The Summer That Melted Everything (35 page)

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.

 

24

Farewell, happy fields

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
1:249

T
HE 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.

“Dad?”

“I said go home, Fielding.”

Then he turned from me. The start of the rest of our lives.

Me and Sal walked home slowly to give Mom enough time to scream the loudest, enough time to cry the worst. I thought we'd find her somewhere inside the house, collapsed under a pile of tissues. I was surprised to see her standing on the front porch, her hands full of our refrigerator magnets.

As soon as I stepped up onto the porch, she fit the magnets into my hands. The magnets were wet. Her eyes made everything wet.

“You've got to go to him, Fielding. Your Father won't do it. He says it's being silly.” Her voiced cracked, and I can't be certain she even said the word
silly.

“I don't understand, Mom. What do you want me to do with the magnets?”

“Rub 'em all over him.”

“Who?”

“Grand.”

“But why, Mom?”

“To get the metal out of him.” She wrung her hands until I thought she'd twist her fingers off.

“What metal, Mom?”

“His arm got cut, didn't it? That's what your father said on the phone.”

“He cut himself.”

“He did not cut himself, Fielding.” She refused to say the word
suicide.
“He was simply cut. And when he was cut, some of the metal got inside 'im. It always comes off the blade, a little bit. And that extra metal will weigh him down.

“All souls are weighed come death, and the souls deemed fit to enter heaven are light as lettuce. No sins to heavy 'em. We've got to make sure Grand's soul weighs as little as it can. I won't have my baby in hell.”

“All right, Mom. I'll do it.”

“But you can't.” Sal stopped me from leaving with the magnets. “Only the mother can get the metal out of a son.”

“But…” Mom looked past us, at the world outside the porch. “I know, you can bring the body here, to me. That's how it'll be done. Then I can do the magnets and make sure all the metal is lifted right outta him.”

“They're not gonna bring his body here, Mom.”

“That's right,” Sal added. “You've got to go down there yourself.”

“Leave the house? I can't.”

“For Grand.” Sal moved the magnets from my hands back to hers. “If it makes you feel any better, there isn't a cloud in the sky. There'll be no rain. Even if there is, you know how to swim now. Remember?”

She held the magnets to her chest as she closed her eyes. She counted to ten before sliding her feet in toothpick strides across the porch. She would on occasion whimper and look around as if terror were going to come in on her from all sides. Finally across the porch, she slowly lowered herself down the steps. She seemed afraid of the way they creaked under her.

Sunlight cast on her red painted toes through her hosiery as she stood on the bottom step. The ground below something she looked at as if it held the greatest fault she'd ever seen. She lifted her foot, as though she would take the step, but instead she lowered her foot back down and cried, “I can't. Oh, Lord, help me. I can't.”

Sal looped his arm through her left and I looped mine through her right.

“It's okay, Mom. We got ya.”

She sighed as she looked down at me. “I don't think I can, Fielding.”

My mother's tears always knew how to hurt. They could push you off balance and send you crashing down. Nothing breaks like a body falling. Nothing puts you to pieces quite like that.

“For Grand, you can.” Sal tugged on her arm.

“Grand,” she whispered as she stood a little taller.

“Your son,” Sal matched her whisper.

“My son.”

The son she always loved a little more than the other. The son she always held a little tighter. A little longer. The son who would bring her down from the porch and onto the dead, brown ground.

She looked unsure of what ground was. It'd been so long since she'd been on it.

Her first steps were slow and scared. Close things she tested the earth with. But more and more, they became bigger and bigger. And then suddenly she was off. Walking faster than us even. Eventually our arms slipped out from hers and the world found her walking all on her own.

Those out in the town stopped whatever they were doing. Conversation ended midsentence. Handshakes never got to where they were going. Food slid off spoons. Mouths gaped. Babies were left to cry. The mothers were busy watching mine. Everyone busy watching the woman who had not been seen outside for twelve whole years. Here she was, she who had been living like a curtain, never trailing far from the window of the house she was attached to.

“Isn't that?”

“I believe it is.”

“Stella Bliss.”

“Maybe the world is really about to end.”

“It's just beginnin' for her.”

If only they knew, it was no beginning for her. It was an end she was walking to. What a day to come out. A rather beautiful day. Did she even see it? Walking hand in hand as she was with magnets and determination. Quick steps to the boy waiting on her. Was she even sure it was trees she was passing or just tall men? Did she look up at the sky, coming blue from the morning's gray?

Pity the child in her path and who was not hers and who she pushed out of the way. Even kicked his ball into the middle of Main Lane. Pity the wasp who flew too close and who she swatted to a concussion. Pity the day she did not see, a day that had been waiting for twelve long years. A day that took but twelve minutes to walk.

The morgue was in the basement of the courthouse. The light dim and like a shedding of clay, dusty and browned. It was a place that smelled of rust and soil, of chemicals and clogged drains. Compared to the heat of every other place, it was cool. Basements are like that. Probably the coolest place I'd been all summer long.

When Dad saw Mom, the only words he could manage were, “What about the rain?”

She didn't say anything, just threw her arms around him. It was like a cold burning between them. Their skeletons joined at soggy throbs. The space they filled before us, like twisted wire, embedding into itself. They were one grasp. One curve of flesh. One heart breaking in startled, flickering cracks.

When they finally separated, you couldn't tell which tears belonged to her, and which belonged to him.

He tried to persuade her not to see the body. Said it was not a way for a mother to see her son. But she held up the magnets and said, “It is the way for a mother to see her son, if it is indeed the only way left.”

We stepped into the room with Grand, where he lay on a metal table with a white sheet beneath him. He looked the same as he had lain in the woods. Only the scenery had changed. It was as if no one knew what to do with the body of a god.

Mom approached the table with wary steps, as if she were walking across water and had to wait for the bridge to keep building. The tan nylon of her hosiery was dirtied and clung to by tiny gravels from the walk outside. Every time she lifted her foot, the nylons cased the strain of her toes as they pointed tensely in every step that took her to the table, where she circled his body, as fluid as the ripple around the dropped stone.

There was a wholeness to the silence that followed. A sort of totality that sucked in all sound, save for our breathing. I thought there would be noise. I thought she would sob uncontrollably. That was the mother I expected. The one who roared louder than the father in the woods. The one who banged her infinitesimal fists and screamed,
Why?
That was not the mother who circled her dead son in the morgue.

She ran her hand through his hair, the short strands going through her fingers in a rising and falling like the abstract summary of his short life. She smiled that slight smile all mothers give to the child who has always been their favorite.

Her apron pressed against the sheet as she leaned over him. I thought maybe she would hold the magnets down like he was a refrigerator and she was merely posting notes. A sort of up-and-down motion. Instead she slid the magnets across him, a different one for each part of his body. She believed each magnet only had enough strength in it to lift the metal from one body part, and after that, it was spent of its power.

When she got to his left arm, she paused at the wide wound stuffed with the gathered blood and leaves and dirt. She started to pick the leaves out, but Dad gently asked her to leave them. It was as if the leaves and dirt provided a foliage to the wound so he wouldn't have to see the cut so naked and clear. She understood this, and merely moved the magnet around the wound, the drooping tip of one of the larger leaves gliding across the back of her passing hand.

I thought the wound would drop her to her knees in realization of his suicide, but she merely looked at it as if it were just your ordinary difference of no particular sin or exclusive death. She was in such denial, that the wound was just a moment his skin was not at its best.

She removed his shoes and socks and as she slid the magnets over his bare feet, her voice broke as she said, “I know how ticklish your feet are. I'll scratch 'em good once I'm done.”

And she did too.