My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  All of this came out over supper, and Daddy, glad to see the tragedy on Lafayette had come to a good end at last, asked, “Well, Myra, sugar, has Ira ever quit talking?”

  Myra said no, but that he was so big now no one ever told him to hush anymore, and they all laughed. I imagine by then Mama had heard news of Mr. Sims’ timely end and was in a very jubilant mood, glad to find there was a God in heaven after all, who not only punished sinners but heard the prayer of the righteous, and had sent her this lovely, devout daughter–in–law the way He’d sent the ravens to Elijah. When she found out that Myra was only passing through, en route to visit an aunt in Milton, she simply insisted she stay the night.

  “It’s already dark, and no woman should be out on the road at night alone—”

  “I took the bus—”

  “Well, that’s even worst, what with the trash that lays out in them bus stations. Listen, shug, you call your aint. I knooow she’ll understand; you can sleep right here in Michael’s room. We’ll leave him a note. He won’t be in till late. He works down to Sanger, works like a dog, makes good money, got a good job down there—”

  So Myra was neatly tucked away in Michael’s bed, and Mama says—swears—she left a note warning him of the presence of a woman in the house and instructing him to proceed with all due modesty and caution, but Michael, who never had reason to lie about it, said he stumbled home after a bonecrusher of a twelve–hour shift, and in the face of a cold October dawn, decided to wait till morning for his shower. Peeling off in the darkness, he crawled into bed and lay there a moment, then gingerly felt something in the bed beside him. He said he thought it was me, at first, home unexpectedly, except that it was somehow different. It made the bed sag lighter, and well, there was this smell that wasn’t no Gabe smell, and after a few more curiosity feels, he came upon something he recognized all right, and leapt from the bed, hitting the lights and saying aloud to no one in particular, “There’s a woman in my bed.”

  The lights wakened Myra, and she sat up, shielding her eyes from the glare, and while Michael frantically pulled on his pants, Mama came in, her hair in curlers, her voice (he said) as calm as if they were standing in the vestibule of Welcome Baptist.

  “Well, I see you’ve met Myra. You remember Myra, don’tchu son? Lived next door—Ira’s little sister? Well, she’s down here a–visiting her people in Milton. Ain’t she made up into a pretty girl?”

  Well, I believe I’ve mentioned my mother’s matchless skill in the fine art of manipulation and am positively convinced, her self–righteous denial to the contrary, that she purposefully set Michael up, knowing once he’d laid his tired Baptist body down in a bed with a woman the approximate shape of Myra, it was all over but the crying.

  And she was right. Before I knew what was happening, Mama was calling me in Tallahassee with the news Michael was engaged, and she was hoping it’d be a short engagement because the girl was living with them till the wedding and she was concerned with how it looked—

  I interrupted her dissection of the morals of the matter with my shock, asking, “Who? How long’s he known her? I didn’t know Michael was seeing anyone.”

  Mama said well, it was a whirlwind sort of thing, but she was a good girl, she was—

  “What’s her name, Mama?” I asked, simply amazed, knowing Michael was not the sort of person given to whirlwinds, and Mama paused a moment before she answered.

  “Myra, honey Myra Odom—”

  “Myra Odom?” I said, and must admit the name rang no bell of recognition, only conjuring up the image of a knock–kneed country girl with a mother named Lueller who’d want to move in the week after the wedding, and I was far from enthusiastic. “Why won’t he wait? I can’t come now. I’m right in the middle of mid–terms. I’ll be there Christmas—tell him to wait, Mama. This is a serious thing.”

  My doubt was genuine, for I was desperate to see Michael get out of Sanger Manufacturing. I’d seen it suck the life out of better men than he, and a wife and gaggle of children sounded like the nails in his coffin. But Mama would not listen, nor Michael, nor even Daddy, and when I came home Christmas Eve, the deed was already done.

  Michael himself picked me up at the bus station that afternoon, still in his work clothes, his face bland and satisfied, and after one look at him I said, “So married life’s treating you well?”

  He only smiled, throwing my bags in the flatbed of his old truck, and on the way home, I asked him the question that had been on my mind since I’d first talked with Mama. “You didn’t knock her up, didju?” This being the only reason I could figure a man would marry a woman he’d only known two months.

  But Michael didn’t seem to follow the logic of the question, turning and looking at me for perhaps ten seconds, then saying in a very light, dry voice, “Gabe, don’t you ever talk about my wife like that again.”

  I rolled my eyes at what I considered his patented Baptist prudishness, and thought well son, you’ve made your bed and you’ll lie in it, but said no more about it, only asking after Daddy’s declining health and steering clear of the pristine virgin bride till we got home and I saw her. She was standing on the porch, surrounded by the neighbors and relations who at that juncture of my life still liked me enough to congregate at my homecomings, and I remember Aunt Mag, Mama’s oldest sister, calling out playfully as I came up the walk, “Michael, you better warch out now, she come here a–asking for Gabe—” She said it in obvious jest, for my peculiarities had set me apart as a queer of no small proportion, but Michael didn’t laugh as his wife stepped forward shyly, and I finally recognized her, letting my hand drop in shock, saying, “Myra? My–ra Sims? You came back?”—then after an incredulous pause, “You married Michael?”

  That was all I could get out before Mama, a little nervous, perhaps feeling a small pinch of guilt, hustled me inside, saying, “Gabe, quit that shouting, honey; give Myra a hug; she’s family now—” then pulled me through the house, still talking in my ear, “—might be pregnant already, come up sick as a dog this morning—”

  And while I hugged Daddy and shook my uncles’ hands, I was still looking over my shoulder, murmuring, “Myra? Myra Sims?”

  Myra who listened to me? Who loved me more than any boy on Magnolia Hill? Whom I waited on that day for an hour, then two, then Mama standing at the foot of the steps, telling me to go on and cry, baby, that she was gone, gone for good and it was for the best? She was back, and she was married to Michael?

  But there was no time to discuss it that night; it was Christmas Eve, the house full of relatives and laughter and talk of the marriage, and when bedtime finally rolled around, I found myself exiled to the living room couch since Michael and his bride were living with Mama and Daddy and had taken our old bedroom for their own. The lights from the Christmas tree, blinking green and red and blue, kept me awake, and I lay there with my hands under my head thinking that if I heard one sound from our old bedroom, even one creak from that rusty old mattress, I was by God walking out that door and never coming back, never again.

  But Michael (or Myra—I never knew) was kind enough to spare me that, and the next day, throughout the turkey and Lane Cake and presents, I found myself watching my old love as she went about her day, helping Daddy wind string on a new reel, trying on the new dress Michael had given her (twenty–one dollars, Mama said with a significant lift of her face), standing in the kitchen with the other women and discussing pregnancy symptoms. I found her shy with me, speaking kindly, like the Myra of old, but never looking me in the eye, which nearly drove me crazy, and always standing close to Michael, her shoulder or hand making bare contact, as if physically drawing on his support.

  All in all, it was enough to drive me to tears, for she was no longer the porcelain–faced child who’d once listened so passively through the spokes of the pig wire fence, but a tall, soft–faced woman with pale skin and coarse, red–brown hair that hung from a finely drawn widow’s peak to just above the straight line of her shoulders. Her
early promise of beauty had not been denied, but was not the head–turning, gut–wrenching sort I might have expected simply because it was ignored, or better, denied. I couldn’t exactly put my finger on it at the time, but it was as if the Lord had called Myra forth and in return for her hellish childhood had offered her beauty, and Myra, looking at the world and reflecting on the nature of man, had said thanks, but no thanks. What was left was a clumsy, neglected loveliness: earthy, common, somehow sensually maternal in her heavy breasts and strong thin arms and wild, uneven hair.

  Such was the holiday crush that we had no opportunity to speak privately, even if she would have allowed it, but I did manage to glean bits and pieces of her life from casual talk—how she had indeed moved to Birmingham after she left Magnolia Hill and lived there in peace after her mother remarried, an insurance agent named Carl Odom, who was probably the one man on earth responsible for the lightness in her face and her frequent laughter—he and Michael, who was quietly, unobtrusively stone in love, watching her as frankly as I did, even following her to the bathroom, where I figured he was up to more than just washing his hands, and proved it the day after Christmas when I walked in on them quite accidentally and found him kissing her with his old relentless concentration, pressing her to the mirror with his chest, not turning, even when I backed into the door in my embarrassment, but only when Myra saw me and pushed him away, murmuring, “Michael—”

  Only then did he turn, his face blank, then showing a flicker of concern, as if he hadn’t planned on something like that happening and regretted I’d seen it. Maybe he’d seen my eyes following her and pitied me, as Daddy had. He’d spoken no word of it Christmas, nor the day after, but the next evening on the porch, after we’d finished our usual homecoming talk—Welcome gossip and company politics at Sanger—he’d stood and said it was late, he’d better be turning in. Then, standing in the door that was framed by Mama’s cheap dimestore lights, he’d looked at me out of his deep, kind eyes and said, “Son, thet’s yo brother’s wife you been watching all day.”

  I didn’t bother to deny it but only looked out on the yard, and he let the night stillness gather awhile, his eyes still on my face, before he was satisfied his point had been taken and went to bed. But his gentle rebuke shamed me more than a thousand angry words, and I tried to keep my eyes to myself thereafter, though it wasn’t easy, especially when Myra laughed, which was fairly often after about day four when she lost some of her shyness and apparently found my particular humor very funny, throwing back her head and arching her white neck till it curved sweetly to her chest in a long, tense bow.

  I’m sure she was very innocent about it, but I was so intrigued that I found myself transformed into Lenny Bruce, on stage twenty–four–hours a day, and after a while, the excitement began to take on an edge of torment that frightened me. What had once been simple infatuation had taken on the characteristics of actual hunger, and after a week of hilarious days and tossing, sleepless nights, I decided to leave early, giving Mama some excuse or another, but seeing in Daddy’s eyes I hadn’t fooled him, not for a moment, and he was proud of me for backing off.

  He was careful I not be offended, though, and took off work to drive me to the bus station, hugging me at the turnstile, saying, “We’ll see you Easter, son, get us in some fishing—”

  I said sure, that would be fine, and told him that I loved him, which turned out to be the last thing I ever said to my father. He died three months later, asleep in his bed, from a cerebral hemorrhage so massive Dr. Winston said it killed him instantly, without one twinge of pain.

  “It was a good way to die,” he told Mama. “I hope I die like that.”

  Mama, of course, was not comforted; none of us were; it was too sudden, leaving us with all the tormenting private regrets that come on the tail of an unexpected death. My own personal agony was not lessened the afternoon of the funeral, when a slightly pregnant Myra, anxious to comfort me, recounted Daddy’s last night. She said he’d gone to bed early with what he thought was a touch of the flu, but had stopped in the kitchen to take some soda, and said that, well, Easter was almost here, Gabe would be home shortly, he reckoned he’d have to get out the poles, that fool boy was too lazy to row a boat—

  Everyone laughed when she said it, laughed through their tears, for Daddy’s lifelong amazement with my colossal laziness was a standing family joke. “Wouldn’t strike a lick at a snake if it bit him” was the way he usually put it, and someone, Uncle Case, I think, quoted it to another round of laughter, but I stood up suddenly and had to get outside.

  The April air was suffocating, already as hot as July, and I walked down to the church, and finding it locked went around back to the old baseball field. Not a breeze stirred the line of oaks that circled the rough, already yellowing grass, and for the first time I realized the field wasn’t very big at all, not nearly the monstrous stadium I remembered as a child. I was standing there puzzling over how things seemed to shrink as you got older when Michael came up behind me, still in his funeral pants, his sleeves rolled above his elbows, his pockets and hands full of regulation baseballs, just like old times, a glove under his arm.

  “Wanna throw a few?” he asked, as if things weren’t bad enough already

  I just looked at him. “You can’t be serious.”

  “Do your hand good,” he said.

  “So would amputation, but I’m not planning on that, either.”

  He didn’t argue, only pulling on the glove and turning his attention to the old hickory stump that had once stood five feet high, but thanks to his line drives, was now down to about thirty battered inches, and after a moment’s pause, he began drilling in fastballs.

  “Myra didn’t mean to hurt you,” he said, winding up, then letting go with a straight blur that popped the stump with a thwack.

  “It’s all right,” I murmured, diverted by the perfection of his form, the way the ball hit like an arrow.

  “So why’d you run like that?”

  “I didn’t run.”

  He let it go without argument, his eyes still on the stump, his body winding around his hand like a slow spring, then snap.

  “I just never should have left,” I said, and he looked at me.

  “Why not?”

  “I shoulda stayed at home like you. Took care of Daddy. He wasn’t fit to work after that asshole beat him.”

  He looked at me even longer this time, not accustomed to hearing me use casual profanity, then turned back to his opponent, the beaten-down old stump, “So what good would you a been around here?”

  “I’d have worked. Took a job at Sanger. Done like you—”

  He smiled at this, letting loose another flawless pitch, then paused to wipe his forehead, murmuring, “Son, you wouldn’t a lasted till first break at any job in this county—”

  “Yeah,” I said, “that’s right. That’s exactly right. I wouldn’t work, I wouldn’t play baseball, I never done a thing in my life Daddy was proud of me for, nothing, Michael, nothing. He was ashamed of me, you know he was.”

  For a long moment, Michael didn’t reply at all, only hammered in the last three balls and watched the dust settle. Then, after a moment, he spoke again in that low, quiet murmur. “I don’t know why you want to do this to yourself. You’re just like Myra, always wanting to grind yourself over nothing—”

  “Well it’s easy for you,” I snapped. “He loved you; he was like you. You understood each other.”

  At this, Michael threw back his head and laughed. “He was like me? He understood me? Gabe—” he looked at me with exasperation, “my daddy and me were about as much alike as nothing. He wasn’t no working man. He never spent a day on any job he didn’t know for certain he couldn’t drop like a light when it suited him.”

  He started toward the stump to collect the scattered balls, and I was intrigued enough to follow.

  “Daddy was just like you,” he said. “He just didn’t know how to read, couldn’t get his hands on things. Why, it hadn
’t a been for Mama and Candace and us, he’d a been a sailor or something. Something he could roam with. Daddy was just like you. Restless.”

  It was the first time in my life I’d ever thought of Daddy in such a way, and I didn’t interrupt as Michael picked up the balls, turning them in his hands, looking for signs of damage.

  ‘Always looking for something,” he mused. “You know what he told me the first time I handed him my paycheck?”

  I shook my head.

  “He said, ‘Son, this is real nice a you to hep your mother and me, but are you sure it’s for the best?’ And I said yeah, that I’d thought it over and figured Sanger was my ticket off Magnolia Hill, and he just scratched his head, said, ‘Well son, it’s yo life, you can do what you please, just make sure when yo feet hit the ground they keep on running till you’re somewhere you’re satisfied, ‘cause life is too short to go around hungry.”’

  It was the kind of peculiar country advice Daddy was noted for giving. In fact it was the same speech he’d given me the night I told him I was leaving Magnolia Hill for good and never coming back, or at least not poor, and Michael had not gotten the words out of his mouth before I remembered my young, arrogant words, spoken to a man who never had a chance to get out, whose feet had only taken half a dozen steps before he was halted, and I started to cry again, out on the old church grounds, not from grief, but humility. Because Daddy hadn’t argued that night, he hadn’t even taken the opportunity to give me a little fatherly advice on how wanting and getting are two different things; he’d only smiled and let me go, and I knew even then how unworthy I was of such love, how far it was above me.

  Michael only watched me cry, just like Daddy used to, and even said the same thing when I was finished. “You cry more’n anybody I ever seen in my life.”

  I didn’t bother to apologize, but only asked him if he was satisfied. He didn’t answer for a moment, only retrieving the last of the balls, then smiling very slowly, and I thought sharply, quickly, that he was thinking of Myra.