Chapter 21
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.
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. “
“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
