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

follow before he goes through himself. And even then, knowing that they are waiting for him, Paul enters the room not knowing how to begin to talk about the lumber they will need to measure and cut, over and over again, to sell for coffins, and the coffins that they will likely have to build themselves, to sell ready-made to undertakers and to new widows, and everything sold on credit because the banks were hit and no one can get at their money.
    The little room is still dark; hardly any light can get through the muddied windows. It puts Paul in mind of waking in the blue air with Little Homer breathing deeply beside him in the bed.
    â€œI dreamt that every last thing was gone,” he is mumbling nervously to Lon and Clarence. “My house was ruined and my family was gone.”
    There had been varnished woodwork everywhere and the kind of carving he’d always wished he’d learned to do, carpets everywhere riding on long, gleaming floorboards, velvet curtains on tall windows. He’d heard his name then, someone calling his name from outside, and when he’d gone outside the house, the city he lived in was gone. The other houses around his were entirely gone. There was no sign that they had ever been there, nor were there people anywhere. Just pale, flat earth as far as he could see, parched and cracked by a hard wind. He’d turned then to escape it, to run back into his house and lock its door against the wasteland, but when he turned, the door was hanging crooked on its hinges, and the paint on the clapboards was faded and flaking. The curtains were torn and flapping out of jagged window glass. He’d known then that Mae and the children were no longer inside the house, that they had disappeared just as the people in the town had disappeared to a place he would never find. The sound of a shutter banging on the house had been the last thing he heard before he woke.
    He sees them standing there and sees a new expression overtaking their faces as they look at him. He hears his own voice, and although he has already begun to regret it, he continues. “I had nothing.” He knows he should have found a way for them to speak first and tell him what they saw, and though he knows it clearly, as clearly as he still sees himself standing in the wasteland in his dream, as if he is the only one among them who could have dreamt it, he says again, “I had nothing.”

9
    E ach night after the storm, the men come out to wander the streets, surveying the damage as if the ruined houses will tell them something new. They set out determined, intending to take in what they will see as nothing more than an implausible exhibition dreamed up for a World’s Fair. They vow to go further afield this time, to gain a broader view of the devastation in order to place their own losses in better perspective. Each man hopes the present quietness will allow him to view his neighbor’s tragedy as if he is a tourist, but the horror embedded in each inconceivable sight shrinks them into shuffling old men.
    Those men among them who are deputized bear arms: rifles and pistols removed from their own wrecked homes before looters could find them. Even without the firearms, the deputies would be recognizable by their gait, the particular stride conferred by their jurisdiction. Unlike the other men, they are imperturbable, having been given a purpose, and they have the luxury of empathy, their dignity restored by their office.
    The deputies learn to read the faces of the men they meet and tailor their questions according to what they see there. If a man has an angry look, they’ll ask,
You had trouble with looters?
because anger is a concrete thing and means the man has not stopped fighting. If a man has a bewildered look, they are mindful of his dignity and of what he has likely lost. They’ll venture to touch a man like this, to lay a hand on his shoulder and say,
We’ll dig out, you know
. And if a