Tiffany McDaniel - The Summer That Melted Everything

Otis hadn’t been part of the mob. He found out Dovey had only after the fact. He didn’t know what to say to her nor she to him. Those moments after the death of their child, Dovey and Otis were husband and wife unable to come together and heal. That distance between them led her to Elohim. It led to the night she said she was going to take a bath and asked Otis if he could hand her a bar of her homemade soap out of the closet.

Later, in the cold water of the tub, she shoved the bar of soap down her throat. Internal cleansing, I suppose. It’s said they didn’t even have to use more soap when they washed her body. Bubbles and suds came by just plain water and the friction of her skin. The dirtiest, cleanest woman ever to be buried.

After her death, Otis no longer walked the nights with the mirror, hoping to see his son. Too much had been lost, and the mirror gleamed from the top of a pile in the junkyard while his shorts and shirts got longer and his muscles turned to fat atop the sofas he sat on and the potato chips he ate.

A large number of the mob chose suicide by bottle. The sale of whiskey and its kin bled upward in Breathed.

There were a few of the folks who seemed to manage.

Did we? Me, Mom, and Dad?

Losing Sal was different than it was with Grand. The tissues weren’t all over tables, floors, beds. Did we even open the new box in the hall? Sometimes I think not having tears meant we cried even more.

It was all that death. It made our eyes unable to produce the grief we felt. We were shell-shocked. Walking stiffs. If we ate, I don’t remember. We must’ve, though, for none of us died of starvation. If we slept, I don’t remember that either. I know both Mom and Dad died tired. As I am dying tired. Maybe that’s what got us. The inability to sleep because nightmares and dreams became alike, as we were gladdened by the sight of our ghosts but haunted by them at the same time.

Mom didn’t work through Sal’s death. There was no cleaning out already clean shelves. Padding already plump sofa cushions. House and home became a place she was rarely in.

She stopped wearing dresses. Too many edges to catch, I guess. There was also the singeing to consider. She was pants from then on out. Polyester, corduroy, denim. Pants, pants, pants. I lost something of my mother when she lost her dresses. That woman in the kitchen. Floating here and there, as light as the flour on her hands.

In pants she got heavier. She stayed thin but got heavier like she was attached to the ground. One grave on her right, one grave on her left, both pulling her down with them. She was veiled, darkened over. The shadow of our family. Of herself. No more guzzling the sweet syrup of the canned pears she’d open like our little secret when it was just me and her in the kitchen. No more kitchen at all. No more aprons. No more hair tied up in strings. No more Dad pulling on those tails and making her laugh.

Dad.

I don’t think he made her laugh again. Maybe he tried. When I wasn’t there. When it was just them and pillows. Maybe he wanted to when he sat there, eyes squinted, arms folded, legs crossed. He just didn’t know how to be the man he once was. The man who had a son named Grand. A son named Fielding. A son named Sal.

After Sal’s death, Dad didn’t fall into T-shirts and pajamas, the way he had when Grand died. Instead, Dad looked the part of who he once was. Three-piece suits. Shaven face. Even added a pocket watch. I suppose to have something certain to look at when his uncertainty got too much for him. Something to see for himself in the palm of his hand. Yes, he looked the part, but he wasn’t it. Not anymore.

Conversation with him became like dragging something out. You had to put hooks in and keep pulling, pulling until he spoke. And then you wished you hadn’t, because his tone alone was like lying down in a coffin and having the lid nailed shut. Talking with him was working with the gravedigger, and sometimes you had to get away from the cemetery, which meant I had to get away from him. I would too, at seventeen. I’d just up and leave my parents.

Or were they just people who looked like my parents? Maybe my mother and father burned that day with Sal, and I walked away with their ashes.

And who was I? Who am I? The boy who met the devil and met hell at the same time. I’m not saying it was Sal’s fault. Of course it wasn’t.

It was Dad’s.

Without his invitation, I would not meet Sal in front of the courthouse. I would not take him home. No journalists would come. Grand would not open his veins and try to bleed Ryker out. There would be no fire. There would be no best friend in its flames. There would be no man I would have to kill.

Yes, Dad, you started it all.

I should address what legally happened to those who took part in Sal’s murder. They were rounded up and charged. The devil was put on trial, though there were no horns, no pitchforks either. It was not one strange face indicted, but many familiar ones. The man who sold us all insurance, the woman who ran the church raffle, and the couple whose cake we ate at their fortieth wedding anniversary the previous April.

The man who fixed my tire when it went flat in front of his house, and his older sister who bandaged my knee when I fell. The guy who was said to have the warmest handshake, and his wife who fed the stray cats in the neighborhood.

They were not walking caves of nocturnal demons, scared of the sunlight and fresh air. In fact, the way they all went into court, they looked like cotton curtains of the sunniest, breeziest, most welcoming windows in all the world. They came not from underground lairs but from homes with flowers in vases and cookies in the oven. They were men who held the door open for the ladies who thanked them as they passed through. And in alphabetical order, the jury found each one of them not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.

Dad was not the man prosecuting them. He was the one defending them. When he first told me and Mom about it, I screamed at him. How could he defend them? The murderers of Sal? It’s like the man I knew all those years was just one long weekend away from the real man who burned garter snakes Monday through Friday.

For the months of the trial, I let go of my father. Maybe some of it was my wanting to let go of myself.

If I didn’t have to be me, then it was someone else who lost so much that summer. Someone else who saw how red his brother’s blood was. Someone else who lost their best friend. It was someone else who killed a man — a bad man, but a man nonetheless. It was someone else, and I was okay with being just that.

Take me away from this Fielding Bliss.

To be someone else. Bottle after bottle, I try to be just that. Pill after pill, restless sleep after restless sleep, fuck after fuck. But still I sober to myself, still I wake to the reaching abyss.

The same abyss that reached for us all. For Dad, for Mom, for Grand, Elohim, and of course Sal. That abyss that always wins.

Dad was walking the edge of it during those months of the trial. I knew he didn’t want to defend them. I also knew he would do everything to see them found not guilty. Because of this, I would never tell my father I loved him again.

The whole situation was made worse by the journalists who came to Breathed, this time not for the heat but to report on the progress of the case. I looked out for Ryker. He never came. Don’t know what I would’ve done if he had. Maybe led him to Grand’s grave. Maybe shown him I know how to fire a gun now. What’s one more murder on my conscience?

A few of the reporters shoved a mike into my face and asked how I felt. Seventy-one years later, and I’m still answering. Is anyone still listening?

I hated the reporters. I hated their questions. I hated the trial. I hated the smell of melting flesh still in the air. I hated the echo of the gun lasting eternal. Gone were the hills of my youth. Gone were the trees. The houses I had known, the people I had loved. Gone, gone, gone with a town that became a place behind a burning door, down a long hallway, and behind an evermore burning door.