Heaven Should Fall (19 page)

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, F
REEZE
-D
RIED
C
HICKEN
and C
ORN
B
READ
M
IX
and M
ILK
. 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.

As the child from the car approached, I saw that both of the little boy’s hands were occupied with a giant plate covered in aluminum foil that reflected piercing rays of the sun. He looked up at the house in an uncertain way, then started toward it. Hurriedly I waved him over. With Candy’s boys where once I had reported them to her for their obnoxious behaviors, I didn’t dare now. They had begun flinching when she even reached over their shoulders to gesture how to do a math problem or find a state on a map. It was still silly to think she’d manhandle a neighbor’s child, but keeping kids away from her had turned into a gut instinct for me.

The little boy was perfectly combed, in a neat flannel shirt and corduroys. He handed over the heavy plate and said, “This is for you, Mrs. Powell.”

“Oh, I’m not Mrs. Powell. But I’ll make sure she gets it. Okay, buddy?”

He nodded and squinted in the sunlight. “Are you kin to her?”

“Kin? Yeah…well, I’m her sister-in-law. Her brother’s wife.” The boy nodded again, though I was sure he was too small to make sense of the connections. “Thanks.”

He glanced back toward the truck. In a reedy little voice he rattled out, “Our family would like to express our sincere condolences at the loss of your son and brother who valiantly served our nation. The Bible says, ‘Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ John Chapter fifteen, verse thirteen.”

I stared at him.

“We have you on our family prayer list for every morning.”

“Thank you.”

Abruptly he turned and walked back to the truck. There appeared to be a woman in the driver’s seat. I waved, and she returned it with a vague wave of her own. The boy climbed in, and she followed the half-circle drive around before going back down the road in the direction from which she had come.

A folded note taped to the top of the aluminum foil fluttered in the breeze. I opened it and read the handwriting.

Dear Olmsteads and Powells,

Our sincere condolences at the loss of your son and brother. While it has been years since we last saw Elias, we grieve with you just the same. He brought honor to our family. Without regard to our past differences we would like to extend the offer of any assistance you might need in this time of grieving. Lucia and I hope you won’t hesitate to call on us. God’s blessings on your family.

Sincerely,

Randy Olmstead

Lucia, Michael, Lydia, Amy, Brent, Junior, Ellie

I peeked under the foil on my way into the house. Cookies, mostly chocolate chip, but also sugar and molasses, with a loaf of banana bread in the middle of the arrangement. It crossed my mind that this was the family Dodge had been openly threatening to us for months now, but in the weeks since Elias’s death he had dropped the subject entirely. I had assumed that he must have seen Randy at the funeral and realized the man bore his family no ill will; and while Dodge would never admit to being wrong, it made sense that Randy’s show of respect had shamed Dodge into silence. Whatever the reason, I was glad to have that particular worry gone, and pleased at the prospect of their mending the rift. In the kitchen I handed the plate over to Candy, who regarded it with suspicion.

“A kid dropped by with all this,” I told her. “Junior or Brent, I suppose.”

She raised an eyebrow, then opened and read the note. Without hesitation she opened the cabinet door under the sink and began dumping the contents of the plate into the trash.

“Whoa, hey,” I snapped at her. “Hold on. I think it was pretty nice of her, don’t you? Did you read that note at all?”

“Sure I did.”

She kept shoveling cookies into the trash. The plate was much too large for her to maneuver into the space, and the beagles snuffled around eagerly, gulping down cookies that missed the trash can. I slid around her and slammed the cabinet door shut, and she stood up straight to cast a dark glare on me. Her shoulders were as wide as Cade’s. Her long curly hair fanned behind them like a cape. I lifted my chin and held her gaze, willing myself not to let her call my bluff.

Leela came around the landing and into the kitchen. “What’s the—oh, my. Candy?”