Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 9

Jill




Only a few days after Elias told me the renters were gone, on a Sunday morning when Candy, Eddy and Leela were off at church with the boys, Dodge pressed the rest of us into service painting and cleaning the rental house. He even managed to bully Elias into coming along, handing him a paint roller and putting him in charge of the room that, judging by the crayon scribbles on the wall, had been the province of the now-evicted children. Cade was put on carpet-cleaning duty, while Scooter and I were sent to the porch to paint trim and lattice. I didn’t mind; the air outside was light and clear, more like spring than midsummer, and the view of the mountains from the porch of the shabby little place was breathtaking. From the corner of my eye I watched Scooter as he painted—he was a skinny caricature of a man, with giant work boots and a barbed-wire tattoo around his biceps that appeared sized for someone much larger. His thin wire glasses would have given him a scholarly look were it not for the cigarette he clenched between his lips like a cowboy, puffing as he worked. In a different town, coming from a different family, Scooter might have been another person entirely. The people I loved most—my mother, Cade and even Dave—all took pride in standing in defiance of their families’ expectations for them, and Scooter was the opposite of that. Yet something about him hinted at the raw material of a different sort of man—someone he might never become, but could be. I wondered what it was inside a person that set them on one path or the other, and if they chose it, or if it chose them.

We worked all morning. Around eleven, Dodge drove off to buy lunch, and a few minutes later Elias wandered outside for a break, obviously pleased to be free of his brother-in-law for half an hour. He walked out to the mailbox that stood at the edge of the road and leaned against it with his back to us, smoking and looking at the mountains. His shorts and sneakers were spattered with paint, and dabs of it spotted his hands and his forearms, obscuring the shapes of his tattoos. For once, he looked at ease.

“You been talking to Elias much?” Scooter asked me, low voiced. He had worked his way over to where I sat painting a section of lattice, and now hovered above me painting a support beam. I looked up at him, squinting at the light.

“Sometimes,” I said. “He’s not very talkative when other people are around.”

Scooter nodded. “He tell you anything about how he’s doing? Or what’s going on?”

“What do you mean, ‘what’s going on’?”

“In his head, I mean. If he’s getting any better.” I didn’t reply right away, and Scooter tossed his cigarette into a bush with a grudging sigh. “I took him to the doctor a while back. He hasn’t said anything to me about whether any of it is working.”

“I didn’t realize you were that close with him.”

“I’m not, exactly. He used to give me rides to the bus stop all the time, when I was in middle school. It was almost two miles. He’d see me walking up the side of the road and pick me up in the van. Practically every day.” He gestured toward the road, pointing north. “My grandparents live in the senior care home now, but we used to live down that way, near the turnoff. They raised me.”

“That was sweet.”

“Yeah, it was really cool of him. Especially in the winter. I never forgot it. After he got back from the Middle East, when he saw I was working for Dodge, he asked me who my tattoo guy was, so I took him out to the shop and introduced them. This was maybe three weeks after he got back. The next week he wanted me to take him there again, and the one after that. I felt weird about it, but I didn’t really want to say no. I mean, I can’t tell this guy what to do, even though the tattoo-a-week program feels strange to me. That and the fact he wouldn’t drive his own car.”

I set down the brush and shielded my eyes with my hand so I could watch him as he spoke. “So what did you do?”

“I just tried to get him talking. Asked him what the new tattoos stood for, whether he was frustrated with living in Frasier, stuff like that. I kept telling him I owed him for all those rides and I’d take him anywhere if he ever needed me to drive. And then one week he asked if I’d mind driving him to the doctor. It was a huge relief for him to ask. I was starting to get real worried he’d do something bad to himself. He had that vibe, you know? Like right before a kid sweeps his hand across the Chutes and Ladders board and knocks all the pieces on the floor. Spring-tight.”

I looked through the lattice at Elias. He seemed unaware that we were talking about him, and even on his best days he had a habit of cocking his left ear toward whoever was speaking. He looked watchful, eyeing the road, but if he was anxious or tense I couldn’t tell. Whatever was going on with him lived inside his mind, and there it stayed.

“If you could maybe talk to him,” said Scooter. “Try to suss out if he’s doing any better. He never wants to go anyplace anymore, so I hardly talk to him. Dodge thinks he just needs to work, and Cade—well, I don’t really know Cade. And I wouldn’t feel right going to him and telling him how to look after his own brother.”

“I’ll see what I can do. He seems to trust me.”

Scooter nodded and gazed toward him. “Thanks. Probably he’s fine now, but I gotta ask. There aren’t enough decent people out there as it is.”

“Too true,” I said, and he shot me a halfhearted smile before taking up his trim brush again and retreating into his deferential silence.

* * *

The chickens hadn’t come out as they were supposed to. Once the chicks in the porch incubator hatched from their neat little circle of eggs, Candy was indignant. The Vogels, who had traded them to Candy, had told her they were Rhode Island Whites—standard white chickens with a red comb, the kind from cartoons and Corn Flakes boxes. But almost as soon as they had hatched, it was clear that some were not like the others. They came out with a fine ash-colored sheen across their backs, and at six weeks some were heather-gray all over, while others—the males—kept the color on their necks and tail feathers even as their backs and bodies whitened. They were Brahmas, I could see, and Candy was annoyed. Despite their beauty, she felt swindled. She had been promised Rhode Island Whites, same as all the others.

As soon as they reached the age where they could be sexed, she wasted no time in separating the male chicks from the females. On the morning when I saw her in the poultry yard rounding them up into a tall-sided box, I felt sorry, but I knew she would care nothing for the pleas of a city girl who thought the roosters too beautiful to kill. They weren’t needed, and so they had to die.

On that morning, when the back door slammed, Candy came in from the yard carrying a cardboard box with half a dozen chicks in it. She set it on the table and got started filling up her mop bucket with water from the sink. Her youngest boy, John, peered over the edge of the box and made clucking noises. He reached in and scooped up one of the chicks, holding it to his chest. I looked from the boys to the bucket and then at Candy. I asked, “You want me to take the kids outside?”

“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 hear 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.”