Falling to Earth (8 page)

These other men will understand when the grieving man says,
I keep seeing them, whole, when I sleep
. And when he says,
I see them, smiling, walking to me out of a ruin,
they will nod their heads deeply, having seen it, too.

Mostly the men around these fires want to detach themselves from their losses by talking about those worse off than themselves. Standing in the glare of the fire, they don't see the wreckage illuminated behind them.
I heard as folks' clothes was ripped right off their backs. Walkin' naked as God made 'em, right down the middle of Main Street,
one man says.
I heard that, too
, the man opposite him replies.
Course most everybody was covered up good with mud and dirt, wherever their clothes had got to
. They shake their heads at the stubbornness of those too prideful to accept a tent and cookstove from the National Guard.
Any roof, even a canvas roof, is better than sleeping rolled up in a rug next to a bonfire in a field
, a man says.
Well, they don't want charity, they say
, is the answer.
They'll come around soon enough, we keep having these flurries at night.

The men end by talking about the things they cannot believe.
They're saying it was worse than a battlefield
, one man ventures, hoping for confirmation, although he is ashamed that he has spoken so baldly.
Well, I was over in France
, another man quietly answers, pausing.
I never saw anything over there to match it.
The men are aghast, but grateful for the veteran's authority in resolving the question. If they'd had exemptions in the war, well, that was all right. They can say now they've seen worse and survived.

The men are emboldened; some of them look at each other now and not into the fire, embarking on the one topic too incendiary to be decent.

Is it true what they're saying about Paul Graves?

All true.

What's that?

Didn't get hit.

You mean his place? His house didn't get hit?

That's right.

Not just his place. The lumberyard, too. Neither one got touched.

I heard his Ford got hit.

Moved. It got itself moved, not hit.

His kids weren't even in school that day. Home sick, all of 'em, and down cellar.

One man whistles in spiteful amazement.
That's luck for you.

Another man looks from face to face and says,
Well, that can't be. There can't be just one.
The others look back knowingly, in gentle derision of his disbelief.

That's what everyone's saying. What Graves says himself.

The unbelieving man frowns into the fire, shaking his head slowly, laboriously. To accept this news as true is to magnify his own anguish, to bitterly underscore the randomness of the storm. The other men in the circle know this already, and they watch as understanding settles on the last man among them to hear the news.

That just can't be,
he says
. He can't be the only one.

 

T
hree-footers and six-footers, that's all he's got measurements for, all he's ever made. Paul is leaning on the counter, papers spread out between his hands. Lon is looking on next to him, worrying the eraser on a short pencil with his thumbnail.

“Seems like we need a couple more sizes,” he says. He glances up at Paul who nods but keeps frowning. “Three foot's too big for a baby and too small for a ten-year-old.”

“Go ahead,” Paul says, “Figure out two more and we'll get cutting. But make them simple. We don't have time for toe-pinchers.”

Lon pauses. As soon as he steps away, work will begin in earnest. This is what they will be doing, all they will be doing, and the Lord only knows how long they will be doing it. Paul looks at him and asks, “Anything else?”

“Are we building them or just cutting the lumber?”

“Both,” Paul says. “I figure we'll do both until someone tells us different.”

They look at the door and the windows on either side of it. They can hear occasional foot traffic outside, but it's impossible to see any people who might be passing, the windows are so muddied. It has always been Paul's habit to look up each time the light in the windows changed, to see who was passing on the sidewalk, who might already be turning to open the door. Paul has always looked up quickly, so quickly that he's known who was coming in before the bell has even had a chance to ring. He knows the look of most everyone in town, no matter if they're wearing a straw hat or a muffler, and he can name folks a block away just by their gait or the way they stand. He'd learned it watching his father, who always seemed to know exactly who was coming up the long dirt road to the house when everyone else was still squinting, only certain of it being a man or a woman. Once Paul had moved to town, it became a regular feature of his days at the lumberyard, making Johnny and everyone who worked for them shake their heads and smile as he called out greetings to people before they'd gotten a foot over the threshold.

Now Paul is of more than half a mind to silence the bell over the door, to stuff newspaper in its cheerful throat. Always before he's greeted people as if he's been expecting them, but now he'll have to meet their gaze knowing already what it is they've come for. He decides instead to prop the door open to prevent the bell from ringing, and to let in some extra light, if nothing else. Pulling the door open, he's startled by someone pushing on it from the other side. A man in uniform comes in, a National Guardsman, smart and clean, wishing him a good morning, saying his name is Captain Kemmel and asking who the owner is.

“I am,” Paul says, taking him in. “Name's Graves.” The Cap­tain takes hold of Paul's hand and grips it a touch more firmly than he needs to, a touch longer. He looks hard at Paul, and Paul knows he's being measured. He thinks he sees regret in Kemmel's eyes, an apology of sorts for having had to begin with an assessment. They're of a similar age, both wear a wedding band. Paul recognizes something of himself in Kemmel's face; this man also has children, of that he's certain. They're of a kind, Paul thinks. He sees the beginnings of a smile around Kemmel's eyes, that he's also recognized himself in Paul.

“I suppose you've been expecting me,” Kemmel says.

“After a fashion.” Paul had thought he'd understood that absolutely everything had changed, but he still hasn't. He realizes now how foolish, how hopeful he had been, thinking it would be his regular customers and friends coming through the door. How many of them must be dead, he wonders, if the government has sent this man to order their coffins.

“How many men do you still have?” Kemmel asks.

“Two, besides myself,” Paul says. He remembers Clarence's son, Sam, then and adds, “One of them has a boy here, sixteen years old. He can help.”

Paul is reasonably certain he's answering Kemmel's questions because he's being asked them only once. Still, the Cap­tain's voice is coming to him distantly, as if they're separated somehow and not walking side by side through the office out to the yard. Two hundred coffins, Kemmel is saying. More than two hundred.

They're looking over the stock in the yard. They've been clearing debris from the yard all morning and Clarence is still at it now, making room for the pallets on which they will stack the cut lumber for coffins. Kemmel is asking how much of the stock was ruined in the storm, and before Paul can say that they haven't gotten that far, he has to stop Irene going by with a bucket in each hand.

“Not yet,” he says, holding up a hand.

“But the windows!” Irene protests.

Paul exhales hard to keep himself from frowning. “Just one, then. And just enough to let in some light.”

Paul hears the bell ring as Irene goes out the door to the sidewalk. He's wondering how much longer he's going to be answering questions, how soon he can get out there to stop her from doing too good a job on that window. Yes, he keeps answering. Yes, they've got enough handsaws to work with while the electricity is out. He and his men are uninjured. They'll finish moving the spoiled stock and start cutting when they uncover lumber they can use. They're walking back into the office now and the Captain is talking to Lon about coffin sizes. Irene keeps coming through with her buckets and splashing water onto the window outside with a cup to soften up the mud. She's scraping the mud off now, dragging it along the glass with the edge of a scrap of wood.

Captain Kemmel is congratulating them on their good fortune and shaking hands again.

“It's lucky for us all that you weren't hit,” he's saying. “There will be Guardsmen detailed here to cut lumber, then they'll start building the coffins once you've got enough cut to get them started.”

Paul knows there'll be some who will want to build coffins for their own dead, as he and John had for their father. Then, of course, there had been time to do the thing properly. Now people will be forced to knock out what amounts to crates, rough ones at that.

“There's one coffin already built,” Kemmel is saying. Paul and Lon look at him and even Irene pauses on her way back out with her buckets full of water.

“You didn't hear? There was a funeral going on in the First Baptist Church when the storm hit. The coffin's still inside the wreckage.” They all stare at him. It might be funny later, each of them knows, many years on, when the idea of a coffin inside a collapsed church won't leave them wondering who it was who was lucky enough to get himself boxed up the very morning of the storm.

Captain Kemmel is moving toward the door, nodding at Irene's buckets and saying, “Wash all you want with that water, miss, but don't drink it. It's contaminated.”

Now there's the water to worry about, too, Paul thinks. And the coffee they've already been drinking this morning. “I have to warn Mae,” he says aloud, wondering just what it is they're meant to drink if it's not the town water. But there's the yard to clear and the lumber stock to sort and boards to cut and bang into boxes so all the corpses around town can start to disappear off people's porches. Kemmel motions Paul outside with him and then says in a low voice, “I'll send a man out to your place with water.” Kemmel holds up a hand when Paul begins to protest at the preferential treatment and says, “You're needed here. We'll be discreet about it.”

Paul goes back inside, looking at his hands and starting to unwrap the bandages so that he can get his work gloves on. He can see Irene plainly through the big front window now. She's gotten rid of the worst of the mud and is moving the rest of it around on the glass with a rag.

“Knock on that window, will you?” Paul says to Lon and heads toward the back. “Ask her to start getting together some rope.”

 

They decide on a rotation—one man measuring, two sawing, one stacking—to avoid fatigue. Paul sees the others hesitate, not knowing what task Sam should be put to.

“You can pull a straight saw, can't you, Sam?” he asks, holding out a handsaw to the boy.

“Yes, sir,” Sam says, taking the saw with a glance at his father.

“Thought as much. All right if I pay you a wage today?”

It's hard not to wink when Sam thanks him, but Paul manages to nod at the boy instead and give him a smile with his eyes. They settle in to work, and when a group of Captain Kemmel's men arrive, they see Paul's rotation in operation and immediately set to work in two more groups of four alongside Paul and his men.

Irene comes through at intervals and forces them to rest and drink some of the water the Guardsmen have brought with them to the lumberyard before they relinquish one task in the rotation and begin another. Paul is streaming with sweat. They all are. He can't think when he's ever cut this much wood with just a hand saw. He looks at each board passing through his hands knowing that although he's built coffins before or sold people the wood for them, he's never cut a board before and known, even as he cut it, that it was going straight into the ground to rot.

He and John had built the lumberyard knowing that the lumberyard would build Marah. They had both taken pleasure in seeing frames going up on lots here and there in town, knowing that they had cut the gleaming boards. Surely John, like Paul, had taken his family on evening drives, pointing out the houses that had been framed with wood from their lumberyard, laughing when the children begged him to show them another and another. Marah was built and Marah must be rebuilt. But for now there is only digging, the furious digging in the cemeteries.

Irene's voice beside him startles Paul. “Your wife is here, Mr. Graves,” she says.

“Mae? Here?”

“She's outside, out front.”

“Why doesn't she just come in?”

Irene starts back into the office, calling over her shoulder, “She says she's not staying.”

Mae is there, in the street, holding the handle of Homer's wagon.

“I didn't think I'd see you at all today unless I stopped by now,” she says. “I have to return some water that was delivered to us by mistake.”

No, Paul thinks, not much discreet about a National Guardsman coming to the house with a large container of water. He sees that Mae has empty stock pots stacked in the wagon as well, to take drinking water home in again. He grins at her, grateful and proud.

“Can you manage all right?”

“I walked right down the middle of the street all the way here.” Mae says, and nods at the Liberty Theater next door, where a couple of men are at work cleaning the sign. “They're making progress here, too, I see. You could probably let Irene have another go at the windows this afternoon.”

Paul watches her until she turns the corner onto Walnut Street and disappears from view. He exhales heavily and when he passes Irene on his way back out to the yard he says, “My wife tells me they're cleaning next door.”