Falling to Earth Read Online Free PDF

they’ll be asked to put in them and give away.
    â€œI 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.
    â€œMa’am,” The man nods. “Any dead or injured here?”
    â€œNo, we’re all fine,” Mae says, her heart pounding. The day’s first official business.
    â€œIs your husband at home?”
    â€œNo. He was . . . He went back downtown to help somewhere. I have no idea where he is.”
    â€œWe 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.
    â€œWe’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.
    â€œI’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,