Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

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.

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.

As the heat increased, Elohim increased his sermons to an ever-increasing audience. At his feet they sat as lumps of soil. He was their sun. He was their water. He was the Father tugging up their growth, occasionally fertilizing with an Old Testament amen and pat on the head, bringing him down from the cloud.

Was he God that summer? There in those woods, he was the only one.

There would be no hollering, no stomping feet, no lectern theatrics. He was the Lord with the soft drawl. Sometimes he didn’t even speak. He’d hold up enlarged photographs of concentration camps, of disasters and accidents. There Sal would be, in the sunken stomachs of starving prisoners, in the corpses piled in holes. He would be painted badly by Elohim, whose skill was as splotched as putting a canvas beneath a pan of boiling paint.

In the photograph of the aftermath of the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake, Elohim painted Sal in the billowing smoke of the resulting fires. His face was the rubble of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane and the bodies by the wreckage. He stared out from the debris of the Johnstown Flood and peered from the shattered windows of the Cocoanut Grove.

He was the 1913 Ohio Flood, the Blizzard of 1888, the explosion in the Monongah mines. Train crashes, bridges collapsed, buses of children careening off the cliff. He was avalanches, stampedes, sinking ships, like the Andrea Doria.

Elohim had made Sal everything bad. Gone wrong. Gone to death.

And they all sat there, believing it, their common sense melting away one drip at a time. Had it not been the flame’s summer, those people would’ve stood and left Elohim. Probably even called him a son-of-a-bitch.

If only it would’ve been a normal summer, a summer where the heat was easily alleviated by air conditioners and fans and those cooling stations set up in town for the elderly and those at high risk of heat-related death.

We were all high risk. That heat brought out the throbs in hearts, the fevers, the things that couldn’t be let go of. It was a perfect extractor of pain and frustration, of anger and loss. It brought everything to the surface and sweated it out.

Those followers of Elohim all had their own Helens, their own Andrea Doria s, their own devils they needed to blame. It was a support group for the wronged. Like the brother of the twin killed in a gas station being robbed by a black man in a black ski mask. There was the father whose daughter had been made a vegetable by the drunk driver who was drunk, black, and very, very drunk. And a wife who’d been raped while coming out of a bar in Toledo. Three rapists, all one color. Black. Black. Black.

That color brought Elohim and his group together. It was the color of their devil, and they needed their devil to have a color so they could find him again.

Elohim became the one they all looked to because he amplified their tragedies and in that addressed their desperation to be heard and to matter. To them, he was the someone who was going to give them the opportunity to take action on what before had seemed to be out of their hands. Elohim placed retribution within their reach, and he was helped by the heat and of all things by Sal himself, who came in the right color, willing to be called devil.

Elohim always ended the meetings by handing out vegetarian recipes. It was because of him the sale of meat was down but that of lettuce was up. The butcher nearly went out of business. We should’ve known right then and there the control Elohim had. All he had to say was buy lettuce and they bought lettuce. Chuck your bacon and they chucked their bacon.

All around me, madness. Madness in the woods, but madness in the town too. Yes, common sense was melting away. At first people followed the old logic that light colors and light fabric are easier to breathe in when hot. Then I started to see a black T-shirt here and dark denim there. Was that flannel? And a leather jacket and some woolen socks instead of bare feet. Those who had painted their roofs white, climbed back up the ladder to paint them black. Instead of iced tea being ordered at Dandelion Dimes, it was hot tea, sent back because it simply wasn’t hot enough.