The Summer That Melted Everything(3)

If the devil was going to come, I expected to see the myth of him. A demon with an asphalt shine. He’d be fury. A chill. A bad cough. Cujo at the car window, a ticket at the Creepshow booth, a leap into the depth of night.

I imagined him with reptilian skin in a suit whose burning lapel set off fire alarms. His fingernails sharp as shark teeth and cannibals in ten different ways. Snakes on him like tar. Flies buzzing around him like an odd sense of humor. There would be hooves, horns, pitchforks. Maybe a goatee.

This is what I thought he’d be. A spectacular fright. I was wrong. I had made the mistake of hearing the word devil and immediately imagined horns. But did you know that in Wisconsin, there is a lake, a wondrous lake, called Devil? In Wyoming, there is a magnificent intrusion of rock named after the same. There is even a most spectacular breed of praying mantis known as Devil’s Flower. And a flower, in the genus Crocosmia, known simply as Lucifer.

Why, upon hearing the word devil, did I just imagine the monster? Why did I fail to see a lake? A flower growing by that lake? A mantis praying on the very top of a rock?

A foolish mistake, it is, to expect the beast, because sometimes, sometimes, it is the flower’s turn to own the name.





2

… a flower which once

in Paradise, fast by the Tree of Life,

Began to bloom

—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:353–355

I ONCE HEARD someone refer to Breathed as the scar of the paradise we lost. So it was in many ways, a place with a perfect wound just below the surface.

It was a resting in the southern low of Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, where each porch had an orchard of small talk and rocking chairs, where cigarette tongues flapped over glasses of lemonade. They said the wooded hills were the fence God Himself built for us. Hills I always thought were the busiest hills in all the world. Busy rising and rolling and surrounding.

One hill could be a pine grove, quick to height and like steeples of the original church. While on another hill, you’d find meadows where grapevines hung on the edges like fallen telephone wires you could swing on with the sparks.

Sandstone was as mountain as the hills got. The sandstone rocks all seemed to remind folks of something, and so were given names like the Grinning Ass, Slain Turtle, and Betting Dragon. You could see images in any of the rock formations. More than that, you could find fossils of the past residents, like lizards and them bugs with all those ridges on the sides.

The rocks were especially outstanding on the sides of the hills where they would ledge out and cliff off with mossy turns. The trees would grow out on those ledges, their roots dangling between the crevices of rock. We all called them roots Praying Snakes. There was just something about the way they slithered across the rocks and dangled like they had a chance.

Summer in Breathed was my favorite season of all. Nothing but barefoot boys and grass-stained girls flowering beneath the trees. My favorite summer sight was those trees. Whether up in the hills or down around the houses, trees were Breathed. Some were old, and they squatted, clothed in heavy moss and time like they were enduring Neanderthals who should not still exist. Others were timelessly modern, smooth and lean and familiars to twine.

Trees were Breathed, but so were the factories—plenty of factories making everything from clothespins to camping tents. There was a coal mine at the eastern side of town and a rock quarry at the western. Fishing and swimming and baptisms could be had in the wide and deep Breathed River that eventually met up with the Ohio and from there the great Mississippi with all its fine strength and slipping song.

If you drove anywhere or walked anywhere in Breathed, you did so on lanes. Never streets, never roads, but dirt-laid lanes that each had their own story. Paved roads were something other towns did. Breathed hung onto its dirt, in more ways than one. Not even Main Lane, the main artery of the town, had been paved, though it was lined with trees and brick sidewalks that fed into brick buildings.

From Main Lane, the town unfurled into lanes of houses, and eventually lanes of farms, the farther out you got. Breathed was the combination of flower and weed, of the overgrown and the mowed. It was Appalachian country, as only Southern Ohio can be, and it was beautiful as a sunbeam in waist-high grass.

It was a good town for a boy to have come of age in. There was a small movie theater, where I had my first kiss while E.T. flew in front of the moon, and a pizza parlor with arcade games I would play until my eyes hurt from the bright, flashing screens. Most days, though, were spent on the tire swing over the river or tossing a baseball back and forth with my brother. In these moments, the gild receded and life was its most naked bliss.

What I’ve just described is the town of my heart, not necessarily the town itself, which had an underbelly that knew how to be of mood with the mud. Just as in every other small town and big city, the women cried and the men knew how to shout. Dogs were beat, children too. There weren’t always mothers to bloom identical to the rose, and more often than not, there was no picket fence to paint.

Yes, Breathed was the scar of paradise lost, and beneath the flour-and-butter drawl, there was the town’s own sort of sibilant hiss on the wind, which made you quiet and made you sense snakes.

They say I was the first one in all of Breathed to see him. I always wondered about that. If maybe I wasn’t the first one to see him, but just the first one to stop.

As I walked, I could hear the song “Cruel Summer” blaring from a boom box from the open windows of a house that smelled like rhubarb pie and Aqua Net. That was the strange collision of the decade and our small town. A crash of gingham curtains and spandex miniskirts.