He'd say these things then he would go silent again, and the only noise would be was the scrape of utensils against my mother's good plates. I told myself, and my parents, what we all wanted to believe. That he was going to work it out in his own time.
The seat my parents saved for him at my graduation was empty when my name was called. But when I walked across the stage, I saw him standing in the back of the auditorium. He waved. When we got to the parking lot, he stood by my father's car waiting for us.
“Sorry I was late, but tying this necktie was a motherfucker.” He laughed for the first time in a long while. We all laughed then. That's when we all believed that things would be alright.
Before we could leave, the man in the car next to us, the father of a classmate I barely knew, congratulated us, patting me on the shoulder and hastily shaking hands with my father before extending his hand to Paul.
My father had taught us the proper way to clasp a hand, a firm, single squeeze without too much shaking. Calibrated just so, for the hands of peers or elders or the children of the deceased. My mother taught me the protocol for taking a widow's or grieving mother's hand in both of my own.
In the days after the accident, I had watched Paul reach for things. Bottles, doorknobs, books. He would forget for a second that it was gone. Paul had that same expression now—standing in the auditorium parking lot, tie loosely knotted—as his left hand was clenched awkwardly in the embarrassed man's right.
I skipped the graduation parties and talked to my brother for most of the night. There was small talk, of Sanford & Son, and of many things unspoken during the weeks after Michael and the mill, and reassuring words he said to me before I went to bed.
“You need to stop worrying about me, Roy. It just took me some time to get right. I've made sense of all of this now.”
Instead of a big party when I turned eighteen, we had dinner at the house, eating the gumbo my mother made. My daddy played his records. Paul danced with my mother until she got tired and went to bed. When she was gone, my father went to his liquor cabinet, pulled out the big bottle of Crown Royal he saved, and poured thin layers into three of his good glasses.
“To my sons. The damn-near twins.”
When I swirled it around, it was just thick enough to stick to the sides of the glass before it rolled back down. That was the same way it felt in my mouth before I swallowed.
This was the first time I'd had good liquor outright. We'd stolen tastes, of course, every once in a while slipping shots into Styrofoam cups and obscuring the taste with too much ice and store-brand ginger ale, but this was the first time I had tasted whiskey full on.
“You can pour yourself another one, Roy,” my father said. “You won't be able to drink with the Right Reverend Paul Deacon.”
Paul stared out the window like my father would sometimes. He hadn't taken a drink yet.
Then, “To Michael,” he said, raising his glass.
That next day, I found on my chest of drawers a note: “Jubilee.”
I folded the note in my pocket. Around the wastebasket, I saw the discarded scraps of paper. Imperfect letters that Paul had tried again and again with his left hand, incomplete early versions of the single word he had finally gotten right.
He always got to the eastern shore before me. I saw the truck parked on the side of the beach road. He left the park lights on so I could find him.
“Old man Roy Deacon.”
After looking out at the lights, it takes my eyes a minute to adjust so I can see my brother. At first I can only hear his voice. But slowly he comes into focus. Whenever I see him, I am reminded how the years have treated me. I am much rounder at the middle, even when I suck in my gut. My hairline has gone its own way. He's still the same. If other people could see us together, it might be hard to imagine that we were born so close together.
“How's forty treating you?”
“I have five minutes left. Let me enjoy it.”
“How does it feel to be on the verge of a grand transcendental moment? On the cusp of something greater than yourself?”
“I'll tell you in five minutes.”
It's warm on the beach, and Paul has his shoes off. He has those high-arched feet that look like they're always ready to run. He used to stand in the water and wait for the fish and the crab without looking for them. He'd just feel them as they started to brush against his ankles.
“Transcendental moments need to be marked. Did you bring some punctuation?”
I show him the purple Crown Royal sack.
“You always come through, Roy. Always did.”
I give him a sip, and pour a bit more on the ground.
“For the brothers who ain't here,” I say.
“For the brothers who ain't here.”
I look down at the ground. The bit of Crown I poured is soaking into the sand between me and my brother.
“I can't stay. I just wanted to wish you a good one,” he says. “I wanted to see the kids, too. Where are they?”
“I let them play in the water for a while. They'll be back in a minute.”
The scars on his arm have healed as well as can be expected. The ones along his wrist, from the accident. And the other scars that he put there. When I'd gotten to the eastern shore that night, I'd seen the park lights of Paul's truck along the beach road. When I'd found him, I thought he was sleeping.
“It's good to see you again, Roy.”
On that Jubilee night in 1981, I had planned to meet my brother here on the beach. Instead I found him in the back of his truck. Since it had been hard for him to sleep soundly those months before—with Michael Donald and the pain in his arm—I'd decided to let him sleep until the tide came in. It wasn't until I came back and tried to wake him that I realized.
“You know Roy, when we were kids I wished I could stay here forever.”
When I'd turned my flashlight on him, I'd seen the places where the blood had run down the rivets of the payload, soaking the dirt and leaves that had collected there. Some had leaked through the rusted places and pooled on the red clay of the road.
“Forever's a long time.”
He didn't leave a note. My doctor said they don't always leave notes. And even if he had, the doctor says it might have caused more questions than it answered. He didn't leave a note, but he left a message, spelled out carefully in neat razor-drawn letters along his forearm. MARK 8 24. Some time later I would find it in his Bible. The verse he had underlined and crossed out again and again until the pen ripped through the parchment.
Tonight, Paul put his good arm on my shoulder. The scars along the arm that hangs at his side have healed as well as could be expected. The red open wounds have closed. In their place, swollen keloids have risen like braille against him.
This is the peace I have made for myself. Here in the place we like to claim. This I need to hold the rest together. While I wait for a harvest I don't understand, while I watch my children play in the water, while I watch how sand adheres to the good liquor I pour for brothers and friends.
I see my brother but I cannot feel his hand along my shoulder. I only feel my daughter's shovel as she taps me on my thigh. The alarm on her watch is beeping. She's singing “Happy Birthday” along with the electronic melody.
“Happy birthday to you, Happy birthday to Daddy . . .”
Give them a hug from their uncle.
“Happy birthday, Pop,” my son yells to me from the soft sand at the water's edge.
Take it easy, Roy.
I light a match to check the wind. The wind is blowing easterly, like it's supposed to for a Jubilee. It won't be long now. Tomorrow we'll celebrate my forty years. Family and friends will gather and we'll eat gumbo made from the crab and fish that I'll bring home in the morning. Many of us have gathered along the shore at the water now, looking for the silver sides of the floating fish and the sand-colored shells of beached crab. Some of us have lights on while others look down with eyes adjusted to the eastern shore darkness.
We watch and wait for them.
Weight
BY JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN
My mother is a weightlifter. You know what I mean. She understands that the best laid plans, the sweetest beginnings, have a way of turning to shit. Bad enough when life fattens you up just so it can turn around and gobble you down. Worse for the ones like my mother life keeps skinny, munching on her daily, one cruel, little, needle-toothed bite at a time so the meal lasts and lasts. Mom understands life don't play so spends beaucoup time and energy getting ready for the worst. She lifts weights to stay strong. Not barbells or dumbbells, though most of the folks she deals with, especially her sons, act just that way, like dumbbells. No. The weights she lifts are burdens, her children's, her neighbors', yours. Whatever awful calamities arrive on her doorstep or howl in the news, my mom squeezes her frail body beneath them. Grips, hoists, holds the weight. I swear sometimes I can hear her sinews squeaking and singing under a load of invisible tons.
I ought to know since I'm one of the burdens bowing her shoulders. She loves heavy, hopeless me unconditionally. Before I was born, Mom loved me, forever and ever till death do us part. I'll never be anyone else's darling, darling boy, so it's her fault, her doing, isn't it, that neither of us can face the thought of losing the other. How could I resist reciprocating her love. Needing her. Draining her. Feeling her straining underneath me, the pop and crackle of her arthritic joints, her gray hair sizzling with static electricity, the hissing friction, tension, and pressure as she lifts more than she can bear. Bears more than she can possibly lift. You have to see it to believe it. Like the Flying Wallendas or Houdini's spine-chilling escapes. One of the greatest shows on Earth.
My mother believes in a god whose goodness would not permit him to inflict more troubles than a person can handle. A god of mercy and salvation. A sweaty, bleeding god presiding over a fitness class in which his chosen few punish their muscles. She should wear a T-shirt: “God's Gym.”
In spite of a son in prison for life, twin girls born dead, a mind-blown son who roams the streets with everything he owns in a shopping cart, a strung-out daughter with a crack baby, a good daughter who'd miscarried the only child her dry womb ever produced, in spite of me and the rest of my limp-along, near to normal siblings and their children—my nephews doping and gangbanging, nieces unwed, underage, dropping babies as regularly as the seasons—in spite of breast cancer, sugar diabetes, hypertension, failing kidneys, emphysema, gout, all resident in her body and epidemic in the community, knocking off one by one her girlhood friends, in spite of corrosive poverty and a neighborhood whose streets are no longer safe even for gray, crippled-up folks like her, my mom loves her god, thanks him for the blessings he bestows, keeps her faith he would not pile on more troubles than she could bear. Praises his name and prays for strength, prays for more weight so it won't fall on those around her less able to bear up.
You've seen those iron pumping, musclebound brothers fresh out the slam who show up at the playground to hoop and don't get picked on a team cause they can't play a lick, not before they did their bit, and sure not now, back on the set, stiff and stone-handed as Frankenstein, but finally some old head goes on and chooses one on his squad because the brother's so huge and scary looking sitting there with his jaws tight, lip poked out you don't want him freaking out and kicking everybody's ass just because the poor baby's feelings is hurt, you know what I mean, the kind so buff looks like his coiled-up insides about to bust through his skin or his skin's stripped clean off his body so he's a walking anatomy lesson. Well, that's how my mom looks to me sometimes, her skin peeled away, no secrets, every taut nerve string on display.
I can identify the precise moment during a trip with her one afternoon to the supermarket on Walnut Street in Shadyside, a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, white community with just a few families of us colored sprinkled at the bottom ends of a couple of streets, when I began to marvel at my mother's prodigious strength. I was very young, young enough not to believe I'd grow old, just bigger. A cashier lady who seemed to be acquainted with my mother asked very loudly, Is this your son, and Mom smiled in reply to the cashier's astonishment saying calmly, Yes, he is, and the doughy white lady in her yellow Krogers' smock with her name on the breast tried to match my mother's smile but only managed a fake grin like she'd just discovered shit stinks but didn't want anybody else to know she knew. Then she blurted, He's a tall one, isn't he.
Not a particularly unusual moment as we unloaded our shopping cart and waited for the bad news to ring up on the register. The three of us understood, in spite of the cashier's quick shuffle, what had seized her attention. In public situations the sight of my pale, caucasian-featured mother and her variously colored kids disconcerted strangers. They gulped. Stared. Muttered insults. We were visible proof somebody was sneaking around after dark, breaking the apartheid rule, messy mulatto exceptions to the rule, trailing behind a woman who could be white.
Nothing special about the scene in Krogers. Just an ugly moment temporarily reprieved from turning uglier by the cashier's remark that attributed her surprise to a discrepancy in height not color. But the exchange alerted me to a startling fact—I was taller than my mother. The brown boy, me, could look down at the crown of his light-skinned mother's head. Obsessed by size, like most adolescent boys, size in general and the size of each and every particular part of my body and how mine compared to others, I was always busily measuring and keeping score, but somehow I'd lost track of my mother's size, and mine relative to hers. Maybe because she was beyond size. If someone had asked me my mother's height or weight I probably would have replied, Huh. Ubiquitous I might say now. A tiny, skin-and-bone woman way too huge for size to pin down.
The moment in Krogers is also when I began to marvel at my mother's strength. Unaccountably, unbeknownst to me, my body had grown larger than hers, yes, and the news was great in a way, but more striking and not so comforting was the fact, never mind my advantage in size, I felt hopelessly weak standing there beside my mom in Krogers. A wimpy shadow next to her solid flesh and bones. I couldn't support for one hot minute a fraction of the weight she bore on her shoulders twenty-four hours a day. The weight of the cashier's big-mouthed disbelief. The weight of hating the pudgy white woman forever because she tried to steal my mother from me. The weight of cooking and cleaning and making do with no money, the weight of fighting and loving us iron-headed, ungrateful brats. Would I always feel puny and inadequate when I looked up at the giant fist hovering over our family, the fist of God or the Devil, ready to squash us like bugs if my mother wasn't always on duty, spreading herself thin as an umbrella over our heads, her bones its steel ribs keeping the sky from falling.
Reaching down for the brass handle of this box I must lift to my shoulder, I need the gripping strength of my mother's knobby-knuckled fingers, her superhero power to bear impossible weight.
Since I was reading her this story over the phone (I called it a story but Mom knew better), I stopped at the end of the paragraph above you just completed, if you read that far, stopped because the call was long distance, daytime rates, and also because the rest had yet to be written. I could tell by her silence she was not pleased. Her negative reaction didn't surprise me. Plenty in the piece I didn't like either. Raw, stuttering stuff I intended to improve in subsequent drafts, but before revising and trying to complete it, I needed her blessing.
Mom's always been my best critic. I depend on her honesty. She tells the truth yet never affects the holier-than-thou superiority of some people who believe they occupy the high ground and let you know in no uncertain terms that you nor nobody else like you ain't hardly coming close. Huh-uh. My mother smiles as often as she groans or scolds when she hears gossip about somebody behaving badly. My, my, my she'll say and nod and smile and gently broom you, the sinner, and herself into the same crowded heap, no one any better than they should be, could be, absolute equals in a mellow sputter of laughter she sometimes can't suppress, hiding it, muffling it with her fist over h
er mouth, nodding, remembering, how people's badness can be too good to be true, my, my, my.
Well, my story didn't tease out a hint of laugh, and forget the 550 miles separating us, I could tell she wasn't smiling either. Why was she holding back the sunshine that could forgive the worst foolishness. Absolve my sins. Retrieve me from the dead-end corners into which I paint myself. Mama, please. Please, please, please, don't you weep. And tell ole Martha not to moan. Don't leave me drowning like Willie Boy in the deep blue sea. Smile, Mom. Laugh. Send that healing warmth through the wire and save poor me.
Was it the weightlifting joke, Mom. Maybe you didn't think it was funny.
Sorry. Tell the truth, I didn't see nothing humorous about any of it. God's T-shirt. You know better. Ought to be ashamed of yourself. Taking the Lord's name in vain.
Where do you get such ideas, boy. I think I know my children. God knows I should by now, shouldn't I. How am I not supposed to know youall after all you've put me through beating my brains out to get through to you. Yes, yes, yes. Then one you all goes and does something terrible I never would have guessed was in you. Won't say you break my heart. Heart's been broke too many times. In too many little itty-bitty pieces can't break down no more, but youall sure ain't finished with me, are you. Still got some new trick in you to lay on your weary mother before she leaves here.
Guess I ought to be grateful to God an old fool like me's still around to be tricked, Weightlifter. Well, it's different. Nobody ain't called me nothing like weightlifter before. It's different, sure enough.
Now here's where she should have laughed. She'd picked up the stone I'd bull's-eyed right into the middle of her wrinkled brow, between her tender, brown, all-seeing eyes, lifted it and turned it over in her hands like a jeweler with a tiny telescope strapped around his skull inspecting a jewel, testing its heft and brilliance, the marks of god's hands, god's will, the hidden truths sparkling in its depths, multiplied, splintered through mirroring facets. After such a brow-scrunching examination, isn't it time to smile. Kiss and make up. Wasn't that Mom's way. Wasn't that how she handled the things that hurt us and hurt her. Didn't she ease the pain of our worst injuries with the balm of her everything's-going-to-be-alright-in-the-morning smile. The smile that takes the weight, every hurtful ounce and forgives, the smile licking our wounds so they scab over, and she can pick them off our skin, stuff their lead weight into the bulging sack of all sorrows slung across her back.
Gumbo Page 36