His daddy is there in the office, alone, with his back to the door, bent over his desk, his head in his hands. Homer stands, panting, in the doorway and smiles a little. But then the smile falls away when he sees his daddy's eyes searching his face. Suddenly, the chair his daddy had been sitting in is tipped over backward onto the floor and his daddy is there, kneeling in front of him, hurting his shoulders, holding them tight. His legs and his sides still hurt from running. He has seen something like this look on his daddy's face before, when he holds his mama's shoulders, pleading with her with his eyes. And then they are running again, his daddy pulling on his hand, and the people on the sidewalk are moving out of the way and staring. His daddy lifts him up and carries him, still running, jolting down the sidewalk, then stops to swing him onto his back and starts running again, his breath juddering with his footfalls.
Homer holds onto his daddy's shoulders and watches for their house come into view. When they've reached it, his daddy sets him down in the same place Homer stood staring at the car when he'd first come home from school. Now his daddy is panting and staring at the car. Homer points toward the side door. His daddy puts his hands on Homer's shoulders, not squeezing now, but pressing down, rooting Homer to the sidewalk. Homer watches him walk away, past the car toward the big garage door. He sees him take hold of the handle and wrench it up, grunting with the effort. The door rises and Homer sees his mama there inside, with her back to him, hanging from a beam.
Homer walks toward her, wanting to see her face, wondering what expression she'll be wearing. They didn't let him see the dead bodies after the storm. They'd kept him home with Gran during the searches and then when the burials came, all the dead people were hidden in their boxes and there was nothing to see. Even when there'd been bodies in a line on the front porch, he hadn't managed to see more than a couple of pairs of feet through the muddied window glass.
His daddy rushes past him and hugs his mama around her legs, lifting her up. He's looking up at her, looking up at the rope, shouting, “Oh, no, Mae! No, Mae, no!” When he lets her down again and grabs a ladder to stand on, Homer thinks of the crate and his school books lying in the grass outside. He watches his daddy on the ladder next to her, holding her under the arm like they're dancing, sawing at the rope above her head with his pocket knife. He nearly falls off the ladder once he's gone through the rope. He throws his knife away from him, hard at the far wall, where it bounces back and spins on the cement floor. He has to let her fall, but he holds onto her arm and comes down off the ladder, and then he hurls the ladder away from him like he did the knife.
Homer still can't see her face. His daddy is on his knees, hugging her, holding her head against his neck. He rocks her back and forth, smoothing her hair with his palm. Homer remembers all of the other fathers and their wet faces after the storm. He feels his gran come in behind him, hears her cry out, and feels her fingertips on his shoulder when she tries to catch him, but he's quicker than she is, and he bolts for his mama. His daddy catches him, and they hold her between them on the floor, rocking her between them.
He hears his gran start to lower the garage door, and then his daddy's terrible voice bawling, “No! Leave it up! I want them all to see what they did.”
Even holding on to her as he is, Homer's thinking of other things. His books and lunch pail still in the grass, and the crate that will need moving. He's wondering how long they can all stay here like this. How long before they must do the next thing.
He knows, somehow, that they will continue, just as the town had continued after the storm, propping itself up again as if the houses had only been paper, blown over by the wind. He knows there are boards enough to make a box for his mama, and that the cemetery is still not so full it can't open itself for one more grave. His daddy will go back to the lumberyard, and his gran will keep at the washing and cooking. They will do the things they must each day, and then they will sit quiet at home each evening. He knows somehow that he will keep growing. It won't be so different. In a way, she'd left them long ago, and only just this morning had finally said good-bye.
Homer can see the objects around him inside his closed eyes. Paint and oilcans on the shelf; the mower, the clothespin bag that used to be Gran's red apron. The toppled ladder and his daddy's open knife on the floor. The ashen light, the dark beams and rafters. He imagines himself up on that beam, beside the knot his mama made, looking down at himself and the rest of them. Gran standing just inside the door, holding Ellis and Ruby against her, not letting them see. His mama's doll body across his daddy's knees, and him, sprawled out like a starfish, riding on top of them both.
L
avinia leads the children back into the house and leaves Paul in the garage with Mae's body. She feels she must do something concrete for the children, so she sits them at the kitchen table and sets a glass of milk in front of each of them. She goes into the hall and looks at the telephone there on its table. She could pick up the receiver and ask the operator to place a call to California, but then the thought of hearing John's voice on the line wanting to know the what and how of it is too much, and she turns away.
“I have to go downtown,” she tells them. “Only a few blocks there and back. I won't be long.” She smiles at each of them out of pity and a terrifying love, touches each of their faces, and takes her hat and coat from their hook behind the pantry door.
She falters on her way out the backdoor, knowing that her accustomed route will take her past the open garage door, but she manages to walk past it without looking in and then manages to walk erect all the way to the telegraph office. It's a mercy, finally, to think that no one she meets will try to talk to her. In the telegraph office, she takes the form and writes the dreadful words,
Mae dead please come
. She looks at the paper for a moment before she pushes it across the counter to the astonished telegrapher who stares at the paper and then at her and then at the paper again before he begins to tap the message out over the wire to Sacramento. She unfolds a dollar bill from her coin purse and hands it to him, then puts the change in her coin purse without counting it.
Standing outside the office with her hand on the doorknob, she wonders if she is strong enough to slam the door so hard in its frame that the glass breaks. She stares at her hand on the knob, imagining how the impact of the door on the frame would feel running up her arm and into her shoulder and how her shoes would look if she were standing amid shards of glass. She closes the door carefully behind her instead and returns quickly home.
Lavinia slows when she has almost reached the garage. The children are waiting for her inside the house. She can have no way of knowing if they are all still sitting at the table where she left them, if their milk glasses are full or empty, or if they have hurled the glasses and the milk at the windows and walls and smashed them. She had thought of the children first in her haste to get home, but now it is Paul, her own child, she needs to see.
She enters the garage and, in the dim light, finds a bucket she can turn upside down to sit on next to Paul. He is there where she left him, next to Mae in her sheet, his legs splayed out and his face in his hands. The garage door is up; any one of their neighbors could walk by and look in to see them there, but miraculously, no one passes. It doesn't matter; Lavinia knows well enough that the news is already spreading throughout the town as surely as if she had sent a telegram to each and every household.
She lays her hand on the back of Paul's head and looks out to the street.
“John will be coming soon,” she says.
P
aul takes to sleeping part of the night in the backseat of the Ford. It is cramped and cold, but still the only solution to lying awake in bed all night, thinking about the garage. If he's in the car, at least he'll sleep a while andâthis surprises him most of allâsleep peacefully until he goes quietly back to bed while the others in the house are still asleep. On his third night in the garage, Paul wakes with a start at the sound of the passenger door opening. Little Homer climbs in next to him without a word, and Paul makes room for him, pulling the blanket Homer is dragging all the way inside before he pulls the car door shut. He tucks the blanket in around the boy and pulls him close against his chest.
“How did you know where I was?” Paul asks him.
“I didn't,” Little Homer says. “I just wanted to be out here.”
Paul thinks about reprimanding the boy for leaving the house before dawn, telling him how frightened they would all be if they didn't find him in his own bed in the morning, but then doesn't speak when he realizes that the garage would be the first place he'd look if Little Homer went missing.
Paul looks down at his hand on that small yellow head that is rising and falling with his breathing. He's astounded by the way they have continued these last few days; the way they've all kept breathing and eating and drinking just enough. Most astonishing of all was the moment his mother somehow exchanged the look of horror on her face for one of resolve. Even as Paul sat there on the floor of the garage watching the terrible finality settle on the white faces of his children, his mother was the one who went back into the house for a sheet to wrap Mae in, who knew better than to insist that the children come with her but left them standing right where they had stopped when they'd seen, who knew enough of children's feelings to bring a pillow to cushion Mae's head against the gray cement before she wound the sheet around her, who spread the sheet out on the dark floor and set the pillow on top of it before she lifted Little Homer off of Mae and stood him with Ruby and Ellis, who knelt painfully on the floor to roll Mae out of Paul's arms and onto the sheet and used her own body as a shield so that the children would not see Mae's face or her purple tongue, who, having covered his dead wife, stayed kneeling and reached for Paul and held his head as he is now holding Little Homer's.
Paul knows what's waiting for him inside the house, all the things that are waiting for him this day. The first thing he will see upon entering the kitchen is the telegram from John lying on the table, which neither he nor his mother seems capable of moving, of folding, of tucking into a book somewhere, that says only
Leaving immediately arrive Carbondale Sunday
. The next thing will be the stove, which he will have to pass knowing it was there he threw out the first copy of his letter to John, which he now believes Mae found and read when she opened the iron door to light the stove in preparation for cooking their supper, which he believes she still had wadded in her hand with the dishtowel when he came into the kitchen and she asked him how to move the Ford, which she read without knowing that it was only a draft, and which convinced her that Paul had buried the idea of moving when he laid it on the ashes. In the upstairs hall will be the doors of all the bedrooms where his mother and Ruby and Ellis are still hopefully sleeping, but where the children will nonetheless have thrashed their covers onto the floor. And in his own bedroom, which is only his now, will be the empty bed and the suit and shirt his mother pressed and laid out for him to wear to the cemetery.
Paul closes his eyes and sleeps some more and after a while, when Little Homer stirs, Paul pulls the blanket away from him to wake him and then carries him into the house. His mother is there in the kitchen, standing in her housecoat, pouring milk for the children.
“There was more food on the porch this morning,” she says. “Another covered dish. They must leave them in the middle of the night.”
Paul looks away, wincing, at the floor. He shakes his head instead of speaking.
“I put it out at the end of the walk, just like the others, and came right back inside.”
“Mother, I can'tâ”
“No, don't you worry about it. I'll take care of it. I imagine they'll give up trying soon enough.”
Ruby and Ellis are looking up at him from their plates of bread and jam. They've come to seem so similar these last few days, as if they'd been born twins and Paul had needed to be shocked into remembering it; always together now, their faces blanching and crumpling by turns. Paul tries to smile at them, but realizes he is shaking and keeps going through the kitchen, past the table, past the stove, carrying Homer up the stairs to the toilet. When he's carried him back downstairs again, he finds he's still unwilling to put him down, and he goes to sit with Homer on the davenport where he's then faced with Mae's wing chair with her needlepoint pillow still in the seat and her basket of knitting on the floor beside it.
He wonders when he'll be able to tell his mother that he sent the letter, that his letter and John will have passed each other as they crossed the country on opposite trains. That when Johnny walks through the front door today, he will not yet have read it, the letter that Paul wrote without telling anyone and sent too late to save Mae who saw it without knowing what it was, who read it, the first letter, without telling anyone while Paul was downtown mailing the second. Johnny will be coming through that door knowing only that Mae is dead but not knowing how or the reason why. Paul will have to look at him knowing that Johnny will see in his eyes how completely Paul has failed at everything, and then he will remember the hollow feeling in his stomach when Mae looked at him with her face that was blank and terrible and asked him to tell her how to move the Ford. He will remember looking up and seeing Little Homer standing there, sweaty and gasping, in the door of his office when he should have been at home, Little Homer standing in the doorway with his face telling Paul it was already too late and Paul lifting him and running with him all the same, as if by moving quickly they could go backward and arrive in time.