Read Online Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood - Free Book Online

up anyway.”
    â€œI’ll be quiet.”
    Mae shakes her head and gives him a rueful smile with her eyes. “No, you won’t,” she says.
    Â 
    They’re there when he opens the door. Lon, Clarence, Irene. Only Dennis is missing and in the shouts that follow Paul’s crossing the threshold, someone manages to say that he went out on a train to Carbondale with his injured wife. Paul can do nothing but stand there while they clap him on the shoulder and beam at him, feeling relief run through him slowly, moving out from his core like warmth on a winter day when he’s come back inside to a fire in the fireplace and knows he’ll get warm and stay warm for the rest of the night. Paul sees the other people in the back of the room, smiling shyly at him.
    â€œWe slept here,” Clarence is saying. “Our places are all flatter than flat, so we all just came back here. There was the heater and plenty of floor space and the sink in back.”
    Clarence’s voice recedes as if he’s walked into another room. Paul hasn’t seen these people for a good while, and has rarely seen them here at the yard, but he’s looking now from face to face and back again: Lon’s wife, Clarence’s wife and teenaged son, even Irene’s mother. Clarence is still talking. He’s normally taciturn, the one they rib because of his one-word replies. Now he’s rattling on apologetically about something, twisting a piece of cloth in his hands.
    Paul smiles at him, and everyone laughs when he says, “Took a cyclone to loosen your tongue.”
    â€œWe’ll pay you back for the coal, or you can take it out of our pay—”
    â€œI’ll do no such thing.” Paul’s eyes are stinging again, he hopes he can keep the shake out of his voice. “I wish there was room for you all at my place, but we’re full up. This sure as hell isn’t much, but I suppose four walls and a roof is better than flat. You did right, coming back.”
    It’s almost like seeing family after a long period apart. Paul can’t imagine he’d have felt any differently if he’d come through the door to find his brother John waiting for him there with his wife, Dora, and their two boys. Maybe he didn’t come back after the storm, he can’t ever change that, but he can’t see that they blame him for it, and the lumberyard he and John built was there for them to come back to. What would John say if he walked in here right now and saw the men they hired together still here. Irene, too, still at the first job she’d had coming out of secretarial school in Carbondale.
    â€œI was just headed out, hoping to get some word about you,” Clarence says. “We didn’t know what to think. Or more like we knew what we thought, and we were trying not to think it.”
    Serious again, Paul is jolted back to the storm. Irene is looking at him like he’s performed a miracle right out of the Bible.
    â€œYou were right outside,” she says, pointing toward the door. “I saw you there on the sidewalk, right outside and then you disappeared. ”
    What must you all have seen since then, Paul thinks. He’d walked the long way down White Street all the way to Union to get to the lumberyard, right down the middle of the street, or the closest he could come consistently to the middle, having had to walk around and climb over debris the entire way. He had not been alone out in the streets this morning as he had been late last night, when there had only been the wreckage and the moonlight and a burnt smell hanging in the air for company. There were people out all along the streets, walking gingerly on the wreckage, searching in the daylight now for whatever they could save. Ragged things fluttered from the trees wherever there were still trees. There were the same kinds of clattering sounds that had woken Paul earlier, coming intermittently when someone