Heaven Should Fall

splattering my brains all over a pine tree. Even if she says no, life could be worse.”

The clerk, who’d been pretending he wasn’t listening, for a split second looked up at me uneasily.

Dodge said, “That would have been a stupid-ass thing to do.”

“I didn’t do it, did I?”

“No. You think maybe you ought to take a little more time to get your head together before you ask her?”

“Now who’s on Oprah?”

“Just a thought.”

I took the bag and headed next door to the tattoo shop. Dodge looked amused while I explained to the guy what I wanted. Half an hour later I walked back out with a new motto in puffy black letters that curved around the insignia: Fiat justitia ruat caelum.

“Where the hell’d you get that from?” asked Dodge.

“John Quincy Adams. It’s Latin. ‘Let justice be done though the heavens should fall.’”

Dodge smirked and gave a quick laugh like a bull snorting. “You make a lot of noise, Cade.”

I said, “I’m not just making noise anymore.”

Chapter 22

Leela

Maybe a month or so after I lost Eve, there I was sitting at the breakfast table in my mother’s house, waiting for my tea to steep, and I had a revelation. It was very early, and the sunlight came through the window almost sideways, colored like pollen. The fields outside were cast in that haze. Easter had just passed, and where the table pushed up against the windowsill there was a basket made out of that plastic canvas stuff threaded with yarn, with the face of a bucktoothed rabbit on the front. In the bottom lay a few small chocolate eggs wrapped in foil, the dregs of that year’s candy she kept around for guests and neighbor children. It made for a poor and paltry scene, but I had my revelation even so.

I thought about the blind man in the Gospel, the one they bring to Jesus to test him. They say to him, so, was this man born blind because of his own sin, or because of what his parents did? Because everybody thought it had to be one or the other. But Jesus, he said no, this man was born blind so the glory of God could be revealed in him. And then he touched that man’s eyes and healed his sight. It made me think, maybe there’s a purpose for this sadness that I just can’t figure out, the way that man lived his whole life up until Jesus came along with everyone having the wrong ideas about why he was blind. Maybe someday I’ll come to find a purpose to this. And it wasn’t much, but it was just enough to cast a little sallow light on my heart, give me enough to feel around by. It would be a lie to say that made me feel better, but at least it made me feel like I could live.

Much later on, when Lucia came to me with that foolishness of hers, I thought about that again. I had the righteousness of knowing Jesus taught that the Lord doesn’t curse children for the sins of their parents. And even though I never received the witness for why that angel came down twice and swooped back each time, I had the comfort of knowing our hands were clean of it.

I don’t want to talk about what happened to Eli. We owe him the dignity of not speaking of that. Because it’s the truth, at wakes and memorials and such, that all the talk begins to turn a life into a set of tall tales. Somebody will tell a story, and when their friend laughs or sighs they’ll add a bit, or leave off the part that makes the deceased person look a little bit bad. At the end of it all, the real life dies back little by little, and in its place you have only a bunch of make-believe stories about the person who lived it. If you want to keep the flame of a life burning, you simply don’t speak of it. Something that isn’t talked about never changes. And that, I can tell you for a fact, is God’s honest truth.

I’d prefer to talk about Eddy.

That last spring we were all together—before school and the army took the boys away—Eddy’s face had been real, real red all the time. He’d begun to sweat so much that he took to carrying around a kerchief in his pocket that he used to wipe away the beads of perspiration that popped up like pearls on his forehead. Always he had been a hot-tempered man, but lately he reminded me of those cartoon thermometers they show on the television weather reports on the hottest summer days, with the red pushing against the top and droplets flying out like the whole thing is melting. Well, there wasn’t any telling that man that he ought to see a doctor. Unless you wanted the upbraiding of your life, you just left him alone. We all knew the art of that.

One evening, he and I were sitting in the den next to the kitchen, watching television. Eddy was sitting in the plaid chair that later turned into Elias’s, and I sat in the other one, crocheting on a blanket for Candy’s John, I suppose. He would have been the baby then. It was an April night, and it wasn’t warm, but Eddy mopped down his face and leaned forward to see the TV better. It was some program on The History Channel, some war thing. All of a sudden I guess he got fed up with whatever they were saying, because he picked up the remote and said something in a disgusted voice and changed the channel. That was all right, except I didn’t understand a word he was saying.

“Come again?” I asked him.

He looked me in the eye and he babbled off something different this time. It was a normal conversation voice he was using, but it was like baby words coming from his mouth, just nonsense. He shook his head, then tried again, but the words still didn’t come out right. I kept my face steady so he wouldn’t get mad at me and think I was mocking him. But I thought that was awful strange. Sometimes if he was drinking he didn’t make a lot of sense, but at least the words he used would string together all right, even if the thoughts didn’t.

That happened another time maybe a week later, at dinner. He was correcting Matthew on his manners, pointing a finger at him, when halfway through the sentence it all turned into gibberish. From the look on his face you could tell he knew, and it didn’t make any more sense to him than to the rest of us. Everybody looked around at each other, but nobody said a word about it. By then I’d looked it up in The Merck Manual we kept in the side table in the front room. It was an old one, but then, so was Eddy. From that I knew that if a person had speech problems that come out of nowhere, it might be a stroke. I watched him as we ate, saw the confusion behind his eyes, and I confess I felt a hard kernel inside me—almost an excitement, or maybe gloating. All those times he’d yelled at me when I told him he ought to get a physical, all those years he’d spent trading on this idea of himself as a hard-tempered man who’d scrap with anyone for anything—perhaps now, here at this dinner table, we’d arrived at the spoils of it. You know, deep down in the heart of hearts—no matter how Christian a person is or how much they say they forgive their enemy—everybody wants to see the justice of God. It would be like pure clear water on a hot day, to have lived with an injustice for so long, to have stood by watching as somebody with a bad soul got a good life, and then to suddenly see the payment come due for that person. Not revenge—I don’t mean revenge. I mean fairness. It’s a pleasure as true as any other of the body or soul, because believing in a fair world is the only thing that makes life livable.

Yet dinner went by, and Eddy was all right, and the next day he woke up just the same as always. Elias was in the front room, cleaning out the fireplace from the winter. He had a plastic sheet spread out over part of the room, with the grate and the poker sitting on it, and himself halfway up in the chimney trying to knock out all the wood ash. Well, Eddy came downstairs, took one look at Eli and said, “Boy, what in the hell are you doing?”

Elias crouched down to look out at his father and said, “What does it look like I’m doing?”

That made Eddy turn that plum-red color of his. “Don’t you start smart-mouthing. You see all that ash you’re getting all over the furniture? The floor? You didn’t think to drape anything?”

Elias ran a hand under his nose, leaving a streak of lighter gray. “Like anyone’ll be able to tell anyway. I’ll vacuum after I’m done.”

“Come here.”

“I’m working.”

“I told you to come here.”

Elias ducked out from the fireplace and came over. He wasn’t even all the way to his father when Eddy grabbed a big bunch of the front of his shirt and got right up in his face. Oh, and then the yelling started. Eddy in that barking voice shouting about how he’d paid for all this and Elias was lazy and didn’t care to do a job right, that’s why he was a failure—all that manner of hollering. My son, he just stood there and took it. He and his father