“It’s because of me.”
Dad said everything would be all right. Then he instructed us to pull up all the cannas. Mom hovered on the porch, yelling at us to stop. Dad said, to my surprise, “Come out and make us.”
She placed her foot on the top porch step. It was the farthest I’d ever seen my mother from the house. “Another,” I whispered. “Come on, Mom, just one more.”
She looked up at the sky, yanked her foot back, and shrugged her shoulders, probably said the word rain. We jerked up the cannas harder, and she looked away. When we returned to the porch with the flowers, she asked for one. Sal handed her an Alaska.
And then we waited. On the front porch we sat. The flowers were so tall, I felt like I was holding another me. We waited in silence for the danger ahead. No longer ahead, coming around the corner. Marching down the lane. Bare feet slapping dirt and led by a short man in white.
Mom lifted the bundle of flowers from Sal and added them to Dad’s.
“Best if they not see ’im.”
With Sal and Mom under the darkness of the porch, me, Dad, and Grand walked to the edge of the yard. First they came fast, determined to use the stones in their hands. Stones that filled their palms and stretched their fingers into scary bends at the knuckles.
They slowed when they saw us, looking around at each other, uncertain of what to do. They had not discussed this situation. They had planned to see only the brick of our house, the windows, the door. It’s easy to throw stones at these things. It is not so easy to throw stones at people they know. People not like the boy and the devil they’d created from that very image.
They met us at the edge of our yard. They were quiet. We were quiet. Somewhere a cricket wasn’t.
Finally, Dad spoke. “Who wants one of my wife’s blue ribbon cannas? Hmm? All they cost is a stone. One stone for a flower. Sounds like a bargain to me.”
He took a step toward them.
“What about you?” He offered a flower to a woman biting her lip and sweating above it. The woman looked down at the stone in her hand, turned it over. She tried to look at the house, but couldn’t get past Dad or the flower.
“All right.” She let go of the stone and took the flower before hastily moving to the back of the group.
“And you?” Dad was making another sale.
Grand was offering his own flowers. Those in the crowd in front of me stared, waiting to see if I too would be something to stop their throwing.
“A flower for your stone?” I stepped forward.
And there we three were, slowly dismantling the mob that had so wanted to tear us apart. We tossed the stones into a big pile in the front yard. Every click of stone against stone made me flinch, made us all flinch behind petals and stems.
As I was handing a flower over, I saw Grand slowly extend a Russian Red to Yellch. Without a word, Yellch gave his stone to Grand. Because their hands lingered for so long in the exchange, you could from afar have thought they were merely friends, or gardeners at the very least, holding hands and talking flowers.
In the back of the crowd, I saw Elohim. No one had given him a flower yet, so I asked him in my best voice, “A flower for your stone, Mr. Elohim?”
He held up his empty hands. And yet wasn’t that whole crowd just one big stone for him?
“Do you remember when you threw stones at me, Fielding? Don’t lower your head like that. Look at me. Do you remember?”
I nodded.
He nodded too. “I hope one day you know what that feels like.”
He took the flower and turned away, the crowd going with him.
Years later, when I was standing on my last roof, the stones finally came for me. They came sudden and from the sky. They hit cars and dinged. They hit the slate roof and broke the tiles I was standing on. Still, while others ran inside, I stayed.
“Hey, buddy, you’re gonna get killed up there in this hail.”
But I stayed and spread my arms out, tilting my face up, the wound before the scar and I, dear Elohim, finally knowing what it feels like.
23
These troublesome disguises which we wear
. . . . . . . .
And that must end us; that must be our cure—
To be no more. Sad cure! for who would lose …
WHEN I WAS thirty-three, I met a man. My house was burning down and he was the one with the hose, come to save me. I liked that about him. That he put fires out, didn’t start them.
Come here, memory of him. I’ll make guitar songs out of his eyes. Come here, memory of him. Give me the Sunday in the warm bathtub when I leaned back against his wet chest and he washed my hair. Come here, memory of him, remind me of the morning sun, like good yellow, on his face. Come here, you memory of him, and give him well.
His dark skin was like that of the color of a bird’s feather I found beneath my window long ago. I almost told him about that feather. I almost told him about Sal. I almost told him all my baseball-shaped secrets, but I was too distracted by the possibility of happiness with him. Far too distracted by him pulling me in by the loop of my jeans and reading me Langston Hughes.
Heaven was no bigger than a queen-sized bed during those days. Blankets kicked off, pillows even. Just a white sheeted square and us. Chests were pillows. Arms and legs were blankets. Waist deep in each other. A heaven of mounting gasps and sides rising and falling in the same deep breaths, breaths grassy enough to walk on from here to Elysian Fields, where paradise is set in motion by the almost too beautiful connection of one man and another.
Sometimes it’d be him over me like a swinging branch and my mouth feeling that slight curved fruit of his neck until I felt like I was falling away from him and that paradise. I’d almost scream, a fearful grasp on him, “I’m falling away from you.”
“I’ll never let you fall,” he’d promise.
And so the heaven continued like a scurry to eat the last apple before the tree gets cut down.
Yes, heaven is a breathless mouth. It is the core underneath, where two souls meet and give and take little pieces of each other, all the while the light orbits, rippling soft on the edges.
He was mine and I was his. He told me so as he pulled me and my jeans into him on the street, the Empire State Building in the distance.
After the kiss, he asked why I looked about to break. I said I didn’t know, but wasn’t it because I did know? Because I knew all the great splendor of a man. I knew the heaven of making love to him later. All the splendid, heavenly things Grand would never know.
We caught the eye of an old man passing by.
“Do you think his frown is because we’re gay or interracial?” he asked, his dark skin the best part of me.
“I’m not gay.”
“What do you call us, Fielding?”
I shrugged. “Just a moment.”
That moment lasted eight years, longer than any woman. A moment that saw me saying I love you and for the first time meaning it. After I said it, I said I was going out for some shaving cream and never went back. I wonder if he thinks of me every time he shaves? I know I think about him. I feel my beard and know I think about him.
I deserve the vinegar, not the violets. It was why I left that queen-sized heaven and that man who made love like a Langston Hughes poem.
I couldn’t bear such a beautiful life, when Grand never got his. Him and Ryker had fucked, but they hadn’t loved — and that was what Grand missed out on. That is what Grand paid for.