Elohim was there, listening as person after person went up to the sheriff, claiming to have seen Sal.
One woman swore she saw Sal actually throwing the rocks. “I tried to take them rocks from ’im, but you know what he did? He picked up one of them glass shards. Cut me good.”
The blood on her forearm glistened under the sheriff’s flashlight.
“I can’t believe they’re actually believin’ her,” I whispered to Sal, watching him scratch his chin. In that gesture I saw the blood trickled down the back of his left hand.
“Where’d you get that blood from, Sal?” Grand saw it too.
“From checking Granny’s pulse earlier. Remember, Fielding?”
“But it looks … fresh.” Its shine was both beautiful and starved of that very thing.
“What they’re sayin,’ Sheriff, it’s all true.” Another witness stepped forward. “He threw a rock at me even. He ain’t nothin’ but a devil, a—”
Sal’s interrupting shout, calling them liars, echoed for miles and made them jump as he stood and walked out toward them.
“Liars,” he said again, rather hushed this time as he balled his hands up into fists at his sides.
A woman reached into the pocket of her bathrobe, pulling out her most holy ally. “Sheriff, I swear on my Bible that there devil has done this.”
Sal dashed toward the woman, snatching the Bible out of her hand as the crowd gasped. He wound up his arm, just as Grand had taught him, and threw the Bible into the last remaining window on Main Lane, that of the butcher’s.
Some will say the window did not break. That the Bible was too soft, not hard like the rocks. Others will say the window did indeed break into the sharpest pieces of all.
I say, never doubt the strength of a boy’s arm.
11
His crime makes guilty all his sons
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 3:290
AT THE BEGINNING of July, Mom turned forty-five years old. Me, Dad, Grand, and Sal baked her a cake. A lopsided, poorly frosted yellow cake she praised as the best ever.
Dad tugged on her tail of hair and made her laugh before giving her a diamond tennis bracelet. Grand’s gift was a book of Walt Whitman poetry, the pages with his favorites dog-eared. I gave her a Bruce Springsteen cassette, and Sal gave her the rain.
“But there’s been no rain,” Grand questioned the water in the jar.
“I hopped a train and stopped at the first town it was raining in,” Sal answered.
Mom held up the jelly jar with the slosh of water in its bottom. “A gift of the rain?” She looked through the jar at Sal on the other side.
“You never know,” he said. “One day the rain might be just the gift you need.”
She thanked Sal, but held the jar fearfully. It was only faucet water. I’d seen Sal fill it up myself. I never did say anything to Mom, so she never doubted its origin from the sky. She even had Dad keep it in his study, just to be on the safe side.
She rarely went into the study during the course of that summer, as it had become a second sheriff’s station with the cork bulletin board pinned with papers, notes, and a map of Ohio, upon which more pins showed the locations of all the missing boys. The sheriff came frequently to the house, updating Dad on the investigation, and together they’d look at that board and try to find Sal.
One of the papers had a phone number written on it. It was the number for the Columbus hospital. One day they might say Dovey was better, might even be able to move her out of critical care, they’d say. Then the next thing you knew, there’d been a setback, the baby’s vitals weren’t looking so good.
Based on the records Dad played, you could tell what days were good news days and what days were not. You knew the baby might make it if Dad put on Louis Armstrong and “What a Wonderful World.” But if he played Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, you knew there is such a thing as infinite slips and falls and high-pitched chaos.
On Mom’s birthday, it was the sad latter. Dad did wait until the end of the day, after the celebrating, to put the record on. As I lay in bed, hearing the strings below, I thought about the baby and what work it is to be born.
I wondered if their child would look like a muscled dove, the build of its father and its mother. I prayed for its birth, quietly and in myself. I prayed not to God, but to Dovey’s womb to give birth to the son who may serve as the miracle to that summer. A miracle to rest the fray.
“Sal?” I looked over at him lying in the window bed. “When’s your birthday?”
“The devil doesn’t have a birthday.”
“Ah, c’mon, Sal.”
“You want me to lie? Tell you my birthday is, I don’t know, February second or something?”
“Is that when it is? February second?”