After Mom’s funeral, when me and Dad were driving back to the house, he told me to take a turn. Following his directions, I ended up driving to an amusement park off the highway.
“We’re going to ride the roller coasters.” He grunted into his handkerchief.
“You hate roller coasters. And what about what the doctor said about your heart? No quick starts, remember. No big frights.”
He rode every roller coaster in the park that day, as somber as his black suit. His heartbeat escalated, his pulse quickened, but what he wanted to happen did not happen. I’ve never seen a more disappointed man in my life. Every day he returned to the park, but after a month of roller coasters, he did not have the heart attack the doctor assured him he would have under such stress.
He’d gotten so used to the coasters that there he’d be, his chin propped up on the back of his hand, looking out past the loops and turns like he was just taking a Sunday drive while everyone else screamed around him and gripped the bar for dear life.
When the heart attack did finally come, it did so when he was sitting calmly in the La-Z-Boy. Instead of an obituary, I put an invitation in the newspaper. I sat there in a pew of the church, and for every person who walked through the door who wasn’t Sal I took a drink from the flask in my pocket. By the time the preacher asked me to stand and say a few words, the flask was empty. I ended up wobbling on the pulpit while going into the graphic details of what happens when a bullet hits the chest cavity.
The preacher whispered in my ear something like, “I think you should take your seat now.”
“Fuck you, man,” I might have said. And then somebody punched him. I suppose it was me.
I was never meant to be a violent man. I was meant to be my father’s son. My mother’s. But in the end, I became the son of that summer. That summer is my father. It is my mother. It is my violence’s blame.
Sometimes I feel like I’m still fighting my way through the mob to get to the fire. I have to throw a punch. I have to swing a kick. I have to give everything I am to put the fire out. It’s been that fight my whole life.
I haven’t been back to Mom’s and Dad’s graves since. I don’t even remember the name of the Pennsylvania cemetery anymore. Sometimes I walk to the cemetery up the road from the trailer park here and pick a couple of graves and pretend they’re Mom’s and Dad’s. I stand over them and chat about this and that. It’s always light conversation between us, something a gnat would whisper in their ear, certainly nothing to tunnel into the dark about. They’ve already got their own huge terrors. Why disturb them any more?
Before I leave them, I always lay a flower down for each and go walking for as far and as long as my aching body will allow.
I’ve not been happy with aging. My once supple limbs and previously bendable joints are now as stiff as layers of cardboard stapled together. I used to be tall, like my family, but arthritis is a bending demon, and in that, a shortening one. But the worst part is the pain that intrudes and clings like venomous batter being poured until it packs up under my skin in lumps and knots that throb like the heartbeat of thunder.
My hands hurt me the most. You wanna know the hurt? Hang a piece of wood up and punch it from sunrise to sunset. See the sick swells of your knuckles, like balls of tightening wire. Pain is our most intimate encounter. It lives on the very inside of us, touching everything that makes us. It claims your bones, it masters your muscles, it reels in your strength, and you never see it again. The artistry of pain is its contact. The horror of it is the same.
Pain is a thing that speaks, and what the pain is telling me is that I’ve been irresponsible in resting my body. From the time I was seventeen, I worked every single day at breakneck pace, climbing up and down ladders, dismantling brick and stone while pushing my body to stay agile across the expanses of roofs.
While steeplejacking was my preferred occupation, I was like Elohim and did all kinds of work. I burnt brush, laid concrete, any and all construction I could get—hell, I was even a logger for a bit. I’ve done ironwork, rigging and welding and working with heavy steel. I took the shifts no one else wanted. I’d go from one job to another. Then there was all the fucking I did, which is its own toll on the body. I was trying to earn my way to sleep. It did not happen.
And thus I am pain in every inch of my mind, in every inch of my body. I am the endless flailing, the endless falling, the endless story of what happens to a man who cannot let go.
I think about my death. I know it is the long hallway of burning doors that awaits me. I know it is the real devil I go to eternity with. I wonder about the body I leave behind. How soon the flies will come. How soon I will be found. They’ll put me into the ground, not for respect but to be rid of the smell. There will be no handkerchiefs drying in the horizon. I will go to death without the give of tears. Maybe the neighbor boy will shed something. Maybe he will say my name like I mattered.
I might show the boy my scrapbook. Red leather like Elohim’s. Sometimes I think the scrapbook is full of Grand and Sal, Mom and Dad, and even Elohim. It’s hard to tell the difference between a picture of them and one of a chimney taken apart. I feel like I’ve felled them all.
The other day I asked the boy if he’d like to go for a walk. I haven’t walked with anyone in thirty years. And suddenly there we were, walking down the road past saguaros and desert. I thought maybe we just might keep walking all the way to Ohio, and it might be all right if we did because I’d have him by my side.
But then we saw it, lying by the edge of the road.
“Poor fella.” I approached its lifeless form.
“Mr. Bliss?”
“It’s okay, boy. It’s just a deer. Been hit, poor thing.”
I squinted and saw antlers that by their size made the deer a young buck. Its blood had a breakfast quality to it, like something to be spread on toast.
I turned back to the boy. “It smells like strawberries.”
“Mr. Bliss, maybe the heat is gettin’ to ya. Maybe we should go back home?”
I looked back down at the deer and saw its belly rise. “My God. It’s still alive. What pain it must be in.” I thought of purpling organs. Of wounds with brutal edges. Of veins unraveling into rivers on a map to the grave. “We’ve got to help it on its way. Put it out of its misery. I’ll do it. You’re still just a boy.”
I pulled the small piece of pottery out of my pocket as I knelt down and patted the deer.
“I wish I had the gun,” I told it, as if it would understand that.
I dragged the pottery’s sharp point across its throat, expecting flesh to open and blood to pour. When that did not happen, I tried again, but the deer would not be cut.
“Mr. Bliss, please stop.”
“I can’t. Don’t you understand? It’s suffering.”
I began to go after the deer’s death rather than help it to it. Over and over, I cut the pottery across its throat. The deer started to resist, or at least I was holding its body down as if it were.
“Mr. Bliss, stop.”
I felt the boy’s arms come gently though determined around my neck, pulling me back.
“It’s not a deer, Mr. Bliss, it’s not a deer. It’s just a cardboard box. Must’ve fallen off a truck.”
“No, you’re wrong. It’s…”
I looked down at what I thought had been a struck deer but was in reality a banged-up cardboard box. The pair of sticks that could be antlers if you needed them to. Then there was the strawberry jam I’d believed was blood. It seeped from the broken jars, oozing wide and then tapering as if the way to eternal glory is one long, narrow passage. Maybe that’s why it’s so hard to get there. Our sins widen us until the narrow way is something we can never go through. We have no choice but to languish in the boiling of what’s left, as I have been languishing.
Oh, God, just burn me away until I’m all gone.
“Mr. Bliss, look here. One of the jars didn’t break.” The boy held the miracle up in the sun, the light shining
through the jam and blessing each seed.
I took the jar from him and tried to twist its lid off, but these damn hands, shortened by the swelling and the knots. I stared at his long, tall fingers as they opened the jar with ease. A boy opened what I could not. I was suddenly the midget and he the tallest man in the world. For that moment, I hated him.
He tasted the jam, it squeezing out to the corners of his mouth.
“Did I ever tell you I had a brother? His name was Grand.”
“Oh, here, Mr. Bliss.” He picked up the pottery piece dropped to the ground. “Best put it in your pocket before you forget.”
“I won’t forget.”
I remember too well the day. Me and Sal were in the kitchen, helping Mom clean the glass in the cabinets with vinegar. I could hear the music blaring from Grand’s room overhead. Ever since that night, it seemed to be the only thing he did. Stay in his room. Blare music. Tell Mom he wasn’t hungry and no he wouldn’t be down for dinner. And no, Dad, he doesn’t feel like going outside at the moment and would you just leave him alone? Those were the things he shouted through his closed door.
He hated me. It was why he couldn’t look at me. Why he skipped meals. Why he shut his door and only came out when I wasn’t around.
Then one day, there he was, like a spirit, standing in my room. By that time, my eyelid had lifted and my nose no longer hurt when I sneezed. The pain of the fight lay in the reason for it. Grand was the type of brother to regret such brotherly brawls. I saw this very regret, as if in his mind he would never stop seeing the bruises, even after they’d faded from me.
“Have ya seen the Bible, Fielding?”
He could not hide the crushing he was still feeling from the night I opened the Bible to him. That was what he was asking me, after all. How I could do such a thing.
What would he have said if instead of shaking my head, I told him, yes I have seen the Bible and I have seen you.
Cowardice is always too late for the fact that bravery has the better chance. Our better chance could’ve been understanding. It could’ve been soaring from that which has too long been believed to be a sin. And yet it’s far too easy to be the coward when it requires nothing more than a lie.
“I never touch the Bible, Grand, you know that.”
He left without another word. Later that night, I would find the Bible open on top of my pillow. A line highlighted there. Hebrews 13.
Let brotherly love continue.
The sun had broke and I blinked in its light. That was Grand. The first to forgive when he had the right to be the last. I tore out the page and held it to my chest as I left my room. His door was open. It was the first time in days no music was blaring. He was laying across his bed, reading. I think it might’ve been Langston Hughes. I quietly passed his room and went down to the kitchen, where I placed the page in the back of the freezer.
I wonder about that page. Is it still in the freezer behind the box of frozen broccoli? Or has someone cleaned? Removed the ice and tossed the broccoli and by that found the page only to wonder why Hebrews 13 was in a freezer in the first place. I would say because I wanted to save it from that summer, from melting away. Our love forever frozen and safe in that freezing.
Sometimes I wake in the middle of the night, clutching for the freezer that has been dismantled. The broccoli thawed. The ice melted. The page flying away into the flames. I reach for it but am always, always, too late for the save.
“Fielding?”
Mom was calling my name and saying I was leaving too much lint on the glass. The whole kitchen smelled like vinegar as the three of us wiped the cabinets.
I laid down my rag and picked up the bowl sitting on top of the counter. An image of it holding macaroni salad flashed into my mind. “Sal? Where’d you get this bowl?”
“I got it from Amos.”
“When his folks came, they said you didn’t. Remember?”
“Maybe it was his mother’s.” Mom took the bowl from me and looked it over herself. “Is that where ya got it, honey, your mom?”
“He don’t have a mom. He said so himself. Ain’t that right, Sal?”
He slowly nodded while Mom set the bowl down with a sigh and leaned back against the counter, staring at the pantry. Her eyes caught on the can of Crown Prince Sardines. She smiled as if it were her best idea ever as she grabbed the can and pulled its lid off. She warned Sal not to move as she began to place the sardines on top of his head.
“What are you doing?” He smiled. To him life could get no better.
“I’m makin’ you a crown because you are a prince and your momma is a beautiful queen who loves you more than you’ll ever know.”
After she laid the last sardine down, she set the can on top of the counter and stepped back to see Sal in full. “Yes, you are a prince.”
“The Prince of Darkness?” He looked afraid she would call him devil.
“My dear, sweet boy, you could never be anything but the Prince of Light.”
“I wish you were my mother.” Sal’s whisper seemed to echo off the walls.
“Oh, my darlin’.” The sardines fell to the floor as she grabbed him into her and held him tight. “I can be her for as long as you need me to, my dear, sweet love.”
He deserved to have a mother hold him like that, and yet I found myself not wanting it to be my mother. As if by embracing him she put herself in danger. For a moment I allowed myself to believe Elohim. That Sal’s feet clacked like cloven hooves across the ground. That he was the forked tongue, the red demon, hell every day of the week. Something to keep back behind a chain-link fence. Away from hearth and home. Away from those you love the most.
“I don’t know why you’d wanna thief for a son.”
Mom gave me one of her looks, told me to just hush now.
“What?” I shrugged. “It’s pretty obvious he stole that bowl and spoon from somewhere.”
“Oh, he didn’t steal anything.” She let go of Sal and he hated me for being the reason.
As she began to pick up the sardines with heavy sighs, I kept at it.
“If he didn’t steal ’em, where’d he get ’em? Hmm, Sal?”
“I can’t remember.” His anger was making a shadow of him, a sort of cold draft coming in under the door.
“You’re lyin’. You’re a lyin’ thief.”
“I’m not a thief.” He glared at me as if he could light me up. I believe he might’ve if Mom hadn’t been there to be disappointed in him for doing so.
I was in his path to the counter, so he gave me a hard shove to the side as he quickly grabbed the bowl and spoon, running from the kitchen with them.
“I don’t know why ya had to go and start somethin’, Fielding. Go after him.” Mom shooed me out.
From the back porch, I saw him running up the hill, into the woods. I called his name and took chase. He seemed to run forever. The hills like his own rising world. Maybe he was a prince, and he was running away to his castle. Could I follow him there? Could I keep running after the wild ruler to his kingdom, where a crown of sardines was enough?
He ran faster than me, and I struggled with what I saw. Was it a boy ahead? Or a flame burning through the land, starting quiet fires only we knew?
It was no kingdom, but the train tracks he finally stopped at.
“Why’d you follow me, Fielding?” He caught his breath like a true boy who had just run too far too fast.
I think he’d been crying, but there was too much sweat to see the difference.
“Sal, about what I said back at the house. I was bein’ stupid. I’ve just been pissed off lately. You know, with Grand and everything. I shouldn’t have taken it out on you.”
After all, that was really what my outburst was about, wasn’t it? Seeing my mother and Sal embrace so easily. The way I wanted to hold and be held by Grand. The raw strength of that very thing, revealing something of us. In the best hope, something like pretty honey drizzling from the crooks of our elbows while we apologize and say it
was all play in the hills and nothing has changed. But, of course, over and over again, everything has changed.
“Sal? I said I’m sorry.”
He looked down at the bowl and spoon still in his hands. “I really don’t remember where I got them from. But I could make up a story. Let’s imagine that you, you’re a boy—”
“I am a boy.”
“And you’re walking down the railroad tracks. Go on, walk down them.”
I stepped over on top of the tracks and, although feeling a bit foolish, began walking in place. I figured I owed it to him for starting the fight.
“Why am I walkin’ down the tracks again?”
“Because you want a shot at life.” He began to circle me. “Your father is exhausted in his overalls and dirt. You can’t sing in the big trees if you’re too tired to climb. You can’t love the day if you’re letting each one pass while you stupidly scream at the life you hate.
“Your father is nothing but a losing old man. Yet he wants you to be just like him. To be tired and losing and to work God’s green earth. But it’s not green earth. It’s the closing of passion. The defeat of zeal. It is ground that ends.
“When you say you want to be more, more than the screaming, more than the father, your mother asks you if you realize just how hard he’s worked to get this land? To raise the farm to something that can be passed down to you. ‘Do you?’ she screams at you, frightened herself, for she too has many deaths to suffer.
“You say, ‘Momma, I just want more. I want to fly like the sudden light. I want to know what it’s like to have a reason to dance. I want all the possible love.’
“She says people like us don’t dance and we don’t fly. People like us, she says, don’t get more. We take the life we are given and we say grace and glory be to God who in His merciful wisdom has granted such bliss. You hate her God and His wisdom. You hate her acceptance of that empty life. And out of all the places your father lives in you, you want to hit her, just like he does.
“You hate them both for all the things they are and for all the things they will never be. This is what you scream at her. That you hate how he wears overalls every day and that she can’t read or write. You hate how he is called boy, even by those he is elder to. You hate he will never be more than a dumb nigger and that she will never be more than a housewife in a kitchen, a kitchen she has had more bones broken in than pies baking.