My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  My tears subsided a moment, for she’d been standing right there when her father had done the job on my wrist, but before I could answer, someone was on the porch yelling. Then what sounded like a mob was there. I could hear potted plants crashing and furniture flying. Then there was the squall of another siren, then silence. Long, unbroken silence, like the eye of a hurricane, that Myra finally broke with her small, kind voice: “Gabriel? Didju fall?”

  When she asked it this time, there was a hiss outside the door and Mama’s voice, low and harsh, telling us to hush. So we were perfectly quiet for another good hour, and at some point I reached out and held Myra’s soft little hand, for her comfort or mine I don’t know, and just before Mama opened the door, I told her that I loved her, too. Then I bent my mouth to her ear and whispered that if she wanted to, we could wait till we were married to kiss, but if she wanted to, we could do it now. She didn’t answer by any word or gesture, but only leaned over and pressed her lips to mine for a bare two seconds. The impact of that dry little kiss sent a shock clear to my toes, rendering me speechless, and I still had not recovered when Mama opened the closet and pulled us out, ignoring me to press Myra to her chest, crying so hard the torrent of tears wet Myra’s tightly braided hair and rolled down into her eyes.

  I stumbled out behind her, blinking at the glare of the lightbulbs, seeing that night had fallen on Magnolia Hill, and Uncle Case was back, a shotgun cradled casually in his elbow, and Brother Sloan was there too, carrying no weapon other than his Bible, but looking like he’d enjoy beating someone to death with it.

  “She’s got a fever,” Mama murmured to him over Myra’s head. “Somebody get Dr. Winston. She’s hot as a firecracker—”

  Uncle Case left and Brother Sloan led me out to the porch, where Michael, with a grotesquely swollen eye, was sitting in a rocker discussing the Yankees’ chances in the American League with Benny and Brother McQuaig. The endless pots of begonias and geraniums and ferns that usually balanced themselves along the porch rail were scattered and broken on the ground, and another shotgun was propped against the door with no explanation at all, but other than that, all was much as it should be, the night fine and warm for January, the men in their shirtsleeves. After I hugged Brother McQuaig and told him I loved him (which was the least I figured I owed the man who’d saved my father’s life), I took a seat on the porch swing and found myself watching the Sims’ house, which stood across the rough, sagging old fence in near darkness, the front door slightly ajar, the sidewalk strewn with pieces of boxes and bits of trash and a sock or two, all signs of a hasty exit. So it was gone, the evil in that house, and I could have wept from sheer relief, not realizing until then what an awful weight of dread had gathered over Magnolia Hill while that man lived there.

  Then I closed my eyes and thought that soon we’d have to start getting dressed to go visit Daddy in the hospital; then Mrs. Sims would be back and arrangements for Ira and Myra would have to be plotted out, and Mama would have to call Daddy’s boss and tell him Daddy wouldn’t be in tomorrow, maybe try to talk him into holding his job for him.

  Soon, the dry, boring details of life would be upon me, but for one sterling moment there, I was alive and well in the here and now For the evil that had hidden next door had been put to battle and bested, and Myra was safe in Mama’s arms, and as I listened to the rise and fall of the calm, familiar voices on the clean, mild night, I had a sure, shining feeling in my chest that the bad was behind me now—that I had survived it unscathed, and it would never touch me, not ever again, as long as I lived.

  I was thirteen years old.

  Chapter

  5

  As a child, I was so often deceived by hope that I grew into the cynic I am today, and that night on Lafayette, the sight of that still, empty house lulled me into a false calm. For within the month, Myra was nothing more than a shake of the head and a murmur of regret on Magnolia Hill, something for the adults to discuss with genuine horror on the porch at night after the children were safely tucked away in bed.

  Now, had I been older, or heir to even one grain of my mother’s hard-nosed practicality, I would have seen the inevitable coming, realizing that though Mr. Sims was out of the picture for the time being, Mrs. Sims couldn’t afford to wait around for him to get drunk enough to come back and finish her off. But I wasn’t, of course. I was too busy being relieved, spending my afternoons knocking on the Sims’ front door and finally being allowed inside the scantily furnished, dimly lit living room, whiling away the cold twilight playing Old Maid over a battered old TV tray with a mysteriously ailing Myra, making jokes, reading books, trying desperately to recapture some of the happiness we’d conjured out by the fence on the warm summer nights before the fall.

  A valiant effort that went mostly unrewarded, though Myra did grow a bit more animated when her fever broke, occasionally laughing or, once or twice, when her mother was next door making one of her endless phone calls, letting me kiss her again, full on the mouth. An exercise in heart-thumping, hand-sweating ectasy that almost paralyzed me, but left her pretty much untouched, only sitting there with the Old Maid in her hand, and the Barber and the Ballerina, reaching out to pick another card, calmly assenting when I asked her to marry me, equally assenting when I insisted she get rid of the red bike, so when she started back to school, she could do it the way the good Lord intended, walking by my side.

  In a pattern that was to follow me the rest of my life I was making plans, big plans, over that rattling old tray, while behind my back, the larger world churned out plans of its own, plans I was blissfully unaware of till mid-February, Florida spring just beginning to make a sly inroad on the pale, leafless winter, when I came home from school one afternoon and found a truck blocking Lafayette.

  It was a moving van, Candace told me, though I didn’t connect the pieces, even when Ira came to the back door carrying some toy or book I’d left over there, his face scarlet with excitement.

  “We’re going now,” he said. I still didn’t get it, thinking Myra had a doctor’s appointment, when he added mysteriously, “Myra says bye.”

  She’d spent two days in Jackson Memorial that month—I didn’t know why, Mama wouldn’t say—and still had to go back to the county health nurse every so often, for blood tests, she told me, holding up a bandaged finger as evidence. So I didn’t think much of Ira’s message, only reorganizing my afternoon, and when I finally emerged late in the evening, the naked tree line a delicate etching in black against the mauve of a winter sunset, I was not worried as much as I was perplexed when no one answered my knock.

  The curtains were drawn, the house perfectly still, a trash heap of cans and torn newspaper and boxes piled in the corner of the yard, but nothing else amiss, and I waited and waited, wanting to ask someone what was keeping them—didn’t the doctor’s office close at five?—but there was no one to ask. Mama had taken the bus downtown to haggle with our policy man over Daddy’s disability benefits, and I hesitated to leave the porch to ask one of the neighbors, afraid I’d miss something. So even after full dark had descended, neighborhood dining rooms filling with light, mothers coming to the porch to call their children, I waited, going to the door every so often and knocking again, then listening, listening with every nerve in my body, not allowing myself the luxury of anger, but caught in a pale, breathless patience that finally broke when I heard the brakes of the bus at the corner.

  Late it was, past eight, Mama’s cloth coat shapeless and gray against the houses as she made her way slowly down the dark street. When she heard me calling, she stopped a moment; then with no wasted words, only a great, a profound deliberation, she came around the fence through the Sims’ front gate, and it was only when she was right at the foot of the steps that she answered my loud, querulous questions, standing there with one hand on the rail, looking up at me with a tired, drawn face. “They’re gone, baby,” she said quietly. “They’re gone.”

  For a moment I only stood there blankly, trying to think of
another question, one that would make it all right, one that would change Mama’s answer and bring Myra back. But nothing came, and after a moment of desperate groping, I jumped flat-footed off that high, rattling old porch and ran away, refusing to come in to supper, refusing to listen to one more word because I really didn’t need to: I knew already and had ever since I’d first knocked on that hollow, empty door three hours before. Knew that she was gone, that I’d let her go without even answering her good-bye.

  And though I couldn’t face it, refused to discuss it, even with Daddy, talk of their departure filled the length and breadth of Magnolia Hill, and for the first time in three years, the balmy, velvet nights were once again full of the name Sims.

  “Moving to Birmingham,” everyone said, to live with a cousin—or maybe it was an aunt. Anyway, it was kin, and there was a communal sigh of relief among the good folk on Lafayette, who had long grown accustomed to sins like fornication and adultery and theft, but were left nauseated and plagued with guilt over incest, berating themselves for not having seen the signs long ago: the favoritism, the obvious violence, the liquor. It wasn’t the first time such a thing had happened, and the women especially, many of whom had been victims themselves of some form of molestation or another, beat their breasts and vented their rage by suggesting creative tortures for Mr. Sims, should he ever show his face on Magnolia Hill again.

  But their fantasies of revenge remain unfulfilled to this day, for Mr. Sims never came back to Lafayette, and we eventually heard he died in Sliddell little more than half a dozen years later after a particularly nasty bout with diabetes. Literally rotted to death, one limb at a time, we heard, and my mother frequently voiced a sincere joy that his death was long and lingering, not just because his kicks had ruptured Daddy’s spleen, sending him to the hospital for four weeks, thereby landing us more or less permanently in poverty, but also because she’d held Myra in her arms. At least, that’s the way she’d explain it on the porch, staring across the fence at the house that never again saw a permanent tenant, but after a few straggling rentals, fell to disrepair. Her face was blank as she murmured reflectively, “If I’d a never touched her, it just wouldn’t a seemed real to me. I never would a b’lieved such a thing could happen”.

  But she had touched Myra; she and I both had, and neither of us forgot her, not for a minute, though Daddy healed fairly quickly and found another job loading crates on the line at Sanger. By summer, life had returned to normal: Daddy sweating, Mama talking, Candace beginning to date boys, Michael playing baseball.

  Always playing baseball.

  Now, I have not written my brother Michael into Myra’s story simply because he did not appear in it until the very end when the Old Man flattened him out with that one lethal punch. While I walked her to school every morning, while I recreated history and played house over the fence, while my wrist was being pulverized by her father, Michael was playing baseball. In fact, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that at any given hour between the years of 1952 and 1961, whenever my brother was not occupied with the necessities of eating and sleeping and going to school, he was playing baseball. Out on the corner lot behind the church, sometimes on different organized teams, sometimes with a ragtag group of men and boys, or if all else failed, nailing pitches into an old hickory stump, perfecting it to one smooth, no-nonsense, hundred-mile-an-hour streak. Always playing baseball.

  A natural athlete with a small, tight frame and even, balanced feet, he was probably naturally gifted in the game, but a combination of things like obsessive drive and precise timing had enabled him to hone his skills to the point that I have seldom seen any player, professional or otherwise, with such talent. Pitching eventually became his forte, but he could do it all, catch, throw, steal bases. By the time he was fourteen, he was so good no one would play with him, for he could score a dozen runs off an opponent, even if that opponent was a grown man.

  But having or not having competition never seemed to bother him. He was not in it for the ego gratification, but for the sheer love of the game that he’d occasionally try to share with me, never with much success, for the sun made me weak–kneed and the idea of standing out in it hour after hour was about as inviting as a trip to the dentist. I said as much to him on many occasions, especially after my hand came out of the cast when he thought pitching would be the perfect therapy. But he never nagged too much, for Michael was a very accepting person, and we were not close enough in age to be locked into the tight claw of sibling rivalry. The actual numerical difference was six and half years, but it was compounded by the fact we were opposites from the moment we were born, or so Mama says. He was dark, I was fair; he, muscular and wiry, while I agonized over having to wear husky jeans. To my knowledge, Michael never opened the pages of anything more taxing than the sports section of the Democrat, while I eventually abandoned Gone with the Wind for C Vann Woodward and the Fugitives (not the television show, but I don’t have time to explain it here—).

  It is very odd, really, the difference between my brother and me, truly not some sort of romantic exaggeration on my part, but scientific fact, almost as if Daddy had undergone a chemical alteration while he sweated malaria in the Islands at MacArthur’s back, returning home to Magnolia Hill with a DNA reversal. Of course, sociological factors had a hand in it too, for I was the baby of the family and Michael the oldest son, considered a man at fifteen and taking a night job at Sanger, whereas Mama was still making excuses for me when I was twenty–three and yet to be gainfully employed. So maybe it all comes down to the difference between late–Depression childhood expectations and those of children born in the great twentieth–century phenomenon known as the Baby Boom. Or maybe it all comes down to nothing more than chance; don’t ask me. All I know and all I’m saying is this: we were never very much alike, my brother and I, and whereas he died early, I live on and bear the burden of both our histories, and I can assure you, the telling doesn’t come easy.

  Oh, Michael, Michael, I’ve turned him over in my mind so much I’ve lost my perspective and can only remember him in the flat, lifeless accolades they listed at his funeral. I can only remember him as my older brother, the rich one, who bought out the factory he worked in and withstood the town and the Klan to hire a black man as his manager. Who turned down a contract with the Reds to stay home and care for his parents. Who told me the night I left for college to pay no attention to all the family who thought it a criminal waste of time, but to do what I wanted, that I was as smart as anybody and if I wanted to mess with books all my life, well, it was all of my business and none of theirs.

  My brother Michael, the one who married Myra.

  An event, I am convinced, that would never have come about in the natural order of things, if not for my mother and a growing obsession she began cultivating at forty that any woman who’d withstood two decades of her own children had a God–given right to grandchildren while she was still young enough to enjoy them. It was the kind of irrational certainty that occasionally worked its way into Mama’s little head, and by the time Michael was nearing his mid–twenties, still unmarried and spending every waking minute at (as she put it) “that fool plant,” she was nearly frantic. Candace had a baby (and it’d be her last; a postpartum hemorrhage had nearly cost her life), but she had left for Germany with her husband, an Air Force lieutenant who couldn’t guarantee he’d be Stateside within the decade, and as for me, I was an eccentric nineteen year old scratching my way through FSU with no girlfriends to speak of. So when a young woman knocked on our front door late one October evening in ’67 and asked for me, you might have expected Mama to hand over my phone number or at least provide my mailing address along with a short, flattering summary of my honor–student status and unusually bright future. But no, that was too logical, too straightforward for Mama. It did not further her goals in any small way, and looking at the woman’s small white hands and shy, agreeable face, she immediately thought of Michael, her eldest and dearest, who still lived
at home and brought in a paycheck, while Gabe had hair to his shoulders and talked so crazy she was ashamed to take him to church anymore.

  So instead of bothering with anything as trivial as the truth, she patted her hair and murmured something about me being gone, then invited the stranger to supper on the spot. While they sat on the couch and waited for Daddy, Mama was quick to note her age (seventeen, considered by Mama to be a woman’s prime breeding peak), her yesma’ams and noma’ams—a sure sign she was from good people—and last, but not least, the small gold cross around her neck that had her pegged as Baptist or at least well–intentioned in that direction. I do believe that by the time Daddy was stomping his boots at the back door, Mama was already tabulating a guest list, and when he came in, she leapt to her feet, anxious he make a good impression on this unsuspecting prospective daughter–in–law I can only imagine her surprise when, instead of merely standing and smiling, the quiet young woman crossed the room and held out her hands, “Mister Catts? My mama says you saved my life once.”

  Mama had been too involved in her matchmaking to even catch the girl’s name, but Daddy’s face, gray with fatigue from his backbreaking work on the floor at Sanger (his last and hardest job before the bastards worked him to death), softened to a smile.

  “Why, Myra Sims, Lord have mercy. Cissie, look at her now” He took her hands. “Why, you’ve made up into a fine girl, a pretty girl—”

  Mama had been stunned enough to get out her reading glasses and give her (in her own estimation) one more good look and agreed it was indeed Myra Sims, except her name was no longer Sims; it was Odom, for her mother had remarried in Birmingham, and her stepfather had adopted both her and Ira, who was now a drill instructor at Parris Island.