could never quite believe that a payment would not be extracted from her sometime in the future. A reckoning, not for her sins, which were forgiven, but for her nature, which she carried inside her through her Christian life like a swallowed balloon full of heroin.
She told herself she needed to put her faith in God and know her fears were unfounded.
And then Elias shot himself in the head.
Chapter 24
In the days between Elias’s death and his funeral, Leela cooked. She abandoned her workroom and spent what seemed like all day in the kitchen, making casseroles and long pans full of green beans seasoned with bacon, scooping precise balls of cookie dough onto baking sheets. Whatever wouldn’t fit into her own refrigerator she stored in Candy’s, and when space ran out in that, she cleared out the big chest freezer and laid down trays in that. On the dining-room table, in a long row down the middle, sat seven or eight family-sized chunks of defrosting meat. Each sat in an enamel pan, slowly dripping icy water around the edges of its plastic wrap. These were the former occupants of the chest freezer, and I supposed she intended to cook them, too.
It was all for the funeral. She seemed to be expecting the whole world to join her in mourning. She sent Cade to a catering supply store in Liberty Gorge to buy disposable aluminum cookware for buffets. The kitchen island was cluttered with giant cans from the cellar storage, FREEZE-DRIED CHICKEN and CORN BREAD MIX and MILK. Once, as she added a second layer of cardboard-textured dried potato discs to an au gratin casserole, Candy snapped at her, “Stop using up all our food storage. We might need that, you know.” Leela said nothing, kept at what she was doing, but I knew what she was thinking: the end of the world had already arrived.
Once the funeral was over, the food all eaten, she retired to her workroom and didn’t really come out. I knew she was still making her stars, because Dodge would come downstairs with an armful of boxes marked up for priority mail. When Cade came back from his camping trip with Dodge and she didn’t even come down to greet him, I went up myself to check in on her.
“They’re back,” I said. “Dodge and Cade. Them and about twenty pounds of stinky laundry and you’ll never guess what else.”
She shook her head. She was painting a stripe across a star. Her eyes weren’t puffy or red, and the room was tidy as ever. My heart ached for her, and I thought, not for the first time, that it would be so much easier to offer her comfort if she would make a show of her grief—to grow hysterical, scream and rant, allow her environment and personal habits to fall apart in a sort of tableau of what was going on in her head. But her dignity made me shy, and the gulf between us seemed to grow wider with each day that passed.
“Cade got a tattoo,” I told her. “He got it last week, but I don’t think he’s shown it to you yet. It’s a tribute, I suppose you’d call it. I don’t know. He seems more upbeat. I guess being out in the woods did him good. It always does, for people.” I leaned against the door frame and watched her paint for a minute. “You want to go for a walk or something? The river’s real pretty right now.”
Her voice sounded weary. “I don’t think so, Jill.”
“Just a quick one? How about a trade? Come out with me for a little while, and when we get back I’ll help you paint. Or package them up, or whatever you want.”
She looked up briefly. “I could use the help, that’s for sure. I’m trying to get seventy extra all ready for a craft show.”
This caught me entirely by surprise. “A craft show?”
“Yes. In Concord.” She swirled the brush in the water and uncapped a new bottle of paint. “For one thing, we could use the money. That death benefit by itself isn’t going to pay the costs of the funeral. And for another, it’s good to have something to do.”
“To stay busy, you mean?”
“Yes. A project. And this is mine. Can you hand me that brush right there? The very, very thin one.” I found it on the shelf above her table and handed it to her, and she added, “I’ll try to get Candy working, too. She can paint, a little. And she can drive, so that’s a help in itself, since I don’t.”
“I don’t mind watching her boys so she can do that.”
“Good. My girl’s got a brittle mind, like ice on a pond. Needs to always press forward in case the ground won’t hold her.”
“Cade’s just angry.”
She unfolded the magnifying lens that hung on a chain around her neck and peered through it at the field of stars, eyebrows up, focusing. In a voice like a stone skipping across the water, she said, “Men always get angry. It’s what they do.”
To help Leela, I took over the aspect of her barn-stars business that she just couldn’t handle these days: painting soldiers’ names on the inside backs or on wooden banners that hung from the bottom, at the request of the families who ordered them. They might have been active duty, or veterans, or killed in action; we had no way to tell. And what Leela needed right now was mechanical work, something she could churn out without thinking very hard, not a task that would force her to reflect and wonder. Every day, outside her craft-room door, I collected a box of stars and a square of notebook paper detailing the day’s orders. I took them down to the porch and worked alone, because I knew she needed the silent time far away from everyone else.
In the midst of the morning’s work, I heard squawking in the barnyard and looked out toward the henhouse. Ben Franklin’s green wings went up, flaring and thumping the air before he tumbled a large white bird into the dust, using his thick-clawed feet to make the lesson hurt. I didn’t have to look closer to know who the unfortunate bird was. One of the capons had gotten scrappy lately, tussling with Ben Franklin a dozen times a day, and all the hits he took didn’t seem to be teaching him who was boss. After the first few fights, Dodge had named him Mojo. “Sure doesn’t act like he got his balls taken out,” he’d commented, watching Mojo goading Ben Franklin into another go- round among the hens.
That was the problem, and I knew it. Castrating the roosters in the kitchen that day, I’d felt eager to prove my worth, but I was inexpert with the details. In the confusion I must have missed something, and now the sexless rooster was proving to not be so sexless after all. Mojo was maturing into a beautiful bird, pure white in his body with black-and-white feathering up his neck, crowned with a red comb. A flash of green-black tail feathers swayed when he strutted, and his feet bore tufts of white down, like marabou slippers. But he wasn’t supposed to turn out like that. His alpha-male rooster characteristics never should have developed. We had eaten his brothers months ago, but I wasn’t sure what to do with Mojo. He wouldn’t be any good to eat, none of the families around us needed another rooster and I hated to kill him without purpose. Dodge liked him, too. He enjoyed watching the impromptu cockfighting.
“They going at it again?” asked Dodge. He had come out to the porch at the sound of the squabbling.
I nodded and said, “I think we need to build Mojo his own enclosure.”
“No way. Let the best man win. Or bird, I suppose.”
“It’s not safe for the hens, though. To have all those claws flying.”
Dodge shrugged. “Get Cade to do it. If he’s got time to mope, he’s got time to work. So God knows he’s got it to spare.”
This was true. When Cade had first announced he was going on a camping trip to get his head together, I had thought we were on the path to healing. He came home with some of the old fire to him, having had the epiphany that in the past year he had spent too much time sulking and not enough showing leadership.
