I was walking up and down the floor of my kitchen, the floor was pine, a type of wood that reminded me of my father, who was a carpenter. This man was my brother’s real father and not really my own, my father was someone else I did not know, I knew only this man and to me he was my father. He was a man I loved and had known very well, better than his own children knew him (my brother who was dead, my brother who was a merchant in the market on Saturdays, my brother who had almost killed our mother when he threw her to the ground while trying to prevent her from throwing stones at him). My brother’s coffin was made of that kind of wood, pine; my other brother, the one who is a merchant in the market on Saturdays, had picked it out. It cost the least of all the kinds of coffins that were on sale at the undertaker’s, I paid for it with traveler’s checks. As a child I was afraid of the undertaker, Mr. Straffee; as a child, all the furniture I came in contact with was made of this wood, pine: the chair that I sat on at home, the floor that I walked on at home, the bed I slept in, the table on which my mother would place the meal I ate in the middle of a schoolday, my desk at school, the chair I sat on behind the desk at school—all of it was made from this wood, pine. The floor on which I stood that morning that my brother had died was cold and the planks had pulled away a little from each other.
I called all the doctors who had prescribed medicines for my brother to tell them he had died. Their names were Scattergood, Hart, and Pillemer. Only when I had called them, standing by the telephone, did their names stand out to me, as if their names had drawn me to them all along. They said how sorry they were to hear of it. I called the pharmacist to tell him that my brother had died. His name was Ed. He had been very kind and sympathetic, often trusting that I would pay him the hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars’ worth of medicine that I had charged; no matter how much I owed him, he always gave me the medicines that had been prescribed to ease my brother’s suffering and prolong his life. I went to the grocery store in the little village to buy something, and when I told Pete, the grocer, that my brother had died, he told me how sorry he was and he said that he was sure that his wife, Debby, would be sorry to hear it, too. Everyone I told that my brother had just died said how sorry they were, they would say this, “I’m sorry,” and those two words became so interesting to hear: everyone tried to say them with an emphasis that they hoped would convey the sincerity of their feelings; they really were sorry that this person they did not know was dead, that this person they would not have liked at all (I knew this, for they would have found him charming, he was so good-looking, he could remember to have good manners when it suited him, when he wanted to get something, but really in the end he would have found their devotion to the routine, the ordinariness of pure, hard work, devoid of satisfaction, yet he would not have quarreled with them, he would only have done everything he knew how to accentuate to them the futility, the emptiness of the thing called life, the thing called living—they would not have liked him). But these words, “I’m sorry,” which sometimes are said with a real depth of feeling, with true sincerity, sometimes just out of politeness, are such a good thing to hear if you are in need of hearing them, and just then I was in need of hearing those words, “I’m sorry,” “I am so sorry.” I did not love my brother, I did not like my brother, I was only so sorry that he had died, I was comforted to hear other people say that they were sorry that he had died. And I was full of admiration for the people who could say this: “I’m sorry,” for they said it with such ease, they said it as if they were only breathing.
When I saw him for the last time still alive, though he looked like someone who had been dead for a long time and whose body had been neglected, left to rot—when I had last seen him and he was still alive, I had quarreled with him. I had gone to see him one weekend, leaving my family to spend the Thanksgiving holiday by themselves. My brother, the one who is a merchant on Saturdays in the market, had called to say Devon was not doing very well, Devon was sinking, Devon was going down. That was just the way he said it: not doing very well, sinking, going down. For the sickeningly floriferous thrush growing in his throat, a doctor had prescribed something; the pharmacist placed thirty tablets of it into a bottle so small I could hide it in the palm of my hand and the bottle could not be detected; the bottle of that medicine cost so much that I could not pay for it then; nor could I pay for the other medicines I needed, medicines for pain, not medicines to ease pain but medicines to make you not feel anything at all. I could not pay for any of it with cash, I could pay for it only with credit; and in that way, though not solely in that way, his illness and death reminded me again and again of my childhood: this living with credit, this living with the hope that money will come reminded me of going to a grocer whose name was Richards, not the one who was a devout Christian whom later we went to, for the grocers named Richards, whether they had religious conviction or not, charged us too much anyway and then forced us to pay our debts no matter how unable my parents were to do so; my parents had more children than they could afford to feed, but how were they to know how much food or disease, or anything in general, would cost, the future never being now; only it actually comes, the future, later.
And when I saw my brother for the last time, alive, in that way he was being alive (dead really, but still breathing, his chest moving up and down, his heart beating like something, beating like something, but what, but what, there was no metaphor, his heart was beating like his own heart, only it was beating barely), I was so tired of him being in this state, not alive, not dead, but constantly with his demands, in want, constantly with his necessities, weighing on my sympathy, at times preying on my sympathy, whichever way it fell, I was sick of him and wanted him to go away, and I didn’t care if he got better and I didn’t care if he died. That was just the way I felt, that was the only thing I felt just at that moment when he would not die and when he would not live; I only wanted him to do one or the other and then leave me alone.
I did not kiss him goodbye when I was returning home to my family, I did not give him a goodbye hug. I said to him at the end of my visit (four days), Goodbye, and he said, So this is it, no hug no nothing? (and he said it in that way, in conventional English, not in the English that instantly reveals the humiliation of history, the humiliations of the past not remade into art); and I said, Yes, this is it, goodbye, and perhaps I will see you again, and I was aware that when I said it—perhaps I will see you again—I was assuming something that was not true at all: seeing him again was left to me, seeing him again was something that I could decide. I did not feel strong, I felt anger, my anger was everything to me, and in my anger lay many things, mostly made up of feelings I could not understand, feelings I might not ever understand, feelings that everyone who knows me understands with an understanding that I will never know, or that someone who has never met me at all would understand as if they had made up my feelings themselves.
Two months before I saw him alive for the last time, there had been a big hurricane, and then weeks later a smaller one. The first one raged over the island for thirty-six hours and caused the usual destruction that goes with a hurricane, but what people talked about afterward was the sound of the wind and the rain; it sounded as if someone were being killed and the someone being killed was screaming “Murder! Murder!” My brother could only lie in his bed. He heard that sound that seemed to be someone saying “Murder! Murder!” He must have heard the sound of large trees crashing into houses, water flooding the streets, the poles holding up the wires that carried electricity splitting, then hitting the ground. When the poles that held the wires carrying electricity hit the ground, the house in which my brother lay, his mother’s house, our mother’s house, became dark and then filled with a light that had been absent for many years; for my mother got out the old kerosene lamps and lighted them. The light of the kerosene lamp was the only light I knew at night when I was a child.
Everyone inside the house was frightened; they could hear the disaster of the hurricane affecting other pe
ople in a dramatic way: dwellings being ripped apart, children crying, people calling in panic, in fear, certainly not in joy, certainly not in welcome. In that room, inside that house, my brother lay still, while outside it was not still at all, and what did he say, what did he think, what did he feel? He felt nothing, he said, he heard the noise of the wind and the rain, he did not hear the people; the light from the kerosene lamp only made him wonder (“De noise bad, man, but me no pay it no mind; dem people, dem people, me a warn you, deh no good, deh no good; de light you know, ’e like dem old-time days”). And in that moment (and by moment I mean a length of time that does not correspond to a scientific definition, and by moment again, I do not mean just a figure of speech) I felt (and perhaps incorrectly, but all the same these are my thoughts on his dying and on his life—and that is one of the reasons to outlive all the people who can have anything to say about you, not letting them have the last word) that I understood him again—nothing new, an old insight, this one—that he was a dreamer, that he liked events best when he could be in them but not have them ask anything of him, that he could observe and have the sensation of something, but while doing so he must not be expected to save himself or anyone else. I remembered then being with him for the first time after twenty years, and lying on his bed in his old shack of a house, the little one-room house that was the house I had grown up in; it had seemed so big to me when I was a child, I lived in it with my mother (the woman who later also became his mother) and my father (the man who really was his father and really was not mine), and I was very happy in it when I was a small child, and then I was very unhappy in that house when I was growing out of my childhood, and my unhappiness in that house coincided with his birth and the birth of the two other boys (my brothers and his brothers) who were born just before him; and so that time (1986 in January) when I saw him again for the first time after twenty years, I was lying in his bed and he was sitting in the doorway speaking to a friend of his, they were planning a career, or something like a career in Dub music, and they were both smoking marijuana, which they did not call marijuana; they called it the Weed, as if that name, the Weed, made it something harmless, something not to be taken seriously. They laughed at me when I told them not to smoke so much marijuana, and then they started to smoke cocaine. And later, as my brother lay dying in his mother’s house, I ran into this boy, his friend, as I was visiting my other brother who sells things at the market, whom I was helping sell things in the market, and this boy, my dying brother’s old friend, came up to us to buy some soda, and he had with him a woman and a child, not his wife, just the mother of his child. The three of them were together and they were a family and they looked so very nice, like a picture of a family, healthy and prosperous and attractive, and also safe. This old friend of my brother’s did not recognize me, and so I reminded him of how I knew him, and even so, he didn’t ask after my brother, and even when I told him in a quite frank way about my brother’s condition, it didn’t seem to interest him at all, and I urged him to visit his old friend and he said he would, but he never did, he never did at all.
When I was lying on his bed that time in 1986, I was looking up at the ceiling; the little house was then old, or at least it looked old; the beams in the roof were rotting, but in a dry way, as if the substance of the wood was slowly being drawn out of it, and so the texture of the wood began to look like material for a sweater or a nightgown, not something as substantial as wood, not something that might offer shelter to many human beings. Looking up at the roof then, rotting in that drying-out way, did not suggest anything to me, certainly not that the present occupant of the house, my brother, might one day come to resemble the process of the decaying house, evaporating slowly, drying out slowly, dying and living, and in living looking as if he had died a very long time ago, a mummy preserved by some process lost in antiquity that can only be guessed at by archaeologists.
As I lay there I could hear our mother busy outside. In a climate like ours we live outside. When I was a child and my mother was trying to teach me European table manners, this was done inside, with the three of us—my mother, my father, and me—sitting at a table that he, my father (that man I knew so well, better than his own children—and that was how I came to know him so well, I was not really his child) had made, they both approving of the way I managed knife and fork and food, and my mouth all properly arranged. All things foreign were done inside, all things familiar and important were done outside; and this was true even of sleep, for though we fell asleep inside the house, as soon as the eyes were closed and sleep came on, no one stayed inside, all dreams, or so it seemed to me, took place outside; and in any case, as soon as we woke up, the first thing was to observe the outside of our house to make sure it had stayed the same as when we last saw it the night before. But at that moment, again in 1986, when I was lying inside the house in which my brother was living, my mother was outside talking to herself, or to a chicken that got in her way, or to the cats she had adopted which were just recovering from fish poisoning, as was my mother, but the cats were lagging in their recovery. Our mother—and sometimes I think of her as my mother only, and then sometimes she is the mother of my brothers also, and when she’s our mother, she’s another entity altogether—had recovered almost at the same moment she became sick from eating some fish, grouper, that must have fed on something poisonous in the sea and had sickened everyone and everything that had eaten it. A dog got in her way and she cursed him; my brother’s friend got in her way, she cursed him and he laughed; she cursed my brother and he laughed. I did not get in her way, I was inside on the bed lying down, but in any case, I no longer got in her way, I had removed myself from getting in her way, I was in a position in my own life that did not allow for getting in my mother’s way, she could not curse me, I no longer needed her. Even so, I still ate the food she cooked, and that was what she was busy outside doing then: cooking some food for me. She was a very good cook; I did not like her cooking when I was a child, but when I was lying in my brother’s bed I loved all the food she cooked, all the food I would not eat as a child: fungi, saltfish with antroba (eggplant), breadfruit, doukona. I longed for these foods and was so glad to have them cooked for me, and not just cooked for me but cooked for me by her. It was while my brother was ill and I began to visit him (I did not take care of him, I only visited him and took him medicines, his mother took care of him) that I decided not to eat any food she cooked for me, or accept any food she offered me at all. It was not a deliberate decision, it was not done in anger. My brother, the one who sells food in the market, the one who had stopped speaking to my mother even though he lived in the same house as she, cooked his own food and would not let her cook anything for him and would not eat anything she cooked no matter how hungry he was. He did not like his mother anymore, he did not love his mother anymore. He called her Mrs. Drew, the name that ordinary people called her, just that, Mrs. Drew; he called her only, used her name only when he could not avoid it, when to address her without speaking her name would cause attention to be drawn to himself (someone might wonder, Why does he not speak to his mother directly?). My brother who was dying (and he was dying; there were times when he seemed sick, just sick, but mostly he was just dying), he too before he got sick called her only Mrs. Drew, but as the life of his death overwhelmed him, he came to call her Mother, and then only Muds. “Muds,” he would say, “Muds.” At that point in his life, that moment in 1986 when I was lying on his bed, looking up at the beams of his ceiling that would eventually remind me of his dry, rotting, shriveling body, he too no longer ate the food she cooked; this was part of a separation he wished to make between himself and his family. It was at this time that he proclaimed himself a Rastafarian and spoke constantly of Jah. The impulse was a good one, if only he could have seen his way to simply moving away from her to another planet, though perhaps even that might not have been far enough away.
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