My Brother's Passion

by D. James Smith

  I had a room upstairs, to myself, with a ceiling that slanted down toward my bed. It was all tongue and groove cedar, the walls and the ceiling. The window was next to the bed and gave me a view of the yard. There was a bathroom next to my room and my brother’s room next to that and that’s all. I was supposed to go up or down stairs and stay put, not run up and down and make a lot of racket so sometimes I got stuck up there longer than I liked.

  On one wall I had a picture of a pheasant scared out of a yellow field. Mother said that picture was special. The Book of Changes, a holy book, she said, told how a flying pheasant was a symbol of forms changing, though looking at it, then, I could still think of the .410 shotgun I wanted and would have needed to bring down something big as it was. On the other wall, my dad hung a picture of Jesus—blond, blue-eyed, face of a girl. Next to that I had a picture I’d made as a kid and still liked: layers of crayolas scratched down with a pin—a boy standing in front of a house, a sunflower growing next to him, a burning yellow wheel in a sky I’d streaked red and blue.

  Downstairs we had a big kitchen with enough room to feed a crew of workers, and I suppose in that house at one time that’s just what they’d done. There was a living room with leaded glass doors that rolled out of the walls and closed off the rest of the house if my father wanted quiet. There was a parlor my mother had painted red where she kept the ancestors above a small fireplace we never lit. There were varnished tablets sitting on wooden stands where the names were carved. There were photographs, too; she kept water and rice in little green bowls that were set in black lacquer pedestals in front of the old faces.

  I know my father didn’t care for any of that, but you could tell he couldn’t bear to see my mother unhappy, so he left it alone. With Glen gone the place seemed especially empty in a way I can’t explain, maybe like the hole that’s left in the air when somebody’s passed by.

  Mostly, I liked the basement. It was damp, smelled of wood beams and dust, and was ringed with shelves of old glass gallon wine jugs, the wine drunk up, the jugs refilled with water so in case the Russians went mad and sent us the bomb we’d have scads of fresh water. My dad had also a little shop for himself down there, a workbench and some tools. There was a little drawer there with a false bottom lined with red felt that had a Smith and Wesson .38 in it because my dad had once been a deputized sheriff for the county which he said didn’t mean much except a few extra bucks when he used to walk the high school’s parking lot at the football games on Friday nights in the fall.

  I liked that you could crawl under the house from the basement and listen to the footsteps and muffled voices coming through the floor. I saw how the space between things was pretty thin, how things were connected and how things could slip back and forth like those voices and footsteps. And it made some sense to me that my mother left stuff out for her family, in spite of the truth of them being dead.

  One night when I was down there in the basement doing I don’t know what the phone rang. My dad had an extension down there because when he was working on something he couldn’t be bothered climbing the stairs. So I waited a little and then picked up.

  “God damn it, you keep that Jew away from the shop,” Aquilla was saying.

  “He’ll get to them one way or another. That’s his job for Christ sakes. He’s supposed to organize. And just so you know, the men are listening to him. They’ve got reason to.” Then a long pause. “He comes in Jack’s Place you know, buys rounds sometimes.” My father’s voice was brittle, but quiet on the line.

  “Just be damn sure you keep your nose clean. Keep clear of this thing. There can’t be any family involved in this. That’s all that I’m saying.”

  “I know what you’re saying,” my dad snapped back.

  “Now don’t get mad,” my uncle said, irritated, talking down to my dad.

  “I can’t afford to get mad,” my father said.

  “Well, don’t forget it.”

  Silence. I wondered if they were listening to see if I was on there, too. But I guess not because finally my uncle says, “How’s everything else? Hear anything from your boy?”

  “He’s OK.” I could feel my father freezing up.

  “Still don’t see why he’d want to go over there and mix things up with his own people.”

  “Just stop it right there, you hear me, Quill?” My dad’s voice was shaky with fury.

  “Now hold on, I didn’t mean anything by that.” I couldn’t tell if he was purposeful—baiting my father—or if that was more of his own ignorant self.

  Dad answered him back, sharp. “Just don’t forget I’m in the middle of this. I’m on the line with these guys every day, not you.” Then he just hung up.

  That was the first time I heard about the Jew, way before I saw him around and long before I saw him with my own eyes, lying in the ditch with his hands tied behind him with baling wire, his feet cut off, and his head face-down in a puddle of dirty water, my brother’s passion kneeling next to him crying, awful as an animal would, long before I’d grown up, before I’d seen real evil, with my own eyes, the Biblical kind.

  6

  So I thought that was that. Dad didn’t ever talk about work, and I was back missing Glen hard, those months of that winter going by with me noticing and not noticing, the watching of that time kind of like watching sky. You watch sky and you won’t see it moving unless you pick something to measure it by. Pick a cloud, nail it with your eye and you’ll see it’s moving, coming past the chimney or something, inching along toward who knows where. You have to notice ’cause what’s going on seems slow, but it’s not. Look away and look back and the whole sky could’ve changed, the whole world.

  So it was some Saturday that I thought was going to be slow as sky when right after breakfast my dad said, “Get in the van.” We were all in the kitchen and my mom was standing at the window washing dishes and didn’t bat an eye or even look around, so I knew it was something they’d decided on already between themselves. And that’s when I found out what I did about P.F. Stanley & Co.

  Nobody worked Saturdays, so when we pulled up there weren’t any cars in that big gravel parking lot, our tires making a chewing sound as we rolled up on the place. It was a monster, a cathedral of tin stretching out for at least two blocks with some flat-roofed buildings spoked out behind it. Dad had keys with him that opened a door down in the side of it, a little door opening into the belly where we stepped in where it was all dark and hushed with metal gleaming and the smell of oil and cold concrete underfoot.

  I followed my dad down the long aisles, looking at the big machinery, complicated and twisted as the insides of a gigantic clock. It was cold in there, but I had my bombardier jacket on, one of those with the fake fur for a collar and some insignias patched on the arms. We went down the line, all the way, me following dad, without talking, my head swiveling round trying to take it all in.

  Dad stopped sudden and pushed his cap back on his head and looked into a space between these big rollers. He squatted down and motioned me to him and he put his hand on my arm at the elbow and he pointed in there and I looked. “Your cousin, Marty, got caught in there back in fifty-two. Chewed him up. It was like cleaning up spaghetti. You see?” he said.

  And I nodded, though I can’t say I did. “Line was shut down for no more than four hours. Can you believe that, four hours?” I thought about that and maybe I got it, because my dad was watching my face and after a minute he seemed satisfied and patted my shoulder and stood up. He looked down at me, his blue eyes giving me a bright flash and me opening mine wide to take it. “I’m not ashamed of my life, but you got to know right now, you won’t work here. Nope. Never.”

  OK, I nodded, sure, I understand, though the truth is I didn’t see any shame in that place. We walked on down to the end of the building and through a door and into a place where the ceiling wasn’t nearly as high and there was some finished-up stuff, lined up for shipping. I think they were pickers of some kind. They looked like giant grasshopp
ers crouched on their hind legs, folded up, big elbows of painted steel, jaws out front just itching to chew cotton. He said to go on and climb around on the stuff if I wanted, long as I didn’t fall and get myself killed. Said he’d be back directly and walked back through the door we’d come in.

  I scrambled up on one of those things, the whole situation science fiction, like one of them might start up of itself and run amok and turn me into spaghetti like cousin Marty. I got up top of it and into a little glass cabin there for the driver and closed the door and smelled the upholstery and pulled on the wheel, making believe I was driving. Soon enough, I noticed from up there I had a view through a window that was set in above the doorway that gave me a square shot of the line. Into that square steps my dad with a pry bar, or something that looks like one, and he’s shoving it deep into the heart of the line, ramming it in solid, and I can tell that if they were to start up the works it would be trouble. It was plain that bar would go round, getting scrunched and things might back up and crunch down one upon another, and then it was I saw that my dad was giving P.F. Stanley & Co. some of the domino theory, all by himself.

  7

  I didn’t plan on climbing out of the ditch one evening and finding the little wooden house where my brother’s passion lived by herself. I wish I could have stopped myself from watching her after that first time, most any day that I could, going by to check on her, seeing her walking by the yellow windows, her red hair hovering round her head and shoulders and her lavender slips and breasts upturned and perfectly fine like the best of fresh peaches. I understand why those men came around. I could tell she had some special pull, something invisible but real like the moon is supposed to have, tugging all the water that’s here on this earth. I saw it said MaryAnn Sheeney on the mailbox. Painted on that tin cylinder at the end of her drive, painted careful, in red nail polish and even that gave me a little thump in my chest, wanting to know her as I did.

  Sometimes those evenings the sky would grow, these canyons of purple and black swelling up, the first stars blinking alive overhead, sun leaking off into nothing, and I would lie in the grass thinking, listening to the wind picking up the leaves and rustling them around in the dark, me thinking about how hard it must be on the Lord to keep track of the wheat and the chaff, how hard it must be to separate all the things in this world that seemed to me all hung tight together. I know that was my mother’s mind. She’d say, It takes heads and tails to make one coin. It’s notions of your own that says one side is good and the other bad. Of course that would just make my dad mad and the back of his throat uncomfortable because he’d go to clearing it with a little hack. Or else she’d say, Desire, there’s the trouble. Liked to say that. Made her feel she was her own self and had some thoughts. It was a subject my dad wouldn’t touch out of respect. She knew that.

  Lying there in the grass, the world going dark, I wondered why the Jew was trouble, why it was that he was around MaryAnn Sheeney more than anyone. Wondered what she saw in him. I tried to figure out what it was about him that made him what he was, how you could tell. The best I could make out was that his shirts were always white, with the collars buttoned down and his pants creased sharp like the men downtown. He had these beautiful shoes, the kind they call wingtips, buffed-up prideful, gloss-black and smooth.

  Those wingtips must be expensive because there weren’t many around that had them. Other than that, it’s a fact I can say, he didn’t look anything special. Not special as she was.

  She had something that put me in mind of the Rose of Sharon my mother had, trussed up at home on some sticks. I don’t know if it was a real Rose of Sharon, but she always said it was, and she admired it especially. I understand a fondness like that. There’s flowers like that that’ll open out, like it was just for you, and that’s a loveliness that won’t be ignored. Some guys say that’s how it is the first time you lie down with a woman. You think it’s just for you and it never happened that way for anybody, but as it’s only your first, it’s illusion.

  If that’s what happened to Glen with his passion, if she was for him the first time he saw loveliness, really saw it—like seeing those special, difficult colors of flowers, that softness spreading open like a bit of God’s glory put in this world, your mind could seize on that little bit, even if God was just flicking it off, the way a bird flicks pieces of water off its wings and doesn’t even know it’s doing it—that’s not illusion, especially if you had all that ugliness Glen did, coming right after, over there, clear down the bottom of Asia.

  8

  Walking home from school on a day I stayed late for my choir practice, I crossed Jensen Ave., two blocks up from P. F. Stanley & Co. I went slow trying to see what I could, though I was careful about getting close because my folks had forbid it. I could tell there was a crowd, and the men out front were bumping shoulders like penned cattle, though not much sound came up the block. So I went down that way, even though I wasn’t supposed to, sliding along the sidewalk along the fronts of the stores, my shadow following like a twin in the glass windows.

  I was maybe a half block from them, and I could see the Jew was shouting into a bullhorn like the kind the lifeguards used at the municipal swimming pool in summer. His dark hair was curling off the top of his head like a flaming black candle. He was pointing with one finger into the air. I was watching so close and not paying attention to where I was going that I bumped into the old guys out front of Nelson’s Hardware & Tire, the ones who always wore flannel shirts and baseball caps and Redwing boots that didn’t show any wear, which I suppose was on account of they didn’t have to work anymore. They were out front of the tire shop getting what sun that they could. Sit down, boy, they said and I did, liking how their bench was a front row seat, that I wouldn’t be noticed sitting there with them. We sat there, those guys spitting chew toward the gutter, spitting it out in a way that looked offhand but took practice and which I admired.

  Across and down the way, the P. F. Stanley & Co. men were keen on what the Jew was saying, heads up toward him because he’d climbed onto the bed of a pickup doing, I guess, what organizers do. Ever once in awhile a cheer would go up, and the Jew would smile and shake his head with satisfaction, full of the devil, a little pinched laugh in his face that was half fun and half anger. I kept an eye for my dad, but didn’t see him anywhere though he might’ve been there as that was a crowd. Three squad cars were parked, butted up together across the street from the men, but they stayed put, those policemen not even getting out.

  It didn’t seem that there was all that much happening, mostly watching—the men watching the Jew and the cops watching the crowd and the old guys watching the whole of it, and of course me watching too, and the Jew was taking note of everybody and everything, out of the corner of his eye, looking out for one and all. I wasn’t that surprised to see Uncle Aquilla too, sitting in his old, polished DeSoto, the one my aunt usually drove, in an alleyway next to Alfred’s Vacuum Repair, his jaw punched out and his eyes squinted as if counting up the thoughts in his head, separating them out and weighing them, you could tell, calm, like my mother would say, calm as a man drained of mercy.

  9

  Mr. Cobley liked for us to sing full out for all we were worth. Sing out making our lips round and perfect so the music would be perfect. He said he expected our best, wanted us to feel the glory in things the way he did. He threw his arms around a lot, shoulders hunched forward, his face soulful, the young Mr. Percy going along with us on the piano. There were some who said that a long time ago Mr. Cobley conducted up in the city of San Francisco, until they wouldn’t have him anymore because of his drinking which was plain enough to see still had him bound up in its sin. His face was chock full of little veins that ran just beneath the surface of his skin that was as thin as the rice paper my mother used when she wrote overseas to her sister and then later to Glen. You could smell the gin coming off of his arms, leaking out of the pores, his hands soft as oil and trembling when he talked.

  But
sometimes he’d join in and sing with us, his eyes lighting up with the beauty and his voice wouldn’t quaver and there was a kind of holiness filling him up so it seemed that power was too much for him, him being shaky with his weakness for pleasure, and I thought the Baptists might be right ’cause I saw how things could fight themselves out, the power and the glory, the good and the bad, right there in front of you, if you just opened your eyes and took a good look.

  10

  Just walked out is what my dad said, puffed up brash, sudden, in a way that wasn’t his way, not the usual for him, said it to my mother, her looking hurt and worried that day and from then on. I remember that right. A definite strike, he repeated, looking at her as if he wanted her to see he still had some fire, wasn’t as old as she thought.

  That got him started with his waiting out the powers of P. F. Stanley & Co., and my mom got a job at a packing house. She glued labels to wooden boxes made for peaches. They’d need those boxes, plenty of them come summer, and so liked to get started early. She worked twelve hours a day, seven days a week for awhile, and then she’d be home for two days solid, mostly sleeping. Dad and I would keep ourselves quiet, not even running the washer or dryer, no color TV, not even talking. He was keen on teaching me chess, said it was all about planning and staying one jump ahead. But mostly it was slaughter, my pawns going down quick and then the rest, too. Dad would give me a look just when I was putting a piece down, a look that said you ain’t thinking ahead, and I could have pulled it back, but didn’t ’cause I didn’t have any other ideas what to do.