Out of all the things to last see, Elohim saw me with the gun as he lay there. Even in the rain, I saw the difference of the tear slipping down his face. His eyes said to me, I hope one day you know what it feels like. The pain, the hurt, the slow dying.
Yes, Elohim, I know what it feels like. I have seen for myself.
When he did finally die, he did so to the sounds of the women weeping and the men howling, not for him but for the boy they had burned to death.
They stared at his small, charred figure in the smoldering ash and knew he was no devil. They knew they had melted the skin off a thirteen-year-old boy. The pain of that was etched into his face, the way his mouth gaped open, the way his teeth protruded from the lips no longer there.
The sheriff, careful not to burn his fingers, began to gently untie the remaining rope as me, Mom, and Dad left.
Along the way, we passed Juniper’s and the truck delivering the ice cream. Mom couldn’t help herself. Her mad laughter caused the man unloading the ice cream to drop a carton. It rolled into our path. It seemed to stop everything, including us. Would we ever be able to move past? That is what I wondered as we stood there frozen before the frozen.
Mom was the first to move. She lifted her foot as if to take a step over it, but she felt the weight of that great task and instead walked around the carton, her head hung in the disappointing realization. Dad followed her around the carton. He didn’t even put on the show of any other choice. Their steps said there would be no getting over it, there would only be the living around it. That it would always be there. It had become the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and our end. I knew this, and yet I wanted to try.
I took a step, but my toe caught on the carton and I fell as if the fall had always been in my nature. Waiting for the right moment of my life. When all my soul, in its smallness and its vastness, would fall face down against the earth from the bliss of my name to the hard crosses I would be handed to bear.
Mom and Dad silently waited for me to stand up on my own. Somehow we knew we could no longer help one another. It was up to ourselves to learn how to survive, and it was because of this, Dad let me carry the gun home. I was no longer the child. I was the man who had yet to have height on his side.
27
They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
COOLER TEMPERATURES AND regret ultimately equaled the recovery of the town. Yes, the murderers of Sal really did regret. Some even regretted it enough to hurry to the grave. Brains on the wall. Gun in the hand. That was how they found one of them. Another rolled a cigarette with some cyanide. His whole room smelled like almonds because of it.
Otis hadn’t been part of the mob. He found out Dovey had only after the fact. He didn’t know what to say to her nor she to him. Those moments after the death of their child, Dovey and Otis were husband and wife unable to come together and heal. That distance between them led her to Elohim. It led to the night she said she was going to take a bath and asked Otis if he could hand her a bar of her homemade soap out of the closet.
Later, in the cold water of the tub, she shoved the bar of soap down her throat. Internal cleansing, I suppose. It’s said they didn’t even have to use more soap when they washed her body. Bubbles and suds came by just plain water and the friction of her skin. The dirtiest, cleanest woman ever to be buried.
After her death, Otis no longer walked the nights with the mirror, hoping to see his son. Too much had been lost, and the mirror gleamed from the top of a pile in the junkyard while his shorts and shirts got longer and his muscles turned to fat atop the sofas he sat on and the potato chips he ate.
A large number of the mob chose suicide by bottle. The sale of whiskey and its kin bled upward in Breathed.
There were a few of the folks who seemed to manage.
Did we? Me, Mom, and Dad?
Losing Sal was different than it was with Grand. The tissues weren’t all over tables, floors, beds. Did we even open the new box in the hall? Sometimes I think not having tears meant we cried even more.
It was all that death. It made our eyes unable to produce the grief we felt. We were shell-shocked. Walking stiffs. If we ate, I don’t remember. We must’ve, though, for none of us died of starvation. If we slept, I don’t remember that either. I know both Mom and Dad died tired. As I am dying tired. Maybe that’s what got us. The inability to sleep because nightmares and dreams became alike, as we were gladdened by the sight of our ghosts but haunted by them at the same time.
Mom didn’t work through Sal’s death. There was no cleaning out already clean shelves. Padding already plump sofa cushions. House and home became a place she was rarely in.
She stopped wearing dresses. Too many edges to catch, I guess. There was also the singeing to consider. She was pants from then on out. Polyester, corduroy, denim. Pants, pants, pants. I lost something of my mother when she lost her dresses. That woman in the kitchen. Floating here and there, as light as the flour on her hands.
In pants she got heavier. She stayed thin but got heavier like she was attached to the ground. One grave on her right, one grave on her left, both pulling her down with them. She was veiled, darkened over. The shadow of our family. Of herself. No more guzzling the sweet syrup of the canned pears she’d open like our little secret when it was just me and her in the kitchen. No more kitchen at all. No more aprons. No more hair tied up in strings. No more Dad pulling on those tails and making her laugh.
Dad.
I don’t think he made her laugh again. Maybe he tried. When I wasn’t there. When it was just them and pillows. Maybe he wanted to when he sat there, eyes squinted, arms folded, legs crossed. He just didn’t know how to be the man he once was. The man who had a son named Grand. A son named Fielding. A son named Sal.
After Sal’s death, Dad didn’t fall into T-shirts and pajamas, the way he had when Grand died. Instead, Dad looked the part of who he once was. Three-piece suits. Shaven face. Even added a pocket watch. I suppose to have something certain to look at when his uncertainty got too much for him. Something to see for himself in the palm of his hand. Yes, he looked the part, but he wasn’t it. Not anymore.
Conversation with him became like dragging something out. You had to put hooks in and keep pulling, pulling until he spoke. And then you wished you hadn’t, because his tone alone was like lying down in a coffin and having the lid nailed shut. Talking with him was working with the gravedigger, and sometimes you had to get away from the cemetery, which meant I had to get away from him. I would too, at seventeen. I’d just up and leave my parents.
Or were they just people who looked like my parents? Maybe my mother and father burned that day with Sal, and I walked away with their ashes.
And who was I? Who am I? The boy who met the devil and met hell at the same time. I’m not saying it was Sal’s fault. Of course it wasn’t.
It was Dad’s.
Without his invitation, I would not meet Sal in front of the courthouse. I would not take him home. No journalists would come. Grand would not open his veins and try to bleed Ryker out. There would be no fire. There would be no best friend in its flames. There would be no man I would have to kill.
Yes, Dad, you started it all.
I should address what legally happened to those who took part in Sal’s murder. They were rounded up and charged. The devil was put on trial, though there were no horns, no pitchforks either. It was not one strange face indicted, but many familiar ones. The man who sold us all insurance, the woman who ran the church raffle, and the couple whose cake we ate at their fortieth wedding anniversary the previous April.