Heaven Should Fall

I pulled him to my breast and eased back into bed, arranging the covers over myself and the lower half of TJ’s body. Cade had left the door ajar, and the night-light from the bathroom was the only illumination in the darkness. The baby’s nursing was slow and rhythmic, and I closed my eyes in deep fatigue. When I opened them, Elias was standing in the doorway, looking at me with his plain, unreadable eyes.

I pulled up the edge of the quilt immediately, self-conscious to be caught nursing the baby bare chested in front of him. When he didn’t react, I held up a finger to let him know I would be with him in a minute. I looked down at the baby, and when I glanced up again, Elias was gone.

After a while TJ fell back asleep at my breast, and I laid him softly in the basket. I pulled on one of Cade’s T- shirts and a pair of pajama pants and tiptoed down the stairs. The entire house was dark; both televisions were off, and the lamp that always burned beside Elias’s chair when he was awake had been snapped off, as well. I checked the porch rocker and found it empty, then headed back up to my room. Only then did I notice Elias’s door was closed, and I knew he must have grown tired of waiting for me to finish nursing the baby and had gone off to bed. For that, I felt a little sorry. Elias and I needed to talk. He had put his arms out to me. That was progress. If he would do that much, maybe he would open up to me about how the rest of us could help him, too. And we could all move forward.

I slipped back under the covers and slept until four-thirty, when TJ woke to nurse again and Cade got out of bed to attend to the day’s chores. And then I drifted back to sleep for a while, until I heard Cade yelling from the barn, and then Candy’s scream, and I realized it had not been Dodge’s gun that went off that night, but Elias’s.

* * *

It was Dodge who stopped me at the door of the barn with both hands held up and out, his face a warning that he meant business, that there was no chance I would find a way to push past him. I screamed for Cade, but Cade didn’t even turn in the direction of my voice. I could see him crouched on the floor of the barn, with Elias’s legs jutting out to the side, sneakers on as always, but both he and Cade were in shadow. Candy came and went, her long hair flying behind her as she ran between the main house and the barn, then down the driveway to meet the ambulance. From the upper window came the sound of TJ squalling with increasing vehemence, but my own newborn’s crying had become a distraction from the primary event. After a while Leela appeared with TJ on her shoulder and her face bone-white, and then red and blue flashing lights twirled in the driveway, accompanied by the staticky clatter of radios. Only then did Cade reappear from the barn, both of his hands and the front of his T-shirt covered with thick red blood. His expression was stoic, and he met my eyes before pointing to the house and saying in a voice that was not to be argued with, “Get inside.”

I took the wailing baby from Leela and trailed into the house, sitting in a dining chair near the window and setting him to nurse. Instantly he went quiet. The window offered no good angle on the barn and driveway. After the sirens chirped to life, I caught sight of Cade stalking over to the shed. He pulled off his shirt and stuffed it into the trash, then squatted by the garden spigot and rinsed off his hands. I let out a shaky sigh and switched TJ to the other breast. There was nothing to do but wait for Cade.

He came back into the house and jerked open the bifold door of the laundry closet, then opened the dryer, spilling out clean clothes onto the floor as he searched for a fresh T-shirt. I asked, “Are you going with him?”

“I’m driving down there now. They wouldn’t let anyone come in the ambulance. Said we needed to follow in a car. Dodge is already on the way, with Dad.”

“What happened? Is he going to be all right?”

He pulled a shirt over his head and looked at me as though I had asked the stupidest possible question. “He shot himself in the head, Jill.”

“Okay, but do you think they can save him?”

“Of course they can’t save him. He’s dead. You think a guy like Elias doesn’t know how to pull off something like that? Did you see my hands?” He felt in the pockets of his jeans. “Damn it, where are my keys?”

“But I saw him. I just saw him first thing this morning. I know I did.”

“Well, I just saw him, too. Jesus Christ.” He pulled off his watch and dropped it onto the counter. Smears of blood marked both the countertop and his skin. “Get rid of all that, will you? My mom’s going to have a nervous breakdown if she sees it, and I gotta go.”

I tore off a paper towel. “Do you want me to come with you? I can leave TJ with Candy. Maybe they can save him. You won’t know until they get him there.”

“He’s dead, Jill. And no, you can’t come. It’ll be hours and hours. I’ll have to help Dad figure out where to send him and how to fill out all the paperwork. And when the hospital files their report, I want them to know every last detail. I want them to know who’s accountable.”

I set TJ on my shoulder to burp him. “What do you mean, who’s accountable? Nobody’s going to think it was you or Dodge.”

“I mean so they know it’s the army that did it. So it’s on the record that they broke this poor bastard and then ignored him and blew him off, and when he tried to get help they threw some pills at him, and then he shot himself because they’d turned him into a drug addict.” The volume of his voice ramped up gradually with each sentence, until he was nearly shouting. “I want it to be on that last line on his death certificate. ‘Cause of death: homicide.’”

“Cade…they’re not going to do that.”

“They’d better. It’s criminal. You don’t agree with me? You don’t think they royally screwed him over?”

“I never said I didn’t agree. I just said there’s no recourse.”

“It’s my opinion,” Cade began, leaning toward me with his hands against the kitchen island, “that people are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, namely life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“Nobody’s arguing with you.”

“And whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it’s the right of the people to alter or abolish it. That’s my right and my duty.”

I stood up and joggled TJ on my shoulder. “Cade, don’t go in there with your sleeves rolled up quoting the Declaration of Independence. They’ll think you’re a nut job. The important thing is to get Elias taken care of.”

Cade threw his arms in the air. “He’s dead!”

“I just saw him!” I shouted back again, and in the moment I felt so passionately correct that nothing would ever have convinced me otherwise. “I bled a lot, too, and here I am! So don’t you write him off until someone with a degree who knows what they’re talking about tells you different!”

He swore at me, grabbed his keys from the hook and slammed the front door.

It would be many hours before I saw him again. And by the time he walked back in the door, dry-eyed and grim and smelling of cigarette smoke, I’d had much more time to consider all that had been said.

I felt sorry for what I’d said about hearing it from a person with a degree. I knew that must have been salt in the wound for Cade, that only a person who had finished college was qualified to judge what he himself had seen.

I believed, finally, that Elias was dead.

And I thought, where the army was concerned, Cade might be right. Maybe it was the army’s fault for throwing him back into the world when he returned from war, woefully ill equipped to make his way through the battlefield of normalcy. Maybe it was their fault for nurturing a culture in which he couldn’t admit need without acknowledging failure.

But also came the terrible thought that it was my fault, too. For not listening to my mother’s voice that had whispered to me so insistently over these past months, warning me that what we were doing for Elias was not enough—never enough. For not recognizing, the previous afternoon, that Elias was trying to make his peace with me and Cade. And worst of all was not what I had failed to do, but what I had done: how I, with the best of intentions, had led him to love me. Deep in my heart I had known for months that his fondness for me was not sisterly, but in spite of that I laid my hands on his shoulders and my son in his arms and expected him to find it a comfort and not a burden.

For a long time after the funeral it seemed always to be on my mind—the constant question of whether my friendship with Elias played a role in his death. He left no note, no letters, no explanation. In the infinite stretch of time that followed, some days I told myself it was egotistical to assume I had a part in it at all. He was addicted, in pain, mentally ill. None of those things had anything to do with me. But I couldn’t get away from the belief, down in the core of me, that it was true. Elias’s mind was a crowded room of people he could never get his arms around: