Falling to Earth (24 page)

“And so you boys fell out with each other.”

“Johnny lost time by starting up here.”

“You were hardly to blame. I suppose you both were still young, but you were grown men and he made a decision to stay.”

Paul shakes his head. “I should have let him go when he wanted to. You were ready to let us both go, but I was afraid to be alone and fear made me play dirty.”

“You stop that right now. I won't listen to you talk that way about yourself. You were never alone and you've never done an unfair thing in your life.”

“But I was alone in a way, or knew I would be. Dad couldn't live forever, and if Johnny was clear out in California, I'd be left to be the head of the family here. I told him if he couldn't stay for me, then he should think of you and Dora's family left behind here.”

“Oh, Paul––”

He gives Lavinia a wry smile and then looks away quickly at his plate. “He never intended to stay. He was only postponing for a while.”

“Whatever do you mean?”

“I wanted to call the place Graves Brothers Lumber. Did you know that? But Johnny said no. He told me to leave out the ‘Brothers.' Graves Lumber was enough, he said. It would look better on the sign, and besides, everyone in town already knew we were brothers.” Paul smiles, blinking hard, and pushes at his food with the back of his fork. He looks up at Lavinia again and says, “He didn't want me to have to change the sign when he left.”

All these years, Paul thinks, that he and Johnny had thought themselves blessed for having such parents as they had who would never let on they were disappointed, all the years he'd spent hoping they hadn't disappointed them too much. There was guilt, too, that turned out now to have been unnecessary. His parents had certainly hoped that one of them would want to work the farm, but had managed nonetheless to understand before either of their sons the indefensibility of choosing the
where
and
what
of another person's life. Johnny had understood it soon after them and long before Paul, who had taken years and was really only now just beginning to comprehend. Johnny, who had seen that Paul was too uncertain of himself to take a chance on leaving Marah. Who had known that Paul didn't trust himself to enter adulthood alone because everything he'd done in his life up to that point had been done in emulation of his brother. Johnny, who had waited, who had deferred on a promise to himself until he'd seen that Paul was shored up with a business, a house, and a wife.

Paul smiles. He must have had a peculiar expression on his face, he thinks, to make Mae look at him like that. He can't remember having seen that particular look on her face before that's making her seem to be looking right through him now, or past him at something else entirely.

“What's this about donating lumber?” Lavinia asks.

“If it's an idea of Paul's, it has something to do with responsibility,” Mae says out of nowhere and startles them both. “Or more likely, it's entirely to do with responsibility.”

Well, yes, Paul thinks. He'd realized the very moment the thought had entered his head that it had to do with responsibility and whether the responsibility was to others, to an idea, or only to himself had been of little consequence. Still, he'd puzzled it out all the same since then and had decided that he was thinking only of himself. He had felt both satisfaction and relief at this, understanding that, in this case, thinking of himself did not mean he was being selfish. The idea of donating wood had nothing whatever to do with how others viewed him or his standing in the town, and although those things had once held importance for him, the fact that he's now been stripped, slowly and deliberately of public regard since the storm has left him distrustful of anything resembling vanity. He regrets that understanding has come to him so late, since that will have cost Mae and his mother something as well.

Paul takes his arms off the table and leans back on his chair. His legs slide out under the table, and as his thumbs hook themselves into the belt loops on the front of his pants he realizes he must be the image of his father. Give him a duck call to chew and he could make his mother cry. “You done, Homer?” he asks, and Little Homer nods. “Put your plates in the sink and go on upstairs, all of you.” Paul knows the children will likely only pretend to be playing once they're upstairs, that they'll go into one bedroom or other and make a little noise and then creep back to the landing to sit with their shoulders against the railings and listen.

“The Methodists haven't decided whether they're going to rebuild yet,” Paul says. “Last I heard, they were thinking of going over to another church instead. Maybe our church or maybe the Baptists. There's hardly enough of any one congregation left to warrant much building.”

“Then why give them lumber?”

“So they can build.”

“It might be too late,” Mae says. “People might think–– well, they'll think a lot of things.”

“I know it, but folks will think what they want no matter what I do. It seems that I've done absolutely everything wrong. I hauled what wreckage I could out to the burns alongside the rest of them. I hardly slept those first days. I just cut wood and cut wood for coffins. I thought that was what I was supposed to do. Cut wood because people needed it. Look them in the eye and do business with them and help them to keep their dignity. I was only trying to be mindful of their pride, and now they've got it figured as greed.”

“It could be the last straw,” Mae says. “It could break us.”

“I believe we're pretty near broken already,” Lavinia says.

Paul nods and looks away, although there had been nothing of reproach in his mother's voice.

“They might refuse the offer,” Lavinia says. “Though that's no reason not to make it.”

Paul looks back at her and sees as tender an expression as he could hope to see in her damp eyes. “I realized one day I couldn't look at myself in the bathroom mirror,” he says.

“You haven't done one single thing to be ashamed of. You hear me? I've been right here the whole time, and not once have I been ashamed.”

“Well, I have. I'm pretty sure it was shame I was feeling when I wrote my last letter to Johnny.” Paul leans forward again with his arms on the table, clasping his hands in his old attitude of uncertainty. “It was his work as much as mine that built the lumberyard, and I couldn't even manage to keep it going.”

“I'll never know what you could have done differently,” Lavinia says. “Not as long as I live.”

In the silence that follows, Paul's mouth tightens and his eyes begin to burn. He keeps his hands folded close to him on the table so that his mother can't reach out and take hold of one. There are no voices, no sounds at all coming from upstairs. The children have begun to listen to their conversations so openly that Paul wonders whether they would even bother to hurry from the landing now if they heard him coming or if they would simply remain there, a jumble of elbows and knees, a row of sober faces. Mae is staring at the table, eyes unfocused, agitated in spite of her stillness, as if she might bolt from the table at any moment. Paul sees that she's holding something back, he sees that she's barely able to contain it. What would he have said the day they were married if someone had told him he'd one day look at his wife and be unable to say whether it was elation or panic she was stifling on her face. He winces and looks back at his hands.

His mother has no trouble reading his face and says aloud for him the very thing he has been unable to bring himself to tell her. “You've been paying them out of savings,” she says, and he nods. “How long?”

“A month.”

Of course she knew, he thinks. She's either seen the passbook or been down to the bank herself and found out there. He feels a hot prickle on his neck at the thought of her standing there at the teller's grill.
No, ma'am. There's no mistake
. One month's pay for Clarence, Lon, and Irene. Payment to the bank in full for the last shipment of lumber from Carbondale.

“They asked me if they should be looking for other jobs,” Paul says.

Lavinia raises a hand. “You don't owe me any explanation.”

“It's your savings, too, Mother. What you put in from the sale of the farm. You had a right to know before now.”

“Well. I don't know that I would have done any different.”

“I suppose I owe it to them to tell them to start looking now.” He laughs in a short sputter. “They'll start looking as soon as I start donating lumber.”

“I'm not so sure.”

“Well, they should. I don't know why they've hung on this long as it is.”

“Of course you do.”

There it is again, Paul thinks. Loyalty. He'll think it, but he can't say it out loud anymore. There's nothing to do at the lumberyard most days; they all just tidy things up all the time. Oil the saw blades, move the lumber from here to there so they can clean places they've never had time to get to before. Sweep the baseboards, sweep the floor, straighten the papers on the desk, check the file cabinet again and again. Time was Paul would have asked their opinion on how to proceed, but now they all just watch him the same way the children do. Keeping busy, keeping quiet, and watching him to see if he'll break. He'd finally taken down the bell from over the door when he realized they were spending too much time looking at it, waiting for it to ring.

“I forgot about them all after the storm,” he says. Lavinia gives him a vexed frown, as if he's talking nonsense. “I got up off the ground and didn't give them another thought until the next morning. Mae remembers.”

“They didn't need you,” Mae says, shaking her head. “You went where you were needed.”

“No, I came here where I wasn't needed either.”

“You didn't know that until you'd seen us.”

“Stop it, Paul! Stop it right now!” Lavinia pounds the table with her palm and makes the cutlery jump. “I said you'd never given me cause to be ashamed, but I didn't say you'd never made me angry. If you're determined to blame yourself for absolutely everything that has ever happened in this town, I guess I can't stop you, but I won't stand by and say nothing while you wallow in it. You haven't let anyone down, but you're on your way to letting yourself down. Give away your lumber if they'll let you. Give it all away. Tell everyone at the yard to find new jobs or empty out all our savings so you don't have to. You've had to make some awful decisions lately, but you've chosen right every time.”

Lavinia exhales and looks at her hands. When she speaks again, her voice is soft. “You'll choose right this time. You'll choose right for us all.”

S
itting in the borrowed church, Lavinia feels as if she is on display, as if she's been picked out by a blazing shaft of light there at the end of the pew, though the air in the church is dim. Half the windows in the church are boarded over, waiting for new stained glass from St. Louis, and the other half give only dull light from a clouded sky, but still she feels as if she is in the center ring, a curiosity for any and all to view. She should have contrived to sit where Mae is sitting, she thinks, at the other end of the pew, away from the aisle and all the eyes she feels turning to look at her.

Pastor Aufrecht is reading from Isaiah. That he could be so artless and that she herself might have sown the seed leaves Lavinia breathless.

“‘He heweth him down cedars, and taketh the cypress and the oak,'” he reads. Lavinia's eyes close, and she wonders if Paul will understand that this is no accident, whether he will also see the straight line that runs from her, sitting with an open Bible at the kitchen table, to Aufrecht's visit, to this. “‘He burneth part thereof in the fire . . . yea, he warmeth himself, and saith, Aha, I am warm, I have seen the fire.'”

Paul is next to her, with the children in a row between him and Mae. Lavinia looks sideways at the children, who are very still, then up at the row of windows interrupting the white wall. She sees young Pastor Ollery sitting off to the side in the front, listening to another man preach in his church. She watches him closely; his head is bowed, he seems to be listening attentively, solemnly, but Lavinia thinks she sees something of sadness or resignation in his downward glance. She could well be imagining it, she knows, hoping to find the dismay she is feeling on another face. Whatever she had intended when she opened her door to Aufrecht and set cake and coffee in front of him is unraveling now and turning into something else.

“‘And the residue thereof he maketh a god, even his graven image: he falleth down unto it, and worshippeth it, and prayeth unto it, and saith, Deliver me; for thou art my god.'”

If Lavinia looked at Paul for just a moment, she would be able to tell what he was thinking, whether he realized how horribly Pastor Aufrecht was blundering even as he sought to chastise and instruct, adding still more fuel to the pyre they'd all been lashed to. It was a foolish use of Isaiah on top of everything else. She would never have said before that this is what she meant, but then doubts herself as Aufrecht continues to read, “‘He feedeth on ashes: a deceived heart hath turned him aside, that he cannot deliver his soul, nor say, Is there not a lie in my right hand?'”

She stops listening then and, without even looking up at the pulpit, simply sits motionless, waiting for it all to end. Was it possible she had thought this in her heart, she wonders now––that the men who burned Paul's lumber had fashioned themselves a false god of righteousness? Lavinia is roused from her thoughts when Aufrecht's voice begins to rise. “‘Follow peace with all men,'” he calls out. “‘Lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled.'”

Lavinia forces herself to look at Paul as they stand, relieved that he is only frowning as if he is puzzled. She feels a twist in her stomach and looks away, reminded of the sound of breaking glass when she'd tried to get at her mother's candy dish as a child and sent it crashing to the floor, and then of her mother's voice when she'd found the pieces later and blamed herself for setting it too near the edge of the shelf.