The Summer That Melted Everything (26 page)

“Because you want a shot at life.” He began to circle me. “Your father is exhausted in his overalls and dirt. You can't sing in the big trees if you're too tired to climb. You can't love the day if you're letting each one pass while you stupidly scream at the life you hate.

“Your father is nothing but a losing old man. Yet he wants you to be just like him. To be tired and losing and to work God's green earth. But it's not green earth. It's the closing of passion. The defeat of zeal. It is ground that ends.

“When you say you want to be more, more than the screaming, more than the father, your mother asks you if you realize just how hard he's worked to get this land? To raise the farm to something that can be passed down to you.
‘Do you?'
she screams at you, frightened herself, for she too has many deaths to suffer.

“You say, ‘Momma, I just want more. I want to fly like the sudden light. I want to know what it's like to have a reason to dance. I want all the possible love.'

“She says people like us don't dance and we don't fly. People like us, she says, don't get more. We take the life we are given and we say grace and glory be to God who in His merciful wisdom has granted such bliss. You hate her God and His wisdom. You hate her acceptance of that empty life. And out of all the places your father lives in you, you want to hit her, just like he does.

“You hate them both for all the things they are and for all the things they will never be. This is what you scream at her. That you hate how he wears overalls every day and that she can't read or write. You hate how he is called boy, even by those he is elder to. You hate he will never be more than a dumb nigger and that she will never be more than a housewife in a kitchen, a kitchen she has had more bones broken in than pies baking.

“You scream until you think you are of single depth and a holding hate you fear you'll never be able to let go of. That's when your mother gets real quiet. You see her eyes and know it was you who put the pain there. You wait for it, knowing it is coming.”

“That what's comin'? Sal?”

When his hand struck my cheek, it felt like the smack of a flame.

“She says you'll never have the godliness of your father.
‘Devil!'
she screams at you. So you look at her one last time and run away because horns is all you'll ever wear there, but somewhere else, you may be able to have the halo. Still, you hear her final word as you walk down the train tracks.
Devil.
You think maybe you are, and maybe you always will be. Maybe that is your permanence, your one eternity.

“As if hearing you run away, a man appears and says he has some ice cream you could run away to. You say you don't know. He says he can tell you are the type of boy who needs something to hold onto, so he gives you a bowl and spoon.”

Sal shoved the bowl and spoon into my stomach, forcing me to take them just to get them out of my ribs.

“The man says you can go for a drive in his sparkling convertible. How can a convertible be bad, you think. They only ever drive them in advertisements when they're selling happiness, when they're selling a shot at a good life. You still want that shot desperately, so you take the bowl and spoon and ride in his convertible, which reminds you of the 1950s, with its polished chrome and high tailfins. You think this is what you're supposed to do. Ride in a white convertible and drop the shadows of the farm.

“As you get closer to his house, he tells you to bend down and touch the car's floor and count to twenty. He's short enough to see over, so you're not afraid, and by the time you've counted to twenty, you're in his garage and from there, in his house where you see pictures of a tall woman. You ask if it's his wife. Yes, he answers. She's smiling in the pictures, so you think he can't be so bad. You forget it is the camera we smile at, not the life behind.”

“I don't like this story.” I set the bowl and spoon down on the tracks.

I thought Sal was going to slap me again. Instead he continued the story as if there could never be anything to stop it.

“The man goes into the kitchen, to get the ice cream, he says. While you wait for him, you read old newspaper clippings in the red leather scrapbook open on the table. See a woman's face in one of the clippings, same face as in the photographs around you. You get a sinking feeling, you feel you might sink.

“When the man returns, he doesn't have any ice cream. He has a white handkerchief. And suddenly, you can't breathe at all.”

Sal came up behind me and held his hand over my mouth so forcibly, I thought my teeth would break.

“Just go to sleep now, boy,” Sal repeated over and over again as I struggled. His strength surprised me, and only when I elbowed him as hard as I could did he let go.

“What's the matter with you, Sal?”

“It's just a story, Fielding.”

A horn blared from the train approaching in the distance.

“That was a pretty messed-up story.”

“Hell's full of all kinds of stories like that.”

He looked back at the blaring train, its smoke churning up like a way to follow. Maybe in his mind he was following that smoke up to the clouds and to the God too gold to be of any earthly help.

I went to get the bowl and spoon off the tracks, but Sal told me to leave them.

“That's the ending of the story,” he said. “Something broken.”

Together we watched as the train roared over first the spoon and then the bowl, its broken pieces scattered to the ground.

“You know, Fielding, the thing about breaking something that no one much thinks about is that more shadows are created. The bowl when intact was one shadow. One single shadow. Now each piece will have a shadow of its own. My God, so many shadows have been made. Small little slivers of darkness that seem at once to be larger than the bowl ever was. That's the problem of broken things. The light dies in small ways, and the shadows—well, they always win big in the end.”

 

18

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;

And in the lowest deep, a lower deep

Still threatening to devour me opens wide

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
4:75–77

T
HIS IS ME
. Teeth marks here. Teeth marks there. Being eaten one bite at a time. I smell myself on my breath. Feel myself swallowed and plopped to my stomach. Clean myself out from my own teeth with a toothpick.

It was Carl Jung who said shame is a soul-eating emotion. It doesn't eat you in one big gulp. It takes its time. Seventy-one years, it is still taking its time.

I am for my own teeth. I am for my own stomach. I alone eat myself to the dark.

It was the end of August, and me and Sal were in the woods by the tree house. There I saw a metal bucket of stones. I thought maybe Sal was building onto Granny's grave. Then I saw the paint on the stones. I picked a few up. They all had the same image of a boat. More than that. It was a ship given the details of something grand like an ocean liner. Then the name written on the sides. SS
Andrea Doria.

“What do you think?” Sal came up behind me.

I was stunned at the details of the ships and how the same image could be done over and over again without miss.

“I painted them at night, while you were sleeping.”

I dropped the stones back into the bucket. “Listen, Sal, if these are for Mr. Elohim—”

“Shouldn't they be? All his pamphlets and meetings. He has no right to keep on me. I've been good. I mean, I could be bad, Fielding. I could be really bad for him, I could be the worst thing ever. But they always take away the trouble, and I want to stay.

“If only he would just be good. Then we wouldn't have to worry about any bad he's done or could do. You don't have to worry about the teeth if they get filed down. And that's all I want to do. Just file his teeth down a bit, so we can all live together.”

“You can't throw stones at 'im, Sal.”

“It's not skin bruises I'm after. I want to take him down from the heart. Only the
Andrea Doria
can do a thing like that.”

He picked up the bucket. “Would you go to the schoolhouse, Fielding? Where he holds his meetings. I'll meet you there in a few minutes.”

Feeling no more argument within myself, I went to the schoolhouse where Elohim and his followers were standing around a contained fire. Hunkering down behind a fallen log, I watched Elohim drop a wiggling burlap sack. The group crowded around as he opened the bag and reached inside, pulling out a garter snake similar to the one Dad had set free in the woods. The bag was full of them, and one by one, the followers grabbed their own.

By then, Sal had come along, hiding down beside me while I stared at the stone in his hand. I wondered if what we were about to do would be something we could never take back.

All eyes were on Elohim as he approached the fire with the snake in his hand, a harmless little black thing that slithered in and out of his fingers.

I've never forgotten the way he looked at that snake with hunger for its death. He started to chomp his teeth at it, biting large chunks of the air before swallowing big with an even bigger smile. All the while, the snake innocently twirled around his fingers, not knowing the flames were for it.

“Good-bye, boy.” Elohim tossed the snake like it was nothing.

The others followed. Snakes flying for the first time, landing in flames for the last. I closed my eyes and found another fire. One where snakes weren't writhing in pain. One that was warming cold hands on a cold night, lighting the dark. Not one where hisses were cries. Not one that was pain slithering, trying to escape.

You could smell the foul secretion of the snakes. Mixing with that was the smell of their burning. You know the smell.

That car crash you're passing. It smells like garter snakes burning. That airplane falling from the sky. Garter snakes. A husband collapsing heart down. A woman screaming. A child hit by a car called Father. You know it all smells like snakes on fire.

“See what I mean, Fielding? Doesn't he deserve to be punished, even just a little bit?” Sal gripped the stone in his hand until his knuckles blanched.

I nodded, repeated his own words, “You can tell a lot about a man by what he does with a snake.”

You could lose your eyes, staring at that group. At their silent twinkling. I am still surprised by the excitement in their smiles.

I was once told writing in a journal could help me. Something about putting the pain on the page. So I got one and finished it in a day. I looked back to see what I'd written. Nothing but little lines, swooping and curving. Not one word. And yet didn't it say everything? The way their smiles did? All the dark, all the hurt, scooped up, carried by curve.

Long after the last snake burned, they continued to watch the flames, in love with fire and so certain of what they wanted burned. It was hurt for them to finally douse the flames. They grieved, watching the smoke of their beloved churn away to the sky.

It was Elohim who called them up from their knees. The meeting was over and he was handing out vegetarian recipes. They quietly received them before glancing back at the fire, wishing it still huge and bright.

When Elohim was alone and humming over the snakes' ashes, Sal stood and announced rather quietly, “I have the
Andrea Doria.
I have your Helen.”

Elohim turned and stared at the ship painted on the stone Sal held up to him.

“You little—” Elohim fell into a tirade of profanity as he took chase after Sal.

I went after them, running past the nearby tree house and through scratching briars and dry blackberry bushes while a woodpecker knocked on one of the trees overhead. I didn't know where we were running to, but I wasn't stopping, not even when a flying squirrel glided across the path in front of me.

Flying squirrels were usually seen only in the woods at night. It was as if the squirrel was saying,
Go back, Fielding, before you make a mistake. You don't belong any further, just as I don't belong here in the light.

At that moment, I didn't care where I belonged. I was all legs running after two souls more entwined than any of us could ever have imagined. Isn't that a scary thing? To be soldered, sword to sword, the battle eternal and the win never had.

I realized Sal was leading us to the river, and once there, he threw the stone into the water as he said, “Best hurry, Elohim, the
Andrea Doria
is sinking. Don't let her. She won't forgive you a second time.”

Without hesitation, Elohim threw himself into the water, paddling his short arms up in big splashes to get to the stone that had already sunk. Still he dived down, only to come right back up empty-handed and gasping for air.

“I'll give you another chance.” Sal reached into the bucket by his feet. “See if you can save this one.”

This was how it went. Sal casting a stone. Elohim splashing to get it. Splashing more to find it before it sank. It always sank. He became stupid-faced. Eyes frantic. Mouth open. Probably slobbering as he turned his face this way and that, his cheeks seeming to bobble in each movement. A slow-motion whale caught in the fisherman's net. Turning and twisting, trying to be free but only getting further away from that very thing.

“Sal.” I grabbed his arm. “I don't know 'bout this.”

“I'm doing this so he'll stop. Maybe he'll even move away and we'll have Breathed all to ourselves. You, me, Mom, Dad, Grand…”

It was the first time I'd heard him make my parents his own. The first time he'd spoken my brother's name like he belonged to him too. I guess I should've said that was all right, because he looked down like it wasn't. Like he could never be my brother, the third son of Autopsy and Stella Bliss.