Since I Laid My Burden Down

by Brontez Purnell

  DeShawn loved Grandma. She was a pretty solid badass. He remembered the first job she had in the late eighties. It was up the road in Athens, Alabama, at a factory called ConAgra, a chicken processing plant. She would ride with the other single woman her age that lived up the road. DeShawn was young when she had that job, but as an adult he was keen on how strong it must have made her feel. Shitty job as it was, it was the first time in almost thirty-five years of raising children that she finally had her own income. But, even then, his grandmother had to answer to the patriarchal backlash in another cruel way. She had many children who all had children before day care was in vogue. As a rule, every grandchild was dropped off at her place during the day all summer long. As the matriarch, she was expected to take care of her eight grandchildren, and sometimes neighborhood strays, for free—alongside working the night shift at the chicken processing plant. DeShawn knew there is virtually no way to sleep during the day with eight brats in your house, and she got fired after her second year. Then she started charging her children for childcare.

  DeShawn took long walks with his grandmother through the cotton fields and when her garden would bloom. As a child, he had never noticed how fucking hilarious she was. She had a laid-back, super-intellectual, dry humor that didn’t register unless you really listened. She told him about her first time on an airplane just last year. “Shit, boy, that thing got to going and rocking in the air, and I sure thought Jesus was gonna take me then. I looked around, and everyone else was being cool so I said, ‘Shit if everyone else gon’ die cool, guess I’ll die cool too!’” He marveled at it. DeShawn understood now where his humor came from, as his mother wasn’t funny—she only had three gears: annoyed, serious, or loving.

  The one day that could keep the two women he loved most from wringing each other’s neck was rather obvious: Mother’s Day.

  DeShawn’s mother gave a special Mother’s Day sermon at the church, and dedicated it to her mother—it touched DeShawn and he started to cry. He wanted to see the two women have a day of love and peace.

  After church the family collected at DeShawn’s grandmother’s, preparing to go out to eat. DeShawn could already taste the catfish on his lips, and went looking in his grandmother’s room for a candy bar to tide him over till dinner—he knew where his granny hid her secret stash. After finding a Snickers in her top dresser drawer, DeShawn saw a picture on his grandmother’s desk. It was his mother and aunts’ elementary class photo from the sixties. A row of little black faces (the schools had not yet been integrated) and then his mother’s face—so young he didn’t really recognize her—and sitting to her right was Jatius’s mom, Edna McClansy.

  It dawned on DeShawn that he hadn’t seen Edna once since he’d been home. The thought of her shook him like a very cold breeze. Three seconds later he heard his mother honk the car horn, signifying that they were leaving for the restaurant. DeShawn put the Snickers back in its place and hurried out to the car.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  DeShawn decided the time had come.

  He propelled his car up the highway and past the mountain range on his way to visit Edna McClansy. She stayed in town a year after Jatius’s death, then moved an hour up the road to Chattanooga. No one had heard much from her since except for DeShawn’s mother. They had been besties from elementary school up until the present, and still talked on the phone constantly.

  “OH BOY, DESHAWN!!!” Edna greeted him over the phone with the love of a second mother. “You get your butt up here to see old Edna, you hear? I’ll fry us some catfish!”

  DeShawn knew he was a man that liked things feeling “equal,” things coming full circle. He wanted this visit with Edna (a woman he hadn’t seen in twenty-plus years) to feel, maybe not like closure, per se, but like symmetry—like a snake eating its own tail perhaps. Jatius had never left DeShawn’s head; he could only imagine how Edna must feel. He stopped for gas somewhere up the state line thirty minutes shy of his destination when he got stuck on a conversation he had with his mother some time before.

  DeShawn had admitted to his mother that Jatius McClansy molested him. He told her every detail, and after his confession stood silent, feeling naked. Her response was nothing short of exactly what his mother would say. DeShawn had always marveled at his mom’s fury and also, in stark contrast, her coolness. These were the times her psychic-prophet side would emerge—wisdom falling out her mouth like a goddamn waterfall.

  “Round about the time you were born, Jatius and a couple of other boys in the field were fondled by this man Randy that lived down by the river. We found out what he was doing to them and we ran him out of town real quick. Jatius thought what he did to you was right ’cause it happened to him. Forgive Jatius and forgive yourself—you can move on from this.”

  DeShawn’s mother always spoke recklessly when it was unnecessary, and coolly when it was greatly needed. Forgiving felt like a radical notion to DeShawn, seeing as he couldn’t say if he had ever really been mad at the other boy, but there was some tension there about what Jatius had done.

  All DeShawn knew was that whatever he felt he was letting go of would become manifest as he knocked on Edna’s front door and was greeted by a woman who looked so much older than he remembered. “DESHAWN BABY!!!!! COME GIVE MISS EDNA A HUG!!!” she said as he stepped in and obliged.

  Edna’s house was filled with Glade PlugIns smells, candles, black Jesus paintings and figurines, and plastic-wrapped furniture. It was spotless, dustless, and immaculate. He could smell fish frying and his mouth started watering.

  “So I guess you gon’ spend the night. I had John clean up the upstairs room for you. He said he’d take you out for drinks tonight so y’all can catch up. He’s still at work,” she said from the kitchen as DeShawn sat in the living room sipping the peach sweet tea she poured him. DeShawn tripped out at the fact that John, well into his thirties, was still living at home, but then again, so was DeShawn. Oh, the damaged men of the field, he thought.

  DeShawn loved Edna McClansy and knew her well. She was from a house of five girls, and both her parents were run-of-the-mill field people. Not much trauma there, but when she was seventeen her father tried to marry her off to a boy whose family was a bit better-off than the rest of them. But after he got Edna pregnant he didn’t marry her, and she had to raise baby Jatius alone. She still worked and got herself through college with nil resources, and later had John by some man no one really knew. She kept her job on the army base until the year after Jatius’s death, when she moved to Chattanooga and became a nurse. She had done well for herself and looked good. She was a beautiful, dark-skinned woman, her hair natural and completely white. Yes, she had aged damn well despite the trouble written on her face.

  DeShawn and Miss Edna kiki’d all night, about how John used to beat DeShawn’s ass all the time, and that time he spent the night and she woke all of them up at 3:00 a.m. to clean the house. “Aw, honey, I was a stressed-ass black woman raising two boys by myself. Nigga, put yo’self in my shoes,” she said, tickling herself to death.

  “Do you ever miss Jatius still?” DeShawn asked. With a couple of beers in his system, he was too curious to stop himself.

  “No, baby, it’s not the same.” She looked off. “You know, I didn’t think he would ever do that and it nearly killed me when he did, but when I found out about what led up to it, I just got mad. I had fought so hard. I thought he understood that you can’t give things away for free, not as hard as we got to fight.” She looked at DeShawn. “But, no, I don’t miss him the same way I did. I’ll see him one day.” And she left it at that. It was all DeShawn needed to hear.

  DeShawn didn’t blurt out his secret about Jatius. It didn’t feel fair to mention it, and he knew that, besides his mother knowing, he could take that secret to the grave. He also was sure that on some level Jatius’s absence spelled some form of meaning in his life. He couldn’t shake the memory of him. He felt sad.

  Twenty minutes later, who should walk in the door but DeShawn
’s old archrival John. He gave a quick hug and a hi, and then went to his room to change and escort DeShawn out the door in a hurry.

  In the years that had passed, it turned out John had kept tabs on DeShawn. John was gay too and had seen DeShawn’s dirty movies online. They made a beeline for Alan Gold’s, the legendary gay club in Chattanooga. They did blow, watched a drag show, and gave each other blow jobs in the restroom.

  Later they made it back to the house and fucked all night.

  In the morning DeShawn woke with a massive hangover and snuck back to his room to mess up the bed so it appeared as if he had slept in it. He lay in the faux-disheveled bed and stared at the ceiling fan swirling over it. This new revelation was too damn intriguing for him. He decided to stay up in Chattanooga a couple more days. He knew Edna and John (particularly) wouldn’t mind at all.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  DeShawn woke up in Chattanooga three days after he was supposed to have left. It was a queer feeling. He wrapped his mind around the visceral facts: that morning a childhood enemy, who was also the younger brother of his first “lover,” fucked his brains out.

  What a mess, he thought as he collected his mind and went downstairs to make some tea.

  Edna had left for the weekend on one of her bimonthly gambling pilgrimages to Biloxi. Before she left, DeShawn asked her if he could take a look at some of Jatius’s things. She informed him there was a box of his old belongings in the downstairs closet. He braced himself for the moment when he would confront the contents of the box.

  John had already left for work that morning, and DeShawn promised Edna he would bust up the dirt in her backyard to prepare for the sunflower garden she planted every summer. She grew magnificent sunflowers. They sometimes grew up to seven feet, yellow and strong.

  He began steeping a packet of Earl Grey in a very hot cup and his mind was reeling. After Jatius’s suicide, and after the McClansys had settled in Chattanooga, DeShawn was finally learning about John and what his life had been like.

  John became a teenage raver of sorts. There were pictures of him in high school all over the house with dyed neon hair, wielding glow sticks and candy necklaces. His room still held artifacts from his teen years, old VHS anime cartoons and a forgotten stack of drum-and-bass records. He was even briefly a drag queen in his early twenties. There were pictures of him performing at the Toolbox (a gay club in Chattanooga) dressed like Beyoncé. The trajectory of his old childhood enemy after his older brother’s suicide fascinated DeShawn to no end. He would not have seen the plot twist of John being gay too.

  John had explained to DeShawn the reason he never left his mother’s home. He was afraid of leaving her as she had, naturally, fallen to pieces after Jatius’s death. It wasn’t a very odd reasoning at all. He thought about John and Edna spending those years in arrested development, trying to move on from the tragedy. DeShawn cried a little into his teacup and then mobilized.

  He grabbed a hoe from the back porch and began busting up the garden, pulling away the dried, dead weeds from the flower bed’s last period of bloom. The garden wasn’t a disaster—it just needed some tending.

  He remembered the heart-to-heart he’d had with Edna before she left on the charter bus for Biloxi with the other older women. “You know, baby, people think life is all about the big battles, but it’s really not about that. Sometimes it’s about finding enough self-love just to get the day’s chores done. If you can do that much every day, life gets a little easier every day.”

  He took this advice to heart and began the chore of gardening.

  DeShawn loved light gardening, putting chaos into order. It was (of course) chock-full of metaphors for him—the clearing away of the dead, the planting of new things, the fact that the harvest was always somehow greater than what was planted. While hoeing and weeding, he thought about his inner landscape: Was his own garden watered and weeded enough? He was pretty sure it wasn’t.

  Earlier, he looked through John’s book collection, and stopped when he found a book of Greek myths. He and John shared a childhood love of those myths.

  Before he left back home to Alabama for his uncle’s funeral, DeShawn had a reading from a fortune-teller who used the Mythic Tarot, a deck based on the ancient Greek myths. The fortune-teller pulled his cards and explained that his life was moving from a Dionysian era into an Apollonian era. He was leaving behind the wild, dark, wine-filled nights and moving into a personal epoch of sunlight and general enlightenment. This sounded good to DeShawn, though he wasn’t quite sure he felt Apollonian yet. In terms of archetypal Greek heroes DeShawn felt like a mix of Atlas and Sisyphus. Continually carrying the world on his shoulders to a great height and watching it all crumble and roll back down, just to put it back together and carry it again. He saw gluing his world back together as rest periods. The true power was never in reaching the summit, but when he was at the bottom repairing it. He thought of himself as his own divine sculptor. Could he ever really lay his burden down?

  He kept on in the garden. The sunlight felt warm and nurturing on his body as he planted the sunflowers. There has to be magic in this, DeShawn thought. At least he hoped so.

  DeShawn hurried along with his work. He knew John would be home soon. The thought of sex between the two men tugged at him. He wondered if he was having sex with John just to be closer to the memory of Jatius. It was worth asking even if the scale of the two siblings was so different.

  There was, of course, the Jatius of DeShawn’s memory. He was a towering figure in both physicality and presence. Did he remember Jatius this way because he had been a young boy? It was hard to say. John, on the other hand, was just different. He was average height, boyishly featured, and had a roundness to him. He was in his early thirties, but still looked to be in his early twenties. He was softer in his mannerisms and speaking than DeShawn recalled—a far cry from the little hooligan that used to shout “faggot” at DeShawn and hurtle dirt clods at his head.

  The day before, DeShawn and John took a trip up to Lake Winnepesaukah and then Lookout Mountain. They dropped acid and climbed through the mountains to look at the black-light-illuminated gnomes some crazy person carved into the rocks god knows when. DeShawn, again, was having a problem with memory and scale. He remembered coming to Lookout Mountain as a child and everything being bigger. Memory worked against time, which seemed to shrink everything, his biggest touchstones looking smaller and smaller in the distance.

  John walked into the back garden and surprised DeShawn, who was moving weeds into a pile. “Good work, sexy boy,” John said calmly. “Let’s go eat.”

  They went to the Pickle Barrel downtown, whose specialty was fried pickles served with honey mustard. They chowed down, drank beer, and walked across the pedestrian bridge into North Chattanooga. John took DeShawn to the local fruit loop tucked in the woods where he went to hook up with older men when he was a teenager. They moved past some bushes and fucked in the woods, mosquitos making it a little difficult.

  DeShawn wondered about John and Jatius. Specifically, he wondered if Jatius had done to his brother what he had done to him. It made him a little sick to his stomach to think about and almost dimmed Jatius’s light in his head. The night before DeShawn left, he decided he had to say something. As he lay in bed with John, he asked him very directly. “John, Jatius never did nothing bad to you, right?”

  “Bad?” said John, queerly furrowing his brow. “Naw, he beat my ass good a couple times, but naw man, my brother was chill . . .” and left the question right there. DeShawn decided he didn’t want to press it.

  That same night DeShawn descended the stairs to the hallway closet to explore the box of Jatius—things Edna pulled for him. There was a paper with his handprint he made in kindergarten, a Tupac shirt, a class ring, and a picture from ninth grade homecoming. He smelled the shirt and it didn’t smell like he remembered Jatius. It had been washed clean of his scent years ago, and just smelled like an oak-lined closet. DeShawn shocked himself when he began to cry
. He knew staying here this long was a mistake. He walked back upstairs to cuddle with John one last time and write a note to Edna thanking her for her hospitality before hopping in his car. By late morning he was back over the state line, home in Alabama.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  DeShawn sat in his mother’s living room, stoned off of shitty bammer weed, staring at his mother’s collection of grade school pictures of him and his brother. They were very disturbing.

  From the ages of five to twelve, whenever there was picture day at school, DeShawn’s mother had the maniacal habit of waiting at the front door of their home, in her nightgown and rollers, brandishing a huge plastic jar of Vaseline.

  “I don’t want you lil’ babies to be ashy in your pictures,” she would say, annoyed and half-awake, as she smeared an ungodly amount of petroleum-based goop on their faces as they ran out of the house to the bus.

  DeShawn sat in his mom’s love seat looking at this bizarre collection of Olan Mills photographs, the faces of his brother and him greasy to the gods and sweating from the lights, goop clogging their young pores.

  I’ve had a hard life, thought DeShawn as he went to the kitchen for a snack; he had a hellified case of the munchies.

  There was this picture of him in eighth grade that he couldn’t quite shake; he remembered the day too vividly. It was some time after Jatius McClansy had killed himself. It was a picture from middle school. In it, he was wearing a Foo Fighters T-shirt. Later that day, after they had taken the picture, he got sent to the principal’s office for mouthing off.

  Years later, as an adult, DeShawn learned what he had always felt was true but couldn’t articulate—that a lot of schools in the Deep South still practice forms of segregation. In a middle school with close to a 40 percent black population, DeShawn was one of three black kids placed in advanced-placement classes. He was, as his father would lovingly put it, “a nigga who knew how to talk to white people.” He was almost never placed with the two other black boys, and had to endure—for each subject no less—a class of thirty redneck motherfuckers saying the craziest shit one could imagine. Self-esteem was a hard battle to fight in these conditions, not to mention the white teacher who had tried to instill some sort of pride in him that day.