The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

  Me and Sal didn’t sit close to Grand nor close to each other. Spaces had already started to form.

  When Dad returned with the sheriff, he said he had called Mom and told her the news so we wouldn’t have to. Then he told us to go home.

  “Dad?”

  “I said go home, Fielding.”

  Then he turned from me. The start of the rest of our lives.

  Me and Sal walked home slowly to give Mom enough time to scream the loudest, enough time to cry the worst. I thought we’d find her somewhere inside the house, collapsed under a pile of tissues. I was surprised to see her standing on the front porch, her hands full of our refrigerator magnets.

  As soon as I stepped up onto the porch, she fit the magnets into my hands. The magnets were wet. Her eyes made everything wet.

  “You’ve got to go to him, Fielding. Your Father won’t do it. He says it’s being silly.” Her voiced cracked, and I can’t be certain she even said the word silly.

  “I don’t understand, Mom. What do you want me to do with the magnets?”

  “Rub ’em all over him.”

  “Who?”

  “Grand.”

  “But why, Mom?”

  “To get the metal out of him.” She wrung her hands until I thought she’d twist her fingers off.

  “What metal, Mom?”

  “His arm got cut, didn’t it? That’s what your father said on the phone.”

  “He cut himself.”

  “He did not cut himself, Fielding.” She refused to say the word suicide. “He was simply cut. And when he was cut, some of the metal got inside ’im. It always comes off the blade, a little bit. And that extra metal will weigh him down.

  “All souls are weighed come death, and the souls deemed fit to enter heaven are light as lettuce. No sins to heavy ’em. We’ve got to make sure Grand’s soul weighs as little as it can. I won’t have my baby in hell.”

  “All right, Mom. I’ll do it.”

  “But you can’t.” Sal stopped me from leaving with the magnets. “Only the mother can get the metal out of a son.”

  “But…” Mom looked past us, at the world outside the porch. “I know, you can bring the body here, to me. That’s how it’ll be done. Then I can do the magnets and make sure all the metal is lifted right outta him.”

  “They’re not gonna bring his body here, Mom.”

  “That’s right,” Sal added. “You’ve got to go down there yourself.”

  “Leave the house? I can’t.”

  “For Grand.” Sal moved the magnets from my hands back to hers. “If it makes you feel any better, there isn’t a cloud in the sky. There’ll be no rain. Even if there is, you know how to swim now. Remember?”

  She held the magnets to her chest as she closed her eyes. She counted to ten before sliding her feet in toothpick strides across the porch. She would on occasion whimper and look around as if terror were going to come in on her from all sides. Finally across the porch, she slowly lowered herself down the steps. She seemed afraid of the way they creaked under her.

  Sunlight cast on her red painted toes through her hosiery as she stood on the bottom step. The ground below something she looked at as if it held the greatest fault she’d ever seen. She lifted her foot, as though she would take the step, but instead she lowered her foot back down and cried, “I can’t. Oh, Lord, help me. I can’t.”

  Sal looped his arm through her left and I looped mine through her right.

  “It’s okay, Mom. We got ya.”

  She sighed as she looked down at me. “I don’t think I can, Fielding.”

  My mother’s tears always knew how to hurt. They could push you off balance and send you crashing down. Nothing breaks like a body falling. Nothing puts you to pieces quite like that.

  “For Grand, you can.” Sal tugged on her arm.

  “Grand,” she whispered as she stood a little taller.

  “Your son,” Sal matched her whisper.

  “My son.”

  The son she always loved a little more than the other. The son she always held a little tighter. A little longer. The son who would bring her down from the porch and onto the dead, brown ground.

  She looked unsure of what ground was. It’d been so long since she’d been on it.

  Her first steps were slow and scared. Close things she tested the earth with. But more and more, they became bigger and bigger. And then suddenly she was off. Walking faster than us even. Eventually our arms slipped out from hers and the world found her walking all on her own.

  Those out in the town stopped whatever they were doing. Conversation ended midsentence. Handshakes never got to where they were going. Food slid off spoons. Mouths gaped. Babies were left to cry. The mothers were busy watching mine. Everyone busy watching the woman who had not been seen outside for twelve whole years. Here she was, she who had been living like a curtain, never trailing far from the window of the house she was attached to.

  “Isn’t that?”

  “I believe it is.”

  “Stella Bliss.”

  “Maybe the world is really about to end.”

  “It’s just beginnin’ for her.”

  If only they knew, it was no beginning for her. It was an end she was walking to. What a day to come out. A rather beautiful day. Did she even see it? Walking hand in hand as she was with magnets and determination. Quick steps to the boy waiting on her. Was she even sure it was trees she was passing or just tall men? Did she look up at the sky, coming blue from the morning’s gray?

  Pity the child in her path and who was not hers and who she pushed out of the way. Even kicked his ball into the middle of Main Lane. Pity the wasp who flew too close and who she swatted to a concussion. Pity the day she did not see, a day that had been waiting for twelve long years. A day that took but twelve minutes to walk.

  The morgue was in the basement of the courthouse. The light dim and like a shedding of clay, dusty and browned. It was a place that smelled of rust and soil, of chemicals and clogged drains. Compared to the heat of every other place, it was cool. Basements are like that. Probably the coolest place I’d been all summer long.

  When Dad saw Mom, the only words he could manage were, “What about the rain?”

  She didn’t say anything, just threw her arms around him. It was like a cold burning between them. Their skeletons joined at soggy throbs. The space they filled before us, like twisted wire, embedding into itself. They were one grasp. One curve of flesh. One heart breaking in startled, flickering cracks.

  When they finally separated, you couldn’t tell which tears belonged to her, and which belonged to him.

  He tried to persuade her not to see the body. Said it was not a way for a mother to see her son. But she held up the magnets and said, “It is the way for a mother to see her son, if it is indeed the only way left.”

  We stepped into the room with Grand, where he lay on a metal table with a white sheet beneath him. He looked the same as he had lain in the woods. Only the scenery had changed. It was as if no one knew what to do with the body of a god.

  Mom approached the table with wary steps, as if she were walking across water and had to wait for the bridge to keep building. The tan nylon of her hosiery was dirtied and clung to by tiny gravels from the walk outside. Every time she lifted her foot, the nylons cased the strain of her toes as they pointed tensely in every step that took her to the table, where she circled his body, as fluid as the ripple around the dropped stone.

  There was a wholeness to the silence that followed. A sort of totality that sucked in all sound, save for our breathing. I thought there would be noise. I thought she would sob uncontrollably. That was the mother I expected. The one who roared louder than the father in the woods. The one who banged her infinitesimal fists and screamed, Why? That was not the mother who circled her dead son in the morgue.

  She ran her hand through his hair, the short strands going through her fingers in a rising and falling like the abstract summary of his short life. She smiled that
slight smile all mothers give to the child who has always been their favorite.

  Her apron pressed against the sheet as she leaned over him. I thought maybe she would hold the magnets down like he was a refrigerator and she was merely posting notes. A sort of up-and-down motion. Instead she slid the magnets across him, a different one for each part of his body. She believed each magnet only had enough strength in it to lift the metal from one body part, and after that, it was spent of its power.

  When she got to his left arm, she paused at the wide wound stuffed with the gathered blood and leaves and dirt. She started to pick the leaves out, but Dad gently asked her to leave them. It was as if the leaves and dirt provided a foliage to the wound so he wouldn’t have to see the cut so naked and clear. She understood this, and merely moved the magnet around the wound, the drooping tip of one of the larger leaves gliding across the back of her passing hand.

  I thought the wound would drop her to her knees in realization of his suicide, but she merely looked at it as if it were just your ordinary difference of no particular sin or exclusive death. She was in such denial, that the wound was just a moment his skin was not at its best.

  She removed his shoes and socks and as she slid the magnets over his bare feet, her voice broke as she said, “I know how ticklish your feet are. I’ll scratch ’em good once I’m done.”

  And she did too.

  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
<
br />   —MILTON, PARADISE LOST 1:620

  THE 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.