The Summer That Melted Everything (40 page)

“They reached for that brightness, and while the light distracted them, while it comforted them in its false rescue, the dark power behind it did its work, and before any of them knew it, they were not being saved by the light, they were being changed by it. They were being controlled by it. By this Grayson Elohim.”

In the gesture of spitting on Elohim's grave, Dad dramatically spit on the floor before throwing his arms up as he boomed, “How can you call them guilty? When they were away from themselves. Temporarily gone. These people, your family, your friends, your neighbors, possibly you under the right circumstances. Away from themselves.

“Haven't you ever been away from yourself? Only to come home and find a mess has been made in your absence? A mess you need help to clean up. Not to be punished for but to be helped with. Won't you help your family now? Your friends? Your neighbors? Yourself?

“Grayson Elohim is the murderer, the real murderer, and he is already gone and buried. Isn't it time we put the shovels down instead of digging more holes? The more holes we dig, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the less solid ground any of us will have to stand on.”

Later that night, Dad came home victorious from the courthouse. You would never have known it. The way his head hung, the way his feet dragged, the way his eyes hardly knew who he was. He went into his study and took down the plain wooden cross from off the wall. With it, he went to the back porch, where he sat down on the steps.

I watched him turn the cross over in his hands. His hair had become more gray than brown, like tree branches covered in ash. His tie was out of his vest, as if he no longer cared if it played noose.

When I sat beside him, he didn't notice. That was Dad from then on out. The man who was sat beside, but was always alone.

It was late spring by then, though it felt wintry. The grass was holding back its green. Flowers didn't know what blooming meant. The trees' bare branches scratched the sky that always seemed to be bright and white, like snow about to come. There was a quiet stillness, even in the moving breeze you wanted to grab a sweater for.

“Dad?”

He didn't answer, so I said his name over and over, putting the hooks in and trying to pull him out.

He let go of a long-held breath. “Yes, Fielding?”

“Why'd you do it, Dad? Why'd you invite the devil?”

He looked at me as if he forgot who I was. And through that, I didn't know if it was me either. I didn't know if I was enough left to be a son. If he was enough left to be a father. Or if we were just two flames, with not enough love to be anything more than reminders of the burn.

Finally, he turned his eyes back out onto the world. “You remember when I told you and Sal about the case I prosecuted? Of the girl accusing her father of rape? I killed that father, Fielding. All because I'd been wrong. I killed him. It wasn't the girl. It wasn't the jury. It wasn't the misunderstanding. But me. I alone killed him because I was the one who was supposed to be certain. I was the one entrusted with the filter. The one who was supposed to do everything right with it. I failed.”

He was quiet, as if to allow me the chance to say something or, at the very least, pat him on the back. I did nothing. I sat there and felt the unrelenting crush of that very choice.

“We live each day with thoughts we think are certain to the core, Fielding. But what if we are sincerely wrong? Take a look at this cross. We are told it's a cross, so surely it must be a cross. But what if it isn't? What if we're wrong? What if this whole time we've just been hanging a lowercased
t
on our walls?”

With one swift pitch, he flung the cross. We watched it hit the ground and felt nothing.

He didn't speak for some minutes later.

“I once overheard Elohim ask, ‘Would a panther eat us before we could call it black? Or would it not eat us at all?' I thought, of course a panther would eat us. Of course. I was certain of it, and yet what if I was wrong?

“That is what I wanted to do. I wanted to test the validity of the claims. I wanted to meet the devil, and through that meeting I would know for certain if I'd ever met him before in the courtroom, in those men and women I sent away. And if I had, then I would've done some good after all. I would've been right and maybe in all those rights, I would be able to make up for that one wrong when I sent an innocent man to prison and in that sent him to his death.

“I had all my faith in. I was so sure of what was evil, of what was good. But then Sal came, and the panther ate salad, and the devil—well, he turned out to be the only angel among us. And I'm lost. I'm lost now, Fielding. What is good and what is bad?” He tossed his arms weakly in the air. “I don't know. I just don't know anymore. My faith is gone. How can it not be? After all, who was burned at the end of this story?”

The quiet filled in all the spaces between us as we sat there, unsure of not just ourselves, but also each other.

“I don't get it, Dad. You loved Sal, right?”

“He was my son.” The world seemed to move a little after he said that. As if it were opening a drawer and putting his words inside for safe-keeping, so should there ever come a day when it was doubted Autopsy Bliss loved Sal as his own son, that drawer could be opened and those words pulled out as the precious proof of a father's heart.

“Then why'd you defend his murderers, Dad? They were the devil. How could you defend the devil?”

He seemed to be asking himself that very question. In answer, he began telling about the time Sal was flipping through one of his law books.

“Sal said to me I might have to defend the devil just once in my life. I said I didn't think I could do that. He said to defend the devil is to defend the broken glass.

“When glass is whole, it's good. When it's broken, it's bad. It's swept up. It's thrown away. Sometimes thrown away too soon. Think of a window, Sal said. Imagine a violence breaking that window. All those shards of broken glass fall to the floor.

“The violence is inside the house now, wrestling you. It could kill you, so you grab one of the shards and stab. The violence dies and you are saved. Saved by the broken glass. Isn't that a funny thing? To be saved by the bad.

“Sometimes, not sweeping that bad up and throwing it away will save you in the end. It just might. So to defend the devil means defending the good of the bad. That's what I was doing, Fielding. Hoping that all those folks are just shards of broken glass and one day in the future, they'll save someone by being just that.

“Furthermore, I am responsible for those people, Fielding. I'm the one who wrote the invitation, and all because I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to see for myself.”

The sky, in its white sheet, let loose a heavy, cold rain. Dad stood and stepped into it, stretching out his arms and tilting his face to the drops, as if in surrender to the fall.

The screen door screeched behind me. Mom came, and together we joined Dad. A barely there family, as together as we could ever be.

*   *   *

Shortly after, we left Breathed for good. Dad never stepped into a courtroom again. He went into linoleum flooring. Ended up with a small bliss after making a chemical discovery that allowed linoleum to be nonslip.

“So no more mothers will fall back and lose their faith,” he said.

They took his picture for the paper. He did not smile.

Mom became a traveler, going to all the places that was our house. She never forgot that house either, so when she went to these places, she'd bury a piece of us there. Since England was our kitchen, she dug a small hole at the base of Stonehenge and buried there the spatula she once used to frost our birthday cakes. And because Russia was our living room, she buried there the framed picture of our family.

As the years went on and she'd return to these places, she would never say,
I'm going to Egypt
or
to the Netherlands
or
to Vietnam.
She'd simply say,
I'm going into the attic
or
walking down the hall
or
stepping into the breakfast nook for a bit.

And Dad would say, “Don't forget to turn the lights off when you leave.”

It was us she wanted to leave. Going to all those places. She was trying to get away. That's why she always went by herself. Why Dad always sat home alone, wondering when she was going to come back to him.

Dad nor Mom spoke to me in regards to my killing of Elohim. Dad didn't ask how it made me feel. Mom didn't say I'd done the right thing. I was just the one who had a gun, and Elohim was just the enemy shot. Everything else wasn't said. I wasn't charged with murder or put through a trial. It was, dear jury, self-defense. But don't you worry, I have been in prison ever since.

When they went into Elohim's house, they found in his cinder block basement a freezer of ice cream and body parts. There were Polaroids of black boys before they'd been butchered, and more gruesome Polaroids of the various stages of being butchered.

Elohim had said he wished someone would've stopped Helen's lover from growing up. Just ate his future away. Elohim, the vegetarian, was eating black boys before they could become black men.

In the collection of Polaroids was a boy identified by his parents as Amos.

And then there was the Polaroid of a boy in a pair of overalls. It was taken near the basement window. The light streaming through was bright and whitened out the boy's face, which was upturned toward the bars of the window, where birds flew outside.

The boy good at escaping.

Or was it?

No one knew if it was in fact Sal or not. Sometimes I'd look at the picture and think the overalls were different. Too much grass stain, not enough dirt. Was the boy in the picture shorter than Sal? He was shorter than the shovel leaning against the wall behind him, and I remembered Sal always being taller. Maybe it was just the camera angle. Maybe it was that light that blocked out his face.

I'd look at that light, squint into its brightness, and think I saw Sal's eyes looking up at those birds just as he always had. After all, that's how I knew Sal was no devil. Because of the way he looked at the birds. Not as an angel who once flew, but as a boy who so wished he could.

We buried what was left of Sal on Reflection Hill, next to Grand. Grand's effigy saw him carved in his baseball uniform. A ball in his pitching hand. A glove on his left. Sal was carved in overalls. A weed daisy in one hand, nothing in the other. Two stone sculptures that did not represent the boys lying beneath them, but rather our own pure ignorance of who they were. For all the ways we knew them, we knew them not at all. They were deep water, and all we could cling to were the baseball uniform and the overalls floating on the surface.

Fedelia took over the shoe factory from Mom. I sure as shit didn't want it. It would be sold before Fedelia died. Fedelia who had stayed in Breathed for the rest of her life. Eventually remarrying. Happily. Ever. After.

We didn't go to her wedding. None of us ever returned to Breathed again. Maybe it was the same problem that faced Adam and Eve when they lost their Garden of Eden. Breathed was a paradise lost to us.

It was the summer that melted everything, and as Dad, Mom, and I drove out of Breathed for the last time, the puddles splashed beneath us. These puddles were from the rain, but to me, well, I've always thought they were the puddles of everything that had melted.

There were the puddles for all the tangible things like chocolate and ice cream. Then there were the puddles for all those things that lived inside us. Auntie's anger. Mom's fear. Dad's faith. Grand's life.

There was a puddle for Dresden. A puddle for Granny. And one for the boy who would change us all. Sal. A puddle that never would've been if not for the puddle of the town's common sense.

As for that last puddle, the one that splashed the most. That was the puddle of my innocence, the splashes still falling in the past as they are still falling now, as they will continue to fall for that eternal always, in a pooling water, ferrying me back.

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

TIFFANY M
C
DANIEL
is an Ohio native whose writing is inspired by the rolling hills and buckeye woods of the land she knows.
The Summer That Melted Everything
is her debut novel. Visit her Web site at
www.tiffanymcdaniel.com
. Or sign up for email updates
here
.

 

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