The Summer That Melted Everything(74)

“I’m sorry, Mr. Elohim. I didn’t mean—”

“My father was a tall man,” he interrupted my apology, never taking his eyes off the sky above him. “My mother was a tall woman. By measurement alone, they were greatly disappointed in me. They were not people who were well prepared to be disappointed, as they so often weren’t in their comfortable lives. They didn’t much know what to do with it, with me, this letdown and disruption to their comfort.

“They weren’t vicious parents, they never screamed in my face that I had failed them in my inability to grow beyond the height of the common armchair. They never struck me, tryin’ to get me to swell taller, one bruise at a time. No, they were not violent. And yet, I don’t remember my mother ever lookin’ at me.

“I like to think she at least did every once in a while when I was still in the cradle, but when I was old enough to recognize whether someone saw me or whether they didn’t, I realized she never did. She would speak to me, of course, she was present in my life. I don’t want it ever said she was cruel or bad tempered or absent. She was there, she was always there in her absolute lady way. She just never looked at me.

“When she would speak to me, she would do so by lookin’ at the things ’round me, but only the short things like the table lamp, the silverware, the string on the shade. It was as if she looked at those short things, she could at least say, my son is taller than that there lamp, that there spoon, than that there four-inch string. There must’ve been comfort in that.

“As for my father, he only ever spent time with me at night and only in the dark woods. He would say it was to collect fireflies, but I knew the real reason was ’cause my father couldn’t bear to be in a room where the light reminded him of his midget son. He had to escape to the dark woods, where in the absence of light I could be as tall as he ever imagined me to be. I was six foot, I was seven foot—hell, I was thirty feet tall, a giant in them woods at night with my father.

“Most people are afraid of the dark, but the dark was the only time I ever heard my father laughin’. There he’d be, my tall, banker father rollin’ up his sleeves, and gallopin’ through the woods, giddy as a hoodlum, chasin’ after the fireflies, all the while yellin’, ‘I can’t see ya, Grayson. It’s so dark. I can’t see you, son.’

“You had never heard a father exclaim he couldn’t see his son the way my father did with such joy.”

Elohim himself laughed. He tried to anyways, but the grief gave it a certain defeat.

“I’d say, ‘I’m over here, Father.’ And he’d tilt his head in my direction, but never down, he never looked down at me in those woods, because in there, I was the son he could look up to. The dark allowed him that. I allowed him that, as I’d stay hidden as best I could as he looked up toward the stars. ‘I see you now, son,’ he’d say. But of course, he was just like my mother, and never saw me after all, not for a damn second.

“You can imagine anything you want in the dark. You can imagine your father loves you, you can imagine your mother is not disappointed, you can imagine that you are … significant. That you mean somethin’ to someone. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, Fielding. To matter. That is all I’ve ever wanted.”

Later, after we climbed down from the roof, Elohim went into the house, he said to get something. While I waited in the yard, I listened to the clanking sounds of the train hauling gravel from the quarry miles away.

I leaned against a tree, my hands in my pockets, my head back on the bark, listening to the clanking until it faded and the night was back to its bullfrog and cricket song. When I turned my head off to the side toward the porch, there he stood, watching me. For how long?

“Mr. Elohim?”

“I always wanted to be a father myself.” His voice was soft like the moths chattering around the light above him. As he came down from the porch, I saw he had two jam jars in his hands. “I’d be damn lucky to have a son like you, Fielding.”

Mostly because I didn’t know what to say, I asked about the jars.

“These are bona fide firefly jars.” He offered me one. “You up for catchin’ some fireflies, son?”

It was the first time he had ever called me son, and I let him do it again in the woods as we ran between the trees, laughing and scooping the fireflies up in the jars, using our hands as the lids we would later open together, releasing that which we had caught for that one brief moment in time.

“Fielding?”

I turned to Sal’s voice. He was propped up on his elbow, looking over at me.

“We said your name a billion times.” Dresden raised up beside him. “What were you thinking about?”

“Nothin’.” I sat up.

They glanced at each other, lying back down while I stayed sitting, looking up at the sky and listening as Sal wished Dresden a happy birthday.

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen. For the first time.” She sighed.

He kissed her forehead before standing up.

“Hey, where are you going?” she called after him as he walked toward the rail fence a ways off.

He didn’t answer her, so she tried me. “Where do you think he’s going, Fielding?”

“I don’t know.”

The moon was enough to see him standing at one of the fence posts. When he stepped away we saw a small light flickering at the top of the post.