When Paul had told Russ he was already working on Gertie's coffin, Russ had looked at him, astonished. Paul had startled himself, saying those words. He had felt a fierceness rush through him as he said them, suddenly determined that he should know which child would be buried in that one small coffin.
“Come out back with me,” Paul had said, knowing that if the others in the yard, and the Guardsmen in particular, saw Russ looking at the coffin, he could be certain it would be used for Gertie Meeker.
Russ had frowned for a moment, looking at the back of the store where Paul was gesturing before he agreed. All work had stopped when Paul led Russ out into the yard. The men stood there with their tools at their sides, watching the man in the dark overcoat walk between them and stop where Paul had been working.
“Just tell me where you want it sent,” Paul had said, knowing he would take it along himself, that he'd carry it alone on his shoulder through the streets if he had to.
“They've got her over at the high school. I suppose you should send it there.” Russ had stood staring at the partially built box, holding his hat in front of him with both hands. “I can't pay you for it yet,” he'd said.
“No one can pay for anything yet,” Paul had said, shaking his head. “We'll worry about that later.”
Russ had looked around himself then, scanning the yard as if he'd misplaced something. Paul had thought at first that Russ was so distraught he couldn't see the way out, but then he saw the simpler truth; that Russ was truly lost, having to force himself to believe the fact of his daughter's death. When Russ had turned to leave the yard, Paul had bent down swiftly to pick something up from the ground and followed him out. When they shook hands on the sidewalk in front of the store, Paul pressed a scrap of wood no longer than his thumb into Russ's hand before he turned to go back inside. Just a small piece of pine from a board he'd been cutting that the saw's teeth had snagged on earlier and that Paul had broken off and thrown on the ground.
“Daddy, why did you tell Mrs. Eberhardt it was my idea to burn this stuff?” Ellis asks, still crouching by the fire, and Paul answers him, feeling again like that boy on the county road who has just looked up but doesn't know yet that his mother is coming.
“I don't know, son. I just don't know.”
T
he women wait silent in their lines, holding their children by the hand. Women with babies ride them on their hips and bounce and sway when the babies begin to fret. The women shift their weight from one leg to the other and shuffle forward in child-sized steps when another box has been handed out and the woman holding it,
Excuse me, Pardon me
, is making her way out of the tent. The women cast sidelong glances at the box as it passes, trying to catch a glimpse of the foodstuffs it contains today. A cabbage, some cans. The woman passes too quickly for them to see more than that.
Mae stands Ruby and Homer on either side of her so that they can't fuss at each other. Homer pulls on her hand as he bends to look at something on the ground, and Mae pulls him up without a word. Their line moves forward, inside the big tent now. Mae smiles at each of the children once they're in the shade of the tent as if to say
Almost there
. She hears mumbling from the line next to theirs and a voice spits, “What on earth does
she
need food handouts for?” Mae turns, wide-eyed, knowing instantly that they will all be looking at her, and they are. Hard, righteous faces in a row hoping to shame her.
“Same as anybody here,” Mae says in a loud, steady voice. “The stores all got flattened.”
She squeezes Ruby's and Homer's hands hard; she feels them looking up at her for an explanation, but she lifts her chin and stares straight ahead at the Guardsmen packing boxes. She'd like to snatch Homer up in her arms and pull Ruby right back out of the tent, march them home and away from this spectacle. Her teeth clench, and Ruby whines, “Mama . . . ” pulling at Mae's fingers clenching on her hand. Mae lets go a bit, and the line moves forward again.
She can see them filling the rows of boxes from the crates full of foodstuffs. Bread, potatoes, milk, carrots, and cabbages. She hears the Guardsmens' voices,
There you go, ma'am. You ladies can bring these boxes back next time.
Her heart is knocking hard by the time it's her turn to receive a box. “Thank you,” she says to the Guardsman who gives her a kind smile, mistaking the look on her face for shame at accepting charity. Mae feels all the eyes on her as she pushes her way out of the crowd, pulling Homer and Ruby in a train behind her.
The box is heavy, but Mae keeps hold of it and says, “Get in,” to the children who stand staring at Homer's wagon. She walks briskly across the grass, yanking the wagon clear of the curb when she reaches the street.
She has as much right as anyone to be taking his box home, of that Mae is certain. Milk for the children and fresh bread are not things a body squirrels away in a pantry or cellar for later. She's certain of this and also that she's afraid of what she'd see if she once looked back at that tent. Mae walks with the heavy box the whole way home, carrying it first under one arm and then the other, holding her head high but nonetheless unable to stop the tears running into the neck of her dress.
Paul is jabbing the burn pile with a rake when she comes up the driveway. He follows her in after hearing her slam the kitchen door and stands there, silent and patient, while she takes cans out of the box and slams them down onto the kitchen table. His face, when she looks up, wears an inexplicable expression: part pity, part need, as if he had seen the whole thing and didn't need telling.
A
young minister sits among his elders. Baptist, Methodist, Lutheran, Presbyterian. Sitting on straight-backed chairs, they hold the lists of the dead. The young minister, Josiah Ollery, is no longer listening to the discussion of times and days and where exactly to bury the people who belonged to no particular church. He's looking around at the other men's faces. They're not untouched, themselves. One man here will bury his wife, another, his son. Everyone of them but Ollery must rebuild his church.
The minister to Ollery's left, Pastor Harland, touches his arm gently, and then withdraws his hand.
“You think we're wrong, spending so long on the details,” he says.
Ollery shakes his head.
“Perhaps we are,” Harland says.
“Of course we have to bury the dead,” Ollery says. “I just can't work out what to say to the living.”
“What have the living said to you?”
Ollery looks back at the older man. He's not so distraught that he can't see Harland's face clearly and each astonishing thing that lies in his expression. Harland sits with his hands clasped and his knees crossed. He is not the least bit agitated or anxious, like the rest of them. Ollery sees Harland's habitual kindness and attentiveness in his eyes, but there are new things there as well: a calm acknowledgment of the storm and an acceptance of the things he has seen since that day. In the time Ollery has known him, HarÂland's tranquility and faith have struck him with a force like physical vigor. Harland's frailtiesâthat he walks with a cane, that he stands so thin inside his suits they seem to belong to another manâhave always surprised Ollery.
“It's not what anyone has said so much as what I'm waiting to hear,” Ollery says. “What I'm afraid they'll say.”
Now that they are all silent, waiting for him to speak, he realizes that there is truly only one thing, one question, that scares him. But what scares him most, whether it is the question itself, the endless futility of answering it, or the very real likelihood that it will never be spoken aloud and only screamed inside people's heads, he doesn't know.
When he says it finally, “Why?” he's thinking of the people who scowl at his church as they pass it. The blazing, angry faces of those who pass and the stunned, blank faces of those who do come in. Either could demand an answer of him, either could stand in the doorway of his church and shout,
Why
? It could come from anyone at any time.
“If someone asks you why, you can answer him honestly and simply by saying that it was God's will,” says Pastor Coffman opposite him.
Ollery feels himself beginning to wince and closes his eyes hard. He had hoped he wouldn't have to be the one to do this. He hadn't wanted to be the one to force the discussion. He looks up again at Coffman and lets some of that same blazing anger come into his eyes before he says again in a level voice, “Why?” No one can mistake his meaning this time. He, the youngest among them, means to challenge them.
They are all looking at him now, but he fixes his eyes on Coffman, waiting for an answer. Coffman, like Harland, is over sixty. His wife died in the storm, horribly, they say. Ollery, whose young wife is injured, but alive, knows it is likely cruel of him to force this question on a man who would clearly rather not think about it at all.
“Please understand,” Ollery says to him, “I don't want to cause you any more pain. But we have to guide all those people out there through pain like yours. We have to be able to answer them.”
Coffman sputters, his voice rising. “But answer what? Why did it happen? Why did God allow it? Why did this person die and not the other? I don't dare say: we can't understand God, we can't know the mind of God!”
Ollery lowers his eyes briefly. Pastor Aufrecht, seated next to Coffman, looks around, flustered, from face to face. “At least the days of people saying it was a judgment are past,” he says.
“Are they?” says Pastor Stephens. “I'm not so sure.”
Stephens is the only one among them who will bury his child. His teenaged son, they say, survived the storm but died when part of the high school collapsed on him as he was working to free another boy from the wreckage.
“Ollery's right,” Stephens says. “But we don't need to just be prepared for âWhy?' we need to be prepared for absolutely anything. People will come out of this thinking and saying strange things, irrational things, even that this was somehow a judgment. People who were perfectly reasonable a week ago will be changed. A thing like this changes people.”
“They're already changed,” Ollery says. “They're angry, some of them. Don't forget, I see this in a different way than the rest of you because my church is still standing. I thought people would flock here to take shelter at night and pray during the day, but they haven't. Not nearly as many as I'd thought.”
“All right, then,” says Coffman. “If someone asks you why, what will you say?”
“I haven't the faintest idea. How can I convince people that God has not abandoned them when it seems that he has?”
“Don't forget that God is still present in all of us,” says Harland. “He is present in every one of us who has done something to help a neighbor since the storm.”
“Perhaps it's the suddenness of it,” says Stephens. “Suddenly, on a day like any other, life as you knew it is gone and your loved ones are gone and there was no time to say good-bye.”
“Yes, but people die suddenly every day,” Ollery says. “A man crossing a street can be struck and killed by a car. It's the scale of things here that makes this different. The insurance companies will be calling this an act of God, and that's what it appears to be, an act of God.”
“It was an act of nature,” Aufrecht says, frowning.
“In a world made by God,” Ollery says.
“I truly take comfort in knowing that my wife is with God now and out of her pain,” says Coffman. “They're all with God now. Can't we try to comfort the living with that?”
“Some of them, yes,” says Ollery. “But as you said, we can't understand God, so how can we understand his taking these people away from their families?”
“They were his to take,” says Harland.
“How do I explain that to a child? That what God wants is more important?” says Ollery.
“You might as well ask why God allows sickness as why he allowed the storm,” Coffman shouts. “God never meant this world to be our final home. This world is not our final home!”
Ollery shouts back, “Yes, and if there were no bad in the world we would never experience the good as good!” He exhales and lowers his voice. “They've heard all those things many times before. I mean something else, something that they haven't already heard or thought of themselves.”
Aufrecht clears his throat before he speaks. “If you don't think faith is enough, then perhaps you should try reasoning. God once created a perfect world in the Garden of Eden. We're outside the Garden now. There's an angel with a fiery sword to keep us on this side, and this is the side where bad things happen. Earth is not Heaven. There are no tornados in Heaven.”
“I thought you said we were past thinking this was a judgment!”
“It's a paradox,” Stephens says. “God gave us the gift of water. People drink it, but sometimes people drown in it. God gave us the gift of fire, but the same fire that warms us and cooks our food can burn our house to the ground.”
“That just turns a problem into a puzzle.” Ollery says.
“Josiahâ” Harland says, softly.
“I can hardly say that to a widow with no home!”
“Josiah,” Harland says again. “You know that if you answer from the very deepest part of your heart, you will never answer badly.”
Ollery looks back at Harland, at that lined, gentle face and everything it contains. He feels chastened, although no one has chastised him.
“You must first be honest with yourself,” Harland says in the same kind voice. “They're not the ones you're truly worried about. None of them can scare you by asking why. But you can scare yourself.”
I
t is a fine day. The minister has said as much, although he probably shouldn't have.
The changeability of all things
, he said, and Mae wondered what prevented the fathers standing there from taking his neck into their hands. So far he hasn't reminded them that the Lord giveth and taketh away, and she prays that he won't.