The Summer That Melted Everything (39 page)

And what had I done?

I had shot a man. A man I once called a neighbor, a teacher, a friend. The best steeplejack in all the world. That's what I told him once, and he'd smiled.

I shot all those things. The man who was the saving hand when I nearly slipped off the roof. The man I caught fireflies with one summer night. The man I'd known all my life. All shot to pieces by me. I shot all the bad, but damn it all, I shot all the good as well. That's something you never quite come back from. That's something that's a fresh pain every day.

Out of all the things to last see, Elohim saw me with the gun as he lay there. Even in the rain, I saw the difference of the tear slipping down his face. His eyes said to me,
I hope one day you know what it feels like.
The pain, the hurt, the slow dying
.

Yes, Elohim, I know what it feels like. I have seen for myself.

When he did finally die, he did so to the sounds of the women weeping and the men howling, not for him but for the boy they had burned to death.

They stared at his small, charred figure in the smoldering ash and knew he was no devil. They knew they had melted the skin off a thirteen-year-old boy. The pain of that was etched into his face, the way his mouth gaped open, the way his teeth protruded from the lips no longer there.

The sheriff, careful not to burn his fingers, began to gently untie the remaining rope as me, Mom, and Dad left.

Along the way, we passed Juniper's and the truck delivering the ice cream. Mom couldn't help herself. Her mad laughter caused the man unloading the ice cream to drop a carton. It rolled into our path. It seemed to stop everything, including us. Would we ever be able to move past? That is what I wondered as we stood there frozen before the frozen.

Mom was the first to move. She lifted her foot as if to take a step over it, but she felt the weight of that great task and instead walked around the carton, her head hung in the disappointing realization. Dad followed her around the carton. He didn't even put on the show of any other choice. Their steps said there would be no getting over it, there would only be the living around it. That
it
would always be there.
It
had become the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and our end. I knew this, and yet I wanted to try.

I took a step, but my toe caught on the carton and I fell as if the fall had always been in my nature. Waiting for the right moment of my life. When all my soul, in its smallness and its vastness, would fall face down against the earth from the bliss of my name to the hard crosses I would be handed to bear.

Mom and Dad silently waited for me to stand up on my own. Somehow we knew we could no longer help one another. It was up to ourselves to learn how to survive, and it was because of this, Dad let me carry the gun home. I was no longer the child. I was the man who had yet to have height on his side.

 

27

They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,

Through Eden took their solitary way.

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
12:648–649

C
OOLER TEMPERATURES AND
regret ultimately equaled the recovery of the town. Yes, the murderers of Sal really did regret. Some even regretted it enough to hurry to the grave. Brains on the wall. Gun in the hand. That was how they found one of them. Another rolled a cigarette with some cyanide. His whole room smelled like almonds because of it.

Otis hadn't been part of the mob. He found out Dovey had only after the fact. He didn't know what to say to her nor she to him. Those moments after the death of their child, Dovey and Otis were husband and wife unable to come together and heal. That distance between them led her to Elohim. It led to the night she said she was going to take a bath and asked Otis if he could hand her a bar of her homemade soap out of the closet.

Later, in the cold water of the tub, she shoved the bar of soap down her throat. Internal cleansing, I suppose. It's said they didn't even have to use more soap when they washed her body. Bubbles and suds came by just plain water and the friction of her skin. The dirtiest, cleanest woman ever to be buried.

After her death, Otis no longer walked the nights with the mirror, hoping to see his son. Too much had been lost, and the mirror gleamed from the top of a pile in the junkyard while his shorts and shirts got longer and his muscles turned to fat atop the sofas he sat on and the potato chips he ate.

A large number of the mob chose suicide by bottle. The sale of whiskey and its kin bled upward in Breathed.

There were a few of the folks who seemed to manage.

Did we? Me, Mom, and Dad?

Losing Sal was different than it was with Grand. The tissues weren't all over tables, floors, beds. Did we even open the new box in the hall? Sometimes I think not having tears meant we cried even more.

It was all that death. It made our eyes unable to produce the grief we felt. We were shell-shocked. Walking stiffs. If we ate, I don't remember. We must've, though, for none of us died of starvation. If we slept, I don't remember that either. I know both Mom and Dad died tired. As I am dying tired. Maybe that's what got us. The inability to sleep because nightmares and dreams became alike, as we were gladdened by the sight of our ghosts but haunted by them at the same time.

Mom didn't work through Sal's death. There was no cleaning out already clean shelves. Padding already plump sofa cushions. House and home became a place she was rarely in.

She stopped wearing dresses. Too many edges to catch, I guess. There was also the singeing to consider. She was pants from then on out. Polyester, corduroy, denim. Pants, pants, pants. I lost something of my mother when she lost her dresses. That woman in the kitchen. Floating here and there, as light as the flour on her hands.

In pants she got heavier. She stayed thin but got heavier like she was attached to the ground. One grave on her right, one grave on her left, both pulling her down with them. She was veiled, darkened over. The shadow of our family. Of herself. No more guzzling the sweet syrup of the canned pears she'd open like our little secret when it was just me and her in the kitchen. No more kitchen at all. No more aprons. No more hair tied up in strings. No more Dad pulling on those tails and making her laugh.

Dad.

I don't think he made her laugh again. Maybe he tried. When I wasn't there. When it was just them and pillows. Maybe he wanted to when he sat there, eyes squinted, arms folded, legs crossed. He just didn't know how to be the man he once was. The man who had a son named Grand. A son named Fielding. A son named Sal.

After Sal's death, Dad didn't fall into T-shirts and pajamas, the way he had when Grand died. Instead, Dad looked the part of who he once was. Three-piece suits. Shaven face. Even added a pocket watch. I suppose to have something certain to look at when his uncertainty got too much for him. Something to see for himself in the palm of his hand. Yes, he looked the part, but he wasn't it. Not anymore.

Conversation with him became like dragging something out. You had to put hooks in and keep pulling, pulling until he spoke. And then you wished you hadn't, because his tone alone was like lying down in a coffin and having the lid nailed shut. Talking with him was working with the gravedigger, and sometimes you had to get away from the cemetery, which meant I had to get away from him. I would too, at seventeen. I'd just up and leave my parents.

Or were they just people who looked like my parents? Maybe my mother and father burned that day with Sal, and I walked away with their ashes.

And who was I? Who am I? The boy who met the devil and met hell at the same time. I'm not saying it was Sal's fault. Of course it wasn't.

It was Dad's.

Without his invitation, I would not meet Sal in front of the courthouse. I would not take him home. No journalists would come. Grand would not open his veins and try to bleed Ryker out. There would be no fire. There would be no best friend in its flames. There would be no man I would have to kill.

Yes, Dad, you started it all.

I should address what legally happened to those who took part in Sal's murder. They were rounded up and charged. The devil was put on trial, though there were no horns, no pitchforks either. It was not one strange face indicted, but many familiar ones. The man who sold us all insurance, the woman who ran the church raffle, and the couple whose cake we ate at their fortieth wedding anniversary the previous April.

The man who fixed my tire when it went flat in front of his house, and his older sister who bandaged my knee when I fell. The guy who was said to have the warmest handshake, and his wife who fed the stray cats in the neighborhood.

They were not walking caves of nocturnal demons, scared of the sunlight and fresh air. In fact, the way they all went into court, they looked like cotton curtains of the sunniest, breeziest, most welcoming windows in all the world. They came not from underground lairs but from homes with flowers in vases and cookies in the oven. They were men who held the door open for the ladies who thanked them as they passed through. And in alphabetical order, the jury found each one of them not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

Dad was not the man prosecuting them. He was the one defending them. When he first told me and Mom about it, I screamed at him. How could he defend them? The murderers of Sal? It's like the man I knew all those years was just one long weekend away from the real man who burned garter snakes Monday through Friday.

For the months of the trial, I let go of my father. Maybe some of it was my wanting to let go of myself.

If I didn't have to be me, then it was someone else who lost so much that summer. Someone else who saw how red his brother's blood was. Someone else who lost their best friend. It was someone else who killed a man—a bad man, but a man nonetheless. It was someone else, and I was okay with being just that.

Take me away from this Fielding Bliss.

To be someone else. Bottle after bottle, I try to be just that. Pill after pill, restless sleep after restless sleep, fuck after fuck. But still I sober to myself, still I wake to the reaching abyss.

The same abyss that reached for us all. For Dad, for Mom, for Grand, Elohim, and of course Sal. That abyss that always wins.

Dad was walking the edge of it during those months of the trial. I knew he didn't want to defend them. I also knew he would do everything to see them found not guilty. Because of this, I would never tell my father I loved him again.

The whole situation was made worse by the journalists who came to Breathed, this time not for the heat but to report on the progress of the case. I looked out for Ryker. He never came. Don't know what I would've done if he had. Maybe led him to Grand's grave. Maybe shown him I know how to fire a gun now. What's one more murder on my conscience?

A few of the reporters shoved a mike into my face and asked how I felt. Seventy-one years later, and I'm still answering. Is anyone still listening?

I hated the reporters. I hated their questions. I hated the trial. I hated the smell of melting flesh still in the air. I hated the echo of the gun lasting eternal. Gone were the hills of my youth. Gone were the trees. The houses I had known, the people I had loved. Gone, gone, gone with a town that became a place behind a burning door, down a long hallway, and behind an evermore burning door.

I watched my father walk to the courthouse every day, hated him every day a little more. I needed to see exactly what I was hating, so that last day I followed him to the courtroom and listened to him deliver his closing statement:

“All the little choices we make, what shirt to wear for the day, what to eat for dinner, what movie to watch come Friday night, they are all rehearsals for the bigger choices of our lives, like what captains we will be when the brakes go out and we rocket full speed ahead.

“But even with all the rehearsing, there can come along someone who makes us forget our God-given right to choose. It is the inability to choose by our own will that lessens us all. It is disease to our sanity, which sickens our good sense until we are the victims of choices we would not normally have been in the company of.

“This is exactly what happened during the course of the summer of 1984. These people lost their right to choose, and in that lost their sanity like sweat in hot bathwater. By the twenty-first of September, they were severed from themselves as completely as they were tied to Mr. Grayson Elohim. Like puppets in the master's claws, they twitched when he told them to twitch. They stepped when he told them to step. They growled when he told them to growl.

“Grayson Elohim had the genealogy of a tablecloth, but over the course of one summer, he became God. At first, his ideas tumbled as dry and harmless as bones from his mouth, but somewhere along the way, his words became the great dinosaurs before the fossils. Yes. The form had gotten its function back. And his function was to orchestrate panic through the chorus of fear. Fear of the boy with color in his skin. Fear of the devil in the skin of a boy. He sang over and over again,
fear, fear, fear
like a lullaby laying their sense down in the thorns disguised as roses.

“You may say this level of manipulation would never happen to you, members of the jury. But how many times have you been convinced to buy something on television that you don't need? How many times have you done something you didn't want to do, but did anyways because someone told you to? How many times has your choice fallen second to the choice of someone else?

“This is the year 1984 we're talking about. The year George Orwell said we would be convinced two and two makes five. He proved through story, mind is controllable. These people have proved through reality no different.

“What these poor souls were desperate for was a light. But the thing about light is it all looks the same when you're in the dark, so you can't tell if what powers that light is good or if it is bad, because the light blinds you to the source of its power. All you know is that it saves you from the darkness. That's all his followers knew. They were in the dark of their own private pain, and then this Elohim comes along and he's shining so bright.