The Summer That Melted Everything (14 page)

“What else would you call it but a place for them and their damage to live forever upon you?”

“It is none of your damn business anyways, boy.” Her roar shook her dangling earrings.

“Have you ever heard of the paradise shelduck?”

“Fuck you,” she whispered through clenched teeth, her hand beating at her chest as if she couldn't quite catch her breath.

“The rule is female ducks are less colorful than their male counterparts. The paradise shelduck is the exception. While the male has a boring black head and an even more boring gray body, the female has a head of bright white with a body of chestnut and gold. The female paradise is a rarity in the duck world. She beats the beauty of the male.

“You, Fedelia Spicer, are meant to be paradise. Look at the white hair there at your roots. As white as the head of the female shelduck. But these colors of the other women. They feather you away from paradise. You must let go of them.” He reached up to a ribbon, but she grabbed his arm.

“I can't.” Her voice tore at the edges. “Don't you understand?”

She sat there in the chair looking so fragile, I thought if I touched her with my little finger, she would instantaneously break like a plate being struck by a sledgehammer. Mom tried to comfort her, doing her best to keep Fedelia's false lashes from falling with the tears.

Dad had long returned from the porch and had listened quietly to the exchange between Fedelia and Sal. Now he placed his hand on my shoulder and said, “Fielding, why don't you and Sal go be a couple of little boys for a while.”

I waved for Sal to follow me outside. Dad stopped him with just a finger gently pressed into his chest. “You are unusual, aren't you, son?” He looked down into Sal's eyes, waiting for a big answer. All he got was a small shrug.

“Well,” Dad sighed, “don't be gone too long.”

We went out the back door, and once we were through the yard and into the woods, I told Sal the sheriff wanted to see him.

“What about?”

“They think you've been kidnapped.”

“By you guys?”

“Naw, by kidnappers. Were you?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I'm kidding. Don't be so serious, Fielding.”

With a smile he took off, his head start giving him a lead we traded to the tree house. Granny followed, staying to sniff the trees below as we climbed up the slats into the house.

“This ain't good racin' weather.” I swept back the strands of hair stuck to my forehead.

“What are these?” He was over by the pair of handprints on the wall.

“That's my hand on the right, and Grand's is on the left. We made 'em years ago.” I felt my finger as I remembered the knife and shoelaces.

As he continued to stare at the prints, even placing his own over mine, I began to toss through the board games that me and Grand kept in the tree house. Me and Sal never did decide on one of those games. We got to talking about movies instead, and I found myself explaining the plot of
Ghostbusters.
Just when I was about to tell him about the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man, he shushed me.

I didn't hear what he did, but still I followed him down the slats and continued to follow him through the woods, the dry shrubbery and briars scratching my legs. As I stopped to wipe small dots of blood off my shins, I heard the low cries. It was then I saw Elohim's rusty can. A few feet from it lay a pile of gray.

Please, God,
I prayed as I ran to her. Already I felt the tearing inside myself, and by fear alone, I knew home would never be the same again.

I fell down by her side, unsure of where to touch her, for she seemed in pain everywhere.

“Oh, Granny. Hey, old girl. How much of the poison you think she got?”

“Enough.” Sal gently fell to his knees beside me.

“What do we do?”

Her tremors became spasms that convulsed her whole body. Sal would later tell me I screamed for God. All I really remember shouting for was help.

He stood, wiping his hands on his red shorts as he walked away. I asked him where he was going, but he didn't answer. I tried to soothe Granny by saying all would be fine as I scratched behind her ears, her favorite place. It was hard to avoid the thick saliva dribbling from her mouth. Over and over again, she jerked, and in the sharpness each jerk was the corner of so many things I just kept running into.

“Sal, where are you?” A crackle of twigs. “There you are.”

He held up the revolver.

“What you gonna do with that? Sal?”

“She's dying, so it isn't a killing. It's what has to be done.”

“No.” I threw myself over her convulsing body. “She'll be okay. She just needs to throw it up. Yeah, that's it, throw up the poison.” I wasn't sure how to induce vomiting in a dog, so I started to pinch her throat. The sticky saliva clung to my hand. I moved down and massaged her stomach as I pleaded with her to vomit. “Please, Granny. Just throw it up. Please.”

All she did was look up at me with the same eyes she had used to beg for table scraps. Now begging for something else.

“Why force her to suffer when you can take it all away?” He held the gun out to me.

“I can't kill her, Sal. She's Granny. Like a real granny.”

“You're not going to kill her. Death has already started. You're not initiating anything that isn't already there. If you're waiting for God to take care of it, He won't. He doesn't do that. By letting her suffer, you risk being God.

“People always ask, why does God allow suffering? Why does He allow a child to be beaten? A woman to cry? A holocaust to happen? A good dog to die painfully? Simple truth is, He wants to see for Himself what we'll do. He's stood up the candle, put the devil at the wick, and now He wants to see if we blow it out or let it burn down. God is suffering's biggest spectator.

“Will you wait, Fielding? Will you wait to see for yourself what happens? If you're strong enough to watch suffering without laying down the pain, then you've no place among men, Fielding. You are a spectator on the cusp. You are a god-in-training.” He kneeled and wrapped his arm around my shoulder.

“Just give me some room.” I shrugged him off. “I need to think.”

He stood back, the gun dangling at his side as if the choice were so casual.

“Hey, old girl.” I scratched her neck, and her tail wagged as best as it could. Only a dog could show such love in such pain.

If only she could've told me it was okay to pick up the gun, to end her suffering. It's having to make the decision all alone and them not being able to tell you it's the right one. All I could see was the fear in her eyes. The fear of not knowing what was happening to her.

I thought of all the things she had planned for the rest of the day. I could see her almost saying,
I've got to get up from here. I've got to go home. Watch Mom fix dinner. Beg for some table scraps. Watch Dad sit and think. Think with him. Watch my boy yawn and go to bed with him so we can get up in the morning together.

All the things she always did. Looking in her eyes, I could see these were all the things she wanted so desperately to get back to.

I hated the way she looked at me as she lay there. Out of all the world, she looked at me, and I wanted to say,
Look at the trees. It's the last time. Look at the sky. It's the last time. Look there, at that ant crawl the grass blade. It will be the last time you see it. That you see any of this.

There was something about her eyes that made me see her death as final. There was no place after, her tears said. This was it. Dying animals have that effect. I think because you never see them in church preparing for an afterlife. You never see them wearing crosses around their necks, or lighting candles in Mass. It all seems so final with them. Their dying is not moving on, it's going out.

I wiped my eyes with my fists before asking for the gun. Sal didn't say anything. Just placed it in my hand. I wasn't sure if distance mattered. I placed the end of the barrel at the side of her trembling skull, beneath her ear, just in case it did.

My hand was surprisingly still. Though I don't know how.

I could no longer breathe through my stuffed nose, so I drew in deep breaths through my mouth. I looked at Sal, so prepared. I hated him for not crying. I closed my eyes and lightly felt the trigger, its slight curve like a smooth tooth, a fang, ready to bite. I flexed my hand. I needed all my muscle. The gun was the heaviest thing I'd ever held up to that point in my life.

When Granny started to whimper, I threw the gun down and ran. It felt like the only thing I could do. On the way, I tripped over the can and spilled the poison. Even with that, I kept running before stopping by a tree. The sound of the gun made me.

As if I'd been shot myself, I fell to the ground, curling up into myself. I closed my eyes and rocked as I sang an old song Mom sang to me over the cradle.

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.

“Fielding?”

I opened my eyes to Sal standing over me, the gun held by the smoking barrel in his hand. “She's still now. Like water healed of its ripples. She's calm and at peace.”

“I couldn't do it, Sal.”

“It's all right, Fielding.” He sat down beside me. I heard the gun plop off to the ground on the other side of him.

When he brought his hand up to his mouth to bite his nail, I saw the blood on the inside of his wrist.

He saw me staring and lowered his hand. “It got on there from when I was checking for her pulse.”

“I don't want another dog.” I wiped my nose hard on my arm.

“I never said anything.”

“Folks always say that. ‘We'll get ya another.' I don't want another one.”

“All right.”

For a long time, the only sound made was that of me finding my way back to breathing through my nose.

“Sal?” I took a deep breath. “Not doin' somethin', am I a god-in-trainin', like ya said?”

He squinted, and I thought how like Dad he looked when he did that.

“No. You're just a boy. A boy holds a gun but cannot fire it, even when he knows it is the right thing to do. A god would never hold the gun in the first place. So you're a man-in-training. And on the day you are asked to hold the gun once more, you will have to decide whether to stay the child … or finally become the man.”

 

10

A summer's day, and with the setting sun

Dropt from the zenith, like a falling star

—
MILTON,
PARADISE LOST
1:744–745

W
HEN I THINK
of her as a grandmother, as old as I was young, with gray hair and a shawl around her frail shoulders to keep out the chill, what happened in those woods becomes something much harder to bear. Granny was my first loss, my first emptying. She was the something that matters for eternity.

I haven't had a dog since, though the neighbor boy has his mutt. The other day, I watched the two of them together. The dog did his best to catch the ball the boy threw. I tried to teach the boy to throw better, the way Grand taught me.

I didn't show the boy I framed his photograph, but he saw it just the same and smiled a little too much. I even told him so. He asked if I wanted to drop by his trailer for dinner. He said his mom was making her famous meat loaf and she always made too much of it, he said. I got to thinking about my place at their table.

“Say, kid, I never see your old man around. Where's he at?”

I knew it wasn't going to be a clean answer, the way he slowly dragged his finger across the dirt on my kitchen counter.

“Mom says he's in the jungle, findin' the cure for cancer.” He kept his eyes on the counter. “Even though he died of it six years ago.”

“Jesus.”

He looked up at me. “So you comin' to dinner?”

How the hell could I refuse after that? Besides, it was meat loaf, and I haven't had meat loaf since my mother's, but when I got to their yellow trailer across the road from mine, it was too damn nice. The smell of dinner. The young mother in a dress. The table set and the boy and his dog just smiling away. To tell you the truth, I was a little scared. I don't know how to be in that world anymore. That world of dinner and niceness. So I ran away as fast as I could. I sat there in the dark of my trailer while the light of theirs shined a yellow glow.

A while later the boy came over, carrying a plate of food. I didn't go to the door when he knocked, so he placed it on the milk crate and headed back home. I opened the door before he got too far away.

“Why you like me so much, kid?”

I didn't say it loud, and for a moment I thought he didn't hear me, but then he stopped and stood there. He was looking across the road at his own trailer, at his mother there in the window doing the dishes in the warmth of the light.

“I remember one Halloween my dad dressed up like an old bum.” He softly smiled. “He looked like you.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something. When I didn't, he walked across the road and into his trailer.

I sat down in the doorway of my own and stared into that clear shot of their kitchen, where I could see the boy give his mom a kiss on the cheek. He stayed there by her side, helping her wash the dishes, sharing suds between their fingers.

The mutt, left outside, came smelling the meat loaf. I removed the foil and set the plate on the ground, letting him have the meal that was too nice for me. Once full, he yawned and lay down on his side. I had to look away because it was how we had laid Granny in her grave. I believe that dirt from burying her is still under my fingernails.

We used some loose pieces of sandstone to break up the dry dirt. It was evening by the time we left the woods. We forgot the sheriff wanted to see Sal. When we got home, we told Dad Granny had been hit by a car. If we'd told him about the poison, then we would've had to tell him about the gun, after which we would've been punished for having the gun in the first place.