Falling to Earth (30 page)

He doesn't know how long he's been sitting here on the davenport. He'll have to get up soon, lay Little Homer down on the davenport to continue sleeping, and go upstairs to shave and dress himself. He'll help his mother dress the children, he thinks, and then somehow he'll drive them all in the Ford to the cemetery, or perhaps Johnny will drive them. Paul can hear the clinking of plates and glasses coming from the kitchen, but he's no longer certain how long the children have been in there eating. Johnny's not here yet. They can't leave for the cemetery before he arrives. He hears the clock on the mantel behind Mae's chair ticking sometimes with a thunking noise that seems so heavy he feels it reverberate in his chest and others with a sound so faint it seems that the clock must be farther away, in another room or house entirely.

They should have flowers. Mae should have flowers, he thinks. But are they meant to lie on the box before they've lowered it into the earth or on the mound they'll heap on top of it afterward? He doesn't know, can't remember, but likely someone else will. His mother, perhaps, will somehow have found flowers and will know where to put them. Paul looks at his hands that are trembling and feels the tremor that originates in his very core and is surprised that his core should be his heart, his actual heart, and that it should hurt so. He wonders who will carry the box and begins to count, but stops when he realizes he's not certain how many men will be present. The front door opens then, and when Paul raises his head and turns toward the sound he sees Johnny there, setting his suitcase on the floor.

In that moment, Paul ages one hundred years. No longer the little boy, running to catch the bigger one; always behind, always slower, forever watching with naked adoration the brother who might slow his pace, might turn, might smile just at him. Now Paul has truly overtaken John, run right past the first moment they were equals, outstripping and surpassing him in being the first to bury his wife. He looks at John and sees him clearly, sees in John the way he himself must have looked to others before the storm: like a man who decided early that his dreams were within his grasp, that they were neither fanciful nor more than his due, and that he could attain and keep them by means as simple as industry and devotion. He sees in John what others saw in him after the storm: a man who still had everything he'd started the day with, a man who had a wife.

Looking at his brother, Paul feels envy. He recognizes it easily for what it is, knows what name to put to it, having seen it himself in so many eyes since the storm. It leaves him breathless, this bitterness piercing him, swelling in his gut. This is what they felt when they had to look at me, he thinks. He knows he should not compare the two, that this is not what a man feels who has cultivated envy, who has beat it into a froth until it can sustain itself, but that he should now be the one to look at another man, at his own brother, with envy is especially cruel.

How strange, Paul thinks, the way the storm finally reached him as well, reached him in a way the whole town can agree upon—has agreed upon, judging from the covered dishes folks have been leaving, as if to say,
We're all the same again
. He could stay now, he knows. He could bury Mae and send Johnny off in a week or so with promises that they'd all go out and visit soon, just as soon as the lumberyard goes back to turning a profit. He could go to work tomorrow morning and hang the bell back up above the door and somebody would ring it. He could walk down Union Street midday and folks would give him a nod. Later, a newcomer to town might notice that people were extra courteous, careful even, around Paul Graves and hear in explanation,
Well, he's had his sorrows
. This is what Mae bought them all with her length of rope.

Paul spreads his hand wide on Little Homer's chest. He feels the boy's warmth and his beating heart and he knows he will not stay. Sitting there, Paul sees clearly the living room emptied of its furniture, the windows curtainless, and his fingertips skimming each bedroom doorknob in parting benediction. He sees his mother, boarding a train with Johnny. He sees himself and the children, driving to Sacramento in the Ford. This is how he will use Mae's length of rope.

His mother and the children are standing in the doorway, waiting to greet Johnny, waiting to see what Paul will do. He knows that he must be the first; that Johnny is waiting for him. He must show them that he is not broken and, for now, he can do that simply by standing up. Paul feels an overwhelming sorrow, suddenly, at having let that look of envy escape his eyes, for letting Johnny see it, if only for an instant. He looks at Johnny, looks at him hard until everything else falls away and he sees not some long-ago, lost version of himself, but his brother who crossed half a continent to shoulder a coffin. These people—Johnny, his mother, and the children—these faces are all that matters now in the world, and they must be enough. Paul lays Little Homer down next to him and rises and each step he takes toward his brother is a journey in itself that he takes slowly. He sees the pain now in that beloved other face and cries out at the tenderness flooding him. He stumbles and Johnny catches him. Paul hears his own voice, filling the room with his brother's name.

A
lifting breeze pushes Homer's trouser legs against his shins and stirs the canopy of leaves in the trees lining the streets. He passes a quavering hand over his hair and the flower in his lapel and then leans on the crook of his cane and watches the house. It is only mid-afternoon. There will be daylight for several hours yet and Homer wonders how long he will stand here, how long he will be able to stand in this place. Perhaps he should have come later, closer to dusk, when he could have watched the blue air settle and darken around the house and seen lights come on in its windows.

Homer remembers clearly the feel of his father's suit coat against his cheek the day they buried his mother, and the look of his child hand, curled around his father's neck. He could also say that the harsh sunlight that day had made him squint and that he remembers looking down at his mother's coffin and at the wall of earth descending into the hole beside it, but he knows he's likely pieced those pictures together from other memories of other coffins he's stood beside since.

The photograph of the house is in his billfold, taken from his bureau drawer to carry along on this trip. The photograph that arrived in Sacramento in 1926 in a letter addressed to his father, that showed the house and the garage in the shadow of the oak tree, that Homer took from his father's trembling hand and kept for almost eighty years. He's certain he's standing now in the spot the photograph was taken, catty-corner from the house.

The paint on the clapboards is still gray. A wooden swing hangs on the left side of the porch. The front door and its oval glass remain and tiger lilies grow along the west side of the house. Homer sees the garage and the windows of the house, and he remembers the light that fell into the rooms that was brighter in the bedrooms and in the kitchen than it was in the living room because of the covered porch and the trees outside. And it is no longer now but eighty years ago and Homer is not an old man, he is only five. Ellis is not lost in the Pacific, he is upstairs somewhere looking for Homer, and his mother is not dead in the garage, she is standing at the counter in the pantry in the particular gray light that comes through the window there and falls on the floor and on her shoes, and he tries to hear her voice but he can't remember it, and he hears his grandmother's voice instead calling him to wash up, calling him to dinner.

Waiting behind him in the car is his daughter Mae, his only child, who is herself beginning to grow old. A tender, curious expression overtakes Homer's face that falls somewhere between sorrow and smiling. He is staring past the house now, far past anything he can see in front of him, thinking that it is unutterably sad and somehow also lovely that, when he tires of standing, Mae will be there to drive him away. That he will be sitting in a car with a woman named Mae, leaving Marah.

F
irst and foremost, I thank my husband and daughters, who have loved and supported me in ways only they can know.

My deep thanks to my other relatives, including my father, Arthur Southwood III, who was the book's first editor; my uncle, Dennis Southwood, who proofread the manuscript; my late mother, Susanne G. Southwood, whose memories of her mother's kitchen helped stock the pantry in this book; my step-father, Thomas Barker, who provided information on building techniques and the lumber industry in the 1920s; my uncle, Robert Southwood, a retired fire-fighter who instructed me on burning all manner of types of wood; and my cousin, Mark Southwood, for his help in publicizing the book.

Many thanks to my friend and mentor, Jay Neugeboren for his abiding support, and to my agent, Richard Parks, for his kindness, insight, and tenacity. Thanks also to my publisher, Kent Carroll, for his commitment and editorial nerve, and to my friends Elisabeth Fairfield Stokes and Christy Lorgen, who generously read and commented on the book.

I am grateful to the Sallie Logan Public Library in Murphys­boro, Illinois for their online archival material from the Tri-State tornado. I am also indebted to Peter S. Felknor for his excellent history,
The Tri-State Tornado
:
The Story of America's Greatest Tornado Disaster
, and to Wallace Akin for his riveting book,
The Forgotten Storm
.

 

K
ate Southwood received an M.A. in French Medieval Art from the University of Illinois, and an M.F.A. in Fiction from the University of Massachusetts Program for Poets and Writers. Born and raised in Chicago, she now lives in Oslo, Norway, with her husband and their two daughters.
Falling to Earth
is her first novel.