They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,
Through Eden took their solitary way.
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 12:648–649
COOLER TEMPERATURES AND regret ultimately equaled the recovery of the town. Yes, the murderers of Sal really did regret. Some even regretted it enough to hurry to the grave. Brains on the wall. Gun in the hand. That was how they found one of them. Another rolled a cigarette with some cyanide. His whole room smelled like almonds because of it.
Otis hadn’t been part of the mob. He found out Dovey had only after the fact. He didn’t know what to say to her nor she to him. Those moments after the death of their child, Dovey and Otis were husband and wife unable to come together and heal. That distance between them led her to Elohim. It led to the night she said she was going to take a bath and asked Otis if he could hand her a bar of her homemade soap out of the closet.
Later, in the cold water of the tub, she shoved the bar of soap down her throat. Internal cleansing, I suppose. It’s said they didn’t even have to use more soap when they washed her body. Bubbles and suds came by just plain water and the friction of her skin. The dirtiest, cleanest woman ever to be buried.
After her death, Otis no longer walked the nights with the mirror, hoping to see his son. Too much had been lost, and the mirror gleamed from the top of a pile in the junkyard while his shorts and shirts got longer and his muscles turned to fat atop the sofas he sat on and the potato chips he ate.
A large number of the mob chose suicide by bottle. The sale of whiskey and its kin bled upward in Breathed.
There were a few of the folks who seemed to manage.
Did we? Me, Mom, and Dad?
Losing Sal was different than it was with Grand. The tissues weren’t all over tables, floors, beds. Did we even open the new box in the hall? Sometimes I think not having tears meant we cried even more.
It was all that death. It made our eyes unable to produce the grief we felt. We were shell-shocked. Walking stiffs. If we ate, I don’t remember. We must’ve, though, for none of us died of starvation. If we slept, I don’t remember that either. I know both Mom and Dad died tired. As I am dying tired. Maybe that’s what got us. The inability to sleep because nightmares and dreams became alike, as we were gladdened by the sight of our ghosts but haunted by them at the same time.
Mom didn’t work through Sal’s death. There was no cleaning out already clean shelves. Padding already plump sofa cushions. House and home became a place she was rarely in.
She stopped wearing dresses. Too many edges to catch, I guess. There was also the singeing to consider. She was pants from then on out. Polyester, corduroy, denim. Pants, pants, pants. I lost something of my mother when she lost her dresses. That woman in the kitchen. Floating here and there, as light as the flour on her hands.
In pants she got heavier. She stayed thin but got heavier like she was attached to the ground. One grave on her right, one grave on her left, both pulling her down with them. She was veiled, darkened over. The shadow of our family. Of herself. No more guzzling the sweet syrup of the canned pears she’d open like our little secret when it was just me and her in the kitchen. No more kitchen at all. No more aprons. No more hair tied up in strings. No more Dad pulling on those tails and making her laugh.
Dad.
I don’t think he made her laugh again. Maybe he tried. When I wasn’t there. When it was just them and pillows. Maybe he wanted to when he sat there, eyes squinted, arms folded, legs crossed. He just didn’t know how to be the man he once was. The man who had a son named Grand. A son named Fielding. A son named Sal.
After Sal’s death, Dad didn’t fall into T-shirts and pajamas, the way he had when Grand died. Instead, Dad looked the part of who he once was. Three-piece suits. Shaven face. Even added a pocket watch. I suppose to have something certain to look at when his uncertainty got too much for him. Something to see for himself in the palm of his hand. Yes, he looked the part, but he wasn’t it. Not anymore.
Conversation with him became like dragging something out. You had to put hooks in and keep pulling, pulling until he spoke. And then you wished you hadn’t, because his tone alone was like lying down in a coffin and having the lid nailed shut. Talking with him was working with the gravedigger, and sometimes you had to get away from the cemetery, which meant I had to get away from him. I would too, at seventeen. I’d just up and leave my parents.
Or were they just people who looked like my parents? Maybe my mother and father burned that day with Sal, and I walked away with their ashes.
And who was I? Who am I? The boy who met the devil and met hell at the same time. I’m not saying it was Sal’s fault. Of course it wasn’t.
It was Dad’s.
Without his invitation, I would not meet Sal in front of the courthouse. I would not take him home. No journalists would come. Grand would not open his veins and try to bleed Ryker out. There would be no fire. There would be no best friend in its flames. There would be no man I would have to kill.
Yes, Dad, you started it all.
I should address what legally happened to those who took part in Sal’s murder. They were rounded up and charged. The devil was put on trial, though there were no horns, no pitchforks either. It was not one strange face indicted, but many familiar ones. The man who sold us all insurance, the woman who ran the church raffle, and the couple whose cake we ate at their fortieth wedding anniversary the previous April.
The man who fixed my tire when it went flat in front of his house, and his older sister who bandaged my knee when I fell. The guy who was said to have the warmest handshake, and his wife who fed the stray cats in the neighborhood.
They were not walking caves of nocturnal demons, scared of the sunlight and fresh air. In fact, the way they all went into court, they looked like cotton curtains of the sunniest, breeziest, most welcoming windows in all the world. They came not from underground lairs but from homes with flowers in vases and cookies in the oven. They were men who held the door open for the ladies who thanked them as they passed through. And in alphabetical order, the jury found each one of them not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.
Dad was not the man prosecuting them. He was the one defending them. When he first told me and Mom about it, I screamed at him. How could he defend them? The murderers of Sal? It’s like the man I knew all those years was just one long weekend away from the real man who burned garter snakes Monday through Friday.
For the months of the trial, I let go of my father. Maybe some of it was my wanting to let go of myself.
If I didn’t have to be me, then it was someone else who lost so much that summer. Someone else who saw how red his brother’s blood was. Someone else who lost their best friend. It was someone else who killed a man—a bad man, but a man nonetheless. It was someone else, and I was okay with being just that.
Take me away from this Fielding Bliss.
To be someone else. Bottle after bottle, I try to be just that. Pill after pill, restless sleep after restless sleep, fuck after fuck. But still I sober to myself, still I wake to the reaching abyss.
The same abyss that reached for us all. For Dad, for Mom, for Grand, Elohim, and of course Sal. That abyss that always wins.
Dad was walking the edge of it during those months of the trial. I knew he didn’t want to defend them. I also knew he would do everything to see them found not guilty. Because of this, I would never tell my father I loved him again.
The whole situation was made worse by the journalists who came to Breathed, this time not for the heat but to report on the progress of the case. I looked out for Ryker. He never came. Don’t know what I would’ve done if he had. Maybe led him to Grand’s grave. Maybe shown him I know how to fire a gun now. What’s one more murder on my conscience?
A few of the reporters shoved a mike into my face and asked how I felt. Seventy-one years later, and I’m still answering. Is anyone still listening?
I hated the reporters. I hated their questions. I hated the trial. I hated the smell of melting flesh still in the air. I hated the echo of the gun lasting eternal. Gone were the hills of my youth. Gone were the trees. The houses I had known, the people I had loved. Gone, gone, gone with a town that became a place behind a burning door, down a long hallway, and behind an evermore burning door.
I watched my father walk to the courthouse every day, hated him every day a little more. I needed to see exactly what I was hating, so that last day I followed him to the courtroom and listened to him deliver his closing statement:
“All the little choices we make, what shirt to wear for the day, what to eat for dinner, what movie to watch come Friday night, they are all rehearsals for the bigger choices of our lives, like what captains we will be when the brakes go out and we rocket full speed ahead.
“But even with all the rehearsing, there can come along someone who makes us forget our God-given right to choose. It is the inability to choose by our own will that lessens us all. It is disease to our sanity, which sickens our good sense until we are the victims of choices we would not normally have been in the company of.
“This is exactly what happened during the course of the summer of 1984. These people lost their right to choose, and in that lost their sanity like sweat in hot bathwater. By the twenty-first of September, they were severed from themselves as completely as they were tied to Mr. Grayson Elohim. Like puppets in the master’s claws, they twitched when he told them to twitch. They stepped when he told them to step. They growled when he told them to growl.
“Grayson Elohim had the genealogy of a tablecloth, but over the course of one summer, he became God. At first, his ideas tumbled as dry and harmless as bones from his mouth, but somewhere along the way, his words became the great dinosaurs before the fossils. Yes. The form had gotten its function back. And his function was to orchestrate panic through the chorus of fear. Fear of the boy with color in his skin. Fear of the devil in the skin of a boy. He sang over and over again, fear, fear, fear like a lullaby laying their sense down in the thorns disguised as roses.
“You may say this level of manipulation would never happen to you, members of the jury. But how many times have you been convinced to buy something on television that you don’t need? How many times have you done something you didn’t want to do, but did anyways because someone told you to? How many times has your choice fallen second to the choice of someone else?
“This is the year 1984 we’re talking about. The year George Orwell said we would be convinced two and two makes five. He proved through story, mind is controllable. These people have proved through reality no different.
“What these poor souls were desperate for was a light. But the thing about light is it all looks the same when you’re in the dark, so you can’t tell if what powers that light is good or if it is bad, because the light blinds you to the source of its power. All you know is that it saves you from the darkness. That’s all his followers knew. They were in the dark of their own private pain, and then this Elohim comes along and he’s shining so bright.
“They reached for that brightness, and while the light distracted them, while it comforted them in its false rescue, the dark power behind it did its work, and before any of them knew it, they were not being saved by the light, they were being changed by it. They were being controlled by it. By this Grayson Elohim.”
In the gesture of spitting on Elohim’s grave, Dad dramatically spit on the floor before throwing his arms up as he boomed, “How can you call them guilty? When they were away from themselves. Temporarily gone. These people, your family, your friends, your neighbors, possibly you under the right circumstances. Away from themselves.
“Haven’t you ever been away from yourself? Only to come home and find a mess has been made in your absence? A mess you need help to clean up. Not to be punished for but to be helped with. Won’t you help your family now? Your friends? Your neighbors? Yourself?
“Grayson Elohim is the murderer, the real murderer, and he is already gone and buried. Isn’t it time we put the shovels down instead of digging more holes? The more holes we dig, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the less solid ground any of us will have to stand on.”
Later that night, Dad came home victorious from the courthouse. You would never have known it. The way his head hung, the way his feet dragged, the way his eyes hardly knew who he was. He went into his study and took down the plain wooden cross from off the wall. With it, he went to the back porch, where he sat down on the steps.
I watched him turn the cross over in his hands. His hair had become more gray than brown, like tree branches covered in ash. His tie was out of his vest, as if he no longer cared if it played noose.
When I sat beside him, he didn’t notice. That was Dad from then on out. The man who was sat beside, but was always alone.
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.
The boy good at escaping.
Or was it?
No one knew if it was in fact Sal or not. Sometimes I’d look at the picture and think the overalls were different. Too much grass stain, not enough dirt. Was the boy in the picture shorter than Sal? He was shorter than the shovel leaning against the wall behind him, and I remembered Sal always being taller. Maybe it was just the camera angle. Maybe it was that light that blocked out his face.
I’d look at that light, squint into its brightness, and think I saw Sal’s eyes looking up at those birds just as he always had. After all, that’s how I knew Sal was no devil. Because of the way he looked at the birds. Not as an angel who once flew, but as a boy who so wished he could.
We buried what was left of Sal on Reflection Hill, next to Grand. Grand’s effigy saw him carved in his baseball uniform. A ball in his pitching hand. A glove on his left. Sal was carved in overalls. A weed daisy in one hand, nothing in the other. Two stone sculptures that did not represent the boys lying beneath them, but rather our own pure ignorance of who they were. For all the ways we knew them, we knew them not at all. They were deep water, and all we could cling to were the baseball uniform and the overalls floating on the surface.
Fedelia took over the shoe factory from Mom. I sure as shit didn’t want it. It would be sold before Fedelia died. Fedelia who had stayed in Breathed for the rest of her life. Eventually remarrying. Happily. Ever. After.
We didn’t go to her wedding. None of us ever returned to Breathed again. Maybe it was the same problem that faced Adam and Eve when they lost their Garden of Eden. Breathed was a paradise lost to us.
It was the summer that melted everything, and as Dad, Mom, and I drove out of Breathed for the last time, the puddles splashed beneath us. These puddles were from the rain, but to me, well, I’ve always thought they were the puddles of everything that had melted.
There were the puddles for all the tangible things like chocolate and ice cream. Then there were the puddles for all those things that lived inside us. Auntie’s anger. Mom’s fear. Dad’s faith. Grand’s life.
There was a puddle for Dresden. A puddle for Granny. And one for the boy who would change us all. Sal. A puddle that never would’ve been if not for the puddle of the town’s common sense.
As for that last puddle, the one that splashed the most. That was the puddle of my innocence, the splashes still falling in the past as they are still falling now, as they will continue to fall for that eternal always, in a pooling water, ferrying me back.