Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“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.

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.