The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

  “His skin’s comin’ off,” the hand said.

  Grand stopped. They all did. Flashlights were turned toward the hand, brown shoe polish showing on its palm.

  The other hands let go of me. The light left and made a backward turn to themselves, inspecting the color smeared upon them.

  “Do you think it’ll make us sick?” one of them asked.

  “Don’t know. Don’t know what it is.”

  “It’s his skin, just meltin’ off. Must be the heat.”

  Even those hit by Grand no longer bent toward their pain. They looked at their own hands to see if they too had the come-off color.

  “C’mon, quick, Fielding.” Grand bent down. “Hop on my back. You haven’t got shoes on. Glass is everywhere.”

  And so I rode the back of the god across the sky to the safe dark of the woods, where I slid off to the ground. Didn’t want to, though.

  “You’re lucky I was out, Fielding.”

  “Thought you had a date?”

  “She wasn’t my type.”

  “I thought she was the girl everyone wants?”

  “I went for a walk instead.”

  He had layers of sweat. One from the heat. One from the fight. One from his walk. One from the girl he did not want. The sweat making a circle on his shirt at the small of his back like some sort of ripe fruit.

  I was about to say something more but the night was speaking my name.

  “Sal? Is that you?”

  He stepped from the trees.

  “You know what’s goin’ on out there, Sal?” I pointed back. “Someone’s broken the windas and the streetlights. They—” I stopped when I saw what he held in his hand. “Why ya got a rock, Sal?”

  He dropped it, and the thud sounded like a window breaking.

  “Don’t say it was you, Sal.” Grand put his arm out in front of me, the way a mother might in a car suddenly stopping.

  “Now, hold on, guys—” Sal took a step toward us.

  “It was you. You broke those windas.”

  “No, Fielding.”

  “You’ve got a rock.”

  “Not to break anything, Grand.” Sal’s hands were up in a way I’d only ever seen on cop shows. “I’m gathering them. That’s all. I’ll show you.” He quickly reached behind Grand to grab my arm, his grip hot and strong. “Please, let me show you.”

  I let him pull me through the woods with Grand following behind and on the way picking up the rock Sal had dropped. We ended up at the tree house. In the patch of dirt over Granny’s body, a pile of rocks were freshly stacked.

  “I was just making a gravestone.” He let go of my arm, my flesh feeling almost burned.

  “Just a gravestone.” Grand placed the rock in his hand on the very top.

  “Shit. I thought…” I walked around the rocks. “I’m sorry, Sal.”

  He looked down at his hand that had gripped my arm. “What do you have all over you?”

  I didn’t answer him. I was thinking about Elohim. About how he had attacked me earlier.

  “He was just like a damn wolf,” I told them. “Or a rabid dog, at the very least.”

  “Why’d he attack you?” Sal was still studying the shoe polish smeared on his palm.

  “He thought I was you.”

  “Is that why you colored your skin? Trying to be me?”

  “Naw. I was in disguise.”

  “As what?”

  “As the night. I was sneakin’ over to the sheriff’s, see what all they were askin’ you ’bout.”

  “Aw, little man, it’s my fault then.” Grand sighed. “I’m so глупый.”

  “I would’ve went even without you sayin’ I should. I’m a shadow, remember?” I turned to Sal. “How’d it go with Dad and the sheriff, anyways?”

  “They wanted me to eat candy and be a son from up north. To be something taken. They were upset to take the candle into my night and find I really am just the devil after all. Afterwards, Autopsy went home, but I came out here. I wonder who did it. Broke the windows. Let’s go see.”

  “What?” I grabbed Sal’s leaving arm. “No way. They saw the shoe polish on me. They think it was you. I thought they were gonna tear me to pieces. They would’ve if Grand hadn’t stopped ’em.”

  “Anytime, little man.” He lightly tapped my chin with his knuckles and then quickly looked away.

  I’ll never know how my adoring smiles affected my brother. Were they yellow and nice, like afternoon butter? Or were they pressure? Pressure to be that hero, that god who could be only at the sacrifice of his true self. Sometimes I think older brothers should not be allowed. We fall in love with them too much. They are our everything, all the while, they hurt out of sight for our sake.

  “C’mon.” Sal started through the woods. “Sheriff is bound to be there by now. They won’t do anything around him. He’ll stop them.”

  * * *

  We hid behind the bushes lining Juniper’s, hidden more by the trunks of the large trees in front. From there, we saw the sheriff’s car, its spotlight on and reflecting in the broken glass.

  Elohim was there, listening as person after person went up to the sheriff, claiming to have seen Sal.

  One woman swore she saw Sal actually throwing the rocks. “I tried to take them rocks from ’im, but you know what he did? He picked up one of them glass shards. Cut me good.”

  The blood on her forearm glistened under the sheriff’s flashlight.

  “I can’t believe they’re actually believin’ her,” I whispered to Sal, watching him scratch his chin. In that gesture I saw the blood trickled down the back of his left hand.

  “Where’d you get that blood from, Sal?” Grand saw it too.

  “From checking Granny’s pulse earlier. Remember, Fielding?”

  “But it looks … fresh.” Its shine was both beautiful and starved of that very thing.

  “What they’re sayin,’ Sheriff, it’s all true.” Another witness stepped forward. “He threw a rock at me even. He ain’t nothin’ but a devil, a—”

  Sal’s interrupting shout, calling them liars, echoed for miles and made them jump as he stood and walked out toward them.

  “Liars,” he said again, rather hushed this time as he balled his hands up into fists at his sides.

  A woman reached into the pocket of her bathrobe, pulling out her most holy ally. “Sheriff, I swear on my Bible that there devil has done this.”

  Sal dashed toward the woman, snatching the Bible out of her hand as the crowd gasped. He wound up his arm, just as Grand had taught him, and threw the Bible into the last remaining window on Main Lane, that of the butcher’s.

  Some will say the window did not break. That the Bible was too soft, not hard like the rocks. Others will say the window did indeed break into the sharpest pieces of all.

  I say, never doubt the strength of a boy’s arm.

  11

  His crime makes guilty all his sons

  —MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:290

  AT THE BEGINNING of July, Mom turned forty-five years old. Me, Dad, Grand, and Sal baked her a cake. A lopsided, poorly frosted yellow cake she praised as the best ever.

  Dad tugged on her tail of hair and made her laugh before giving her a diamond tennis bracelet. Grand’s gift was a book of Walt Whitman poetry, the pages with his favorites dog-eared. I gave her a Bruce Springsteen cassette, and Sal gave her the rain.

  “But there’s been no rain,” Grand questioned the water in the jar.

  “I hopped a train and stopped at the first town it was raining in,” Sal answered.

  Mom held up the jelly jar with the slosh of water in its bottom. “A gift of the rain?” She looked through the jar at Sal on the other side.

  “You never know,” he said. “One day the rain might be just the gift you need.”

  She thanked Sal, but held the jar fearfully. It was only faucet water. I’d seen Sal fill it up myself. I never did say anything to Mom, so she never doubted its origin from the sky. She even had Dad keep it
in his study, just to be on the safe side.

  She rarely went into the study during the course of that summer, as it had become a second sheriff’s station with the cork bulletin board pinned with papers, notes, and a map of Ohio, upon which more pins showed the locations of all the missing boys. The sheriff came frequently to the house, updating Dad on the investigation, and together they’d look at that board and try to find Sal.

  One of the papers had a phone number written on it. It was the number for the Columbus hospital. One day they might say Dovey was better, might even be able to move her out of critical care, they’d say. Then the next thing you knew, there’d been a setback, the baby’s vitals weren’t looking so good.

  Based on the records Dad played, you could tell what days were good news days and what days were not. You knew the baby might make it if Dad put on Louis Armstrong and “What a Wonderful World.” But if he played Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, you knew there is such a thing as infinite slips and falls and high-pitched chaos.

  On Mom’s birthday, it was the sad latter. Dad did wait until the end of the day, after the celebrating, to put the record on. As I lay in bed, hearing the strings below, I thought about the baby and what work it is to be born.

  I wondered if their child would look like a muscled dove, the build of its father and its mother. I prayed for its birth, quietly and in myself. I prayed not to God, but to Dovey’s womb to give birth to the son who may serve as the miracle to that summer. A miracle to rest the fray.

  “Sal?” I looked over at him lying in the window bed. “When’s your birthday?”

  “The devil doesn’t have a birthday.”

  “Ah, c’mon, Sal.”

  “You want me to lie? Tell you my birthday is, I don’t know, February second or something?”

  “Is that when it is? February second?”

  “Do you really think the devil’s birthday would be in winter?” He was quiet. Then with his arms behind his head and his eyes upon the ceiling, he told me about a man he once knew who had a wife and a son.

  “Every year for this man’s birthday he would ask the woman and child to get him a long rope as his gift. A rope long enough to stretch around their house. An easy feat, as their house was so small, just a blur, really.

  “When he would wrap this rope around the house, he did so beginning at the porch steps, ending there also with a knot that was like a swarm of brown flies too easily swatted away.

  “During the course of his year from one birthday to the next, the man would shorten the rope. He would swat the knot away, and from there, whenever he was the reason for the bruise, for the wound, for the shivering terror, he would take the ax and chop off a piece of the rope. He swore that if ever his evil lunged so far and for so long, making the rope short enough to make a noose, he would hang himself, knowing he had put the sun under the wheel and run over the light one too many times.

  “The wife and child thought well of the man’s purpose with the rope. That he documented his sins by it and bound himself to the crack of his own abyss. They believed he would one day no longer sweat with the blade of the ax but that he would sit calm and peaceful within the circle of unbroken rope. That is the hope of the abused. That the bruises will leap away and the monster of the man will lift above his person like smoke.

  “Then came the year the crops strained. The roots shifted and the dry fields began to constrict like throats too weak even to muster a whisper, all the while the man couldn’t stop screaming. Little can be done to mute the roaring monster. Pity too, because up to then, the man had been good. The rope had barely been chopped away. But every day the crops yellowed and the ground cracked, the shorter the rope and the angrier the man.

  “The fields were unnerving him at a rate the rope had never known. Perhaps it was the man’s fear that the fields would never grow again. That his American chance would go to the grave in the dirt around him. Whatever it was, it spurred a cycle of fists and blood and screams. The small house felt even smaller. Their bellies felt even emptier. Bang, bang, bang went the man. Chop, chop, chop went the rope.

  “Then came the day the man got so angry at the woman. The reason I forget. I always forget the reasons. They were always such small drops. Burnt meat. Overalls not yet patched. Too lax a look when looking out upon the barren fields. Things that wouldn’t be cured by a fist to the cheek but the man tried that day as he beat his wife down to the floor, while the son watched from the doorway but only out of his left eye, as his right was still low and swollen and like peering through milkweed.

  “The son knew if he helped his mother, he too would get poured upon by his father’s lava and he was still burnt from yesterday. If the boy had it to do over, he would do something to help his mother, but something is hard to come by when you’re only nine years old and stalked by the shattering blow. You are so exhausted that to not be beaten is to squeeze into the crevice of light, even if it means your mother is beaten in your place.

  “It was a terrible day to be hurt in the kitchen. The sun coming in the windows, the spots of light looking like lemons scattered across the floor. The screen door opening the room to the sweet air and the clothesline outside, where the just-washed dish towels flapped in the breeze.

  “All the while, the woman lay there on the floor, doing her best shield. That was her way. To be still. To take it and all its killing. It was like seeing a handkerchief try to cling to a window screen during a tornado. You knew she would lose in the end, and when the blow to her face came, there was no more clinging to the screen for a chance.

  “She was knocked unconscious. Her face bleeding like old red rivers from broken ground. The man quickly scooped her up in his arms and ran out the door with her. He was always good when it came to the save, and as he sped the woman to the doctor, the boy cleaned up the blood with a mop, afterwards wringing it out in the dying fields as if the drops of his mother’s blood would in some way pay for the crops’ growth.

  “When the man returned, having left the woman with the doctor, he took the ax and chopped the rope down until it was short enough. He carried the rope up to the porch, where he hung it from the exposed beams of the ceiling. With the loop around his neck, he stood on the stool, checking it back and forth. Without more, he kicked the stool over, grunting as his body jerked down.

  “Having not had his neck broken, the toes of his boots dangled just above the porch boards as he hung there with his still arms by his side. Suddenly he started to thrash, though looking more like he was rummaging through some drawers than losing his life.

  “The boy would have thought had this moment ever come to pass, he would pull up a chair and watch patiently as his father strangled to death. Instead the boy ran and stood up the stool so it was there for his father’s feet once more. The father kicked it back over. Let it be said, the father did want to die. It was the son who didn’t want him to.

  “Once more, the boy stood the stool up beneath his father’s feet. In kicking for the stool, the father kicked the boy, who fell back onto the two-pronged pitchfork they would use when gathering hay from the fields.

  “The father used the last of himself to hoist his legs up onto the porch rail, supporting his body as he loosened the rope from around his neck. He smelled of piss and whiskey as he scooped his crying son up. He’s always been good with the saving, the boy thought as his father carried him inside and laid him on the bed.

  “The father very carefully cleaned and dressed the two large gashes going up the boy’s back, along his shoulder blades. As he did so, the father apologized, and the boy reached out to the noose marks.

  “‘Promise you won’t do it again, Pa. Promise you won’t let the rope get so short again.’

  “The father looked down at his son. ‘You’ll have to help me. I can’t keep it long on my own. You must help me.’

  “Later that night, while the father lay asleep beside the boy, the boy got out of bed and went to the porch. He took down the noose and carried it to the
yard where the other pieces of chopped rope were piled. Piece by piece, he tied the rope together until it was long enough to stretch whole once again around their house. When the father woke the next morning and saw the rope, he promised his son, in the sober morning light, that the rope would stay together forever. In the world of truth, it stayed complete for seven months.

  “While the rope was chopped after that, it was never chopped so short again to make a noose, and the son, while bruised, was always grateful to the father for at least keeping the rope long enough, because if it were to happen again, the son knew he would not prop the stool back up beneath his father’s thrashing legs.”

  * * *

  When I was twenty-one, I was with a woman with hair like rope. I say woman because she was thirty-seven. She had this small cabin by a lake in Maine. During the day, I’d go off to the town to replace the spires of the boot factory I’d been hired at. She’d go to work as the secretary of that factory. All day I’d be on the roof, on top of her, and then at night we’d go to that cabin, and all night she’d be on top of me.

  I liked her. But I loved her hair. It was dark and long enough to graze the backs of her calves. During the day at work, she wore it up in a braided bun. But at night, at the cabin, she let the braid go loose, twisting and turning and so much like rope, I named her that very thing.

  I remember how she’d stand up out of bed, naked in front of the windows. The moonlight silvering her flesh. She’d take her braid and circle it around her thin waist. It went all the way around, making the trip back to her belly button, where she would gently tie a loose knot.

  “My, my.” She’d click her tongue and look down, admiring what her hair could do. She’d say her hair was like Samson’s and was where all her strength came from. Then I’d pat the bed and she’d come over, her legs around me, her hands on my chest, her rope stretched back. I came feeling like a good man who had not yet picked up the ax.

  I stayed in Maine with her that winter, long after I’d finished working on the spires of the factory. I found other work to do in town.

  Then, at the end of January, while standing in only a pair of wool socks, she wrapped her hair around her waist. The ends would not tie in a knot.