My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  Well, it sure didn’t sound too sweet to me, that I was left sitting home alone while my wife fell in love with a fourteen-year-old rebel without a cause, and in the end I was forced to play the last, the only, card I had left in my hand, when I woke up the next morning in a puddle of blood.

  Chapter

  20

  Albeit, a small puddle of blood. But the relatively small showing didn’t calm Myra, not for a second. Suddenly, she was my wife again, holding my hand, calling Dr. Williams.

  “He’s bleeding,” she told the nurse at Sanger. “Yes, from the mouth—”

  “It’s just the ulcer, honey,” I told her. “It’s nothing. I’m fine.”

  Though actually, I wasn’t so fine. I hadn’t been since Christmas when I ate fruitcake at the Sanger party and realized after about my fifth slice that it wasn’t the pecans I was enjoying with such frenzy, but the rum they were soaked in. And since I’d been on Antabuse since September as a sort of insurance policy against self-pity, I spent the remainder of the evening (literally) puking my guts out.

  I wasn’t proud of the fact I was back on Antabuse, or that I’d made such an amateur’s mistake, so I kept it to myself and passed it off as a virus, but my poor stomach wasn’t letting me off that easy. For six months I’d been eating Tagamet and drinking Maalox and all the other things that used to work, but the baseball tension put me over the edge, and I crossed the border from active to bleeding ulcer in the space of one night.

  “Margaret said Dr. Williams is out,” Myra said. “We’re going to the ER.”

  “Myra, no, I’m giving finals today—”

  “A sub can give finals,” she said, throwing on some clothes with a firm expression. “You’re going to the hospital.”

  So within the hour, I was sitting on an examining table in the ER waiting for the doctor, feeling like a complete fool, asking Myra if she realized how much all of this was going to cost.

  “I’ll sell some shoes,” she said absently, strolling around the room, nervously clicking lamps on and off, stopping every few steps to take a deep breath, and when a very young doctor came in and asked me what my problem was, she blurted out, “He’s bleeding. The pillow, it was covered with blood. I told him we can’t ignore it; it won’t just go away.”

  The doctor looked rightfully surprised at her vehemence, telling me to pull up my shirt and lay back, and I felt like even more a fool and tried to downplay it.

  “Listen, she’s exaggerating. I have an ulcer. All I need is a little Tagamet—” I stopped to scream when he pressed my stomach, “Damn, boy, that hurts.”

  He ignored me, moving around the table, his voice thoughtful. “Have you had some kind of blunt trauma recently? A punch? A fall?”

  “No—” I began.

  Myra just about yanked me off the table, saying, “Tell him the truth, Gabriel. He has to know—” with such intensity that I looked at the doctor.

  “Well, I did puke Antabuse Christmas. Ate some—uh—fruitcake with rum in it.”

  “Yow,” he said lightly, but was a little disconcerted by Myra, who was still clutching my arm.

  “See?” she said quickly. ‘And they can do things for you. They can fix you up. They’ve got medicines now.” She looked at the doctor. “Don’t they?”

  The doctor was looking at her with earnest perplexity now, saying he’d have to order blood work, that he couldn’t venture a diagnosis until he saw the labwork.

  Myra ignored him, her face blank and white as she reassured me, “That’s all right though, because they can do things for it now. Nowdays,” she said, “it never kills anybody.”

  The doctor and I both were watching her now, wondering just what the hell she was talking about, when I finally noticed her eyes, and felt a tight claw at my throat and reached up to hold her hand. “That’s right, baby. It’ll be fine.”

  For they were squinted, distant, connected by a tiny marker of memory to another voice, another time by a cue so strong her face was panicked, far-off, trying to fight an old forgotten battle, but not sure, not sure—dying of not being sure. Overall, it was a look that I would liken to the eyes of an animal two seconds after the spring of a steel trap, and in a light, dry voice, I asked the doctor to please call my mother and tell her I needed her.

  He said he would and left, saying something about ordering blood work, and when he was gone, Myra broke down and cried against my shoulder.

  “It’s all right, baby, it’s fine—” I said, thinking that waking up on bloody sheets was a hell of a lot more serious a matter to Myra Sims than it’d ever be to me, but when she spoke, it was not in that nervous, shifting voice, but in her own: impatient, mad, trying to set me straight.

  “It’s not that, Gabriel, it’s never that—” she cried, but was too flustered to finish, and it was a while longer before she was finally able to enlighten me. “Michael died here,” she said. “He came in just like this. He had the flu, we thought. Then it was just gallstones, but—” I pulled her to my chest, but she finished. “He was never the same again. He kept losing weight. He got so thin, so weak. He died Gabriel, he died. I’ll never talk to him again—”

  I finally realized there was a betrayal larger than Old Man Sims looming here and held her tightly, trying to calm her, but was getting close to tears myself when my mother came to the door in one of her old housedresses, looking like she hadn’t stopped to brush her hair when the doctor called. And you know, I have problems, deep philosophical problems, with this woman who bore me and gave me such an idiotic name, but I tell you what, she is nobody’s fool, and sized up the situation in about two seconds flat.

  “Well, Gabe, son, I toldju to quit eating so much of thet hot sauce,” she said irritably, when I told her my complaint, neatly deflating all the ends and pieces of old memories of defeat that still lurked in these clinical halls, then turned to Myra. “Myra, baby, while he’s getting these tests and whatall, why don’t you come home with me?” Without missing a beat, she added, “Clay’s coming by after school. He’s heping me move my azaleas and cut back thet kudzu. It’s sa blame hot I can’t stand it more’n an hour, and if I leave it to Clay, well, it’ll never get done.”

  Myra’s tears came to a sudden and complete halt at the mention of Clayton’s name, but Mama politely ignored it, making a pretense of having to talk her into it. “We get done in time, you can stay to supper. I got a ham and potato salad and we’ll send Clay to the store for ice cream or frozen yogurt or whatever it is you women eat these days.”

  “I need to stay with Gabriel,” she answered in a small voice, the voice of a responsible child who cannot attend a birthday party because she’s promised to visit a sick aunt.

  I proved I could play this game as well as Mama, pushing her off the table, saying, “Go, go. I’ll be fine. Listen, when he gives me the Tagamet, I’ll pay him his thousand and go grade my finals.”

  It took a little haggling, but she finally kissed me and left, just as the lab technician came for the blood, and an hour later, the ER doctor was back, a stack of little yellow slips in his hand, looking somehow annoyed.

  “How long have you been bleeding?” he asked. I was vague. “Oh, awhile. I’ve had it before, though. No problem.”

  “As a matter of fact,” he said, “it is a problem. Your hematocrit is low, your white blood count is high, you’re anemic, and your stomach feels like spaghetti.”

  I just shrugged; I mean what was I supposed to say? That I was sorry?

  “You’ve been ignoring a very serious condition, Mr. Catts. I think the least radiology will find is a sizable perforation, and my only recommendation is surgery.”

  I rubbed my eyes for a long time, then tried to explain why this was impossible. “My wife is emotionally fragile. She lost a husband to cancer here a couple years ago. I just can’t see putting her through another surgery this soon.”

  “Well, you may be putting her through another funeral here soon if you hemorrhage again with that blood count.”


  I cursed long and hard at this, then gave him my conditions: “Only if I can get it done today. As soon as possible. I mean, right now.”

  “I’ll have to call surgery. They’re probably booked—”

  “Tell them I’m bleeding to death, threaten malpractice—I don’t care, just do it quick, or I can’t get it done at all.”

  He left with a look of moderate disgust, but returned slightly mollified, telling me I was in luck, the one o’clock colostomy had taken a turn for the worse, and he could slip me in at two.

  “If you need to call anyone, the phone’s in the drawer. Dial nine to get out.”

  So I lay back and dialed nine in combination with every number I knew, feeling like Jackson at Cold Harbor, amassing my troops, telling everyone where Myra was, where I was, what to do and say, and what to avoid.

  “But are you all right?” Missy asked, still sniffling, for they’d called her out of geometry finals to speak with me, and she’d convinced herself en route to the office that either Myra or me or Sim or all three of us had died in a car wreck.

  “I’m fine, fine,” I assured her. “The nurse gave me a blue Valium and a Zantac and I’m sitting pretty here.”

  “Well,” she began, then finished nervously, “take care. I don’t know what to say. Try not to bleed to death or anything.”

  I promised her I’d give it my best shot, and when the Valium kicked in, decided I might as well lay back and enjoy this perfectly legal little buzz and put the phone away.

  Sometime later, an orderly came and rolled me down the hall to surgery, and I remember asking him what time it was. One thirty, he said, and I thought how Clayton would be out of school already because of early dismissal, and he and Myra would be in Mama’s yard clipping the kudzu, pulling it off the fence that separated us as children. And if the conversation lagged, maybe she’d tell him how I once showed her how to make a hopscotch board there, once a thousand years ago. . . .

  The next thing I remember is waking up in a sterile, white-walled room, my mouth dry, my stomach tight. I tried to investigate, but my good hand was taped up with an IV so I could only lie there and stare at the ceiling till a nurse came by to check the drip.

  “Can I use a phone?” I asked, and at first she said no. Then she told me to lie back and returned with Simon in her wake, dressed in his dirty khaki work clothes, looking so much like Michael that I was too bewildered to speak.

  “The doctor says it went off without a hitch,” he said, leaning on the rails and taking my hand.

  I only whispered, “Myra?”

  “She’s still at Grannie’s with Clay. Grannie says they’ve talked more than they’ve pulled kudzu, but I guess that was the point, wasn’t it?”

  I nodded and closed my eyes and remember telling him how much he favored his father, but that was all. When I woke up, much later, I was in a regular private room, not sure if Simon had come, or if I’d had some weird twilight vision of Michael. It was the first thing I asked Myra when she came to see me that night, nervous over the tubes and IV, but the Myra I knew and loved, not the skinny one, as Michael would say.

  “Yes, baby” she said, “he stayed the whole time. Him and Candace and Brother Folger.”

  “Brother Folger?” I asked, still a little light-headed. “Who’s that?”

  “Carlym Folger? Why Gabriel, he married us.”

  “Oh. Knute. I’m glad I was unconscious.”

  She let down the bed rail with sure, experienced hands and climbed into the narrow bed beside me.

  “Why do you have to be so nasty?” she asked, and I tried to move over to give her a little room.

  “He wasn’t visiting me, he was visiting my checkbook—”

  “Hush,” she said. Then when she had settled in, “The doctor says you can go home Monday. Said everything went fine. He had to remove part of your stomach, but the part that’s left will stretch out. You won’t even miss it.”

  “Good riddance,” I murmured, feeling safe and happy with Myra there beside me. “Did you see Clayton?”

  She hesitated a moment, which really hurt me, for that slight pause before she spoke said volumes more than her careful words. “Yes. He’s fine. His hair’s not as bad as it sounds. It’s kind of a moussed-up flat-top.”

  She offered no more, and I didn’t press her, thinking that if she could see him, explain her side of the matter, then all would be well. That maybe in a situation like this, where there was a jagged loss of innocence, someone had to bear the blame, and after her horrible, furious words in the ER, I was perfectly content to be the scapegoat. For it was like my sister said, nobody put a gun to my head.

  So it was with a calm sense of acceptance that I returned home four days later to the house on Thomasville Road, the beautiful house built in 1903 by a wealthy banker, the house that fell into disrepair in the forties and fifties but was reclaimed by my brother and his wife, one broken window, one painted baseboard at a time, and as we rounded the last curve in the drive, I said the same thing I always said: “This is the most beautiful house in Florida.”

  And as always, Myra replied, “Lord, you should have seen it when we bought it. We only paid for the land. The house was just a structure on the deed description.”

  “I think,” I said, very wisely (for I was still on Percoset, which affects me something like whiskey, making me full of profound insight), “that we can safely say you and Michael reclaimed it magnificently.”

  As long as it lasted—a week, I think—I was a source of great inspiration, and so kind, even to Carlym Folger, that I believe Myra considered asking the doctor for a permanent prescription. But she didn’t, or he wouldn’t, and with no warning at all, I was out, flat out, the little bottle all gone, and I found myself not only wrestling a savage desire for whiskey, but facing my fortieth birthday with no children to comfort me. Simon had moved to Waycross to get in a little practical experience at the Georgia plant before he started FSU in August, and Missy was resolutely preparing for her senior year, full of college plans and dedicating two hours a day to convincing her mother she needed to study at least a year in (get this) France—an indecent obsession I took full responsibility for, since I was the idiot who’d introduced Napoleon to this otherwise Celtic bunch. But she paid little mind to any of my very compelling arguments, and about the most any of us saw of her these days was the back of the Volvo as it drove down the drive.

  However, on the eve of my birthday, she came into the kitchen one night after a date and found me sitting alone in the dark, wondering what kind of God would let a man have six million dollars and not one drop of whiskey, and told me she was ordering me an ice-cream cake for my birthday

  “That’s all right, baby, save your money,” I told her, but she would not be satisfied until she and her mother had hit the mall, presumably on my behalf, though they returned home with more bags than one small birthday could warrant.

  They left after lunch with many warnings I not attempt the stairs unaided, and with nothing better to do, I lay in bed and stared at the old ceiling boards, thinking about the day I was born on Magnolia Hill.

  The sun was high, the house already hot, smelling of cedar and camphor and after Mama’s water broke, the fresh, pungent smell of amnionic fluid. I could hear the excitement in the voices of the neighbors, someone running for the doctor, someone taking the children. Candace, five, excited with the prospect of a live babydoll, and Michael, just over six, worried, not wanting to leave, kicking and crying, showing himself and calling for Mama as they dragged him down Lafayette, having to spend the hot, endless morning on the curb down the street, watching the trail of women come and go in and out the front door, then the doctor, then, finally, Aunt Mag, waving him home.

  With no eye for traffic, he crossed the street in a dead run, up the porch and into the hot, strange smell of the house, going room to room till he found Mama in her own bed, her face white, her hair tangled on her shoulders, but smiling, happy, a tiny baby wrapped in a towel in her arms.
A boy, she told him. A fat little boy, pretty as he could be. Did he want to know what she was going to name him? Michael only stood there with his finger in his mouth, frightened by the strange smell, the nervous excitement, the exultation in the women’s voices, not able to speak, and Mama smiled, “Gabrielle.”

  Someone, an uncle—or maybe it was the doctor—laughed, but she ignored him, pulling Michael to the bed, kissing his small dark head, showing him the tiny face, saying, “See? You boys looked like angels when you were born, and I named you for angels.”

  And suddenly, the morning lost its awful nightmare cast and returned to a normal, happy day; for he was a good boy, he’d gone to Sunday school every week of his life, he knew all about Michael and Gabriel, the archangels, one sent to rebuke Satan, one sent to proclaim a King. And he wasn’t mad anymore; he wasn’t afraid. He climbed on the bed, kicking his dirty feet on the cover, and when he heard Daddy at the door, he ran to meet him, leading him into the bedroom by the hand, presenting him to his wife and new son, saying, “See? See? I’m Michael and he’s the other one. He’s Gabrielle.”

  I could see him so clearly, I could almost reach out and touch his little hand. God, I wished I could. I wished I was the father who walked through the door and lifted him above his head and laughed in his face, but I wasn’t. I was alone in my bed, with scars on my belly and scars on my head, and I fell asleep to the sad, wistful dream, waking up late in the afternoon to long shadows and the strange, disoriented heaviness that comes from oversleep.

  I could hear Myra and Missy moving around downstairs, their voices a confidential whisper, but I waited patiently till Myra finally came up, still dressed in her mall clothes, carrying an armload of boxes and bags.

  “D’you want me to wrap ‘em or just give ‘em?” she asked with an excited, flushed face.