The Summer That Melted Everything (36 page)

His face was last, and as she looked at the pile of used magnets, she lost that control she had so carefully held.

“There ain't any left. I've used 'em all. I don't have any to lift the metal from his face.” Her cries were like a coming of new death.

Sal went to her and held her hands as he asked her, “Don't you know a mother's got ten good magnets at the ends of her fingers? Not enough to take on a body, but a face, yes.”

She looked at her hands, bending her fingers as if testing their strength. As Sal gave her room, she returned to Grand, holding her hands high over his face, standing there for a few seconds as if she was unsure of how to begin. Then as if suddenly realizing exactly how to do it, her hands slowly lowered to his chin, where her fingers stroked back and forth.

I was almost hopeful, watching her hands lie next on his forehead as if they could bring him back. As if her fingers feeling softly down his cheeks were the way to resurrection. I thought this until I saw her face and all its hopelessness, and then I knew there wasn't going to be a miracle.

I imagined a series of small falls in the world at that moment. Somewhere the petals of a lilac were falling off. Somewhere a moth was heading straight for the ground. Grains of sugar were rolling off the counter. A baseball was losing its soar. Small falls taking me down with them and to that low where no wings can be found and no rising is ever had.

“My baby,” she whispered. “My dear, sweet love of my life. Why did you leave me?”

She waited as if she believed he might rise long enough from the dead to tell her why. When he didn't, it became a kick to the back of her knees. Dad caught her just in time, bringing them both down to the floor in a hold that made them look like one wound of the same deep stab.

I thought maybe she'd fainted, but she was still open in all the places that can be. She'd just lost her legs for a moment, she said. As Dad held her there, beneath the height of their dead son, I ran.

I ran from my brother's body. From the town. From the terrible ripping apart. I could hear Sal behind me. I went faster. Between the trees, and up the high land to the edge of the cliff that gave way to the rock quarry below.

“Why'd you follow me, Sal?”

“Fielding—”

He didn't get to finish what he was going to say because I tackled him to the ground and hit him even before my hands had formed their fists. When they did, boy did they ever mean it. I hated him that moment because I had to hate someone, and Ryker was somewhere too far.

“Why the fuck did you have to come?” I hit and hit until I couldn't feel my knuckles anymore.

When his punch came, it struck me hard across the chin, knocking me back. He held his fists up as if I would charge him again and he was going to have to fight me off. But I just sat there, holding my jaw in my hand and staring at the long tears streaming down his cheeks.

“I'm so tired of being hit. Why is it always me to get it when the fists come out?” He lowered his own fists as he sat back in a great, exhausted sigh.

The ground seemed the safest place to look, so for the next few moments, we both looked there, struggling with what to do in the aftermath of a god's death.

Only a squawking bird was heard for a while. And then his hushed voice, saying, “I tried, Fielding. To save him. I swear that to you.”

His tongue reached and tasted the blood from his nose.

“How'd you try to save 'im, Sal?”

“I told him the story of Century.”

I closed my eyes. “Well, go on then. Tell it to me.”

“We all called him Cen. He had a vineyard, and one winter he found a grape growing out of season.

“He ate the grape, and people said he was sick for doing so. That it was unnatural to eat a grape out of season. That it went against the laws of God. They forgot that God is the great authorizer, and a grape can grow out of season only with His permission first.

“The people, in their fear and ignorance, chased Cen out of the town and into the woods. There he lived alone and unhappy as the sick Cen no one could accept.

“Then came the day the light went out. No sun shone. No flashlights turned on. No candles would light. God wanted the people to realize who they had chased away, so He left them in darkness to find out.

“After weeks of night, a light suddenly appeared in the woods. The people, desperate and hungry for light, ran to it, surprised to find Cen. They had been so certain of what they thought was wicked. Of what they thought was a sick desire. And yet, in that darkness, Cen was the only light God allowed.

“The light was coming from Cen's blood. He had cut his finger by accident in the dark, and his blood was a bright pouring. That was what eating the grape had done. Light was the gift, the beautiful result of the man who dared not question his hunger for that which grows out of season.

“The sorry people fell to their knees before this very light. They said they were wrong to run him out of town. They had been fools, they cried. Won't you forgive us? they asked.

“Other men would have turned them away, but Cen was a grand man and he allowed them to stay in the light. He would have allowed them to stay there forever, but his finger stopped bleeding and when that happened, the light stopped as well.

“‘It's so dark again,' they cried. ‘How will we ever get home?'

“‘I can help you home,' Cen said.

“‘But how? You've no more light.'

“He took out his pocketknife and cut his arm, the light shining them through the woods to town. There were so many people to see home, Cen had to keep cutting his arm in order to bleed more light.

“After walking the last person home, he had to sit down, for he was far too weak to continue. He'd bled so much for them and there was no more to bleed, not even a drop left. He died alone and in the dark.

“The next morning, in the light of the returned sun, everyone saw the body of Cen on the ground. I guess some say he killed himself, cutting his arm like that, and I guess he did. But at least he killed himself on the way to something else. And that's what I told Grand.

“I said to him when you hold the knife, you have to ask yourself will more light come from this than dark? And if the answer is yes, then by all means cut away. If through your death, you can walk someone home, then do it—but if by your death, they lose a home, then think again.

“I guess to him, slicing open his arm was walking someone home. It was walking himself. And how can you be mad at him, Fielding, if he's home now?”

 

25

Tears, such as Angels weep, burst forth

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
1:620

T
HE NIGHT BEFORE
Grand's funeral, Dad sat on the porch, squinting his eyes, folding his arms, and crossing his legs. He hadn't bothered turning on the porch light. In those dark days following Grand's death, lights were rarely turned on. It was as if we no longer knew how to pull a lamp cord or flip a wall switch. We'd suddenly gone dumb of the way to light.

Darkness was everywhere for us then. A darkness so thick, it was near solid. And it was all over the place, from Dad's silence to the creases of Mom's tissues. Everywhere there were tissues. Some piled, some scattered, some on tables, and some you had to step over on the floor. If you did step on one, your foot would be wet, the snot and tears carried on your heel.

These tissues light as air but denting the ground beneath them. As we were dented. Every time we passed Grand's quiet room. A dent. When we looked at his empty chair at the table. A dent. When we saw all those crumpled white tissues and thought of baseballs.
Dent, dent, dent
. We were scooped out, hollowed in, and pocketing darkness all over us.

Dad stopped shaving. His hair came straight from the bed. His cheeks puffy, a coming swell. In his mouth, you could hear thunder in the distance and his breath came humid and smelled like toothpaste laid aside.

He stopped wearing his suits and wore a T-shirt and pajama bottoms all day and days at a time. He didn't eat. He was trying to get even in the bone with Grand. If you thought it was a shadow passing, it was probably Dad.

Sometimes I'd find him on his knees, thinking at first he was praying, then realizing his arms were out, reaching beyond the wall in front of him. Twitching his fingers slightly as if to say,
Come on, come on back to me, now.

Mom got thinner everywhere too, especially her fingers, like unraveling spools of thread. While Dad seemed unable to move, Mom seemed unable to survive stillness. Always up, always moving and circling the drain lest she stop and be sucked down it.

She cleaned out closets, cleared shelves, tossed fresh flour out, not realizing she was bringing more emptiness in.

Age had finally found her. The smoothness she once had appeared to have run out of her like water. A lay of wrinkles that would ordinarily have taken years to put down seemed to have come overnight. In her, something had been dimmed. I found myself unable to pull the strength together to look at her eyes, like gashes on her face torn fresh every few seconds.

I saw her once in Grand's room, pacing around his empty bed. She was singing the lullaby.

Down in the hills of Ohio,

there's a babe at sleep tonight …

I watched her, unable to stop moving around his bed, hugging his old sweatshirt in her arms. After every verse of the lullaby, she would fall silent. I'd watch her mouth open slowly in that one syllable word,
Why.
Another verse, another
why.
Over and over again, she was trying to figure it out, all the while unable to stop moving.

Fedelia gave Mom something to help her relax. I thought it was working as I looked in at Mom, lying on the bed, her back to me. I tiptoed around her. Her eyes shut. Her fingers in her mouth. I pulled them out and found her nails bleeding. She'd bitten them down to the quick in her sleep, her teeth still grinding. I stayed there, holding her hands away from her mouth while her eyes tossed frantically under their lids, her teeth searching for something to gnaw.

Fedelia never left the house. She slept in one of the extra rooms. We needed her there. She seemed the only one out of all of us capable of continuing. She would ask me if I was hungry and give me something even though I said I wasn't.

She'd sit by Mom and hold her hand and nod out to me as she said, “Don't forget him, Stella. He needs you too, remember that now, child.”

She would sit by Dad and hold her hands up, showing him a crack and how it grew. “It's gettin' bigger and bigger, Autopsy. You have to be careful because if the crack gets too big, it'll break your whole world wide open and destroy you. I know something about being destroyed. I know a thing or two about lettin' cracks get outta hand. You can't let that happen, Autopsy. You have got to get up from here. Shave your face. Put your suit on. Fielding needs his father. He doesn't need a great, big crack.”

After Fedelia left, I found a pile of tissues beneath her pillow. Never once did she cry in front of us. She knew it would do us no good. We needed her to be the strong one. She could say Grand's name without breaking into a million pieces, and she taught us how to do it one letter at a time. She could walk by his room and not get dented. We tried her walk. We dented less and less. Our faces got drier and drier, and we went from tissues to sleeves, to brief wiping on the backs of our hands before one day finding there was nothing to be wiped, at least not on the outside.

Sal had mourned with the rest of us. He seemed to drink a lot of water during those days as if to replenish what he lost by eye. He thought it was his fault. Grand's death had made Sal's ears sensitive to those accusations. He was finally listening to the people who said everything bad was him. That whole summer of great undoing, of great unrest. This made him unhinged. Loose. As if you turned his nose slightly to the right, you would unscrew the last piece holding him together and all at once he would collapse into a pile of broken bones and broken heart.

“Do you want me to leave, Fielding?” he asked one night, sitting on the floor of our bedroom, leaning back against the wall. The room dark, his voice more of the same. “I'll leave if you want me to.”

I eased down and found his side, leaned into it. “I already lost one brother. How can you ask if I'd wanna lose another?”

Losing Grand turned me into the passed-by. Blue skies, they pass me by. Good days, they pass me by. Talk and joy pass me by. The reasons people laugh, the reasons they smile, pass me by.
Whoosh, whoosh,
passing me by.

When I had Grand, I loved forever. Now forever frightens me. Must it last so very long?

I can't spell me without him. I mean that. His full name, Grandfather, takes out every letter of my own except for two
I
s and an
L.
Who am I with those things? I'm not who I once was. I am simply the teeny-tiny remains of him, this Fielding who had a brother and in that had everything.

I thought it'd get better, losing a brother. That's what they say, isn't it? All those books I've gotten, those meetings I've gone to. They all say it gets better. How can it get better for a brother like me who threw out ignorance too late?

Sometimes I throw out my apologies. I go to the store and I get a pack of baseballs. White. Red stitching. I use a red marker to match. I write,
I'm sorry.
And then I throw. I've thrown them everywhere. Down alleys. Off the side of the road. In fields, in parks, in other people's yards. I throw. And then I wait. I wait to see if an eighteen-year-old god will appear and pick up the ball and come walking with it toward me, saying,
It's all right. I forgive you, little man.

That never happens. It never will. Forever is here, and it's nothing but hurt over and over again.