Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

Mom turned an electric fan on in the next room. The battle between heat and home had begun.

I spoke next. Dad was too busy. His eyes were trying to help his thoughts find the seams in the boy before him.

“What about this Amos?” I asked. “Sal?”

He nodded his head. “I know about him. I met him.”

“Where?” Dad sat up.

“It smelled like … cinder blocks.” Sal looked down at the bowl and spoon. “I’d like to wash these, if I may?”

Dad nodded as he tapped his fingers on the table, clearly in a hurry to put the puzzle before him together and solve the mystery. “I’ll give you this, son, you are convincing, but I got a feeling when those parents show tomorrow morning that you will be their son. A very imaginative son, but a son nonetheless.”

Dad left, saying he was going to check on Mom.

As Sal washed the bowl and spoon, I stared at the wing scars on his back, following his blades of shoulder. No one could be blind to the scars’ near perfect sameness.

“I wish I could fly.” I said it more to myself than to him.

The spoon clanked against the sink’s side and he flinched. “Has your father ever thrown you up on his shoulders? Carried you around?”

“Sure, when I was a cricket.”

“Then you’ve felt what it feels like to fly. It is being carried by something that raises you up while at the same time promises to never drop you.”

“Well, if that’s the case, then when you flew I guess you knew what it’s like to be carried by a father.”

He stopped washing the bowl, the running water the only sound. He turned it off, and in its place of rushing, he came slow to say, “And yet why is it I stand here not knowing just that? Knowing only the feeling of falling, the blood dripping like red feathers down my back.”

OLD MAN, WHY do you buy so many rolls of aluminum foil? For my sins, I answer, to make them beautiful.

I write my sins on a piece of foil and place it on the ground with a rock on its corner so the foil doesn’t get carried off. Then I go away from it. Go a distance from it because then, from afar, the sins become beautiful silver things that catch the light of the sun so brightly, heaven is left in want.

I tried. Let it be said I did try. When I was twenty-nine I jumped out of a plane over the sweeping canola fields of North Dakota. Before I got on the plane, I placed my sins amongst the blooming yellow crop. A bullet here, a gun over there, a few baseballs scattered throughout. Really, they were all melted candles. Isn’t that what sin is, after all? Life given too much flame? The devil’s at the wick, and the wax heads south.

Just before I jumped from the plane, I promised myself if I landed on only the yellow blooms, I would take it as a sign of my ghosts allowing me peace. With that peace, I would no longer suffer in the worst shadow of the snake. I would stop skinning peaches. Cease all mad damage. I’d bring an end to splintering my knuckles against picket fences and running chainsaws through rows of American corn.

I’d sweeten my heart. Be gentled by the small of a lover’s back. I’d no longer scrape my spine against cinder blocks nor cannibalize myself in perfect bites. I’d get rid of my stash of horns and keep hell out of the honey. I would learn how to say June, July, August, September without scream and as one word. Forgiveness.

If, however, I were to land on one of my sins, I promised myself I would go on with the punishment and the guilt and let the final fangs in to do all their damage. I would stay the shape that best fits the coffin and accept the terrifying permanence of my crimes.

As I readied to jump from the plane, I looked down at those bright yellow fields. Sal once said there was no yellow in hell. That was why I picked North Dakota during its canola season. Those yellow fields gave me my best chance to land in heaven.

As I jumped from the plane, I tried to see my sins, if not to somehow steer away from them. Maybe that was cheating, but who doesn’t choose to fall well when such a choice is to be had? I had no say, really, in where I landed. All I could do was trust the fall.

When it did finally come to an end, it was a bumpy landing, a little facedown, a little rolling. Had I landed on one of my sins?

Nothing beneath me. Nothing trapped up in the dragged parachute. I laid it out flat so I could see. I retraced my tumble. The ground clean, too much yellow to be hell. I tilted my head back to the sky and smiled for the first time since 1984.

“That was a real nice landin’. I say, a real nice one.”

I turned to a voice and the man it belonged to standing by the road, his car just parked there, the door still open.

“I saw you comin’ down.” He pointed to the plane as his shaggy graying hair dripped over his sunburnt forehead. “Pulled over to watch. It was a good fall ya had. Was it scary?”

“Just the landing.”

He took a few steps into the field as he looked up at the sky, at the plane circling overhead. “I always thought I might wanna do somethin’ like that.” He lowered his eyes back to me as I turned to pull in the parachute. “Say, what’s that you got on ya?”

“What?” I looked down at myself. “Where?”

“On the back of your pants there. Here, I’ll get it.” He stepped closer and plucked something from the back of my pant leg. “Now, what in tarnation is this?” He held the smashed candle up in his hand.

“My sin,” I answered from the back of the cave that had suddenly swallowed me. “That is my sin.”

And so it had been decided I would not be set free from the prison or its bars like eternal candle wicks, burning any chance of escape. All I could do, all I have done, is to sit with the flames, sleep with the heat, smell the burn of flesh filling the urn one ash at a time.

I think about that first night they came to look at Sal, and I think maybe it was beautiful from a distance. The way a flooding river is. Maybe the knuckles, some tapping, some banging at our door weren’t so loud from far away. Maybe the faces pressed into our window screens looked like hung pictures. The hollers asking if they could see, maybe they sounded like songs out on the edge. Yes, maybe it was beautiful from far off, but up close it was a crowd. It was a noise. It was drowning under flooding waters.

That first evening, our house swelled. They came to see the devil Flint told them we had. They’d look at Sal, pat him on the head, be a bit disappointed.

“Just a little boy. That’s all. Just a boy. Though dark as the night, ain’t he?”

“Yeah, but look at them eyes. You don’t normally see that color in ’em. Maybe we shouldn’t say he ain’t the devil just yet. They’re just so green.”

Staying outside through all of it was Elohim. I waved for him to come in, but he just took a step back. I still remember the way the gold band gleamed from his ring finger. In his mind, he was a husband, and just in case anyone doubted it, he was going to look the part. Hell, he was going to live the part.

When he got letters or sent them, he put in a Mrs. beside his Mr., and when he hung clothes on his line to dry, one could not help but notice the dresses and bras. Perfume and lipstick sat on the vanity in his bedroom, and the strands of his fiancée’s hair from the last time she brushed it on Kettle Lane were fossilized in bristles. He was surrounded by a woman who wasn’t there. He was one half of a relationship that did not exist.

Just as I was about to go out to Elohim, a man bumped into me on his way in the house. With his cowboy hat and spurs, he looked like a man sure of the saddle. He had a Polaroid camera in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. I told him to put it out before he went into the house. He silently took my picture, though he did nothing to the cigarette as he stepped through the front door, adding to the rest of that crowd consisting of our friends, neighbors, and strangers, like the woman in the bright red dress with showy purple flowers who nearly knocked over the vase in the entry hall with her wide swinging hips and rear like a bag of apples.