Falling to Earth (2 page)

“I don't think we can go out yet,” Mae says. “We could still be in the eye of it.”

“What if Daddy came home? He can't get down here with that bar over the door!”

“Ruby, hush. He wouldn't have tried to come home in this. He'd have known he couldn't make it in time.”

“He could come home quick in the truck, couldn't he?”

“No,” Mae says quietly, as much to warn Ruby against further questions as to answer her. “It's not safe to drive in storms like this, he knows that. He'll have found shelter at the yard.”

Mae can feel the fear in the children's wire-hard bodies. I'd like to know where he was meant to find shelter, myself, Mae thinks. Not in the store, with those windows along the front; nor yet in the yard, among the stacks and rows of lumber.

“You all remember how strong and smart your daddy is,” Lavinia says. “He can out-think a storm, easy. And imagine how glad he is right now that we had this cellar to go to.” Her voice is decisive, but she can't entirely mask the quake she means to conceal.

When the rain finally stops coming in between the cellar doors, Mae rises and touches each of the children. Her eyes close, and she breathes in and out rhythmically, preparing herself. She lifts the crossbar and pushes against the doors, but cannot budge them. She pushes again, braced with one foot on the lowest step, and still they will not open.

“Something's fallen across the doors. Probably that crash we heard.” Mae labors against the doors, shoving with her arms locked straight above her head. A gap opens between them as she pushes up, and they can see a tree trunk lying across them. Lavinia pulls the children back as far as she can. Debris rains in on Mae's head, and she thrusts against the doors but can't dislodge the tree trunk. Finally, Ellis pushes with his mother; they bounce against the doors with their shoulders and backs until they hear a scraping sound on the opposite side. “It's starting to give,” Mae pants, turning to thrust at the doors again with her hands, bit by bit, rolling the tree trunk off the sloping doors and onto the ground. Mae leans against the doors, gulping air, and pushes one side up and open so that the children can run up out of the cellar. She reaches a hand down again for Lavinia, to help her out and over the fallen tree.

“Where in the world . . . ” Lavinia says, looking around. All of their trees are still standing, festooned now with debris and broken branches.

“It's not ours,” Mae says.

Debris and dirt are still swirling in the air around them. They shield their eyes, looking around, too shocked by what they see to move.

“Oh, Lord, Oh, Lord, Paul! Where are you?” Mae moans, clutching her mouth with one hand, her stomach with the other.

Ruby runs back with a metal object in her hand. She holds it up, a long black thread trailing from it. “What is it, Mama?” she asks.

“It's the shuttle from a sewing machine . . . ” Mae says in a murmur. She takes the shuttle, turning it over and over in her hand, as if by touching it, it will tell her something more. She feels dread rising from her gut and registering in her face. She hands the shuttle to Lavinia. “The thread's still in it.”

The children pick their way around the side yard, looking for wind-borne treasures under the branches lying everywhere. Lavinia is shaking, mumbling, “I never . . . I never . . . ” She turns to look at the house, knowing, feeling at first glance that it is whole. The roof is littered with branches and twigs, the clapboards and windows are smeared with mud, but the house is whole.

“Saints be praised, Mae! Look at the house!”

“Shhh, Mother,” Mae says, holding out a hand. “What's that sound?”

A woman is moaning across the street somewhere behind them, and as Mae and Lavinia turn to look, the moaning turns to screaming. Their neighbor Alice Duttweiler is there, staggering toward her house, which has gone all wrong. Turned facing another direction, one whole side missing, like a doll's house, to show what's inside. Alice sinks to her knees in front of the house and then rises to run back to the other side of the yard, her arms held out in front of her like she's trying to catch something. Alice's cries land in Mae's gut like fists. She feels Lavinia take hold of her arm. “Oh, sweet Jesus,” she says with her hand over her mouth, “The baby.”

 

 

Downtown, the cloud has passed, but the air is still choked with dirt. Paul pulls himself up slowly from the ground, still gripping the pole he'd taken hold of when the cloud was almost on top of him. His arms and hands ache from gripping the pole so tightly for so long. He's looked out the lumberyard windows at that very telegraph pole day in and day out for years, and now both he and the pole are still standing, the imprint of the pole on the side of his face. He looks at his hands, held out in front of him. He sees them but can't feel them, skin and shirtsleeves mud-black, his arms shaking. He touches his head, his neck, and holds out his hands again to see if there's blood. Retching on the air he's breathing, he begins to look around.

Everything is happening slowly, so slowly. Live wires dangle from utility poles, twitching in the wind. Buildings that stood solid only minutes before are now so much rubble and kindling. The trees left standing are choked with garments, newspaper, even the limbs of other trees that the black branches have snatched out of the wind. The sounds of wailing begin to reach him. Voices screaming, calling out names or crying for help. A blackened figure staggers in the middle of the street, a woman with her long hair clumped at the back of her head, the remnants of her clothes trailing.

Paul blinks as if he is waking. He'd gone outside before the cloud hit, heard it coming, seen it boiling along the ground. He'd been frozen where he stood, knowing the cloud would be on him, around him, before he could get back inside the store. He'd taken hold of the telegraph pole next to him then, and let himself fall prone to its base while he'd turned his face into his arm and hugged the wooden pole.

He'd been facing into the cloud and he'd known that that posture might save him. The wind had raised him off the sidewalk and snapped him hard like a flag, but he'd held tight, waiting for it to set him down. Now he turns, expecting to see the lumberyard in ruins behind him, but it's whole. The storefront, at least, of Graves Lumber is whole, and so is the Liberty Theater beside it, though their fronts are smothered in mud.

Paul hears a man shout, “Watch the hot line!” and turns in the direction of the voice. A downed power line trails near a cluster of figures struggling around an overturned automobile; shouting, pulling, they are trying to free someone trapped inside. Paul looks past the figures in the direction of the school and takes off at a run down the middle of the street. He passes a man lying on his side, wide eyes in a blackened face, staring blankly past a metal rod driven through his chest. Paul doesn't stop; if the man is not yet dead, he will be soon. Bodies lie all around; Paul leaps the sickening hurdles. Among the dazed people are men and women who, like Paul, are rousing and running for the school. They shout their children's names as they near the collapsed building and the bodies sprawled there on the ground. They run among the stunned survivors, looking for their own. A woman is frozen, screaming under a tree at a child's body caught high in its branches.

“They're not here,” Paul murmurs. He's remembering at last that his children were kept home today with chicken pox. “They're not here!“ he shouts. His voice is suspended somewhere between shock and jubilation and makes a man standing nearby take notice. The man is calm, holding a small girl in his arms. “They're pulling more kids out of the building over there!” he yells, climbing over the debris toward Paul.

“They were home today!” Paul yells back. This man has found his own child in the wreckage, and his child is alive. The cellar
,
Paul thinks. Please God, the cellar. The man stares at Paul and then suddenly shouts, “Go home! Go home! Go!”

Running the length of his own mutilated street, Paul tries to look straight ahead at what he's running toward. He can't make any sense of the nightmare vision, but neither can he look away. The cloud has been capricious: the houses on one side of the street have been knocked into piles of sticks, the bricks blown out of the sidewalks and trees snatched out of the ground like hanks of hair. On the other side, the houses are still standing, some shoved over sideways or twisted. Their roofs are mostly gone, and the first fires have been touched off by the snapped electrical lines and cookstoves lying in the wreckage. A few of the people he passes walk naked, crazed, calling out names. An arm rests in the crotch of a tree. Paul tries again to shut out the grotesques, running toward home, running through the searing in his lungs, desperately afraid of arriving.

Nearing the corner, he sees someone behind the house, a child standing there, and then another. He's crying, running toward those small heads. Once he's between the house and the garage he sees them all, all five of them, standing in different places in the yard. His mother looks at him, but Mae is the first to recognize him and she cries out. He's laughing now and they're all shouting. He holds each head, kissing them in turn, laughing, then suddenly he stops and a terrible look darkens his face.

“I have to go back,” he says to Mae, and he's running again, running back toward the school.

P
rincipal Claude Frayley stands grief-stricken outside his school, his trouser legs snapping against his shins, staring at the remains of the building. The air has finally begun to clear, the wind having carried away most of the filth and debris and deposited it in the nearby fields. How can it look this way, he wonders. How can the sides have simply folded in on the middle like that? The section of wall still standing with its window glass intact baffles him. He feels betrayed; he's looking at the school as if it can answer him, as if it is mocking him. It seems to him that, as an institution of learning, his school, a fine old school, should somehow have had more structural stability than that. Now it seems it was only an edifice after all, as frangible as a child's sand castle before an advancing wave.

He is aware in a vacant sense that there is activity around him, that there are voices intruding, annoying him. He is struck from the side by another person stumbling into him, and turning to issue a reprimand, he sees it is a woman who has struck him. Or perhaps it was only the legs of the dead child she holds in her arms.

“Help them!” she screams savagely at him. “What are you standing there for? Help them!”

Frayley is still desperately hoping that someone will come to lead him away, to tell him that it's all a horrible mistake and that he can go home to rest. He could just walk home as he does every day, to the white clapboard house on his oak-lined street. He could go right up the stairs to his bedroom, turn the cool porcelain knob on the door and just go in. He could hang his suit jacket on the beechnut chair by the window, take off his shoes, and lie down on top of the bedspread, just lie still with his hands folded on his chest and his feet crossed at the ankle. He could close his eyes without worrying about sleeping and listen to his mother at her work in the different rooms of the house.

He looks all around himself but sees nothing here that he can do. What can a man like him possibly do to help people who are screaming and children who are dead? A man nearby, seeing Frayley's paralysis, walks over to him and hands him a child. “Take him,” he shouts, already walking away. “He says he's got an older brother here somewhere. Their parents might be here looking for them.”

A live child, then, a boy. The first thing in his mind is the scrubbing the child will require; the mud around his eyes is like a minstrel's blackface. Rather than allow the next thought to blossom in his consciousness, rather than wonder who is still alive to assume responsibility for this child, he thinks logically and retreats into his official position.

“Whose classroom are you in?” Frayley asks, but the boy says nothing. He sets the boy down. “Did you hear me? I asked whose class you're in.”

“Miss Geiler's. I'm Charlie Needham, sir. Don't you know me?”

He sits down on his heels to look closely at the boy. “Yes, I know you,” he says. He takes hold of him and swings him up again, aware now of what he can do for him.

“Your brother's name is Joe, isn't it? Joe Needham!” he shouts, then shouts it again above the din of the other voices. He sets out to walk the periphery of the school property with the boy in his arms. He stumbles a little at first; his legs won't obey him properly. What he will do if he manages to make a circuit without a response, he does not know. He's begun to shake but has remembered that he should conceal this from the boy. “Joe Needham!” he cries, knowing that the boy in his arms is quiet because he hasn't yet realized what the adults knew immediately; that the question of who has died is not nearly as important in this moment as who has survived.

“Needham?” a man yells, running toward him. “Over here!” He takes the boy and runs a hand over his head. “Oh, thank God, thank God,” he says. “You come with me, Charlie. I found your dad.”

Frayley looks up and sees to his horror that he is standing near the school, much closer than he had intended to come. Another man is walking toward him, another bloodied man holding another child. It's not properly a child, though it's a child's body. He feels his arms reaching to accept the child and then realizes that the man is leaving.

“Wait! What do I do?” he pleads.

“Find someplace to set her down,” the man says. His voice is thick, anguished. He's shaking his head. “There are more coming.”

Now Frayley understands what he can do for these children, the last thing he can do for them. He kicks debris away to clear a space in the grass well away from the school and lays out the girl's body. He straightens her dress over her legs and takes off his suit coat to lay over her, but it doesn't cover the length of her body. Her legs stick out at the bottom. He pulls the jacket lower, to cover her legs and feet and to allow her face to be seen so that she can be identified. He then disturbs his coat one last time, to remove a notepad and pencil from the inside pocket.