Heaven Should Fall Page 10

“No, no. They’re farm kids. They know how it is.”

  John was holding the little white chick right up to his face, almost beak to mouth, and making kissing noises at it. Even for a farm kid, I thought he was a little young to watch his mother drown small animals. I knew Candy’s choice wasn’t unusual, but it wasn’t strictly necessary either, especially when we were dealing with only a few. I decided to try my one idea that might resound with her.

  “You don’t have to kill them,” I told her. “You can castrate them and raise them for meat.”

  She chuckled and turned off the water. “If I knew how to castrate a rooster, maybe.”

  “I do.”

  She stopped in the middle of moving the bucket closer to the table and looked at me distrustfully. I continued, “I learned to do it at the camp I worked at. It’s not difficult. Then you can raise them alongside the hens and they don’t compete with the rooster. They’re called capons. The meat’s really good. It’s expensive, too. A gourmet thing.”

  She laughed again. “Gourmet chickens.”

  “I can do it in no time.”

  Matthew, who had been circling the table as though looking forward to the spectacle of his mother drowning the chicks, looked from me to Candy. “Well, okay,” Candy said. “If you kill them by accident, who cares.”

  The conditions weren’t ideal, but I gathered up the supplies I needed and got started. I tried to shoo the boys away, yet they were all rapt at the idea I was going to cut into living birds, and Candy did nothing to discourage them. I was fairly adept at the process. Halfway through, Dodge walked in. He took one look at the bloody towels on the kitchen table, the stunned chicks and his gawking sons, and asked, “Now, what in the blue hell is Jill doing?”

  “She’s deballing the chicks,” offered Candy.

  Dodge leaned over my shoulder, close enough that I could smell him. He was the only man who lived here, not counting Cade, who didn’t smoke. Dodge smelled of sweat and light cologne and the leather seats of his SUV. The overall effect was a weird combination of manual labor and vanity.

  “I didn’t even know you could do that,” he said.

  I explained to him about capons and how they would behave more or less like the hens, and he nodded with approval. He looked at his boys and asked, “What do you kids think of that?”

  “It’s cool,” said Mark. “There’s blood.”

  “Blood and balls,” said Matthew. “Except they don’t look like balls. More like little bitty lima beans.”

  Dodge shook his head. “I’ll be damned. Lived on a farm all my life and I never seen that. Not once.”

  I smiled, in spite of the gory scene in front of me. I wasn’t afraid of Dodge, exactly, but nobody wants to get on the wrong side of someone who wants to go to war over a broken dishwasher. Elias stayed quiet now during Dodge’s dinnertime rants, but sometimes he would pause in midmeal, his fork forgotten in his hand, and look at Dodge with a steady, unblinking glare that, in a more magical land than this one, would have reduced his brother-in-law to ash.

  At dinner that night, Dodge regaled the family with the story of the day’s rooster surgery. “Now, there’s a woman who can do everything,” Dodge declared, and I glanced up uneasily at the unexpected praise. “Can use hand tools and power tools, knows how to split a log and neuter a rooster, and can still cook a decent meal. She’s got you outclassed and outgunned, Cade. I bet she can shoot worth a damn, too.”

  “If I’m in the right mood,” I conceded. Dave always claimed there were bears in the woods around Southridge and had made sure every member of his staff could hit a target with both handgun and rifle. I had never seen a bear or any sign of one around the place, but I was pretty confident I could shoot one if it ever proved true.

  “See, she’s one up on you,” Dodge told Cade.

  “I know how to shoot a gun,” Cade argued. “Dad taught me when I was Matthew’s age. I just don’t want to hang out in the woods with you and your compadres, shooting up beer cans.”

  “You should come along one day anyhow. Spend some time outdoors. You’re lookin’ pretty pale these days. Getting that desk-jockey look about you.”

  Cade scowled at Dodge across the table, and I knew he had hit a nerve. Back in Maryland Cade had run at least five miles every morning, but here the farm chores left no time for that before work, and in the evenings he was too tired. He couldn’t go tanning here either, and made self-conscious remarks to me about his increasingly wintry complexion. A few days before, I’d caught him looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, peeling down the waistband of his boxers to check for contrast, then rubbing his stomach as if to reassure himself it was still flat.

  “Jill, you can come out, too,” Dodge said magnanimously, in a tone that made me suspect I was the first female he had ever invited into the boys’ club. “The two of you can compete. Make whatever bets amongst yourselves, like a good husband and wife.”

  Candy giggled. Cade looked at me and rolled his eyes. In spite of my distaste for Dodge, the idea sounded like fun. It would be something to do at least, an interesting break from the monotony of our day-to-day routine. It might be good for Cade, too, to get his head back into the kinds of things people did up here instead of all the things he felt he was missing. I smiled and said, “Sure, I’m up for it. Why not?”

  He narrowed his eyes at me before focusing down on his plate, stabbing at his potatoes as if it was personal.

  * * *

  “He needs to just relax and take a breather,” said Leela, wrapping a barn star in bubble wrap and slipping it into a shipping box. “Dodge has some funny ideas about things, and goodness knows that shouldn’t be any shock to Cade. And he’s always got to get all worked up anyhow.”

  We were standing in Leela’s attic workroom, me with the roll of bubble wrap and a pair of scissors, Leela with the priority mail packing labels and boxes and a pen. On the desk the laptop was open to the eBay screen so Leela could get addresses, and indeed it did have a slip of electrical tape over the webcam’s camera lens. I cut off another length of wrap and rolled it around a star as she addressed the label in her spidery handwriting.

  “You wouldn’t think they would dislike each other so much,” she went on, her voice a little distracted, “Dodge and Cade, two of a kind as they are. Both of them are men of strong opinions. Both have the stubborn idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with them must just be flat stupid. And their opinions aren’t so different, but I suppose it’s enough that each thinks the other is a dummy. Of course, Cade’s only twenty-one. He’s got lots of growing left to do. Dodge, I don’t know what his excuse is.”

  “Maybe that he never expanded his horizons.”

  “Maybe. It does a body good to get out and see the world. Elias sure is better off for it. Did you see what he brought me back?”

  I shook my head, trying to make sense of her idea that Elias was better off. She patted a piece of tape onto the box, then walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a small rolled rug. Letting it unfurl to the ground with a flourish, she said, “It’s a real Muslim prayer mat. They kneel down on it and do that thing, bowing toward Mecca and all that business.”

  “That’s pretty neat.”

  She smiled. The delicate metal hooks of her bridgework showed. “Bet you it’s the only one in Frasier. I thought it was a bathroom rug when he first gave it to me. Wonder what the Muslims would think of that, if I’d put it out for people to drip-dry on.”

  I grinned back, and she rolled up the mat and put it away. “Cade seems excited about the baby coming,” she said. “He’s going to be a good daddy. You don’t know, Jill, what a lucky thing that is to see a man who cares about all that. Eddy, God bless him, he hardly paid our kids any mind until they were walking and talking. Cade’ll be different, I can tell.”

  I nodded, thinking back to the night before, when Cade had rested his palm against one side of my belly and his ear against the other as if trying to pull the baby closer. Sometimes I just wish I could hea
r its heartbeat, he had said. I know it’s there and all, but sometimes I just want to hear it. I told him I wished I knew whether it was a girl or a boy, and he’d shaken his head. I wouldn’t want to find out, even if I could. The anticipation is better than knowing.

  “I was always terrified of being a single mom,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to have to struggle like my mother did. And if I couldn’t do as good a job, I knew I’d never be able to forgive myself.”

  Her smile was tight as she peeled a label and smoothed it onto a finished package. “But that’s all mothering is. Whatever your own parents got wrong, you absolutely will not do, and whatever they got right, you’d darned well better get right, as well. That’s the disadvantage to those of us who had good mothers. We spend our whole lives trying to match them and can’t ever quite shake the feeling that we’re falling short.”

  My voice was teasing. “Maybe it’s better to have a bad mother, then. Gives you higher self-esteem in the long run.”

  “Maybe it’s better to know that your children love you regardless,” she said. “They don’t care how your mother was. They just want their own.”

  I thought about that. During my first summer at Southridge, all the kids in the Alateen group had gathered around the campfire and told stories about their families. In the typical manner of girls my age I’d started to butt heads with my mother; her mere presence embarrassed me, her nagging about my room and my grades threw me into explosive tantrums and I looked forward to the chance to vent about my life at home. But I never got the chance, because the stories that made their way around the circle alarmed me into silence—tales of parents in denial, parents who couldn’t stay sober, or flew into rages, or passed out on the floor in puddles of their own bodily fluids. I understood then why my mother had sent me there, and my heart ached for the kids whose lives had become the collateral damage of their parents’ addictions. But it was true—they loved them even so. Admiration and love, I learned, are two entirely separate things.

  “You’re going to be a good mother,” Leela said. “I can tell you’re a strong person. You’ve got the mama lion inside you. You haven’t seen her yet, but she’s there.”

  Her praise warmed me. If she had been my own mother I would have rested my cheek against her arm as she worked beside me; but I knew she was Cade’s, not mine. “Hopefully nothing will happen to bring her out anytime soon,” I replied.

  She laughed. “Oh, Jill,” she said, and her voice was rueful. “Peace never lasts long enough. That’s what’s true.”

  Chapter 10

  Leela

  Sometimes during the day Candy will have that TV on, showing those court programs where people air out their dirty business in front of a judge. I don’t like to hear that stuff. Some things other folks just aren’t meant to know. Why I would ever care who’s the father of that baby or whether someone’s husband had a lady friend on the side, I can’t even imagine. You tell me what you want me to think about your circumstances, and I’ll take you at your word. It’s none of my business to go guessing at what you’ve got under the carpet.

  My mother and father, they taught me not to stick my nose in the affairs of others, and thanks to that I never felt as though it was a lie to let folks go on believing their presumptions about me or my family. Even my own children never knew I had a husband before Eddy. It seems like a different person’s life now, that for four long years I had a different name and lived in a different state, sleeping in a bed every night with a man who was not Eddy. Of course it was so long ago now it doesn’t matter one bit. Children assume so many things that it isn’t hard to make an old life go away. At one point in each child’s life, when they realize what’s possible, they’ll look you in the eye and ask, “Did you ever have a boyfriend besides Daddy?” And you shake your head no, and just like that it’s gone. None of them ever asks again.

  I’d been so lonely, living in Maine. The house Harold promised me had turned out to be a trailer, with secondhand curtains that didn’t hang right. These days I wouldn’t care too much, but a new bride is picky about those things and she has a right to be. She’s making up a home. As it was, all the women my own age, there at our church, had babies already. When they met up it was for coffee and to let the babies play, so they never thought to include me. And then finally I was expecting, and for a while they included me some. I was embarrassed about my house, so I didn’t invite people over too much. That was a mistake, I suppose. It made me look inhospitable, but I didn’t realize that in time. I should have just bought some real curtains.

  But then, before I got any chance to get to know anyone real well or fix the place up any better, the baby—my daughter Eve—was gone. After that I went back home to my mother and father, because I couldn’t take living among those women and their babies, nor with a man who thought we could replace Eve like buying a new dog. I couldn’t just come back to that trailer, pack up the baby things and get to work decorating as if a new rug and some wallpaper would ever cheer the place up. It was like that life had gone sour in the refrigerator, and there was no choice but to throw it out.

  For years I hardly thought about all that. I’d cast it off, and it went away like it was supposed to. But then, once Candy got so concerned with her religion, started passing comments about true marriage and God’s plan for families, I felt the sour taste of my departure in my mouth again. I knew that if she really knew me—my own daughter—she would think I was a sinful person. I wanted to say to her, life isn’t so simple as all that. If ever there was someone who understands how hard it is some days to be a family, it’s the Lord. I kept quiet in spite of Candy’s ramblings, and I knew that in this life I’d poured all I had into the measure, and let the Lord fill up the rest of it with grace. That’s the main thing with her—she’ll spout off with her God-talk about rules and regulations and forget everything about the mercy. The whole blood-flow system she’s got all mapped out, with no heart at the center.

  But even though I didn’t need for my children to know about my first husband, or about their lost sister, having lived inside that loneliness for so long made me anxious for my children to have better than that. Candy I wasn’t so concerned about, because she had that hardness in her that, for all its worrisome qualities, made me sure no man would break her. And as Cade came into his own, I stopped fretting over that for him, too. He had a big heart, but if he had a falling-out with a friend or got a snub from a girl, he knew how to close himself off against further hurts from that person. He wasn’t like me, where I’d keep bleeding out the feelings like a wound that just won’t clot. Neither Cade nor Candy was the type who would ever just pack their things and abandon a life, the way I had. But when I left Harold, I hadn’t done it because it was the easy thing. It was just the only way I knew to stop the pain.

  Elias, though. I confess that when he was little, his father and I worried that he was a soft boy. He was a sulker, the kind to go off kicking the dust to sit under a tree all alone, licking his wounds. Mostly people didn’t try to fight with him, because he was big and if he did get a notion to fight back, he’d have that person flat on the ground in one strike. But he couldn’t shrug things off, and he never did those peacock-y things boys do to get girls’ attention. For a while we worried whether he liked girls at all. His father made some noise about that, and as much as I shushed him I admit I fretted over it myself.

  And then, not too long before he graduated high school, he started bringing home Piper Larsen from down the road. She came from a funny family—her mother and father were archaeologists or something of that nature, and they’d go away for months at a time to dig up old pottery and bones. The house she lived in belonged to her aunt and uncle, who farmed that land, and I suppose her folks found it convenient as their home base in between trips to wherever they ran off to. Well, it’s hard for me to trust people like that, but I was just so pleased to see Eli interested in a girl at all. He always had some excuse for bringing her around—that she wanted to see our ne
w baby chicks, say, or to try the rhubarb pie I’d made because she’d never had rhubarb, or wanted to stay for supper because it was leftover night at her place. It was cute to see him trying to court her that way, and she was a pretty thing, too, like a foal: all bones, big eyes. She had pale, pale hair. My mother had always told me to make a wish when I saw a white horse, and every time I saw Piper walk in that door with Eli, I felt like making a wish on her. I couldn’t have picked a better choice for him, either. She was smart, grounded, good-hearted. Even though her people were from away, her family didn’t seem so bad, just a little odd. I couldn’t help but picture where it all might lead. And I confess, too, that since I’d set aside my imaginings about that sweet daughter who would sit beside me quilting, I started inventing new ones for how I would teach Piper to make a piecrust, or listen to her tell me some things about the strange places she’d visited. I hoped she would like me.

  One night we had her over for supper and she helped me fix up the biscuits and a salad. Oh, she had the nicest manners, that girl, and a good, open way about her for learning new things. I showed her how you peel strips down the cucumber, then slice it lengthwise and scoop out the seeds with a spoon before you slice it in smaller pieces, and then you get pretty little half-moon slices with no seeds to bother with. She acted like I’d taught her something really special. She had a manner of touching your shoulder or arm in this affectionate way, like family almost. I was so fond of that girl, I couldn’t hardly contain it.

  We all sat down to supper, and I’d made sure to put in the extra chair next to Elias, so he and Piper could sit right beside one another. Eddy and I sit at opposite ends of the table, so I made sure to put Piper’s seat closest to mine, because now and then Eddy gets off on some tirade during the meal and I didn’t want to risk the girl getting spooked.

  Elias pulled out her chair for her, all gentlemanly. It made me smile. In all that time I’d never once seen him touch her, but that was just how he was. Elias wasn’t a hugger, but none of us were, really, except for Cade. Cade was fifteen then and I had to watch him like a hawk when he brought a girl over. First floor only, that was my rule. They could watch television or play a game or what have you, but there would be no going upstairs or, heaven help us, down cellar. At least upstairs I could have overheard if he had anything funny going on, but that cellar was so solid you could hold a party down there and, so long as you had the door shut, nobody would ever hear a thing. Plus Eddy’d stored up enough wool surplus blankets and army cots to tide us over through a nuclear blast, which was about how angry I’d be if I found out my son had gotten some town girl in trouble.