Heaven Should Fall Page 20

  “Dad, what’s the matter?” asked Elias. Eddy just lay there, breathing in a stuttering sort of way. Elias looked at him, then at me. “What should I do? You think I should drive him to the hospital or something?”

  “If he’ll go.”

  Neither of us proposed calling 911. All the fuss Eddy had made over the years about how we don’t call 911, nobody was going to even float that idea right then, when he was still conscious and maybe up to making us pay for it. So Elias got on one side of him and I got on the other, and together we hoisted him into the Jeep and took him down to the hospital that way. It cost him a lot of time. Elias didn’t really realize how serious it was, and I didn’t say much. Probably I should have, but that kernel was back inside me again and it gave me a sense of calm. This didn’t feel like an emergency. It only felt like what was inevitable, like a harvest.

  My first thought, when the doctor confirmed to us that he’d had a stroke, was Praise God, he’ll never hit my son again. That is God’s honest truth, too.

  But Elias left for boot camp just a couple of months after that. It turned out he’d had that in the works for months. That surprised me, because Eli and the army didn’t sound like a very good mix. That boy already had enough holes in his spirit from the drill sergeant who sat across from him at the dinner table; last thing he needed was to have a stranger shoot him full of more of those, especially when the world had finally turned a little more fair and cut him the break he needed. But he was an adult and could do what he liked, and he wanted to go.

  Sometimes I think I should have insisted he stay home. I should have said, son, I know you, and I don’t think you’re cut out for this. Had I pushed at that, maybe we wouldn’t have fallen into all this trouble. But I was afraid to be like Eddy or Dodge, always telling Eli that he wasn’t good enough to do a thing, that he was too weak. And so I let him go. Some days I have such a sore regret about that, I can barely face the day. I feel like I ought to be ashamed to show my face to the sunrise, knowing if I’d done differently Eli might be here to see it, too.

  Exactly one week after that awful day, I got a letter in the mail with an unfamiliar handwriting on the envelope. It was from Harold, the first man I married, telling me he had seen the obituary and extending his condolences. He wrote, “I am certain Specialist Olmstead was fortunate to have a mother such as you.” That was a bittersweet thing to read. It caused me to think of how young I was when I walked out on him, how I didn’t understand at all about how hard life would get, and how maybe he acted hard-hearted about Eve because he was too sorry to know what to say or do. My father was a gentle man and that wasn’t his way. I suppose I expected every man to be just like him. Well, I would learn. I’d learn the hard way. And seeing Harold refer to me as “Mrs. Olmstead” filled my eyes up with tears, because it’s the sorriest thing to know that what you’ve left behind, you can never go back to get it.

  But with Eddy, I never did stir up any regret about how I handled all of that. I never felt one bit of guilt. That right side of him still doesn’t work too well, and feeling the weakness of his body has taken all the fight out of him. And I’ll tell you, if ever there was a weakness that manifests the glory of God, it’s that one. He finally sent the rest of us a measure of peace and harmony in our home. Perhaps it’s cold for me to believe that, but if it is, so be it. If I have to glean in the fields for a little of the fairness of life, don’t begrudge me what I find.

  Chapter 23

  Candy

  He was always her victim. Not Cade, because he was too small. Always Elias. He would chase her screaming through the backyard, around the henhouse and shed, through the mud-rutted horse corral where her house with Dodge would someday stand, between the rows of cabbages in the garden and finally under the porch. Cornered between the lattice and the moldering wood, she would scream with the exhilaration of being trapped and helpless, shivering with it as he combat-crawled toward her on his belly. Even then he had a set of jungle BDUs from the thrift store, black work boots and a T-shirt that said “Marines.” His belt was loaded like a cop’s: his Boy Scout knife, his BB gun, make-believe clips of ammo made from Mike and Ike candy boxes wrapped in electrical tape, and his trick handcuffs. He had the BB gun out as he crawled, pointed at her once she ran out of space to run. Probably it wasn’t loaded. But you never knew.

  “Gotcha, you goddamn VC,” he always said, drawling, imitating the men from the gun club. He was nine years old. She felt the thrill of the words he wasn’t supposed to say, profanity and blasphemy at once. His hair was short as the bristles of a currycomb. He grabbed for her ankle, but that was all he could do. At twelve she was almost too old for this game, and she fought too hard for him to subdue her without turning her into the sort of mess that enraged their mother. The game was supposed to end there, but it never did.

  He was not lithe like Cade. He maneuvered on his elbows to turn toward the exit, cumbersome, working against his belly. And she pounced, springing from her corner to land on his back, asnatched the cuffs from his belt. He cried awwww in defeat, and she slapped them on his wrists pulled behind his back as he writhed against the earth. Above him her body rocked as if on a boat. Sometimes she grabbed him by the front of his hair, what she could grasp of it, and pulled his head back to see him wince. Sometimes she scrambled away and left him to flick his thumbs against the levers in hope they would release.

  It wasn’t this that started it. It was already there: the particular, pinpoint thrill, one that came with the amorphous sense that she should not talk about it. That the pleasure of overpowering him was far disproportionate to what it ought to be.

  She thought about it often. On the stereo in their station wagon there was a knob for the volume and a sliding control that deepened the bass. If she slid it lower, even the lightest song on the inspirational-rock station developed a palpable throb. Made it vibrate in her bones. Her predilection was the same way. No matter how sweet the song inside her, if they drove past a traffic stop and saw a man being taken into custody, or if in the church coatroom a man struggled to get out of the sleeves of his coat, the bass lever in her throttled downward. By thirteen she knew it was shameful. Anything that made your thoughts go that way was a shame on you, by its very nature. Get thee back, Satan. It was almost certainly what the apostle Paul had meant when he wrote about the thorn in his side. The church, her pastor said, was a hospital for sinners, not a museum for saints. And so there she was, more and more often, and that was not shameful.

  Then she was fourteen, and there came the day of the Easter passion play. She wore a smock made of sackcloth and a thin crown of flowers. She was part of the Hallelujah chorus. The man playing Jesus, naked but for a rag wrapped around his hips, hauled his cross through the street that led to the church’s front yard. The Romans hoisted him onto the cross and, because the Jesus of their play was a real man and not a martyr, bound him to it with lengths of rope. His head lolled back, the tendons in his neck thrust and trembled against the thin skin, his hands contorted. She felt dizzy with the thrill and the horror. She was certainly damned.

  When Dodge started coming around, drinking beer with her dad in the living room and inviting her to talk to him about school, she welcomed his attention with an almost frantic enthusiasm. When he asked if she would ride with him over to the sport shop to pick up a new vest for hunting season, her father gave his permission. They fucked in the front seat of his truck, and she was grateful. She was damned now for a specific, common thing. She would be in hell for a crime she could name. To see Dodge helpless with desire for her was empowering. And to take pleasure from him—for he offered it effusively—was surely nowhere near as evil as taking it alone, with thoughts as aberrant as hers.

  She was a good woman now, and she lived a good life. She knew she was forgiven of her sins, although she could never quite believe that a payment would not be extracted from her sometime in the future. A reckoning, not for her sins, which were forgiven, but for her nature, which she carried inside
her through her Christian life like a swallowed balloon full of heroin.

  She told herself she needed to put her faith in God and know her fears were unfounded.

  And then Elias shot himself in the head.

  Chapter 24

  Jill

  In the days between Elias’s death and his funeral, Leela cooked. She abandoned her workroom and spent what seemed like all day in the kitchen, making casseroles and long pans full of green beans seasoned with bacon, scooping precise balls of cookie dough onto baking sheets. Whatever wouldn’t fit into her own refrigerator she stored in Candy’s, and when space ran out in that, she cleared out the big chest freezer and laid down trays in that. On the dining-room table, in a long row down the middle, sat seven or eight family-sized chunks of defrosting meat. Each sat in an enamel pan, slowly dripping icy water around the edges of its plastic wrap. These were the former occupants of the chest freezer, and I supposed she intended to cook them, too.

  It was all for the funeral. She seemed to be expecting the whole world to join her in mourning. She sent Cade to a catering supply store in Liberty Gorge to buy disposable aluminum cookware for buffets. The kitchen island was cluttered with giant cans from the cellar storage, FREEZE-DRIED CHICKEN and CORN BREAD MIX and MILK. Once, as she added a second layer of cardboard-textured dried potato discs to an au gratin casserole, Candy snapped at her, “Stop using up all our food storage. We might need that, you know.” Leela said nothing, kept at what she was doing, but I knew what she was thinking: the end of the world had already arrived.

  Once the funeral was over, the food all eaten, she retired to her workroom and didn’t really come out. I knew she was still making her stars, because Dodge would come downstairs with an armful of boxes marked up for priority mail. When Cade came back from his camping trip with Dodge and she didn’t even come down to greet him, I went up myself to check in on her.

  “They’re back,” I said. “Dodge and Cade. Them and about twenty pounds of stinky laundry and you’ll never guess what else.”

  She shook her head. She was painting a stripe across a star. Her eyes weren’t puffy or red, and the room was tidy as ever. My heart ached for her, and I thought, not for the first time, that it would be so much easier to offer her comfort if she would make a show of her grief—to grow hysterical, scream and rant, allow her environment and personal habits to fall apart in a sort of tableau of what was going on in her head. But her dignity made me shy, and the gulf between us seemed to grow wider with each day that passed.

  “Cade got a tattoo,” I told her. “He got it last week, but I don’t think he’s shown it to you yet. It’s a tribute, I suppose you’d call it. I don’t know. He seems more upbeat. I guess being out in the woods did him good. It always does, for people.” I leaned against the door frame and watched her paint for a minute. “You want to go for a walk or something? The river’s real pretty right now.”

  Her voice sounded weary. “I don’t think so, Jill.”

  “Just a quick one? How about a trade? Come out with me for a little while, and when we get back I’ll help you paint. Or package them up, or whatever you want.”

  She looked up briefly. “I could use the help, that’s for sure. I’m trying to get seventy extra all ready for a craft show.”

  This caught me entirely by surprise. “A craft show?”

  “Yes. In Concord.” She swirled the brush in the water and uncapped a new bottle of paint. “For one thing, we could use the money. That death benefit by itself isn’t going to pay the costs of the funeral. And for another, it’s good to have something to do.”

  “To stay busy, you mean?”

  “Yes. A project. And this is mine. Can you hand me that brush right there? The very, very thin one.” I found it on the shelf above her table and handed it to her, and she added, “I’ll try to get Candy working, too. She can paint, a little. And she can drive, so that’s a help in itself, since I don’t.”

  “I don’t mind watching her boys so she can do that.”

  “Good. My girl’s got a brittle mind, like ice on a pond. Needs to always press forward in case the ground won’t hold her.”

  “Cade’s just angry.”

  She unfolded the magnifying lens that hung on a chain around her neck and peered through it at the field of stars, eyebrows up, focusing. In a voice like a stone skipping across the water, she said, “Men always get angry. It’s what they do.”

  * * *

  To help Leela, I took over the aspect of her barn-stars business that she just couldn’t handle these days: painting soldiers’ names on the inside backs or on wooden banners that hung from the bottom, at the request of the families who ordered them. They might have been active duty, or veterans, or killed in action; we had no way to tell. And what Leela needed right now was mechanical work, something she could churn out without thinking very hard, not a task that would force her to reflect and wonder. Every day, outside her craft-room door, I collected a box of stars and a square of notebook paper detailing the day’s orders. I took them down to the porch and worked alone, because I knew she needed the silent time far away from everyone else.

  In the midst of the morning’s work, I heard squawking in the barnyard and looked out toward the henhouse. Ben Franklin’s green wings went up, flaring and thumping the air before he tumbled a large white bird into the dust, using his thick-clawed feet to make the lesson hurt. I didn’t have to look closer to know who the unfortunate bird was. One of the capons had gotten scrappy lately, tussling with Ben Franklin a dozen times a day, and all the hits he took didn’t seem to be teaching him who was boss. After the first few fights, Dodge had named him Mojo. “Sure doesn’t act like he got his balls taken out,” he’d commented, watching Mojo goading Ben Franklin into another go-round among the hens.

  That was the problem, and I knew it. Castrating the roosters in the kitchen that day, I’d felt eager to prove my worth, but I was inexpert with the details. In the confusion I must have missed something, and now the sexless rooster was proving to not be so sexless after all. Mojo was maturing into a beautiful bird, pure white in his body with black-and-white feathering up his neck, crowned with a red comb. A flash of green-black tail feathers swayed when he strutted, and his feet bore tufts of white down, like marabou slippers. But he wasn’t supposed to turn out like that. His alpha-male rooster characteristics never should have developed. We had eaten his brothers months ago, but I wasn’t sure what to do with Mojo. He wouldn’t be any good to eat, none of the families around us needed another rooster and I hated to kill him without purpose. Dodge liked him, too. He enjoyed watching the impromptu cockfighting.

  “They going at it again?” asked Dodge. He had come out to the porch at the sound of the squabbling.

  I nodded and said, “I think we need to build Mojo his own enclosure.”

  “No way. Let the best man win. Or bird, I suppose.”

  “It’s not safe for the hens, though. To have all those claws flying.”

  Dodge shrugged. “Get Cade to do it. If he’s got time to mope, he’s got time to work. So God knows he’s got it to spare.”

  This was true. When Cade had first announced he was going on a camping trip to get his head together, I had thought we were on the path to healing. He came home with some of the old fire to him, having had the epiphany that in the past year he had spent too much time sulking and not enough showing leadership. Showing leadership: that was his new pet phrase, and it encompassed everything from not working harder to get help for Elias, to his contentment about staying in a crummy job, to the fact that he and I were still not married. Two weeks after Cade returned from the woods, we drove to the courthouse and were married by the justice of the peace. It was all subdued and almost casual. Had I been the type of girl who’d dreamed of the wedding she would have one day, I would have been terribly disappointed, but I was not that girl. I wanted Cade to have the sense of control he craved in the face of chaos, and I wasn’t in much of a mood to celebrate. I was mourning Elias, too
.

  I understood Cade’s hurt. I understood his mother’s stoicism. It was Candy who puzzled and worried me. Since Elias’s death she had gone nearly silent, slapping down paper and pencils for her children at the dining table each morning after breakfast, offering a few perfunctory lessons from a math or grammar book before sending them outside to play for the rest of the day. The meals she made were strange. For supper one night she served three canned vegetables and nothing else; the next she put together an elaborate feast of all of Elias’s favorite foods. Leela worked to engage her in the craft show project, bringing down boxes of half-sewn garden flags patterned like the Stars and Stripes, a concession to Candy’s crafting preferences; she would tell her daughter in a firm tone that they needed to be completed by a certain date. Candy, who had set up the sewing machine at one end of the dining table, would hammer them all out in an hour, working at a sweatshop pace, then toss the pile back into the box and hand it over. She took not an ounce of pleasure in the work, and her frenetic energy set me on edge. I gave her a wide berth, working apart from her as much as possible.

  One morning, as I was on my knees in Candy’s garden, I saw a truck coming from a long way down the road, a small shimmering shape growing larger against the mountains that had gone blaze-orange below the tree line. At first I thought it might be Dodge’s, until it came close enough that its dark green color was apparent. I rose from my task—pulling the last of the carrots from the ground before snow buried the garden—and shaded my eyes with my hand, trying to discern the driver. When the strange truck pulled into the driveway and a child climbed out, I stayed to look but didn’t go over right away. A few feet away from me, TJ napped in the laundry basket, bundled in a thick sweater and shaded by a quilt pulled half over the top. I didn’t feel comfortable walking away from him, as small as he was. A pioneer woman might have, but my pioneer skills didn’t extend that far.