That morning before I left the house, I had glanced at the old thermometer on the side of the garden shed. The mercury was at a comfortable 74 degrees. Added to that was a breeze that made fools of fans.
I was on my way home from Papa Juniper’s Market with a bag of groceries for Mom when I came upon the courthouse and saw him standing under the large tree at the front.
He was so very dark and small in those overalls, like I was looking at him through the opposite end of a telescope.
“Excuse me.” He held his hand out toward me, but did not touch. “Sorry to stop you. Do you have any ice cream in that bag?”
He had yet to look at me.
“Naw, I ain’t got no ice cream.”
I thought he should have asked for a pillow. He looked so tired, like he came from nights spent being jerked from brief moments of sleep.
“You can pick some up from Papa Juniper’s. It’s just back that way.” I turned with my finger pointed back, though we were not on Main Lane, so the store was no longer in view and what I ended up pointing at was a woman walking blistered and barefoot with her red heels in her hand.
“I got some chocolate.” I patted my jeans pocket.
He twisted his mouth off to the side like a blown-off curtain. If I would have let him, he probably would’ve gone days like that.
“C’mon.” I passed the grocery bag from one arm to the other. “You want the chocolate or not? I gotta get home.”
“I really wanted ice cream.” It was then he looked into my eyes for the first time, and it was such an intense stare, I almost overlooked his irises, as certain and green as the leaves. The stare broke only when he turned his attention to the birds above.
I looked at his ribs, which were exposed by the cut-out sides of the overalls. I could almost hear the hunger gnawing on his bones, so I reached into my pocket for the chocolate. “You best eat somethin’. You look all … deflated.”
My fingers sank with the chocolate, like I was holding a small bag of juice.
“That’s odd.” I set the bag of groceries down to open the wrapper. The chocolate oozed and dropped. I said the first thing that came to mind: “It died.”
“Dead, you say?” The boy looked down at the chocolate splattered on the ground.
“Well, it’s melted. Ain’t that death for chocolate? It ain’t even that hot.”
“Isn’t it, though?” He tilted his face to the sky, the light illuminating the green in his eyes to a yellowed shade as he stared at the sun the way every adult in my life up to that point had warned me not to.
“Isn’t it, what?”
His eyes fell slowly from the light to me as he asked, “Isn’t it hot?”
My sudden awareness of the heat was a pop, the way the bubble joins the water in a boil. I felt lit, a change told in degrees, steadily climbing upon my internal thermometer. From a distance, maybe I was a car with its headlights on. Up close, I was flames burning up.
The lukewarm past had been overtaken by the scalding now. Gone was the perfect temperature. The breeze. All replaced by an almost violent heat that turned your bones into volcanoes, your blood into the lava that yelled their eruptions. Folks would later talk about that sudden onset of heat. It was their best evidence of the devil’s arrival.
I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand. “This heat, it puts sweat on the skull. Where the hell has it come from?”
He was looking across the lane. It was then I saw bruising on his collarbone, though fading one blue shade at a time.
I swallowed, suddenly conscious of my thirst. “Whatcha doin’ here in front of the courthouse anyways?”
“I was invited.”
“Invited?” I squinted like Dad. I went on like that until a man humming “Amazing Grace” continued past us on the sidewalk. The man glanced back at the boy but never stopped his humming, though it did slow to a more concerned pace. Meanwhile, I chewed at my already short nail. “Who were you invited by?”
The boy reached into the bulging front pocket of his overalls. He worked around the bulge to pull out a folded newspaper.
My eyes darted from the invitation on its front page to him. “You don’t mean to say that you’re…”
He said nothing, neither with words nor with face. I could have pushed at him until the day’s end and never got anything of a telling expression.
“Are you sayin’ that you’re the devil?”
“It is not my first name, but it is one of them.” He reached down to scratch his thigh. It was then I noticed the denim was worn at the knees more than anywhere else. Over top of the wear were layers of dirt, as if kneeling were all the time for him.
“You’re lyin’.” I searched his head for horns. “You’re just a boy.”
His fingers twitched. “I was once, if that counts.”
If looks were to be believed, he still was just a boy. Something of my age, though from his solemn quietude, I knew he was old in the soul. A boy whose black crayon would be the shortest in his box.
I reckoned he came from even farther out in the country, where outhouses were still in use and your nearest neighbor was the field you planted.
At that moment, I felt compelled to look at his hands. I thought if he was the devil, they would be singed, charred, somehow influenced by fathering the fires of hell. What I saw were hands experienced in plucking chickens and in steering a tractor over a long haul of ground.
The clock in the courthouse tower behind him began to chime the hour. He glanced back at the clock with its white face, like a plain dinner platter. Atop the roof of the tower stood Lady Justice, poised on the balls of her feet. If it wasn’t for that clock and statue, the place of court would have been just a large wooden house with a wide wraparound porch scattered with rocking chairs and dirty ashtrays. This was what law and order looked like in Breathed. A house with a termite problem that made the gray boards like stewed wood.
The boy’s eyes fell from the clock to the tree in front and its smooth bark and pointed leaves lining the length of the pale gray branches.
“They call it the Tree of Heaven,” I told him. “It’s some sort of ail … ailanthus, Dad calls it. He says they should never have planted it here.”
“Such a name as heaven, you think everyone would plant one in their living rooms.”
“You could plant it in your livin’ room. It’d sure grow outta carpet. Them things grow anywhere. And they just keep growin’. It’s a pest.”
“Peculiar that a tree named after paradise is a pest.”
He spoke all his words in the burdened and slow pace of a pallbearer in wartime.
“Where your folks at? C’mon, I know you’re not the devil.”
From the pocket, he pulled out the bulge, which was a gray pottery bowl with five dark lines of blue circling it. It was followed by a spoon inscribed with LUKE 10:18: I SAW SATAN FALL LIKE LIGHTNING FROM HEAVEN.
“It’s a real shame you don’t have any ice cream. I have everything for it.” He held the items close to his chest.
“We might have some at the house. Ain’t no point in you standin’ here. Don’tcha know the courthouse is shut on Sundays?”
“Is it Sunday?” He held a tightness in his dark brows that stretched to his elbows.
“Yep.”
For what felt like a very long time, he made a quiet study of me. I picked up the bag of groceries and held it like a shield to my chest. Finally he asked, if it was indeed Sunday, why I wasn’t in church.
“Never am.” I shrugged. “Dad will go. He don’t make a regular thing out of it, though. He says the courtroom is his church.” I leaned in as if whispering were the only way to say, “My dad is Autopsy Bliss.”
He too whispered, reciting the last bit of the invitation: “With great faith, Autopsy Bliss.”
I made room for a man and his limping dog. Once they passed, I stepped closer to the boy. “You’re really Satan?”
“Yes.”
“The big man Lucifer?”
&
nbsp; He nodded his head.
“The villain of the story?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“If you’re the devil, then you’re the bad one. That’s just the way it is. Well, come on then.”
“Where to?”
“To meet the man who invited you.”
3
… wakes the bitter memory
Of what he was, what is, and what must be
Worse
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:24–26
FROM THE LOOKS of it, his overalls were his only wearing. Was that a year’s worth of dirt on the strap? The cuffs of the pants? How long did it take to fray the denim like that? To lose the button? To rip that hole by the knee, the biggest of them all?
The only spot not worn was the seat. Did he never sit down? Too busy getting that dirt caked into the thread. That dust settled into the pockets. In some areas, the denim was so thin, you could see his skin lifting like shadow through the thread-baring weave.
He didn’t walk like other boys. There was no bounce, no thrill of movement. I could see him low and deep, peacefully wise below the grass line of the cemetery.
His skin reminded me of when I had been woken by high-pitched screeches outside my window. I rolled out of bed, pressing my face into the screen. It was too dark to see anything, but I knew the birds were close from their battle sounds and the whooshing thud of their wings.
The next morning, a feather lay on the ground beneath my window. It was black on the tip, but the closer it got to the quill, the black began to gray into an almost hurting brown. I thought it a sore color for a feather to have. When I saw the boy, I thought it made for even sorer skin with its reddened tinge.
Once we came to the residential lanes, I watched him as he carefully studied everything from flies on roadkill to a tangle of barbed wire rusting in a field. They were poems handwritten by nature to him, and he was as fascinated with them as I would’ve been about a ticket to the World Series.
“How do you say this place?” he asked.
“Whatcha mean?”
“I mean, the name of the town. How do you say it?”
“Oh, well, most folks think it’s pronounced like the past tense of breathin’. You know, like you just breathed somethin’ in. But it’s not like that at all. Say breath. And then ed. Breath-ed. Say it so the tongue don’t recognize such a large break between Breath and ed. Breathed.”
He repeated after me.
“Yeah, just like that.”
I knew by looking at him, he was the type of boy who got up with the sunrise, already tired, and worked until the sunset, shrunk to the bone. He knew the resilience of a seed, and the vulnerabilities of it also. The blessing of a full field and the destroyed hope of a barren one.
I wondered how many times those dirt-crusted fingernails had tried to pry growth from a drought. How many times those small hands had thrown buckets of water from flooded plains. He knew how to jar and can vegetables the way I knew how to play Mario Bros. We were in the same world, yet to me he smelled of rocket fuel.
“Your eyes…” I stared at his irises, never having seen such a dark yet sparkling shade. They were like July foliage in the sun. “They’re so green.”
“They’re leaves I took as souvenirs from the Garden of Eden.” He said it so certain, I couldn’t doubt its truth.
A truck backfired. Or maybe that was just what that group of kids sounded like as they came bursting from around the corner, nearly knocking the boy over. At first I thought his hands were up in order to catch his balance. Then I realized he was reaching out to the kids. Each sleeve or arm that came close enough he tried to grab hold of but couldn’t. They were passing him by as if he should know better. As if he should know he could never be them. Joyous and free and in pure bliss.
There was someone in the group falling back, calling my name.
It was Flint, always Flint. The boy with Coke-bottle glasses and one eye lazier than the other.
“Hey, Fieldin’.” He ran in place as the others kept forward. “We’re goin’ out to the river for a swim. You comin’? Mason swears he seen an alligator in there.”
“Ain’t nothin’ but a longnose gar.” I shook my head, unimpressed.
“I told ’im.” He wearily shrugged his shoulders while his bare, dirty feet continued to pound the ground as he looked from me to the boy. “Who’s the cricket you got with ya, Fieldin’?”
The boy was looking up, his wide eyes as seemingly edgeless as the sky he tilted to. His mouth slightly opened in dazzled wonder. What drew those wide eyes? That dazzled wonder? Why, nothing more than a hawk. Just something to glance at for most, but to him it was something more. The way he looked at it made it almost holy, a sort of flying cross. The moment spiritual. He could have sat down on a lawn chair and turned it into a pew.
“This is, um, well”—I grabbed the back of my hot neck—“it’s the devil.”
Flint stopped running in place, though his arms took longer to slow down to his sides. “What’s that you say?”
“He’s the devil.”
Flint scratched his temple like his own dad was prone to do in situations of deep figuring. “Let me get this straight, Fieldin.’ You mean to tell me that this here little tick is the devil? The one come to answer your pa’s invitation?”
“That’s right.” I pulled my words close. They seemed less silly like that.
Still his laugh came. Hard and bumpy like the gravelly path that led to his trailer park. He took a step closer to the boy, clicking his tongue the way one would approach a potentially skittish pony. The boy lowered his eyes from the hawk.
Flint smiled small, like a tapping at a door. “Hey.”
The boy stared back, no tell on his face. Flint didn’t need more than that.
“Wait’ll I tell the fellas.” He pushed his thick glasses up on his nose and took off, his bare feet kicking and lifting the road dust into little clouds that hung long after he’d gone, like swarms of gnats.
“Ain’t no goin’ back now. Flint will make sure the whole town knows who you say you are, so you better be prepared to be just that.”
The boy nodded.
“C’mon then. We’re almost there.” I pointed to the KETTLE LANE sign before us. “My house is at the end of here. There’s an actual kettle buried somewhere on this lane. They say if you find the kettle, you can drink your way to immortality. If I find it, I’ll let you have a sip.”
“No, thank you.”
“Don’tcha wanna live forever?”
“I’m the devil. I am already forever.”
Any further conversation was doubted by the start of a John Deere in the nearby yard. Instead of trying to compete with its blaring rumble, we continued down the lane in silence.
The lane was drenched in sunlight. The trees put their shade down in the large lawns of the large houses that made up Kettle Lane.
The first house on the lane belonged to our neighbor, Grayson Elohim, and was part of an inheritance from Elohim’s banker father.
As we came upon the orange-red brick, we saw Elohim eating on the porch. His feet, too short to reach the floor, hung barefoot. His lunch consisted of macaroni salad and a raw onion sandwich. No meat would be found on his table. At that time, he was the town’s only vegetarian. I used to think this put his sharp teeth to waste.
He ate at the large, dark dining table on his white porch every day for all his meals. The heavily polished table was set for two, with a yellowed lace tablecloth, while a radio in the background played violin. He’d go through the gentlemanly motions of dining with his wife in mind.
At one time he had been engaged, but his fiancée drowned in 1956. Though her body was recovered from the Atlantic and buried in Breathed, he lived as if she were by his side and not low and deep and slowly disappeared by the soft power of the worms.
He showed me her picture once in his red leather scrapbook. A tall woman with lines like string, a very white string at that. As far as loveliness goes
, she had something like it. Enough to be far too lovely for an ugly little man like Elohim.
He was named Grayson, for being the son with the gray eyes. In his porridge-lumped face, his gray eyes gave possibility to his high-rising forehead and low-hanging chin. He wore his ashen hair long and slung in a low, limp ponytail. He had started balding in his late twenties following the sinking of the Andrea Doria. By ’84, and in his late fifties, he was completely bald on top, except for this strange growth of hair that grew above his forehead like a limp horn. He turned it into two by parting the meager strands, wearing them long to the corners of his mouth.
“Hey, Mr. Elohim.” I threw my hand up.
“Why, hey there, Fielding.” He spooned more macaroni salad onto his plate.
When I turned to introduce the boy, he was gone.
“Over here.” The boy’s hushed voice came from the other side of a nearby tree.
“Who you talkin’ to, Fielding?” Elohim stood up from the table, craning his brief neck in the tree’s direction.
I did my best to urge the boy out, but still he stayed behind the tree.
“I thought you come by yourself.” Elohim cleaned his teeth with a toothpick. “If there’s anyone else, you come on out now. I don’t like hidden things.”
The boy wouldn’t budge. Not even when I tugged his bony arm. When I asked him why he looked so afraid, he nodded toward Elohim.
“You ’fraid of ’im ’cause he’s a midget?” I asked quiet enough so Elohim wouldn’t hear me call him anything other than short. “He won’t harm ya none.”
The boy chewed his lip. “You sure?”
“He’s never hurt me, and I’ve known ’im my whole life. That’s sayin’ somethin’, ain’t it?”
“Come on out,” Elohim called. “I won’t bite.”
I smelled a whiff of urine as the boy took a small step, still holding tight to the trunk of the tree.
“Can’t see ya.” Elohim wiped his mouth with his napkin.
After a deep breath, the boy stepped out from the trunk completely, though he had stuck his arms inside his overalls and seemed to lose his neck as his chin stayed pressed to his chest. It was as if he were trying to retreat into the overalls, which were wet between the legs.