The Summer That Melted Everything(96)

I laid down the chemistry book and my homework.

“I wish it would snow.” I reached behind the sofa and laid my arm across the hot windowsill, my fingers dangling to the brick outside. Mom had taken the screens down to clean and the windows were left open to air out the house.

I looked up at the sky. It was like the fur of a coyote, tan in all the places it wasn’t gray. A bolt of lightning came in a slender flash. The thunder slipped in a low grumbling hello. In its wild self, it was finally going to rain.

“There’s something—” Sal cleared his throat “—there’s something I have to tell you all. About me.”

I brought my eyes down from the sky and saw Elohim’s face staring back at me. How canine his features looked. How his mouth seemed to foam. Just another rabid dog at the window.

“I’m sorry, Fielding.”

Elohim looked as though he might have meant it as he reached through the window and grabbed Sal. Dad quite possibly made a leap from the chair to the sofa. Mom quite possibly flew from the lampshade. I know Fedelia ran in from the kitchen, joining Mom and Dad, who each had a foot of Sal’s.

Elohim would not let go. For all his life, he would not let go of Sal, of Helen, of her lover. He held tight to all these things and that’s when the others appeared. They’d been so quiet, not your usual loud mob. Their silence was worst, stealing away our right to shut the windows and bolt the door. We didn’t even have time to scream. It was a silent struggle on both ends. Joining the battle, I wrapped my arms around Sal’s legs, pulling back with Mom, Dad, and Fedelia.

“Don’t let me go.”

Sal was looking at me. If only I were Grand. If only I had his strength. No one ever said it, but I know it was my fault they pulled Sal away from us. I wasn’t strong enough, and it was me who let him go.

That was when the screaming started. They were screaming cheers, we were screaming tears, and Sal was screaming fear. A rhyme of the ages.

Dad lost his slippers and Mom lost her heels as they climbed out the window, his bathrobe and her apron flapping as they gave chase. Me and Fedelia were behind them, but she broke off before we got into the woods. She said she was going to get the sheriff. No one had time to tell her the sheriff was in the mob. I suppose he always had been.

Fedelia’s parting words were for me to save the day.

I will, Auntie. I tried to believe I could.

Even before we got there, I knew it was to the schoolhouse they were going. The place in which their insanity had ripened and been brought to fruit. There in the middle of the schoolhouse was a wooden post they had newly erected. To this post they tied Sal as quickly as anybody has ever been tied.

Dad grabbed at the rope and punched a guy. Kicked another in the groin, but someone grabbed onto the back of his robe and yanked him to the ground by it. It took three guys to hold him down.

Mom was screaming somewhere on the other side of me. I know I looked at her face, but all I remember is seeing the edges of her dress. Edges turning and flailing under those who held her down.

I myself was scratching, biting, and kicking the shins of a guy holding me against him. It was then I saw Dovey with the gas can. Beside her was the woman in the rhinestone belt who had asked Sal if God was a nigger too. Together Dovey and this woman poured gas on the ground around Sal. They did it so steady, as if they were pouring milk in glasses for their very own dinner table.

I bit down on the man’s hand holding me until I drew blood and he let go. I ran to Sal. I almost made it too. I felt the rough of the rope at the tips of my fingers. I saw him smile with the hope I would be enough to save him.

It was Elohim who grabbed me back by my hair and slapped me down. By his orders, two followers came to get me. I hit one in the stomach. He hit me in the face. I bit one on the arm. He bit me on the hand. I wiggled and squirmed, but it only seemed to tighten their grip.

All I could do was watch Elohim light the match like it was the only right choice. I would like to say he was not smiling. I would like to say he was not happy as the match tossed through the air in slow motion like a thing that held all of time. Tumbling and flipping its flame down to the gasoline, where it lit in a bright, painfully beautiful burst.

I was still looking at that burst when I heard Sal scream to me to remember Granny. Granny? The flames were all I saw. But then I did remember. Granny. The suffering. The gun. Yes, I remembered what I couldn’t do the first time. Would I stay the child? Or become the man Sal was asking me to become?

The flames burned through the gas trail around him, building higher and higher as they headed for him. He didn’t scream, but he did cry. I didn’t understand how a boy could have so many tears, yet not have enough to put anything out.

In love with the flames, the two men who held me loosened their grip as they watched the fire they couldn’t stop being in awe of. It was enough of a loosened grip for me to break away, to run past them, past Dad, watching me, his teeth gritting under the elbow plastered to his cheek.

I ran past the edge of Mom’s dress, to the tree house not far there in the woods. From the crate I grabbed the gun because it was the only water I had to put the fire out.

By the time I returned, the flames had made their way in the circle of gas around the tree, and were now at Sal’s feet, burning up his calves. The smell of his melting flesh was so thick, it packed into the nose as something solid. I thought my nostrils were going to split under the strain.