Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

“If he didn’t steal ’em, where’d he get ’em? Hmm, Sal?”

“I can’t remember.” His anger was making a shadow of him, a sort of cold draft coming in under the door.

“You’re lyin’. You’re a lyin’ thief.”

“I’m not a thief.” He glared at me as if he could light me up. I believe he might’ve if Mom hadn’t been there to be disappointed in him for doing so.

I was in his path to the counter, so he gave me a hard shove to the side as he quickly grabbed the bowl and spoon, running from the kitchen with them.

“I don’t know why ya had to go and start somethin’, Fielding. Go after him.” Mom shooed me out.

From the back porch, I saw him running up the hill, into the woods. I called his name and took chase. He seemed to run forever. The hills like his own rising world. Maybe he was a prince, and he was running away to his castle. Could I follow him there? Could I keep running after the wild ruler to his kingdom, where a crown of sardines was enough?

He ran faster than me, and I struggled with what I saw. Was it a boy ahead? Or a flame burning through the land, starting quiet fires only we knew?

It was no kingdom, but the train tracks he finally stopped at.

“Why’d you follow me, Fielding?” He caught his breath like a true boy who had just run too far too fast.

I think he’d been crying, but there was too much sweat to see the difference.

“Sal, about what I said back at the house. I was bein’ stupid. I’ve just been pissed off lately. You know, with Grand and everything. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”

After all, that was really what my outburst was about, wasn’t it? Seeing my mother and Sal embrace so easily. The way I wanted to hold and be held by Grand. The raw strength of that very thing, revealing something of us. In the best hope, something like pretty honey drizzling from the crooks of our elbows while we apologize and say it was all play in the hills and nothing has changed. But, of course, over and over again, everything has changed.

“Sal? I said I’m sorry.”

He looked down at the bowl and spoon still in his hands. “I really don’t remember where I got them from. But I could make up a story. Let’s imagine that you, you’re a boy—”

“I am a boy.”

“And you’re walking down the railroad tracks. Go on, walk down them.”

I stepped over on top of the tracks and, although feeling a bit foolish, began walking in place. I figured I owed it to him for starting the fight.

“Why am I walkin’ down the tracks again?”

“Because you want a shot at life.” He began to circle me. “Your father is exhausted in his overalls and dirt. You can’t sing in the big trees if you’re too tired to climb. You can’t love the day if you’re letting each one pass while you stupidly scream at the life you hate.

“Your father is nothing but a losing old man. Yet he wants you to be just like him. To be tired and losing and to work God’s green earth. But it’s not green earth. It’s the closing of passion. The defeat of zeal. It is ground that ends.

“When you say you want to be more, more than the screaming, more than the father, your mother asks you if you realize just how hard he’s worked to get this land? To raise the farm to something that can be passed down to you. ‘Do you?’ she screams at you, frightened herself, for she too has many deaths to suffer.

“You say, ‘Momma, I just want more. I want to fly like the sudden light. I want to know what it’s like to have a reason to dance. I want all the possible love.’

“She says people like us don’t dance and we don’t fly. People like us, she says, don’t get more. We take the life we are given and we say grace and glory be to God who in His merciful wisdom has granted such bliss. You hate her God and His wisdom. You hate her acceptance of that empty life. And out of all the places your father lives in you, you want to hit her, just like he does.

“You hate them both for all the things they are and for all the things they will never be. This is what you scream at her. That you hate how he wears overalls every day and that she can’t read or write. You hate how he is called boy, even by those he is elder to. You hate he will never be more than a dumb nigger and that she will never be more than a housewife in a kitchen, a kitchen she has had more bones broken in than pies baking.

“You scream until you think you are of single depth and a holding hate you fear you’ll never be able to let go of. That’s when your mother gets real quiet. You see her eyes and know it was you who put the pain there. You wait for it, knowing it is coming.”

“That what’s comin’? Sal?”

When his hand struck my cheek, it felt like the smack of a flame.

“She says you’ll never have the godliness of your father. ‘Devil!’ she screams at you. So you look at her one last time and run away because horns is all you’ll ever wear there, but somewhere else, you may be able to have the halo. Still, you hear her final word as you walk down the train tracks. Devil. You think maybe you are, and maybe you always will be. Maybe that is your permanence, your one eternity.

“As if hearing you run away, a man appears and says he has some ice cream you could run away to. You say you don’t know. He says he can tell you are the type of boy who needs something to hold onto, so he gives you a bowl and spoon.”

Sal shoved the bowl and spoon into my stomach, forcing me to take them just to get them out of my ribs.

“The man says you can go for a drive in his sparkling convertible. How can a convertible be bad, you think. They only ever drive them in advertisements when they’re selling happiness, when they’re selling a shot at a good life. You still want that shot desperately, so you take the bowl and spoon and ride in his convertible, which reminds you of the 1950s, with its polished chrome and high tailfins. You think this is what you’re supposed to do. Ride in a white convertible and drop the shadows of the farm.

“As you get closer to his house, he tells you to bend down and touch the car’s floor and count to twenty. He’s short enough to see over, so you’re not afraid, and by the time you’ve counted to twenty, you’re in his garage and from there, in his house where you see pictures of a tall woman. You ask if it’s his wife. Yes, he answers. She’s smiling in the pictures, so you think he can’t be so bad. You forget it is the camera we smile at, not the life behind.”

“I don’t like this story.” I set the bowl and spoon down on the tracks.

I thought Sal was going to slap me again. Instead he continued the story as if there could never be anything to stop it.

“The man goes into the kitchen, to get the ice cream, he says. While you wait for him, you read old newspaper clippings in the red leather scrapbook open on the table. See a woman’s face in one of the clippings, same face as in the photographs around you. You get a sinking feeling, you feel you might sink.

“When the man returns, he doesn’t have any ice cream. He has a white handkerchief. And suddenly, you can’t breathe at all.”

Sal came up behind me and held his hand over my mouth so forcibly, I thought my teeth would break.

“Just go to sleep now, boy,” Sal repeated over and over again as I struggled. His strength surprised me, and only when I elbowed him as hard as I could did he let go.

“What’s the matter with you, Sal?”

“It’s just a story, Fielding.”

A horn blared from the train approaching in the distance.

“That was a pretty messed-up story.”

“Hell’s full of all kinds of stories like that.”

He looked back at the blaring train, its smoke churning up like a way to follow. Maybe in his mind he was following that smoke up to the clouds and to the God too gold to be of any earthly help.