Bendio Joules--If Not For You
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BENDIGO JOULES--IF NOT FOR YOU
by
Michael Allender
Copyright 2013 Michael Allender
(The following story is the first in a series of fourteen stories)
Dedication
Jeremy 'Bendigo' joules. Son of Horace and Raye Joules. Older brother of Abbie and Sissy. Born March 1, 1941. Died too soon. August 26, 1958.
How I miss the joy of your company, Ben, the brotherly advice you gave me, the fun we had together, and all the trouble a brother and sister could find as partners in mischief. You were a living part of me that I scarcely thought I could live without. It's the memories you left me, the lessons you gave, and the laughter that still rings in my heart that have brought me this far.
Almost everything we did, we did together. You were my friend, my guardian, my partner in mischief, and my mentor. In a very real sense, you gave me the chance to simply be, and I can only pray that someday I'll live up to your hopes and expectations. Hopefully, before I've finished writing your story, I'll muster the courage to reveal the final chapter, just like it happened.
No amount of words can tell the whole story of your life, nor erase the debt that I owe you. But words are the only currency left me to repay you, so this will have to sserve as my memorial to the only brother I will ever have. Perhaps someday I will be allowed to pass along your gift of life, but if not, these words represent my inadequate but hearfelt way of saying:
Thank you, Bendigo. May your memory find a place in the hearts and minds of all those who come t know you through these writings. I love you.
Your little sister,
Abbie Joules.
Connectedness
Have you ever wondered about the 'connectedness' of things in your life? Of events, and how they're arranged in time and place? I suppose most people don't get very preoccupied by such thoughts, but I have special reasons to muse over the subject. On occasion I have tried to follow a few of the connections that have stitched my life together back through the tangled web of time, studying the knotty 'what ifs' along the way. Even though this exercise produced maps of where I'd been, rather than signposts to direct my future wanderings, the results still made an interesting study.
Here is a case in point, working backwards from what I'll call the end result. One afternoon my dad was standing on a ladder looking for a leak in the roof of the house over Kissy's bedroom (she's my younger sister). He had climbed halfway down the ladder when a rooster flew past and startled him. He slipped off a rung and fell backwards, with his legs trapped in the ladder. An instant before he would have smacked his head against a brick planter box, Ben (my older brother) caught him in his arms and very probably saved him from being killed or at least badly injured.
Had Ben not been charging around the corner in hot pursuit of that same rooster, he would not have been there to grab Dad (nor, of course, would Dad have been startled).
Had Mother not told Ben to catch, kill and clean the rooster for our dinner, he would not have been chasing the bird.
Had the idiotic rooster not insisted on perching on a fence outside Mon and Dad's bedroom window and crowing at four AM every morning, Mom would not have been so vexed.
Had Ben not stayed home (which was a Sunday when he usually worked at the hospital), he would not have been there to chase the rooster.
Had Dad not asked Ben to bleed the fuel lines, refill and start the diesel tractor, he would have been at the hospital instead of at home.
And had I not tried to finish plowing the west field I would not have run out of diesel, causing Dad to enlist Ben's services. And of course one could go back indefinitely to some ultimate first event, whether it's a very large Big Bang, or God feeling restless. No, I do not claim to have caused Dad to fall, nor to have saved his life by running out of diesel fuel, and had I not, other events in the sequence might have been different as well. Still, there are those pesky connections.
Here's another example, moving forward in time. The events went something like this: (1) We were at our Aunt Sherry's house for dinner. (2) It was an unusually cold night. (3) Aunt Sherry shooed one of her house cats out because Kissy was teasing it. (4) The cat took refuge on top of the warm engine block of our Studebaker pickup. (5) When Dan turned the ignition over an hour later, the cat's tail was in contact with the coil, (bad luck), which ended up smoking the cat and the truck's electrical system. (6) A tremendous rain storm had begun to blow through by then, forcing us to spend the night at Aunt Sherry's, and when we got the truck running the next day and drove away, we discovered that (7) a flash flood had taken out a bridge over Peach Creek early the evening before. It is quite probably that we were alive that day because of a cold, smoked cat. Afterwards I looked up the definition of fate.
Fate: That which is inevitably predetermined.
I find a certain comfort in that definition. It says that the 'connectedness' of things is not my fault, and it reduces the complicity I feel in my own actions to a manageable level, as long as I don't analyze the sequence of things that happened in my youth too closely. Still, one's previous actions cannot be denied, and if I want to celebrate my brother, Bendigo, then I have to face my past.
The seeds of disaster were sewn when I was a small child, listening spellbound while an old high school chum of Dad's talked for hours about his adventures canoeing the lakes and rivers of southern Ontario. I had never been in a boat, but the very next day I made a toy boat, using scraps of wood, string, and glue. Bendigo joined me, and we were subsequently set along a path that has led too directly for comfort to these very words. Every time my thoughts have gone back to that ridiculous looking little boat, built by two children eager for entertainment on a poor farm in east Texas, I have wondered how close two events have to be connected in time and space to say that one caused the other. It is a question I have yet to answer.
One toy boat led to another. Each became larger and more sophisticated, eventually enabling them to carry passengers of insects, mice and once even a kitten. Those gave way to our first real boat, a particularly ugly pirogue, which we poled to the center of our catfish ponds to escape our parents. At about the ages of nine and eleven, we acquired a small canoe, which we used to poke about on the backwaters of Peach Creek and the Navasota River. Next came a larger canoe, one which took us to the Mernard and Big Sandy Creeks in the big Thicket, the Trinity River, and, last of all, the Brazos in flood in August of 1958.
It is a trail that I have tried to make sense of all my life. Appearing like a postscript under the bottom line of every explanation I have come up with, lies the cold hard fact that my brother, Jeremy 'Bendigo' Joules, died in my presence through a whole series of events which I set in motion with that original toy boat. Most of those events seem far removed from Ben's last day, yet I know they are connected, and I have been unable to sever the link that binds them nor erase the responsibility I feel. I've discovered that logic does not always apply, and even when it does, it offers little consolation.
I had these things on my mind on the last trip I made to our old homestead, the land occupied now by Kissy, and her family. One afternoon I walked a mile up the road to a small plot of land that still supported an old meetinghouse sheltering under giant live oak trees. The sills of the building stood solidly on large river stones, each one set firmly in matching depressions in the soil. I ran my hand over the weather3ed boards and peeked through a dusty window at the old sheet-covered billiard table that stood exactly where it had fifteen years earlier. It took two years to complete that structure, tumultuous years that rocked our family to its core, and raised serious questions in my mind about the existence of love and justice in a world that
had inexplicably turned hard and cruel. The meetinghouse was christened on July 20th, 1958 with a 'town meeting', a potluck picnic and a dance. It had been a community effort, not unlike a barn raising, but Ben raised most of the money for it single handed, and did much of the work as well.
Though I think it was one of the proudest moments of Ben's life, it was not an entirely happy occasion for our family, as our mother, Raye Joules, had died six months earlier. Ben