The man who fixed my tire when it went flat in front of his house, and his older sister who bandaged my knee when I fell. The guy who was said to have the warmest handshake, and his wife who fed the stray cats in the neighborhood.
They were not walking caves of nocturnal demons, scared of the sunlight and fresh air. In fact, the way they all went into court, they looked like cotton curtains of the sunniest, breeziest, most welcoming windows in all the world. They came not from underground lairs but from homes with flowers in vases and cookies in the oven. They were men who held the door open for the ladies who thanked them as they passed through. And in alphabetical order, the jury found each one of them not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
Dad was not the man prosecuting them. He was the one defending them. When he first told me and Mom about it, I screamed at him. How could he defend them? The murderers of Sal? It’s like the man I knew all those years was just one long weekend away from the real man who burned garter snakes Monday through Friday.
For the months of the trial, I let go of my father. Maybe some of it was my wanting to let go of myself.
If I didn’t have to be me, then it was someone else who lost so much that summer. Someone else who saw how red his brother’s blood was. Someone else who lost their best friend. It was someone else who killed a man — a bad man, but a man nonetheless. It was someone else, and I was okay with being just that.
Take me away from this Fielding Bliss.
To be someone else. Bottle after bottle, I try to be just that. Pill after pill, restless sleep after restless sleep, fuck after fuck. But still I sober to myself, still I wake to the reaching abyss.
The same abyss that reached for us all. For Dad, for Mom, for Grand, Elohim, and of course Sal. That abyss that always wins.
Dad was walking the edge of it during those months of the trial. I knew he didn’t want to defend them. I also knew he would do everything to see them found not guilty. Because of this, I would never tell my father I loved him again.
The whole situation was made worse by the journalists who came to Breathed, this time not for the heat but to report on the progress of the case. I looked out for Ryker. He never came. Don’t know what I would’ve done if he had. Maybe led him to Grand’s grave. Maybe shown him I know how to fire a gun now. What’s one more murder on my conscience?
A few of the reporters shoved a mike into my face and asked how I felt. Seventy-one years later, and I’m still answering. Is anyone still listening?
I hated the reporters. I hated their questions. I hated the trial. I hated the smell of melting flesh still in the air. I hated the echo of the gun lasting eternal. Gone were the hills of my youth. Gone were the trees. The houses I had known, the people I had loved. Gone, gone, gone with a town that became a place behind a burning door, down a long hallway, and behind an evermore burning door.
I watched my father walk to the courthouse every day, hated him every day a little more. I needed to see exactly what I was hating, so that last day I followed him to the courtroom and listened to him deliver his closing statement:
“All the little choices we make, what shirt to wear for the day, what to eat for dinner, what movie to watch come Friday night, they are all rehearsals for the bigger choices of our lives, like what captains we will be when the brakes go out and we rocket full speed ahead.
“But even with all the rehearsing, there can come along someone who makes us forget our God-given right to choose. It is the inability to choose by our own will that lessens us all. It is disease to our sanity, which sickens our good sense until we are the victims of choices we would not normally have been in the company of.
“This is exactly what happened during the course of the summer of 1984. These people lost their right to choose, and in that lost their sanity like sweat in hot bathwater. By the twenty-first of September, they were severed from themselves as completely as they were tied to Mr. Grayson Elohim. Like puppets in the master’s claws, they twitched when he told them to twitch. They stepped when he told them to step. They growled when he told them to growl.
“Grayson Elohim had the genealogy of a tablecloth, but over the course of one summer, he became God. At first, his ideas tumbled as dry and harmless as bones from his mouth, but somewhere along the way, his words became the great dinosaurs before the fossils. Yes. The form had gotten its function back. And his function was to orchestrate panic through the chorus of fear. Fear of the boy with color in his skin. Fear of the devil in the skin of a boy. He sang over and over again, fear, fear, fear like a lullaby laying their sense down in the thorns disguised as roses.
“You may say this level of manipulation would never happen to you, members of the jury. But how many times have you been convinced to buy something on television that you don’t need? How many times have you done something you didn’t want to do, but did anyways because someone told you to? How many times has your choice fallen second to the choice of someone else?
“This is the year 1984 we’re talking about. The year George Orwell said we would be convinced two and two makes five. He proved through story, mind is controllable. These people have proved through reality no different.
“What these poor souls were desperate for was a light. But the thing about light is it all looks the same when you’re in the dark, so you can’t tell if what powers that light is good or if it is bad, because the light blinds you to the source of its power. All you know is that it saves you from the darkness. That’s all his followers knew. They were in the dark of their own private pain, and then this Elohim comes along and he’s shining so bright.
“They reached for that brightness, and while the light distracted them, while it comforted them in its false rescue, the dark power behind it did its work, and before any of them knew it, they were not being saved by the light, they were being changed by it. They were being controlled by it. By this Grayson Elohim.”
In the gesture of spitting on Elohim’s grave, Dad dramatically spit on the floor before throwing his arms up as he boomed, “How can you call them guilty? When they were away from themselves. Temporarily gone. These people, your family, your friends, your neighbors, possibly you under the right circumstances. Away from themselves.
“Haven’t you ever been away from yourself? Only to come home and find a mess has been made in your absence? A mess you need help to clean up. Not to be punished for but to be helped with. Won’t you help your family now? Your friends? Your neighbors? Yourself?
“Grayson Elohim is the murderer, the real murderer, and he is already gone and buried. Isn’t it time we put the shovels down instead of digging more holes? The more holes we dig, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the less solid ground any of us will have to stand on.”
Later that night, Dad came home victorious from the courthouse. You would never have known it. The way his head hung, the way his feet dragged, the way his eyes hardly knew who he was. He went into his study and took down the plain wooden cross from off the wall. With it, he went to the back porch, where he sat down on the steps.
I watched him turn the cross over in his hands. His hair had become more gray than brown, like tree branches covered in ash. His tie was out of his vest, as if he no longer cared if it played noose.
When I sat beside him, he didn’t notice. That was Dad from then on out. The man who was sat beside, but was always alone.