“On the back of your pants there. Here, I’ll get it.” He stepped closer and plucked something from the back of my pant leg. “Now, what in tarnation is this?” He held the smashed candle up in his hand.
“My sin,” I answered from the back of the cave that had suddenly swallowed me. “That is my sin.”
And so it had been decided I would not be set free from the prison or its bars like eternal candle wicks, burning any chance of escape. All I could do, all I have done, is to sit with the flames, sleep with the heat, smell the burn of flesh filling the urn one ash at a time.
I think about that first night they came to look at Sal, and I think maybe it was beautiful from a distance. The way a flooding river is. Maybe the knuckles, some tapping, some banging at our door weren’t so loud from far away. Maybe the faces pressed into our window screens looked like hung pictures. The hollers asking if they could see, maybe they sounded like songs out on the edge. Yes, maybe it was beautiful from far off, but up close it was a crowd. It was a noise. It was drowning under flooding waters.
That first evening, our house swelled. They came to see the devil Flint told them we had. They’d look at Sal, pat him on the head, be a bit disappointed.
“Just a little boy. That’s all. Just a boy. Though dark as the night, ain’t he?”
“Yeah, but look at them eyes. You don’t normally see that color in ’em. Maybe we shouldn’t say he ain’t the devil just yet. They’re just so green.”
Staying outside through all of it was Elohim. I waved for him to come in, but he just took a step back. I still remember the way the gold band gleamed from his ring finger. In his mind, he was a husband, and just in case anyone doubted it, he was going to look the part. Hell, he was going to live the part.
When he got letters or sent them, he put in a Mrs. beside his Mr., and when he hung clothes on his line to dry, one could not help but notice the dresses and bras. Perfume and lipstick sat on the vanity in his bedroom, and the strands of his fiancée’s hair from the last time she brushed it on Kettle Lane were fossilized in bristles. He was surrounded by a woman who wasn’t there. He was one half of a relationship that did not exist.
Just as I was about to go out to Elohim, a man bumped into me on his way in the house. With his cowboy hat and spurs, he looked like a man sure of the saddle. He had a Polaroid camera in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. I told him to put it out before he went into the house. He silently took my picture, though he did nothing to the cigarette as he stepped through the front door, adding to the rest of that crowd consisting of our friends, neighbors, and strangers, like the woman in the bright red dress with showy purple flowers who nearly knocked over the vase in the entry hall with her wide swinging hips and rear like a bag of apples.
There was a man who when he bent low to look at Sal, showed the part in his hair and the dandruff there, like shavings of pearl. He was pushed to the side by a woman in a rhinestone belt. She wanted a good look at Sal, and she didn’t want anyone in her way. The man in the cowboy hat took her picture, maybe only to remember the woman who chewed her gum as if her jaw was about to be undone from creation.
There was just something about that woman. The ponytail rising out of the very top of her head like a mushroom cloud. The awful stare of her eyes. A shiny viciousness as if when the wolves saw her, they turned and ran the other way, fear putting their tails between their legs.
I felt like telling the sheriff he should go through her house. I was certain he’d find bottles of tampered Tylenol, potassium cyanide, and a scrapbook of newspaper articles from 1982.
As she looked down on Sal before her, she suddenly stopped chewing the gum. Her thin lips settled like a single bleed across her face. The old acne scars like embedded wreckage.
She cleared her throat, and in one easy go of it, she asked, “Is God a nigger too?”
The gasps of the women were like bright cries. Things that knocked their shoulder pads out of balance and put runs in their hosiery right then and there. My mother included. Some of the men shoved their hands into their pockets and looked down at the toes of their shoes. It was their best natural stance. The braver ones looked directly at Sal. Stepped closer to him even. Waiting as one ear for his response.
He hadn’t so much as flinched.
If the woman had expected to sword him, she was mistaken. His elegance so apparent, even in the filthy overalls. Maybe in his own wounded thoughts he could not give such chance to dignity, but before us he stood as tall as he could. His chin raised. His eyes upon hers not in anger but almost in pity, as if he already knew her eternity was to writhe in flames over and over again.