38
Once when I was little I saw a black cat swat a sparrow, deft as could be with his paw. It made an impression on me, I suppose, as I was young, and it had sprung out of the grass, unexpected, like an apparition and swatted that bird, stunning it still and snatching it up with his mouth. And then they were both gone, and all I could see was the long winter grass rippling out in a secretive line as the cat moved along through that field where we were. And then that hint disappeared, too. And I blinked, staring hard, but that grass had nothing to tell. I thought it was that, that cat, nuzzling my face when I opened my eyes and saw my mother, bent close to wake me. But it wasn’t like being awake after that. It was all watery and sound-dull, and everything an echo and all a fast vision, and all jumbled, too.
Now we are gathered said Pastor Jenson, head bowed and trusting because All is vanity, vanity before the Lord. On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross, the emblem of suffering and shame sang the choir at First Baptist, this time without me, those voices swelling high. I’m so very sorry, said Mr. Cobley.
Shot him right in the ass, whispered somebody else. I don’t understand, said my dad. Amos, I can’t bear this place, was what my mother said every day after. Can’t-let-you-sleep-any-more said the rain at my window, whole nights through, tapping it over and over.
39
One day sometime after, I went to the window to see the clouds huddled close as cobblestones on the road that sky was, and they cracked apart ever slowly, and the sun broke through and its swords fanned out, touching the ground with authority. It was October and the rain had quit. Down below, I watched my father, slow and strong because he had to be, crawling in and over the van, roping things down, working like some kind of beetle, with that same sure strength and dumb purpose they have, filling the van with boxes that had in them what things we would take.
I knew my mother was down in her room, the light still trying to get into her eyes, trying to trickle in now, like an electricity that would stutter and fail. I knew my father would load everything first before he came for her and that she would insist on packing the ancestors herself and she would take her time and Glen would go in last and all would be boxed up then and they’d call me, and we’d go.
40
If you drove down Highway 99, all the way down to Bakersfield, you would have found us. Down there, my dad would start work fixing washers and dryers for a laundromat chain. Mother would stay home, fuss some in a sort of half-garden she made there, and sit every evening watching us eat, but not eating herself. She would eat when she was alone, though I never knew why that was. And she would go walking, too much, and she would walk too far, too many times, because after awhile she wouldn’t make it all the way back to us and her eyes would become distracted and her mind soft.
It would seem natural for me and my dad to just go along with that, treating her as if she was a child. Never once would my dad admonish her. And though we’d miss her, both of us, there was not anything either of us could do about it, so that was why we never tried, or even talked about it. I guess it made sense to us and so why would we pick at it and who was it that could tell us we should?
We would live then in the middle of town so I would make friends. Arnie would be one, a basketball nut, who, of course, was short and not coordinated at all. He hung with Lance who was tall and mad for girls and thought he knew everything about them because he was into his dad’s magazines, Penthouse Forum and the like. He would go around in a state of some kind of murderous arousal. He would not once, in the time that I knew him, talk directly to a girl, yet would tell you exactly what they were thinking and in a way that would keep you awake half the night, if you listened to him.
Lance stuttered when he talked, especially if he was excited, which was most of the time. Actually, his whole self was a stutter as he hadn’t really grown into his body. When he walked, his long lanky frame would seem to hold back a second and then jerk forward, a little ahead of him, so that he was in a way always trying to keep up with himself. If I had to have friends, and I did because my dad said so, then those two were fine with me. They let me fall in with them without any fuss and didn’t ask anything much. I had some fun with those two, but never got close, and that’s most everything I remember of them.
Mostly, then, I just walked to school and back. That was Alexander Hamilton Junior High, eighth grade. And the only thing that interested me about school was Melissa Whalen who sat up front of the class. She was a dark-headed girl who hardly spoke up ever unless Miss Watkins called her out directly. Melissa Whalen always answered in a quiet voice, not scared and not showy. Mostly she knew the answers. She would sit in her desk with one leg folded under her and the other hanging down to swing back and forth kind of lazy. After awhile it began to put some hurt on me to watch her, and I would exercise the habit of not looking.
I stayed home most of the time. Dad eventually got on his feet and bought some woodworking stuff on credit—table saw, lathe, drill press and such. He set it all up in the garage. That started me making things out of wood. I liked that. Liked the way the saw would buzz through the wood, make a clean cut without biting. Liked the way things went together, the joints sure with no gaps, liked the smell of the shavings, and the way my hands would heat up when I did the sanding. I never cared what I made. A bookcase was as good as a bowl or a small table. I think I could have stayed in that shop all the time that was mine if my dad didn’t come out and say lights out every evening.
Once in awhile my dad would cry. Usually that would be at supper, all of us together, mother sitting quiet as any trained animal. Dad would take some particular notice of her and his eyes would tremble and spill over. Sometimes he would put his silverware down and let himself go some, but mostly he would just go on eating, slicing and bringing his fork up to his mouth, the tears coming and him going on with the weeping and the supper as if it was some strange work he had to go on and finish up, like it or not. I never held it against him.
41
One night he came out to the garage, and I felt him there standing behind me and shut the saw down to turn round and look at him. He fumbled along the workbench with his fingers, gathering up bits of blonde sawdust to his eyes to examine it. He wouldn’t look at me direct. Then said what he came to say.
“You’ve had early all that’s wrong in this life.”
I didn’t argue. I wanted him to finish and leave.
“You should think on how you’re due for what’s right.” I could tell that was hard for him to say, like he wasn’t sure he believed it himself, and I appreciated that he was trying, but that was too much like caring for me, and I swallowed that back as where it came from was a place huge with itself.
I nodded and turned back to my saw, but didn’t fire it up, just waited.
“You got as good a chance at that as any, maybe more,” he said, his voice catching.
When I turned back he was gone. It was the last time he ever tried to really talk with me. That was nobody’s fault, just the way that it was. I didn’t choose my life.
I wondered about Glen. He was born in his body and he grew into it, had to walk out with it into his life, his own special self. Like all those birds, I’d catch myself saying. The big ones and the small, some of them quick and some clumsy, the wind takes them all, each of them, when they swim up and out to make a way for themselves with their bodies, their beaks and their wings. But the wind shaped them, too. I’d learned that in science. It took a long time, but science has forever. And the wind blows them wherever it wills. Glen was one of those, those birds that wouldn’t come down all summer, excepting he could never come down and that is a difference that is no small thing. Those times I wished I still had my notebook, but I knew it didn’t matter. I had all those pictures by heart.
I wouldn’t cry. But one day I dug a hole in the yard and buried that rifle and my pellet gun, too. I didn’t need to talk to the Lord, and I didn’t call on the ancestors. I stood over that place, and I made a sig
n with my fingers, a secret sign of my own that I waved at the sky, my arms over my head. And I felt better after that.
But sometimes, a weight would come on my chest and squeeze me. Those would be the nights I’d come awake to get my breath, and I’d sit up in bed and listen hard, thinking I heard the wind outside in the trees, though those nights were still. It would be then like I was a bowl brimming cold with water from a deep place, a place of lonesomeness, pure.
And I’d feel my heart, a tight bud beginning to open of its own knowledge, slowly, in its own time—like science hinting of the wisdom it must take to make just the petals of a flower. And at times, when I’d wake, my pillow was wet and then, I would just be still and know everything, all, was ordinary and extraordinary—the velvet quiet, the rough blankets, the bush of stars at the window. I would see that Melissa was ordinary, and special, too, only a girl with soft blackberry eyes, set, one and two, in a lean and serious face that was hers all alone. I knew a heart could burst with such sweetness.
And so I would come to know where she lived, would start the watching again, would follow her home a little distance behind, would see the white stucco house with the red tile roof where she lived on a quiet block not more than a mile from school. I would hum the tunes that I’d known, the ones that had gotten stuck somewhere under a rib.
And I felt a little guilty the times I found myself liking some things, like the way the afternoons leaked off, leaving the streets blue in the twilight, my chest tight with that sort of pretty.
Finally, I would come to stand across the street from her house, knowing I had some crying coming someday, that I’d have to open that place in me up, all the way, because she’d already showed me I still wanted it all, the sharp and the tender of things. She would come out her front door and sit on the cement steps. Always in dresses and black patent shoes, and I’d watch.
And one day she waved to me, and I was found out, a blush put on me complete. And I surprised myself. I gave up and did what was in me to do, went on and stepped out from behind that tree. She was smiling then, a little hopeful and unsure. I tell you, just a girl with red ribbons in her hair. And I went ahead and crossed over to her and all that she was, all the hope that there is, a little hesitant, but crossing all the same, knowing the risks, but taking a chance anyway, because I wanted to, because it wasn’t ignorance at all.
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge The National Endowment for the Arts for a fellowship which aided in the completion of this book, and, too, for their welcomed help: Annette Fiel, Richard W. Jackson, Sonya Janian, Rod Paul, Josephine Redlin, Teresina Smith, and Liza Wieland.
Also, I must thank Judith and Martin Shepard for making it possible in such genteel fashion,
Barbara Markowitz, my agent, for her counsel and encouragement,
Linda St. John for her generosity and art,
and, of course, Kimberly, who always believed.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2004 by D. James Smith
ISBN: 978-1-5040-2849-3
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My Brother's Passion Page 9