The Brothers K

by David James Duncan

  A Kamikaze snapped down into the strike zone. “Well!” Irwin said, clearing his throat loudly, “anyhow, it’s not about us!”

  Everett started to laugh.

  “The world was weird back then!” Irwin said, making a weird face to emphasize it. Everett laughed harder. “India was an oddball spot in those days,” Irwin blustered. “So don’t let it worry us! Let not the olden days get you down today, huh, guys?”

  Everett’s eyes were streaming, Pete and I were laughing too, and the fact that Irwin was genuinely distressed made his rampant backpedaling all the funnier. “But really!” he said. “If one of us was a Pandava, we just plain wouldn’t fight in that situation! Turn the other cheek, right? That’s all there is to it, right? We’d just flat out refuse!”

  Peter stopped laughing. “What if you’d promised, Irwin?” he asked. “What if you’d given your word, like Arjuna?”

  “I’m never fightin’ nobody!” Irwin insisted. “Ever!”

  Peter just smiled at this. But Everett, imitating Irwin’s voice and bluster to cruel perfection, added, “Not even if some maniac comes after Mama with a knife! Not even if some goon with a Presto-log dick decides to rape my girlfriend! I’m just gonna run, like Jesus says!”

  Papa threw another Kamikaze. Again it snapped down into the dent left by the previous pitch. Irwin’s face reddened and his mouth opened and closed several times before he managed to mutter, “That’s not what Jesus says.”

  Meanwhile Peter closed his eyes, and in a soft voice began to recite: “Arjuna placed the deep blue gem on Drona’s brow. The severed head was beautiful as a dark hill covered in new fallen snow …”

  There was a quiet, during which I found myself picturing, very much against my will, Papa’s head, with its new snow at the temples. Then Irwin cleared his throat. “No offense,” he said, “but I’m headin’ in. I don’t like weirdness. And if you ask me, you guys are gettin’ weird.”

  He left us.

  Peter and Everett and I didn’t move.

  Papa threw three straight fastballs right into the dent.

  The bird’s severed head kept falling.

  the suppertable

  At the next no-Papa grace time it was Everett’s turn to pray again—and Mama still blames him for all the hell that broke loose. But I don’t. I feel there’s no blame to place. Everett was sixteen years old at the time, chock-full of hormones, chock-full of doubts about the Sabbath cult he’d been born into, and chock-full of pride in the intelligence it took to entertain and articulate such doubts. If his siblings were going to start indulging in a bunch of cornball hillbilly graces, all right, he figured. But his turn was his turn. And he was having nothing to do with the buckle, band or notches of any sort of Bible Belt. So …

  Bowing his head over his macaroni, and speaking in a voice gone suddenly creaky with nerves, he said, “Dear God, if there is One …”

  And the walls came tumbling.

  “Not one more word!” Mama hissed.

  “Dear God, if You exist,” he repeated.

  “Silence!” Mama shouted.

  “Dear God,” he said again, “or whatever we mean by that word—”

  “Shuttup!” she shrieked. And Everett’s attempts to pray and Mama’s efforts to stop him fell so close upon each other that they formed an insane litany:

  “Dear God, if there is any such Being—”

  “Shame on you! Get up to your room this instant!”

  “Dear Jesus, then, if there really was a resurrection—”

  “Shut your mouth this instant! I’ve been expecting something like this from you, and I’ll not have it! Not in my house!”

  “Dear God, if You exist!”

  “You don’t know anything about anything! And you will leave this table this instant!”

  “If You’re still kicking, Lord, if there’s any life the preachers haven’t beaten out of You, I’d sure appreciate it if You’d make Mama here pipe down, because—”

  “Satan, get behind me! Beatrice, Winifred! Cover your ears! No! Go to your rooms! Everybody out! I will not have this in my—”

  “Dear God If You Exist!”

  “The Lord is the Shepherd I shall not want! He maketh me lie down in still waters! He restoreth my—”

  “Dear Pops, Spook and Junior! Please help Mama see that I’m not trying to lead her lambies astray. I’m only trying to be honest, dammit, and—”

  “Yea though I walk through the shadow of the valley of death …”

  “I’m sick of reciting pious Betty Crocker recipes! I don’t know Who You are or even if You are, and instead of speaking David’s or Luke’s or Matthew’s minds I want to speak my own for once—”

  “And your mind is a sewer that Christ alone can cleanse!”

  “Speak for yourself, Mama! DEAR GOD IF YOU EXIST—”

  Mama jumped to her feet, swung from the heels, and slapped Everett so hard he fell clear over against Peter. But when he lifted his face again he looked her in the eye, then slowly, arrogantly, but also biblically turned the other cheek. “Dear God, if there is One,” he whispered.

  Mama let him have it again, this time with her fist.

  “Dear Christ, if there was One,” he murmured.

  And she slammed him a third time. His eyes glazed, his mouth started bleeding, Bet started screaming, Freddy and Peter were in tears. “Dear Holy Ghostie, Dear Post Toastie,” he blithered, “Dear Tricycle, Dear Triceratops, Dear Larry, Moe and Curly …”

  She’d literally knocked him silly. And she was ready to hit him again. But Irwin jumped up, and stood between them.

  “Leave him alone, okay, Mama?” he said. And he was smiling, nearly laughing as he said it. But it wasn’t a request: it was an order.

  Mama said nothing. She just blasted Irwin’s face as hard as she could. And at that moment—at the sight of her little white fist bouncing off Irwin’s big smile—I completely lost contact with my body. My mind remained conscious, I kept listening and watching, but I’d entered a state of such complete thralldom to the situation that I honestly don’t think I’d have moved or acted even if Mama had picked up a steak knife.

  “Please, Mama,” Irwin said, and his smile, instead of fading, had intensified. “Let’s all calm down now. Everett too.”

  She hit him again. He hardly flinched. “You’ll hurt your hand,” he said.

  Mama picked up her plate. Bet screamed. Then Peter, moving so quickly I could hardly follow, lunged and grabbed Mama’s wrist from behind. She struggled briefly, perhaps kicked him once or twice, then Irwin had the other wrist. For a moment she fought them both. Then she froze. And then she began to let out a series of horrible, convulsive gasps which, even in my wooden state, I recognized as the death rattle of my brothers’ and my childhood.

  “It’s just us, Mama,” Peter said, awkwardly trying to pat her shoulder with one hand as he gripped her wrist with the other. “We’re not your crazy father. We’re just your boys. It’s just Everett, Mama. And Irwin and me.”

  His voice was soothing, at least to me, and though there were tears in his eyes his composure was amazing. “We know Everett and all his big theories, Mama. We’ve heard them plenty, and I don’t think one of us agrees. But they’re his honest feelings, Mama. And he’s not going to corrupt or ruin us just by saying, at grace time, what we’ve all heard him say at other times. Remember the verse Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling? I think that’s all he was trying to do, Mama. Till he lost his temper, anyway.”

  You could tell she was listening. You could tell Peter’s words soothed some part of her, tempted her to calm down. But being tempted, even by forbearance, is still being tempted. And a lifetime of sermons had left no doubt in her mind about who the Master of Temptation was. Abruptly stiffening, she turned and shrieked in Peter’s face, “Get thee behind me, Satan!”

  “I’m not Satan,” he said as calmly as he could. But she’d stunned him, you could tell; she’d sickened and weakened him. Then with a sudden
mad lurch she pulled both her wrists free, leapt away from Peter and Irwin, and with her hair in her face spun round till she was half crouched, right in front of Everett, like an animal about to spring. It was the worst thing I’d ever seen. The language of her body, the hatred in her eyes, these were things that none of us, the seven-year-olds especially, should ever have had to see. Not in our mother. Not aimed at one of us.

  Not knowing what else to do, Irwin and Peter placed themselves in front of Everett. But she looked between them and spoke her hate: she screamed—a horrid, insane shriek of rage. And when it was over she grabbed Bet and Freddy and dragged them, howling and hitting and fighting her all the way, back to their bedroom, where she slammed the door so hard the entire house rattled like the cheap, hollow box we usually managed to forget it was.

  Irwin sat down, still wearing the dregs of a smile. Then he hung his head in his hands, and silently started to cry. Everett’s mouth was still bleeding; his face was a mottled red and pale gray. “Are you happy?” Peter asked, plunking down in the chair beside Irwin. “Are you proud of yourself?”

  “She hates me,” he said, sounding stunned now, and frightened, and maybe even a little sorry. “She despises me! She really does!”

  Over the sniffling of the twins back in the bedroom, we heard Mama sob, “Examine me, O Lord! Try my reins and my heart, for thy loving kindness is before mine eyes, and I have walked in thy truth …”

  Peter’s forehead dropped onto Winnie’s shoulder. “The Psalms,” he groaned.

  “Betty Crocker!” Everett shouted down the hall.

  “Shuttup, Everett!” Irwin and Peter cried in unison.

  But Mama had heard him. “I have not sat with vain persons!” she hollered through the door. “Neither will I go in with dissemblers. I have hated the congregation of evildoers, and will not sit with the wicked …”

  “Or with the honest!” Everett shouted.

  “Please, Everett!” Irwin begged.

  “Deliver me not over unto the will of mine enemies!” Mama cried. But in the meantime Everett had darted into the livingroom and returned with Mama’s enormous old family Bible.

  “I can recite recipes too!” he bellowed, flinging the thing open and slapping pages around till he’d hit on the Psalms. “I can roast and fry and poach you too, Mama! Just listen! When mine enemies and mine foes came upon me, they stumbled and fell! Though an host shall encamp against me, my heart shall not fear …”

  Mama couldn’t compete in volume, but there was a maddening self-righteousness that gave her screech terrific piercing-power: “For false witnesses are risen against me, and such as breathe out cruelty! I had fainted, unless I had believed to see the goodness of the Lord in the land of the living …”

  “Draw me not away with the WICKED!” Everett thundered, easily drowning her out, “nor with the Workers of INIQUITY, which speak Peace to their DAUGHTERS, but snivel MISCHIEF unto their SONS!”

  “You’re making that up!” Peter said, grinning in spite of himself. It shamed me, but I’d begun to smile a wooden smile too. Everett had a marvelous voice and accent. He sounded like some power-crazed English king in his huge stone castle, reveling in the sheer rock-and-roll power of his lung-blasts.

  “Thou hast lifted me up!” Mama quavered, sounding forlorn, in comparison, as a violin bowed by a chimpanzee, “and hast not made my foes to rejoice over me!”

  “Plead my cause O Lord if there is One!” Everett roared gloriously. “Plead my cause with her that strives against me! Fight against her that fights me!”

  And now even Irwin and the twins began laughing. There is a trigger in even the most mannerly children that is pulled when one of their peers refuses to back down from the ruling adult—and Everett had found that trigger in all of us, and was squeezing it again and again. Our laughter meant little. It was helpless, not cruel. Yet by the sound of her voice we knew that Mama was mistaking it for a mass revolt—a veritable six-headed outburst of the satanic. And her misapprehension, her desperation, somehow only made us laugh harder.

  “But in my adversity they rejoiced,” she half shrieked, half groaned. “The abjects gathered themselves against me, and I knew it not! They did tear me, and ceased not! Hypocritical mockers, they gnashed upon me with their teeth!”

  “Nice!” Everett called out. “Very nice! But listen to this!” And trilling his r’s, swinging his arms operatically, bastardizing verses as he went, he boomed, “Deliver me, O Lord if there is One, from the woman who imagines mischiefs in her heart! Continually is she primed for war! She has sharpened her tongue like a serpent! Adders poison her lips! So SHEBANG! Let the mischief of her own lips cover her! And KABLAM! Let burning coals fall upon them! And A-HEY-BABA-LUBA-AND-A-BIM-BAM-BOOM! Let her lips be cast into fire, into deep pits, that they rise not up and—”

  There was a report, like a gunshot, and pages were suddenly everywhere, floating like the feathers of a shotgunned grouse as what was left of the family Bible flew through the kitchen, slammed the far wall, then slid to the floor, a dead thing. There stood Papa, his clothes and hair drenched with rain and sweat, his face black with fury. “Lord, how long wilt thou look on?” came Mama’s stricken wail. “Rescue my soul from their destructions, my darling from the lions …”

  “He just did,” Peter whispered. But Papa spun round and, with a single, lethal glance, silenced not just Peter, but all of us.

  Towering over Everett, he pointed at the Bible body crumpled on the floor. “Next time,” he said, speaking very softly, trilling no r’s, moving nothing but his lips, “that’s you.”

  Everett turned white as a newborn baseball, took one cautious, backward step, nodded his head, and collapsed in a chair.

  Papa turned, and stalked off down the hallway.

  “Where is now the heathen’s God?” Mama screeched.

  Then Papa flung the bedroom door open so hard she must have gone flying, because his first words were, “Oops. ’Scuse me, Laura. But for God’s sake stop that squawking and tell me what the hell’s happened here?”

  Set free by his arrival, Bet and Freddy came scampering into the kitchen, grinning like imps as they inspected the remains of the Bible. The bedroom door closed quietly. “Good action!” Bet giggled, parroting a phrase she’d stolen from Irwin. When she and Freddy began to babble, though, Peter pulled them both into his lap and kept them quiet. We waited a solid ten minutes, the twins squirming afresh every twenty seconds or so. But Peter wouldn’t release them. He sensed, we brothers all sensed, that the impassioned mumbles and cries and sobs behind the bedroom door would very likely determine just how much love would be left in our family from this day forward …

  It did not bode well that Papa, when he finally emerged, looked every bit as angry as when he’d gone in. Nor that Mama didn’t follow. Slowly, meticulously, Papa washed his hands and face at the kitchen sink. When he’d finished, he dished himself a huge plate of macaroni and salad, sat down with the rest of us, and muttered, “There’s been enough praying for one night. What say we try to eat without choking ourselves to death?”

  We did as he said.

  Mama didn’t come out.

  Psalm War

  Addendum

  It may be different for other people, but we in our green youth have to settle the eternal questions first

  —Ivan to Alyosha Karamazov

  upstairs/Psalm War night/1964

  It was nearly midnight and there was school in the morning, but my brothers and I weren’t even close to being sleepy as we lay side by side by side by side on Everett’s and Peter’s beds. It didn’t help, I’m sure, that our faces and flesh were a lurid red and the room was wracked by the nerve-wringing buzz of a scarlet neon OLY sign that Everett had scavenged from a Dumpster bin a few days before, or that Mama and Papa were still arguing, often savagely, downstairs in their bedroom.

  We’d been talking about everything under the sun but the blowup with Mama. But after a long, OLY-raped silence Everett finally broached the subject
with his usual light touch: “I got us all in deep shit,” he grunted.

  Irwin and I just looked at him, but Peter nodded.

  “I think Mama’s nuts on this religion crap,” he said, “but I got you guys in hot water with me, and I’m sorry about that.”

  “Heck, we don’t mind,” Irwin said, smiling beatifically. “It’ll work out.”

  “I mind,” Everett said flatly. “And it won’t work out. Not between me and her.”

  “Sure it will,” Irwin said blithely. “Everything always works out.”

  “The hell it does,” Everett growled. And, hearing his tone, I wanted to warn Irwin to concede the point.

  But he just let out a yawn and said, “Sooner or later everything comes out in the wash, just like the good Lord intended. That’s what I believe.”

  “Then explain concentration camps to me, Mr. Sunshine!” Everett snarled. “Explain six million dead Jews, or even Grandawma’s dead family. Explain that woman up in the Tri-Cities last week who didn’t like the sound of her baby crying so she threw it down on the kitchen floor and stomped it to death? How did that come out in the wash, Winnie the Pooh? And if you say the baby went to heaven, buddy, I’ll bust you! Because what about the mother? What sort of wash’ is that crazy bitch going to come out in? And if you say ‘hell’ I’ll hit you again, because how did she get so fucked up in the first place? What sort of life, what sort of a world, turned her into a monster in the first place? Huh?”

  Irwin looked ashen, even in the red light. It’s dangerous to wax mindlessly sunny around a dark cloud like Everett. No one spoke for a good while, and in the silence I realized that my splitting headache, though partly due to what had gone on with Mama, was mostly due to Everett’s neon OLY. It was obvious to all of us that the thing had been chucked because its buzzing drove people stark barking mad. But on the day Everett brought it home, Mama had ordered him to trash it, and in the battle that ensued he’d sacrificed his fifty-cent weekly allowance, and now he was so proud of what the thing had cost him that we no longer had the courage to ask him to shut it off.