Falling to Earth by Kate Southwood Page B

happen?”
    Paul allows himself a smile. Ellis hasn’t entirely lost his serious expression, but he is beginning to look more like a seven-year-old again. “Go get yourself a good one,” he says.
    â€œStarted clearing things up, have you?” a woman’s voice calls once Ellis has run off. Paul looks up to see Virginia Eberhardt looking at him from her porch next door.
    â€œThought we might as well get started,” Paul says, walking away from the fire to the hedge that divides the Eberhardt’s yard from theirs. Virginia is still in her bathrobe. Paul looks toward the fire; Ellis is back, crouching there and peering in at whatever object he has found to throw in it. Virginia has exactly the same cleaning job ahead of her, washing mud off her house and clearing her yard of debris, but newly widowed and childless as she is, Paul has no idea who can help her. He realizes his error then and feels his stomach drop. If he had been killed downtown in the storm instead of Henry Eberhardt, Henry would have been cleaning up in Mae’s yard before he touched his own. It’s too late now, the first fire was lit in his own driveway, not Virginia’s. If he makes her the offer, it will be an afterthought, born out of guilt and not selfless duty to his neighbor.
    â€œMight as well,” Virginia says. “It’s quite a job, and I don’t suppose you have much else to do.”
    â€œEllis wanted to, you see,” Paul hears himself saying. “He built the fire almost by himself.” Paul’s eyes dart over to Ellis and then back to Virginia.
    â€œDid he, now? Well, I’ll be.”
    It’s over almost as soon as it’s started, ending with Virginia drifting back inside her house. Paul stands there by the hedge, unnerved by his error and by the fact that the very comment he’d feared had come, and come immediately. There is a small, cold feeling growing in his gut that feels like fear. He knows the feeling; he felt it once before, the time he’d wandered away from the farm as a child. He had been about five, the same age Little Homer is now. All he’d meant to do was walk for a while on the county road, then turn and come back again, just long enough to see if it felt different to do it alone than it had the times he had done it with Johnny. He’d walked a long ways and, when he’d turned and could no longer see the farm buildings but only the towering corn on either side of the road, he had believed himself to be lost. He’d stood there not knowing what to do, not thinking clearly enough to realize that he’d never even turned off the county road, feeling that new feeling in his belly when he’d heard his name called and seen his mother hurrying along the road toward him. He’d remembered that moment since, and the way that cold feeling began to dissolve the moment he’d seen her.
    They’d gone out searching for him when they’d realized he was gone, his father and mother setting out in opposite directions, praying that he had stayed on the road and not strayed into the corn. Once they were all home again, his parents were serious but hardly scolded him at all, which had the inadvertent effect of frightening him more than if they’d simply punished him. They had agreed not to let on what a scare he’d given them and had also understood that they couldn’t simply forbid a curious boy to go off wandering alone again. They’d told him instead to stop more often when he was alone, to look up and make certain he knew where he was before he went any further. Paul had taken them literally out of remorse as a child and had thereafter kept faithful track of his whereabouts, and by the time he’d reached adulthood, the incident had turned to metaphor; an illustration that he could overcome indecision or uncertainty by turning, figuratively now, to see where he stood in relation to where he had been.
    Now it seems