The Summer That Melted Everything (2 page)

Dear Mr. Devil, Sir Satan, Lord Lucifer, and all other crosses you bear,

I cordially invite you to Breathed, Ohio. Land of hills and hay bales, of sinners and forgivers.

May you come in peace.

With great faith,

Autopsy Bliss

I never thought we'd get an answer to that invitation. At the time, I wasn't even sure I believed in God or His antonym. If I had come upon a yard sale selling what was purported to be the true Veil of Veronica beside a bent Hula-Hoop, well, I was the type of boy who would have bought the Hula-Hoop, even if the veil was free.

If the devil was going to come, I expected to see the myth of him. A demon with an asphalt shine. He'd be fury. A chill. A bad cough. Cujo at the car window, a ticket at the
Creepshow
booth, a leap into the depth of night.

I imagined him with reptilian skin in a suit whose burning lapel set off fire alarms. His fingernails sharp as shark teeth and cannibals in ten different ways. Snakes on him like tar. Flies buzzing around him like an odd sense of humor. There would be hooves, horns, pitchforks. Maybe a goatee.

This is what I thought he'd be. A spectacular fright. I was wrong. I had made the mistake of hearing the word
devil
and immediately imagined horns. But did you know that in Wisconsin, there is a lake, a wondrous lake, called Devil? In Wyoming, there is a magnificent intrusion of rock named after the same. There is even a most spectacular breed of praying mantis known as Devil's Flower. And a flower, in the genus
Crocosmia,
known simply as Lucifer.

Why, upon hearing the word
devil,
did I just imagine the monster? Why did I fail to see a lake? A flower growing by that lake? A mantis praying on the very top of a rock?

A foolish mistake, it is, to expect the beast, because sometimes, sometimes, it is the flower's turn to own the name.

 

2

 … a flower which once

in Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life,

Began to bloom

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
3:353–355

I
ONCE HEARD
someone refer to Breathed as the scar of the paradise we lost. So it was in many ways, a place with a perfect wound just below the surface.

It was a resting in the southern low of Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where each porch had an orchard of small talk and rocking chairs, where cigarette tongues flapped over glasses of lemonade. They said the wooded hills were the fence God Himself built for us. Hills I always thought were the busiest hills in all the world. Busy rising and rolling and surrounding.

One hill could be a pine grove, quick to height and like steeples of the original church. While on another hill, you'd find meadows where grapevines hung on the edges like fallen telephone wires you could swing on with the sparks.

Sandstone was as mountain as the hills got. The sandstone rocks all seemed to remind folks of something, and so were given names like the Grinning Ass, Slain Turtle, and Betting Dragon. You could see images in any of the rock formations. More than that, you could find fossils of the past residents, like lizards and them bugs with all those ridges on the sides.

The rocks were especially outstanding on the sides of the hills where they would ledge out and cliff off with mossy turns. The trees would grow out on those ledges, their roots dangling between the crevices of rock. We all called them roots Praying Snakes. There was just something about the way they slithered across the rocks and dangled like they had a chance.

Summer in Breathed was my favorite season of all. Nothing but barefoot boys and grass-stained girls flowering beneath the trees. My favorite summer sight was those trees. Whether up in the hills or down around the houses, trees were Breathed. Some were old, and they squatted, clothed in heavy moss and time like they were enduring Neanderthals who should not still exist. Others were timelessly modern, smooth and lean and familiars to twine.

Trees were Breathed, but so were the factories—plenty of factories making everything from clothespins to camping tents. There was a coal mine at the eastern side of town and a rock quarry at the western. Fishing and swimming and baptisms could be had in the wide and deep Breathed River that eventually met up with the Ohio and from there the great Mississippi with all its fine strength and slipping song.

If you drove anywhere or walked anywhere in Breathed, you did so on lanes. Never streets, never roads, but dirt-laid lanes that each had their own story. Paved roads were something other towns did. Breathed hung onto its dirt, in more ways than one. Not even Main Lane, the main artery of the town, had been paved, though it was lined with trees and brick sidewalks that fed into brick buildings.

From Main Lane, the town unfurled into lanes of houses, and eventually lanes of farms, the farther out you got. Breathed was the combination of flower and weed, of the overgrown and the mowed. It was Appalachian country, as only Southern Ohio can be, and it was beautiful as a sunbeam in waist-high grass.

It was a good town for a boy to have come of age in. There was a small movie theater, where I had my first kiss while E.T. flew in front of the moon, and a pizza parlor with arcade games I would play until my eyes hurt from the bright, flashing screens. Most days, though, were spent on the tire swing over the river or tossing a baseball back and forth with my brother. In these moments, the gild receded and life was its most naked bliss.

What I've just described is the town of my heart, not necessarily the town itself, which had an underbelly that knew how to be of mood with the mud. Just as in every other small town and big city, the women cried and the men knew how to shout. Dogs were beat, children too. There weren't always mothers to bloom identical to the rose, and more often than not, there was no picket fence to paint.

Yes, Breathed was the scar of paradise lost, and beneath the flour-and-butter drawl, there was the town's own sort of sibilant hiss on the wind, which made you quiet and made you sense snakes.

They say I was the first one in all of Breathed to see him. I always wondered about that. If maybe I wasn't the first one to see him, but just the first one to stop.

As I walked, I could hear the song “Cruel Summer” blaring from a boom box from the open windows of a house that smelled like rhubarb pie and Aqua Net. That was the strange collision of the decade and our small town. A crash of gingham curtains and spandex miniskirts.

Everything seems neon lit when I look back at that time, like the tracksuits that made color exhausting and the parachute pants that gave all the boys who wore them airplane eyes. Sometimes I'll even remember an old man in greasy coveralls and instead of mechanic's blue, I see them bright yellow and glowing. That's the art of the '80s. It's also the damage of it.

Perhaps because they belonged to me, I will say that the '80s were as best as any time to grow up in. I think too they were a good time to meet the devil. Particularly that June day in 1984, when the sky seemed to be made on the kitchen counter, the clouds scattering like spilled flour.

That morning before I left the house, I had glanced at the old thermometer on the side of the garden shed. The mercury was at a comfortable 74 degrees. Added to that was a breeze that made fools of fans.

I was on my way home from Papa Juniper's Market with a bag of groceries for Mom when I came upon the courthouse and saw him standing under the large tree at the front.

He was so very dark and small in those overalls, like I was looking at him through the opposite end of a telescope.

“Excuse me.” He held his hand out toward me, but did not touch. “Sorry to stop you. Do you have any ice cream in that bag?”

He had yet to look at me.

“Naw, I ain't got no ice cream.”

I thought he should have asked for a pillow. He looked so tired, like he came from nights spent being jerked from brief moments of sleep.

“You can pick some up from Papa Juniper's. It's just back that way.” I turned with my finger pointed back, though we were not on Main Lane, so the store was no longer in view and what I ended up pointing at was a woman walking blistered and barefoot with her red heels in her hand.

“I got some chocolate.” I patted my jeans pocket.

He twisted his mouth off to the side like a blown-off curtain. If I would have let him, he probably would've gone days like that.

“C'mon.” I passed the grocery bag from one arm to the other. “You want the chocolate or not? I gotta get home.”

“I really wanted ice cream.” It was then he looked into my eyes for the first time, and it was such an intense stare, I almost overlooked his irises, as certain and green as the leaves. The stare broke only when he turned his attention to the birds above.

I looked at his ribs, which were exposed by the cut-out sides of the overalls. I could almost hear the hunger gnawing on his bones, so I reached into my pocket for the chocolate. “You best eat somethin'. You look all … deflated.”

My fingers sank with the chocolate, like I was holding a small bag of juice.

“That's odd.” I set the bag of groceries down to open the wrapper. The chocolate oozed and dropped. I said the first thing that came to mind: “It died.”

“Dead, you say?” The boy looked down at the chocolate splattered on the ground.

“Well, it's melted. Ain't that death for chocolate? It ain't even that hot.”

“Isn't it, though?” He tilted his face to the sky, the light illuminating the green in his eyes to a yellowed shade as he stared at the sun the way every adult in my life up to that point had warned me not to.

“Isn't it, what?”

His eyes fell slowly from the light to me as he asked, “Isn't it hot?”

My sudden awareness of the heat was a
pop,
the way the bubble joins the water in a boil. I felt lit, a change told in degrees, steadily climbing upon my internal thermometer. From a distance, maybe I was a car with its headlights on. Up close, I was flames burning up.

The lukewarm past had been overtaken by the scalding now. Gone was the perfect temperature. The breeze. All replaced by an almost violent heat that turned your bones into volcanoes, your blood into the lava that yelled their eruptions. Folks would later talk about that sudden onset of heat. It was their best evidence of the devil's arrival.

I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “This heat, it puts sweat on the skull. Where the hell has it come from?”

He was looking across the lane. It was then I saw bruising on his collarbone, though fading one blue shade at a time.

I swallowed, suddenly conscious of my thirst. “Whatcha doin' here in front of the courthouse anyways?”

“I was invited.”

“Invited?” I squinted like Dad. I went on like that until a man humming “Amazing Grace” continued past us on the sidewalk. The man glanced back at the boy but never stopped his humming, though it did slow to a more concerned pace. Meanwhile, I chewed at my already short nail. “Who were you invited by?”

The boy reached into the bulging front pocket of his overalls. He worked around the bulge to pull out a folded newspaper.

My eyes darted from the invitation on its front page to him. “You don't mean to say that you're…”

He said nothing, neither with words nor with face. I could have pushed at him until the day's end and never got anything of a telling expression.

“Are you sayin' that you're the devil?”

“It is not my first name, but it is one of them.” He reached down to scratch his thigh. It was then I noticed the denim was worn at the knees more than anywhere else. Over top of the wear were layers of dirt, as if kneeling were all the time for him.

“You're lyin'.” I searched his head for horns. “You're just a boy.”

His fingers twitched. “I was once, if that counts.”

If looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul. A boy whose black crayon would be the shortest in his box.

I reckoned he came from even farther out in the country, where outhouses were still in use and your nearest neighbor was the field you planted.

At that moment, I felt compelled to look at his hands. I thought if he was the devil, they would be singed, charred, somehow influenced by fathering the fires of hell. What I saw were hands experienced in plucking chickens and in steering a tractor over a long haul of ground.

The clock in the courthouse tower behind him began to chime the hour. He glanced back at the clock with its white face, like a plain dinner platter. Atop the roof of the tower stood Lady Justice, poised on the balls of her feet. If it wasn't for that clock and statue, the place of court would have been just a large wooden house with a wide wraparound porch scattered with rocking chairs and dirty ashtrays. This was what law and order looked like in Breathed. A house with a termite problem that made the gray boards like stewed wood.

The boy's eyes fell from the clock to the tree in front and its smooth bark and pointed leaves lining the length of the pale gray branches.

“They call it the Tree of Heaven,” I told him. “It's some sort of ail … ailanthus, Dad calls it. He says they should never have planted it here.”

“Such a name as heaven, you think everyone would plant one in their living rooms.”

“You could plant it in your livin' room. It'd sure grow outta carpet. Them things grow anywhere. And they just keep growin'. It's a pest.”

“Peculiar that a tree named after paradise is a pest.”

He spoke all his words in the burdened and slow pace of a pallbearer in wartime.

“Where your folks at? C'mon, I know you're not the devil.”

From the pocket, he pulled out the bulge, which was a gray pottery bowl with five dark lines of blue circling it. It was followed by a spoon inscribed with
LUKE 10:18
: I SAW SATAN FALL LIKE LIGHTNING FROM HEAVEN.