Falling to Earth (3 page)

He pushes her hair back away from her face, wipes his palms off on his trousers, and smoothes her face again. Mattie, he thinks. Mattie
. . .
“Second grade,” he says aloud. “Dawkins.” He writes out her name and tucks the sheet of notepaper inside the neck of her dress. Satisfied that the white paper is visible there, he rises, ready to receive the next body. He clears space each time, kicking at things with his feet, laying the children's bodies out properly, side by side with their legs and arms straight. He realizes the row will be all the more horrifying if it gets too long and decides it might lessen the impact to begin another row below the first. He clears the space alone with his hands, tossing debris and bricks well away from him. He kneels down to look at each one of the children's faces, to wipe them free of blood and dirt if he can, so that he can write another name on his pad and tuck the paper into their clothing.

There is a girl with a smashed-in head he cannot hope to identify. He covers the pulpy remnant of her face with his handkerchief and forces himself to examine the pattern of her dress, the buttons on her sweater, hoping they'll provoke a memory from when the children arrived at school that morning. He's kneeling, holding her hand when he sees the ring. He writes just that, “ring,” on his pad, hoping that someone will look and be able to say which girl wore a ring like that, so that she can be buried with her name.

He watches the fathers and mothers tearing at the collapsed building with their bare hands. When he is handed a living, injured child, he gives it away to someone else standing there to take wherever it is they're taking the living. Two men carry a badly injured teacher out on a door. Her eyes are closed, not because she has lost consciousness, but because she has squeezed them shut to keep herself from moaning. The digging begins to slow. There are no tools, no shovels, and both men and women are beginning to stop, sitting anywhere, exhausted, allowing their bloodied hands to be wrapped.

Frayley climbs over the wall then, into the ruined building for the first time. He tries to lift a fallen beam. Grunting and shaking, he heaves at it until it finally budges. Amazed that he was able to lift it, he looks behind him and sees another man, holding up the other end. The man nods to him to start carrying it out and they climb, in turn, over the caved-in wall to set the beam out somewhere on the grass. They work together without talking, the man helping him, doing most of the work in fact, but never refusing his weaker partner. When they find a crushed boy under the next fallen beam, the man cries out. They pull the boy's body out together. He's one of the bigger boys and heavy to carry. After they've laid him out with the other children, the man stays where he is, kneeling by the boy's side. Frayley thinks he sees a flicker of relief in the sorrow on his face.

“Do you know who he was?”

“No,” the man says, sitting up on his heels and wiping his brow with his forearm. “He's not mine, if that's what you mean. None of mine were here. They've all three got chicken pox.”

Frayley looks at the man, bewildered, waiting to understand.

“Paul Graves, Mr. Frayley. I'm Paul Graves.” Paul claps him on the shoulder.

“Your family . . . ”

“Alive, they're all alive. That's why I'm here. As soon as I saw they were okay, I came running right back. I feel a fool now for having left in the first place. They didn't need me; I could have been here.”

“But the chicken pox . . . There were more families down with it, several of them.” Frayley grasps Paul's arm. “That means there were others who weren't here today!” His eyes are wide with relief; he doesn't understand why Paul is looking at him that way and shaking his head.

“Mine were down cellar,” he says.

“I don't understand.”

Paul speaks the next difficult words carefully. “There's not many as has cellars in Marah. There wasn't much time, either.”

This brings Frayley, finally, back to his own house and what he will likely find, or not find there, when he returns. Having seen the ratio of living to dead here at the school, he feels certain now in which column his mother's name will be recorded. The arbitrariness of his mother's probable fate, alone when the storm hit in the old frame house in which he was born, the utter blamelessness of it sickens him, pointing, as it does, to his own culpability. His stomach heaves and he cups a hand over his mouth, managing to turn quickly enough that he retches in the grass below the line of bodies. When he's wiped his mouth on his sleeve, he looks up to see the people behind him, fathers and mothers standing below him on the slope, looking silently at the rows of children he has laid out.

“I was sending them home early,” he bursts out. “It had gotten so threatening, and I was thinking of the farm children going home in the open bus, and I dismissed the school early. It was only ten minutes before the bell. I thought they were probably all just looking out of the windows anyway, waiting to go, so I had the bell rung early.” He is holding his hands out, palms up, beseeching.

“Then how come more of them weren't outside?” one of the fathers asks.

“I told them they could come back in. It was raining so hard and it looked . . . I told them they could come back in and wait it out. But then the walls began to quake so . . . ” He sees the children running back inside the school, running past him, squealing and laughing at having gotten soaked through in just those few seconds outside. Then their faces when the storm came howling. He had looked along the corridor at the children lining the staircase, and then it all went dark. He remembers the screaming and the first sounds of breaking glass. Then the deep rumbling, the shuddering walls, and his own voice screaming for them to get outside again. The staircase plunging, the walls sheeting down, and him caught, quite by happenstance, in the only safe place, under the framework of the main doors.

It's so hard, he thinks, to know which thing was the most wrong. But then he sees it in their faces and feels it in his hands that laid the children out. He feels someone take hold of his arm and looks to see Paul Graves, the only man present who can offer him absolution, there beside him. Paul is looking, too, at the parents standing there, he's looking back at them and frowning. Frayley feels a tug on his arm and allows Paul to lead him away.

C
hill floorboards under bare feet. Bathroom taps screech. Boiled coffee, a triangle of toast.
Eat your egg, eat up
. Wet comb through the hair.
Take your umbrella, good-bye, good-bye
. Now only a handful of hours later in the same day people are doing things they would not have dreamed themselves capable of when they sat down that morning to their breakfast. They do what they must; the uninjured and the walking wounded organize themselves. There is no time to talk over what needs to be done or to decide democratically who will do what. People are where they are and their surroundings decide for them. If an injured person needs to be moved to a place of safety but there is no way of moving him, a man standing there will look around, see a door lying nearby, and shout to another man to help carry.

A woman will find herself pressed into service by a doctor, running in the street from one injured person to the next. She will be astonished at the things she can bear to look at, surprised at how she can maintain an impassive expression while she's tearing away their clothing to reveal the horrifying wounds.

The injured themselves will find that they can lie silent and wait for help, because what little morphine there is is running out and there is nothing to be gained by wailing. Owners of automobiles and delivery trucks will volunteer their vehicles as ambulances; those whose homes are still standing will offer them up as provisional morgues and as shelter for the living. A man still too young to have been tested by life will find that the disaster has left him clearheaded, that he can see the things happening around him as if he is standing above them, and that people listen to him when he tells them what they should do.

They will keep on into the night, without pausing for food or rest, but the injured will nonetheless continue to die of their wounds. The streets will be largely impassable and the ambulances will not get through. Neither will the men who come in with wagons to carry away the injured because their horses will scream and rear, even if their heads are blanketed, even if they are led by hand, at the smell of so many dead.

That the black cook at the Blue Front Hotel is a powerful man, that he struggles tirelessly—though injured himself—to save the guests trapped inside will not prevent the kitchen floor from giving way and sending the great iron cookstove into the basement, burning alive the people who had fled there from the storm.

That the fire brigade will use dynamite to choke the biggest fires downtown will not stop the fires that are spreading among the houses. People completely stripped of their clothing will wander the streets wrapped in blankets and rugs, and dazed children found miles away will be unable to say if the storm blew them there or if they walked.

People will know that many other towns to the east and west will have lain in the path of that cloud and that help will be slow in coming. And when the evening train arrives from the north, its cow catcher thrusting debris ahead of it along the tracks, the dumbfounded engineer will take the first of the injured on board and reverse the train all the way back to the nearest town, promising to come back.

It will occur to some that life, ordinary life, is going on for people other places; that the news has not yet been printed in the papers or broadcast on the radio, and that breakfast was a lifetime ago.

M
ae fills her largest pots with water and sets them on the stove. She shovels more coal into the firebox and then sits at the kitchen table to rip a top sheet into rags. She bites the sheet's edge each time before she tears, rather than nicking it with scissors. The fabric is dry on her lips; it smells like the linen closet and a good day's work. It's like preparing for a birth, she thinks, listening for the boil to start. When she's reduced the sheet to a pile of cotton squares the size of washcloths, she looks in the icebox. The chops she'd bought that morning on their plate, a half a pound or so of butter, two bottles of milk, one half empty, bacon, a bowl with six eggs. In the pantry there are opened bags of potatoes and flour, sugar, coffee, tea, and cornmeal. Soup, vegetables, and salmon in cans. Boxes of cornflakes, tapioca, Cream of Wheat. Cookies, three loaves of bread. None of it will last long.

Mae thinks that perhaps she should be behaving differently—not calmly, in any case. She supposes she's stunned, really, and that Lavinia is stunned, too. But it's Lavinia's calm she's mirroring, although there's a sadness, too, in Lavinia's face she can't figure yet, something that didn't vanish entirely even when she'd seen Paul. Once they'd gone back inside the house, it might have been possible to pretend it was just another day. Nothing was changed inside, after all. The world outside the house had gone all wrong, but inside everything was the same. No, not everything, Mae thinks. They were not the same. They had stopped being themselves once they'd fought their way out of the cellar; opening those doors again had been the last thing they'd do as just themselves for a good long while. Standing there in the yard, they'd been like figures glued inside a snow globe with the remains of their neighbors' shredded possessions drifting down around them. Now they're safe inside but avoiding the windows and their view of the exploded streets around them. It's strange to feel fear, she thinks, now that the storm has done its work and passed, now that they've seen that both Paul and the house are whole. What exactly it is she's fearful of is difficult to say. It's not the lack of electricity or food, it's nothing inside the house. It's not even awareness of what they in particular have been spared, but it feels like fear all the same.

Mae had been all of seven when she'd first seen a person dead. She'd woken to sounds that had nothing to do with a normal day and found her mother in the dining room, covering the wide oak table with a clean sheet so that they could lay her grandmother out on top of it in her nightgown, her hair still woven into her thin silver-gray sleeping braid, her ashy feet splayed out where they rested on the heels. When the undertaker had arrived and gone in with his black case and clanking bottles, they'd pulled shut the pocket doors behind him and left Mae to wonder silently how her grandmother would look when he was done with her. They had kept Mae busy with them all that morning, her mother and her aunt, cleaning the house and especially her grandmother's bedroom, which would be used for the viewing.
He's giving us time
, her mother had said of the undertaker, but time for what? Dead was dead as far as Mae could tell. She couldn't fathom the rush to push strange liquids into her grandmother's veins and build a box for her to lie in while relatives hurried into town on trains, as if her grandmother would somehow become more dead, or perhaps even less so, if everyone took their time.

Mae closes her eyes and lays her hands on the pantry countertop. She skates her hands out over the surface. The wood is cool, worn smooth with work and washing. When she opens her eyes again, the light falling in from the pantry window seems to her to be the same light she's seen on the counter and shelves for years. The gray half-light of an overcast day that would be too dim for work except for the familiarity of the shelves and their contents. She stands here in the pantry most afternoons, leaning with her head and shoulder against the window frame, to all appearances avoiding her work but really letting the view of the houses and the cobbled street decide what she will bake that day. She's never had more than a valance on the window before, but now she knows she'll need a simple calico curtain to block the window, even though that will also block the light.