The Summer That Melted Everything(12)

“Welcome, welcome.” She had a drawl like raw vegetables. Hard. Rooted. Not yet ripe.

“You know who you’re huggin’ right now, Mom?” I sat the groceries down on the porch floor and leaned back into the rail as she smothered Sal in her bosom.

My mother was always in dresses then. I don’t think I ever saw anything else in her closet in those days. Her nylon hosiery was as pants as she got. I think because she was always in the house, she was doing her best to be that quintessential housewife. The one in the styled dress that fell full-skirted under her always-worn apron. That day it was the plum gingham apron that she’d made herself with her own chicken-scratch embroidery.

“Oh, he ain’t the devil. He’s too short.” She kissed his cheeks, leaving her wine-colored lipstick smeared there.

She had that tendency to be overaffectionate. It was almost like a nervous tic. It was the staying in the house that did it. She thought if she loved you enough, you’d never want to leave her, and then the house wouldn’t seem so lonely as it could be to her at times, when it was just her and the vacuum.

“Mom, what does bein’ short have to do with it?”

“There are some awful tall men who go to hell.” She released Sal to adjust her shoulder pads. “Just look at Cousin Lloyd. With all them tall men, the leader of hell is gonna have to be tall or else all these tall men are gonna be lookin’ down. No one much respects things they look down on.”

Just then my brother Grand pressed his face into the screen of the back door, his skin popping small through the net of wire.

“That’s my older brother Grand,” I told Sal. “No doubt you recognize him?”

Sal shook his head.

“Hey, Grand, come out here and meet the devil so he can recognize you.”

“The devil, eh?” Grand opened the screen door and stepped out onto the porch. “Hi, Дьявол.”

“He’s always in the papers.” I smiled with everything I had at my brother. “They say he’s gonna go pro.”

“Pro at what?” Sal asked.

“Baseball. He’s the best anybody has ever seen.”

“Easy, little man.” Grand put on his team ball cap, lowering its lavender bill. “You’ll raise the hopes so high, I’ll never reach.”

Grand had a vernal face of clean, almost transparent skin, like freshly washed windows. His appearance was his own, but he got there by first taking after Dad. Hair dark brown like a wet branch. Eyes blue like the hill fog. His thick brown brow proved a thoughtful underlining to his forehead, upon which stretched a lone wrinkle, deep for his age.

Something about his eyes made me think of Russia. Perhaps because they were so large, the largest country in the world of his face. Then again, knowing what I know now, maybe it was because his eyes were so like matryoshka dolls, hiding the real him within boxes of lacquered mystery. You’d open one box and find another just the same. No matter how many boxes you took away, there was always one more.

Because I told him his eyes were Russian, he decided to learn the language and would at the most unexpected times drop Russian words in a saline accent Tolstoy would have praised, for an Ohioan at least. It was because of this habit we kept a Russian-to-English dictionary on the coffee table within easy reach.

I often found myself opening that dictionary and trying to learn all that foreign. Mom and Dad didn’t bother with learning it. It was enough for them to be able to look the meaning up quickly, if at all. But for me and Grand, the foreign was something we had an innate desire to learn.

“Kind of young to be the devil, ain’tcha?” Grand smiled at Sal.

Grand was traditionally handsome. His hair was not worn long and loose like mine or his friends’. His was short and tight like that of a father in the 1950s.

I think about the way the world wanted him to be. As classic as a front porch post. Clean direction, straight up and down. But really he was as wild and as twisting as the honeysuckle vines. Bending and exploding in uneven wonders. Moveable and crooked, crossing in awesome curves and beautiful bends.

As far as small town fame goes, my brother was a star. The boy who always did what was expected of him in every aspect of his life. He looked like a heartbreaker, so he broke hearts. He looked like a brain, so he never missed making the honor roll, and he looked like an athlete, so he became the one Breathed pinned its Major League hopes to.

As fate would have it, Grand was born with an arm for pitching with a precise windup and an acceleration and follow-through that everyone said would get him to the Majors.

His forkballs and curves were guaranteed strikes that palsied the batter into a trembling swing. In the games of light rainfall, he would throw a God-given spitter the ump wouldn’t be able to shout illegal on. His cutters might’ve been a swarm of midges, for the bats hit the air more than those pitches, while his four-seam fastballs were always food for the catcher’s mitt.

Grand was the very meaning of his name. I wanted to be just like him. There wasn’t a sport I was really great at, but I could climb. That was why Elohim asked me to join him on his jobs. He’d seen me climbing the tree in front of his house. As I was climbing, one of the branches broke beneath my foot. I was quick and fell only for the second it took to find another branch. I didn’t panic. I merely accepted the fact. That particular branch was gone, and I had to find me another. It was because of this that Elohim said I had the feet of a steeplejack.