Falling to Earth (22 page)

“Keep going.”

“There isn't any more. The rest is about sacrifice and burnt offerings.”

Paul reaches across the table for the Bible, turns the page, trails his finger down the first column, and reads, “‘And the goat shall bear upon him all their iniquities unto a land not inhabited: and he shall let go the goat in the wilderness.'”

Paul stares with blank resignation at the book in his hands, worrying the soft black cover with his thumbs. “Well, that's some comfort,” he says. “They don't actually blame the goat. They just need the goat to carry off their sins.”

Lavinia shakes her head. “I don't understand.”

“It's just something that's been bothering me, Mother. I'm not sure I understand it, myself.”

Mae comes in and Paul pushes out a chair for her at the table, but she shakes her head and leans against the stove instead with her arms crossed tight and her eyes fixed on the floor.

“They're not asleep yet. I had to leave the light on in Ruby's room,” she says. “Please don't tell the children to keep things from me,” she says, looking up at Paul. “I can either hear things from my family or I can overhear them when people slink into our yard at night.”

“I wanted to spare you hearing it at all.”

“People are burning your lumber rather than use it! How were you going to keep me from finding that out?”

Paul shakes his head. “I hadn't thought that far.” How much of the evening is left, he wonders. How long before he can walk away from everybody talking at him and lie in the dark bed.

“How much did the children hear?” he asks.

“They heard what we heard,” Lavinia says. She gets up to shut the curtains over the sink and then those on the window by the back door before she sits back down at the table. “I don't know how much they understood.”

“Why did you let them hear that?” Paul says to both of them and neither one of them in particular.

“Because it all happened so fast,” Lavinia says. “The children followed us in there and we could hear the two of you talking as clearly as if you were standing there in the room with us and we froze. I could no more have moved right then than I could have flown to the moon.”

“The children already knew what had happened,” Mae says. “They knew long before that coward Ben Eavers walked into our yard.”

Paul's eyes snap up at Mae.

“He is a coward. I don't like saying it, but that's the truth of it. They're all cowards and Ben Eavers is no less so for coming here to warn you. And that was no warning, that was just making sure you'd gotten the message they'd all sent through their children.”

“You didn't see his face,” Paul says.

“I didn't have to. I heard his voice and I heard the truth you got out of him out there. He was here to ease his own conscience.”

“Ben's one of my oldest friends.”

“He was your friend,” Mae says. “He's not anymore.”

“I know that!” Paul bangs his hand hard on the table. “Let me get used to the idea.”

Mae exhales and finally sits at the table with Paul and Lavinia. The only sound is insect song coming through the open windows.

“What on earth do we do now?” Lavinia asks.

Paul has never reckoned on this. He's never figured on everyone looking to him any more than Ruby and Ellis would turn to Homer for help in solving a problem. “I don't know if there's anything we can do but wait,” he says.

“Wait for what?”

“Wait them out. If folks were trying to make a point, they've made it.”

“They're not making any point, they're punishing us,” Mae says. “The storm didn't take this house, none of us died, and they're all bent on punishing us for it.”

“I don't understand it,” Lavinia says. “I don't understand why we lost nothing at all. This is a well-built house, but no better than any other good house in town was. It was just dumb luck, that's all. How anyone in his right mind can blame us for that, I don't know.”

Paul has stopped speaking and neither Mae nor his mother seem to have noticed. He could tell them that he doesn't think waiting is any more a solution than they do. He could go to the foot of the stairs in the living room, look up to the dark landing where the children are surely listening and call, “Go back to bed.” He could drive out to the burn site and see for himself that the remains of his lumber, charred and cold, look no different really than what was left after they burned the wreckage last spring. He could tell them about the shipment he just took delivery on from the mill in Carbondale and the payment that's due to the bank on it in less than thirty days. He could say that he's waiting to feel numb, as if he's hit his finger with a hammer and the pain is just now beginning to recede. He could even try to explain that Ben Eavers is responsible for the strange smile on his face. Not the Ben who came to him tonight in secret after dark, but Ben as Paul remembers him at sixteen or seventeen, right there ahead of him on the running track, his arm stretched out and his fingers splayed for the relay baton, grinning back at Paul and waiting to run.

T
here had been many nights when Mae was a child that she had woken to find her mother sitting on the edge of her bed, looking out Mae's window at a full moon. The curtains open, her mother sitting silent, wrapped in her shawl, their two faces bathed in the astonishing light. Her mother did not chart the moon's waxings and wanings, never drew crescents or circles on the kitchen calendar as she might have done, but let it take her by surprise instead. And whenever it appeared, ripe and white, she would watch for hours with the curtains thrown apart wide.

There had been other nights when her mother had carried Mae outside wrapped in a blanket to look at the girl in the moon. It wasn't enough to see it through the window, her mother had said. You had to get on the other side of the glass and feel the night air on your skin. Mae remembers her head on her mother's shoulder, her hand gliding over her mother's unpinned braid, the cold night air on her bare feet under the blanket, and her mother saying, “Look!” as if the moon had never before been full, as if it had never before sailed above their house.

“Can you see her?” her mother would ask then.

“Yes,” Mae would answer.

“Can you?” her mother would ask again, as if it were the first time. “Tell me what you see.”

“A sideways girl.”

“And?”

“A big flower and her hair blowing like it's windy.”

They could never, either of them, see the man in the moon, only this girl of her mother's. Mae has tried many times since to show it to Paul, standing outside and pointing to show him which part was the girl's dress and which part was her hair flowing out behind her. She's even drawn it on paper, trying to make him see, because this is her best way of explaining her mother, but he's never done more than smile and shake his head. He can't see it and he never will.

Mae remembers her mother's lips moving silently those nights her face was tilted up to the sky. As a child, she had never questioned what her mother might have been saying or to whom, and later she never thought to ask. She had been transfixed by her mother's face, if only because while her mother was occupied with the moon it had been possible for Mae to watch her more closely than usual. She had thought her mother even more beautiful on those nights, like a storybook princess under a curse, forced to wander in another shape until the full moon when she would turn again, briefly, into her authentic self.

Now there are clouds racing across the face of the October moon and Little Homer is on Mae's lap, wrapped in the plaid blanket he had been dragging behind him when he found her out on the porch. He twitches in his sleep. Mae tucks the blanket in again under his feet and presses her mouth against his hair that smells of a faded tang of sweat. Sitting outside like this it's impossible to stop herself from thinking of the time before the storm and all the other fall evenings they've spent out here on the porch, the nights when it was too chilly to be comfortable, nights that finally forced you to admit that Indian summer had gone and there were only cold days ahead. Back then, of course, Mae wouldn't have had to bring this straight-backed chair out from the kitchen, and she and Homer would have had the porch swing to sway on. Before the storm, Ruby and Ellis might have followed Homer when they heard him leave his bed to find her, but then again before the storm none of the children would have had much need, and Paul would have been out here with her instead of reading the evening paper inside. He's switched on the lamp near the living room windows to let her know he's there and not in the kitchen. Mae supposes he saw the chair missing from the kitchen and figured out where she got to. He won't come out here, she thinks, not now. She would welcome it tonight and greet him with a smile, but he can have no way of knowing that. He's learned by now what an absent chair usually means.

It's getting late now, and colder and lonesome with only Paul's lamplight spilling out over the porch boards for company. The light stretches away from the windows as if it is bent on getting away, much the way Mae sees her shadow toiling outside of an afternoon, stretching itself out long and thin on the pavement in different directions by turns as if by perseverance alone it will one day surprise them both by snapping and rolling away. Mae thinks her mother must have felt fettered this way, chained to life by her burdens, like a hot-air balloon staked to the ground and forever prevented from rising.

When her mother escaped her burdens by dying suddenly at the age of forty-three, the doctor had blamed her heart. It had likely always been weak, he'd said, and had finally given out. It would likely have killed a laboring man sooner. Mae had nodded, but she couldn't agree. She'd never told her father, who had been too occupied with grief to have heard her anyway, but she'd believed her mother had been exhausted by her life and that her body had simply given up struggling. It had been easy enough to go along publicly with the idea of a weak heart, if only because her mother's heart probably had been growing weaker through the years along with the rest of her, defeated as she was by each succeeding day. In any case, it was her father's heart that had turned out to be weak, and he had entered his own grave five months after. “A broken heart,” Mae heard a woman say at the funeral, shaking her head at the waste of it all.

It seems likely to Mae that her mother had never comprehended her own life, just as it was certain her bewildered father had not. They had no doubt been able to remember a time before their lives had become so diminished, or perhaps they had only been able to look back and see a time when they hadn't yet understood what was happening. After she died, Mae's mother hadn't looked peaceful, at least not in the way Mae had been hoping she would. She had looked as if she were finished with something more than that she had finally understood it, as if she were simply done. “I did used to think it would all amount to more than this,” she had once said.

When Ruby was born, Mae's mother had refused at first to hold her, so Mae had sat right next to her mother on the davenport and held Ruby so that they both could look at her. Paul and Mae's father had sat on chairs opposite them, and they had all just looked at the baby without speaking. Her mother's hands had twitched now and then, beginning to reach for the baby, but she had stopped them each time and squeezed her handkerchief instead. Mae had finally said, “She won't break,” in a soft voice, and her mother had gone as far as to lay her hand on Ruby's feet through the blanket she was wrapped in. Mae wondered at the terrible expression of dread mixed with longing on her mother's face, as if she were worried she'd hurt the baby somehow, or that she was simply overwhelmed by the possibility of joy; of what might happen if she just once touched the baby's skin.

A night like this one would have given her mother some ease. How wearying it must have been, knowing that each reprieve would be a short one, so short it must have made her mother doubt they would recur at all. Mae is weary herself, tired of grabbing hold of every last thing she feels and shoving it behind her back as if her feelings were unruly children threatening to bolt each time she opens a door. She's beginning to feel it's dangerous, holding on like this. Something will surely break. She'd let her thoughts wander to her worries one night in bed, let the indignant, accusing faces she sees all over town swim up before her, and suddenly she was biting Paul's lip so hard he hollered. She'd felt his lower lip between her teeth, she'd simply shut her own teeth together on it, not thinking what it actually was. They'd looked at each other, aghast, Paul with his hand on his mouth to feel that his lip was still all there and Mae with her hand on hers from the shock of it. She'd apologized and he'd reassured her, both so genuinely that they'd then proceeded, agreeing somehow to pretend it had only been passion though Mae thought privately that they were both surprised she hadn't drawn blood.

Mae's burdens are her own. Curtains and windows are nothing more to her than curtains and windows, except in the way they recall her mother and her mother's way of always having to close them. It's mirrors she can't abide suddenly, and she's taken to washing her face and brushing her hair without ever meeting her own eyes. She knows what she should be feeling, she sees the way they all hope she'll remember to feel each day, as if remembering were as simple a thing as putting on a blue sweater instead of a brown one.

Little Homer shifts in her lap and Mae feels his breath on her neck.

“I saw her, Mama,” he says, and Mae answers, “I know.”

It's not surprising to her that Little Homer was the one to see her mother's girl on the face of the moon, not surprising at all. She exhales while he settles again, falling back asleep. She'll stay here holding him as long as she can because tomorrow morning when she wakes in her bed, this will all have gone. Tomorrow, she'll be unable again to see a beautiful thing without wanting to look away. Tomorrow, someone will accidentally slam a door or drop something and they will all look at her first, before allowing themselves reactions of their own. Tomorrow, the children will want something from her and Mae's eyes will betray her, Lavinia and Paul will give her their looks of suffocating pity and tell them, “Leave your Mama be,” while Mae spends her day waiting for the clock to show that she has come through another day and can disappear into sleep.