Heaven Should Fall

Chapter 16

Leela




Things between me and Candy weren’t always so strained. There was a range of time—between when she was ten and thirteen years old, say—that I thought she might turn out like a regular daughter anyway. She grew real interested in homemaking arts around that age, wanting me to teach her sewing and how to make peach pies and such. It felt a little like a game, but I went along with it. For a while she had a hutch of rabbits in the backyard, white ones, and the babies came out so tiny and sweet you couldn’t help but love them like they were kittens. But then Eddy said they weren’t worth keeping unless we used them for food, and then once a week or so Candy’d go out back with Eddy’s .22 pistol and shoot a few for supper. I’ve lived on a farm all my life, and still I couldn’t stand the sight of her skinning those things on the counter. They were the same little creatures she’d been loving on just the day before. I couldn’t abide it, so they had to go.

Back then we still got along fine with Randy, and we all spent time together often. Randy’s wife, Lucia, she was in my kitchen three or four days a week, and we traded and lent and borrowed things like our two houses were really one, just broke in half and dropped ten miles apart. She had her two little girls then and they tagged along everywhere with her, bobbing along with their pigtails and their dresses made from the same fabric as hers. I had to work not to envy her. Candy was getting ready to turn twelve, and I was feeling the loss of her childhood. Lucia’s daughters were just toddlers then and I kept thinking she still had all those years ahead with them, all that potential for happy memories, and here she was pregnant with the next one, too. But this is just exactly why the Lord tells us not to covet things, not once but twice. Because envy will eat at your soul if you let it, and it’ll take you to a place inside yourself where you’ll have the things of this world at whatever cost. So I tried to push it all down deep, because the truth is when I tried to give it up to the Lord, it seemed like even He didn’t want it.

One afternoon, when Lucia was sitting at my kitchen table drinking herb tea as we watched Cade chase her little girls around in the backyard, I let it slip a little bit. I said, “Even though he’s almost seven years old, sometimes I think about having one more. Don’t know if I’m ready to say goodbye to those baby days just yet.”

And she said, “I wouldn’t with Eddy.”

Well, I just stared at her then. There she sat with her hand on her mama belly, with all her long hair swept back just so, that mug of lemony tea in her other hand. She was watching her girls, and looked so much at peace. And yet that statement had just come matter-of-factly right out of her mouth. I said, “I beg your pardon.”

She shrugged her shoulders and kept watching her girls a minute. Then she turned her eyes on me, and I steeled myself inside, because I knew Lucia was one to say what she was thinking when she looked like that. She said, “If Eddy were my kids’ father, the way he’s been acting, I wouldn’t want to bear another one of his. I’d just say no thank you. Because you know what, Leela—and don’t you look at me that way, because I’m telling you the truth. The Lord commands us to raise them up in righteousness. And there’s no point in bringing them down from heaven in the first place if that’s a covenant you can’t keep.”

I said, “I think you ought to be leaving now.”

“Oh, it’s no reflection on you,” she said. “But something’s gone dark inside that man and you know it. It seems like he’s always grinding on the edge of that temper like a blade. You didn’t do anything to deserve that, and I’ll tell you what, neither did Elias. Randy said next time he sees his brother pin that boy against the wall, it’s going to be the last time.”

I stood up, and once I did, she pulled herself up, too. “Well, I guess I’ll fetch my girls,” she said.

After that I didn’t say one more word to her. I didn’t have the kind of words inside me that could talk about those kind of feelings. I’m not a violent person in any way, but as soon as she walked out the door I felt like kicking it and slamming on it with both fists. All I had inside me was a scream, and it seemed to fill me up like a tongue of flame. I was made of rage. I don’t think I really understood until then why we need redemption. I knew why we need strength from the Lord, sure, and his help in carrying our burdens. But it wasn’t until right then that I could understand how even a good-hearted person, a God-fearing person, could break every commandment in her heart, shatter them all like a mirror falling off a wall.

I never told Eddy what she said. He saw I had a cold shoulder for Lucia after that, but he chalked it up to women’s bickering. It was a few months later that I found out I was expecting again, and I took that news with joy, even as a small part of me guarded itself a little. I could feel that baby’s spirit hovering around me, and I knew who she was. It was different from with Candy. I remembered this spirit from the first time, with Eve, like when a good friend walks up behind you and without even looking you know who’s standing there. It was a welcoming feeling, as if inside my heart I was saying, Oh, hello there.

You know, I remember, when I was a child, how some mornings my mother would pull up the shade as she was waking me for chores, and I’d turn and see the light so bright that I had turn back to face the wall. And other times, when it was pig-slaughtering season, I’d watch them string up the hog, but once they slashed it open I’d grimace and look at my father instead. And this was one of those things. When I woke up one morning and found my sheet thick with blood, my heart couldn’t bear to look upon it. Instead I just pictured Lucia, sitting there filled up with her son and all her sanctimony, telling me why I didn’t deserve to bring down another soul from heaven, or to give a second chance to the one I’d lost the first time. Why my family wasn’t good enough for Eve.

A lot of women might pat my hand over that, and say, oh, Leela, those are the thoughts of a grieving mother. You’ll be forgiven of all that anger. But if you want to know the truth of it, I don’t want that forgiveness so much as I want an answer to my question. If the Lord wants to grant us our righteous desires, then I want to know why he kept taking her back from me. Because you can’t fault a woman for the man she married. God knows we go in with the best of intentions. I think Lucia was wrong about that, and if she wasn’t, well, the Lord and I have some things we need to work over. I can take on the burdens of my children’s failings, but not those of my man. It’s too much to ask, and I don’t say that too often.