Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“I hung up. Dialed the operator, told her to get the number for God. She never did say nothin’, just laughed. I hung up on her too. It wasn’t God I really wanted anyways. They say if you wanna get things done, you gotta get hold of the devil.

“So I picked up the phone again, but I didn’t dial nothin’, I just waited. The dial tone hummed in my ear, then it crackled and I knew. I knew he had picked up.”

I shifted beside him. “He?”

“The devil. I told ’im what I wanted. Told ’im I wanted Helen home. He didn’t say nothin’, but I knew he understood. The next day I got a call from Helen. I asked her ’bout the man who answered her phone. She said it was just a hotel worker, bringin’ more towels and for me not to worry ’cause she was comin’ home early. Had booked passage on the Andrea Doria, she said. Wasn’t I happy? she asked.”

He fell quiet, and together we watched a hawk go flying by. When it landed, he spoke again, rather low in the chest. “The so-called hotel worker came to her funeral. A tall son-of-a-bitch. I recognized his voice when he came up to me to offer his condolences. I hated the way he bent down to talk to me, like I was a damn child. Told ’im that. Told ’im I thought it funny he would come all that way from Paris for a woman he’d just brought towels to.”

The silence that followed was like practicing for death. That lonely silence that describes the dark so well. A fly came and landed on the back of his hand. I shooed it away for him because he just sat there, a concreted form, heavy and still.

“Mr. Elohim? You okay?”

His head seemed unsteady on his neck as he said, “Turned out he was a painter. An artist. I suppose they like that distinction. I saw his work years later in a museum up in Cleveland. He had a paintin’ called the Andrea Doria . It didn’t have the ship in it, though.” He bit and swallowed another fingernail. “It had Helen. Beautiful paintin’, I’ll give ’im that.”

His trembling hands gripped his knees.

“My momma, God rest her soul, used to say a black boy is only good till he reaches thirteen. After that, he’s man bound, and a black man’s no good for nothin’, especially since they passed all them laws on workin’ ’em.

“I thought of my momma and what she had said as that man shook my hand at Helen’s funeral. I thought, gee, if only someone had stopped him from growin’ up. Just ate his future away, I would still have mine.”

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do, really, except lay my hand on his back and pat like I’d seen Dad do before.

Elohim slowly turned to me. “Don’t pat my back like I’m a damn dog, boy. I’m a man, for Christ’s sake.” He stood, trying his best to make himself taller. “I think you better go on home. And, Fielding, keep all I just said to yourself. I shouldn’t even have said it. It’s just sometimes you don’t say nothin’ for so long, you forget why ya shut up in the first place. Oh, and Fielding? You might wanna let that boy know somethin’.”

“What?”

“Dovey lost that baby.”

He didn’t say it cruelly. Nor did he say it as if it were a victory for him and his. He said it like a man tired of describing what lost means.

I’VE NEVER BEEN married, though when I was twenty-eight, I was close to it. Got the tux and everything. Even went to the church. She was a lovely girl. Maybe a little too much hair. She was always putting this white cream on her upper lip. I’d walk into the bathroom, and there’d she’d be, snow on the face.

Years after we were to be married, I would hear she died in a car crash in Minnesota. They didn’t find the accident right away. The state was in the middle of a blizzard, and by the time they come upon the car, only its roof was visible. Windshield was in a bad way. They knew she’d been ejected. They shined a flashlight around. Beam, beam, beam . Saw something a few feet out. It was her lips. That was all that was seen. The rest of her was covered by snow.

Snow on the face, and I’ve hated Minnesota ever since.

I don’t know. Maybe I should’ve married her, but when I got to the church, I found myself staring up at its steeple. I didn’t have a ladder, so I had to stand on the outside sill of a window and reach up and grab the gutter. Then I just pulled myself up. I used to be strong like that. They heard my feet walking across the roof, that’s what they said when they all came out of the church to stare up at me. Said they heard a noise and came out to see.

“What are you doing up there?” they asked.

“Fixing the steeple,” I answered.

I didn’t have my tools with me, so I had to improvise. I heard someone down below say I was mad, the way I gripped air and hammered it too. The way I sounded out the sound of steel hitting wood. I had gone temporarily around the bend. Don’t we get to at least once in our lives? To go so mad, we survive what it is we are doing. And what I was doing was jilting the woman who loved me. My God, what I must’ve done to her heart.

I heard someone from below say I had always been good for nothing. I picked up one of my invisible crowbars and flung it his way. He didn’t flinch.

I suppose someone told her I was on the roof. She came running out of the church, white dress and all. I heard her mother saying, “Mary, get back inside. He’s not supposed to see you yet.”

But Mary didn’t care. Mary only ever heard what she wanted to hear. It was her fault we got as far as we did to the church.

One day I said Mary and then I said something else, I know I did, but ended it all with a me. She thought I’d said Marry me. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that wasn’t what was said at all. She was just so excited. I thought, hell, this girl really wants to marry me. Why not give it a try? Maybe her love would be enough to paradise the hell. But then I realized, I couldn’t use her like that. Like a shield in the fray. She deserved to marry a man who loved her for all the things she was and not for all the armor she could be.

As she stared up at me that day on the roof, she knew exactly what I was doing up there. I’ll always be grateful for her, how she never asked me to come down like everyone else did. She just took off her veil and told her mother she’d like to stop by Denny’s on the way home. She was hungry, she said.

That was the last I saw of her, her white dress piling up against her body like the snow I never saved her from.

I waited for them all to leave. I cringed when I heard a woman call me a no-good son-of-a-bitch. Even the flower girl flipped me the bird. I threw an invisible hammer at her. She just dropped her chin to her chest and shook her head as she walked away, dragging her feet while the flower petals fell from her hand.

Before I climbed down, I yanked some of the shingles off the steeple, kicked it in the side, and broke the stained glass in its little window. A week later, I’d drive by the steeple and see it was still damaged.

Some people might call me lonely because all I got are pictures of steeples and towers and roofs. I do have the neighbor boy’s photograph, but he’s not mine. Like I said before in Maine, I wouldn’t have done much good with a kid if I had one. I did have a dream once that I had a son. In this dream, I went out to the woods with him and put a gun in his young hands. I woke up at the bang.

“Just a nightmare,” I muttered, reaching for the bottle by the bed. “Just a nightmare.”

Maybe I am lonely. Maybe I do hold onto the pillow at night, maybe I have twisted a bread tie around my ring finger just to see what it feels like to have a meaning there. I think of Elohim during these moments.