Heaven Should Fall (18 page)

I took a moment to process all this, then burst into a laugh. “You got a
vasectomy?
”

“Sure did. I got all the kids I can handle. Don’t you ever tell her, though. She’d shit a brick.”

“No kidding. She’s always telling Jill how we need to have this ‘full clip of babies’ or something.”

“Quiver-full family. She can want it all damn day, but somebody’s got to pay for it. The day I tap my maple trees and money runs out like the slots in Atlantic City, then me and God will have a talk. Till then, he can want me to have thirty kids, and I can want a nice camping trailer, and he and I can call it even.”

I laughed hard. “Well, your secret’s safe with me.”

“You ready to do some fishing?”

“Yeah, sure. I warn you, I’m not very good at it.”

Dodge clapped me on the back. “Comes as no surprise, boy.”

* * *

I kept in good spirits through the time spent fishing and into the night, but over the next couple of days my thoughts got bleaker and bleaker. Dodge seemed to sense this, but it also didn’t seem to surprise him—after all, that was the whole reason we were here in the woods. My brother had died. I needed to grieve. I’d get it all out of my system and return home ready to face life without Elias. I wasn’t sure how that was possible, but it was the goal.

On our second-last night there, we ran out of beer. The next morning after breakfast Dodge set out to replenish the supply. After he drove off I scraped the skillet from breakfast and buried the food scraps to keep animals away. I pulled off my dirty T-shirt and exchanged it for the one I’d left drying on the clothesline overnight, then tucked my nose into the collar to gauge how badly I needed a shower. The test confirmed what I’d suspected—despite the field hygiene, I stank, and yet the fact of it bothered me only a little. The first few days of the trip had felt like the welcome escape I had hoped for, but now, with the last full day mostly over, I felt a measure of panic at the thought of going back. Real life awaited: the shitty job that took only a laughable stab at my expenses, my girl who could shed half her blood and still be twice as tough as I was, my little bud of a son for whom I was the model of manhood. It was what didn’t await me that gnawed at me most. My brother, who had died because he had burned out his usefulness to the country he had served, and also because I was an idiot.

I ducked into the tent to retrieve a fresh pack of cigarettes—the last from Elias’s carton. Since moving back I’d limited myself to two or three a week, mainly because it really pissed off Jill when she saw me smoking. But Jill wasn’t on the camping trip, and so I’d tossed the half-full carton into the SUV before we left. I’d smoked a whole pack each day of the trip. It felt decadent. I was using Elias’s lighter, which they had given me in the hospital along with the rest of the personal effects from his pockets. Dodge had last used it to kindle the fire at breakfast and hadn’t given it back. After a quick hunt around the campsite, I found it sitting on a stump in a pile of things Dodge must have emptied out of the SUV before he left: a copy of
Sports Illustrated,
a foil packet of freeze-dried chili, the lighter, a spool of fishing line and a handgun.

It was not Dodge’s gun; I could tell that right away. Dodge owned a 9 mm Glock. I knew that for a fact because I’d seen it a zillion times since we started shooting lessons months ago. This was an M9 Beretta, almost new, and I knew exactly where it had come from. It was Elias’s.

I picked it up and looked over the matte black metal. Dodge had cleaned it, wiped it down at least, thank God. I supposed he had intended to sell it to a dealer, which would explain why he had put it in his SUV and left the magazine in it. That made Dodge a scuzzbag, because he had no right to pawn Elias’s possessions—but then, for all I knew, he had run it past my father already. Both of them still thought I was basically an idiot when it came to guns and probably wouldn’t ask my opinion.

I sat on the fallen tree and turned it over in my hands. The sight of it took me back to that morning. The expanding triangle of light moving from the barn doorway across Elias’s sprawled legs. The way his body, heavy and dense as wet sand, had refused to be shaken back to consciousness, no matter how I tried. And all the blood, vast mucking quantities of blood that slicked my hands and shirt and just kept coming, a pornographic excess of the stuff that felt like a screaming confession of just how much Elias had inside him, how much life, how much of a god-awful mess.

The dark. The nervous animals who could smell death in their midst, looking at me above the stall doors with their oversize eyes. My own raw scream for Elias, and then for God, and then for Dodge, in order of their authority to fix this, and yet nobody could. The mistakes had already been made, turning Elias into a slowly ticking time bomb who had meant well and loved us all and then tucked himself away to detonate.

I rested my elbow against my knee and pressed the barrel against my right temple. The metal felt cool, like an ice pack. I pulled back and racked it, then returned it to the space above my ear. To obliterate oneself: mind and face all at once, smudged from the great class photo as though by a pencil eraser. I could take care of my miserable disappointing half-assed existence in one click.

But I had chosen to carry the standard. I had etched it into my arm. There was no point in having hauled it up from its falling place only to pick myself off a week later. The insignia was still raw around the edges, achy and itchy like a new thing still stretching into its nerves. I would not be Elias’s collateral damage. I would be my brother’s avenger.

I turned the gun around and looked for a target. At the peaked space above the open tent flaps was a white label with a flag in its center and words underneath: “
P
ROUDLY
MADE
IN
THE
USA.” I sighted in on it, precisely on the field of stars, and fired.

My aim was off by half an inch, hitting the red and white bars, but it was still a respectable shot. For once.

I returned the Beretta to its place on the stump and, at long last, lit up my smoke.

* * *

Dodge returned about an hour later. He brought back a pair of cheesesteak sandwiches and a greasy bag of French fries, in addition to the beer.

“Got tired of eating all that campfire cooking,” Dodge explained. “Roughing it is good for a while, but it wears off.”

“Good call. It’s greasy as hell, though.”

“You’ve just stopped being used to it. You’re gonna be shitting in the woods all night.”

I laughed. I’d kicked up the fire while Dodge was gone, and we ate near it for the warmth. Once we were done, I rounded up all the trash and locked it in the truck to keep away bears, then lit a cigarette with an ember from the fire.

“You’re gettin’ to be as bad as Elias,” Dodge said. “Better slow it down or the little woman isn’t gonna be happy.”

“She’ll live.”

“Guess she doesn’t have much choice in the matter.”

As I cleaned up around the fire, Dodge picked up the pile of objects from the stump and began to move it toward the SUV. Suddenly he stopped, paused and set down everything but the Beretta. He ran a finger across the muzzle and held the hand near his face. I met his stare.

“What did you shoot?” asked Dodge.

“The tent.”

Dodge’s head swung slowly in the other direction. He looked at the tent for a long moment, his gaze locking on the hole in the label before he ducked to see the exit hole. Then he looked at me again.

“Why in the blue hell would you shoot the tent?”

I shrugged and exhaled loosely.

Dodge returned his gaze to the tent. Then he turned back toward me. Looked as if he was considering what to say. It took him a while.

“You know what,” he finally said, “everybody’s pissed about what happened to Elias. I know I am. But probably you most of all.”

“Maybe.”

For a long moment Dodge said nothing further. He looked at the SUV and then up at the trees, as if they might shed some light on the situation. It was dead quiet.

“I don’t know what they taught you down in Washington, D.C.” Dodge began. “I don’t know if they sold you all that Oprah crap about being in touch with your feelings. I know you went down there with the notion that they would all kiss your golden-boy ass because that’s what your mama told you—”

“Whatever.”

“Don’t ‘whatever’ me. You sure didn’t come back thinking any different, so I suppose they didn’t relieve you of that notion. But I’m gonna school you a little bit, Cade.” At the sound of my name, I looked up at him. “You need to man up. You might think I’m a redneck piece of shit, but I get by. Your brother, he was a good soul, but you won’t see me putting a bullet in
my
head.”

“Shut the fuck up,” I said, but it lacked any aggression. I was tired, and my stomach already hurt from the grease.

“And you sure as hell better not pull that stunt on my watch. You made that baby and you got that woman to put her trust in you. Don’t ever let it be said about you that you took the coward’s way out because life’s not fair and you were boo-hooing about your brother.”

I said nothing.

Dodge walked over to the tent and examined the bullet hole. “You better hope it doesn’t rain tonight, boy. If it does, I guarantee you you’ll be sleeping in the wet spot. And don’t think for a second I won’t tell the whole family exactly that.”

* * *

Dodge was right. I spent half the night shitting in the woods. Next morning we woke up and broke camp, and Dodge made a bunch of noise at me again about the tent. I didn’t care. On the drive home I put up with his country music station without saying a word. At the New Hampshire border we stopped to get lunch, and I caught sight of another shop I wanted to stop at in the strip mall.

“Not in any hurry, are we?” I asked Dodge.

“Not really, why?”

We stopped in at the pawnshop. In the glass case they had a lot of different wedding rings and engagement rings. I picked out a narrow gold band that would bottom out the last of my money until payday. Dodge said, “Your timing’s a little funny.”

“No time like the present.”

“You think she’ll go along with it?”

“Beats me. I got nothing to lose.”

He chuckled as if he wasn’t sure that was true.

“You know what,” I said slowly as the clerk wrapped up the box. “Yesterday I was one second away from splattering my brains all over a pine tree. Even if she says no, life could be worse.”

The clerk, who’d been pretending he wasn’t listening, for a split second looked up at me uneasily.

Dodge said, “That would have been a stupid-ass thing to do.”

“I didn’t do it, did I?”

“No. You think maybe you ought to take a little more time to get your head together before you ask her?”

“
Now
who’s on
Oprah?
”

“Just a thought.”

I took the bag and headed next door to the tattoo shop. Dodge looked amused while I explained to the guy what I wanted. Half an hour later I walked back out with a new motto in puffy black letters that curved around the insignia:
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
.

“Where the hell’d you get
that
from?” asked Dodge.

“John Quincy Adams. It’s Latin. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’”

Dodge smirked and gave a quick laugh like a bull snorting. “You make a lot of noise, Cade.”

I said, “I’m not just making noise anymore.”

Chapter 22

Leela

Maybe a month or so after I lost Eve, there I was sitting at the breakfast table in my mother’s house, waiting for my tea to steep, and I had a revelation. It was very early, and the sunlight came through the window almost sideways, colored like pollen. The fields outside were cast in that haze. Easter had just passed, and where the table pushed up against the windowsill there was a basket made out of that plastic canvas stuff threaded with yarn, with the face of a bucktoothed rabbit on the front. In the bottom lay a few small chocolate eggs wrapped in foil, the dregs of that year’s candy she kept around for guests and neighbor children. It made for a poor and paltry scene, but I had my revelation even so.

I thought about the blind man in the Gospel, the one they bring to Jesus to test him. They say to him, so, was this man born blind because of his own sin, or because of what his parents did? Because everybody thought it had to be one or the other. But Jesus, he said no, this man was born blind so the glory of God could be revealed in him. And then he touched that man’s eyes and healed his sight. It made me think, maybe there’s a purpose for this sadness that I just can’t figure out, the way that man lived his whole life up until Jesus came along with everyone having the wrong ideas about why he was blind. Maybe someday I’ll come to find a purpose to this. And it wasn’t much, but it was just enough to cast a little sallow light on my heart, give me enough to feel around by. It would be a lie to say that made me feel better, but at least it made me feel like I could live.

Much later on, when Lucia came to me with that foolishness of hers, I thought about that again. I had the righteousness of knowing Jesus taught that the Lord doesn’t curse children for the sins of their parents. And even though I never received the witness for why that angel came down twice and swooped back each time, I had the comfort of knowing our hands were clean of it.

I don’t want to talk about what happened to Eli. We owe him the dignity of not speaking of that. Because it’s the truth, at wakes and memorials and such, that all the talk begins to turn a life into a set of tall tales. Somebody will tell a story, and when their friend laughs or sighs they’ll add a bit, or leave off the part that makes the deceased person look a little bit bad. At the end of it all, the real life dies back little by little, and in its place you have only a bunch of make-believe stories about the person who lived it. If you want to keep the flame of a life burning, you simply don’t speak of it. Something that isn’t talked about never changes. And that, I can tell you for a fact, is God’s honest truth.

I’d prefer to talk about Eddy.

That last spring we were all together—before school and the army took the boys away—Eddy’s face had been real, real red all the time. He’d begun to sweat so much that he took to carrying around a kerchief in his pocket that he used to wipe away the beads of perspiration that popped up like pearls on his forehead. Always he had been a hot-tempered man, but lately he reminded me of those cartoon thermometers they show on the television weather reports on the hottest summer days, with the red pushing against the top and droplets flying out like the whole thing is melting. Well, there wasn’t any telling that man that he ought to see a doctor. Unless you wanted the upbraiding of your life, you just left him alone. We all knew the art of that.

One evening, he and I were sitting in the den next to the kitchen, watching television. Eddy was sitting in the plaid chair that later turned into Elias’s, and I sat in the other one, crocheting on a blanket for Candy’s John, I suppose. He would have been the baby then. It was an April night, and it wasn’t warm, but Eddy mopped down his face and leaned forward to see the TV better. It was some program on The History Channel, some war thing. All of a sudden I guess he got fed up with whatever they were saying, because he picked up the remote and said something in a disgusted voice and changed the channel. That was all right, except I didn’t understand a word he was saying.

“Come again?” I asked him.

He looked me in the eye and he babbled off something different this time. It was a normal conversation voice he was using, but it was like baby words coming from his mouth, just nonsense. He shook his head, then tried again, but the words still didn’t come out right. I kept my face steady so he wouldn’t get mad at me and think I was mocking him. But I thought that was awful strange. Sometimes if he was drinking he didn’t make a lot of sense, but at least the words he used would string together all right, even if the thoughts didn’t.

That happened another time maybe a week later, at dinner. He was correcting Matthew on his manners, pointing a finger at him, when halfway through the sentence it all turned into gibberish. From the look on his face you could tell he knew, and it didn’t make any more sense to him than to the rest of us. Everybody looked around at each other, but nobody said a word about it. By then I’d looked it up in
The Merck Manual
we kept in the side table in the front room. It was an old one, but then, so was Eddy. From that I knew that if a person had speech problems that come out of nowhere, it might be a stroke. I watched him as we ate, saw the confusion behind his eyes, and I confess I felt a hard kernel inside me—almost an excitement, or maybe gloating. All those times he’d yelled at me when I told him he ought to get a physical, all those years he’d spent trading on this idea of himself as a hard-tempered man who’d scrap with anyone for anything—perhaps now, here at this dinner table, we’d arrived at the spoils of it. You know, deep down in the heart of hearts—no matter how Christian a person is or how much they say they forgive their enemy—everybody wants to see the justice of God. It would be like pure clear water on a hot day, to have lived with an injustice for so long, to have stood by watching as somebody with a bad soul got a good life, and then to suddenly see the payment come due for that person. Not revenge—I don’t mean revenge. I mean fairness. It’s a pleasure as true as any other of the body or soul, because believing in a fair world is the only thing that makes life livable.

Yet dinner went by, and Eddy was all right, and the next day he woke up just the same as always. Elias was in the front room, cleaning out the fireplace from the winter. He had a plastic sheet spread out over part of the room, with the grate and the poker sitting on it, and himself halfway up in the chimney trying to knock out all the wood ash. Well, Eddy came downstairs, took one look at Eli and said, “Boy, what in the hell are you doing?”

Elias crouched down to look out at his father and said, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

That made Eddy turn that plum-red color of his. “Don’t you start smart-mouthing. You see all that ash you’re getting all over the furniture? The floor? You didn’t think to drape anything?”

Elias ran a hand under his nose, leaving a streak of lighter gray. “Like anyone’ll be able to tell anyway. I’ll vacuum after I’m done.”

“Come here.”

“I’m working.”

“I told you to come here.”

Elias ducked out from the fireplace and came over. He wasn’t even all the way to his father when Eddy grabbed a big bunch of the front of his shirt and got right up in his face. Oh, and then the yelling started. Eddy in that barking voice shouting about how he’d paid for all this and Elias was lazy and didn’t care to do a job right, that’s why he was a failure—all that manner of hollering. My son, he just stood there and took it. He and his father were the same height and built alike, though his father wasn’t as heavy. Then Eddy shoved him in the chest, back toward the fireplace, and Elias shuffled back over and started to get back to work. But when he knelt down again Eddy shoved him in the hip with his boot, starting that yelling all over again, pushing Elias’s head with the flat of his hand. Elias, I guess he got fed up, because he said, “Knock it off,” though with another word in there I won’t say. Eddy shouted at him not to curse at him, but then when he bent over to get in Elias’s face again, he staggered to the side and fell into a chair.

At first neither Elias nor I moved to help him. We both just watched, like rabbits in their holes watching a mad dog get taken down. Eddy tried to stand up, but fell farther down instead, and slumped there on the floor. It wasn’t in his vocabulary to try and call for help. His body was powdered with ash down one side, where he’d slid onto the plastic sheeting, and there was a streak of it across his cheekbone. He pulled himself to the middle of the floor on his left arm, while his right just hung there. I wasn’t stupid, now. I knew what was happening. But half an Eddy, especially when angry, was still powerful. He was a mad dog wounded.

“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.