The Summer That Melted Everything by Tiffany McDaniel
“It has begun,” she whispered.
That night I heard the chop of an ax. As the weeks went on, soon the ends of her hair would make it only to her side. Chop, chop, chop.
“Have you been cutting your hair?” I asked her.
“My belly is getting bigger. It’s making my hair shorter.”
Of course I knew that. I just didn’t want to say it. Neither of us ever said it. She just started buying bigger clothes, and I suddenly made a cradle for the back bedroom. There wasn’t a plan to make the cradle. I just one day picked up a handsaw and a piece of wood, and next thing I knew, I had a bed for my child in front of me.
The closest we ever got to discussing the baby was the night she asked me what I thought.
“Fielding? I asked what you think?”
I’ll say it now because all the years in the world have passed, and I am old enough to know I wanted the child.
I knew I would be no good for it. I would build it cradles, yes, but wouldn’t actually cradle it myself. How could I with my sleeves drenched in blood? The snake has had its victories over me. And in its victories I am no longer sweet nor gentle. The very things a good father must be. It’s impossible to make a family when your mind spins mad with the old monsters. Isn’t it?
The fear of being the horrible father was a noose tightening around my neck. It was why when she asked what I thought, my answer was, “I don’t like how your hair doesn’t wrap around anymore.”
That long rope that in its length meant I could have a shot at a good life. Its length meant I hadn’t done anything bad yet to chop it off. But wasn’t her growing belly my bad inside her? Wasn’t that growth an ax, making the rope shorter, making her weaker? And weaker she’d gotten.
Pregnancy did not give her that glow. It gave her a redness to the cheeks like punches. It drooped her eyes from all the sleeping she did not do. And mornings sounded like sickness being flushed down the toilet. Maybe she was like Samson, the long hair her strength, and I was Delilah, cutting it shorter and shorter with the wielding ax I put inside her.
I suppose I said the wrong thing to her, for shortly after, she began buying castor oil. It was said the oil would help with hair growth, so every night she’d slather it on, staining pillowcase after pillowcase. Even if her hair had grown, it wouldn’t have shown, because her growing belly was always outpacing her hair.
Castor oil was everywhere. On the doorknobs, on her clothes, on her forehead from where the oil dripped from her scalp. She was sent home from work because the oil kept dripping onto all the paperwork.
Then came the day she drank the oil. I didn’t know, I tell you. I was off at work, trying to wipe the castor oil off my hands. Later in the hospital, she would say she drank it because she thought it would make her hair grow from the inside out, like a big oily vitamin.
“Oh, Fielding, I had no idea it could affect the baby. I wouldn’t have drank it. Doctor?” She wanted to make sure he heard too. All the nurses as well. She didn’t want them to think she had tried an at-home abortion. “I didn’t know it could induce labor. And as soon as the blood and the cramps came, well, I called straightaway for an ambulance. It felt like a kick to my stomach. Oh, Fielding, stop looking at me like that. Please. I didn’t do this on purpose. Fielding, I said I didn’t do this on purpose.”
Later, when she was out of the hospital, she stood in front of the windows, the moonlight upon her flat stomach. She pulled her hair all the way around her waist, just as she always had before.
“Now you can love me again. Fielding? I said, look, the hair goes all the way around, just as before. Now you can love me again. We can start over.”
That night, while she slept in her castor oil crown, I went to the back bedroom, picked up the cradle, and threw it into the lake, watching it sink like a ship beneath the dark water.
I never went back to Maine. I did buy a rope. I did make a necklace on a porch one night. I did think of Sal as the stool wobbled. I did make the rope too long, as my toes landed on the porch floor and became the son who saved me, if only for that one, brief moment.
12
All good to me is lost
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:109
THE FLYERS ABOUT him first came as inserts in the vegetarianism pamphlets. By July, Elohim started writing so much about Sal that those inserts became pamphlets all their own. These pamphlets led to meetings held every afternoon in the woods.
When I overheard the sheriff telling Dad he was going to stop by Elohim’s to have a chat, I ran through the neighbors’ backyards as the sheriff drove down the lane to Elohim’s. I snuck up through the side of Elohim’s yard, hunkering below his windows, should he be near them. Then I crouched by the lattice, waiting for him to answer the sheriff’s knock.
They sat down on the porch in the padded wicker chairs while the sheriff reminded Elohim of how he said he wouldn’t speak ill of Sal anymore.
“Now, Sheriff”—Elohim’s smile was careful—“I never said that. What I said was I would talk to folks and help ’em understand the possibility of Dovey fallin’ on her own. I said I would tell ’em that that car hittin’ that boy was perhaps an accident after all. I never said I wouldn’t go further. I never said I wouldn’t speak ill of him on other issues. Folks have got a right to know about the devil in their midst, and I am merely describin’ his flames for them. Now, I ain’t sayin’ I’m tellin’ folks to run ’im outta town. That wouldn’t do me no good.”
“Do you no good?” The sheriff spit between the columns of the porch.
Elohim quickly controlled his disgust as he turned from the spit that had landed on the leaves of the hostas, which were drying and yellowing in the drought, though still relevant and lining the front of his porch.
“It would do none of us any good, runnin’ an evil off like we’re too weak and too scared to take care of our own problems. As if we zero in bravery and sword. We can’t forget, we are the lords of our own ’round here, and we alone hiss back the serpent.”
“Now, Elohim, I’m warnin’ ya right now to leave that boy alone. I trusted you to do no harm. You waited till the Blisses got custody, and now you’re startin’ up again. You best get used to that boy. Their custody might not be temporary after all. We’re talkin’ ’bout a boy that could be part of their family permanently. Every family is part of this town. Don’t hurt the town, now, Elohim. You hurt us all, and there ain’t gonna be enough bandages to heal every wound.”
“Sheriff, I am merely keepin’ information and knowledge alive and healthy.”
“Shit, Elohim.” The sheriff crossed his snakeskin boots at the ankles. “You got more followers than the church now.”
“That’s ’cause the preacher finds it hard to point the snake out. That preacher has always been on the cautious side of things. Him and his khakis. He’s from Canada, for Christ’s sake. What the hell is he doin’ down here? We ain’t his people. He ain’t one of us. He ain’t got Ohio soil shakin’ off his roots, he ain’t got hands for squeezin’ river mud through fingers, and he sure the hell ain’t got the holster that the hills and the hollers put at our hips.”
“I ain’t got Ohio soil on my roots either. You forget that?”
“But ya got the South on ’em, and ain’t that a magnolia closer than anything Canadian? Listen, it ain’t my fault if that careful preacher can’t keep an audience. Folks come to me ’cause I’m one of ’em. Maybe more than that, they come to me ’cause I don’t candy the horns and I certainly don’t dignify the demon.
“But don’t you worry your badge, Sheriff. We are a refined group, me and mine. We don’t force our ideas or pamphlets on nobody, we simply offer them. As I will offer them to you now.”
The sheriff accepted Elohim’s offered pamphlet with a grunt. As the sheriff started to read it, Elohim spoke more about his group.
“Our meetin’s are held out in the woods, far from the town. You don’t have to hear or see us if you don’t wanna. We are simply a concerned group. I can as
The meetings were held, just as Elohim said they were, out in the woods in that abandoned one-room schoolhouse close to the tree house. The schoolhouse had at one time caught fire, burning the roof away and leaving only the brick shell. Inside this shell, Elohim raised his religion to his followers, which at first was a small group that steadily gained members over the course of that summer. It was a funny thing. One day you’d hear someone warning about Elohim’s cult. Then the next day that very someone would be at the meetings like they’d always been there.
Elohim was smart to hold the meetings out in the woods, where there were no fans, no air conditioners, no way of alleviating or escaping the heat. The heat was his partner. It was what connected his words to their sweat, his furnace to their melt.
Those meetings consumed Elohim. Before, he could be gone from Breathed for months at a time as his work took him across the country. There wasn’t enough steeplejacking to be done in Breathed alone to be profitable. Long-held travel was necessary.
His obsession with Sal forced Elohim to find other work closer to home, like roofing jobs, burning brush with his propane torch, and patching concrete like what he did in Juniper’s.
I hadn’t worked with him on a roof since before Sal arrived, so on that day, after the sheriff left, I followed Elohim to a job. When he put all his tools into a small wagon, I knew the roof would be close by.
It ended up being a cinder block house, a few lanes away.
As he stared up at the chimney of pale, beige brick, I went to him with my head down. We hadn’t spoken since the night he attacked me. His teeth marks were gone from my skin, but they were fossilized underneath. Branded upon my bone. I have no doubt they would show up on X-ray. I am his walking dental record.
“Hey, Mr. Elohim.”
He dropped his eyes from the chimney to me. The way he looked at me was as if he were looking at someone taller, at someone wider, at someone more beast-sized than human. I was no longer the boy he used to know. I was friends with the demon, and in that friendship, I became transformed as such.
“What you want?”
What I wanted was the Elohim I used to know. The man who taught me how to repair belfries, how to hold a chisel properly, how to save myself from roofs. The man who once saved me when I wasn’t saving myself. When my foot slipped and I was going down, it was him who kept me from falling two stories below. That is what I wanted. The saving hand.
“I just wondered if I could help ya today, Mr. Elohim.”
“I’ll be needin’ your assistance no more. I cannot associate with someone who associates with … Well, you know who I’m referrin’ to. You have to understand somethin’. We build chimneys and towers and steeples. In essence, we are buildin’ and erectin’ starts to heaven.
“They may not reach there, but they are the start of somethin’ to there. I cannot, in good faith, build with someone who associates with the great antithesis of God Himself. What if one day one of these starts we build together ends up bein’ the first step of the devil’s climb? And all because I allowed evil to build the beginnin’.”
He watched me scratch a scab off my arm until I drew blood. “I really liked steeplejackin’ with ya, Mr. Elohim.”
I remember the first time I stood on a roof with him. A storm had caused damage to the church’s steeple. Of all the roofs I’ve done, that of Breathed’s carpenter church has always been my favorite.
As he assessed the damage to the spire, I sat back on the ledge of the belfry and looked out at Breathed. He came and sat by my side, sighing something like, “Beautiful, ain’t it?”
“Yeah,” I must have said, and probably nodded.
“You can see the top of everything. Well, not everything, but a lot more than other folks ever see. Look there at the top of that tree. Top of that car. Top of that house. Top of that woman’s hat and that man’s head. I never see the tops of most things unless I’m standin’ on a roof.
“It’s funny ’cause the top of my head is the only thing anybody ever sees of me. Folks think when they look at the top of my head, all they’re seein’ is the top of a short man. But they’re really lookin’ down at roofs, trees, hills. I got ’em all right on top of here.” He tapped the top of his head. “I’ll never be a tall man, Fielding, but by God, I’ll never be a short one either. No matter what folks may say.”
“Listen, Mr. Elohim.” I shoved my hands into my pockets as I watched him pick up the tools from the wagon. “I hear ya ’bout the ladders and chimneys and steeples bein’ starts to heaven. But, today, well, today you’re fellin’ a chimney. Right?”
He nodded his head as he examined the end of one of the chisels.
“Then I reckon me helpin’ ya today, for one last time, wouldn’t be so bad, because we’ll be tearin’ the ladder down, stoppin’ the start to heaven and I suppose ’cause of that it wouldn’t be such a bad thing if I helped ya this last time. It’d be like we were tearin’ the start down so the devil couldn’t finish it. That there’s the opposite of wicked work.”
It was a slow coming around, but eventually he did see me as the boy he used to know. How could he not? The way I urged him to with my eyes, with my smile, with my begging, “Please.”
“I suppose there’s no harm in the fellin’.” He handed the chisel to me. “One last time.”
Before we climbed the ladder, we said the little something we always said:
Up I go, up so high,
I pray I do not fall and die.
But if I should, let it be said,
I’m mighty missed, now that I’m dead.
It was a chimney easily removed one brick at a time using the single jacks, small sledgehammers, along with tempered steel chisels. By the time we dismantled the portion of the chimney above the roofline, it was late and Elohim said I should go home, that the remainder of the chimney in the house was work he would do alone.
I picked up my shirt I’d taken off to use as a sweat rag. But I couldn’t go. Not before I knew.
“Why you hate Sal so much, Mr. Elohim?”
He wiped his forehead with his handkerchief as he sat down on the roof. I think he must have gotten sweat in his eyes from the way he blinked.
“Some folks think just ’cause I set her plate at mealtimes, wash her clothes, wear this weddin’ ring that I don’t know my Helen is dead. I know she is. Did you know she was an art historian? Yep, sure was. And in 1956, she went to France, to look at a paintin’. I missed her terribly, probably more than I should’ve.
“One night I had a little too much to drink. I stumbled to the phone and called her hotel room in Paris. A man answered. An American. A nigger.”
He bit his fingernail off and swallowed it before saying, “I could tell that’s what he was. They got a different sound. Sure ain’t the sound of a white man.
“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, lik
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.