My Brother's Passion

by D. James Smith

  “Sit,” she said and I did, and then she went to a drawer in the sideboard and took out a paper with a picture of a blanket drawn on it which she showed me before she placed it in a dish and took the candle and lit it. “I’m cold today. I don’t know why that should be. Your grandmother was like that, always cold.” But I already knew the picture of the blanket that was burning then was supposed to keep grandmother warm wherever she was.

  Mother closed her eyes and went walking, I guess, and I knew I was supposed to stay quiet and wait, but I didn’t want to and I said, “There’s a lot that have a passion for her.” And my mother’s eyes opened and slid sideways so as to study me good.

  “Perhaps that’s her nature,” she said, almost gentle.

  I think perhaps has a curious meaning of its own that she wasn’t telling, but I said, “Why?” I knew I was being stubborn, but my father wasn’t there and so I was being wise, taking a chance.

  “Of course, it’s possible it is not her nature and if so …”

  “Why would that be her nature?”

  “… then she will suffer.”

  “It’s not, it’s not her nature,” I said, ’cause I knew about the suffering.

  “I know what my father would say to you right now: ‘Stretch a bow to its full and you will wish you had stopped in time.’”

  And I was seeing the sunlight tipping the grass out back of her place, that field gone to fire …

  “It’s her business, Dave.”

  … and the struggling and the blue jays screaming from the trees, the sky pulled tight, and the bow that she was, stretched to its full. I didn’t want to know anymore then. My mother was watching me carefully. She leaned close and pulled me to her, her cheek against mine, her eyelashes brushing my skin like I was her baby again. “You stay away from there,” she whispered.

  And I let it go. I didn’t say, Why? anymore, because, in my way, I knew.

  16

  The Nam made a hole in my brother’s ear, made a hole in the little drum that’s in there. Sound busted through and did it, punched it out. Had to call our own artillery in, he was saying on the phone. I heard it ringing and I picked it up because I was the only one home. That’s all we could do, Dave is what he was telling, how he and some he was with got their position run over one night. That’s my luck, he said and I knew he meant the good kind because he told how all of those others’ luck was the worst kind.

  Uncle Sam couldn’t use him without his having both of his ears working. He said he put it all in a letter a couple of weeks back. We never got that, was all that I said. He said some more, stuff about Okinawa and the hospital there, how he was pretty much as good as new, and that he was free.

  Tell them that, Dave. I’m free to come home and I will be. Soon.

  OK, I said and then the line got fouled up with a sound like wasps crawling around, bunched up and crazy, and then that got faint as if they took off and were moving away and then the line, it went dead. I hung up the phone then, and sat down in the big soft velvet chair that’s there by the front door where the phone sits, sat there, my feet not touching the ground. I was thinking how dumb I was not even telling Glen I was glad he was OK and coming right back, and I was thinking about what it would feel like to have your friends all dead and what it would be like to have your ear opened up like a window torn open in a storm, bits of leaves and dust and the night blowing in. So I just sat there waiting for someone to come home so I could ask about that.

  17

  In a small town, you do something and it is a pretty sure bet that somebody will know it, so those scabs played a dangerous game. It wasn’t just crossing the picket line that was a danger. People knew where you lived. Those scabs would load up a car, pack themselves in for courage, and then drive fast as they could through the gate at P.F. Stanley and Company. Work at the plant took time to learn so it wasn’t as if those scabs could do much, but it was the sight of them that made people sore. If it weren’t for Erin Bleacher those scabs would’ve got killed.

  Erin Bleacher shot animal hormones into his own body. Every part of him grew, except his head which stayed the same and made him look like a potato in a t-shirt with a white melon on top for a head. No neck, fat white arms the size of most men’s legs. Some said he was an Angel come down by way of Oakland, came down on his Sportster after some of his brains got eaten by crystals of meth which are supposed to be as sure a poison as you can get if you’ve got that affliction, if you let yourself go like that and get bound up in the flesh.

  He was half of him dumb and the other half mean, and that’s all there was that I knew of him. They say he killed somebody with a cue stick, once, or so he liked you to think. But they that would tell it were those that were desirous of some attention when they talked, so who knows. They say the cops used him when they needed something done on the side. And it was everybody’s knowledge that the old Fresno Hotel took care of his rent as long as he kept the girls there in line, so all that was his were the wages of sin. Still, the old men on the bench were surprised when he started showing up along with some other fellows, strange sorts because they’d grown these Rip Van Winkle beards over their young men’s faces, surely ugly enough to be his genuine friends, all of them showing up outside the plant in the mornings to open the gates and wave the scabs through.

  Some of those scabs were black boys, tar babies, I said to my folks when we were driving one evening out in the country, and my dad reached back without even looking and slapped the side of my head so hard I toppled over in the seat.

  Amos, my mother says, he doesn’t know what he’s saying. But I guess I did ever after because I took care not to say it again. Those two were nervous then, what with the strike and with the knowledge that Glen could show up any time.

  One morning I saw Erin Bleacher wave those boys in and somebody threw a beer bottle that went head over heels, somersaulting out of the crowd to pop open in bit-size pieces at his feet. And Erin Bleacher pulled a double-barreled shotgun from under his coat, a shotgun sawed-off nearly as short as a pistol and duct-taped on the handle, and he shot it in the air, his hand bouncing twice, those blasts echoing off the two-story buildings clear across the street, sending the pigeons clattering from the rooftops there. The men backed away so the scabs could go through; and across, down the street, the cops in their car just sat there minding the business they wanted to mind and no more.

  That same day, right after Erin Bleacher locked up the gates, Uncle Aquilla came out to the fence and tried talking to the men. He came out slowly with his thumbs in his suspenders and chewing a cigar into one corner of his mouth. He stood at the chain link and unhooked his thumbs to raise his arms as if he’s surrendering, but he’s not, he’s just curling his fingers through the fence and resting against it. “Men,” he hollered. “Men,” he hollered again, even louder, though the men had already shut up and were only a few feet from him, on their side of the fence, waiting on what he’s got to say.

  “Don’t you be fooled by this … this outside agitation,” he said, quieter now ’cause he sees the men are hushed and because he’d got his nerve up. “What does this joker from Seattle or wherever the hell he claims he’s from got to do with our work here? Huh? NOTHING!” He looked around, studying faces. “That’s right, nothing. I’m saying to you boys, don’t kill this company. Don’t do it.” He shook his head, and you could tell there was some actual sorrow there in his voice and some fear, too.

  And the men were silent and that particular day the old guys on the bench were holding their tongues, and I looked round, but didn’t see the Jew anyplace. And then I saw my dad. He was back some, in among the men, wearing his khakis and a red flannel shirt and his old blue and white nylon Nascar windbreaker. And he had a P. F. Stanley cap on. I watched him. I could tell he was thinking because he was biting at the inside of his cheek the way he’d do before he’d make a move on the chessboard at home, chewing like that on the inside of his mouth before he’d pick up a knight and go forward and
flank to the side, part of the plan, staying one jump ahead.

  He snatched his hat off his head and flung it out over the fence where Uncle Aquilla, surprised, studied it on the ground where it landed, until the men began to laugh—started chuckling and then laughing full-out—and somebody did a hoop and holler, and they all started taking off their caps and sailing them over the fence, those caps flying clumsy as chickens with their wings clipped. And Uncle Aquilla turned around and started walking back to the plant and the caps were landing, rolling at his heels and his backside is all we saw, and I was thinking it don’t look much better for being covered up, the fat and the wrinkles covered up, walking away like that, dangerous and shamed.

  18

  I was lying up there in the weeds, waiting on her to come on home from wherever she’d gone, the one time I talked to him myself. I was looking out across the fields, kind of humming to myself, bored, watching this skinny white crane, like one I’d seen in my library book, saw it off just a few yards away. It was jumping round in the grass like a Chinese kite and trying to take off, and I was thinking, No wind, until I see it was because it had one of its wings broke and that was why. I wanted to help, wanted to sneak up and capture it and take good care of it until it could mend. But I already knew touching a wild thing would most likely kill it, and besides it was too big for me to even know how I could get hold of it proper and get it home.

  It wasn’t making any sound, just hopping in circles on its long orange legs and beating the one good wing and trying to make the other one go but just making it worse—bent and crazy, snapping softly in the wind like hung laundry. It didn’t cry or make any sound, its eyes, black buttons, shining with pain, and I realized it would never get out of there, some dog or something would get at it, or it’d starve. And when I figured that out it felt like the first time of something, felt like a finger pushing slow and hard into my heart, and I didn’t like it at all, didn’t like that I saw that’s just how it is sometimes.

  I wasn’t sure, then, anymore about shooting birds all the time, that in the future, I should put more thought on that. Soon enough, it ran off down the edge of that field, scuttled away, me watching after it some. And I settled back in, got to feeling lazy, just watching the clouds, and fell asleep, dead-out with no dreams, just black and nothing, limbs heavy as logs.

  When I woke up, right off I saw that somebody had to have been sitting next to me while I slept, sitting there long enough to smoke three Pall Mall non-filter cigarettes and then stub them out on the ground right next to me.

  I looked around. There was only her little white house and the oak trees and the grass and the sky still wobbling overhead, fly-specked and so rich you could swim in it, almost. Then the hairs on the back of my neck stood up, and I turned round and there was the Jew sitting on a long branch in the tree, right next to me. I jumped up. “Lord,” I said before I knew I was going to say it, “you gave me a scare.”

  He just smiled and swung his legs back and forth very slowly and gave me a kind of salute with a long-necked bottle of beer he had in one hand. He was only a few feet up in that tree, up on the first good branch, and he was just taking the day anyway that it came, I could see that, just relaxing, but still, I tell you, to me, right then, it was as if he’d dropped out of the sky, trouble sitting there as close as your shoulder, sudden and real. I said that. “You’re the one that’s trouble.” And he laughed a little, silently to himself, appreciating what I’d said in some way of his own.

  I suppose, he said, though he didn’t say it, it’s just what he meant, I could tell, when he nodded and lifted his shoulders. Then he took a long pull on that beer, head tilted back, but those big black eyes of his on me still. That’s when I noticed his hair was wavy and a bit long, and I thought, maybe, I might like to look that way myself when I was grown.

  Then he said to me, “She’s not home, bub,” the insides of his eyes all prickly with stars, crinkled with humor. I didn’t say anything. But I felt the shame on me hard, burning my ears. I just stood there to see what was going to happen next. I figured he could make some sport of me if he cared to as it was true I’d been keeping track of things, and he knew then. I stood there so he understood I was not denying anything, but I wasn’t sorry, either.

  “She’s not your passion, is she?” I blurted out, but it didn’t sound like a question.

  His face went dark for a second or two like a shadow of a cloud slipping over some flat, sunny field. “No … not really a passion,” he said.

  I shook my head, my head saying yes, that’s what I thought, then I couldn’t help myself and I said, “She’s my brother’s.”

  And our eyes met and held on and he said, “Who’s your brother?”

  “He’s Glen. He’s gone to the Nam.”

  “Oh …” he said. Then he jumped down out of the tree, and stared off into the fields and there was sun spotlighting them so hard they looked bleached, and he wound up and tossed the beer bottle out as far as he could and watched after it where it went down, thud, in the grass. He was looking off that way when he said, “Well, you don’t worry. I won’t be around here long.”

  “He’s supposed to be back sometime soon,” I added, because I thought he should know it and I didn’t care if I was sounding bold.

  He looked at me, one side of his face hunkered down, half-sad, half-smirk.

  He took out a handkerchief from his pocket and shook it loose like a sudden white blossom and wiped the dirt off his shoes, forgetting me, full of care for his shoes, kind of weird. I didn’t know what to make of that and looked down at my own shoes and started thinking it’s time I got going. I guess he was uncomfortable and why not as I’d said what I did. So I turned and I left, and I believed that was because I’d had enough for that day, what with that white bird still spinning round in the grass and him they called trouble in a tree, that I’d gone then and talked to, making claims for my brother.

  19

  Mother grew lemon grass back of our house. She said it was as good as they grew in the old country. She was forever chopping it up and mixing it in with chicken or peas or whatever she wanted. In the ground it looked like the stalks of green onions, though it could grow taller than me. Cats would lie up in there and go half-mad with the pleasure. It was all mystery to me why they liked it. Sometimes they’d spring up out of there, full of the wild and impressed with themselves, enjoying their spunk and the way they’d surprised you.

  She had peppers and tomatoes and squash and whatnot growing in summer. For a long time my mother had pestered my dad to build her a square box out of redwood so she could keep leaves and garbage and such so as to have something to use to nourish her garden. The box was to have no bottom and the top would be covered with a tin lid with holes poked through. She called it a cooker because it was supposed to heat up and cook down all the stuff into food for the vegetables. I liked the idea. Sun and the closed-up box warming the stuff, breaking it down, but the stuff still there, just changed and ready to change again when we’d rake it into the vegetable garden so the roots of the plants could clutch it, hold it, and take it up into themselves. Things really could go round forever.

  Of course, I never saw it until my brother built it for her the first week he was back. Yes, that was a week to remember. Glen was always a natural carpenter. And believe it, he was out there early, one of those first days it was hot, him not wearing a shirt, first thing in the morning, the day after he showed up, his hammer going down, the nails yelping hard as he punched them into the lumber my dad had bought for the job over a year before. Mother was in the bathroom crying out of relief or maybe sorrow of some kind, and my dad was out there hovering around, nodding and handing Glen stuff, neither of them talking. It looked from my window as if my dad couldn’t help himself being a pest. He was pretending he was watching the job, but it was plain he was just watching Glen, drinking him up with his eyes that were weak with that kind of thirsty.

  Even from my window I could tell Glen wasn’t hi
mself. I mean he was himself, he was Glen, and he was my brother and he was glad to see us, but we made him nervous in some way we hadn’t before. Even that day you could tell he wished my dad would go into the house and leave him be to let himself go in that work, and I believe dad knew that himself, but couldn’t bring himself to be quit of his son.

  I’d had enough sense to stay out of the way, just shook his hand when he showed up at the door the day before, spiffed out in his dress uniform, his hair cropped as short on the sides as a Plains Indian, those I’d seen in a book, the ear on his left side plastered over neatly with some kind of putty, his eyes like almonds damp with some rain but already drying, his cheeks sharp, and his shoulders new with muscles. He came into the house and put his arm on my shoulder, let it rest there the whole time he said hello to my folks, well hello and hello son and hello mom and everybody hello and everyone stiff and shaky, bound up and relieved at the same time and his hand staying there on my shoulder, like I was holding him up, my brother, Glen.

  And that’s how it was at first with both of them, my mother and my dad watching him, trying to see who he was now, all the time watching him and him knowing that and him patient with them, letting them come closer than he’d like with their eyes, which they did all the time, sometimes secretly, sometimes not, sometimes them just staring at him at the dinner table until he’d look at them and smile a very little smile, patient with them, not wanting to show them directly, but letting them see for themselves, waiting for them to see that yes, he was, yes, all of him, changed.