The Summer That Melted Everything (17 page)

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

T
HE 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 assure you we are not on hunt. We are merely on guard.”

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.