The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  “Any fool can watch cooking shows,” she said. I followed her into the kitchen, where she found space in the freezer for the soup. “I was very bored in Dallas. I got very domestic.” Once again I didn’t mention the fiancé. I wondered if she had gotten domestic because of or in spite of him.

  She put the muffins in the bread box on the counter. “They’ll keep a couple of days and then you should freeze the rest of them too. You can just defrost them one at a time in the microwave.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Will you remember?”

  “Tell Anita.”

  “Right.” This seemed to amuse her. “You’re welcome.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”

  Had she ever stood here, in my kitchen, before? Of course she had.

  “May-May? Is that you?”

  She turned to the voice. “Hi, Anita!” she called, and disappeared into the living room.

  I heard Anita say, “You’ve still got your coat on! Charlie didn’t take your coat?”

  “Oh, I can hang up my own coat!”

  “I’m going,” I said. “Ladies?” I heard laughter. “May-May?” I wasn’t speaking loud enough to be heard. I knew it. “Bye,” I said, to the empty kitchen.

  I BEGAN TO NOT feel surprised when May walked in the door. Or when I walked in and found her already there.

  But I could feel the effort my mother was expending not to talk about her. When her name did leak in, I knew it was only one of maybe a dozen times that Anita had almost said it.

  One day, after May had left, Anita began, “Charlie—”

  “No.”

  “You don’t know what I was going to say.”

  “You cannot tell her.”

  “But, son—”

  “It would wreck her,” I said. “You don’t want that. And don’t you see how happy Nicky is? Don’t you see that? Aren’t you glad? Do you want to wreck that too?” She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “It is the only thing I am asking you,” I said, and I felt like stone, forbidding and eternal, and Anita didn’t say anything more.

  HOW HAD MAY BEGUN IT? “Nicky has told me so much about you”? “My mother is from south Georgia too”? And Anita feigned ignorance, but May sensed there was something she was supposed to hunt for, something easily missed, a golden egg hidden in deepest underbrush?

  For Anita was telling her stories.

  One evening my mother said, “You know, I used to like sitting under my grandmother’s table. In the kitchen.”

  “Like a fort?” Nick said.

  “No, I’d do it when she was sitting there. With her lady friends. In the middle of their legs.” She chuckled self-consciously. “I can’t imagine why she let me. Except that it kept me quiet.”

  “How old were you?” May said.

  “Little. Little-little. But old enough to remember. And one of the women one time—it was our neighbor. Memaw didn’t like her much. This neighbor would come over and Memaw would be in her housecoat and slippers and she wouldn’t even change. So that’s how I knew. And one day this woman said something about a redheaded stepchild. I’d never heard that before, and I thought she was talking about me.”

  “But she wasn’t?” Nick said.

  “Oh, no. It was just an old expression. For someone you don’t treat so well. You say, They treat her like a redheaded stepchild.” Her fingers were twitching beside her plate. No one would notice but me. But I knew that right about now there should be a long drag; then a tap in the ashtray, without looking. (Charlie, empty this ashtray, please. Charlie, find me an ashtray. They were the only requests she used to make of me that had been anywhere close to favors. I’d done the dishes, taken out the trash, cleaned my room, but she would never have dreamed of asking me to bring her a glass of water, or the book she was reading, or a deck of cards to play her solitaire;, but I’d see her patting her pocket, and if she came up empty I’d go to her purse or her coat or the pocket of her other sweater. It was what I did for her. She’d favored pockets, then.)

  “She said something later though,” Anita was saying. “That time, or a different time. I don’t know. They would just forget I was there, I expect. I would sit there quiet as a mouse.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She said something about my complexion. Memaw wouldn’t let me out in the sun, but I went anyway of course, and I got the worst burns. She said she’d never seen a child so pale. So the neighbor lady said, well, at least you know there’s no nigger in that woodpile. And Memaw said, yes, there’s that at least.”

  “Mom,” Nicky said.

  “I didn’t say it, son,” Anita said. “It was just another expression. But it used to be so important.” Her fingers twitched. “To know. People used to think it was very important.”

  “Because they didn’t know who your father was,” May prompted.

  “Yes. Because of that.”

  There was a fiction afoot, which was that I knew all these stories. Anita and I let it stand. The truth was our business. As a child, I had felt the past sitting there, undeniable, but I had known with great certainty that my mother only looked forward. Together we pretended that history, by definition, was dead and could not hurt us anymore, or rather she pretended and I, not knowing any better, believed it. Now the past was filling in. Hints and guesses and ghosts gaining color and weight. Beginning to breathe.

  I thought about what she’d just said. How she’d heard in that woman’s voice that she’d done something good, was something good, unintentionally, which also meant the reverse: that she could sin anytime and not know it. That she was keeping some secret she didn’t know she had.

  “YOU KNEW MY GRANDFATHER was a preacher,” Anita said.

  “I don’t think I did know that,” May said.

  “Oh yes. In a little country church. No denomination to speak of. He was self-trained. He felt the spirit. He could interpret tongues.”

  I was coming downstairs when I heard this conversation happening in the living room, and I stopped, unseen, on the stairs.

  “They spoke in tongues there?”

  “Yes indeed. As a child, it was so confusing. There would be this whole stream of gibberish—oh, I shouldn’t say that, I reckon—but it would sound just, well, strange. But still, every time I would think, Oh, here it comes! And then Granddaddy would interpret and it was never the end of the world or any good, interesting prophecy. Or a flood or tornado even. It was just God is mighty, and He’s watching, and repent, repent of your sins.” She paused and I knew without a doubt that she was shaking her head, her mouth comically tight. “It would be boring.”

  And May burst into laughter, and after a moment Anita joined her, and I realized how seldom I heard that sound. The laughter carried them out to a glorious sunny blue sea; for a second or two I felt utterly abandoned, but that was an old thought and instead I let myself be glad, and I stood listening to the laughter baptizing my house.

  WE TOOK ANITA WITH US to the winter concert at Abbott. Celia had a solo. It was a piece by Mozart. Her voice was rather thin, lacking confidence, but on key; “Laudate Dominum”: that’s what it was. She swayed a little with concentration during the legato notes. Her Latin was careful, foreign in her mouth. She wore her long hair down, in a long twist hanging over one shoulder. I wished someone would push it back and make her symmetrical.

  As she sang I began to feel a pull, not from the stage but directly to my left; I looked over and across the aisle I saw Zack, his face rapt with dread, as though he were watching an execution, or Celia’s wedding to another boy. I elbowed Nick, beside me. He turned to Zack for a long moment, almost too long, and then back to me, his expression sad, resigned: Told you.

  The solo ended and the choir came in, repeating what Celia had already sung, confirming it now in four parts, following its path, bringing it to full life. Celia stood quiescent, her arms at her sides. Then all at once she lifted her chin, looking straight at us; she wasn’t finished; and her
voice came out twice as strong—strengthened by the choir behind her? Laudate dominum. She sounded almost free, her voice more pure, in a long slipping string of an amen, and I knew that during her song she had, somehow, answered a question for herself—and was singing it to us? No. To Nicky.

  But from this distance surely I was wrong. I glanced over at Zack. No, she wasn’t singing to him. “Who is that?” Anita whispered. She’d noticed me looking. I whispered back. “Oh. Poor boy,” she said.

  After the concert, as we were getting Anita arranged and taking the brakes off her chair, Zack came over to us and stood there expectantly. I wondered if he’d noticed Nicky’s and my glances, but I knew his eyes had been fixed on the stage the whole time. I introduced him to Anita. He shook her hand, leaning down to her chair, and then when he straightened I thought he looked almost military, more erect—maybe he was practicing. Also healthier than I’d seen him, better color. “This is the hockey star I was telling you about,” I said. “This guy had a hat trick a couple nights ago.”

  “You saw that?”

  “Of course I saw it. Haven’t missed a home game yet.” He smiled to himself, the Zack I remembered. “And now you better tell my mother what a hat trick is.”

  But instead he looked back down at her and gestured at her empty pants leg. “I’m sorry about that,” he said.

  I sucked in my breath. I was glad Nick and May had gone to get the car. But Anita just said, “Thank you, son.”

  “We heard about it. Here at school.”

  “Not from me,” I said. I’d mentioned that my mother was visiting, and was ill, that was all.

  “I don’t mind,” Anita said, a little sharply.

  “We hear things, Mr. G.,” Zack said. “We young people.” And he actually smiled. Then he looked at Anita, grew serious again, and said, like a five-year-old, without guile, “What happened?”

  “Bad habits,” she said. “Don’t ever smoke, son.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I mean, no, ma’am.”

  “Mother, Nick’s probably outside now with the car,” I said.

  “That’s so weird,” Zack said, and shook his head.

  “I don’t follow you,” my mother said.

  “You’re Mr. Satterthwaite’s mother too.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Yeah,” Zack said, speaking to himself, smiling, shaking his head. “Yeah, all right. You take care now, ma’am. Mr. G.” I saw him in uniform. Saluting. Some roughness had dropped away from him but I didn’t believe it: when had Zack ever told me to take care?

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON. A terrific clanging and I went out in the hall and saw Zack, banging into the lockers, throwing an occasional punch into the doors as he went. People were standing clear of him, looking around, their eyes lighting on me—Fix it, fix it! I hurried down to him. “Zack?” My hand on his shoulder. Good God, the wad of muscle. As soon as I touched him, he stopped and crumpled against the wall of metal doors. “Cool it, buddy, what’s up?”

  “Don’t fucking buddy me.”

  I removed my hand. “I said cool it, Mr. Middleton.”

  He turned his face into the lockers, twisting a little, eyes closed, as though he were a little boy pushing into a closet, hide-and-seek in the coats, the warm woolly dark. The posture, the healthy color of the night before were gone, and now he looked sallow, awful—skin violently broken out, eyes puffy, cheeks hollow. “Why do you do that?” he said. “Get all formal and shit.”

  I crouched down beside him. “Zack, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing nothing nothing,” he said. “Nothing, fucking nothing.” He turned to me and opened his eyes. They were exhausted. “I hate your brother,” he said. “You’re the better man. What a fucking phony. What a pussy.”

  “Zack, shh. You can’t talk that way. You know you can’t. I can’t let you.”

  “It’s all his fault. She would still be with me.”

  “Zack. Let’s go talk. We need to talk about this.”

  “Don’t tell me there will be other girls,” he said. He was crying again.

  “I won’t.” He looked at me and I saw the trust he’d been hiding. Charlie, hold me up. I want to go with you. No, Charlie’s taking just me. And also despair. “Come on a walk with me,” I said. “Something.”

  He closed his eyes for a long minute, and then he finally spoke. “No,” he said. “No, I can’t, Charlie.” And he pushed himself to standing, and turned and walked away.

  I FOUND OUT ZACK had failed his last calculus test. He was, in fact, failing the course. There were others failing too, but this was BC Calculus; was that so unusual? Nick was adjusting the curve. No, he was not sabotaging Zack’s academy hopes. Bump in the road. Colleges would never see these grades, it would be fine. Zack would retake the test. The college counselor assured Zack she’d take care of it, don’t worry, the main thing was not to worry, and I thought about all the machinations that must be going on to preserve the future of Zack Middleton, diversity prize. And I remembered what he’d said to me about the academy: You have to earn it, that’s the thing, you know you’ve earned it. Just you.

  In my class, he shut down completely. It didn’t surprise me. I was sure he’d only signed up to be with Celia. Now, they sat at opposite ends of the table, and the rest of the class maneuvered around him as though he were a boulder in the sea at high tide.

  “You people are seniors,” I said. “You’ve all done well and you’re all about to fly the coop. You’ve filled in little bubbles with number two pencils and sent in the applications. You’ve checked all the boxes, you’ve gotten it, you’ve learned how to get it, but the deal with this class is that these poems can’t be gotten in the way you’re used to.

  “You need to do two things with these poems. One, you need to get down on the floor and wrestle with them. Look at every word. Every word is there for a reason, probably ten reasons. Get closer and closer. Be patient.

  “And the other thing, the less academic thing, the soul thing, is to pull back. Intuit. Trust yourself. Like I said, these poems aren’t something to get. They are something to apprehend. Apprehend: to take hold of. To pay attention to. Pay attention, and meaning will open up.”

  They regarded me with boredom and disbelief and bafflement and trust. Curiosity and also a little hope. “Darius? What do you say? How about the first elegy. Every angel’s terrifying. Here we go.” And the heads bent to the page—all except for Zack’s. He hadn’t opened his book, sat with his hands folded on top of it. He glanced at me, his face washed clean of any expectation—Was that the same thing as hopelessness? Or better? Or worse?—and closed his eyes as Darius began to read. Maybe birds will feel the air thinning as they fly deeper into themselves.

  But at the end of class he stopped by my desk. “Charlie,” he said. “There’s a game tonight.”

  “Do you want me to come?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will be there,” I said. “You can count on me.”

  “HOW IS THAT BOY?” Anita said.

  “Which one?”

  “The one I met at the concert. The poor lovelorn one.”

  “Lovelorn,” I said.

  “I worry about him,” Anita said.

  “I do too.”

  She sighed. “Charlie, I’ll take a pill.”

  I went upstairs to get them for her. They weren’t in her cosmetic bag; I found them in the medicine cabinet. So she’d taken some when I hadn’t known about it. Good.

  When I handed her the bottle she shook it, and confusion passed over her face, a quick shadow, gone. I brought her some water. “The prescription is for two,” I said, resigned. She ignored me, shook out a single capsule, and then closed the bottle again with a sudden, violent twist.

  Twenty

  Little Anita in white dress, feet dangling, sitting in the front pew of the white cinder-block church. Friday night. Hot. The windows are open and thousands of moths flutter outside the screens. The church is a giant lantern.

  Her grandfather
up in the pulpit, her grandmother beside her. All around them the fans waving, a hundred sticks held in a hundred hands, back and forth, like so many unsynchronized wings of a vast, fantastic insect. On one side of the fan, a tinted picture of the town funeral home; on the other, a melting-eyed Jesus, knocking at the door of your heart. As she watches, all the fans’ rhythms come together, an astonishing, undulating creature—it is about to take flight—

  The heat is thick, coastal, a leaded blanket over every movement, but a child doesn’t realize. A child can breathe in that heat, a child can think fresh thoughts.

  The fans go without ceasing; the only thing that makes them stutter is when men (never women), in short-sleeved shirts and Sansabelt slacks, their foreheads glistening and their necks clay red, stand up one by one, a babble flooding from each mouth, a mysterious pidgin syntax. Once we were perfect (say the men, in the language only her grandfather understands), but then the devil tricked Eve and sin was layered over all of us; we are made of dirt, wicked forever; and yet we can recover, in a paradox that we can never understand.

  Somehow the sin is woven in, and yet extra. It is an appendage that can be cut off, but it always grows back. We’re always, forever, in need of forgiveness; we do not have one clean moment.

  “Amen, brother,” says her grandfather. “Brother John has been the vessel.” “Brother Lester has been the vessel.”

  She thinks that that’s her own granddaddy in the pulpit, and so she herself is chosen, there in the front pew. But later on, over and over, she realizes how wrong she was. Bit by bit she learns, and then tells herself the rest of her life, that sitting in a white dress in the front pew is an accident of birth, something unearned. As are all births, all accidents.

  IN THE CHAPEL, on Sunday, the beginning of February—a short month, days already longer, we would make it through; and Anita doing well, the stump nearly healed; and I didn’t wake up every day surprised.

  During Cletus’s sermon Anita nodded every now and then, at the most emphatic points. I thought of her in that little white church in that hot little town, and now she was in a little stone church in New England, with me, in the snow, and I thought, This is my life, and I was content in an unfamiliar way.