The Summer That Melted Everything

  Above all else, I said with that one word, I hate you. How can it ever be believed I loved him above all others?

  “Say it again, Fielding.” He grabbed me by the collar. As he shook me under him, one of his tears fell onto my cheek. To have my brother’s tear slide down my face cut worse than the world’s sharpest knife. He screamed over and over for me to call him a faggot just one more time.

  So I did.

  Before I knew it, I was down with Grand’s fists pummeling into my face and stomach. I did my best to shield against them, but he was Grand and I was Fielding and there was no way I wasn’t going to get the shit kicked out of me.

  “I hate you, you little bastard.” His voice trembled. “I hate you.”

  I could feel my tears mixing with blood from my nose. This mixture felt old, like something pulled from the past. I suppose I was feeling the tears and blood of every boy before me who had a brother who would never have a wife and to whom no one had ever said that was all right.

  It was Sal who pulled Grand off of me, leaving me to curl up into my beaten self and whine like a baby.

  “C’mon, kid.” The man grabbed Grand’s arm and led him away. Led him away from me as I reached and cried for Grand to come back.

  “I was comin’ up from the basement when I heard the most terrible racket.” Mom stood in the doorway. “What was goin’ on?”

  Once she saw my nose, she went for a wet rag and a bag of ice. Too sore to move myself, I watched the man and Grand get farther and farther away. All the while, my voice echoed for miles. I was calling for my brother. Please, just come back to me. He didn’t so much as turn his head. He just kept walking until I could no longer see his bare back, nor the yellow shirt of the man beside him.

  “What on earth were the two of ya fightin’ about?” Mom bent down to wipe the blood from my nose. “Good Lord, I hope it’s not broken. Noses never look quite right after they’re broken.”

  “It isn’t broken.”

  When Mom asked Sal how he knew, he shrugged and said, “I guess I’ve been hit a lot myself. I know when it’s broken and when it’s just hurt. And that is just hurt.”

  “It’s no good havin’ sons fightin’.” Mom sat down beside me, leaving me to hold the bag of ice. “Just look at what happened to Cain and Abel.”

  “My nose is broken.” I threw the ice down. “And none of you even care. Let alone that Grand is gone … with that man.”

  “What man?” Mom looked out across the yard like they were still there. “You mean that New Yorker? He was all right. Said he’d give us a free subscription to The New York Times. I’m gonna hold ’im to that.”

  “Your nose isn’t broken.” Sal picked up the bag of ice and handed it to me. “It isn’t even bleeding anymore.”

  “It still hurts.”

  “My poor baby.” Mom pulled me into her side and sang,

  Down in the hills of Ohio,

  there’s a babe at sleep tonight.

  He’ll wake in the morn of Ohio,

  in the peaceful, golden light.

  “Come on, you too.” She waited for Sal to sit at her other side. And there the three of us swayed with her soft voice,

  The Father will smile in Ohio,

  and the Mother will hold you tight.

  You will be my love in Ohio,

  and fooorrrr allllll time.

  My mother always smelled like Breathed River, of wet rocks and gritty sand. Or maybe she didn’t. Maybe I just gave that smell to her because her flowing fluid form should’ve smelled more like a river than a house.

  “I remember when we first moved into this house,” she sighed. “Me and your dad. I was pregnant with Grand. He wasn’t due for another week or so. Your father was off at the courthouse while I stayed home here, takin’ wallpaper swatches ’round to the different rooms. As I was considerin’ makin’ the entry hall blue, my water broke.

  “I couldn’t call your father, ’cause we had yet to hook up the phone. I tried to make it to the neighbors, but the pain became everything. I delivered right there beside the grandfather clock.

  “I thought the worst part was over, but as I held Grand in my arms, I heard growlin’. We had yet to put the screens up, and a dog was comin’ through the livin’ room winda. A big beast of a mutt. I knew at once it was First, Mr. Elohim’s dog. Then I saw the white foam at First’s mouth. Bein’ a country girl, I knew he was rabid.

  “I was far too weak to fight off a rabid dog, so I opened the door of the grandfather clock and placed Grand down inside, just below the pendulum. I thought the dog may get me, but at least my baby will be safe. Before I closed the clock’s door, I saw it. A revolver with an ivory handle. I checked to see if it was loaded. Then I took aim and fired. One bullet, that’s all it took to take down an entire system of muscles and vessels and organs and bones.”

  I was quiet for a few moments, and then I asked as if I didn’t already know, “What’d ya do with the gun, Mom?”

  “Don’t you get any ideas, Fielding. I put it someplace safe. I do not want you fishin’ for it. Mark my words, Fielding, if I find that gun missin’, I’ll shoot you with it.” She took her arm out from around Sal so she could playfully poke me in the stomach. “Bang, bang,” but I couldn’t laugh, because my stomach was in the low from Grand’s punches.

  “Oh, poor Mr. Elohim.” She coiled the beads at her neck. “He loved that dog so much. It’s why he puts the poison out. It was a coon gave First rabies.”

  * * *

  After Mom went inside to start dinner, me and Sal stayed on the porch. We were there when Dad got home. He asked about my bruises.

  “Me and Grand just played too rough.” I shrugged it off.

  Grand didn’t come home for dinner. He did call. Told Mom when she picked up the phone that he’d eat with the journalist at Dandelion Dimes and wouldn’t be home for a while.

  I thought about Grand and this man in the yellow booth with the dandelion wallpaper around them, the little yellow vase of plastic dandelions between them. The waitress who would come in her yellow uniform to take their order on a yellow pad, before walking past the yellow curtains to the yellow kitchen to serve their food on yellow dishes. Everything so yellow. Grand, I’m sure, remembered back to how Sal said there was no yellow in hell. With so much around him, Grand must’ve thought he was with that man in heaven, forgetting they were merely in Dandelion Dimes.

  I stayed up long after Mom and Dad went to bed, pacing the porch while Sal sat patiently on the swing. My nose was still sore and the vision in my right eye was obstructed from my hanging lid. It hurt to stand up tall. It stretched the bruises out on my ribs. I was the beaten boy and feeling it all over. I feel it now. Especially the bruise in my chest, the length of a heart, the width of one too. The pain making me wince.

  “You should go up and take a hot bath, Fielding. Help with the soreness.”

  I shook my head at Sal. “I’m waitin’ for Grand.”

  “What if he doesn’t come back?”

  This thought frightened me. Maybe he wouldn’t come back. Maybe I had to go to him.

  I ran down the porch steps and was nearly out of the yard when Sal grabbed my arm.

  “Let him come home on his own, Fielding.”

  “What’s it to you? Huh? He’s not your brother. This is not your family. Stop actin’ like it is.” I pushed him back and ran. I could hear his feet pounding behind me. He hollered that I didn’t even know where Grand was.

  But of course I did. He was with our secrets. Where else would he be?

  It had been a few years back when I snuck into Grand’s room and took his Eddie Plank card. I only took it to show off to a couple of friends, but I ended up losing it. I turned the world upside down looking for it, but it’d already been given to that place out of reach, so I went to Grand and said I had something to confess.

  “What is it, Fielding?” He closed the chemistry book he’d been reading and sat up on the edge of his bed.

  “I don’t wa
nna say, Grand. You’ll hate me.”

  “Well, I guess you’re a little man now, huh? Kids are never afraid of bein’ hated for somethin’, ’cause they’re still kids and easily forgiven. But men, they’re not so easily forgiven and live in fear of bein’ hated. I say you’re a little man ’cause you’re still more kid than man, but you got the fear now, so you’re on your way. So what should we do, little man? Should ya tell me and risk bein’ hated by me? Or, should ya keep it a secret?”

  “Don’t I have to tell ya, Grand?”

  “I have secrets I haven’t told you.”

  “What haven’t you told me?”

  “The make of a secret is silence, little man. There is a way we could tell our secrets to one another without really tellin’ ’em.”

  We went downstairs to the kitchen, where he took the cocoa tin and dumped the last bit of its cocoa into the trash. So we could bury our secrets in it, he said.

  “But that’s not really tellin’ a secret,” I insisted.

  “Sure it is. And one day when we’re both feelin’ brave, we’ll dig up the secrets and promise each other, right now, that no matter what they are, we won’t turn on each other. We won’t get angry. We will accept the secrets and still … I don’t know … любовь each other.”

  “What’s любовь mean, Grand?” I did my best pronunciation of the Russian word. It came out jarred and mumbled, but I already knew what it meant. It was the first Russian word I had learned. Still I wanted to hear him translate it.

  “‘Love.’ It means ‘love,’ little man.”

  This love echoed in my ears as I got closer to the tree house, where we had buried the secrets. I shushed Sal as we moved low through the brush. We heard the moans before we saw them. It was the first time I’d ever seen sex. It took me a moment to realize that’s what I was seeing.

  At first I just saw Grand standing back into the man’s chest. Clothes in piles on the ground around them. Two naked bodies strong and close. The movement was gentle and familiar, like the time I was in Juniper’s with Dad. He was going up to the register with a tube of toothpaste in his hand. There was another man already at the register. Along the way, Dad tripped and fell into the backside of this man. They didn’t fall down, they just nudged forward, bending in a curve of bodies while that tube of white toothpaste shot out in front.

  That’s what their sex looked like to me, just two men falling into each other and catching each other at the same time.

  I wanted it to be a girl he was with. Grand with a girl wouldn’t have frightened me. We had been brought up not religiously but Bible aware. I knew the Bible said thou shall not lie with another man if you are one. I was not wise enough to know that God was more than the Bible. I had yet to know this at thirteen years old for not just Grand’s sake but for my own as well.

  I was sure Grand was going to the fire in the ground, and even though the devil wasn’t so bad when he was Sal, maybe he was terrible when he wasn’t. Thinking of Grand being tormented for eternity not only broke my heart, it broke all the surrounding area too. My lungs. My ribs. My everything.

  I wasn’t ready to lose the fantasy that was my brother, because like his name, he was grand. The grandest damn thing I’d ever known. And yet, I didn’t know him at all. I had always thought he was just this traditional American male, and here he was so foreign to me. It was then I realized he’d been telling us he was gay all along, every time he spoke Russian. Not because of the Russian itself. It could’ve been any language because being gay was what was foreign. It seemed not to speak English and he didn’t understand it. He knew no one else who fluently spoke that language. He tried to speak it, learn it, understand it, but being gay didn’t feel like home, where all the boys wrapped their arms around girls and kissed them and made love to them because they wanted to.

  Grand tilted his nose up. He was breathing something in. I smelled it too. His cologne on my shirt. Oh, God. Was that his face turning toward me? I pulled back into the shadows. No, he wouldn’t see me. I wouldn’t let him. But still he would know. He would smell my shadow and know I had seen who he truly was.

  The heat was making it worse. It felt centered on my face. I wished I could just go home like it didn’t matter. But of course, it mattered. It was the thing to matter the most.

  I was going to scream. I had to get away. I made a mad dash to the river, where I jumped into the water and stayed under. Nothing but the fish hear you screaming underwater, nothing but the fish and yourself.

  I think Sal thought I was trying to drown myself, because he swam down after me and pulled me up. I suppose I was under there for a rather long time. I let him swim me out of the water and to the bank, where he laid me down. He lay beside me and in silence, we looked up at the stars.

  I saw each small glitter as another Earth. A billion planet Earths. A billion Grands fucking a billion men. And would I be lying at the side of the river a billion times? Frightened. Confused. Lost. Or was I up there somewhere getting it right?

  “Sal?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Is it a sin? What Grand’s doin’ with that man?”

  “Are you asking me as a boy? Or as the devil?”

  “As a boy, Sal. I’m askin’ you as a boy.”

  “Then, yes. It is a sin. Isn’t that what all boys are taught? To like girls? To fall in love with one and make a life out of it? That’s what they say. I don’t know, Fielding, it’s just what they say.”

  I shut my eyes. The stars were blurry anyways. “And what if I ask you as the devil?”

  “I’d say no. It isn’t a sin. And shouldn’t the devil know more than a boy? Shouldn’t a devil know all the things hell exists for?”

  * * *

  When we got home, Sal went to bed while I dusted off the family Bible. I carried it up to Grand’s room and, using his yellow highlighter, followed the lines,

  If a man also lie with mankind, as he lieth with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination: they shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them.

  I left the page open on top of his pillow so he’d see it when he got home. I thought I was saving him.

  When he did finally come in an hour later, I stayed in the shadows. I remember how he was whistling. So happy as he turned on his light. I could hear him walking toward his bed. Then silence. Was he reading the Bible?

  Yes, he had read it. Yes, he had thrown it into the wall and slammed his door shut. When he started to cry, it sounded like hail on a roof and I had to leave. I returned to the tree house and dug up the cocoa tin, and under the light of a billion mes, I read his secret:

  I’m afraid.

  A billion times the stars flinched and screamed, I’m afraid.

  17

  … mutual love, the crown of all our bliss

  —MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:728

  I’VE STOOD ON top of more churches than I’ve gone into. The last time I was in a church, I was forty-four, and it was my father’s funeral. Him and Mom had been living in Pennsylvania, and I came in to stay with them while she was sick.

  She died in June. He died in August. Another summer of death. I knew he wouldn’t last long, the way he sat at her bedside, eyes squinted, arms folded, legs crossed. For all the sunscreen Grand had asked me to put on, no one ever once asked Mom, not even when she left the house and went to all those places in the sun. Her chocolate chips had melted. I wasn’t there to pull her away from the oven.

  I remember how Dad would lay his hand on her head as white and as slight as powder on the pillow. She’d tilt her ending eyes toward him and the window. Her breathing raspy and rutted, like a fingernail scratching across a cotton sheet.

  All she wanted to do was to go outside, even in the rain. Especially in the rain.

  “Let me go.” She’d reach for her feet like that was the first step.

  We’d pull her bones back to the bed. It was no longer her keeping her inside. It was us, and that turning of the tables clotted our hearts with an
inescapable sorrow until we almost wished she were still afraid of the rain.

  “You need your rest,” we’d say, and feel her pulse, sounding like closing.

  One time as she slept, I held my nose to her cold skin. I thought she would smell like the morphine they pumped into her. I don’t know if morphine has a smell, but I thought it would be something metallic, something acidic, most definitely something cold. I was relieved when she still smelled like Breathed River. Did she really? I think I just needed her to.

  Our conversation consisted of her saying my name, me saying hers. Fielding. Mom. Fielding! Mom! Fielding? Mom?

  A dying mother is hard to talk to, especially when she starts screaming about a fire. We told her it was put out.

  “When?” she asked.

  “A long time ago,” we said almost in unison.

  I took a wet washcloth and stroked her face. She seemed to like it. She smiled. Said Grand’s name.

  “He’s not here, Mom.” I laid the washcloth over her eyes so I wouldn’t have to see them.

  “Why ain’t my boy here?”

  “He’s with Sal.”

  With my palm lying on top of the washcloth, I could feel her eyes pushing like tiny hands trying to push up out of rubble.

  “Oh.” She drew her breath. A faintly sketched line. “My boys.”

  I went away from her then and thought of Granny, of that suffering we are asked as men to end. As I was packing my suitcase to go to Mexico to buy pentobarbital, the phone rang. It was Dad. He didn’t say a word. All he did was cry. I told him it was a bad connection and to call back. I had to hang up first. I tore up my plane ticket and went around the house, turning on all the faucets. The kitchen, the bathroom, upstairs and down. Sinks and tubs and showers. I wanted to hear the water go down the drains so I wouldn’t have to hear myself doing the same.