The Summer That Melted Everything

by Tiffany McDaniel

  She cleaned out closets, cleared shelves, tossed fresh flour out, not realizing she was bringing more emptiness in.

  Age had finally found her. The smoothness she once had appeared to have run out of her like water. A lay of wrinkles that would ordinarily have taken years to put down seemed to have come overnight. In her, something had been dimmed. I found myself unable to pull the strength together to look at her eyes, like gashes on her face torn fresh every few seconds.

  I saw her once in Grand’s room, pacing around his empty bed. She was singing the lullaby.

  Down in the hills of Ohio,

  there’s a babe at sleep tonight …

  I watched her, unable to stop moving around his bed, hugging his old sweatshirt in her arms. After every verse of the lullaby, she would fall silent. I’d watch her mouth open slowly in that one syllable word, Why. Another verse, another why. Over and over again, she was trying to figure it out, all the while unable to stop moving.

  Fedelia gave Mom something to help her relax. I thought it was working as I looked in at Mom, lying on the bed, her back to me. I tiptoed around her. Her eyes shut. Her fingers in her mouth. I pulled them out and found her nails bleeding. She’d bitten them down to the quick in her sleep, her teeth still grinding. I stayed there, holding her hands away from her mouth while her eyes tossed frantically under their lids, her teeth searching for something to gnaw.

  Fedelia never left the house. She slept in one of the extra rooms. We needed her there. She seemed the only one out of all of us capable of continuing. She would ask me if I was hungry and give me something even though I said I wasn’t.

  She’d sit by Mom and hold her hand and nod out to me as she said, “Don’t forget him, Stella. He needs you too, remember that now, child.”

  She would sit by Dad and hold her hands up, showing him a crack and how it grew. “It’s gettin’ bigger and bigger, Autopsy. You have to be careful because if the crack gets too big, it’ll break your whole world wide open and destroy you. I know something about being destroyed. I know a thing or two about lettin’ cracks get outta hand. You can’t let that happen, Autopsy. You have got to get up from here. Shave your face. Put your suit on. Fielding needs his father. He doesn’t need a great, big crack.”

  After Fedelia left, I found a pile of tissues beneath her pillow. Never once did she cry in front of us. She knew it would do us no good. We needed her to be the strong one. She could say Grand’s name without breaking into a million pieces, and she taught us how to do it one letter at a time. She could walk by his room and not get dented. We tried her walk. We dented less and less. Our faces got drier and drier, and we went from tissues to sleeves, to brief wiping on the backs of our hands before one day finding there was nothing to be wiped, at least not on the outside.

  Sal had mourned with the rest of us. He seemed to drink a lot of water during those days as if to replenish what he lost by eye. He thought it was his fault. Grand’s death had made Sal’s ears sensitive to those accusations. He was finally listening to the people who said everything bad was him. That whole summer of great undoing, of great unrest. This made him unhinged. Loose. As if you turned his nose slightly to the right, you would unscrew the last piece holding him together and all at once he would collapse into a pile of broken bones and broken heart.

  “Do you want me to leave, Fielding?” he asked one night, sitting on the floor of our bedroom, leaning back against the wall. The room dark, his voice more of the same. “I’ll leave if you want me to.”

  I eased down and found his side, leaned into it. “I already lost one brother. How can you ask if I’d wanna lose another?”

  Losing Grand turned me into the passed-by. Blue skies, they pass me by. Good days, they pass me by. Talk and joy pass me by. The reasons people laugh, the reasons they smile, pass me by. Whoosh, whoosh, passing me by.

  When I had Grand, I loved forever. Now forever frightens me. Must it last so very long?

  I can’t spell me without him. I mean that. His full name, Grandfather, takes out every letter of my own except for two Is and an L. Who am I with those things? I’m not who I once was. I am simply the teeny-tiny remains of him, this Fielding who had a brother and in that had everything.

  I thought it’d get better, losing a brother. That’s what they say, isn’t it? All those books I’ve gotten, those meetings I’ve gone to. They all say it gets better. How can it get better for a brother like me who threw out ignorance too late?

  Sometimes I throw out my apologies. I go to the store and I get a pack of baseballs. White. Red stitching. I use a red marker to match. I write, I’m sorry. And then I throw. I’ve thrown them everywhere. Down alleys. Off the side of the road. In fields, in parks, in other people’s yards. I throw. And then I wait. I wait to see if an eighteen-year-old god will appear and pick up the ball and come walking with it toward me, saying, It’s all right. I forgive you, little man.

  That never happens. It never will. Forever is here, and it’s nothing but hurt over and over again.

  The night before his funeral, I dreamed of him. It was a transparent dream, like I was looking at him through jars. A bit seedy too, like the jars once held strawberry jam.

  He was wearing tennis shoes that instead of having solid rubber bottoms, had lotion bottles affixed. Every step he took squeezed some of that lotion out.

  When I asked him why, he said, “To soften the scar.”

  “What scar?” I asked.

  “Why, my scar.” He turned and I saw his left arm was gone. It was then I realized we were standing on it. Either we’d shrunk or his arm had enlarged, either way his suicide gash had scarred and it made for a squishy, pink road beneath us.

  He jumped up and down, high in the air like the scar had the springs of a trampoline. The lotion shot out from the bottles and onto the scar as he said, “Maybe if I soften the scar enough, it’ll just go away, then God won’t have proof I done somethin’ bad. Won’t you help me soften the scar? Make it go away, little man?”

  “How?”

  He pointed behind me. I turned and saw a vending machine full of the lotion tennis shoes. I went to the machine and with a deposit of my blood, got a pair of the shoes out. I slipped them on and started walking. Grand was ahead of me. By the time I caught up to him, I tried to stay by his side but the walk was full of turnstiles and there wasn’t one with room for the both of us.

  Our lotion shoes started flattening. We were running out of lotion. We tried to go back to the vending machine but the turnstiles wouldn’t turn the opposite way. There would be no going back.

  “What’ll we do now, Grand?” Even in dreams, voices tremble.

  He looked at me and I wished he wasn’t crying.

  “покаяться, little man.”

  Upon waking, I couldn’t get to the Russian dictionary fast enough to look that word up and its meaning:

  Repent.

  We had Grand’s funeral at the house, holding it in Russia, which was the living room and large enough to allow space for the great grow of mourners. Neither Elohim nor his followers attended.

  His onetime follower Yellch was there. He didn’t cry, but his eyes were red and swatted as eyes tend to be at the end of wet work. In his squeezing hand was the end of a tissue. So many ends. He was like an end himself. Quiet. Still. Tired and trying to bend back to the beginning to fix a different end. One where his onetime savior and best friend didn’t end up in a coffin.

  A coffin that wasn’t your usual. It was a decision Mom made when she was unable to sit still and found herself dusting and polishing the grandfather clock. She removed its pendulum and clockworks to make room for Grand’s body. The clock didn’t look that different from a coffin. Both wood, both long and square. The only unsettling thing was how Grand’s face showed through the glass where the clock’s dial once did.

  They dressed Grand in a dark blue suit, a three-piece like Dad’s. I worried Dad would attend the funeral in the same T-shirt and pajamas he’d been wearing for days. Ma
ybe if it were left to him he would’ve, but Mom yanked the T-shirt and pajamas off and pushed him toward the shower, the razor, the toothpaste by the sink.

  Though showered, shaved, and suited, Dad did not look like Dad as he placed Grand’s baseball cards and glove in the coffin. I made Grand a new Eddie Plank card for the one I’d lost by cutting a small square out of the flap of a cardboard box. Then I drew Eddie on it, even put his statistics on the back. Sal drew Eddie’s eyes. I’ve never been able to do the eyes.

  Mom tucked a New York Times under Grand’s arm so he’d have something to read while waiting in line to have his soul weighed. I didn’t have it in my heart to tell her or Dad about Ryker and all the sorry that went with him. I’d let them have the son they thought they did. In that thinking, Grand became the son who hadn’t committed suicide. He had simply died. That would be how they would answer for his death in the future if anyone should ask.

  “Is Fielding your only child?”

  “Oh, no, we had another son. His name was Grand. But he died.”

  “I’m so sorry. How did he die?”

  “One night in the woods, he just died.”

  “Oh, I see.”

  I often wondered if they ever discussed it between themselves. They never did with me. Never asked me why I thought he did it. Had they even asked themselves? In the silence, and in the dark, ask themselves why their son would make such a choice?

  I think Dad almost asked me once.

  It was long after Breathed, and we were sitting on the porch of their house in Pennsylvania. Him on the porch swing, me on the steps. He was looking at me.

  When I turned to face him, he said, “Grand was a fine boy.”

  “Yes, he was.”

  “Do you know…?”

  “Do I know what, Dad?”

  He recrossed his legs and picked up the paper by his side. “Do you know if that fella, the one Grand knew…”

  “Ryker?”

  “Was that his name?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know if he still works at The New York Times?”

  “Ryker died, Dad.”

  “He did?”

  I nodded my head. “He died in ’85.”

  “Oh.” He shook the paper out in front of him. “Grand would’ve been a fine journalist. Don’t you think?”

  “If he wanted to be.”

  “He would’ve been a fine baseball player.”

  “If he wanted to be.”

  “He would’ve been a fine husband and father.”

  “Only if he wanted to be.”

  “Well, what is it he wanted to be?” Dad hastily folded the paper and smacked it down.

  “I’m sorry, Dad. I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  I got up to leave.

  “Fielding? Wait. Do you know…?”

  “Know what, Dad?”

  It was on the tip of his tongue. That question of why Grand had killed himself. Would I have answered it had he asked me? No. My father was too rid of any muscle by then. He was an old man and he wouldn’t have been strong enough to withstand the tragedy that was his son’s life. Maybe he saw this in my eyes, that I wouldn’t tell him the truth. Maybe that was why he said never mind and looked out over the marigolds growing in the nearby flowerpot.

  What was he thinking of? Was it how he screwed in handles along the side of the clock so there’d be something for the pallbearers to hold onto? Dad was a pallbearer, as was I. Grand’s body wasn’t heavy but his death was, and sometimes I thought I’d have to let go of the handle because the burden was just too much.

  It was like trying to lift something pouring in a river wideness and spilling out farther than my hands would ever be able to catch. A deep, torrential pouring that swore to drown me in a limitless sinking. Just when I thought my hand was going to break under the strain, we lifted the coffin into the back of the hearse and I could breathe, not freely but enough to live.

  As we were preparing to take the short drive to the cemetery, Mom tugged Dad’s sleeve to tell him she wouldn’t be going with us.

  “Why, Mom? Is it because you’re afraid to go outside again?”

  “I’m not afraid. Today I choose to stay.”

  “Why?” Dad asked, but I don’t think he really cared. He was too busy looking at his son’s coffin in the back of the hearse.

  She grabbed his hands in hers and patiently held them until he finally turned from the hearse to her.

  “Autopsy, my love. When you get home, you’ll say to me, ‘Honey, the funniest thing happened on the way to the cemetery.’ And I’ll ask, ‘What happened, my love?’ And you’ll say the door of the clock suddenly opened and Grand jumped out. Said he was never really dead at all, just pretendin’.

  “Then he’ll run away. Run right away. And I’ll ask you, but where’d he run away to? And you’ll answer, where all clocks go. The place where time never runs out, the place of beautiful eternity.”

  I looked out the car window as we drove away, at her standing in the front yard. Her yellow handkerchief was her wave. Sal was the only one to wave back.

  I faced front, straightening my tie. Mom had bought Sal a suit as well, and while I wore my tie like a heavy laying on the chest, Sal’s was more like a gentle dropping. He looked at home in a black suit. Sometimes when I think of him now, I see him in that suit, a small form crying on a pew out in the middle of an overgrown field. A tractor going behind him. His shoes shiny on dull soil.

  On the way to the cemetery, we passed Elohim and his followers. They were standing in the woods, close enough to the edge to see them. I glanced at Dad and Sal. Dad was staring straight ahead. Sal was looking out the other window. I was the only one who saw Elohim, the little garter snake slithering in his hand.

  The cemetery was a flat-top meadow on one of the hills. It was called Reflection Hill because if you were buried there, your stone was a full-body effigy of yourself, laid on the ground. Your reflection, hence the cemetery’s name.

  Once everything was set up graveside, Sal stood before us with Grand’s dog-eared Leaves of Grass and said a little something about the brother lost to him.

  “He existed. Hurrah! He existed, and we shall be each moment celebrating him and singing him and through eternity, we shall hold him with our strong hearts. And strong we must be because we cannot stop in the night, for the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. The powerful play goes on, and you, dear Grand, have contributed your beautiful verse.”

  Sal laid the book on top of the grandfather clock. And then Grand’s teammates, the very ones who had turned from him, stood in a line by the side of his body. Like the marine gun salute, they tossed balls up into the air and hit them out. It wasn’t perfect. I even think there were a couple of the players who failed to hit their ball, but no one noticed. To all of us, the swings were in unison and the balls flew as the same. Two more times they did this. Two more times it was perfect.

  I still remember the sound of the dirt hitting the top of the clock. The glass face would break under the weight, and even though I shouldn’t have been able to hear it, I did. Under all those layers of dirt, I heard the glass breaking and the dirt surging in onto his clean face.

  As the others left, including my slumped father, who dragged his feet toward the car, I found myself unable to leave the heap of dirt before me.

  “What are you thinking about, Fielding?”

  Sal was by my side. Where were his hands? For some reason, I remember them on top of the dirt.

  “I saw your handprint on the wall of the tree house,” I said. “I saw it the night we found Grand.”

  “Are you angry I put it there? With yours and his?”

  “When’d you do it?”

  “The night the stones were thrown in the windows on Main Lane. The blood you saw on my hand, it was from cutting my finger.”

  I looked down at the dirt. Thought about digging it up.

  “His birthday is next month. I wonder what Mom’s gonna do wit
h that cake recipe she’s already got out on the counter.”

  “There’s your birthday. She can save it for that. The candles too.”

  Candles.

  “Sal, how’d you light those fence posts in the field?”

  He looked across the effigies. We could see the top of Dresden’s from where we stood, her beautiful face upturned toward the sky, her dress long and the toes of the one leg stretched out from under it. The dress flatter on the other side below the calf of the stub she’d come into this world with.

  “Remember when I went into her house, to use the bathroom, but not really use it?”

  I nodded my head.

  “Alvernine had already laid her birthday candles out on the counter, along with a book of matches. The fence posts were splintered in their tops. All I had to do was wedge the candles down in them.”

  “But they blew out when Dresden exhaled.”

  “Candles always go out when the wind is as soon as whenever.”

  “Why’d you tell me that, Sal? Don’t ya want me to believe you’re the devil?”

  “You don’t believe anymore?”

  I shrugged. “A devil don’t need matches to make fire.”

  “Funny, I’ve never made fire without them.”

  “Boys?”

  We turned to Dad, having reluctantly returned.

  “It’s time to go now. C’mon.”

  The ride back home was a quiet one, and while Dad was just as far from me as the front seat, he seemed to be farther away in the low of some deep field.

  Come on up from the field, Dad, is what I wanted to say. It’s what I should’ve said, but I left him there. I always left him there. Grand’s death had and would always cause little spaces between us all. Between me and Dad, me and Mom. Between the two of them. Little spaces we got good at keeping. Sometimes we’d walk toward each other like it was hard, like we had water up to our waists and it was a fight to move through it. That’s how Dad walked toward Mom when we got home. When we got home and she, having been waiting, held her hands hard into her waist, almost like a punch to the gut.