Heaven Should Fall

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.

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?”

I could feel Candy’s breath against my forehead. “Randy Olmstead’s family brought by some cookies,” I explained. “Candy’s not happy about it.”

For a long moment Leela said nothing. Then she said, “Well, Candy, if Jill wants the cookies, let her have ’em.”

“Mom,” I said, and both Candy and Leela looked at me in surprise. It had just been the word that came out of my mouth, and it surprised me, too, but I didn’t betray that. “They sent over a nice note and said they want to help if they can. There’s no need to be petty about it.”

“Can’t imagine the moment when we’d ever need their kind of help,” said Candy. “Somebody’d have to be dead or dying for those people ever to cross this threshold.”

“Somebody did die,” I pointed out. “Maybe it’s time to reconsider, then, huh?”

“Not on my watch.”

I looked to Leela, who shrugged. A wave of frustration rippled through me, and I wished for Cade to be there so he could talk some sense into these people. He didn’t seem to bear his uncle’s family any particular ill will. But he wasn’t home, and if I had learned one thing by living there so far, it was that Cade’s family held a kind of sway over him that dwarfed his otherwise strong will. I wouldn’t be wise to test it.

Instead, I wrote a thank-you note to Randy’s family and put it in the mail the next day. I signed only my own name to it, but it was something, at least. A declaration that I was above the rest of the family’s squabbling. It felt good to write it—liberating—and it seemed like the reasonable, sane thing to do in the face of Candy’s erratic behavior and Leela’s stony silence. Sanity seemed like an especially valuable thing right now, one I ought to store away in case of a family shortage, like evaporated milk or Potato Pearls.

* * *

The ax broke. That was the problem that led me into the shed that day. It was a frigid morning and I couldn’t get warm; the furnace, I suspected, was failing, doing little more than blowing around the air heated by the living-room fireplace. For a long time I sat in front of the fire, watching TJ bat around toys on his play mat rigged with arches that suspended his rattles above his head. Since the night before, he had been tugging at his ear, the now-familiar sign of an impending ear infection. Not again, I’d thought with a sense of dread, and nursed him twice as often in an effort to clear all the fragile little passageways. But the chances that would work were slim, and I knew now. I pulled the cuffs of my sweater over my hands and held my fingertips to the flames until they began to die down, and then I decided, for TJ’s sake and mine, we needed more wood.

Winter had been colder than expected and, where the woodpile was concerned, we were down to the bottom third of the cord, which Cade had not split properly. Such had been the theme of the past five months: chores were done carelessly, the remnants of tasks often trailing into the next day or week, as we found ourselves too distractible or disheartened to summon a good work ethic. Cade had it the worst of all. In November he had given away the two remaining cows to the Vogels, unable to continue venturing into the barn to milk them twice a day. Now he slept in until seven each morning, but he wasn’t any better rested for it. Often when I awoke to nurse TJ I found his side of the bed empty, and it worried me awfully, this evidence that his sense of work and routines and clear paths through the madness was faltering. If only he could run, he’d be all right, I thought, but you can’t run in New Hampshire in the winter. All you can do is stay put and try to stay warm. He’d been using the shed as his getaway place, the cave where he could retreat from the rest of us and maybe find a few moments of peace.

Laying TJ in the playpen, safely out of licking range of the beagles, I strapped on my boots and ventured out into the deep snow intent on splitting just enough wood to get us through Cade’s workday. I found the ax and wedge embedded in a section of tree sitting on a larger stump, all powdered with snow, and I cursed quietly. Cade was the worst in the world at putting away tools. When I tried to jerk the ax from the wood, the handle rattled in the fitting and then pulled out, leaving the ax head where Cade had left it.

“Winter and tools, Cade,” I muttered. “They don’t mix.”

I sighed. My breath whirled into the air like white smoke. I shoved my jeans deeper into my boots and began the trek through the snow to the shed. Dodge had conscientiously shoveled paths from his house to both main house and shed, forming two sides of a triangle, and so I headed toward the space he had cleared. Once at the shed I shoved its sliding door open and faced the mess Cade had left behind. At least the tools he neglected to put away indoors wouldn’t be damaged by the weather, but the place was still a disaster. In the center of the room was an enormous worktable littered with saws, hammers, boxes of nails, pliers in all sizes, rolls of tape and crumpled bags of barbecue-flavor potato chips. Beer cans were stacked in a short pyramid at one end, as though he’d had the idea to build a wall of them, frat-party style, but lacked enough material.

The walls were covered with nails and braces for hanging all sorts of tools, but there was no ax to be found. I did a cursory survey of the buckets clustered on the floor, then began sliding out boxes from the shelf suspended beneath the worktable. The first held a jumble of old drill batteries, the second a few half-filled cans of paint. Losing hope, I pulled out the last box in the row. Inside it were six lengths of thick metal pipe, neatly stacked.

There was something oddly tidy and uniform about the pipes—it didn’t fit with the mess of the rest of the shed. I lifted out one of them—nearly a foot long and heavier than expected, pinched closed on each end, with a length of wiry cord protruding—and turned it over. It sort of looks like a bomb, I thought. And then it dawned on me: It is.

I controlled the impulse to drop it and bolt from the shed. Softly now. I set it back in with the others, then eased the box back onto the shelf before hurrying outside, leaving the door ajar and the latch swinging on its hinge. From the henhouse came the fluttery sounds of the birds, their gentle clucking conversations. The sky was hidden beneath a thick cataract of white clouds. Squinting at the haze of light that filtered past them, I peered up at the top floor of the house—those four neat windows high above the back-porch roof, the rusted grate of the attic fan disturbing their symmetry. Somewhere up there, Leela worked. She was the one I needed to talk to.

I climbed the stairs to the top floor and knocked softly at her door. When she opened it, her kind face wore a businesslike, somewhat irritated expression. The magnifying lens on its dull yellow cord rested against her chest. It came back to me right then, the way she had looked when Candy dumped Lucia’s cookies in the trash, her gaze stoic and impenetrable. She was one of them, after all. They had cast off a brother forever, simply because he disagreed with them on a point that, to me, barely warranted a bump in a conversation. I loved Leela and I believed she loved me, too, but if I asked her a question that challenged the uprightness of her family, she would align with them, not me.

“I think TJ’s getting another ear infection,” I said. Her face softened, and I added, “And we’re out of wood, and it’s cold, and I can’t split any because I can’t find the right tools. I think the furnace is broken.”

She reached out and cupped my chin. Her face had gone blurry. “Well, there, don’t cry about it. Dodge’ll be back in a bit, and we’ll get him to look at it. Surely we’ve got some of those fire-starter logs in the cellar. Did you take a look?”

I rubbed my cuff beneath my nose, and she pulled me to her. Her hug pushed my face against her shoulder, and I choked a sob. “I know, I know. It’s hard when your baby’s sick. He’ll be all right, now.”

I nodded and pulled in a shaky breath. It made me so terribly weary, this business of having family that I loved but could so easily lose. Whatever I had seen in their shed wasn’t worth a rift with Leela. Nothing would be worth it, I thought, except TJ, and I tried not to think about how it might come to that, the way things worked in this family.

* * *

It was three-fifteen in the morning when Cade and I loaded TJ into the Saturn and drove to the emergency room, navigating the pitch-dark roads to the furious soundtrack of TJ’s squalling. In an hour his fever had spiked to 103, and Cade, bouncing the purple-faced baby against his chest, had cast ever-more-frequent glances at the road beyond the front window before asking me, in a defeated and vaguely frantic tone, to bring him the car seat. Now he raked his fingers back through his hair with his left hand, flexed his right against the steering wheel and mumbled that he was going to lose his mind if the kid didn’t quit screaming.

“He’s in pain,” I reminded him. I had to speak up to be heard above the baby. “He’s not doing it to be obnoxious.”

“I know, but God. It’s as bad as the night he was born. Remember?”

“No. I was unconscious when he was born.”

“I mean Eli. Well, you wouldn’t remember that, either. The way he just kept screaming and screaming until I was ready to punch him in the face just to make the noise stop.”

I glanced at him. Only half-seriously, I said, “Okay, well, don’t punch the baby.”

“I’m not going to punch the baby. Jeez, Jill. I feel sorry for the poor kid.”

He pulled into the circular drive of the hospital and I carried TJ inside. By the time Cade had parked and followed us in, TJ was nursing desperately at my breast in a plastic chair in the hallway, awaiting a promised shot of antibiotics. Cade sank into the chair beside me with weary grace, letting his head drop back against the wall so that his ball cap popped partway off, and stared up at the acoustic tile of the ceiling.

“I’m so freakin’ tired I can’t see straight,” he said. “And I gotta get up for work in two hours.”

“Call in sick.”

“I can’t. Not after what this hospital visit is gonna cost.”

“The state has a program for—”

“F*ck the state. C’mon, Jill. You know we don’t do stuff like that.”

I looked away. TJ gulped noisily, but at least he sounded contented. I pulled his feverish body more tightly against me, less for his comfort than for mine.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“You sound like Dodge.”

“Oh, please. Not everyone wants to sponge off the government, is all. Dodge didn’t invent that concept himself.”

“Maybe not, but it annoys me when you agree with him. You never used to.”

“That’s because his ideas used to be dumber.”

I turned to look at him again. He sat with his knees splayed wide, bootlaces half-undone, pulling his Terps cap down over his eyes and then pushing it up again in an idle way. The copy of Elias’s tattoo was too dark against his pale arm; his brother’s complexion had been swarthier, and Cade couldn’t pull off the look. Seeing him now was like looking into a chrysalis to see Cade’s half-formed, new incarnation: from the elbows up he was still his old self, but below that, he was turning into Dodge.

“Maybe his ideas are as lousy as ever,” I proposed.

Cade glanced at me and cracked a grin. “I’m getting dumber, huh? Maybe so.”

“Whose stuff is that in the shed?”

His grin evaporated. “What stuff?”

“You know what I’m talking about.”

The nurse padded over with a loaded syringe on a tray. I sat TJ up to allow him to get his shot, setting off a new round of hysterics. Cade took him from my arms and lifted him to his shoulder, settling into the same bounce that had failed to lull him an hour before.

“You don’t understand how it is around here,” said Cade. “We used to blow stuff up at the quarry all the time, just for the hell of it. What else are we going to do around here, play croquet? There’s nothing to do on a weekend except drink, fish and screw. And I don’t like fishing.”

I kept my own gaze locked with his, trying to gauge the honesty of his words. He looked at his shoulder, where the baby had just spit up milk on his T-shirt. “Nice,” he said.

I tried not to smile. “So you’re telling me it’s all leftover stuff from high school?”

“Yeah. I can get rid of all that. Do you have a burp rag in your bag there? This smells disgusting.”

I handed him the cloth from the diaper bag and watched him mop himself up. As he did, a doctor stopped short beside us, looked at his clipboard and then at our baby, and asked, “Thomas Olmstead?”

“That’s him,” said Cade. “The one who just puked on me.”

The doctor’s smile was stiff. “Can I have a word with both of you in the exam room?”