Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

I jumped down out of the tree house and picked up the light. Its shine found Sal. The way he stood there, I’ll never forget the horror on his face. What he and Dad had seen, I didn’t know. But he raised his trembling arm to show me.

I was afraid to shine the light to where he was pointing. I would go slow to the sorrow. Light on tree, another tree. Bark, more bark. Took the light lower and saw dirt. Leaves and more dirt, and … the toes of Grand’s tennis shoes.

Oh, God, no.

Slowly I moved the light up his laces, untied.

His jeans. Something red drenching the denim up his left side. More red drenching his hand, his arm. More than more, it was plenty to scream at, as Dad was screaming.

Oh, God, Dad. You on all fours and scooping the blood up from the ground, trying to put it back into the large gaping slash on your son’s arm.

With every scrape Dad made of the ground, leaves and debris were brought up too and because of this Grand’s arm became Halloween and I had to look away because the scare was no longer subtle and I thought I was going to scream my throat to pieces.

It was then I saw the pocketknife. The knife me and Grand had used to cut our fingers. The knife that had once bled us closer. Now it was the knife that cut us apart.

I looked at Dad’s face. His tears didn’t drop. Instead they stopped at his cheeks like they were taped there. I tried to remember, did someone come along with clear tape, and if so, when? Were they still around? Would they tape my tears? I wanted them to. I wanted my tears to be always stuck on my cheeks in that particular fall the way I knew they’d always be on Dad’s. In ten, twenty, the eternity of years, I knew the tears would still be there. This would be the reason I would never again be able to get close to my father. I’d never be able to make it past the tears.

Dad never gave up trying to put Grand’s blood back into his arm, not even when I asked him to. Even when I screamed at him to stop, to just stop it already, he kept going and was so there with it that he never saw Sal. Never saw how he picked up the piece of paper with Grand’s words written on it, Don’t touch my blood.

I’d forgotten about the blood. It was everywhere and I had forgotten it. I almost told Dad to wipe it off his hands. It could make you sick, I almost said, but Sal tore up the letter and stuffed the pieces into his pocket and I did the same with my words.

Even if I had told Dad, he wouldn’t have stopped touching it. How could he? All that blood was Grand before it was anything else. And I mean grand in all the magnificent definition of the word. I fell to my knees at his side and tried myself to put the blood back because, hell, I wasn’t finished with my brother. How could I be when I was only thirteen and he was only eighteen.

I would’ve worn a tie to his graduation. Dad would’ve made me, but I would’ve wanted to. Grand would’ve grabbed the end of it, tugged it until I laughed, tousled my hair and called me little man.

I would’ve gotten the extra boxes needed to pack his things for the dorm, though he would leave me his baseball glove. I’d hold it when I was missing him. Because of this, my chest would start to smell like leather.

He’d study hard at college, though I’m not sure what and that not knowing would break my heart. It breaks my heart still. That I didn’t know my brother enough to know what he would study, what he would become. That I didn’t know he would be more than baseball.

Goddamn it, I wasn’t finished with him yet. I still had to get drunk with him at least once and stumble into a conversation that would maybe heal all things. He’d make me burnt toast in the morning for the hangover. Of course he would. He was Grand.

No, I wasn’t finished with him. We were supposed to grow old together, me and my brother. If I was going to grow old with anybody, it was going to be him. Our parents would die. Our lovers would die. Our friends would all go before us. But we, we would be the last on the road.

My brother of mine, I had your white hair and wrinkles all picked out. Now I wear them, along with my own. Twice wrinkled, twice gray. I hate you for leaving me no choice but to go forth into this heat-colored future and its long voyage I no longer want to hold.

I wonder if when we get to the beyond, if we are there what we were here. If so, he’ll still be eighteen. A beautiful eighteen. And I will be old, as I am. He’ll be like a grandkid to me. What will I do with that?

I wonder if he would ask me for his wrinkles. Even if I handed them over, they’d never fit him, not that eighteen-year-old skin. A boy trying on his grandfather’s face, that’s all he would be.

I’ll never have my brother back even when he is back, because that night he died, he vanished, and vanished things stop becoming more. That is the tragedy of losing an older brother. He stays still. You keep on and one day become the older one. It’s unnatural, that reversal. It’s the thing that keeps the family from ever being whole again.

I knew we’d never be the same as I listened to Dad’s crying screams and watched him frantically search and dig at the ground for every last drop of blood. As if the reason Grand hadn’t risen was because the blood wasn’t all back in his arm yet.

“Dad, please stop now.”

A bawling howl set me back on my heels. Dad’s agony was so severe, it was frightening. I didn’t have the courage to hold him through it, so I stayed back, letting my father be devoured before me.

Somewhere I heard a crying that compared to Dad’s was so small, it almost didn’t exist. I shined the flashlight, and there was Sal, coiled up on the ground, face tucked toward his knees. He didn’t rise to look at me or the light. The ache had curled him into a circle, rounding him out, like a porthole into a darkness that was taking his place.

I needed the devil more at that moment than the weeping Sal. I needed that comfort of authority. I needed the experienced angel to stand solid and strong, not collapsed on the ground as just another crying boy who could offer me no wisdom nor understanding.

I grabbed the pocketknife and climbed up the tree house. I looked at mine and Grand’s handprints on the wall. There was a new third handprint, smaller than either mine or Grand’s. I didn’t worry about it then. It was Grand’s handprint I wanted. It was his that I stabbed.

“I hate you. I hate you.”

I spit my powerful fire. I raged against his ghost, so my living hurt could haunt him, the way he was already haunting me. I stabbed until the wood splintered and broke away, revealing the outside and what I had tried to escape. My father crying. My brother dead in his arms. The darkness eating from edge in.

THE YELL IS permanent, the wrong is lasting, the damage is complete, and the goddamn is eternal when a young man goes into the woods and in his fray turns the sword inward.

I waited for Dad to ask me why Grand would do it, but he never did. Not even when the morning light began to reveal more of the scene before us. He just stood and said he was going into town to do the things that needed doing. Me and Sal were to wait with Grand’s body, he said. And then he left. Me and Sal listened for as long as we could hear him. He was rambling off case after case. Some real. Some not. Like Man v. God. Boy v. Knife. Bliss v. Misery.

Me and Sal didn’t sit close to Grand nor close to each other. Spaces had already started to form.

When Dad returned with the sheriff, he said he had called Mom and told her the news so we wouldn’t have to. Then he told us to go home.