Dad was walking the edge of it during those months of the trial. I knew he didn’t want to defend them. I also knew he would do everything to see them found not guilty. Because of this, I would never tell my father I loved him again.
The whole situation was made worse by the journalists who came to Breathed, this time not for the heat but to report on the progress of the case. I looked out for Ryker. He never came. Don’t know what I would’ve done if he had. Maybe led him to Grand’s grave. Maybe shown him I know how to fire a gun now. What’s one more murder on my conscience?
A few of the reporters shoved a mike into my face and asked how I felt. Seventy-one years later, and I’m still answering. Is anyone still listening?
I hated the reporters. I hated their questions. I hated the trial. I hated the smell of melting flesh still in the air. I hated the echo of the gun lasting eternal. Gone were the hills of my youth. Gone were the trees. The houses I had known, the people I had loved. Gone, gone, gone with a town that became a place behind a burning door, down a long hallway, and behind an evermore burning door.
I watched my father walk to the courthouse every day, hated him every day a little more. I needed to see exactly what I was hating, so that last day I followed him to the courtroom and listened to him deliver his closing statement:
“All the little choices we make, what shirt to wear for the day, what to eat for dinner, what movie to watch come Friday night, they are all rehearsals for the bigger choices of our lives, like what captains we will be when the brakes go out and we rocket full speed ahead.
“But even with all the rehearsing, there can come along someone who makes us forget our God-given right to choose. It is the inability to choose by our own will that lessens us all. It is disease to our sanity, which sickens our good sense until we are the victims of choices we would not normally have been in the company of.
“This is exactly what happened during the course of the summer of 1984. These people lost their right to choose, and in that lost their sanity like sweat in hot bathwater. By the twenty-first of September, they were severed from themselves as completely as they were tied to Mr. Grayson Elohim. Like puppets in the master’s claws, they twitched when he told them to twitch. They stepped when he told them to step. They growled when he told them to growl.
“Grayson Elohim had the genealogy of a tablecloth, but over the course of one summer, he became God. At first, his ideas tumbled as dry and harmless as bones from his mouth, but somewhere along the way, his words became the great dinosaurs before the fossils. Yes. The form had gotten its function back. And his function was to orchestrate panic through the chorus of fear. Fear of the boy with color in his skin. Fear of the devil in the skin of a boy. He sang over and over again, fear, fear, fear like a lullaby laying their sense down in the thorns disguised as roses.
“You may say this level of manipulation would never happen to you, members of the jury. But how many times have you been convinced to buy something on television that you don’t need? How many times have you done something you didn’t want to do, but did anyways because someone told you to? How many times has your choice fallen second to the choice of someone else?
“This is the year 1984 we’re talking about. The year George Orwell said we would be convinced two and two makes five. He proved through story, mind is controllable. These people have proved through reality no different.
“What these poor souls were desperate for was a light. But the thing about light is it all looks the same when you’re in the dark, so you can’t tell if what powers that light is good or if it is bad, because the light blinds you to the source of its power. All you know is that it saves you from the darkness. That’s all his followers knew. They were in the dark of their own private pain, and then this Elohim comes along and he’s shining so bright.
“They reached for that brightness, and while the light distracted them, while it comforted them in its false rescue, the dark power behind it did its work, and before any of them knew it, they were not being saved by the light, they were being changed by it. They were being controlled by it. By this Grayson Elohim.”
In the gesture of spitting on Elohim’s grave, Dad dramatically spit on the floor before throwing his arms up as he boomed, “How can you call them guilty? When they were away from themselves. Temporarily gone. These people, your family, your friends, your neighbors, possibly you under the right circumstances. Away from themselves.
“Haven’t you ever been away from yourself? Only to come home and find a mess has been made in your absence? A mess you need help to clean up. Not to be punished for but to be helped with. Won’t you help your family now? Your friends? Your neighbors? Yourself?