It was late spring by then, though it felt wintry. The grass was holding back its green. Flowers didn’t know what blooming meant. The trees’ bare branches scratched the sky that always seemed to be bright and white, like snow about to come. There was a quiet stillness, even in the moving breeze you wanted to grab a sweater for.
“Dad?”
He didn’t answer, so I said his name over and over, putting the hooks in and trying to pull him out.
He let go of a long-held breath. “Yes, Fielding?”
“Why’d you do it, Dad? Why’d you invite the devil?”
He looked at me as if he forgot who I was. And through that, I didn’t know if it was me either. I didn’t know if I was enough left to be a son. If he was enough left to be a father. Or if we were just two flames, with not enough love to be anything more than reminders of the burn.
Finally, he turned his eyes back out onto the world. “You remember when I told you and Sal about the case I prosecuted? Of the girl accusing her father of rape? I killed that father, Fielding. All because I’d been wrong. I killed him. It wasn’t the girl. It wasn’t the jury. It wasn’t the misunderstanding. But me. I alone killed him because I was the one who was supposed to be certain. I was the one entrusted with the filter. The one who was supposed to do everything right with it. I failed.”
He was quiet, as if to allow me the chance to say something or, at the very least, pat him on the back. I did nothing. I sat there and felt the unrelenting crush of that very choice.
“We live each day with thoughts we think are certain to the core, Fielding. But what if we are sincerely wrong? Take a look at this cross. We are told it’s a cross, so surely it must be a cross. But what if it isn’t? What if we’re wrong? What if this whole time we’ve just been hanging a lowercased t on our walls?”
With one swift pitch, he flung the cross. We watched it hit the ground and felt nothing.
He didn’t speak for some minutes later.
“I once overheard Elohim ask, ‘Would a panther eat us before we could call it black? Or would it not eat us at all?’ I thought, of course a panther would eat us. Of course. I was certain of it, and yet what if I was wrong?
“That is what I wanted to do. I wanted to test the validity of the claims. I wanted to meet the devil, and through that meeting I would know for certain if I’d ever met him before in the courtroom, in those men and women I sent away. And if I had, then I would’ve done some good after all. I would’ve been right and maybe in all those rights, I would be able to make up for that one wrong when I sent an innocent man to prison and in that sent him to his death.
“I had all my faith in. I was so sure of what was evil, of what was good. But then Sal came, and the panther ate salad, and the devil — well, he turned out to be the only angel among us. And I’m lost. I’m lost now, Fielding. What is good and what is bad?” He tossed his arms weakly in the air. “I don’t know. I just don’t know anymore. My faith is gone. How can it not be? After all, who was burned at the end of this story?”
The quiet filled in all the spaces between us as we sat there, unsure of not just ourselves, but also each other.
“I don’t get it, Dad. You loved Sal, right?”
“He was my son.” The world seemed to move a little after he said that. As if it were opening a drawer and putting his words inside for safe-keeping, so should there ever come a day when it was doubted Autopsy Bliss loved Sal as his own son, that drawer could be opened and those words pulled out as the precious proof of a father’s heart.
“Then why’d you defend his murderers, Dad? They were the devil. How could you defend the devil?”
He seemed to be asking himself that very question. In answer, he began telling about the time Sal was flipping through one of his law books.
“Sal said to me I might have to defend the devil just once in my life. I said I didn’t think I could do that. He said to defend the devil is to defend the broken glass.
“When glass is whole, it’s good. When it’s broken, it’s bad. It’s swept up. It’s thrown away. Sometimes thrown away too soon. Think of a window, Sal said. Imagine a violence breaking that window. All those shards of broken glass fall to the floor.
“The violence is inside the house now, wrestling you. It could kill you, so you grab one of the shards and stab. The violence dies and you are saved. Saved by the broken glass. Isn’t that a funny thing? To be saved by the bad.
“Sometimes, not sweeping that bad up and throwing it away will save you in the end. It just might. So to defend the devil means defending the good of the bad. That’s what I was doing, Fielding. Hoping that all those folks are just shards of broken glass and one day in the future, they’ll save someone by being just that.
“Furthermore, I am responsible for those people, Fielding. I’m the one who wrote the invitation, and all because I wanted to see for myself. I wanted to see for myself.”
The sky, in its white sheet, let loose a heavy, cold rain. Dad stood and stepped into it, stretching out his arms and tilting his face to the drops, as if in surrender to the fall.
The screen door screeched behind me. Mom came, and together we joined Dad. A barely there family, as together as we could ever be.
* * *
Shortly after, we left Breathed for good. Dad never stepped into a courtroom again. He went into linoleum flooring. Ended up with a small bliss after making a chemical discovery that allowed linoleum to be nonslip.
“So no more mothers will fall back and lose their faith,” he said.
They took his picture for the paper. He did not smile.
Mom became a traveler, going to all the places that was our house. She never forgot that house either, so when she went to these places, she’d bury a piece of us there. Since England was our kitchen, she dug a small hole at the base of Stonehenge and buried there the spatula she once used to frost our birthday cakes. And because Russia was our living room, she buried there the framed picture of our family.
As the years went on and she’d return to these places, she would never say, I’m going to Egypt or to the Netherlands or to Vietnam. She’d simply say, I’m going into the attic or walking down the hall or stepping into the breakfast nook for a bit.
And Dad would say, “Don’t forget to turn the lights off when you leave.”
It was us she wanted to leave. Going to all those places. She was trying to get away. That’s why she always went by herself. Why Dad always sat home alone, wondering when she was going to come back to him.
Dad nor Mom spoke to me in regards to my killing of Elohim. Dad didn’t ask how it made me feel. Mom didn’t say I’d done the right thing. I was just the one who had a gun, and Elohim was just the enemy shot. Everything else wasn’t said. I wasn’t charged with murder or put through a trial. It was, dear jury, self-defense. But don’t you worry, I have been in prison ever since.
When they went into Elohim’s house, they found in his cinder block basement a freezer of ice cream and body parts. There were Polaroids of black boys before they’d been butchered, and more gruesome Polaroids of the various stages of being butchered.
Elohim had said he wished someone would’ve stopped Helen’s lover from growing up. Just ate his future away. Elohim, the vegetarian, was eating black boys before they could become black men.
In the collection of Polaroids was a boy identified by his parents as Amos.
And then there was the Polaroid of a boy in a pair of overalls. It was taken near the basement window. The light streaming through was bright and whitened out the boy’s face, which was upturned toward the bars of the window, where birds flew outside.