Falling to Earth Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    â€œStraighten 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