My Brother Michael

by Janis Owens

  I yawned. “Just give them,” I said. “Why waste paper?”

  She dug around in one of the bags awhile, then presented me with, of all things, a Pierre Cardin robe and pajama set.

  I was not only disappointed, I was perplexed. “We’re in Florida. Nobody sleeps in pajamas. I’ll burn up.”

  But she paid me no mind. “Missy’s sixteen now, too old for you to be walking around here in your underwear.”

  “I have never,” I told her sternly, “walked around here in my underwear.”

  But I could have saved my breath, for she had connected her children’s welfare with the pajamas, and was very firm about it, shaking them out of the cellophane, saying, “Here, try ‘em on. Then I’ll give you your next present; I promise you’ll be thrilled.”

  Something in her bright eyes made me think I was in for something big here, an evening of careful sex, or maybe something truly wonderful, like Clayton, and I went to the bathroom and put on the idiotic pajamas (noting the price, and you wouldn’t believe what she paid for them, I mean, you would not believe).

  But when I came out, I found no Myra in a G-string, no Clayton with a bow on his head calling me Daddy, nothing but my fully clothed wife, sitting there on the edge of the bed with a smile, and I was so bitterly disappointed I lay back down,

  “What?”

  She smiled brilliantly “I’ll retype your story.”

  “Wonderful,” I said with a stunning lack of enthusiasm, for I’d boxed it up in the closet after I came home from the hospital, deciding it was simply impossible to insert my hand without rewriting the whole damn thing. Besides, after one last particularly objective reading, I’d come to the unavoidable conclusion that if you separated the wheat from the tares in my life, Michael and Daddy and Mama and Brother Sloan and Sam and Brother McQuaig and Myra and Candace and the children would comprise the former group, while I held the company of Old Man Sims and Jack Kin and the stinking Ku Klux Klan in the latter. I mean, I wasn’t the Nathan Bedford Forrest of the bunch, the Old Man still held that honor, but I was miserably, undoubtedly, Jeb Stuart: the lovable, romantic ass who rode circles around battles and got a lot of good press when, in fact, all he really did was compromise the position of the real armies.

  It was a painful revelation, one that was causing me many hours of alternating self-pity and resolution, and between times, I asked myself why and oh, why was I knocking myself out to make sure Clayton had a sound, black and white, three-hundred-page documentation of my lack of moral worth? Why not let time heal all and hope I was remembered for Harvard and the Oral History Project and my many droll jokes? But I didn’t bother to favor myself with a reply; the answer was as plain as the nose on my face: Michael. Michael was the reason I was willing to bare my sorry little soul to the world, and while I never doubted I’d get back to it eventually, it was certainly no reason for celebration.

  “And,” she said, her face still beaming, “you can go to baseball with me tomorrow night. Lay down in the backseat. Candace says we can take a quilt to throw over you in case Clay comes by”

  “Wonderful,” I repeated with such a stunning lack of enthusiasm that her smile dimmed.

  “I thought you’d be pleased. It’s the city-wide tournament. Maybe he’ll hit a homer.”

  If I had bothered with a reply, it would have been something about when pigs fly, and Myra’s face was actually frowning.

  “What a disagreeable man you’ve become,” she said, snatching up the bags and wadding them into balls with tight, angry fists. ‘And poor Missy bought you a ice-cream cake, ordered it special in Tallahassee, and you’re gone lay up here and show yourself—”

  What I was doing, in fact, was lying there thinking she was getting as good as Mama at slapping on the guilt. She even had that pained singsong perfected.

  I got up slowly. “Hush, I’m coming. I’ll behave.”

  But she was not convinced. “She also got you some old book, and I’d appreciate it if you wouldn’t tear it apart the whole time you read it.”

  I looked at her. “What book?”

  “Some book on that war—the Civil War.”

  I had the gall to grimace at this, and she turned a little nasty. “Well, you just stay up here and sulk, Gabriel Catts. We did fine without you a lot a years. I’m sure we’ll make it a few more—”

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” I said, standing. “Has she read it yet?”

  “No,” she said, helping me up.

  “Good. I can fake it.”

  “Gabriel—” she murmured in a low, annoyed voice, but did let me lean on her as we went down the stairs, still murmuring something about me behaving myself as I concentrated on not tripping on the hem of my new robe, when a sudden blast of music hit me, Madonna or the like, and I looked at her.

  “You run tell Missy I ain’t sitting down here listening to her nigger music, I don’t care what kind a cake she bought me—” This being Magnolia Hill slang for rock-and-roll, that after three decades of enlightenment, I used in a pinch. But before she could answer, the room was suddenly full of laughter, and I looked over the stair rail to see all the old fish-fry gang gathered around the French doors with punch glasses in their hands and possumlike grins on their faces, while my dear wife stomped her foot with glee, for the choice of welcoming song at my fortieth surprise party had been hers. It was “Like a Virgin,” and she just thought she was so hilarious, laughing till tears ran down her face at having pulled one over on me, while the old men joined in with happy abandon, knowing they’d finally had the last word on the Yankee-liberal-intellectual and our fights over affirmative action would never be the same again. But what can I say? They had me cold, and I hobbled down the stairs and shook their hands and admitted that yes, they got me that time.

  As for Myra and her little knife twist in an old wound, I forgave her outright. Listen, she could have arranged for someone to be singing: “Like a Crippled Alcoholic Occasionally Impotent Homophobic Narcissistic Ass,” and I would have kissed her and told her I loved her, for as soon as I looked down on that roomful of people, my eyes had fallen on a young man with blond spiked hair standing next to Curtis, and I knew that by some act of grace, I’d not only broken even, I’d actually won.

  From that point on, the party never lost its hilarity, for frayed nerves had me at my shameless, most sarcastic best, and though Myra and Candace seemed a little worried, afraid I’d suddenly lose it and run across the room and scream at Clayton that I loved him, I was cool as a cucumber, walking around in my designer robe like Hugh Hefner; for, as I say, when it suits me, I can exhibit patience that would put Job to shame.

  It was only when we opened presents that I spoke to him at all, nothing more than a spontaneous thanks for the book he and Missy bought me, that was not on the Civil War, but a very fine biography on Martin Luther King, Jr. I’d been wanting to read. Missy kissed me when I proclaimed my (sincere) thanks, but Clayton looked away. To divert the moment, I saw Jack Kin standing there with a look of unashamed disgust and lifted an eyebrow. “Hey Jack, you want this when I’m done?”

  He turned his head and said “Shht,” making everyone laugh, even Clayton, and I saw Myra smiling at me, for, as she would put it, behaving myself. So the evening went, not hindered by expectation or accusation, and the old men found my new tolerance so engaging that they hung on long after the others had left, sitting around the pool and discussing, of all things, Chappaquiddick, while Myra and Missy helped Clayton move his stuff back in.

  “—girl was pregnant, sure as I’m sitting here—” Brother Gaines was saying, shaking his hand at me for emphasis, when I noticed Clayton was standing at the French door, looking at me. I don’t believe the irony of the situation escaped him for a minute, and when the old men saw him, they paused long enough to wish him good night.

  But his eyes were on me when he answered, very levelly, “Good night, Uncle Gabe.”

  I accepted the revision without pause, wishing him good night with no shock or hu
rt at the very significant uncle, and he seemed satisfied, going back inside, leaving Brother Gaines to resume, “—plain old-fashion cover-up is what it was.”

  On and on they went, far into the night, and for once I let someone else take the self-righteous lead, too relieved with my own forgivenness to get real worked up over another man’s indiscretion.

  It was well past midnight when their wives finally dragged them home, and as I walked them out to their cars, they assured me the second half of a man’s life was a hundred percent better than the first. I was in no position to argue the matter, and when they left, I watched the red pinpoints of their brake lights flicker at the highway, then stood there in the yard awhile, savoring the night smells of summer—ligustrum and tea olive and, underneath, a hint of raw earth from a neighboring farmer’s newly turned field—before I went inside.

  The house was empty, Missy gone home with Mama, Simon on the road to Waycross, Clayton’s door shut, and after pausing there long enough to press my hand to the wood and reassure myself that life actually lived and breathed behind those four walls, I went down the hall and found Myra reading in bed, her head wrapped in a towel, her Sunday School Quarterly in her hand. I didn’t find it too much of an anticlimax, for I knew by now that if a nuclear device hit us ground zero, these Baptists would crawl out of the rubble on Saturday night to study their lesson. So I took off my robe and sat on the edge of the bed, and after a moment, I said very clearly, “I’m gonna have to cry.”

  “Well go outside,” she said, glancing up. “Don’t let him hear you,” proving that in some ways, she has truly grown the way of all country-born women: hard-headed and practical in the extreme.

  But I didn’t argue. I only pulled my robe back on and pretended to take out the garbage, but kept on walking till I was at the fence line, then leaned against a post and cried till I was hoarse. When I was finally done, I washed my face at the faucet and came back inside with a calm, perfectly normal expression and found Myra sleepy, but still awake, her face tender when she saw my red eyes.

  “Gabrielle, Gabrielle,” she murmured. “He looked like an angel when he was born and I named him for an angel.”

  She laughed lightly when she said it, quoting Mama, who’d had to defend her taste in masculine names to Brother Kin at the party after Missy put the official spelling on the birthday cake, but later, when I was about to turn out the light, she asked in a much smaller voice, “If you found out he wasn’t yours, would you still love him so?”

  I was surprised at the question, but maybe such relentless uncertainties are the curse of all indiscretions, and I lifted her face so I could look her in the eye and lay this one to rest, once and for all. “Well, honey, I look at it this way: He’s either my nephew or my son, so we’re blood kin one way or the other.” I paused to turn off the lamp and finished in the darkness. “Anyway, that boy in there and whose blood is pumping in his veins is the least of my worries.”

  And such was the love, the unqualified acceptance in this gentle, no-nonsense answer, that she kissed me and fell asleep, and her face looks very young, very innocent, in the half-light, like that of the smart, sassy, red-headed child she never was, but always meant to be, fought to be, has, in some good and innocent ways, become.

  And I am left alone in the darkness, in a position that has befallen me at last: that of the survivor, the revisionist of my own life. For I cannot tell her—it would hurt her so—that these are really not my words at all, but those of my brother Michael. You remember him: The one who played baseball. Who pulled for the Braves. Who left me a million dollars. And a house and a car, and a pool and a deck. And a wife and a son and a soul. The one who walks with God. My brother Michael.

  Janis Owens was born in Marianna, a small town in the Florida panhandle, about fifteen miles south of the Alabama line, about thirteen from the Georgia line. Her father was a preacher and insurance salesman who moved his family to Mississippi and Louisiana before settling back in north Florida. She earned a degree in English and Southern History at the University of Florida and continues to reside in rural north Florida with her husband and daughters. The story of the Catts family continues in her two novels after this one: Myra Sims and The Schooling of Claybird Catts.

  The Writing of My Brother Michael

  My Brother Michael has its roots at my great Aunt Izzy’s funeral years ago in the West End of Marianna, a small town in the Florida Panhandle. She was my beloved Grannie’s only sister and the last of her generation, and her passing was dearly felt, her small house packed with story-telling relatives and rivers of food, as we do in the South. I had my baby daughter with me, and late in the afternoon, Mama and I went for a walk to quieten her, just around the corner to Magnolia Hill, an adjacent neighborhood of small shotgun houses where Mama had lived as a child, when her father and uncles all worked at the heading mill, making wooden barrelheads.

  Mama is a storyteller of some skill and imagination, and as we went up the slant of the Hill, she told me a family story that I’d heard many times before—the tragic story of the death of a nameless young girl who’d briefly lived next door to them on the Hill, in a small row house that was still standing that day; she pointed it out as we passed. With her usual attention to detail and evocation of mood, Mama described the girl as she always did, as pre-teen, maybe thirteen, a plump and pretty child, with red hair and far-off eyes, who moved in next door with a reclusive mother and a stepfather; they never seemed to fit in with the bustle of life on the Hill. She said they kept to themselves, but she remembered one encounter with the red-haired girl. She came up to their porch one afternoon in late autumn while Mama played dolls. Mama says the girl didn’t say a word, just stood and watched her for a long, quiet moment, then went back inside her own house, and was never seen alive again.

  The next morning, Dr. Whittaker came for Grannie and asked if she could assist him next door, as rural doctors used to do in small towns when women and birthing and female trouble were involved in a case. When Grannie went next door, he stopped her on the porch and swore her to an oath of secrecy to never divulge the secrets of the house—an oath Grannie took seriously for many years to come. Mama says she only knew the young girl was deathly ill and that none of the children on the Hill were allowed to play outside or make any noise that day for fear of disturbing her. The next time Mama saw her, it was late at night after she died, after Grannie had bathed and dressed her and laid her out for burial in a small coffin in their living room, where the neighborhood children—Mama included—were allowed to stroll past her coffin for their last goodbye.

  She was buried shortly after in the paupers’ section of the local cemetery, and her family soon left the area. It was only years later that Grannie broke her oath of silence and told Mama what had really happened next door: that the child had been found in the outhouse that morning, unconscious from blood loss after a self-inflicted abortion. What was worse was that the father of the baby was rumored to be her own stepfather—a charge never proven, and thanks to the oath of silence, never even voiced, though it haunted Grannie till her death, and in one of our last conversations in 76, she mentioned the incident, her face full of horror, even after sixty years.

  That was the story my mother recalled that day—The Story of the Little Redheaded Girl Who Died Next Door, which, as I say, I had heard many times, though somehow the combination of postpartum hormones and grief over losing Aunt Izzy brought her tragedy home more sharply than ever before. When I returned home the next day, I had mastitis and woke up with a temperature of 105° and an image from a dream. The image was of a man watching a woman through a French door; the woman was in great emotional distress, though the man didn’t know it. I had no idea who the man was, or why the woman was in distress, but before I got out of bed, I knew the story from beginning to end and wrote the last page first, then the rest, straight through in five weeks.

  So unconscious and instinctual was the writing that it was only on a much later reading that I realized
what I’d done: that I’d rewritten the tragic story of the voiceless child next door on Magnolia Hill. But with the magic of fiction, I’d done what even Grannie couldn’t do: I’d rescued her in time, had given the girl a name, a story, a voice. In fiction, she becomes Myra Sims. In short, I did the same thing that Mama had done that day on the Hill: kept her story alive and bore witness to what had happened to her, broke the oath of secrecy over a tragic end.

  —Janis Owens

  Questions

  1. Author Janis Owens is not afraid to label her writing unashamedly Southern. What do you think makes a book Southern? Could My Brother Michael have taken place anywhere? What about the story is different and what is similar to, say, a Willa Cather or Eudora Welty story?

  2. Some readers are exasperated by Gabriel Catts to the point of irritation; some find him likable and redeemed. Did you find him a sympathetic figure, or a true anti-hero?

  3. Most readers bring their own histories to their reading of novels. Did you find Ira Sims a sympathetic or a sinister character? Did you find Cissie overbearing or wonderfully nurturing?

  4. The search for the father is one of the underlying themes of this book. How was each character’s fate determined by their relationship with their father? Were there exceptions?

  5. My Brother Michael was written by a woman in a man’s voice. How do you think it would be different if a man had written it?

  6. The author makes many references to Cracker Florida and Cracker architecture. The term “Cracker” is sometimes considered derogatory. How would you define the Cracker culture? How is it different from mainstream Southern life?

  7. Religion plays a large part in the life of the characters of this novel and the theme as well, with an almost Victorian sensibility of right and wrong. Does this stark contrast lower or strengthen the tone of the story for you?