I’ll say it now because all the years in the world have passed, and I am old enough to know I wanted the child.
I knew I would be no good for it. I would build it cradles, yes, but wouldn’t actually cradle it myself. How could I with my sleeves drenched in blood? The snake has had its victories over me. And in its victories I am no longer sweet nor gentle. The very things a good father must be. It’s impossible to make a family when your mind spins mad with the old monsters. Isn’t it?
The fear of being the horrible father was a noose tightening around my neck. It was why when she asked what I thought, my answer was, “I don’t like how your hair doesn’t wrap around anymore.”
That long rope that in its length meant I could have a shot at a good life. Its length meant I hadn’t done anything bad yet to chop it off. But wasn’t her growing belly my bad inside her? Wasn’t that growth an ax, making the rope shorter, making her weaker? And weaker she’d gotten.
Pregnancy did not give her that glow. It gave her a redness to the cheeks like punches. It drooped her eyes from all the sleeping she did not do. And mornings sounded like sickness being flushed down the toilet. Maybe she was like Samson, the long hair her strength, and I was Delilah, cutting it shorter and shorter with the wielding ax I put inside her.
I suppose I said the wrong thing to her, for shortly after, she began buying castor oil. It was said the oil would help with hair growth, so every night she’d slather it on, staining pillowcase after pillowcase. Even if her hair had grown, it wouldn’t have shown, because her growing belly was always outpacing her hair.
Castor oil was everywhere. On the doorknobs, on her clothes, on her forehead from where the oil dripped from her scalp. She was sent home from work because the oil kept dripping onto all the paperwork.
Then came the day she drank the oil. I didn’t know, I tell you. I was off at work, trying to wipe the castor oil off my hands. Later in the hospital, she would say she drank it because she thought it would make her hair grow from the inside out, like a big oily vitamin.
“Oh, Fielding, I had no idea it could affect the baby. I wouldn’t have drank it. Doctor?” She wanted to make sure he heard too. All the nurses as well. She didn’t want them to think she had tried an at-home abortion. “I didn’t know it could induce labor. And as soon as the blood and the cramps came, well, I called straightaway for an ambulance. It felt like a kick to my stomach. Oh, Fielding, stop looking at me like that. Please. I didn’t do this on purpose. Fielding, I said I didn’t do this on purpose.”
Later, when she was out of the hospital, she stood in front of the windows, the moonlight upon her flat stomach. She pulled her hair all the way around her waist, just as she always had before.
“Now you can love me again. Fielding? I said, look, the hair goes all the way around, just as before. Now you can love me again. We can start over.”
That night, while she slept in her castor oil crown, I went to the back bedroom, picked up the cradle, and threw it into the lake, watching it sink like a ship beneath the dark water.
I never went back to Maine. I did buy a rope. I did make a necklace on a porch one night. I did think of Sal as the stool wobbled. I did make the rope too long, as my toes landed on the porch floor and became the son who saved me, if only for that one, brief moment.
12
All good to me is lost
—MILTON, PARADISE LOST 4:109
THE FLYERS ABOUT him first came as inserts in the vegetarianism pamphlets. By July, Elohim started writing so much about Sal that those inserts became pamphlets all their own. These pamphlets led to meetings held every afternoon in the woods.
When I overheard the sheriff telling Dad he was going to stop by Elohim’s to have a chat, I ran through the neighbors’ backyards as the sheriff drove down the lane to Elohim’s. I snuck up through the side of Elohim’s yard, hunkering below his windows, should he be near them. Then I crouched by the lattice, waiting for him to answer the sheriff’s knock.
They sat down on the porch in the padded wicker chairs while the sheriff reminded Elohim of how he said he wouldn’t speak ill of Sal anymore.
“Now, Sheriff”—Elohim’s smile was careful—“I never said that. What I said was I would talk to folks and help ’em understand the possibility of Dovey fallin’ on her own. I said I would tell ’em that that car hittin’ that boy was perhaps an accident after all. I never said I wouldn’t go further. I never said I wouldn’t speak ill of him on other issues. Folks have got a right to know about the devil in their midst, and I am merely describin’ his flames for them. Now, I ain’t sayin’ I’m tellin’ folks to run ’im outta town. That wouldn’t do me no good.”
“Do you no good?” The sheriff spit between the columns of the porch.