My Brother's Passion

by D. James Smith

  I’d seen them driving around in Mr. Cobley’s old Thunderbird sometimes, and I was glad those two had found some friendship, and I thought maybe Mr. Cobley might give up the sauce and come to First Baptist, not just with the choir, but with a pure heart, prepared for Jesus. Though I have to say, I liked him pretty much the way he was. He called us all manner of things—urchin and warbler and star dust and little apple. He’d grab our heads with his hands if we’d done well and kiss our foreheads and clap his hands with delight so much that we felt some of that ourselves and were proud. And even if the time was getting late and he was hurting for his weakness and you got clipped, he’d get teary after and say, Now sugar, I’m sorry. There’s a fondness that’s easy to have for somebody who is all themselves and Mr. Cobley was that. I think that must have been hard in a town where most folks took satisfaction in being no different than anyone else.

  It was one of those Thursday afternoons when practice ran late and it was getting dark and he was warming up to one of his fits when in walked Glen to the back of that room. He walked up very respectful and stood next to Mr. Cobley.

  Young Mr. Perch stopped the piano and Mr. Cobley looked round and saw Glen standing there lanky and calm, his eyes burning soft with his thinking that always showed through because Glen was a thinker it was easy to tell. “Sir, we are working. If you wish to sweep up you’ll have to come later,” said Mr. Cobley.

  Glen told him he was there for his brother and pointed at me, and I stepped forward and waved a little with my hand so Mr. Cobley could see it was me that was the brother. Mr. Cobley looked at Glen and at me, and I saw all of a sudden he had the usual confusion, that is, Glen with the Korean eyes and me with the round ones. Glen got it but he didn’t act mad, just said, He’s my brother, which were words I liked hearing him say. Mr. Cobley sniffed and whipped his eyes up and down Glen and said something like go, then go, both of you go, and we did, out the door and down the steps and into Dad’s van, the doors slamming one on each side, chunk, chunk.

  It’s when we pulled into the street that I heard the shishing and ahhing and saw the black boys in the back scrunched down so you couldn’t see them through the windows, and I snapped on the dome light and saw it was real blood, thick and pasty, that’d seeped out, already starting to dry, between the fingers that they had clamped over their heads.

  24

  “Hell’s bells,” my dad said. “Now we could end up with a war where everybody gets hurt and nobody’s right.” Glen just looked at him with some kind of hurt and some kind of strange ugly when he said that. We were in the garage and the doors were closed and those black boys were sitting on the ground. Glen had already poured alcohol on one of their heads and was dabbing it then with a towel. “Jeez, now I’m screwed three ways to Sunday,” said my dad, half under his breath but still loud enough we all heard him.

  Glen told about how he found those two running away from the pickets, the men chasing them. How there was some that was liquored-up and who got to talking and ended up throwing bricks and glass bottles of gasoline that they’d lit. Threw them at those scabs coming out in their cars at the end of the shift. Then all hell broke loose and there was blood and vengeance and commotion enough to call down Lord Jesus, least that’s how it sounded.

  Those boys on the cement floor weren’t hurt bad, mostly scared as you could see easy enough, both of them on the floor, wobbly and unsure. Dad wouldn’t even look at them. He hated a scab more than anything. But, he hated what’d been done to them, too, and right then, hated those that had done it. Stupid sons of bitches, he’d say over and over the next couple of days. Stupid.

  I wanted to go when Glen drove those black boys back over to their side of town, but I wasn’t allowed. I’d been there before. It looked almost the same as some other parts of town except there was cars without wheels in some of the yards and couches out front on the porch. I heard dad say to Glen before he took off that night that he’d better be careful as there was no telling what might be going on over there. The whole place could be burning for all we knew. I thought about that, those couches and those yards and those doorways, dark with those kids hanging in them, all of them rising, all sucked up in the flames, all twisted in fire, all blinded, burned bright, the color of hate.

  25

  At breakfast the next day, my mom was quiet and my dad looked like he’d beat himself up all the night long. His face was pale and his eyes were bloodshot and he hadn’t bothered to shave. Glen said that there was some fair amount of trouble, a few cars overturned and set afire. And some of the men who were union were locked up. Not for running amok on the colored side of town, but for breaking windows at the plant and obstructing justice, whatever that was. Glen seemed upset in an odd way, polite on the outside, but as if on the inside, he was sitting on some part of himself he’d had to whip good in some kind of wrestling match. His left cheek would twitch a little when he talked, and his black eyes didn’t want to be there you could tell because they kept dropping away from you and going down to stare at the table.

  I was thoughtful that day, and I felt the ditch pulling me, felt I wanted to get out by myself and come up on some other family and watch their lives for a change. I was tired of the fuss and the bother. I didn’t start out for her place on purpose, but I suppose I knew that’s where I was headed once I climbed down in that ditch. I suppose I knew because it was the only ditch close by that wasn’t full and there wasn’t too many places other than hers that I could get to by going down that way. Maybe it was on account we were connected that I went. Maybe I wouldn’t have gone, if I’d known.

  It was bright and fine out and I lingered as I went. Thistle was growing along the banks in bunches of yellow so strong they just jumped at my eyes. I found some pools on the ditch bottom where baby carp were trapped and wiggling around. If the water didn’t come again soon their whole world was going to dry up and them too. I tried to think of them getting saved, how the water would come, rushing them off to a slough where they could grow fat as they liked, safe in that water, living easy, rising and falling, slow like big tender blimps. But that was a dream.

  That morning the sky was pale hot and no clouds were out, yet when I came down towards her way, came down on her and got close and found her, she was shuddering. Yes, shuddering she was, very much. Her whole self was. She was rocking back and forth on her knees and ever once in awhile a sound would be made, her whole body making that sound, rocking back and forth and letting that sound out. Maybe it was the sound like that litter of kittens that got caught one time when our neighbor was discing his field. He didn’t see them in the grass ’til it was too late, and then he shut the tractor down too soon and they were some of them kittens that were only half-dead and wailing. I’d come running over and seen it when he stopped, and he’d made me turn around so as to finish them with a shovel he had on his rig. Said, Boy you go home. There’s nothing to do. Said, They’re released, now. Said it gentle.

  What I saw plain enough when I came down on her was that that Jew was released. His face was down in a mud puddle and his hands trussed up behind him. And his shoes, still polished, with his feet and his ankles still in them, set up neatly there by his head. I told her that over and over, said, He’s released, now. But she couldn’t seem to find my meaning and just stayed there, down in that ditch, out back of her place, rocking on her knees and shivering in spite of the heat. She leaned forward like she was going to talk to the ground, and I hushed up to listen, but she was just retching some, her insides coming out in filthy brown spurts. Then it was that the flies came down, awkward and light like bits of black ash, fumbly and soft and sticky, and then me it was climbing out of there, running hell bound for help.

  26

  Chief Horton, dressed in a wrinkled brown suit, and a policeman, in a uniform, came round to see Glen. That was two days after I’d run home and shouted what I knew and Dad called the cops and then got in the van with Glen and took me along to show them where, mother calling after us, Amos
, bring him right back, her voice, a small bell, ringing, frightened, over our heads. And I see, now, that was the first of my mother losing her strength.

  Anyway, when the chief came round to the house, it was days after the men in slacks and shirts and ties and their sleeves rolled up came down from the county and took pictures and sniffed around delicate as ladies at Sunday picnic before they put him in a gray zippered bag and put the bag into an ambulance that drove off slowly without its lights or siren going, driving off quiet as a dream.

  After all that, when things settled down just a little, it was mother who answered the door that morning and after some words I couldn’t hear properly, she came to get my dad and Glen from the kitchen. They sent me upstairs to my room. I made the door to my bedroom shut hard in case they were waiting for that and then opened it very quietly and crawled back down the hall on my knees and my elbows like I SPY to the top of the landing so as to hear what exactly was what.

  “No, no, just a few questions,” Chief Horton was saying. “Routine.” I couldn’t see them, but I knew my mother and my dad were sitting on the sofa in the living room because I could see the chief’s legs where he was standing, facing that way. I don’t know where the other one was or where Glen was, except I figured in the room there with them somewhere.

  Chief Horton didn’t want any coffee and he’d rather stand. What he did want was just a little understanding of what Glen had been doing that night. “He was here.” That was my dad’s voice sounding strange and high, fear making it go high, I could tell. The chief said oh well, that’s what he’d figured, but all the same wanted Glen to tell it. That’s when I heard what it was that was in him since he’d come back not the same, heard the sound of it clear and uncovered there in his voice, right under the words. It was I don’t give a damn what you think, and There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t been done, and Kiss my sweet ass, all of that sweet and calm, not even a challenge in it, just the fact of it laid plain, saying sure as Jesus, You’ve no authority, though that’s not anything he actually said. He just told them about the plant and the black boys that night, about bringing them here and then driving them home. They went on for awhile Glen telling it and the chief stopping for little details all the time. Dad broke in and said, “You can understand. We had to do that. It wasn’t right what they were doing to those boys.”

  “A good Samaritan,” said the chief, his voice still mostly respectful. I could tell he was talking to Glen because his legs and his brown trousers and his worn-down-at-the-heel shoes had shifted toward the other side of the room. Glen didn’t answer. So they talked some more about what Glen had been doing with his time since he’d been back and all kinds of this and that, everyday stuff and then specific stuff about that night until it seemed things were going round in circles.

  That’s when the chief told my mother he wouldn’t mind that cup of coffee after all. She must have left the room because he started talking again to my dad, saying, “Some weather, huh? Ever summer just seems to get hotter or maybe I’m just gettin’ fatter. Heat’s hard on a body.” And dad agreed, a little relief in his voice, grateful things were still sort of pleasant. Then the chief asked a few questions about my brother’s relationship with his passion and Glen said only that he knew her, yes. Then the chief went and said, quiet so I had to strain my ears to hear and with a little we’re-all-friends-here in his voice, “I guess over there those people are something else. Cunning little shits is what I hear. You boys have to be hard with them. I understand that. I do.” That was to Glen, there was no mistaking that, the chief wouldn’t be saying that to my father.

  Glen gave him silence. So the chief, his voice suddenly ugly, a little fed up with Glen’s attitude maybe, said, “I suppose there’s some strange goings on over there. I mean you’ve seen some serious stuff. That’s only natural.” Then no one was saying anything and the air down there was sharp as metal and I thought if it had a taste it would be of a nail on your tongue. “I mean it doesn’t bother you to talk about this.” And nobody’s answering him.

  After a little of that silence the chief said, “Well, Amos, tell your wife I’ll have to have that coffee another time. I got to go now.” His legs moved toward the front door and then most of his body came into view, all but his head, and the cop in uniform, I’d forgotten about him, came to stand next to him. The door opened and the uniform left and then the chief says, “You know, son … I don’t really give a damn what you were doing that night. But we’ll have to see. There may be some who do and then you and I will have to talk some more. You understand. Now, you keep yourself available, you hear?” Then he closed the door after himself quick, not wanting to hear that sound in Glen’s voice, that fuck you, again, not giving him the chance.

  27

  It came as a surprise when P. F. Stanley & Co. made their last offer the very next day, the second to last day of August. It was a blow. Dad got his news in a yellow envelope and sat there at the kitchen table muttering in harsh whispers, swearing with lots of s’s, like a tree rat I once cornered in the garage. Uncle Aquilla hadn’t even let us know it was coming. It was a surprise that P. F. Stanley said in the letter that the men were fired but they could come on back and apply for their jobs if they cared to, but the pay was one dollar less than what they’d had before. They had two weeks to decide. They could come in the fifteenth of September and apply, after that anybody that wasn’t hired back was fired forever.

  That day I was home and just lurking around the house, staying out of the way, but paying attention. My dad got on the phone and started calling around. We got to stick together, he’d say. We got to stick. But it sounded like he was talking to himself, and it occurred to me then that perhaps the fight had gone out of him and it was no longer in his nature to be a striker, and I thought of what my mother had said and wondered now if he’d suffer.

  That night, in spite of being tired, Mom served us our dinner. Stuff my dad liked especially—chicken-fried steak, sweet potatoes, mashed with butter, and string beans she’d grown herself. It was a bit of luxury that dinner, laid out with candles, but still my dad didn’t eat, just pushed on his potatoes with his fork till they were flat. My mother ate slowly and kept tabs on my progress, making me slow up and put my knife down each time I took a bite, her usual routine, but I knew she wasn’t happy.

  Glen wasn’t there and she’d glance every once in awhile at his empty plate and something in her eyes would kind of fold up and sit down and her brow would wrinkle. Still, she was pretty. I’d heard a man say once, Now that’s a handsome woman—if you like chinks. Right then my dad was getting more fidgety and tied up in himself and it wasn’t long before it got so the air seemed to be sucked out of that room and the summer-dark, hot at the window, seemed about to bust through the glass and come in. So it was a relief when he dropped his fork and pushed his chair back in a rush and stood up and walked out the back door. Didn’t say anything to any of us directly, just I’m gonna take a drive which he spoke to the ceiling, and I know that hurt my mom because she looked as if she’d been slapped, but she didn’t say anything because that was never her way.

  I was done, but I sat there with my mom, trying to say, without saying it, that I was sorry for how things were going, and that I was grown enough to understand all the mess, and I could be counted on always and forever. But, she didn’t want me there I guess as she said, You’re excused. And I was about to go on without a fuss because I knew she was about to cry and she wanted that comfort alone.

  So it was another surprise for that night when Glen came banging through the back door just as I was about to go. He came in and stood there wavering by the cupboards, holding on to the counter with one hand like he was just lounging, but really to steady himself as he was drunk plain as night and day. His eyes were lit up and burning sharp as a cat’s and with the same keen indifference they’ve got, and I didn’t know him that way, even with all his changes and it surprised me and scared me something profound.

  B
ut the biggest surprise was that he sneered at mother because she’d started her crying; soft it was and gentle, that crying of my mother. Like it was finally out after a great struggle, only a few tears squeezed out, now, hard as glass, stuck to her cheeks. And those tears made Glen mad, made his lip curl back from the top row of his teeth. “You think losing a job is something to cry about?” was what he said, though it was more of a spit in her direction. And she dropped her eyes because I don’t think she could look at his eyes the way they were then. He didn’t say anything for a bit, just stood there looking around the room like he’d lost something and as if everything he saw was curious.

  Then he said to no one in particular, “You know, this whole sorry town makes me sick. Bunch of ignorant, ignorant fools. Waving ol’ Glory. Fried chicken on Sunday, and everything’s fine. Just fine. They didn’t even give that man a service. The man gets himself killed trying to help them and they don’t even say a few words. Too busy pining after some new pickup they can’t afford, but will probably buy anyway. Just ignorant shit.” He swung round and stares at mother. “I’m surprised they even let you into their church.”

  Mother stood up and walked past him quickly, out of the room, head down in the old way of her people. Glen sniffed after her, sniffed at the air. “Incense. God, I can’t stand the stink of it,” he said to himself. Then he put those animal eyes on me for a second, making some vague appraisal, as if I was something too little to eat. He shifted his weight, carefully, so as not to fall, and walked out of the room.

  That night I lay in my bed, the moonlight chopped into a rectangle by the shape of the window, making half the room blue. I heard my dad pull up in the driveway and slam the door of the van and come in the house, heard him climb the stairs, each step complaining as he came up, heard him rustling around like he always did in the hallway before he went on down to bed. I lay there a long while. Long enough to hear Glen get up to go puke in the bathroom, and I thought of his passion, that MaryAnn Sheeny, that day in the ditch and I saw those shiny shoes looking like they’d been stuffed with ground chuck, and I wanted to ask Jesus to come into my heart, and I wanted to talk to the ancestors, but that night nothing would come, and, the truth is, words of that kind would come hard ever after.