The Half Brother (35 page)

Such a long way.

I had never been good at prayer but I was good at thinking, it was in fact the only thing I was at all proficient in (
oh let me think these thoughts, let me; I will let myself; enough
), and I moved my feet and I thought of Anita. Of Nicky. Of May. Of Preston, Win, Zack. Hugh. I turned the pages.

I tried to crack myself wide to them. To spare myself nothing.

May’s voice in the darkness, Nicky’s baby fists on my knees, Hugh in his study, at his desk where a yellow pool of light shone down, my mother in a yellow dress, leaving, leaving, my mother in my arms, heavy and incomplete. When I got to Zack, I thought of Booker, digging, and had to stop.

I saw my students, hundreds of them now, there really had been hundreds. I saw them as rosy babies and as gray shriveled sexless crones, their lives and all the possibilities folding and blurring.

And the center. Here it was. Was it the still point of the turning world? No answer.
Neither flesh nor fleshless. And do not call it fixity
.

The weight of the clouds pressed on me and I sank to my knees, just gave down. As Anita would have said. The snow began to melt under my knees and soak through my pants. I thought of ascetics seeking such things out. Bloodied flagellants. Nuns binding thorns into the belts of their habits, monks in lice-ridden cilices. Oh, a little cold water was nothing. Bush league.

Whose woods these are I think I know. Let me not to the marriage of true minds. Love bade me welcome. Time present and time past are both perhaps present. And now good-morrow
. There were secrets in the spaces and in the rhythms of the spaces and the vowels and the consonants. There had to be. I kept rocking along with the meter. With that music.
Ba dum ba dum ba dum ba dum
.

But to what purpose Disturbing the dust
.

These are the feet. I’m marking the feet with the chalk.

I was sitting in the pew next to my mother.
In the beginning was the Word
. She said lay your head right here Charlie.
And the Word was God
.

Yes exactly
.

Up at Divya’s a light went on. A minute, two, three. The back door opening, closing. Then footsteps on the wooden stairs of the deck.

“Charlie?” A sigh. “Charlie.” That lilt. The warmth of another world.
Chaah-lee
. I wasn’t sure if she could see me. But why would there be cause for alarm? With good old Charlie?

“Charlie, May called me. Come out of there. Charlie.”

“Hello, Divya.”

“Charlie.” Her voice didn’t change. “You mustn’t feel so sorry for yourself.”

“That is a fact,” I said, more grateful than ever for the boxwood walls. A child in a fort.

Divya’s outline at the bottom of the stairs was becoming clearer. Or rather her shapelessness. A puffy lump with a head. She’d have on her big down coat, her ridiculous wearable sleeping bag. And snow boots. May had called and she had come downstairs, to the coat on the hook, to the boots by the door.

May knew now that Nicky was gone. She knew we’d made Nicky because we wanted glimpses of the bright beyond. We had given him his own glamour. But the rest of us were getting older. And all we had was the warmth of one another’s decrepit bodies. And time would not stop, even for Nicky, especially for Nicky—that was the horror and the beauty, we were in it, circle or line, we were in it, we were in it. Around and around, all of us.

“Charlie,” Divya said. Was she whispering? Singing? “You must come out now.”

May who had known where I would go.

The snow was water now. I was kneeling in water.

“This is the hard part,” Divya said. The lights behind her, in the kitchen, were so warm. “You cannot stay. You must come back out.”

I began to stand. Both legs asleep—not an ascetic, not close. I paused, one hand in the wet, ass in the air, a ridiculous tripod. Blood roared down to my feet. Electric shocks for my negligence. Oh how real the flesh. Then I stood, I was up, I could see.

“May is at your house,” Divya said. “She is waiting for you. She said to tell you that. She said, ‘Tell him. Tell him I’m here.’ ”

AND IN THE DARK,
the warm dark, one more story.

When I was two weeks old, Anita received a small package. She removed the brown paper—a grocery sack, cut to fit, carefully taped. Inside was a picture book, the kind with the gold spine, from the dime store. Inside the book was the letter she’d written for Ann Fusco, unopened.

Holding the baby—holding me—Anita felt suddenly unsteady on her feet. She sat down in a kitchen chair and felt that both she and the chair were floating unmoored, out into a great void. Then there was a horizon, as when the Lord separated the heavens and the earth; and then on the horizon was a towering wave of tears. It came toward her, a tsunami of feeling, and passed over her while she somehow withstood it, ducking under it as she used to duck under the surf as a child, feeling the suck of tumult passing over, disappearing.

With one hand, she somehow slit the letter open, giving herself a paper cut. She spread the letter she had written out on the table, and then stuck her finger in her mouth before the blood smeared.

Dear Memaw and Granddaddy
,

If you are reading this, I am dead, and my baby is alive
.

She didn’t read any more. She simply read those lines over and over and held me, who was asleep on her shoulder, and the waves, calm now, lapped gently at her heels. She realized that all this time she had been making a decision. It had been the roiling in her heart, in the
middle of the night when, exhausted, she had laid me down beside her in her own bed and instead of falling into oblivion had lain awake watching me and feeling in herself a great duality. She hadn’t known she was making a decision but she had been and now it was done, and now she knew I was well and truly hers, and no one else’s. And that she was not her mother. But mine.

She folded the letter back into the envelope and carried it to the range, where she kneeled down, awkwardly, keeping the bundle of me balanced on her shoulder, and opened the broiler at the bottom with her free hand and pushed the letter in. When smoke curled out from the edges of the closed drawer, she turned off the gas, and when the smoke died away and she opened the drawer, it was empty save for gray flecks of ash that disintegrated when she touched them. Then she stood up, with me, and began our new life.

Twenty-six

We cremated Anita’s body and I scattered some ashes in the back of the house, beyond the patio—flinging them toward the mountains, pretending they were going far beyond where they landed, that they were winging away like birds. I told myself that this was the last vista she had seen on this earth and that she would understand if I wanted to look out and know she was there—although I thought also that she would not have cared at all where the last physical bits of her ended up. And it was true also that someday people would live in this house and look out its windows and have no idea of this particular aspect of their view. Perhaps sooner rather than later.

I took the rest to Atlanta, where I put them beside Hugh, in a small graveside service. There was a plot waiting, and there was no reason not to do what was expected. She wouldn’t have cared either way, and for the rest of the family it was neat and tidy, and anyway burials are for the living. Although I did beg out of a bigger one by saying she wouldn’t have wanted any fuss, which no one disputed.

I saved out a baggieful of ashes for Nick. If he showed up back in the States anytime soon, he could scatter his own pieces of her where he wanted, too.

Once I was back in Abbottsford I considered a spoonful or two on Preston’s grave. (And thought that Anita would have rolled her eyes at this doling out of herself.) I even went there, bringing Nick’s bag
along, as a sort of test, and stood there a long time. I told myself I was deciding, but really the decision was already made, and I kept the bag in my pocket.

It was late March by now and we were in a glorious thaw. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the air was thick with snowmelt. On Preston’s grave, shadowed by the headstone, a crystalline patch of snow remained, icy at the edges. I’d come here only a few times before, and this time was no different—the sense that I was trying to manufacture emotion and wisdom far different from whatever portion of those things I possessed. I tried, dutifully, to remember what he’d looked like, to summon his actual person, and for a moment he rose before me, standing in the snow, shadow-faced, the rest of him Disneyfied: robes and gray hair flowing, something almost obscenely fine about him. In a mythical way. An untouchable way.

I’d tell May about that vision, one of these days, but not yet. I turned away from Preston and went to look for her, and found her where I expected, at Win’s grave, just over a little rise. His stone was one of those twofers, with a blank on the other side where Divya would go, her name and birth date already engraved, the hyphen ominous and a little absurd. May stood there, looking down at it, a hand shading her eyes. She was wearing her red coat with the proud black velvet epaulets and I thought she looked magnificent.

I went and stood next to her. We were silent a moment and then I said, of the stone, “Divya swears that isn’t creepy.”

“I know,” May said, surprising me. “She calls it ‘the other side of the bed.’ ”

“You’re kidding,” I said, and May just gave me a look. We stood awhile longer. The silence began to grow. Finally I said, “Do you think you’ll tell her?”

“I don’t know.”

“You don’t ever have to.”

“I know.” She sighed, tolerantly. “I suppose it would be interesting.”

The gelid wind was picking up, and May brushed her hair out of her face. “I’m cold,” I said.

“Me too.”

Halfway back to my car she took my hand in her gloved one, briefly squeezed, let go.

Once we were in the car and I had cranked the engine May said, “Are you ready?”

I nodded, and headed slowly down the narrow road to the cemetery gate. As I drove, May twisted in her seat to face me. “I have the one class,” I said. “And then my meeting. Then I’ll go home.”

I kept my eyes on the narrow road but in my peripheral vision I could see her face held out to me, still bright from the sodden wind. “Charlie.”

“Yes.”

“I could go with you. Wherever you go.”

“Yes, you could.”

We had said such things already; we would say them again. We took careful steps on a long and winding bridge, and did not look down.

I EXAMINED THE FACES
of my seniors. “Don’t stew too much. Try,” I said. Most of them would be hearing from colleges over break. “Write your final papers instead. As a stress release.” Eye rolling.

No one had sat in Zack and Celia’s old seats.

“Please do not forget. Poets do not just see. They notice. They
look
. It’s active. And writing poetry without
looking
is impossible. Decent poetry, anyway. And I would argue decent living is impossible without looking, too.

“Does anyone remember
Our Town
? From ninth grade?” Indulgent nods. “People, it’s not a simple play. It’s dark. The opposite of sentimental. Go reread it sometime. Anyway. Near the end. Emily says, ‘Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it?—every, every minute?’ And the Stage Manager says, ‘The saints and the poets, maybe. They do some.’ ”

Dex’s hand was up. I nodded at him and he started flipping through his
Four Quartets
. “Wait a second. Wait. Okay. Yeah.” He started reading. “ ‘Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind cannot bear very much reality.’ ”

“Exactly,” I said. “Exactly. Today, Dex, you are on.”

“Mr. G.,” Minnie said. Her face deadly serious. “Will you be here when we get back?”

“Yes,” I said. “I will be here when you get back.”

Dex burst out, “They aren’t making you leave, are they? Are they firing you?”

Immediate rumblings from the chorus.
Not his fault. He didn’t know. I heard. I heard
. And one other undertone, seizing at fairy-tale logic:
They’re only half brothers
.

I held up a hand. “No one is getting fired,” I said. “One day at a time. Besides, you seem to forget
you
won’t be here next year. You’ll have flown the coop. You’ll be long gone.” They couldn’t really believe it. For once, neither could I. I had been through this cycle seventeen times, but still my heart twisted, and a grief that was strangely close to euphoria hit me once again. “Go,” I said. “Go. Have a wonderful break. When I see you next, it’ll be spring.”

THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING WAS
already silent as a tomb. But Salter was waiting in his office, as promised. “What are you doing over break?” he said.

“Headed back south. I’m cleaning out my mother’s house.”

“Mm.” He made a regretful, clucking sound. “Never easy.”

“No,” I said. “But she wasn’t a collector. Thank God. She traveled light. Materially speaking.”

“Is Nick coming to help you?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “He’s in Darfur now. At a refugee camp.”

“Holy cow.”

“Congo didn’t work out,” I said. “Or something.”

“You’ve talked to him?”

“Once.”

Salter was shaking his head. Finally he said, “So much talent, Charlie. A born teacher. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen so much potential.
Gone
.”

In the silence, I handed him my own letter.

Salter opened it and read it, unsurprised. He folded it up and put
it back in the envelope. “Falling on your sword is very old-fashioned, Charlie.”

“I suppose you’re right about that.”

“How about I keep this letter for a while, maybe over the break, and you think about it.”

“Whatever you want,” I said. He ran a hand, reflectively, over the stiff brush of his hair. I thought of him when Nick had disappeared and the truth had come out: his anger had been righteous and palpable, and laced with a sorrow purer than I would have expected from Adam. I’d been moved, and ashamed. “It will make things easier, Adam,” I said. “I’m surprised the Paxtons didn’t demand you throw me out.”