Falling to Earth (4 page)

She can hear Lavinia with the children upstairs opening dresser drawers and closets, pulling out linens, towels, and clothing to donate. Mae takes a stack of folded paper bags from the pantry upstairs, and they put the things they've piled on Lavinia's bed into them. There isn't as much as she would have thought, not as much as she had hoped. Of course, they should pile absolutely everything into those bags, everything but the clothes on their backs. It's hard to know where the line between thinking of their basic needs and stinginess lies.

“What else should we do?” Mae says. They are proceeding on instinct, preparing for a clothing drive before they've been told there is one. They've seen the smashed houses all along White and Elm, looked from the corner up and down both streets and not needed to walk any further, not needed to wait for someone to come to them and tell them what to do. When Paul had turned to run back toward downtown yelling, “Stay put!” when they were still giddy and wild with laughter at seeing him whole, Mae had stood watching him recede and then, when he was gone from view, looked at the way the storm had reshaped the landscape, as if it hadn't just smashed the houses, but had somehow blown things further apart. The spaces in front of her, cleared in their brutal way, were more open, and as Paul had receded, the town had seemed to recede with him.

Now she's standing, looking at the paper bags full of things that, up until this moment, they had bought or made and laundered and used themselves. She's aware of her breathing, of her uninterrupted breathing, and the feeling she still has in her legs of wanting to run. She had wanted to run with Paul, to run without stopping, to feel her legs reaching and hear her shoes striking the pavement, to simply run as she had run as a child, with abandon and no thought of destination. The children are all either sitting or leaning on the bed, each of them touching one of the bags in some way, poking the point of the bottom corner or running a finger along the crisp, cut line at the top. They're looking at the bags, wondering what other possessions they'll be asked to put in them and give away.

“I don't know what more to do,” Lavinia says. “Surely Paul will come home soon with news from town?”

Mae laughs and says, “Paul won't come home until someone forces him to, you know that.”

The children are worried, that much is clear. They've seen everything Lavinia and Mae have seen, looking up and down the ruined streets. But whatever the children saw was diminished the moment they looked back at their own house again, when they looked up at Mae or Lavinia, or even when they heard their father's voice coming from the mud-covered man who ran shouting into their yard. They will never think, never say, Mama, what will we do? They can't guess at anything larger than what they see, can't reason that hardship can and will follow for them, too. Like Mae, they heard the screaming from across the street, they saw Alice Duttweiler running up and down her own front yard, shrieking that her baby was gone. Mae can't tell them yet that the baby is surely dead, carried off God knows where by the cloud. She can't ever tell them that what looked to them like her holding Alice and comforting her, was actually her fighting to restrain Alice, preventing her from running back into her kitchen for a knife, telling her Nash will come, I know Nash will come. And when Nash Duttweiler did come running, just as Paul would do, and Mae had crossed the street back to her own yard, the children had petted her hands to comfort her without any understanding of all the reasons she was crying.

Mae jumps. Someone is pounding on the front door. She runs down the stairs and slows when she sees the outline of a large policeman standing on the porch through the sheer curtain over the front door's glass. Lavinia and the children are behind her by the time she opens the door.

“Ma'am,” The man nods. “Any dead or injured here?”

“No, we're all fine,” Mae says, her heart pounding. The day's first official business.

“Is your husband at home?”

“No. He was . . . He went back downtown to help somewhere. I have no idea where he is.”

“We need your porch, ma'am.” He looks behind Mae at the children, and when he looks at her again, he's hesitating.

Lavinia says quickly, “Come with me, you three. Let's see if that water's boiling.”

The policeman lowers his voice and Mae steps out closer to him.

“We're asking anyone who didn't get knocked flat for space for the bodies. There's nowhere else to put them, and frankly, it's cold enough that they'll do better outside.”

Lavinia had said as much, that they'd be laying out bodies on the porch before the day was out. Mae feels herself nodding and hears Lavinia clattering pot lids in the kitchen. She hears herself saying, “Yes, it's a good-sized porch,” and stares out over the policeman's shoulder, but there's no one else coming up the sidewalk. Now the cloud has finally reached them. Having passed them by before, it's reaching back now to deposit its dead at her door. She hears the policeman saying, “Wait for the undertakers. You'll be on a list,” and thinks that she and Paul would have been hanging up the porch swing again in a month or so, and wonders how they'll ever stand it now. The policeman going back down the steps brings her back to herself. She goes into the kitchen and finds that Lavinia has set the children to peeling potatoes.

“I'll try to manage alone as long as I can,” she says, taking the old metal washtub from the pantry. She and Lavinia carry the steaming pots of water out to the porch between them and tip them into the washtub. They've made the last trip when the next knock on the door comes. “Stay here and do what your Gran says,” Mae tells the children, taking her stack of rags from the table. She hasn't told them what the policeman wanted and is hoping Lavinia will do it for her somehow. The curtains are drawn in the front room on all the windows that overlook the wraparound porch to prevent the children looking out. There's nothing but the sheer lace curtain over the glass in the front door, but there's nothing to be done about that. Mae sees another man through it, waiting for someone to answer the door. He's standing there alone, just as the policeman was, and when she opens the door, he greets her with another “ma'am.” He's already laid the body of a woman to the side and is saying, “There's some coming without their clothes,” and she answers, “We've got clothes,” thinking of the paper bags and of her grandmother on the dining room table. Across the street, there are people crawling over the wreckage of their house, making piles of what belongings they can salvage on the grass. Next door, the Eberhardt's porch is being put to the same use as hers. Mae looks away; she doesn't need to see what they're doing over there, she'll be doing it herself in a moment.

“Straighten them out if you can,” the man is saying, going back down the walk. “Some of them are already going stiff.”

She's crying again and her blood is thundering in her ears. Her face is convulsed and there's no way to stop it, so she lifts her apron to her face and waits. It occurs to her that she has not yet had word about her friend Bess and she is ashamed not to have thought of Bess before this. She glances at the woman the policeman laid out long enough to be sure she doesn't recognize her and looks away again quickly. A list of painful truths races through Mae's head, among them the fact that Bess and her husband Stuart never dug a storm cellar for their house. Whether Stuart was inside or out when the storm hit is impossible to say, the only certain thing is that he was at work at the rail yards and not at home with Bess. Mae can picture the McCorkle house in every detail, she can picture Bess in it, and now she's working hard to stop the image of that house in ruins from entering her mind. Bess and Stuart's house is not so far away, only a couple of blocks north of downtown. She's praying, but it's all wrong. She should be pleading, bargaining with God, for Bess's safety, but instead she's praying that Bess's body doesn't end up on her porch. Thank God, she thinks, that they hadn't any children.

The boards Paul painted gray are there beneath her feet and there's a creaking sound coming from somewhere that sounds like the porch swing, and in her head she sees Paul, leaning back with her on their swing, rocking them slowly with just the heel of his work boot saying,
We got the best corner lot in town, we've sure got a view
. But the woman is waiting and there are more coming, so she dips hot water out of the washtub with a pail and kneels by the woman's side to begin to wash her. Someone's child, someone's sister, she thinks, wiping the woman's muddy palm with her rag and then someone's wife when she comes to the other hand and its ring. She washes the woman's face and neck, and when she hears the front door open, she looks up and Lavinia is standing there with her hand over her mouth. Mae asks her for a bedsheet and when Lavinia brings it to her she asks for the paper sacks they packed earlier, all of them. She straightens the woman's legs and folds her arms over her stomach with the wedding ring showing, then stretches the sheet out over her and puts a chunk of brick and a snapped piece of two-by-four she has found in the yard on one side to keep it from lifting in a breeze. It's a double sheet, one of hers and Paul's. How many times has she folded it before, with Lavinia on the other side of it, or alone. How many times has she smoothed it, fresh from the linen closet over their bed.

Virginia Eberhardt is looking toward downtown from her own porch, hands on her hips, a print scarf tied over her hair. Mae goes inside quickly before Virginia sees her looking, before she has to hear that Virgina is still waiting for news of her husband and their son. Leaning against the inside of the closed door, Mae is holding her hands in her apron, hands that she held in the tub of hot water and rubbed hard with a clean rag before she rose from her knees to come inside. The others are still in the kitchen. It'll be getting dark in another hour or so. Mae wonders how she'll be able to carry on outside in the dark, how long she'll have to carry on, and whether she'll be bent over a body when Paul finally comes up the walk for the night. She can hear Lavinia talking quietly to the children, talking somehow about ordinary things so that she can keep them away from Mae. She goes back out when she hears men coming again up the front walk, tells them to lay the next body alongside the first, and when one of the same men comes again a little while later and stops to look at her after he's laid out the next body, she sees that he's sizing her up, deciding how much she can take. She lets him have a good look at her, and when he's seen that she's tired and frightened but not broken, she says, “It's all right,” and he nods and goes back down the walk. She knows they'll bring her the worst ones after that, and they do, bodies they've already covered before they come up the walk, some smashed, some without their limbs and some, like they'd said, without their clothes. She washes them all as best she can, puts clothes on those that need them and covers them with sheets. There's a child, a girl, she has to wash and then cover with a dress that she'd made herself and that Ruby has outgrown. They worried about sending me a man with no arms, she thinks, but this is the one she's crying over, the muddied skin and broken legs, the tiny, slack mouth. When the porch is full, the men stop coming. She never counted the bodies and won't lift the sheets to do it now. There are fifteen or so; it doesn't matter.

Mae had never eaten the sandwich Lavinia brought out to her, couldn't bear to pick it up with her hands, although she could have held it wrapped it in the napkin laying under the plate. She's light-headed now, wondering what time it is. She's worked through till dark, and now the moon is rising, bright and hard as a button above the broken houses. She's hardly had to speak to the children, who watched her carry out more pots of hot water from where they sat at the kitchen table, all of them clearly, and for the first time in their lives, doing exactly what they had been told. Now she's shaking, her knees are bleeding, and her apron and dress are filthy and wet to the hem. When she goes in, Lavinia is there, talking to her in a soothing voice as if Mae is an exhausted child who needs to be coaxed into bed, telling her that the children are eating their supper and then walking ahead of her up the stairs with a lit candle. There are several inches of hot water in the tub, fresh clothes folded on the lid of the toilet and a cup of coffee and another sandwich on a plate sitting on the children's stool. Lavinia pulls Mae's sweater off for her, puts the candle on the windowsill and raises a hand to Mae when they hear a knock on the door downstairs. “I'll go,” she says, “You take your time.”

Mae feels as if she could sleep right here in the water, even if it went cold, just sleep and wait for Paul to come lift her out and carry her to bed. She knows, though, that there will be more for her to do, despite what Lavinia said, and she's agitated by the voices coming now from downstairs and the next knock on the door. She hopes they're coming already to start taking the bodies away, but knows as soon as she thinks it that they're not. Neither was the candle Lavinia put in the window downstairs meant for Paul. She closes her eyes and sees her mother's face, hears her saying,
He's giving us time
, saying it in the way an adult says a difficult thing to a child when the child needs to understand that she is not to ask any more questions. Mae knows now that there is such a thing as more dead, and that once you've laid the body out and washed it, you need to rush to build the box and dig the hole and pray that the trains are running on time.

N
ight falls. The sky above the town is clear, left scoured by the cloud, and as the light fails, it begins to color again, a delicate blue that deepens quickly, tumbling through navy into black. The scavenging continues through moonrise, but then tapers off despite the brilliant light falling on the town. Men and women take what possessions they can carry, gather what members of their family remain, and set out into the streets in search of shelter. Each person carries something. An older child will carry a sack of food, a man will strap rolled blankets and rugs together to carry on his back, a woman will hug a bundle of clothes to her belly as she goes, and even the smallest child will be given something to carry; the family's Brownie camera if it can be found, or a cooking pot.