The Castle Cross the Magnet Carter (95 page)

“Hey there, Eliot! I jus figured it out. Looks like I owe you a heck of an apology.”

But Eliot don't seem to hear. Keep typin, typin.

Awake. My throat take to catchin, B.J. put a tissue to my face, tears soakin it soppin, he gotta bring another tissue, nother. Then the gulpin stop. Startin not to feel my body. Like maybe I already done left it, no pain.

“Well, big brother,” I smile, “looks like ya outlived me.”

Backa his han against backa mine say nothin.

“B.J.? When you said, ‘You were my brother.' What else?” I rest fore I go on. “Didja mean, ‘You were my brother, an I loved you'? Cuz I still love you. I never stopped lovin you, B.J.”

His han against mine shakin, shakin. I'm in the tree. I done my eighth-grade graduation speech I'm way up in the tree, I got the world. Nobody see me but I see them, Roger an Emily on a picnic. They kiss.
Crazy?
That could get em kilt! him for sure. All I gotta do is holler! But I don't. I like em. I like Roger an Emily.

“Roger an Emily! It's okay! It's okay, yaw look happy. It's okay, I jus hope yaw're happy.” Then I say it softer, all smilin to myself. “Roger an Emily. I jus hope”

**

Today, Sunday October 17th, is Eliot's seventy-sixth birthday. Every year I wonder about the man he would have become. I imagine him having stern talks with Rett about his defeatism, I see him walking with Eloise through a park, much like he'd walked Liddie's twin little girls around the block that Christmas way back when.

I woke up feeling strong, renewed. I told Lem I'd like to stroll through the Botanic Gardens. He looked at me skeptically and I assured him I'd take it easy, calling out for rests when necessary. I want to breathe in the fresh autumnal air, to walk among the vibrant colored leaves. New York is a city of only two seasons unless you make the extra effort: the parks and gardens hold the equinoxes.

October was once a month of despair, but it has transformed into one of reflection. My mother died on the seventh. We don't know for certain what she went through, those moments her weak heart gripped her for the last time, but the evidence, that she was found simply slumped over in her chair, has led us to the comforting conclusion that she died peacefully. I still miss her. But the bittersweetness that accompanies the anniversary of her death differs infinitely from my complicated feelings every October 25th. This is the month Eliot came into the world and the month he was viciously torn from it.

Lem could see I didn't want to talk when he came home with the groceries yesterday afternoon. He didn't push me, just went to the kitchen to cook. Last night we sat up in bed to read as usual, my paperback open on my lap but my mind elsewhere. Finally he closed his book to look at me. And I told him. The letter I'd received and what it had revealed about the stranger with whom I had shared a room for five days. Our son was already ten before I divulged to my husband, on the anniversary of my brother's passing, the story of my journey South for the aborted kill mission, and last night I told him how I'd seriously considered going to the hospital and at long last finishing the job. He was quiet a long time.

“What's left of him, D? A lump of ugly, diseased flesh, inside and out.”

I turned to him. “So?”

He was silent.

“That's justice?”

“In a sense.”

He could be like that. Karma. “You're saying every terminally ill patient just got what they deserved.”

“No. I'm saying this one did.”

“He's an old man! Everyone dies of something, for all we know his life up until now's been one long party.”

“How many people came to visit him? And this only the second time in fifty years his own brother's seen him? Something tells me his life up until now's been nothing.”

I shake my head, eyes filling. “We don't know.”

“We
don't
know, we'll never know.” He's quiet again. “It was an apology. He's felt shame for his brother for half a century. What's that tell you?”

I swallow. “Eliot felt shame for me.”

“Eliot was twenty-six in 1960. And Eliot was coming around at the end, you've said that. Andi told you about his wholehearted gratitude to Keith.”

I nod, look away. He shakes his head.

“Nothing I can say to make you feel better. What happened to your family, to Eliot. I wouldn't wish it on anyone.” Several sirens dashing by. “And those decades the only Campbell left was lost. But how long you been clean now. Twenty-nine years? And what you've meant to Eliot's son the last twenty-seven? And now starting a relationship with his grandchild, Eliot looking down sure must be relieved you're here taking care of things, proud of his big brother.”

I stared at my partner. His words had never occurred to me, and yet they suddenly felt so blatantly, undeniably true. And then the tears in my eyes flowing hard, and we held each other a very, very long time.

At sixty-nine Lem still does a little running every morning, and while he's out Dawit stops in briefly with Safiya to see how I'm feeling, the both of them off to some demonstration, his sign saying “Close Guantánamo Now!” and hers “WikiLeaks Don't Lie!” I realize I'd forgotten to tell him about the play Lem and I saw a few weeks ago, an off-off-Broadway production written by a friend and focusing on a young gay soldier in Afghanistan, a gung-ho American boy who comes to see the dismal pointlessness of it all after some confrontations with local civilians. I expect my son to reassert his well-established own low opinion of the war but instead he grins: “Oh, so you all had a
date
night.”

Lem returns in time for a quick hug as they're leaving, then makes us an omelet brunch before going to our bedroom to check his email. In the living room we have a few extra picture frames in a drawer, and I find one for the note from the Coatses, among the last friendly faces Eliot ever saw, and two more for the photos Liddie sent, of Eliot and me in our precious boyhood, which Lem has already scanned on his machine—the copies I'll send to Rett. I place the newly framed portraits on the coffee table next to one of Rett as a child, the resemblance between father and son astonishing. My solemn nephew Everett, conceived just days before his father's unimaginable end.

I hang the note near the framed sketch I'd sent to Didi in '85, six years after the promise I'd made at Max Williams's law school graduation to send her a work of mine. There are no photographs of her and Eliot together so I imagined one, drawing them both smiling, nearly laughing, him seated and looking down at a document he holds, her just behind him and looking over his shoulder. I still have her thank-you letter somewhere. She said when she opened the package, she had to quickly move away to prevent marring the sketch with her tears. It was in her will that the illustration be sent back to the artist upon her death.

The living room wall is also graced by the two paintings of Keith's from my San Francisco apartment, Keith's apartment. Those shattering days when my beloved companion had been such a comfort in my harrowing grief, and later transformed into the scapegoat for all my unleashed fury. My brother's senseless death set in motion a slow killing of myself for twenty-one years, and it took my best friend's senseless death to resurrect me.

“Chilly out, D,” Lem says, coming out of the bedroom. “Grab your jacket.” He goes into the bathroom, brushing his teeth. As much as I may scoff at the determinism of Lem the preacher's son, I must admit to my own moments of embracing something like destiny. Did my mother plan it? Could something in her being have arranged it so Eliot and I would have to come together for her funeral? So that, when Eliot's grief broke, we would have that one night of brotherly reconciliation before he was abruptly and terribly gone?

The problem with this theory would be the implication that Eliot's death was inevitable. It most certainly was not. But too many decades I've wasted in screaming at the universe, demanding answers. My profound bitterness was justified, but what good did it do? In my old age I ponder: What if, instead of focusing on the potential of a life of greatness and graciousness being so appallingly cut short, I could have beheld the greatness and graciousness Eliot had already given the world? Winning the case for Mr. Daughtery, the police brutality victim. Laying the groundwork for the release of the little boys. And all the lives he'd touched personally: Andi, Didi, Beau, Winston Douglas, the other gentleman from his office who'd sent that lovely condolence card, lonely old Miss Onnie, little Jeanine and cousin Liddie and Parker the Cat and the Coatses and Rosie from Alabama in the brief time he knew them. And my mother, father, and me. My book-smart, hyperactive, aloof, annoying, mysterious, justice-seeking, huge-hearted baby brother.

Lem goes back into the bedroom to grab something before our stroll. I gaze at the pictures on the table once more, the gallery of our history. A baby shot of Dawit, a studio sitting of the three of us when our son was an adolescent. The picture of Eliot smiling that last year, the one we were fortunate to have after my mother made him stand still for it on Christmas, the one my father and I sent to the police during the investigation and which appeared in the papers. Hard to believe half a century since my brother has walked this earth, since I've seen him, held him. I'm blessed to have had the family I was born into and to have the family I made. And now I glimpse the photo of the four Campbells at Eliot's law school graduation, him beaming in cap and gown, and I'm catapulted back to that spring evening of '58, our family celebratory restaurant dinner. Mom had recently taken up Aunt Beck's habit of scolding Dad for his salt intake—his perennial high blood pressure leading us all to believe he would be the family member we'd lose first—and Dad grumpy about the chastening, and as they lightly bicker my brother and I exchange glances, secret smiles, as if we'd never had a conflict between us in all our lives. Eliot, Eliot. Forever twenty-six.

**

My brother is dead. His right hand clutching my left has gone weak, and now his left hand feeling my right for the signs has slowly slipped away. I lay it down next to him.

I don't understand his last words. I don't know who Emily was, or Roger, though the latter seems to ring a distant bell, from when we were both very, very young. I gaze at his blind eyes. After my first visit three days ago, I found on my shelves my old book of Helen Keller writings, the one Abigail the librarian had recommended to me so long ago and which I eventually purchased. “I, who had thought blindness a misfortune beyond human control, found that too much of it was traceable to wrong industrial conditions, often caused by the selfishness and greed of the employer.” Now, as in the minutes Randall spoke his last words, his eyes have settled into a soft contentment. I gently close them.

And an ancient memory comes flooding back, something I haven't thought of in decades. My little brother, a thirteen-year-old child teaching me the manual alphabet. Teaching me to read. Introducing me to the library. There were signs I'd created to communicate my basic needs to my family, but even the most rudimentary complex thought was out of reach until I learned language. Once there was a shoe, and a stove, and a brother, but Randall walked me through a door and on the other side was integrity, and logic, and justice. My mother gave me life, and when I was eighteen my little brother Randall gave me the world. I realize now, looking down at the empty corporeality of him, I never thanked him for that. I lean over and kiss his forehead, and I stay here a very long time. When I lift my face, I wipe my tears from his eyes, his cheeks.

I walk out into the corridor. I should probably tell someone at the nurses' station that my brother has passed, but I imagine that will activate all sorts of complications and I want to leave the hospital
now
. He's not going anywhere. They'll find him and get in touch with Leslie Jo who will get in touch with me and I'll cross that bridge then.

Outside I put on my reading glasses to text Iona. She had some shopping errands to do in Manhattan and told me to let her know when I was finished with my visit so she could pick me up. We take turns every Sunday. Last week she and her family had dinner with me in Harlem, and today I'll ride with her to the 'burbs.

My brother's confusion regarding my mortality brought me back to a spring night in '81. April May June and I had been invited to the birthday party of her old Gallaudet friend Marielle. I never became comfortable at parties and my wife had long stopped cajoling me on such matters, so as always she went alone. I helped my eight-year-old daughter with her homework and after I put her to bed, I thought I'd catch up on some bills but had trouble locating a pen. In my search I opened April May June's desk drawer, found a ballpoint and inadvertently noticed near the back a ragged composition book. How I'd missed her sharing her stories with me! In the three years since my near-death, I noticed my wife had ceased to write. When I mentioned it once she became defensive—her time consumed by the need for her to work outside the home since my hospitalization (only part-time), having to take Iona to her musical events (a task we shared), helping Iona with homework (ditto)—so I dropped the subject for the time being. But this evening I sat rereading the narratives, indulging once again in her words and her worlds. The latter tales became wildly creative, her earlier concerns about not having the imagination to craft anything but autobiography having long been put to rest. “Deaf Baptist Revival,” among my favorites, was followed by one final work, a lengthy untitled piece I'd never seen before. It was the chronicle of a deaf couple, a black woman named Paulina and a white man named Orville. They met on a subway platform.

When April May June returned close to midnight, all lights were out in the apartment save the small lamp near my chair in the living room. She walked in smiling and tired. Then she spied the notebook on my lap, and froze. She came to me, falling on her knees, putting her face into her hands and on my lap, weeping. After a few moments, I began stroking her many braids which had grown halfway down her back. She looked up, her forty-three-year-old face still so young, and she saw that my eyes were soft.