I did, she had replied. I called for help.
The third hour turned over, and at last the Buffalo rumbled into sight. “Good job, soldier,” the staff sergeant said to him as he ambled down the turret and collapsed onto the bench. Somebody handed him a Red Bull, and it kept him awake long enough to get back to the barracks.
The air conditioners greeted him with a blast of wet cool air and all their incessant grinding. He squirted some peanut butter onto a packet of crackers from field rations, smoked his last cigarette of the day and stripped down to his undershirt and boxers. At the urinal he recycled his Red Bull—VALOR HONOR DUTY QUIT WHINING—before falling into his bunk and pressing his face into his pillow. He was still alive.
With his sleep came his dreams. He dreamed of kneeling on the rifle range with his father beside him as he shot and missed, shot and missed. Everybody was watching. With each shot the helplessness doubled in his belly and doubled again, infused every moment with the dread of the inevitable. He dreamed of the man’s dry hand against his skull, pounding his forehead against the stump—not of the pain so much as the humiliation of his sister watching it all and knowing her brother had failed, feeling pity for him. He dreamed of her curling up behind him, offering him her love as he feigned sleep to ease the embarrassment of accepting it.
And when he awoke the next morning, the dream dissolving with the light, he understood the man in the ditch had felt just as he had—helpless, desperate, abandoned—but no, a hundred times worse, and without the glimmer of love to comfort him at the end of what he had endured. Elias pushed this away and forced a new thought, a dependable thought: Today is the day I will die. And it was easy to accept that morning, because he knew, in a small way, he already had.
Chapter 21
Cade
The funeral was held on a Sunday, the first day the air smelled like fall instead of summer. An American flag draped the blond-wood casket. I really wasn’t cool with that. As I fell in line behind Dodge and gripped the handle to carry it to the grave, the flag seemed less like an honor than an affront.
I did not look left or right. The mourners were a blur, anyway. I caught a line of mottled green—camouflage uniforms, probably people my brother had served alongside. Somewhere to the right of me, Candy was crying. My parents were the gray heads at the front. It was a kind of relief that my dad was too broken-down to serve as a pallbearer. Not a father’s job to bury his son.
I knew he felt awful. Elias and Candy always swore I was the favorite, but my parents didn’t run like that. They loved Candy for being their daughter and a good Christian. I was the smart one who was going to break out and make it in the world. But Elias, he was what they’d envisioned when they first got married and tried to picture what their son would be like. Happy to be their kid, happy in New Hampshire, aspiring to do okay in school, and serve his country, and come home to marry some local girl and keep the land in the family. Even after he came back as screwed up as he was, they never imagined for a second that he would deviate from the larger plan. Nobody thought he would except maybe Jill, and that was just because Jill didn’t understand what Elias was supposed to do.
I stepped back from the casket, folded my hands and looked at her across the aisle. Her eyes were dry, and she hoisted TJ to her shoulder with a competent shrug that was so like her. I didn’t know how she could be so goddamn stoic. Once she finally got it through her mind that Elias was really dead, she slipped right back into her cool, quiet, unflappable Jill mode. Normally I admired her for being like that, but now it made me uneasy as hell. I couldn’t shake the feeling that behind it all was a big “I told you so.”
Past her shoulder stood a solid, heavily built man in a dark suit, close enough that he could touch her. I glanced at his face and almost reeled back from pure shock. The guy was my uncle Randy. Right away I looked at my father to see if he had noticed, but my dad only stared at the ground, shrunken inside his dark blue suit. Dodge would be the real measure of whether Randy’s presence would be a problem. But Dodge was standing right next to me, and there was no way I could check his expression without being obvious.
Candy’s minister was conducting the service. Once we got to the sermon part he got all evangelical, which I thought was distasteful. The rest of my family wasn’t like that, and Elias hated that kind of shit. But it brought Candy to tears, big gulping sobs that had her clutching at tissues and her sons and Dodge as if she was slipping on a patch of ice. I knew that her mind divided up the world into two neat categories of “saved” and “damned,” and it had to be crumbling with the effort of figuring out where Elias fit. Cognitive dissonance, my professors would have called it. She had loved Elias with a depth I doubted any of us could quite match. I felt a shiver in my shoulders when I wondered how she would reconcile the brother she loved with something as blasphemous as suicide.
Without being obvious, I looked again at Randy. I hadn’t seen him in ten years, maybe twelve, but he didn’t look any different now than he had when I was a kid. That was crazy, because my father’s brother was younger than him by only eight years, and in the past decade my dad had aged at what seemed like double the speed of ordinary time. But Randy was still fit and dark haired, with the cowboy glower I remembered well. I tried to decide whether it was nice that he had come to pay his respects, or so insulting that somebody ought to shoot him where he stood.
The bugler was playing “Taps.” Two of the soldiers in uniform folded the flag, and one handed it to my mom. The casket was lowered into the grave and the mourners began to throw handfuls of dirt onto it, but by now I felt weary of the whole thing. I wanted to go home and curl up on the sofa with TJ on my chest. Drink a beer. Watch the Patriots play the Steelers.
I breathed a sigh through my teeth and waited it out. As I took my place in the line to thank the mourners, I watched Randy shake hands with the minister, speak to him briefly and then saunter back up the hill without a word to any of us. At that point I figured “shoot him where he stood” would have been the right way to go, but it was too late now.
“Hi, Cade.”
I focused on the woman who had stepped in front of me and, for the second time in half an hour, almost fell backward with shock. It was Piper. Her hair was short now, tucked behind her ears in a way that gave her a slick, professional look. She was as skinny as ever, and it really showed in her face. Her eyes looked huge. She held her hand out to me, and I shook it. What I really felt like doing was throwing my arms around her and pulling her off her feet. I was that glad to see somebody who hadn’t pissed me off lately.
“Hey, you,” I said, and began to smile, but then I realized the greeting was way too familiar for a funeral, besides which that Michael guy—the one she’d been with back at Christmas—was standing right behind her shoulder. Her eyes glinted as if she were laughing at me. I straightened up and said, “Thanks for coming. It would mean a lot to Elias that you’re here.”
“I’m so sorry, Cade.”
I nodded. I had no idea what to do with pity, but the offering of it made me feel weak. Being weak made me angry. None of those were good feelings when it came to Piper.
She loosened her grip on my hand, and I knew she was about to move on. I asked, “Where are you going to school now?”
“At the University of Vermont. Graduating in May.”
“That’s cool.” The rest of the people in the line were beginning to look annoyed, so I knew I had to let her go. “Thanks again.”
Driving home, Jill was quiet. After a while she asked, “How are you doing?”
I shrugged. “I just want to get this crap over with. He’s gone. There’s no point in standing on ceremony.”
“It doesn’t give you any sense of closure?”
It was all I could do not to laugh outright. “Hell, no.”
“It was nice to see all the people who cared about him. I thought you’d have more extended family there. Seemed like it was just you guys.”
“Pretty much. I saw Randy the
re.” I stopped and signaled my turn. “That was a surprise.”
“Are you serious? Boy, he’d better hope Dodge didn’t see him. There would have been a brawl in the middle of the funeral. Or worse.”
“It’s possible Dodge saw him and just ignored him. He knows how torn-up Candy is, so this might be the one occasion when he knows he’s full of shit and so he lets it lie for his wife’s sake. That’d be good to see for once.” There was a tractor in front of me, and I let my hands rest on the bottom of the steering wheel as I followed it slowly. “She’s not going to take this well.”
“Candy?”
“Yeah. In her world, a person doesn’t do something like this. It offends Jesus. She’s either going to be really angry at Elias for what he did, or really angry at God. In her way of thinking, Elias is screwed. He’s damned.”
“Maybe it’ll soften up her approach to the God business.”
“No chance of that. Candy’s nature is to take a hard line. Which one she’ll take, I don’t know.”
“What about you?” she asked. “Are you worried about his soul?”
“No. Not like I could do anything about it anyway. What I should have been more worried about was his mind. But I didn’t take it seriously enough, and here we are.”
“It wasn’t your fault, Cade.”
I can’t tell you how many times she said that to me over the next few months. All I can tell you is how many of those times I believed her. None.
* * *
The day after the funeral I drove down to the tattoo parlor in town and got Elias’s unit insignia inked on my forearm. Jill was opposed to the idea, telling me I was letting grief make me impulsive, but I went anyway and took Scooter with me. The tattoo guy was a buddy of his, the same one who’d done the tribal design on his arm. The needle hurt more than I expected. The truth was, physical pain had not been a big part of my life. I’d never even broken a bone. The worst I’d ever suffered was some painful road rash falling off my bike, and this hurt way more than that. But Scooter looked unimpressed by the size of the design and the blood that wept from the needle’s line across my skin while the artist worked, and so I kept my mouth shut and my face blank. Gradually the underside of my forearm took on the large black shield that Elias had worn. It was depressing and satisfying at the same time to watch it take form. This was the standard Elias had carried into battle, and now that he had fallen, it was my job to carry it the rest of the way.
The concept was easier in thought than in practice. I’d gone back to work the day after Elias died, only taking off for the day of the funeral, and that hadn’t been such a great idea. I needed to get away from that damned house for a few days. Every morning when I approached the barn door to milk the cows, my heart rate would start to accelerate. Fresh straw had been spread around inside, but when I cleaned up I could easily see the dark brown stain of his blood on the hard-packed earth. Inside the house, seeing his empty chair was killing me. I did what I could—went out back with the chain saw and cut down the rest of that oak tree he’d hacked up, disassembled the weight bench and took it back to the U-Store-It—but none of it gave me any of the closure I was looking for. Instead it seemed to make it all worse, as if my brother was getting further and further away. I guess Jill could tell how strung out I was getting, because she started encouraging me to take some time off work, and she freaked out about money as much as I did. So I took four days off work and told everyone I was going camping, which was the polite way of saying I needed to go live in the woods for a while or my head was going to explode. Jill approved. She packed me a week’s worth of clothes, with extra socks and moleskin for hiking.
The night before, I felt Dodge watching me while I packed the cooler. When I started packing up my car, he wandered out to the porch and just stood there. After a while he said, “Your car’s not going to make it if you run into bad conditions.”
“It’ll be fine.”
“Uh-uh. As much as you complain about it overheating? You really want to be an hour away from civilization if that happens again?”
I shrugged. “I’ve got my phone,” I told him, which was a stupid answer because in our part of New Hampshire you might as well send smoke signals half the time. Where I was going, the only good my phone would do me would be to knock out a rabbit if I was starving and my aim was good. But the truth was I didn’t care. I just needed to get away.
“What would you say to making it a fishing trip?” he asked. “I could stand to go on one of those.”
I smirked, sort of laughed a little. “I hate fishing.”
“Fine, I’ll fish, you sit on your ass and think your thoughts. Either way, there’ll be dependable transportation.”
It wasn’t his big behemoth of an SUV that won me over. My car wasn’t safe and I was okay with that, but the other thing that wasn’t safe was me. I was going to go crazy if I didn’t get some peace in my head, but being alone with my thoughts for a few days wasn’t necessarily a route to peace. Having Dodge there as a sort of spotter in case my brain started slipping off the edge wasn’t such a bad idea. And I figured he’d be tolerable. Dodge was an idiot around the house, but he wasn’t as bad when he was alone.
We left for the fishing trip the next morning as soon as dawn broke. It wasn’t too long before we crossed the border into Maine and, the better part of an hour later, found the lake he’d had in mind. Together we pitched the tent in near silence. True to form, away from the family his obnoxious edge was all but gone. He pulled a six-pack of longnecks from the cooler and handed me one, then set to work getting the fishing tackle in order while I cleared space for a campfire. It was pretty clear that Dodge’s plan was to keep us busy and slightly drunk. It seemed like an inspired idea.
Still, the way he acted threw me for a loop. Most of my life I had hated Dodge. From the beginning he had embodied everything I hoped not to be, and the older I got, the deeper grew my antipathy for him. But recent events had shown him in a different light from what I was used to. When Jill was bleeding to death, Dodge was the one fast on his feet, helping me get her in the car. When I found Elias in the barn, it was Dodge who didn’t get hysterical but instead called for emergency services—something we never did around here—stayed calm and kept the women back from his body. At every turn Dodge commanded a sense of order and authority.
And it was a damn good thing, because under stress all I could see were the ways I had failed in the task of becoming a man. My failure as a provider had nearly cost Jill and TJ their lives. In the chaos of it, I blamed Elias but showed no leadership. And then on the terrible morning when I found my brother laid out on the filth-covered floor of the barn, his limp arms and missing face making him look like a scarecrow made of blood, what was the first thing I had done? I admitted defeat, and shouted for Dodge.
I sat on the hard dirt outside the campfire ring and rested my back against a fallen tree. The lake glittered just ahead. It was amazing to look at—a flat silver pool set deep into the black earth that crumbled at its edges like cake. I shoved the hair out of my eyes and sighed from the bottom of my lungs.
After a minute, Dodge came over and sat down beside me. He wore a ball cap with a fishing hook looped into the brim. His dirt-worn jeans were slung low and held up by a leather belt that had seen better days, but still carried an army of items at the ready: keys, buck knife, Leatherman tool.
“Fishing’s gonna be good,” he said. “I can feel it in the air. They’ll be jumping.”
I nodded and twisted a green stick until it split open into threads.
“It’s gotta beat my last big fishing trip, for sure.”
“How do you know?”
Dodge grinned. Beneath the brim of his ball cap his eyes crinkled up at the corners, and his missing side tooth exposed a dark hole. “Told Candy I was coming up here and then took my ass straight to the clinic. Got snipped, checked into a motel, spent three days with an ice pack on my balls and drove home. Bought some fish at the market on the way back and
stuck ’em in the cooler for her. Done and done.”
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.
Heaven Should Fall Page 18