The Summer That Melted Everything(25)

“Devil!”

Elohim was pointing at Sal from across the lane, his arm looking like a trembling sword. “He’ll make you ill, mother-to-be. His touch is the layin’ on of the end. It is death.”

With tears still in her eyes from Sal’s story, Dovey yanked his hand from her stomach. “Don’t—don’t touch me.”

I had never seen a woman look so frightened as she wrapped her arms around her belly. It was as if that whole moment between her and Sal had never happened. I suppose when the life of your child is threatened, you don’t hesitate. When someone shouts devil, you shield against the horns.

As Elohim continued shouting, Dovey quickly turned to take a step, but the toe of her tennis shoe caught the uneven brick in the walk.

All those years of exercising and that experience of jumping up in the air and landing so agile and safe had abandoned her. Falling will do that. It’ll dumb your landing, your ability to catch yourself. Her hands flew up in the air as her back arched and her belly led the way down. It hit first, her belly, in a dull sound as it pushed in on contact with the hard brick. Her face down after, smacking against the brick in a sickening thud.

A woman shrieked about the baby. I didn’t know who, because I was like everyone else, looking at Dovey and the blood on her face. I’m not even sure where it was all coming from. It started at the top of her forehead, but that could’ve just been the spread from her gushing nose. All I know is that she wore the blood like a mask, and it dangled in drops from her chin before falling down to her stomach, where it landed in the half-moon shapes of broken thumbnails.

I heard someone shouting for the sheriff, for the doctor, for God. Dovey just sat there, her hands anxiously gripping her stomach as if trying to feel the baby’s heartbeat with her fingers.

Otis looked lost. He kept looking down at his muscles as if to say, Come on, do something. But they lazed in their size. He suddenly looked as if he regretted ever lifting a dumbbell in the first place. They had not prepared him for what to do for a fallen wife and child. They had not prepared him to keep that from happening, and at this he frowned into his abs.

“Help her up, Otis,” someone from the crowd ordered. It was his job, they said when someone tried to do it for him.

He squatted down as if preparing to perform a dead lift. With his arms around Dovey’s hips, he lifted her up. She was still gripping her stomach. I don’t think she even realized she was being raised. The blood from her nose kept at it as if it had been waiting a long time to gush. She looked at Sal, a bit drunkenlike. Then her eyes widened in that mask of blood.

“I know what it feels like now.” Her front tooth, loosened in the fall, flopped against her lip like a piece of tissue. “I know what it feels like to fall from the seven millionth hand.” And then she laughed. She laughed delirious and sick and sad. Self-shattering through sound.

“Dovey.” Otis’ leg muscles tightened as if at any moment he was going to have to run away from her. “Please, Dovey, stop laughin’ like that.”

She did stop, though I preferred her laughter to the screams that followed.

Over and over again, she was already fearing the worst. Otis led her away, saying the doctor would check her out and that everything was going to be just fine. She didn’t believe a word he said.

As one organism, the town watched Otis and Dovey until they disappeared around the corner. Then in near unison, the town turned back to me first, then Sal.

“I seen him push her,” a voice came like nails on a chalkboard. “Pushed her down.”

“Yeah, he did. I seen it too.” Raspy and so sure.

Elohim was still shouting, hopping from one foot to the other, yelling about devils and death. He smiled when the crowd took a step toward us. Another step. Another smile. Fists were bunching up at sides until knuckles went white. Necks were being cracked. Men were pushing up their sleeves. Women flung their purses up into the crooks of their arms, getting them out of the way.

I watched as one woman tied her feathered hair back out of her face while the man beside her shot his arms out from his shoulders the way a boxer walks to the ring.

Mom had been right. The heat was making people behave on their most terrible side. Maybe it even gave them the confidence to act foolishly, rashly, without real reason. Hands in such heat bloom to fists. Fists are the flora of the mad season.

“He didn’t do nothin’.” I realized I was trembling. “Just stay back. Y’hear?”

“He pushed her down.” A small voice from a small old lady who spoke for them all when she pointed at Sal and said, as soft as a hill flower, “He’s bad.”

“Just stay back. I’ll tell my dad on y’all. He’s Autopsy Bliss, in case some of you don’t know. He’s a lawyer, and if you do anything, he’ll put you in prison.”

“Devil.” One of them pointed not at Sal, but at me.

“But I’m not—”

“Devil.”

That wasn’t what was supposed to be part of my life as Fielding Bliss. No one ever said you’ve got to prepare to be hated. You’ve got to prepare for the yelling and the anger. You have got to prepare how to survive being the guilty one, even in innocence. And yet, there I was, sharing the horns with Sal.

I remember how a kid no more than seven started practicing his punches. His mother patted his head. “That’s good, son. That’s real good.”