My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  “Yeah,” he said. “I ain’t hurting.”

  He offered no more, and I did not press, for Myra was still a sensitive subject, one that I would have gladly put behind me, except that an argument with a department head over the relative worth of LBJ had cost me a scholarship, and with all my money going to books and rent, I had little or nothing left for food and found myself like Ira Sims, drawn to Mama’s table out of biological necessity.

  So I was around fairly often those next two years, there to see Myra produce what would have been Daddy’s first grandson, named Michael Simon, but always called the latter, for he was Daddy’s spitting image from birth, with the same dark eyes, the close–fitting ears, the sweet, patient smile. It was as if God had sent down an instant replacement, and we loved him, fought over him, spoiled him shamelessly.

  When I was home on weekends, I’d sit on the porch and sing:

  Dance up a boy, dance up a little,

  If you don’t dance up, you cain’t play the fiddle.

  It was a silly little song with about a thousand verses that my grandfather used to get me to dance to when I was a baby, and Myra would come outside to watch us, laughing and clapping as Simon danced till he dropped, and once she smiled at me out of her deep, kind eyes. “Gabriel, you’ll make a good daddy. You need to find you a wife.”

  Simon had fallen into my arms, and I was holding him upside down, tickling him till he screeched, when I caught her eye. “I have found me a wife,” I answered over his head. “Found her when I was thirteen. Problem is, she married my brother.”

  For one blank moment, her eyes had connected with mine, then she’d sidestepped me deftly, taking Simon, saying he needed a bath, and when I caught her in the kitchen later and tried to apologize, she jerked away and backed to the stove, her eyes averted, murmuring, “No—no, listen, Gabriel, it’s fine. Don’t touch me again, it’s fine—”

  By the time Michael got home from work, she’d already gone to bed, with a headache, she said, and I was disgusted with myself as I watched my brother eat supper with his dirty, nicked hands and tired, red–rimmed eyes, the kind you get after putting in seventy hours Chinese overtime, so disgusted I left early and stayed in Tallahassee and starved awhile. Not because of Myra’s rebuff, but because of the shaking in her voice that held a note of desperation, as if she were feeling it too, that subtle surge between us that had never quite died out. Desperation, because that kind of emotion might be inescapable, and she was in a vulnerable spot there, with Michael gone so much, and Mama at church, leaving just me and her and little Simon for company

  And you know, looking back, I think that both of us realized, even then, that sooner or later the jokes and the laughter and the dancing up would have to come to an end, and if it happened to dry up while we were alone, what would we have left but betrayal?

  Chapter

  6

  So I left and stayed away, for Myra’s sake and my brother’s, still unable to reconcile myself to the fact he was satisfied spending ninety percent of his mortal life inside the pounding walls of a furniture factory A mill. A plant. Whatever you wanted to call it, it meant hell to me.

  How can I describe the life of a mill worker in the South? The most compelling image that comes to mind is one of Michael I remember from this period when I went down to the plant to take him his supper one night. They were working shifts then, the place lit up like Cinderella’s castle, but when I went inside, there was no ball, no prince, only row on row of saws and molds and lathes, all chopping and ripping and making such a racket I couldn’t hear myself think. After screaming in the foreman’s ear a few minutes, he motioned me to a small glassed–in break room where a handful of men sat huddled around a table, drinking coffee in the ninety–eight–degree heat for the caffeine, their faces paste–white from the hours and the fatigue and the sheer monotony of the hot, wasted night. Michael was not among them. He was standing alone in the corner with his back to the wall, and though I hammered on the glass and held up his lunch, he remained there, motionless, his cap pulled low over his eyes, and after a moment, I realized he was sound asleep, there against the wall, his arms folded on his chest, his knees locked, his face slack with a curious peacefulness. I went inside the little room that was only slightly insulated from the roar of the floor, and when I touched his arm, he was immediately awake.

  “How can you do that?” I screamed into his face.

  “Do what?” he asked, feeling around in the bag Myra had fixed him and pulling out a sandwich,

  “Sleep!” I screamed. “Standing up?”

  “Oh.” He casually devoured the sandwich—something cheap, like bologna—in two or three bites. “I’m tired. Fifth night. Tell Myra I’m signed up for tomorrow”

  “You can’t work tomorrow!” I screamed. “You worked all night, all week, the overtime’s fixed! Damn, Michael, don’t let them do you this way!”

  He just shrugged, eating the pathetic supper in fast, hungry bites, and I was enraged at his passivity. I mean, here was a man who’d mastered baseball so well that the Reds’ scout had begged him to come to Cinncinati and try out. Had called every night for a week, but Michael had turned him down because Daddy was about to lose the house, and while the scout was sure, was positive, he’d make it, at least to the minors, he couldn’t give him a contract till the manager saw him, and by that time, it’d be too late. So, with this pointless, hillbilly need to martyr his life away, he’d gone on full–time in this rattling monster of a soul–sucking furniture factory, putting in his hours miles from the sun and mowed grass of a baseball diamond, while his wife sat home alone and his little boy sometimes called me Daddy by mistake.

  ‘Are you gone stay here all your life?” I yelled into his face, and he only shrugged, throwing his bag away and sliding his safety glasses back on.

  “Just till I die.” He grinned, amused at my outrage, but I didn’t think it funny at all and turned and left without a word, slamming the breakroom door in a particularly ineffective show of anger, the mighty bang consumed by the din and roar of the machines, costing the men around the table not so much as a blink.

  But Michael followed me, calling my name, and caught me just outside the door, his face still smiling, though he was trying to be kind.

  “Listen, Gabe, I’m fine. I’ll catch some sleep on my breaks. It’s nothing, it’s work, I’m used to it.”

  But I wasn’t satisfied. I was madder than hell. It was so pathetic, the endless line of saws, the workers with their pale, sunless faces and mortgages and cardboard–soled shoes, and I stood with my back to the cool dense night and lashed at him. “No, you’re right. You’ll work here till you die, work like a dog to put a few more dollars in Old Man Sanger’s pocket while Myra and Simon raise each other alone.”

  His smile disappeared. “Myra’s fine,” he said, then, with an almost sullen intensity, “she’ll be driving a Cadillac in ten years.”

  I only looked at him, shaking my head at this pathetic poor–boy brag, sickened he was already so dehumanized by the factory shuffle that he could not speak in first person, but had to say his wife would have the Cadillac.

  “Yeah,” I shouted over the roar, “and in ten years I’ll be pitching for the Yankees.”

  It was a cheap shot, even for me, bringing up pitching in the middle of this exhausting, dreamless night, but he said nothing, only watching me a moment, then turning and walking away. Watching him dissolve into the dust and roar of the floor, I felt even worse and ran after him.

  “Michael, I’m sorry!” I shouted, grabbing his shoulder and turning him to speak into his face, “I believe you. A Fleetwood. Pink, with white-walls. Be the wonder of Magnolia Hill.”

  smiled then, easily, accepting my sarcasm for what it was meant to be, an apology, and when I was almost to the door, he shouted, raising his voice for the first time that night, “Kiss Sim for me!”

  I turned and waved, and when I was in the car, I paused a moment to watch the cold white lights that fille
d the monotonous row of windows. They still glowed with that air of light–hearted, fairy–tale gaiety, and it was hard to believe there was a God in heaven when flesh and blood men sweated seventy–hour weeks for the privilege of living on Magnolia Hill. Then I started the engine and went home and told Simon his father loved him and packed up, lock, stock and barrel and left for good, not returning home the whole time they lived on Magnolia Hill, preferring genteel starvation to lying on the couch every night and letting my mind wander around the corner to the iron bed where Myra slept alone, thinking how easy it’d be to slip in there and press my mouth to her neck and see for myself if the increasing desperation in her voice was nothing more than my imagination.

  To further remove myself from temptation, I transferred to Chapel Hill for my master’s, and if times were hard in Tallahassee, winter in North Carolina took on the rigors of Valley Forge. My thin Florida blood would simply not adjust to the cold, and the night Mama called with the news Myra was expecting again, I lay in bed with chattering teeth and thought, well, that was wonderful; I’m up here dying of hypothermia while Michael and Myra are way down yonder in the land of mimosa, plotting Cadillacs and making babies.

  It hardly seemed fair, and when they sent me a photograph of a tiny, red–haired girl, I sent a polite letter and pleaded poverty in lieu of a present, then moved even further north for my doctorate, all the way to Boston, where, to my mother’s everlasting joy and eternal name–dropping satisfaction, I finished it off at Harvard.

  To this day I cannot properly explain why I chose Harvard of all places to take a doctorate in history with a specialization in the Southern contribution to the Civil War, since despite various fellowships and grants, the tuition alone landed me in perpetual, unresolved debt for the better part of two decades. I can only attribute the move to low self–esteem and a need to hook into the aristocratic, Faulknerian air the name, coupled with a Southern accent, evoked, though by the time I’d etched out my degree, I had grown very tongue–in–cheek about it, telling people at parties that yes, I was a Southerner and in love with my sister Candace, but my family had sent me up here to Boston, and at first I was a little depressed, but lately I’d started taking walks on the wharf, and God, I hoped everything worked out.

  Then I’d laugh till I cried; I thought I was so damn funny and would entertain them with all my little gothic anecdotes from home. Like most Southern emigrants, I had a whole cherished repertoire, small eccentricities, like how a cousin of mine had shot off his arm for the insurance money; the ins and outs of Baptist courtship (in which poor Cassie Lea Scales featured predominantly); how my brother Michael, the poor hick, had turned down a contract with the Reds because he wasn’t sure there was any money in it.

  So by means of my hiliarious, confessional laughter, I nearly managed to dehumanize and de–sting them all, breaking every icon in sight till someone, a fellow student or later, a student of my own, would join in the fun by asking with a grin if I knew the definition of a Mississippi virgin? Then he’d wink and say, “a twelve–year–old who could run faster than her father.” Old joke. I used to hear it a lot, and sometimes I’d just look at him, or if it was a student, take out my vengeance later in the semester with the red pen. But I never laughed, never, not even politely, for Myra was still too alive to me, her memory too fresh. I could still remember her ocean–colored eyes over the fence at twilight, and how she and Mama had cried so much the day Simon was born that they’d gotten me started, and we’d passed Kleenex and sobbed like old women at a funeral all afternoon long while Michael only shook his head and smiled.

  Sometimes I wondered whatever became of her hellish memories of Magnolia Hill, and how she’d ever brought herself to move back, one house, one pig iron fence, down from her own Auschwitz revisited. Once, when I was still at FSU, I remember coming home unexpectedly and seeing her outside, standing under the edge of the old sweetgum we used to play under as children, her face calm and blank as she looked across the fence at the rotting old house the absentee owner had let fall to disrepair, the yard a wasteland of waist–high brush, kudzu creeping down the wires to take hold of the sagging roof.

  She was so still, so vacant, that I went down the steps and stood next to her, putting a foot up on the fence and saying lightly, “So, Myra, wanna draw a hopscotch board?”

  But she paid me no mind, only stood there without the barest flicker of response until she turned and she saw me there at her side and was as pleasantly surprised as ever to see me, smiling, shaking her head at my hair, leading me inside to show me Simon’s new tooth.

  So I figured even the worst wounds healed with time, mine and hers both, and was a bit more accepting when Mama called with the news that Michael had been promoted to foreman, and they’d bought a house way out on Thomasville Road, ten miles or so out of town. An old house, she said, but they were fixing it up, and she thought it’d be right pretty when they finished, though Myra was having some female trouble; she’d been in the hospital, but was all right now.

  By then, I’d finished my degree (“And about time,” as Uncle Case was fond of saying. “Never a day he’s worked, never a day in his life—”) and accepted a nice entry–level position at Boston College that entailed reading so many freshman essays that I can say without fear of contradiction that I know more about the Continental Congress and Western Expansion than any man, woman, or dog in the state of Massachusetts.

  It was a combination of the essays and the New England winter (I thought UNC was bad) that made me give it up after only a year, and I looked around awhile before settling at the Archives in Washington, doing research on a grant from the Smithsonian. It was a safe, boring job that hardly paid anything at all, but did allow me to dig through trivia in my spare time and begin the first draft of my great American History of the War of Rebellion, a book I had long since roughed out and occasionally toyed with, but had never gotten around to the actual meat and bones of writing. I was too busy, I told myself, but did manage to churn out a few articles for historial reviews that kept my fellow historians hopping, especially the Southern ones.

  Somehow, for no very clear or understandable reason, I’d developed a lasting hatred for two of the great paragons of Southern mythology, Nathan Bedford Forrest and Jeb Stuart, and my obstinate opinion of their relative worth was tantamount to calling for desegregation in Biloxi in ‘62. A self–hating Southerner, they must have thought me, and I received actual hate mail for my assertion that the most creative act Robert E. Lee could have done in 1863 was to stick Jeb Stuart’s jaunty feather up his nose and so asphyxiate him. As for Forrest, he was as cunning a soldier as he was slave–trader. My only problem was that I’d somehow identified his proud, high–cheeked face in the fading sepia daguerreotypes with none other than Old Man Sims, and once I’d made the connection, I could never again look on him as anything more than an antebellum Nazi.

  Perhaps it was this connection between Old Man Sims and Nathan B. that first got me interested in nosing through the old slavery records that were salted away in the upper stories of the Archives, and from their black and white sureness, a shocking portrait began to emerge, one that would eventually pull the rug right out from under me, so I could never again refight the great battles at Manassas and Vicksburg and Chattanooga with such vigor.

  It is my heartfelt conviction that the spark that drives any historian forward is a certain fascination with the solidity of the past and a tiny obsession with the wistful realm of might–have–been. This is surely the case with Southern historians, who have refought the same old battles a thousand times, writing reams of papers on the near misses, the coincidences, the whole ghostly domain of almost, as if such conjecture were capable of moving them closer to what they wished had happened, a Southern victory.

  At least, that was the case with me, until I began innocently tracing the slavery records and saw such a ruthlessness emerge that I could never again get very excited over how very close a pacifist administration came to being voted
in in ’64. After all, it would have meant the continuation of the very real evil that was slavery, and though in debate my colleagues were quick to point out what a small percentage of CSA soldiers were actual slave owners, I was equally quick to bring up the Missouri Compromise that got the ball rolling in the first place. Then we’d go back and forth over states’ rights and rural versus city and industry versus agrarian, and all the other dimensions, but I’d stand my ground till they shrugged and said, well, I could be like that if I wanted to, and I always had a feeling they privately added a small mental note along the lines of Cassie Lea Scales (Well I know what boys like you are called, my Daddy told me).

  Philosophical musings aside, the long and the short of it was that after eight years of higher education and a truckload of money, I was still out there looking for my niche and beginning to get a little desperate. After all, I was twenty–five, and it occurred to me that at twenty–five, my father had not only fathered three children, but had seen Iwo Jima and lived to tell about it.

  Not the man my father was. The old phrase sometimes echoed in my mind, and as another year passed in passive somnolence, the sound of my footsteps in the cold marbled halls of the Archives began to take on the hollow ring of an undertaker’s in a mausoleum. By then I was officially within spitting distance of thirty, and increasingly tormented by a growing obsession that if I didn’t make a move soon, I’d die among the microfilm and be quietly filed away for some other poor bloodless research assistant to stumble upon in the twenty–first century and report to the main library—“Yes, I’ve come upon a perfect specimen of, I think, a twentieth–century male. Looks to be a repressed Protestant from, say, the post–Vietnam era. I’ll have to verify it in coding.”

  So I quit. Cold turkey. Memorial Day weekend, 1974, and went to my apartment and gathered all my notes and maps and files full of documentation, and with nowhere else to go and the registrar at Harvard still in possession of my social security number, headed home. Twenty–three hours on a Greyhound bus it was, and the first thing Mama said when she saw me at the door, was: “Lord, Gabe, you done quit yo job.”