing rows of tents, incandescent with light like strings of Chinese lanterns.
If that isn't a pretty sight.

M
iss Schuster and Miss Williams are the only two teachers in the makeshift school in the church; the others are either dead or lie injured in hospitals in St. Louis and Carbondale. The children sit unnaturally still in the pews. They look only at the teachers or at the books they hold in their laps, old McGuffey's Readers brought from home because it is too dangerous to try to salvage any books from the remains of the school building. They dare not look at each other; each glance at a pew mate is a reminder of the children who are no longer there. Instead, the children look imploringly at the teachers for help in understanding how they should act.

The teachers try to take a proper attendance, certain that behaving as normally as possible and following routine will be best for the children. A sense of the familiar will reassure everyone and establish order. They have no class lists to proceed from and call what names they can from memory, asking by surname who is present and who is absent, knowing that some of the children are simply truant, kept back in the tent cities by parents still too frightened to let them go into town. But the children become increasingly upset when they hear the names and must answer again and again, “No, ma'am. Not injured, dead.”

When Miss Schuster calls “Graves?” heads in every pew turn toward Ruby and Ellis.

“Here, ma'am,” Ruby answers.

Miss Schuster looks at them both, uncertain of how to proceed. She should look at the other children's faces and try to recall other names and proceed with the roll, but she can't seem to look away from these two.

“You're both here,” she says. “And your little brother is home?”

“Yes, ma'am.”

“Is it true then, what they're saying? Didn't anyone in your family get hurt?”

“No, ma'am.”

“No one at all?” she repeats, and Ruby shakes her head.

“Well, I'll be. Your house, too, and your daddy's business? All just the way it was?”

“I suppose so, ma'am.”

The children in the pews ahead of Ruby and Ellis are still turned around to look at them, elbows hanging over the pew backs, chins resting on hands. A stranger might judge their faces to be impassive, except that they wear the same expressions they would in the school yard if they were standing circled to gawk at a child who had soiled himself.

“You two can be an example to everyone else,” Miss Schuster says with her arms folded across her chest, looking down at them. She continues, addressing the rest of the children, “You all can look to Ruby and Ellis to see how to conduct yourselves now. They didn't lose a thing, they weren't even at the school when it collapsed, so they can be expected to behave normally and lead you all by their example.”

She looks again at Ruby, but Ruby doesn't reply.

The children then take turns standing at the front and reading lessons aloud from the few primers they brought along to share, an arrangement that puts both Miss Schuster and Miss Williams in mind of their own girlhoods spent in one-room schoolhouses. There is no blackboard in the church, however, and since no one has brought a slate, they try to drill the children in mental arithmetic and even hold a spelling bee, standing the children in two groups on either side of the aisle, the youngest and the oldest divided equally between them, and the children try hard at first but soon grow too weary even to try and simply begin to take their seats rather than answer, too distressed to spell the words.

Both teachers know they are floundering. Miss Williams looks at Miss Schuster hoping for some sign of how to proceed but finds that Miss Schuster is looking at her the same way. They understand that they have somehow gotten things wrong, every last thing, and also that it is too late to set it right again.

They dismiss the school early. Miss Schuster calls out, “I hope everyone will be less upset tomorrow,” looking at the girls who are weeping openly and at the boys who are stone-faced, trying to control themselves. She and Miss Williams stand in the church door, bewildered, watching the children file down the church steps and into the street.