Rebecca Coleman - Heaven Should Fall

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 there.” 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.