The Salt Fields

by Stacy D. Flood

  For all its weight, the trigger was the softest thing I’d ever felt. The hard, sharp crack that rang in the atmosphere afterwards surprised me and everyone around me. All sound evaporated. The music stopped. Conversations ended. The smell of gunpowder mixed with the acrid air. I could hear ice melting and the seas falling silent.

  * * *

  There are moments in life when God has nothing to say to us, when there is a deafening silence surrounding our souls, when our lungs squeeze and eardrums still, when there is no air left to move through. I watched sweat pool against the dark opening in the man’s forehead, collect, then stream down his cheek stained red. His eyes shimmered. I remember him blinking, just once, as I kept the gun pointed at his forehead.

  Then everything about the light in him fell.

  The tall man said and did nothing.

  I wanted to see Divinion or Carvall in my periphery, or reflected in his eyes, but all was empty. My fingers and palms were damp from sweat, and my arm twitched as I held the gun steady. I spotted Carvall on the ground next to me, his breathing ragged; it was the only music that played. Had he been so close the entire time? His palms were pressed into the floorboards; his fingers were outstretched, reaching towards the heel of my shoe. I’d only heard about it in stories: this was what it was like to watch a man die.

  “Minister.”

  When I heard my name, I was jolted back to myself, and everything rushed through me—the revival, the seat on the train, all that I had left behind and hadn’t. I lowered the gun and there was a release, a collapse. The entire room jumped as the man’s body fell, head crashing against the floor next to Carvall’s fingertips. Then there was a long scream, and beneath it I heard Carvall whisper my name again.

  I honestly thought there would be more blood. Some ran down the dead man’s sleeves, forming a jagged line over the back of his hand into the webbing between his fingers, where it dripped through the slats in the floorboards. Still, it seemed like so little. Maybe that’s why humanity is so fragile. Biologically, we should have more blood inside in order to endure.

  I took a step backwards as the dark cherry pool crept closer to my shoes. One step turned into another, then another. It was as if I were trying to keep my balance, step after step to keep from falling backwards. The crowd parted behind me; no one wanted to touch me; everyone stayed away. I couldn’t breathe. I turned towards the door and burst through it. As hard as I tried, or wanted, to let it go, the gun wouldn’t fall from my hand; I can’t remember when it finally did—whether it landed on wood or earth—or even what it felt like to have it burning in my hand one minute, then slipping away. I’ve never touched another gun since.

  There wasn’t enough air outside, either, so I started walking. I had to get back to Lanah and the Dawn Lightning. I had to. It was all I was. All I could think about. As I moved beyond the lights of the juke joint, a red glow caught my eye, flickering along both sides of the road that led out of the parking lot. The air thickened. Fires were burning in the dry grass. But I walked on alone, and soon the fields around me were engulfed in flames.

  I didn’t look behind me. I didn’t look for Carvall or anyone. The smoke from the fires formed an acrid canopy over the road, the low sky a crematorium, ashes sticking on my suit jacket like snow, my body moving towards whatever peace and darkness was left in front of me. I wanted to run, but the weight of it all. Tatters of white cloth floated towards me, circled, then soared like apparitions. I tried not to look down as my shoes crunched the tiny stones, beetles, and centipedes in the road. Field mice by the thousands scurried from the ash and the flames, running across to find the same danger on the other side of the road, or heading for the darkness of the swamps ahead, like I was, or running towards me, past me, into the peeling heat.

  Before she died, my grandmother told me that there were people made from fire. That’s what dries them, but the rest of us—clay, still wet on the inside—take our time to truly harden.

  The heat scorched my throat and lungs. I was parched, but I was convinced that every well near me was dry, filled with nothing but bones. On one side of the road a bare tree was filled with crows, but none of them flew away as I approached. The air shimmered. At first the smoke covered the stars like cataracts, but as I kept walking the acidity of the swamp air cleared it, and when I looked up at the sky again, the moon was renewed, laden, heavy, milky, slick, smooth. The soot and sweat dried on my skin. I wanted to close my eyes, but the cracks in the sclerae kept them open, and the last beautiful thing I saw was a grey-winged moth twisting in a breeze I couldn’t feel.

  I walked over cinder, brimstone, melting earth, and broken stones before the winds became even stronger, until I made my way to the station platform, now abandoned in the dead of night. No Divinion, Carvall, or other cousins followed. No one came looking for me. No one could help me. My skin was mist. I no longer had bones or water inside of me, only air. The Dawn Lightning, carrying everything that belonged to me which wasn’t attached to my frame, was gone. Lanah was gone. My suitcase, with the rose petal inside, was gone. When I looked in either direction, it was too dark to see the tracks converging at the horizon. There was no more horizon, no sky, no future or past. I’d lost. I’d won. I waited for the moon to disappear, as it always eventually does, while every star in the pitch glared at me.

  As I sat there on the platform, I thought about baptism by fire, then bodies floating out to sea—either on tall, beautiful ships in the middle of the ocean or from little sunken islands closer to shore. I thought of my daughter’s body floating. I thought about other souls flying away. I tried to remember one of my daughter’s songs—a chorus, a melody, one line of a verse, a single note—but nothing that came to my mind felt right. Around me the smell of smoke was still thick on the air. All the insects had stopped singing hymns. Still, no Carvall or Divinion. No soldiers. No brothers. No angels.

  I started to laugh, hysterically, in the early morning, until the next train arrived. It was the last time in my entire life I’ve ever laughed that hard.

  Eventually the carapace and chrysalis, ethereal and darkened, flaked off, and I couldn’t remember a single drop of blood from the night earlier. I took a deep breath as a new train arrived, and I bought a new ticket and boarded as if I were a new person.

  I took the first seat I could find. The unfamiliar air was cooling and scarring all at once. The new faces—whether ashen or glistening from sweat—appeared to be nothing more than clay masks drying in the emerging sunrise of the dirty windows. I spoke to no one. In the window across the aisle I thought I saw a comet, but it was only a streak of powder along the glass. I looked towards the burned and blackened fields in the distance, but they were too far away for me to see clearly. There were still some tall, white wisps of smoke, but I never learned what was burning to have caused them, and though I’m certain I smelled of smoke, and soot clung to my skin and clothes as the masks clung to their faces, no one asked my name or my situation. No one asked where I was headed. The train moved forward. The clouds were the color of dry teeth. In the field outside imagined I saw a chestnut horse, running beneath what was left of the moon.

  I thought of an oil painting I once saw in a Saturday magazine. A deer, maybe the one I tried to kill in my youth, crossing a frozen lake. Back then I didn’t know how heavy snow could be, or how it stung, and that picture made me envision its softness, its weightlessness until it touched the ground. I imagined my uncle in the picture, on the far side of the lake, the flame of my grandfather’s red hot blood in his glowing eyes as the deer approached—the mist, carbon, and smoke from my uncle and the deer breathing, ice cracking into shards like knives under noctilucent clouds, wolves somewhere in the distance.

  My father told me that once he and my uncle approached the South Carolina shore, the sea foam thickened, then turned to salt: so much salt that the boat they were in stopped, so much that they could scoop up the crystals in their hands.
So much salt that they walked across it to get to the beach. All the salt from our ancestors who didn’t make it across the seas. It was blinding. It made the distance so much farther than it originally seemed, their feet sinking deeper and deeper into it, every footfall only increasing their efforts, until eventually they reached the sands. Once there, they lay on their backs and looked up at the blue sky, then at the distance they’d traveled, and promised to never forget each other, and to endure.

  * * *

  So what if I told you that here—in those moments when the sky is the only wilderness left to our thoughts and dreams, when we’ve already made every other journey we were destined to make—is where God lives? What if that’s my only story, the only secret I’ve ever had to tell? What if everything else is mere tautology? I’m much older now. Through it all, my memory has held fast to the one thing I have ever been sure of: that I survived. Like my grandmother, I tell stories to preserve the rest.

  Eventually, one day, your anatomy starts to fail you. Your skin doesn’t renew itself, your future becomes your epitaph, and you end up in a room that you’ll never leave, where you spend time thinking about things and wondering why they’re gone. My room has pipes and tubes and the best intentions connected to my body. My room has a doctor who visits once a day and a nurse who tells me, with a smile, that everything will be fine. A part of me is afraid that she is right. Everything is terribly comfortable and uncomfortable at the same time. For a few months I had a roommate who was a scientist, and who after retirement had worked as a locksmith at a kiosk in a supermarket parking lot because he liked the idea of having the keys to every mystery in his small booth. He died just recently, and the last thing he told me was how he’d never wanted his children to take care of him. Which made me realize that I’ve never taken care of anyone, or even really tried—or, if I did try, I didn’t do a very good job.

  For me now, the rectangle outside my window is the complete world. I’m comfortable with that, though I wonder how much of the rest is still burning. Through that window I watch the birth of clouds. Every evening, the world decays from blue to black to simply a reflection in the glass, and then bands of white light peel across the ceiling from the headlights of passing traffic. Then I close my eyes and sleep better than I ever have.

  Sometimes, when I wake up, there will be a nurse or an orderly in my room. I’ll say, “I want to tell you about my father.” They’ll smile politely and carefully ease away to other patients.

  Other times they bring children to visit, who carry generic gifts made with their small hands and who’ve volunteered to sit with us for a few minutes. I try to entertain them with stories of my father and the sea monsters he encountered on the journey from his home island to the Carolina coast. Ferocious stingrays as long as buses, angry whales as wide as city blocks, sharks with enormous mouths and nineteen rows of razor teeth, mermaids, mile-long serpents, jellyfish the size of hot air balloons, sunken ships filled with treasure and the bodies of slaves. Some of the children believe me; others don’t.

  One even asked, “So, what happened to your uncle?”

  I wanted to claim he’d wandered long patches of frozen, barren fields, never reaching the great western ocean. But in spite of all of the possibilities I’d envisioned, and in spite of all I’ve learned about ending a story with a distinct emotion, I simply answered, “I don’t know.”

  As I sit here, staring at the trees I’ll never touch, I often think of snow, and how much, over years of being here up North, I’ve learned to appreciate it. And the limbs of the trees that, in spite of the long winter months spent bowed under all that weight, still rise, bloom, continue. Beyond the trees blink the lights on the construction cranes reminding helicopters and low-flying airplanes that there is a future that is unavoidable.

  I don’t think much about the rest of my life after that train ride up the Eastern Seaboard, but I would like to consider my days happy ones—year after year, decade after decade of the planet and everything on it heating, cooling, freezing, then thawing through season upon season. In that time I bought a nice watch and kept it for years. I read book after book, with each one longing for the light from my father’s old reading lamp to ease me through the pages. Once, a cat followed me home, and I took care of him for two decades until he died. In that time, he was the closest thing I had to a friend. I didn’t make others. I told people that my “cousins” were coming to visit soon, so they stayed away; no one ever asked when. I never had another argument: that night in the juke joint was my last act of passion, the last bit of violence I’ve ever been involved in apart from a few brutal New York Januaries. After too many evenings of bread soup and cold sardines I went back into teaching. I taught algebra to the children of men who built skyscrapers in the early morning, who swept the empty streets at night, who carried the steel used to form the city’s core, who dug holes for lampposts and telephone poles so we could all connect to each other a little better, who cleaned the gutters with dark fingers and held tiny hands in those same fingers before bedtimes.

  So I’d like to think that I’ve influenced the world somehow, if only from afar; none of us expected the roads up north to bubble with sugar and gold, but what we had seemed better than what was even possible before. Some of my students became successful enough to never have to come home. Some became surgeons, astronomers, and scientists, so you’d think that by mere association I’d have a better understanding of how to cut away the parts of myself that I don’t need any longer. To remove the parts that continue to spread infection and hurl them towards the evening skies to dissolve among the stars. One became a linguist and taught me about the concept of sankofa; another became a geologist and taught me about sastrugi. The physicists taught me about time and eternity; the cardiologists taught me about the human heart. On my own I learned some astrology and phrenology, but I don’t believe the stars have any secrets left, and in the end bumps on the head are just damage.

  I never remarried or fell in love again. But I’ve watched the sun drop below the tops of buildings, below a hovering kestrel or the flights of sparrows, as the sky slowly darkens. That’s romance. I’ve seen elephants, majestic, in cages, with the saddest eyes I’ve ever witnessed on any being. I’ve watched children count fallen leaves. I’ve seen women wearing pearls and diamonds as protection. I’ve heard eruptions of laughter so boisterous and true that it shook windows, street lamps, and hearts; I, myself, have even laughed so fully at times that it didn’t sound like my own voice. Nothing like my laughter on the train platform that night, but much more enjoyable. I’ve seen two people fall in love and not even know it. I’ve looked for Lanah on the silver screen. I’ve sat in movie theaters where lovers clutch each other tightly, each afraid that the other might float away, while on the screen we watch the imaginations of people we’ll never meet coalesce with our own. The greatest of human gifts is the ability to project a self-image larger than ourselves across a desert, an ocean, or a canvas. All of these things, and more, I wanted for my daughter.

  Since that night, ages ago in the juke joint, I’ve never raised my voice. And to this day, I’ve never screamed. Or cried.

  I just lived, then fell into a quiet that I never emerged from. I’ve decayed nicely, and my apparitions and I have come to an understanding. No regrets. With time you learn to make peace with everything rotting inside you. When you’ve reached my age, you’ve already become all that you’re going to be. Whenever any pain does rise it always lingers longer than I expect it to, like it wants to remind me of something I already understand, but I breathe through it, and eventually it fades like everything else.

  I’ve learned that my father was right; our planet is sinking. Orbits and rotations degrade, yet it’s still a little over three thousand six hundred miles from New York to Paris. I wonder, if Lanah ever made it there, how she’s spent the years. Some quiet days I would look up Parisian newspapers at the library just to see if there was a picture of her
. I never found one, and I never went searching for her myself. Likewise, she never came searching for me—or if she did, she probably stopped trying well before I did. The earth is long.

  Vision degrades, but I can still see her face. I think of her every day, even though, try as I might, I can’t envision what life we might have had together. Instead, I think of her smile, her hair, and how much she illuminated everything around her. I’ve never looked at anyone since the way I looked at her. I think of Ronalda Lawson, too, though not quite as often. They were both beautiful in their own way. I wouldn’t say, though, that I loved either of them; you can’t fall in love with anything that’s so distant, and always has been.

  By now, all of the stars in the sky have settled into their dance, memorized its steps and followed them; by now, both women are so far away that they are little more than fragments of a remembered image.

  Someone once told me that the greatest gift one person can give another is a kiss. I gave kisses to my wife, and my daughter, but those were the last, besides in dreams, that I have ever felt.

  After telling that story of my grandfather, my grandmother would remind me that whatever we love, we bury, partially or whole, hoping to be able to dig it up and love it again someday.

  But—like Lanah, unlike Lot’s wife—I’m wise enough to not turn back for what I’ve left. To me, Carvall and Divinion never left that bar that night, so their future is rarely in my thoughts. They are frozen, yet will dissolve. They will vanish. The rest is just scripture.

  * * *

  No part of me has ever regretted leaving the South, and I’ve never tried to reshape it in my mind and make it a place better or worse than it was. In the hard northern winters I sometimes miss my grandmother’s quilt, but I’ve convinced myself that’s simply a desire for familiar warmth over an easy department store purchase. I do miss bottle trees. Sometimes, in summer, I miss how the grasses there would whisper the names of those I’d lost, but those voices were never anything more than my imagination. As much as even I wanted to stay with Divinion’s family, I, like my father, left them all to drown. I left everyone down there to drown, and I’m sure that, had I stayed, I would be dead already—devoured by the sea or rotting on the surface of the earth. I’m not brave. Up here, in this city with more steel and stone than I could have imagined, things are more comfortable.