Rebecca Coleman: Heaven Should Fall

Through the open door I could see my husband hard at work just outside the shed, a column of sweat staining his T-shirt in the June heat, his solid arms shedding flecks of grit and sawdust as he twisted down the metal vise. He wore a ball cap with the brim tightly rolled and heavy leather work boots, and when he stepped back and held his small, lethal project up to the light, the ease of his broad shoulders and smoothness of his belly made him lovely in spite of his efforts. Truly, Cade could have been anything. With his passion for his country and whip-smart intellect, he could have been the congressman he had once aspired to become. He could have been a pastor or a diplomat, a marine, or, thanks to his sincere charm and beautiful eyes, a very successful womanizer. But instead he stood alone outside this shed in northern New Hampshire, loyal and angry and probably not entirely sober, building a pipe bomb.

I caught his eye, and he waved and commenced to shake powder into the pipe from a narrow-topped bottle.

“Lunch is ready.”

“Be there in a sec. Is the baby awake?”

“Yeah, he’s in the high chair. Candy’s watching him.”

“How’s he feeling?”

“Better. I put some drops in his ear and they seem to be helping.”

“Good. Poor kid.” He slipped in a fuse, and then, with a cautious hand, slid a palmful of nails down the center. “You know what we need, Jill?”

I could think of many answers to that question, but Cade answered it himself.

“A weekend away,” he said. “No whining kids, no animals to feed, no parents in the next room keeping things all quiet and inhibited. No sitting watch at three in the morning like we’re the goddamn Branch Davidians. Just you and me in a motel room someplace, getting friendly.” He set the other end of the pipe into the vise and tightened it down.

“There’s an alumni weekend at our alma mater next month. We could go to that, if you haven’t blown yourself up by then.”

He laughed. Carefully he set the completed bomb into the box with the others, then came over to kiss me. Not to my surprise, he tasted like beer.

“‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall,’” he quoted, low voiced, smiling.

I smiled back stiffly. “Come eat. The family’s waiting.”

He turned on the garden spigot and crouched to wash his hands in the crashing water. It flowed away from the house in a narrow river, carrying away steel dust and explosive powder, the grime of farmwork and sloughed dry skin from his calloused hands: the slow erosion of my husband.

The signs for Baltimore-Washington International Airport began to appear above the highway ten miles out. “Keep right.” Cade shot a glance at my side mirror, then shifted two lanes over in one graceful, if reckless, maneuver. I braced the dowels of the two miniature American flags against my lap, but they barely shivered. Cade and his little white Saturn coupe were like a boy and his dog. He spent half his life in the thing, and there was no reason to doubt his skill at handling it.

“I bet he’s dying to get off that plane,” said Cade. “It’s a fifteen-hour flight from Kabul to Baltimore. That’s a crapload of Nicorette.”

I grinned. “So if he seems really cranky, I shouldn’t assume that’s his normal personality.”

“Nah. He’s a cool guy. Getting shot at for three years probably makes a person a little edgy, but he’ll mellow out fast enough.” He felt around in the console and, finding it empty, said, “Pass me the mints, will you, Jill?”

“You’ve got one in your mouth already.”

“Yeah, but it’s almost gone.”

I reached into the neatly arranged “auto office” box at my feet and retrieved the Altoids tin from a side pocket. “Cade, you’re a mint addict.”

“Usually you’re not complaining.”

“The first step is admitting you have a problem.”

His brow creased above his sunglasses. “I thought it was believing in a higher power.”

“No, that’s the second step. That a higher power can restore you to sanity.”

A white sign appeared above our heads, marked with a rainbow of coded indicators. Cade turned down his Dave Matthews Band CD, as if quieter music would help him see the signs better. “‘Arriving Flights,’” he read aloud. “We’re coming to get you, bro.”

We navigated the labyrinth of the parking garage and emerged into the airport. Once through security, our gate passes in hand, we joined the crowd gathered around the walkway cordoned off for the soldiers. The air was electric with anticipation. We could see, through the window, the plane pulling up to the gangway, setting off a noisy cheer and the waving of handmade signs drawn in red and blue marker. Young mothers strained to see through the glass, leaning heavily on the handles of their strollers, as if exhausted by the journey. Senior citizens stood patiently alongside, the men wearing trucker caps embroidered with the names of units and platoons, the women in sweatshirts hand painted with cheerful flag themes. Cade passed his American flag off to a little girl, then unclipped his sunglasses from his T-shirt collar and shifted them to the back pocket of his jeans. When I gave him a funny look he explained, “I don’t want to stab Elias with them when I hug him.”

Then the door opened, and a great wave of a cheer rose up as the first soldiers started down the walkway. Among the colorful crowd, their tidy uniforms—buttoned and tucked, the digital camouflage in subtle shades of sage and moss—gave them gravitas and dignity. So many hands to shake , I thought, so many people to work through , when surely each one must want nothing more than to collapse in a recliner with a beer. One soldier after another worked his jaw around a piece of gum, and I thought about what Cade had said on the highway.

At last Cade’s searching gaze snapped into recognition, and he uncoiled his arms from their crossed position against his chest. “Hey, dude,” he said, clasping Elias’s extended hand, then pulling him into a hug unimpeded by the flat ribbon of the walkway marker wedged between them. “I missed you, man.”

For a year now—ever since Cade and I began seeing each other—I’d been looking at the same photo of his brother, a glowering soldier bulked out by body armor and carrying an M-16, standing on a patch of sand with an American flag pinned to the tent behind him. The image was tacked to the corkboard above Cade’s bed in his dorm room, among the various bumper stickers from campaigns he had volunteered on—local representatives, congressmen, state senate—and a postcard of Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders portrait with the quote “Aggressive fighting for the right is the noblest sport the world affords.” Elias almost never wrote letters home, so on one rare trip back to their farm in New Hampshire, Cade had commandeered the photo sent to their sister, Candy, as a thank-you for her church fundraising the money to buy him the body armor. “Thanks ” and “Elias” were scrawled on the bottom in a sloppy cursive that looked as if it belonged to a twelve-year-old schoolboy, not a twenty-four-year-old army infantry specialist, but it looked as if Elias had bigger things on his mind than good penmanship. Sometimes when Cade and I were making love, I caught sight of that scowling image and felt a wave of guilt. Here Cade and I were in the ivory tower of academia, casting aside our textbooks to spend an afternoon at play in his bed, while seven thousand miles away his brother was making a diligent effort not to die. But the fact was, we had each chosen our own path. And now here we all were, together.