were the same height and built alike, though his father wasn’t as heavy. Then Eddy shoved him in the chest, back toward the fireplace, and Elias shuffled back over and started to get back to work. But when he knelt down again Eddy shoved him in the hip with his boot, starting that yelling all over again, pushing Elias’s head with the flat of his hand. Elias, I guess he got fed up, because he said, “Knock it off,” though with another word in there I won’t say. Eddy shouted at him not to curse at him, but then when he bent over to get in Elias’s face again, he staggered to the side and fell into a chair.
At first neither Elias nor I moved to help him. We both just watched, like rabbits in their holes watching a mad dog get taken down. Eddy tried to stand up, but fell farther down instead, and slumped there on the floor. It wasn’t in his vocabulary to try and call for help. His body was powdered with ash down one side, where he’d slid onto the plastic sheeting, and there was a streak of it across his cheekbone. He pulled himself to the middle of the floor on his left arm, while his right just hung there. I wasn’t stupid, now. I knew what was happening. But half an Eddy, especially when angry, was still powerful. He was a mad dog wounded.
“Dad, what’s the matter?” asked Elias. Eddy just lay there, breathing in a stuttering sort of way. Elias looked at him, then at me. “What should I do? You think I should drive him to the hospital or something?”
“If he’ll go.”
Neither of us proposed calling 911. All the fuss Eddy had made over the years about how we don’t call 911, nobody was going to even float that idea right then, when he was still conscious and maybe up to making us pay for it. So Elias got on one side of him and I got on the other, and together we hoisted him into the Jeep and took him down to the hospital that way. It cost him a lot of time. Elias didn’t really realize how serious it was, and I didn’t say much. Probably I should have, but that kernel was back inside me again and it gave me a sense of calm. This didn’t feel like an emergency. It only felt like what was inevitable, like a harvest.
My first thought, when the doctor confirmed to us that he’d had a stroke, was
But Elias left for boot camp just a couple of months after that. It turned out he’d had that in the works for months. That surprised me, because Eli and the army didn’t sound like a very good mix. That boy already had enough holes in his spirit from the drill sergeant who sat across from him at the dinner table; last thing he needed was to have a stranger shoot him full of more of those, especially when the world had finally turned a little more fair and cut him the break he needed. But he was an adult and could do what he liked, and he wanted to go.
Sometimes I think I should have insisted he stay home. I should have said, son, I know you, and I don’t think you’re cut out for this. Had I pushed at that, maybe we wouldn’t have fallen into all this trouble. But I was afraid to be like Eddy or Dodge, always telling Eli that he wasn’t good enough to do a thing, that he was too weak. And so I let him go. Some days I have such a sore regret about that, I can barely face the day. I feel like I ought to be ashamed to show my face to the sunrise, knowing if I’d done differently Eli might be here to see it, too.
Exactly one week after that awful day, I got a letter in the mail with an unfamiliar handwriting on the envelope. It was from Harold, the first man I married, telling me he had seen the obituary and extending his condolences. He wrote, “I am certain Specialist Olmstead was fortunate to have a mother such as you.” That was a bittersweet thing to read. It caused me to think of how young I was when I walked out on him, how I didn’t understand at all about how hard life would get, and how maybe he acted hard-hearted about Eve because he was too sorry to know what to say or do. My father was a gentle man and that wasn’t his way. I suppose I expected every man to be just like him. Well, I would learn. I’d learn the hard way. And seeing Harold refer to me as “Mrs. Olmstead” filled my eyes up with tears, because it’s the sorriest thing to know that what you’ve left behind, you can never go back to get it.
But with Eddy, I never did stir up any regret about how I handled all of that. I never felt one bit of guilt. That right side of him still doesn’t work too well, and feeling the weakness of his body has taken all the fight out of him. And I’ll tell you, if ever there was a weakness that manifests the glory of God, it’s that one. He finally sent the rest of us a measure of peace and harmony in our home. Perhaps it’s cold for me to believe that, but if it is, so be it. If I have to glean in the fields for a little of the fairness of life, don’t begrudge me what I find.
Chapter 23
He was always her victim. Not Cade, because he was too small. Always Elias. He would chase her screaming through the backyard, around the henhouse and shed, through the mud-rutted horse corral where her house with Dodge would someday stand, between the rows of cabbages in the garden and finally under the porch. Cornered between the lattice and the moldering wood, she would scream with the exhilaration of being trapped and helpless, shivering with it as he combat-crawled toward her on his belly. Even then he had a set of jungle BDUs from the thrift store, black work boots and a T-shirt that said “Marines.” His belt was loaded like a cop’s: his Boy Scout knife, his BB gun, make-believe clips of ammo made from Mike and Ike candy boxes wrapped in electrical tape, and his trick handcuffs. He had the BB gun out as he crawled, pointed at her once she ran out of space to run. Probably it wasn’t loaded. But you never knew.
“Gotcha, you goddamn VC,” he always said, drawling, imitating the men from the gun club. He was nine years old. She felt the thrill of the words he wasn’t supposed to say, profanity and blasphemy at once. His hair was short as the bristles of a currycomb. He grabbed for her ankle, but that was all he could do. At twelve she was almost too old for this game, and she fought too hard for him to subdue her without turning her into the sort of mess that enraged their mother. The game was supposed to end there, but it never did.
He was not lithe like Cade. He maneuvered on his elbows to turn toward the exit, cumbersome, working against his belly. And she pounced, springing from her corner to land on his back, asnatched the cuffs from his belt. He cried
It wasn’t this that started it. It was already there: the particular, pinpoint thrill, one that came with the amorphous sense that she should not talk about it. That the pleasure of overpowering him was far disproportionate to what it ought to be.
She thought about it often. On the stereo in their station wagon there was a knob for the volume and a sliding control that deepened the bass. If she slid it lower, even the lightest song on the inspirational-rock station developed a palpable throb. Made it vibrate in her bones. Her predilection was the same way. No matter how sweet the song inside her, if they drove past a traffic stop and saw a man being taken into custody, or if in the church coatroom a man struggled to get out of the sleeves of his coat, the bass lever in her throttled downward. By thirteen she knew it was shameful. Anything that made your thoughts go that way was a shame on you, by its very nature.
Then she was fourteen, and there came the day of the Easter passion play. She wore a smock made of sackcloth and a thin crown of flowers. She was part of the Hallelujah chorus. The man playing Jesus, naked but for a rag wrapped around his hips, hauled his cross through the street that led to the church’s front yard. The Romans hoisted him onto the cross and, because the Jesus of their play was a real man and not a martyr, bound him to it with lengths of rope. His head lolled back, the tendons in his neck thrust and trembled against the thin skin, his hands contorted. She felt dizzy with the thrill and the horror. She was certainly damned.
When Dodge started coming around, drinking beer with her dad in the living room and inviting her to talk to him about school, she welcomed his attention with an almost frantic enthusiasm. When he asked if she would ride with him over to the sport shop to pick up a new vest for hunting season, her father gave his permission. They fucked in the front seat of his truck, and she was grateful. She was damned now for a specific, common thing. She would be in hell for a crime she could name. To see Dodge helpless with desire for her was empowering. And to take pleasure from him—for he offered it effusively—was surely nowhere near as evil as taking it alone, with thoughts as aberrant as hers.
She was a good woman now, and she lived a good life. She knew she was forgiven of her sins, although she
