My Brother's Passion

by D. James Smith

  28

  It was a sin. When you do something and you have full knowledge it’s wrong there’s no excuse for going ahead with it. Choosing it makes it a sin. I knew that when I got up the next day and went into my mother’s red room and stole the green vase from the mantel and walked out of the house before anyone was up. I did it knowing my mother was hurting the way she was. And I gave it to that woman.

  I didn’t even bother skulking around or trying to hide it under my shirt, and I didn’t even go by way of the ditch. I just walked along the side of the road, in plain sight, all the way out to her place. I was thinking about how she was pregnant, and I wondered how that baby would look. Wondered if it would look like the Jew or Glen or Uncle Aquilla or some other fellow. I knew it could. I wondered if a woman like that had twins if one could come out one way and one the other. I’d seen that with a shepherd that had one pup that was mostly collie and another pretty close to a lab.

  I didn’t have the nerve to go up to the door and talk to her, and I didn’t really want to talk. I just wanted her to have some bit of beauty, and I knew that vase was special beauty itself and would have to have some effect on her. I went up on her porch, one of those old wooden ones made for sitting, five tall steps up. I set it next to the door like a bottle of milk, a little to the side so she wouldn’t break it coming out. I’d thought about a note all the way going over there. This vase is a beauty, like you was one. That was too much like romance, not my intention. The whole world isn’t awful was another, more to my meaning. Of course, I hadn’t thought about a note ’til I was already on my way and couldn’t make one without any paper or a pencil. I just left it there to speak for itself.

  I went back up in the grass and lay down to see if she’d come out and find it. I was up there for a couple of hours, though I didn’t mind that. I had lots of practice watching folk’s houses and it gave me that excitement a person gets when they fancy they’re in charge of things, which they aren’t. Pretty soon, the sun came up ragged and burning and the air heated up, dry with the last of August. A million gnats, at least, were doing these little whirligig circuses, moving over the grass.

  The trees there were hanging their leaves limp, letting the birds weave in through their branches any which way they wished. I guess as I was lying on my back, I started to think about when Glen showed me, once, how if you’re out somewhere completely lost and you’re hurt bad and an airplane spots you, you’re supposed to lie flat on your back with your arms outstretched so they’ll know you need emergency treatment. So I did that. And then she came out.

  I heard the screen door squeal first and then spied her stepping out. I rolled over to see. Her hair was piled up on her head, strands falling down her neck, very delicate, and she had a blue housecoat on, something fine and thin, not a farmer’s wife’s housecoat at all. She came out without even noticing it, came out to the steps and leaned on the post there looking out across the fields kind of soulful. I could just barely see her face proper, her pale flecked skin, half moons of darkness under her eyes. And she did have that baby showing from her stomach, just a little, though it was no more than a puff of air swelling her slip, but I saw how folks had got that notion, that it was true.

  She looked sleepy because she lay her head against the post, and I wished right then she would love Glen and make him well. And I could be that baby’s uncle, even if it looked like one of those black boys I would be its uncle, and they would have me around, and I would say clever things and they would laugh and be glad of me.

  She yawned and turned around, and she saw that green vase. Went over to it and bent down and then knelt down and picked it up and turned it in her hands. Then standing up slowly, she came back toward the steps, looking round, and then stepping down them and walking out a little ways, her face pinched from all that sunlight pecking down at her eyes. I saw that she didn’t have that limp any more, and I was glad of it and smiled to myself.

  She was sure then that nobody was there but herself so she held the vase out in front of her to study it, the sun filling it up, and suddenly, she pulled it tight, fierce, to her breast, and I knew she knew it was a treasure, and I felt the relief soft in my chest, felt glad of my gift. But that knowledge was also an odd trouble—tasting sin, knowing its pleasure.

  29

  I had a magnifying glass, and I was round the side of the garage, hunkered down, holding that glass over my hand, pointing a pinhole of sun onto the meat of it. It blistered up good and I thought, Now, that was dumb, but some part of me didn’t much care, in fact, I could tell that part was happy, happy with itself and with some kind of spite and that surprised me. Then I felt some eyes on me and swung round and looked up and saw Glen’s face like the picture of a ghost, framed in the little window there was on the side of our garage.

  I stood up. He came round the side of it. He just came up to me, no expression on his face and grabbed my hand and looked at it. Then he tilted his head back, still holding my hand, and stared at the tops of the trees that were back there. He looked back at me and his eyes glazed over sudden and wet. Then he shook his head. And, very odd, no reason for it, he chuckled, no happiness in it, just weird. I yanked my hand back.

  He stopped chuckling and threw his arms around me in a head lock and started spinning us round, and we ended up in a crumple on our knees in the dirt. He pushed me all the way down and sat on my chest and started to tickle me hard and half-swat my cheeks, and I punched him in the shoulder, ’cause I knew then that we were playing, but he was scaring me some. Then he stopped and said to me, “You going to knock that off?” And I nodded yeah, sure, OK, and he rolled off of me and onto his back, kind of winded. He goes on lying there, so I lay back, too, and for awhile we just watched the sky that was nothing but the blank of your mind, white and still.

  I got bored, and I said, “Glen, what we gonna do?” Though I didn’t know exactly what I was asking about.

  But he seemed to understand because he put some thought on it, but gave that up and seemed to just flip it, that question, like a coin in his head, then said to me, very serious and true, “I don’t know.”

  30

  Summer had hammered us all that it wanted, and come September, the heat just seemed to sift off toward the hills in the distance. The wind blew west from the ocean, over the passes, poured down through the valley, the weatherman said. Dark clouds slid in like slow freighters and the trees and the shrubs would look like big buffalo heads plunging in the wind. When that rain first came, it came at an angle, the wind blowing it sideways, splinters of it hitting the windows. It’s not that it rained hard, it’s that it just kept at it, out there all the time sweeping across the fields, the streets all shiny and lacquered-up black, the cars whooshing by. Rain is supposed to make you feel sad. Something old about it, all that water being the same water that’s been going around since Noah and before. But it made me excited, made me want to breathe in that air, fresh-washed, everything washed, the birds and the houses and the leaves and the sidewalks, and I didn’t mind being out in it one bit.

  The first week of it, there was lots going on, men coming round to talk with my dad at the table in the kitchen, coming in, scraping their boots, shaking water from their jackets. God damned dilemma, is what they’d say, and, Up shit creek. Lots came and went, but by the end of the week there were only a few of them Dad counted that said absolutely for sure they wouldn’t go in, wouldn’t cross a union line now or ever, so help them God, no way, not if it killed them. Most agreed that they shouldn’t cross over, but that’s all they’d said. So everybody would have to wait and just see who was who and what what.

  And Glen was becoming a weather unto himself. A boil appeared on his neck one day and didn’t leave, his hair came in thick and black and every which way. He never did remember what he’d said that night he was drunk. He wasn’t exactly mean, it’s just that the trouble that was in him was showing, like a storm you can see building a long way off before it blows in.

  He compla
ined that he got intolerable headaches, his body heating up with some kind of burn from inside and he’d have to go be by himself else he would bite you like a dog that’s been hurt and doesn’t know any better. His trips up to the VA in Fresno weren’t a secret anymore. They said he was just over-tired from Nam. But I know he was sure something had happened to his body over there, heard him talking to my folks about it, and I think it made him mad no one completely believed him or understood, so he shut up and festered.

  Though, sometimes I’d hear him. I’d look out and see him framed in that little window there on the side of our old garage, that was half-falling down, and he was in there whispering to nobody something I couldn’t make out. He wouldn’t eat with us anymore and came and went at hours strange all the time. Sometimes during the day he’d sit in the doorway of the garage, on an old kitchen chair made of green vinyl and rusted chrome, sit smoking and growing into some place in himself, watching the rain wringing off of the eaves, watching it as if it offended him, personally.

  And he called her. Did it at night. At the bottom of the stairs in the velvet chair in the entry. Think about it, is what I heard him say. And what she said I don’t know, but she took some time saying it because he was quiet, listening, his eyes squinting down and then closing. And he hung up so carefully there was no sound. I know what makes a person go strange, every time; it’s something gets them and they can’t cut it loose. Gets hooked in them. Like the Plains Indians in my books, those little hooks they put in their shoulders and chests, pulling them up and them twisting, slow in a circle, feet off the ground. And I’d have cut those hooks off Glen, but he’d never have me do it. Like they were all that he had.

  I knew also an early rain like that wasn’t good, wasn’t good for the farms. My dad was saying all the time that the plant might cut production, make them care even less if the men stayed out. Mornings, he’d go out on the front porch to smoke his pipe and put some more of his worry on things. Mother was still gone working a lot or squirreled up in her room. I kept to my room too, reading or drawing or sitting at my window, watching.

  I still had my papers to deliver, but I liked walking my route in that weather. And there was choir practice for our concert in the church basement that was coming up soon. Other than that, my time was my own so when the day came I knew I was going to be up and ready to go with my dad to the plant, to see how many would throw all that hardship away and lay the fight down and go in. That Sunday Pastor Jenson spoke out hard about not raising your hand, brother against brother, about how all should remember the Lamb. But everyone knew things could blow up of themselves and all was unsettled.

  One night I heard my mother and dad having a fight, sort of a shouting stuffed into hoarseness behind the door of their bedroom. I knew it was about me, about me going or not. I knew it was final when my dad came out of there, slamming the door, saying out loud, He should understand what this is that we’re doing. And then, He’s going, sister. He never called her that before.

  And it kept raining most unusual. All the ditches were filled and began spilling over in some places, flooding some fields, that water the color of coffee and cream. I started wearing my dad’s waders to deliver my route as in some places the water was running down the streets and coming up over the sidewalks and right up to some houses. Folks had sandbags piled around the places that opened into their basements and out round the front doors like little forts a kid might want to play in.

  Those nights, truly, I was not sleeping good. I’d think about the strike and what might happen and what it would mean. I’d wonder about Glen and was he ruined, about passion and the black boys huddled in the back of the van. I’d hear that tractor’s engine shutting down and huffing diesel over those kittens all tangled, mewling awful in the grass, stripped the way meat is before it’s dried, what Glen did once with some of a deer. Sometimes I’d think of the sun, how it was a thorn on the back of your neck all summer long. I’d see that Jew sitting in that tree, half-smiling the way he did, swinging his legs like I remember, except this time—no feet. I’d be wanting him to know I was sorry folks had seemed to have forgot him so quick. I’d imagine him real, swinging like that, but I knew he was dead.

  Sometimes, I’d find my mother’s face swimming towards me in the dark, her eyes so familiar, her eyes that were the shape of small narrow fish, the irises or the pupils, whichever it is, swelling open, so big I could fly right into them, fly in and float up over the houses, see the chimneys piping smoke, float out high over the fields. I’d see the ditches suffering their limits and the crops and the blossoms, all that grain rotted by rain, and I’d waver there lonely as God, God of the Bible and the ancestors, too. He was there. One night, half awake or asleep, it doesn’t matter to me which, I saw Him. He looked a lot like the Jesus framed and hung on the wall of my room, except His eyes were pulled thin, like those of the grandfathers my mother kept on the mantel. And I studied His features, studied them fierce, and all things seemed to be in Him, always, I could tell, all perfectly still, forever, yet all those things changing too, and hurt, there, in that change, always and again, coming like tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow which weren’t words then, but little brown sparrows bursting new from His tongue when He opened His mouth, when He smiled at me.

  31

  I think it was a wren that woke me, a little brown fellow, feathers stained dark by the rain. He was scraping his beak on the sill of my window, sharpening it the same way a barber would his razor, sharpen it some, take a look at it and go to sharpening some more. I got dressed quick and went on downstairs. My dad was already up, drinking coffee. I could see by the sink he’d already had the breakfast my mother would’ve cooked for him before she went to work. I thought maybe he might have changed his mind and was planning on going without me, but he said no that wasn’t it, said to hurry it up, said I could have some coffee too, if I didn’t dawdle.

  I put some peanut butter on a piece of Wonder, without even toasting it, and got it down with some milk, fast as I could. Still standing, I grinned at my dad. The sap’s sure rising in your britches today is what he said and he was right ’cause my blood was up something foolish, I guess. That day was some day. Outside, it was raw. Still dark when we walked toward the garage, you could feel the wet had got some cold to it. My dad zippered up his yellow slicker and blew air through his lips in a rough whistle. Rain coming so fine it was more of a mist.

  Inside the garage, we climbed into our seats, letting the van warm up, dad starting to whistle, nervous, through his teeth a tune I didn’t know. The way he whistled was kind of jagged and half-done, him stopping dead sometimes on account he was thinking of something else before he’d recover and start up again. That’s him being scared, I thought. My dad never had the same privacy about himself like mother or Glen.

  We pulled out of our place, and he pointed the van toward downtown. Engines in those Volkswagen vans weren’t big enough to handle the weight is what everybody said and it was true you could feel it straining right up into the seat of your pants. It was loud, too, and kind of a funny car for a family to have.

  But, he liked it, liked the big steering wheel that was laid flat as that of a bus, liked sitting up high. I watched him, watched him being scared and still enjoying driving that thing at the same time. My dad was a likable sort, I guess. I think others thought that too, and I was glad of it.

  We’re early is what he whispered to himself as we pulled up across the street from the plant. Only a cluster of guys were out by the gates, their heads snugged under the hoods of their coats, the wind driving that mist back and forth across them in brief, pushy gusts. It was light out, then, a haze overhead, no specific clouds, just a sky washed the color of tin and some parts flushed pink with the morning that was coming on fast.

  We got out and started across the street and it was then I caught fear. Caught the fear of my father. Something about the way he was punching his hands deep into his pockets and rolling his shoulders forward again and again as we
walked toward the men. Something a kid might do, pulling his nerve up through himself. I think I realized then, right at that moment, crossing that street which was like any street but was different that day ’cause I think I saw, in those few steps we made crossing, that my dad had been a kid once himself. I don’t mean I didn’t know that already, I just never felt it before, felt how he could be hurt just as bad as me or any kid by the things in this world. And that’s how I caught fear, saw how it was mine all alone, and how I’d have to manage it from then on, same as the next.

  We came up close on them and they shook hands all around. I was trying to open the umbrella I’d brought with me. I got it open, forcing the latch, but the wind bent it half over itself, the little web of soft metal in it giving way so that half of the thing was flapping like a tamed crow chained to my head. The guys were stamping the cold from their feet, and talking low, and making these sweeping moves with their heads, looking around front and back of themselves and on occasion spitting off in short, specific arcs and nodding to one another. They saw me struggling with my umbrella and laughed, and I knew it wasn’t that it was so funny but because they needed to laugh. Finally, I threw that thing to the ground and let the rain soak me down, wetting my hair, running down my neck to my back.