Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood Read Free Book Online

at Lavinia who was smiling at them all and realized she was savoring it, too, gratified at their increasing. That Mae had been pregnant with Little Homer when his father had died was a comfort in its way. He’d known, at least, that the last one was coming.
    It had been Mae who’d named the baby, though he supposed most people thought it had been him. She’d taken his hand at the funeral supper in the church basement and pressed it against her belly for him to feel the baby’s heel pressing hard from its side. “Doesn’t that hurt?” he’d asked, and she’d smiled and shaken her head no, but pressed back anyway with her fingertips to tell the baby it was time to stop. “It’s a boy,” she’d said and smiled at him in a way that told him she was right. “We’re going to call him Homer.”
    Life goes on
, Paul had thought at the time. So many things at once. His father, dead, abruptly. The farm, his mother’s to decide about now. A boy, another son, and his name. It was all right, though, not being in control of everything. He could settle again into his own life now and do the things he needed to do to keep moving forward. That his and his brother John’s debt from starting up the lumberyard was repaid was a comfort, too. They had gotten to see their father’s damp, proud eyes when they’d handed him the last envelope of bills, their loan paid in full and ahead of schedule. “Well, I’ll be,” he’d said and shaken both their hands.
    Paul wonders how much of the day the children can have comprehended. What began as a miracle for him has more likely seemed like magic to them; the destroying wind brought only rain and strange airborne treasures into their yard. They can have seen the other houses around theirs, they can be told that well over half the houses in town have been smashed, that an as-yet-unknown number of their schoolmates are dead, without their being able to attach any particular meaning to any of it. What was horrifyingly concrete for him would remain hazy and indistinct for them for a time, and perhaps should remain so for as long as possible. He knows that meaning and consequence will continue to filter into his own consciousness as well, that it might take the rest of his life to make sense of this.
    Soon enough he’d be the one to tell his children which of their friends were lost. Knowing that had made him avoid looking too closely at the children laid out at the school. Certain knowledge now, right now, was still too much. Holding the crushed body of a boy of twelve or thirteen had been too much. And in the end it wasn’t really grief for the boy that had overtaken him but a sad kind of joy at knowing that he’d still hear Little Homer and Ellis’s voices break one day; that he would see his sons grow taller and faster than he himself had ever been.
    Now his children are lying, all three of them, heavy and warm, against their mother. It’s a temptation to look at them all and try to erase them, one after the other, from the scene, to imagine other ways the day might have ended. But the occasional sounds coming from the rest of the house, the sounds of grieving that draw a moan out of Lavinia each time they hear them, tell him quickly, shamefully, that that is folly. It’s late, getting on toward midnight finally, not twelve hours yet since the storm, but it’s time for sleep.
    The weight of the coming day should make it impossible for him to sleep, but it won’t. He could sleep right here in this chair all night, probably without moving even once. He thinks of John and his wife, Dora, again as he has off and on throughout the day, and again, without any whiff of the old rancor. He thinks that their moving to California was providential. He hasn’t seen it for himself but has heard from others that the houses on their old street were hit hard, that there’s nothing left except