“I had been so certain of his guilt. If I could be so certain and yet so wrong, how many times had I been wrong before? I started to wonder. I looked back on my cases and saw cracks, not victories. I was no hero. I had failed in handling the filter entrusted to me.”
Dad was standing, but he looked like he was kneeling. His trousers dirtying at the knee before my eyes. His hands coming together, at his sides, but coming together in front. My father was praying.
“It got me thinking about all the things we are so certain about. Like the devil. I put that invitation in the newspaper, and I thought the devil will show and he will have a pitchfork and horns and be red all over. He’ll be mean and cruel and evil. I was so certain of that, and then you came, Sal. Not with a pitchfork but with a heart. I—”
Dad was cut off by the ringing doorbell. He wiped his eyes as Mom answered the door and a moment later showed Fedelia in, wearing a heavy black coat—velvet, of all things—that swept the floor and which she held tightly closed by the collar.
I stared at the sweat glistening above her bare lip. It was the first time I’d seen her face naked. The makeup washed off. Little red marks on her cheeks from scrubbing. White film at her hair line left by the soap.
She rather forcefully pushed me out of the way to get to Sal standing behind me. “Well, you little devil, you’ve put me in quite a state since last I saw you.”
“I have?”
“Every time I look in a mirror now, I see the infinity I have built.” She gestured up to her hair. “It is time to be rid of it.”
“Oh, Auntie,” Mom gasped.
Fedelia nodded as she reached into the pocket of her coat to pull out a pair of hair shears, offering them toward Sal. “Won’t you do the honors?”
To avoid a mess of cut hair in the house, we went to the back porch, where Mom brought out a stool. The dark of the evening had laid its way, so she made sure to set the stool beneath the porch bulbs, the lights already preaching to dozens of moths, beetles, and little night flies.
As Fedelia sat down on the stool and checked its wobble, she kept that coat closed tight, her squeeze straining the veins in the backs of her hands. She was quickly tapping her toes. In the tapping, the bottom of the coat slightly fell down across her leg and I caught a glimpse of sequins. She grabbed the coat back and frowned at me as if it’d been my fault.
Sal stood behind her, watching the insects fly the light above, giving him a halo of gnats and moths as he asked Fedelia if she was ready.
“I am ready. Set me free.”
As the shears made their initial approach, Fedelia closed her eyes. She winced as the blades cut and the first ribbon fell in that slow-motion elegance of falling things.
I thought she was going to stop him, say she’d changed her mind, but as the tear slid down her cheek, she opened her eyes, and as if all the light were shining there in her irises, the amber shade became diluted by glow to a yellow that took hold of us all.
Each ribbon and clump of hair that fell, she sat a little taller, a little straighter. A drip from her forehead. A drip from her eyes. Her nose. Her cheeks. Drip, drip, drip. All sweat and tears, and yet wasn’t it the anger melting away before us?
I watched the ribbons fall, their curling and swirling like retiring snakes given the send-off by a woman letting go of the anger that had nearly cannibalized her.
Sal cut so close to her head, all that remained were her white roots. Once he finished, she stood and stepped away from the pile of orange hair and ribbons on the floor. She lowered her head and felt the short rise left.
“Auntie?” Mom reached toward Fedelia. “You all right?”
“All the weight of that hair. You get so used to carryin’ it around, you forget how heavy it is.” Fedelia raised her head and smiled. “I am so happy it is finally gone.”
She threw off the black coat, revealing the glistening chestnut and gold gown beneath. It was cut low in the front and back, fitting to a waist and hips I didn’t know she had. No more bags for her. Sequins and fit the rest of the way.
“Just name me Paradise.” She struck a pose that called to mind a certain duck in flight.
“You look so beautiful, Fedelia.” Mom smiled and lightly clapped her hands under her chin.
Fedelia lowered her arms. “I haven’t heard anyone call me beautiful in forty years.”
Dad held her wet cheek in his hand. “Then that was our fault, not yours.”
He didn’t stop staring at her as he said, “Fielding, tell your aunt how beautiful she is.”
“You’re beautiful, Aunt Fedelia.”
She grabbed Dad’s hand and squeezed it before kneeling down in front of me. “I haven’t been very nice to you, have I, Fielding?”
“You haven’t been nice to any of us.”
That was the first time I’d ever heard her laugh.
She thanked Sal and was about to say something more to him, but the loud knocking on the front door distracted us all.
We went to see who it was, Mom complimenting Fedelia the whole way while Fedelia nodded like she’d never been who she was before.
Through the windows around the front door, we could see Otis pacing the porch, pumping his shoulders and cracking his neck.
Dad stepped over to the door, but Fedelia warned him about opening it.
“He’s mighty boiled up ’bout somethin’. Might scald us all if ya let ’im in.”
Dad quietly slid the end of the chain into the locking track on the door. “We’ll just see what he wants. Isn’t the man owed that? Isn’t he still our friend?”
We weren’t so sure as Dad slowly turned the knob. Over his pacing, Otis heard the quiet opening of the door. The whole house shook as he clutched onto the frame to stop himself from overshooting the door in his mad dash for it.
His face was so damp, it looked as if it’d been attached to a water hose. He was squeezing his head in between the door and the frame, his nose pressing against the top of the chain.
“Did you get our card and vine? You and Dovey have our prayers at this most dreadful time.” Dad shook his head in that give of sympathy.
“Where is he?” Otis tried reaching his arm through the opening, but his muscles were too wide for the narrow way.
“Who?”
“You know who, Autopsy.” Otis leaned into the door Dad was trying to close.
“He’s not here.” Dad waved for Mom to yank Sal out of sight.
Otis roared with his muscles ready. This was what he had lifted all those barbells for. Why he had done all those squats with a bar digging into his shoulders. The running, the protein shakes, they had not been worthless after all. Him being lost in a gym, escaping the world but only in preparation for it. Preparing for this one moment he would be asked to defend his fallen son. He would be asked to bring the grieving mother a revenge she could read in his fists.
“I told you he’s not here, Otis.”
Dad’s fast push into the door wasn’t enough, not against Otis and his great bellowing shove. The chain snapped and Dad was knocked back to the floor. Mom cried out and fell to her knees by his unmoving side, holding his banged head.
She slapped his cheeks, trying to get him to open his eyes. “Come on, love.”
I kneeled at his other side, grabbing his limp hand and shaking it. He didn’t respond.
I looked up at Otis standing in the busted doorway, the broken chain still swinging against the frame as he clenched his fists. All he saw was the boy hiding behind Fedelia.
“You get on outta here, Otis Jeremiah.” Fedelia held one firm hand up, as the other stayed fearfully behind her with Sal. “I said get on. Don’t you dare, don’t you dare come near here. No, I said no.”
Otis gave Fedelia a hard shove into the wall. She slid frightened and shocked down the wallpaper to the floor while Otis grabbed Sal up by the collar of his shirt.
“Fielding?” I looked down to see Dad’s eyes finally open. He was weakly clutching my arm, saying, “Save Sal.”
I would never have been fast enough. No matter how quick I was. I would never have been fast enough to stop Otis from punching Sal in the face. The punch thrust him back onto the floor, where he curled up so tight, I thought he was going to disappear.
I yelled for Otis to leave as I pounded my fists into his abs. It was like hitting a slab of concrete.
He grabbed me by the shoulders, as he’d so often done before when checking my strength. This time it was to throw me to the floor.
I heard a weak grunt. When I looked up, I saw Dad on Otis’ back. Dad wasn’t a fighter. He tried, but it was like watching a spider struggling to take down a bear. Long legs and arms coming around, but doing nothing more than irritating the beast beneath him.
Otis flung Dad to the floor. Their wrestling sent them into a roll. Fedelia, improved from her own shove, grabbed the nearby broom, using its handle to prod Otis, on occasion accidentally prodding Dad, who moaned on impact.
Tall, lanky Dad was no match for square, boxy Otis, and he quickly wound up in the bad position of a choke hold. Otis was really squeezing too. Dad’s eyes bulged until I thought the blue was going to burst from his face and scatter like the blue chicories cut up by the lawn mower and spewed out the chute.
I got into the fight, wrapping my arms around Otis’ bulging neck. It was like holding onto a wet log.
Grand, who had been upstairs, came running down. He would later say he’d had his headphones on and hadn’t heard our fighting over the music, until I started screaming for Otis to let Dad go.
I thought Grand would be the god to save us all, but he became just another spider on the growling bear’s back. It was Mom who did the most damage when she grabbed the porcelain vase and broke it against Otis’ head.
He just stood there, blood trickling over the tight curls of his perm. Suddenly he threw a confused punch that hit the air. He swung around and threw another. Punch after punch, until his glazed eyes landed on me. Before I knew it, his hands were coming. They are why I am still afraid of skillets. His hands big, round cast iron things of heat that pushed into my chest, sending me back against the wall. Hard enough to make the mirror behind me drop to a shatter.
“Stop!”
We turned to Sal’s scream. Otis’ punch had lacerated Sal’s right cheek, and the blood, while not profuse, had gathered like the blooming flora of his already swollen cheek.
“It bleeds?” Otis dropped down to the floor in a squat. That’s kneeling to a muscleman.
“Of course he bleeds.” Dad wheezed. “He’s just a boy. For heaven’s sake, Otis.”
“I thought he was…” His fingers raked through his blood and perm, trying to rake what he’d thought from his brain, his brain that felt like a pulled muscle.
“You thought he was the devil.” Dad was still recovering from the choke hold.
Otis nodded his head slowly before apologizing to Sal. “They said you were what done it to Dovey and our baby. I was just bein’ a good daddy, you know. I wouldn’t have hurt ya if I’d known ya was just a boy. I mean I don’t know you. I didn’t—”
“You nearly strangled me to death, Otis, and you’ve known me all your life. And just look how you shoved Fedelia and Fielding. You could have hurt them beyond repair, Otis.” Dad slumped by the front door, wearily motioning with his hand out. “It’s time you go home.”
Otis stood from his kneeling squat. When before he might have loved the perfection of his strength, he stood before us ashamed by it.
“I said I’m sorry. Stop lookin’ at me like that. Didn’t y’all hear me? I’m sorry. Hey, I’m gonna pay for that mirror.” His finger shook as he pointed toward the pieces of glass around my feet.
“And who’s gonna pay for all the years of bad luck?” Fedelia shooed me away as she used the broom to sweep up the pieces. “Seven years, we’re lookin’ at. You gonna pay that debt, Otis Jeremiah?”
“Shucks, Fedelia.” Otis grasped the back of his neck, log to log. “Seven years is a long time for just one person to bear when it comes to unlucky things. There’s seven of us here. We could all take a year.”
“Oh, no.” Fedelia shook her head. “I have just come into an awakenin’, and there is no way I’m gonna go through it unlucky. No, Otis, this bad luck will be all yours.” She began to pick up the pieces of glass, spitting on each as she said Otis’ name.
“What ya doin’?” He took a step toward her but no more. He had already threatened us enough, he knew.
“I’m markin’ ’em for you, Otis Jeremiah. So this bad luck knows the name of its victim.”
He hugged himself because there was no one else to do it. “I’ve got bad luck enough. I’ve just lost my baby, don’t ya know? My son is dead. I already had a name for ’im and everything. Not just that but the nickname too. Now what am I supposed to do? This nickname rollin’ ’round in my head. I saved it up for all the times I would call ’im that. Now it’s just a pile inside me. I can’t throw it out. It’s not garbage. I can’t throw it out. But how can I live with it?”
Fedelia left the glass on the floor, the tears in her eyes glistening for that grieving father who loved the fetus as much as most men love the fully grown.
He had already prepared himself to be a father. Already prepared himself for what his son would be. He would’ve looked like him. Been strong like him. That’s how he pictured him. Truth was, he didn’t care. That child would never have to lift a dumbbell into Otis’ heart. His love was easy.
He would have praised his son for dropping the football when others booed him for not catching it. He wouldn’t have cared if his son was scrawny. Couldn’t fight. Didn’t know who Arnold Schwarzenegger was. If he was fat. Ate candy bars and television shows and smelled like sofa cushions. Just as long as he came. It was the not coming that Otis couldn’t handle. The not having the son to see.
Sal knew this. That was why he went to the pile of broken glass. He picked up one of the larger shards and offered it to Otis with instruction to take the glass out into the night.
“Every light that reflects will be your son.”
Otis, the man who would later die at 660 pounds of pure fat, accepted the sliver of glass and went out the door with his head down. It was his sudden shriek that made us run out to the porch.
He was looking into the mirror, the sharp edges of the glass cutting his palm in his tight grip. He was smiling at his son, he said. None of us told him it was just the porch light and always would be.
Long after he left, we could hear him. Seeing his son. Hollering that very thing into the dark for all of Breathed to hear. Sharing it somehow made it more than streetlights, more than house lights, more than cars coming his way.
16
I sung of Chaos and eternal Night
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:18
AUGUST WAS. A housewife taken in for heatstroke. A nursing home put on a bus for the next town. A pepper in the mouth. Another cow dead. Another fly landed. A woman cutting her hair—cuts to get cool, they called them. A fury. A baby crying but not heard over the fans. Dovey home from the hospital. An air conditioner kicked. Dovey going to Elohim’s meetings. Another ice cube melted. Another farmer cursing. Water shortages. Otis staying home and dismantling the crib. Wells going dry. A man throwing up his lunch because it’s just too damn hot. August was.
And by the beginning of it, news of our heat wave stretched across the nation like one long sentence looking to never surrender to a period.
“Boiling,” said the Chicago Tribune, while The Boston Globe called the town a “Torrid Furnace.” The San Francisco Chronicle was a telephone dialed to meteorologists who blamed the depleting ozone layer, while the Omaha World-Herald wrote extensively about the barren fields and how farmers kneeled in the loss of their crops.
The Indianapolis Star had a quote from an environmentalist who was certain our dying livestock and infestation of flies were the prologue to the disease in us, while The Miami Herald listed Breathed at the top of its list of the ten
worst places to spend summer vacation.
Then there were the articles less about the heat and more about Sal and what they called his “devil delusion.” The Columbus Dispatch quoted a prominent psychiatrist who gave an abridged diagnosis of pediatric schizophrenia while The Washington Post gave a detailed description of the therapy and miracles of modern medicine used to treat such a disorder.
The Baptist preacher interviewed by The Clarion-Ledger ignored any verdict familiar to the lexicon of the medical and instead said Sal was an energumen, a person possessed. The preacher went further to say that he would be more than happy to perform a Mississippi-style exorcism—for a small donation, of course.
The focus of other papers like USA Today was on Sal’s race, and their articles were narrations from the NAACP, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and Al Sharpton. To them, Sal was just a black boy who by calling himself devil was personifying the white man’s claim.
There weren’t as many journalists to come to Breathed as there were articles written. Most of them phoned it in or relied on their fellow journalists, lifting the common themes of heat and race. Those who did come rarely stayed more than a couple days. The heat got to them. The people who wouldn’t talk got to them. Not even Elohim and his followers had anything to do with the newspapers. National news was something Elohim did not want to make.
These reporters especially wanted to speak to the family with the boy. Of course to the boy himself. Every notepad, every big city accent, asking, “Say, aren’t you—?” we ran away from. Some chased, shouting they just wanted to talk. We ran faster. They wheezed and cursed over their urban knees. And we ran faster.
Aside from Sal’s race, the town got darker that summer, beyond a Midwestern tan. No hat, no shade, no night could keep you pale. The heat had its own sun. Even housebound Mom came away with a cook to her normally rinsed skin.
Much to his annoyance, Elohim was also changed. A browning start surely there. It’s why he started to wear white. White shirts. White pants. White everything. He was keeping the white in place. It meant so much to him that it stay in place. That meant a great deal indeed.
The Summer That Melted Everything Page 16
