Where the Light Fell

by Philip Yancey

  Her eyes burn with rage. The trailer shakes as she runs into our bedroom in search of a weapon. She reappears with a tennis racket and, holding it head-high, charges toward us. Marshall steps forward, catches hold of her wrist, and seizes the racket.

  In those few seconds I see the end of my brother’s childhood. Already he has outsmarted her; now he can overpower her. Their glares show that both realize something has ruptured between them, perhaps forever.

  The second scene takes place with Marshall sitting at our Sunday School–castoff piano, lime green and still plastered with cartoon decals. When Mother starts badgering him about something, Marshall often plays the piano, shouting his retorts over the notes. Words fly back and forth at the speed of thought, and as they escalate in strength and volume, he shifts from Mozart and Chopin to pound out Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. I retreat to the bedroom, hearing every word over Marshall’s playing.

  “You don’t know the first thing about love,” she rails. “I’ll tell you what love is. Who does your laundry and cooks your meals, huh? I slave for you, pay for your music lessons, and this is how you act. You think the world owes you a living? You’re a pig, nothing but a lazy, sloppy pig! When are you going to get that through your thick skull?”

  “You’re right!” he shouts back over a series of crashing chords. “I don’t know the first thing about love. And if you call that love, I can do without it.”

  Suddenly the telephone rings, interrupting both the music and the quarrel. Mother picks up the receiver, cradles it between her jawbone and shoulder, and makes mm-hmm noises as the person on the other end talks. I can tell who it is. One of her Bible club hostesses has been calling regularly, distraught over a sick child and a failing marriage. Mother counsels the woman in calm, soothing tones, quoting Bible passages and praying with her over the phone.

  The conversation continues for at least twenty minutes, with Marshall still sitting at the piano, waiting. In the quiet I hear rain pattering on the trailer roof. The instant Mother hangs up the phone, Marshall lets loose with an arpeggio and she resumes her tirade in mid-sentence. “And if I ever catch you again with that snide look on your face…”

  * * *

  —

  Both Marshall and I have kept the scratched-up photo of ourselves that had been clipped to the iron lung at Grady Hospital. On the back of Marshall’s, Mother wrote our father’s final words to his three-year-old son: “Love your mommy, take care of your brother, and live for Jesus.”

  Ever after, Marshall bore weighty burdens: his father’s name and reputation, a solemn deathbed charge, Mother’s Hannah-like vow. All through elementary and high school he valiantly tried. He was the pious son, lecturing other kids on why they shouldn’t dance or frequent movie theaters. He resigned from the marching band because they played jazzy music and the girls wore short skirts.

  Like most big brothers, mine dominated, excelling in intelligence, musical talent, and athleticism—not to mention spirituality—and I meekly accepted my underdog status. Yet nothing quite worked out for Marshall. When I skipped the second grade, he resented it because he knew he should have been the one. Teachers complained to Mother that although he was their brightest student, he didn’t apply himself. Marshall brushed aside their complaints: “Einstein flunked the third grade. President Kennedy had lousy report cards.”

  But Mother accepted no excuses. “You’re plain irresponsible,” she told him again and again. “Your problem is, you don’t think! You have no common sense.”

  She had good supporting evidence. One day when she knew she’d be working late, she wrote out instructions for dinner. “Take potpies out of box. Slit the crust. Place on cookie sheet. Heat oven to 400 degrees. Cook for 35 minutes.” When she arrived home the trailer was broiling, with the oven door yawning open like a dragon’s mouth. “You didn’t tell me to close the oven door,” Marshall protested.

  For much of our upbringing, Marshall and I had an uneasy alliance. We argued, we competed, we sometimes snitched on each other. Everything changed after the incident with Mother and the tennis racket. From then on, we banded together as comrades and confidants.

  * * *

  —

  The same high school that opens new worlds for me fosters an eccentric streak in Marshall. He chooses odd friends, such as Billy Picklesimar, who gets ridiculed for his name, and Malcolm, the tough little guy who eats live grasshoppers and has a KKK uncle. Marshall will try anything. He drinks sixty-three glasses of water in one day just to see what will happen. He perfects the art of catching flies with his bare hand, and kills hundreds of them in the church building across from our trailer. He develops a fascination with bats, possibly because of their fly-catching prowess.

  Although he cuts a handsome figure—tall and with dark, curly hair—Marshall cares nothing about appearance. He wears loud, mismatched clothes, most of which he gets from the Philadelphia church’s missionary barrel. For some reason, he has an aversion to brushing his teeth. As a child he would hold his toothbrush under running water to pretend he was brushing. He pays dearly as a junior in high school when our quack dentist pulls all twelve of his remaining upper teeth, without Novocain.

  “He’s no dummy, he knows what he’s doing,” Mother argues that night, as Marshall nurses his sore jaw and grumbles about having to wear false teeth. “Besides, now you won’t have any more cavities.” The false teeth make a definite improvement—he no longer has to hold his hand over his mouth to cover the cavities and blank spaces—though the dentures are so poorly made, a dental student later will ask him to donate them to the Emory Medical Museum. The dentures also force him to abandon the trumpet in favor of the piano.

  As I pour myself into high school activities, Marshall channels his energy into spirituality. He reads Mother’s books about the Victorious Christian Life and earnestly strives to attain the elusive “life on the highest plane.” Unlike me, he feels no embarrassment over the school’s YFC club, and in fact volunteers to serve as its president. Far more diligent than I, he carries the big red YFC Bible on top of his schoolbooks as a visual witness. Whenever someone compliments him on his piano playing, he responds, “It’s not me, it’s the Lord.”

  Marshall gives up baseball cards and Monopoly for being too worldly, though he continues to go bowling. His senior year, he regales me with stories about his new girlfriend, who has transferred to Gordon High from a private boarding school in Virginia. Natalie is sophisticated and sarcastic, and Marshall’s spiritual intensity attracts her. He persuades her to give up makeup and roller-skating, but feels guilty every time they hold hands or kiss. When he suggests they avoid all physical contact, she balks. A few days later he gets a card in the mail that reads, “You take the worry out of getting close.” Natalie has put a quick and painful end to my brother’s first true romance.

  High school presents little intellectual challenge for Marshall. Friends call him “the Walking Encyclopedia” because he remembers most of what he has read in the Britannica volumes. The various steps in solving algebra and math problems seem to him a waste of time; he goes right to the bottom-line answer. He spends class periods playing chess on note cards passed furtively across the aisles. In Latin, he translates passages in advance and then pretends to read, haltingly, to make it sound spontaneous.

  Some of the faculty try to engage Marshall. His Latin teacher prods him to apply for a scholarship to the University of Georgia. One evening Mr. Pickens, his favorite, drives him to hear the famous conservative thinker Russell Kirk. Marshall comes home excited and wakes me up to announce, “I’ve just realized that until tonight I’ve never had an independent thought!” I tell him to turn out the light and go to bed, and never do hear about that first independent thought.

  * * *

  —

  Bored by high school, Marshall starts taking music more seriously. One day he tries explaining to me the different moods of key sign
atures, as if they have emotions. “Listen to this in G major—don’t you think of sunlight and summer? Compare that to a passage in F minor. It sounds gloomy, like a storm.” I nod, humoring him.

  The green piano in our trailer has only sixty-four keys, missing twelve on each end, which suits our crowded living room. For more demanding pieces, Marshall retreats to the concrete-block Sunday School building next door, where at least he can practice on a full keyboard. On those two shabby instruments, the perennial underachiever begins to display the talent of a prodigy.

  One day I am sitting at the piano in our trailer, muddling through my Czerny exercises, when Marshall stops me. “Play a note, any note,” he says.

  I plop my finger on a random key. “F-sharp?” he asks.

  “How’d you know that!? Were you looking?”

  “No, no, try it again.”

  Making sure to block his view with my body, I plunk down another key, and another. He identifies the notes correctly every time. When I put my fingers down on any ten discordant notes, he rattles them off in sequence.

  We make a game of it. “What’s the dial tone on a telephone?” I ask. He picks up our rotary-dial phone and guesses a combination of F and A above middle C. Only one person in ten thousand has absolute pitch, and my brother somehow got the gift. He practices identifying car horns and sirens, and tracks the Doppler effect of train whistles.

  Marshall also possesses a near-perfect memory. He can hear a complex piece of music on the radio and later sit down and reproduce it. Watching these feats, I gain a new level of respect for my brother. His talent seems to me Mozartean, the kind before which you bow. I have read of Beethoven’s slovenliness and of Liszt’s eccentricity—could my “irresponsible” brother actually be a genius?

  His junior year in high school, Marshall enters a piano contest at a YFC conference in Jacksonville, Florida, and is overwhelmed by the quality of the competition. Inspired, he directs all his energy toward a singular goal—mastering the piano—and signs on with a new, advanced teacher. Day after day Marshall practices after school, rocking our trailer or the Sunday School room with his scales and lightning-fast chords.

  For the following year’s competition he chooses variations on the hymn “Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing.” His composition begins in the upper registers, a simple statement of the melody played with two fingers. Then it flows into a grand exposition that has his fingers running up and down the keyboard before concluding with a series of stately chords. I can hardly believe my brother composed such a work.

  How many times do I hear that rendition of the hymn as he practices?

  Come, thou Fount of every blessing,

  tune my heart to sing thy grace;

  streams of mercy, never ceasing,

  call for songs of loudest praise.

  Teach me some melodious sonnet,

  sung by flaming tongues above.

  In Jacksonville, Marshall places but does not win, so he redoubles his efforts. At the end of that summer, he is asked to perform during the offertory at Maranatha Tabernacle in Philadelphia. I sit in the pew, nervous and proud, as my brother plays the simple part in the first movement, knowing the forte passages that will follow.

  Without warning, the pastor stands up and says, “Thank you, Marshall,” assuming he has finished the piece. My brother slouches back to his seat, humiliated.

  * * *

  —

  To the dismay of his teachers, Marshall doesn’t apply to any universities or music schools, instead yielding to Mother’s mandate that he attend a Bible college in the adjacent state of South Carolina. “It’s not worth fighting her,” he tells me. “It’ll get me out of here, and then I’ll probably transfer someplace else.”

  In September, Mother and I drive him to the campus. I help him carry boxes of clothes and books up the stairs to his room in the men’s dorm. “I hope you like it,” I say, and give him an awkward hug. I feel suddenly alone. “Don’t forget about me back at home.”

  “You’ll do fine,” he says. “You spend so much time at school, you’re not home much anyway.”

  Mother says little on the four-hour drive back to Atlanta, but I notice she’s driving very slowly. “I think there’s a minimum speed on interstate highways,” I say. “Maybe that’s why those cars are flashing their lights and honking.”

  “Since when did you become an expert on driving?” she fires back. “You’re not even old enough to have a license.” I keep quiet on the rest of the trip.

  That very month, Mother decides we have to move. There’s some kind of power struggle going on at Faith Baptist Church, and she’s on a different side than the pastor’s. “I just can’t stay here with all that tension,” she says. The church is splitting, and most of her friends are leaving.

  One of those friends makes available a rental property at minimal cost, and we move into a house, a real suburban home with wood floors and a carport and a fenced-in backyard. The trailer stays behind. In my senior year of high school, no longer do I have to use Eugene Crowe’s house as a decoy to conceal where I live.

  In a new place, with Marshall gone, I have hope that family life will finally change. It does, though not in the way I expect. Mother’s moods prove as fickle as the weather. Sometimes she is cheerful and happy, other times petulant and angry. Who are you angry at, Mother? I wonder. Your husband, who abandoned you? God, who double-crossed you? Your sons, who can never please you?

  Often the old silence descends, and I don’t even have Marshall to talk to. He means more to me now that he lives two hundred miles away than he did when we shared a bedroom.

  I am deep into my let-nothing-affect-me project, and home puts it to a daily test. Often, as I lie sleepless in bed late at night, I hear from down the hall the muted sound of Mother weeping. I lie there helpless, not knowing what to do. I feel a tug of pity, remembering her hard life: my father’s death and, before that, the years in a row house with my stern grandmother.

  The next morning I try to be nice, only to find that she has hardened overnight. She sniffles as she stirs the oatmeal on the stove, the metal spoon clanking loudly against the pot.

  “What’s wrong, Mother?”

  “What’s wrong? I’m dead, child! My brain’s not working! I teach all week, then drive a nursery school bus. You couldn’t possibly understand—women have these moods. The pressures I’m under—bills, the church mess, your brother…I’m dead! Nobody knows what I put up with. You two are driving me to a nervous breakdown.”

  The rest of that day, whatever I say makes things worse. If I mention a debate meet coming up or a practice session for a play: “You’re never around! You’re always gone!” If I suggest a shorter route to school: “I don’t care what the map says, son, I know the best way to get there. When are you going to learn to listen?” I feel like a Russian political prisoner called before a judge, knowing in advance that I will be condemned but with no idea what I’ve done wrong.

  In Marshall’s absence, I have become the sole target, the outlet for her stormy emotions. I feel trapped, like one of my beetles that can’t escape the specimen jar. Unlike Marshall, I don’t even try to fight. I fall back on my habit of hunkering down, masking, blocking emotions before I feel them.

  * * *

  —

  It’s our fault, mine and Marshall’s, that Mother didn’t remarry. She made that clear when we were young: “I knew you boys would never accept a different daddy. I wouldn’t do that to you.” Now she has to slave from morning till night, to keep the household running. And how do we repay her? By slacking off on household chores. By playing tennis instead of practicing our music lessons. By doing stupid things like playing touch football with a broken arm. We leave lights on and the toilet seat up.

  The memories sting like paper cuts. I resolve to work harder around the house, and take on Marshall’s chores
now that he’s away. Nothing helps. I go away for a debate tournament, missing the weekly lawn care, and return to find Mother in the front yard on her knees, cutting the grass with a pair of scissors.

  Sometimes at night she stands outside my closed door, sniffling again, though with a different tone. “I know I’m not the greatest mother in the world, but I’ve tried my best, son, really I have. You hear? Maybe I’ll just move back to Philadelphia and take care of your uncle Jimmy. Or find some old folks’ home. Maybe one day you’ll come home and I won’t be here. Then you’ll know how hard things are. You’ll be sorry, when it’s too late.”

  I lie in the darkness, holding my arms across my chest, squeezing tight. I can’t let myself feel. I have to not-feel.

  I want to get away, like Marshall. Only, I want to go to a real college, as the school counselor keeps urging me, not some rinky-dink Bible college. When I won the fellowship at the CDC, Mother acted like I had committed a sin. “You’re not ready for a job like that. I should never have let you skip that grade.” At the beginning of my senior year, an English teacher confides to me that I have a chance to be the class valedictorian. When I tell Mother, she doesn’t even react.

  Slowly it sinks in that nothing that Marshall or I do will please Mother, that our lives are a stabbing reminder of her own failed dreams and especially the dream—the vow—she had for us. It dawns on me, that’s why she’s so insistent about the Bible college. She can feel us slipping away.

  We tiptoe around everything except the truth: that one of her sons has left and the other is counting the days, that she has lost control, and that we will never replace her husband and are incapable of meeting her needs.