Falling to Earth (16 page)

M
ae takes Ruby onto her lap and rocks her as best she can, sitting there on the davenport. How many times Mae has held a child on her lap, sitting on that end of the davenport, Paul can't imagine. It's hard to reconcile his memory of Ruby as a small child with this long-legged creature who is sobbing and gulping, clinging to Mae.

Ruby has turned her face against the front of Mae's dress, but Paul can still see her mouth, lips pulled back in a howl like a wide smile. Ellis stands beside Paul, taciturn and staring at Ruby. His fists jerk now and then, and Paul suspects that, given an invitation, he'd climb right on top of Ruby to get near Mae. It's clear that Ellis doesn't trust himself to talk, doesn't trust himself not to lose control. Paul lays his hand on the small of the boy's back and looks across at Little Homer who is watching everything from Lavinia's lap in one of the wing chairs by the fireplace.

“Ruby, sweetheart,” Mae says, smoothing the girl's hair. “I couldn't understand you. Can you tell us again?”

Ruby shakes her head. She has stopped crying but is still shuddering each time she draws breath. Paul shakes out his handkerchief, still in an ironed square, and hands it to her.

“Was it the teachers who said something to you, or one of the children?” he asks.

“Both,” Ellis says, still not looking away from Ruby.

“What was it the teachers said?”

“That nothing happened to us so we should act normal.”

Paul catches Mae's eyes before she looks down again at Ruby. He asks Ellis, “What did the children say?”

“It was just a couple boys. They followed us part way home, out of their way, and yelled stuff.”

Paul looks up at Ellis standing there next to him and waits.

“How maybe they should show us what it felt like when a school falls on top of you.”

Mae starts to cry at that, lips and eyes squeezed shut tight. The sight of her, blindingly angry and struggling to control herself, is too much for Little Homer, who throws himself off Lavinia's lap and onto the floor and lies there crying with his face in his hands as if he'd done himself an injury. Lavinia tries to pick him up again but isn't strong enough, and Homer crawls away from her across the rug to Mae and presses himself under Mae's arm so that she's holding him and Ruby, both.

“One of them threw some rocks at Ruby. Just a handful of gravel or something. He missed and I grabbed some gravel where I was standing and jumped out in front of her. I didn't have to throw it or nothin'. Just show him I meant it.”

Paul takes hold of Ellis's fist and opens it. Ellis raises his other hand and opens it, palm up, next to the other to show Paul the gravel he has been clutching.

“You want to tell me who these boys were, son?”

Ellis looks back at Paul, unblinking, and says, “No, sir.”

Paul brushes the gravel off onto the floor and rubs the red marks on Ellis's palms with his thumbs. He pulls Ellis to himself hard and stares across the room. Eyes stinging and mouth tight, he kisses the top of his boy's head.

Y
ou'll wear that letter out inside a week if you don't let it alone,” Lavinia says, sitting across the breakfast table from Paul. He can't stop reading it, won't stop reading it, and every time he manages to put it back in its envelope, it's out again just a few minutes later and he's sitting with that same smile on his face, reading it again.

“You'd think it was a love letter, the way you're grinning at that paper,” Lavinia teases him.

“Well, Mother, it is, after a fashion. Things haven't been right between Johnny and me for a long time now, but this letter sets it all right.”

“I think it was your letter to him that set things right.”

“Could be,” Paul says. “Could be.”

Lavinia laughs aloud, “Lord, you sound just like Homer. You look like him, too, sitting there with your coffee cup in one hand and that letter in the other. Only he would have been mooning over the newspaper.”

“Homer doesn't read newspapers!” Ellis protests and makes Lavinia laugh again.

“No, snookie, I meant Grandpa Homer, not Little Homer.”

“I could read a newspaper if I wanted to!” Little Homer says. Mae puts the coffeepot back on the stove and walks around the table to smooth Homer's hair and kiss the top of his head.

“Next one we get, you can read me the headlines,” she says. “Right now it's time to finish up your breakfast. Ellis, eat up. Ruby, take your plate to the sink, please, and go brush your teeth.”

“Aw, Mama, can't we stay home today?”

“Please don't start that again, Ellis. You know you have to go to school.”

“But not all the kids go. Some of them in the tent cities don't go.”

“That's a problem for their parents and the teachers, not us.” Paul says. “There's nothing wrong with either you or Ruby, so you're going to school today, tomorrow, and the day after that.”

“It's not even real school. We have to sit in pews in the church!”

“Well, you don't have to sit any stiller in the church than you did in school. There'll be a new school building soon enough, if you're missing it so badly.”

“Homer doesn't have to go to school.”

“Homer's five.”

“Maybe Homer could go instead of me and I could stay home. People say we look just alike.”

“Nice try. Now get upstairs and brush your teeth.”

Ellis pushes his chair back and mutters, “I wish I lived in a tent.”

“What was that?” Mae stops him on his way to the sink with her fingers against his chest. “What did you just say?”

“I said I wished I lived in a tent.”

“What is it you think they're doing out there, camping? Do you think it's fun, having to live in those tents? Tell me why all those people are living out there in tents.”

“Mae—” Paul wants to stop her, but it's too late.

“Go on, Ellis,” Mae says. “Tell me why they're living in those tents.”

“Because the storm knocked down their houses.”

“What else?”

“It wrecked all their stuff.”

“And did your house get knocked down?”

“No, ma'am.”

“That's why you don't live in a tent. Your house is standing, so you live in your house. And school in is a church for the time being, so you go to church for school.”

“Yes, ma'am.” Ellis is looking down at Mae's apron, waiting to bolt.

“Go on,” Mae says, shaking her head. “Go brush your teeth.”

Paul waits till Ellis has pounded his way up all the stairs before he says, “He's only seven. He didn't mean anything by it.”

Mae is staring out the window. She won't meet anyone's eye. “He has to be made to understand,” she says. “What would happen if he said something like that while he was at school? What if he said that to a child who is living in a tent? You're the one who's wanted to be so careful, Paul. How we appear, what we say, what we do in town. That means the children have to be careful, too.”

“Yes, they do. Why couldn't you have said that to him instead?”

“Because I didn't. I just didn't, that's why.”

Paul gets up from the table and tries to go around to touch her, to stop her trembling, but she turns quickly toward the sink, wiping her eyes. “I have to get ready if I'm walking them to school.”

Lavinia hands John's letter, back in its envelope, out to Paul. “You might want this today,” she says, and when Paul leans down to kiss her cheek, she nods toward Mae and gives him a shove.

“I'll take them,” Paul says, dropping his hands. “You stay here.”

He's afraid Mae will move away from him again, find some excuse to turn.

Mae lowers the plate she's washing and even turns to kiss him. The corners of her mouth twitch into a tiny smile. She lowers her eyes again and begins to rinse the plate. There she is, he thinks. He hooks her around the waist and kisses her cheek. “Whose pretty girl are you?” he says and laughs when she shakes a wet hand at him to get him to stop.

That Little Homer laughs the loudest of any of them, as if it were his job to finally dispel the mood, weighs heavily on Paul the rest of the day.

 

Small wonder Ellis wishes he could live in a tent, Paul thinks on his way to the lumberyard after taking the children to school. He had promised them that school wouldn't be so bad again after that first day, but he had been wrong. Wouldn't Ellis or Ruby wish away the house or the lumberyard if it meant all the staring and the whispering would dry up and they could look their schoolmates in the eye? If Paul himself can't figure how to prevent people from thinking that they alone in all the town are living it up like a bunch of swells, living life in a bubble like it's still the day before the storm, how on earth are his children supposed to manage it? People in town haven't stopped staring at him, why on earth would they stop staring at his children?

It's easier for him, he knows. If Ruby and Ellis feel eyes upon them they have no recourse other than to stare harder at their primer or look at the street ahead of them and quicken their pace. If Paul feels he is being watched, he does what he has always done when he meets people out somewhere in town—simply greets them by name and stretches out his hand. Usually, that causes a person to blink and seem to wake up in an odd sort of way. They smile back then, and shake his hand, fully aware that he is only Paul Graves after all, and not the ghost of a man they once knew.

Other men and women who stare at him seem shamed by his greeting them. Paul sees that, and although it unnerves him, he continues to greet them anyway, figuring that he won't have to do it a second time. Still others frown at him like they're figuring something out and are then embarrassed by his walking over and shaking their hand. It's as if they're trying to work out a trick he's played on them and if they just watch him long enough without his looking back they'll figure it out.

Now and then Paul meets a man who seems to want to pin blame on him. He shakes the man's hand and asks how he's been keeping himself, and when no shadow of compunction, no trace of remorse or recognition that he's been rude crosses the man's face, Paul begins to shiver. He finds a reason he has to be going then, wishes the man a good afternoon, and sets off back in the direction he was headed, all the while feeling the man's frowning eyes as if they are raining blows upon his back.

Such a man stands in his path now, ten yards or so between him and the front door of the lumberyard. Old man Rittger, bent over his cane, scowling unashamedly at Paul as if Paul is blind and can have no notion that he's been watched.

“Morning, Mr. Rittger,” Paul says as he nears him. “How are you today?”

“Fair,” says Rittger, who leans on his cane now with both hands, to prevent himself from shaking hands with Paul. “Come to work have you?”

Paul nods, “Just took my kids over to the church for school.”

“Is that right.”

“Yes, sir.”

“How many teachers they got left over there?”

“Just the two. A few of the others are injured and might come back later.”

“Two, you say?”

“I hear there's a few more over at the high school, although that's still not enough. School board's got its work cut out for them.”

“That's a fact.”

Paul hears that he's chattering and is amazed that he feels powerless to simply make his way around this frail old man. Rittger is still glowering at him, as if Paul owes him an explanation for standing before him there on the sidewalk.

“Be needing a new principal, too,” Rittger says.

Paul frowns. “What happened to Claude Frayley?”

“Frayley?” Rittger snorts, “Nerves got so bad he up and left town. Went to live with an old aunt somewhere around St. Louis. Just as well, man hasn't any more backbone than that.”

Paul has never been one to think badly of anyone, but the image of Rittger as a rank, ancient bulldog enters his mind and he does nothing to shake it off.

Rittger squints up at Paul. “I heard they're set on building the grammar school even bigger than it was,” he says.

“I couldn't say,” Paul says. “I haven't heard a thing about it.”

“Course you have. Who else will they be coming to for the lumber to frame it?”

Paul knows that Rittger has been a crank as long as anyone can remember. Back before the storm it had been possible to smile at him and laugh as if everything he said was just a put-on. No one could be so truly cantankerous all the time. Back then, it hadn't been unheard of for some of the older ladies in town to shake their heads at him and tell him he was just a cheerful dreamer as he railed on about something or other in the street. But Rittger had grown more ill-humored with every passing year, even as his body had become more wizened and bent. If his moods seemed more sour, Paul thought, perhaps it was only because they'd been magnified somehow as he'd shrunk. Now Rittger is acting like nothing more than a bully, calling Paul to account for some imagined wrong and daring him to walk away before he's through with him.

“Everyone's in a hurry, what with everything that wants building around here. You're sittin' pretty good, though. Don't have to rebuild a thing.”

Paul stops talking and resolves to say nothing more, not even yes or no, until Rittger has finished his raving. He has even abandoned his customary propriety and is scowling right back at him.

“I heard talk they want the grammar school even bigger than it was,” Rittger repeats. “Doesn't seem to bother anyone that there won't be enough children to fill it. Suppose you'll make out all right, either way.”

Rittger looks past Paul, as if he sees something down the street. “That'll be a sight,” he says, finally. “Graves's lumber going up all over town.”