But the feeling that his life with its metaphor of the bud of a flower firmly set, blooming, and then the blossom fading, the flower setting a seed which bore inside another set of buds, leading to flowers, and so on and so on into eternity—this feeling that his life actually should have provided such a metaphor, so ordinary an image, so common and so welcoming had it been just so, could not leave me; and I was haunted by everything that had happened since he died and everything that had happened before he died, and everything that was happening as I went from the city of Chicago and its view of the frozen lake of blue, a blue that was not permanent, a blue that would change with the season (a thing my brother would never know, a change of season, for he never left the place in which he was born).
Once, when I was looking for a new dress to wear to a ceremony during which my husband would receive an award, I bought a white dress with blue stripes, a dress I liked (though it was not the dress I finally wore to the ceremony, I later bought a plain white dress and wore that to the ceremony) because it reminded me of a dress worn by children (though it was a dress my own daughter, ten at the time, would never wear, too childish, she would say), and perhaps I bought it because I was just becoming old enough (I was forty-six) to want innocence again and old enough to convince any observer that the appearance of innocence at my age was meant to be my actual innocence at the age when I was actually innocent. I bought this dress; it had an Empire waistline, it had gathers under the breast, the length of the skirt came to just above my ankles. It was this dress I wore to my brother’s funeral. I bought it at the moment I was thinking of celebrating the honor my husband had been given, but it was that dress I wore to my brother’s funeral; and at the time I wore it to his funeral I thought to myself, I will never wear this dress again, I can never wear this dress again, and as I write this, it is true: I have never worn that dress again. I tried to give it away, but the person to whom I tried to give the dress was too old for it, she was sixty-one years old and was too short for it, the skirt dragged on the floor, and she was too stout for it, the zipper in the back would not go above the point that was her waist. And the airplane I flew on to his burial was blue, and the sky in which the airplane flew was blue, and there was the white of the clouds; and the water surrounding the land, the ground in which he was buried, that water was blue, and that water, the water surrounding the land in which he was buried, was sometimes flecked with white, the foam caused by the rush of the waves as they dashed against the shore. But the color blue did not run through all my memories, or all my experiences; on the whole, every scene, every memory remained itself, just itself, and sometimes a certain color might make memory more vivid and sometimes again, not so at all, just not so at all; sometimes a memory is without color, a dream is often like that, without color, but the absence of color does not mean an absence of truth, or truth in a way that one could understand as not a falsehood. Oh, how I wished never to think about him again, never to see blue and say, “What did Devon think of that, such a color,” or think, Here is the sound of something that reminded me of Devon, or something that if Devon had heard of, he would have been propelled into a world in which he could delay his death, or just simply taunt its inevitability, for his death was inevitable, as was mine (as is mine, but at that time in his life my own death would have been an accident or a surprise, not something anyone expected).
And then he died, not in the middle of the night, which was the hour he was born, but in the very early morning, at about five o’clock, the hour I was born; and I know the hour he was born because I was there, and I know the hour I was born and the hour he died because our mother has told me. And all that night as he was dying, he called out over and over again the names of his brothers, and he called out for his mother. He called her “Muds” then, short for Mother, but when he was well and when he was young, he called her Mrs. Drew, which is her married name; when he was well and when he was young he did not like to show any dependence on her and so he called her what any ordinary person would call her, but perhaps it was only to disguise how much he needed her, for he never ever made a home for himself apart from his mother. He called out for his brothers; he called out, “Dalma”: Dalma was the brother he was closest to and they had played cricket together when they were small boys, and they were together when Mr. Drew, their father, our mother’s husband, died in the hospital all alone one night after he had suffered a stroke; they were in the house together at the very moment Mr. Drew had suffered the stroke.
It was Dalma who gave him, Devon, the name “Patches,” because he liked to place patches of different-colored cloth all over his clothes regardless of their needing such a thing as a patch. And Dalma would call him by that name when he—Dalma—came home from one of his three jobs (“Hey, Patches, how you doing, mahn, how you doing?”), and people who knew him from when he was a boy, a student at Boys School, would call him that, “Patches.” And when he was dying he called Dalma, he said, “Dalma,” the only name he had ever called that brother. His other brother’s name was Joseph, and he was generally called Joe, only Devon called him “Styles,” because when they were boys Devon had noticed that Joe was very particular about the way he looked and would always dress in a way that might be called stylish, and so Joe was known to him as “Styles,” and I do not know if Joe ever liked being called that, for those two brothers did not get along, and when Devon first learned that he was dying it vexed him so to see Joe in good health, it vexed him so to think that Joe would continue to live after he had died and inherit his little house, the coffinlike structure their mother had built for him, or any other thing that was his (“Me bex, you know, me bex, me no want he get me tings”). And yet “Styles” is the last thing he said, only that, “Styles,” and then there was silence, a silence so ordinary that my mother thought he had fallen asleep at last, exhausted from calling out the names of his mother and his brother that he was close to (“loved” must be the word) and the brother that he did not like so much, the brother he could not bear to have inherit the little house he used to live in. When the silence fell, how relieved my mother was then, she told me so later, and when telling me so, she was full of sorrow, and I had sympathy for her then, but still no love, only sympathy, and some revulsion, as if I felt what had just happened to her—her child had died, she would be burying one of her children—was a contagious disease and just to be around her, just to be so near her meant I might catch it, this thing of burying your children when they are still so young, when they have not really lived at all.
And that night he was dying in the dark of that small room, thirty-three years of age, with none of the traditional attachments ordinary to a man his age—thirty-three—a wife, a companion of some kind, children, his own house, even a house he rented, his own bed (I had gone to a furniture store one day and purchased the one which he lay dying on, and even as I did that, I could remember his father, Mr. Drew, repairing the crib that he lay in when he was a baby just born, but that crib was first made for Joe and then refurbished for Dalma and then refurbished again for his birth; I don’t remember that too much attention was lavished on the crib by the time he arrived, because his arrival pushed the family to a brink over which we all fell, our family was never the same after his birth).
He had read in a novel written by me about a mother who had tried and tried and failed and failed to abort the third and last of her three male children. And when he was dying he asked me if that mother was his mother and if that child was himself (“Ah me de trow’way pickney”); in reply, I laughed a great big Ha! Ha! and then said no, the book he read is a novel, a novel is a work of fiction; he did not tell me that he did not believe my reply and I did not tell him that he should not believe my reply.
That night as he lay dying and calling the names of his brothers and his mother, he did not call my name, and I was neither glad nor sad about this. For why should he call my name? I knew him for the first three years of his life, I came to know him again in the last three years of his
life, and in the time between I had changed my name, I did not have the name our mother had given to me, and though he always called me by the new name I had given myself, he did not know the self I had become (which isn’t to say that I know this, the self I have become), he did not know who I was, and I can see that in the effort of dying, to make sense of me and all that had happened to me between the years he was three and thirty was not only beyond him but also of no particular interest to him. And that feeling of his lack of interest in me, his sister, not being included in the roll call of his family, seemingly forgotten by him in the long hours before he left the world, seems so natural, so perfect; he was so right! I had never been a part of the tapestry, so to speak, of Patches, Styles, and Muds; I had only heard about the time he was involved in murdering a gas-station attendant and our mother used her substantial political connections to get him out of jail, his sentence reduced because he became a witness against the others, his friends, who along with him were involved in this murder, and then his emerging to live a life made up of strong feelings (positive feelings) for a man who was king of a small country in a landlocked part of Africa (Haile Selassie of Ethiopia), smoking the leaves of a plant which would cause him to have hallucinations. I shall never forget him, my brother, but this was not because of his smile, or the way he crossed a swelling river and saved a dog, or his sense of humor, or his love of John Milton (he loved not so much John Milton as all the people who came after and were influenced by John Milton; but all the people he met who came after John Milton and were influenced by John Milton were servants in the British colonial enterprise); I shall never forget him because his life is the one I did not have, the life that, for reasons I hope shall never be too clear to me, I avoided or escaped. Not his fate, for I, too, shall die, only his life, with its shadows dominating the brightness, its shadows eventually overtaking its brightness, so that in the end anyone wanting to know him would have to rely on that, shadows; and in the shadows of his life is a woman emerging from an audience in a bookstore in Chicago and telling me of secrets in his life, his life as he lived it in the shadows.
And at the time he was dying, all through that night, all through the night I was a continent away, seated in an airplane as it flew through the dark atmosphere, then sitting in the falsely lighted rooms in the airport, waiting for planes to transport me home to my family, traveling through these spaces in a natural dark and then a false light, carrying plants (those rhododendrons, native to a part of the world, New Guinea, that was foreign to me but has shaped my memory all the same: plants that would make prosper a population of annoying small flies in my house and then die, and nothing I could do, no remedy in any of many plant encyclopedias I have, could save them. They bloomed beautifully and then died, dying, as always, being so irreversible).
My mother’s house after he was dead was empty of his smell, but I did not know that his dying had a smell until he was dead and no longer in the house, he was at the undertaker’s, and I never asked my mother about the smells in the house. I wanted to see what he looked like when he was dead and so I had asked the undertaker not to do anything to his body before I arrived. Only now, a little more than a year later, I wonder how I knew to say such a thing, for I am grateful (only because I would have wondered, been haunted about it, and so now my interest is satisfied, even as it raises another kind of interest, another haunting) that I did, but at the time it happened—he was dead, I had been told so—I felt removed from events, I wished something else was happening, I wished I was complaining about some luxury that was momentarily causing me disappointment: the lawn mower wouldn’t work, my delicious meal in a restaurant was not at an ideal temperature, a meadow I loved to walk past never achieved a certain beauty that I wanted it to achieve.
He was in a plastic bag with a zipper running the length of its front and middle, a plastic bag of good quality, a plastic bag like the ones given to customers when they buy an expensive suit at a store that carries expensive clothing. The zipper coming undone sounded just like a zipper coming undone, like a dangerous reptile warning you of its presence; oh, but then again, it was so much like the sound of a zipper, just any zipper, or this particular zipper, the zipper of the bag which held my brother’s body (for he was that, my brother’s body). He looked as if he had been deliberately drained of all fluids, as if his flesh had been liquefied and that, too, drained out. He did not look like my brother, he did not look like the body of my brother, but that was what he was all the same, my brother who had died, and all that remained of him was lying in a plastic bag of good quality. His hair was uncombed, his face was unshaven, his eyes were wide-open, and his mouth was wide-open, too, and the open eyes and the open mouth made it seem as if he was looking at something in the far distance, something horrifying coming toward him, and that he was screaming, the sound of the scream silent now (but it had never been heard, I would have been told so, it had never been heard, this scream), and this scream seemed to have no break in it, no pause for an intake of breath; this scream only came out in one exhalation, trailing off into eternity, or just trailing off to somewhere I do not know, or just trailing off into nothing.
My husband’s father had died four years before, and when I had seen him dead, I had a strong desire to tell him what it was like when he died, all the things that happened, what people said, what they did, how they behaved, how his death made them feel; he would not have liked hearing about it at all, I knew that, but I also knew how curious he was about experiences he did not like or want to have, and that one of the ways I became a writer was by telling my husband’s father things he didn’t want me to tell him but was so curious about that he would listen to them anyway.
My brother would not have wanted to hear how he looked when he died, he would not have wanted to know how everyone behaved, what they said and what they did. He would not have wanted to know anything about it, except if someone had a mishap; an embarrassing mishap would have made him laugh, he loved to laugh at other people’s mishaps, I cannot remember him showing sympathy, and yet I do not remember him being cruel, his own mother was cruel. He would have found his death—his lying in the plastic bag of good quality, his mouth open, his eyes staring into something, a void that might hold all of meaning, or staring into nothing in particular—funny, but only if it was happening to someone else. I do not know, I do not know. And when next I saw him again, lying in the coffin made of pitch pine, the wood which Mr. Drew, his father, my mother’s husband, a carpenter, used mainly to make all sorts of furniture, his hair was nicely combed and dyed black—for how else could it have gotten to such a color—his lips were clamped tightly together and they made a shape that did not amount to his mouth as I had known it; and his eyes had been sewn shut, sewn shut, and I have to say it again, sewn shut. And so he looked like an advertisement for the dead, not like the dead at all; for to be dead young cannot be so still, so calm, only the still alive know death to be still and calm; I only say this after having seen my brother just dead, before the people still in life arranged him. My mother said that the body in the coffin did not look like her son at all (“’E no look like ’e, ’e no look like Devon”), and that was true, but it was only that he did not look like the Devon we had gotten used to looking at as he got sick and then declined amazingly into death, living while being dead. She forgot that for a long time he did not look like Devon, the Rastafarian, the reggae singer, the seducer of women (we did not and cannot now know what he looked like as the seducer of men), that the body in the coffin was of someone we did not know, the body lying there would never become familiar to us, it would have no likes and dislikes, it would never say anything memorable, we would never quarrel with it, he was dead. The undertaker went among the mourners asking if we wanted one last look before the coffin lid was put in place, and after that all views of him on this earth would be no more.
Such a moment, a final goodbye, must be complicated. I put it this way, “must be,” because this was something happening in my life, a r
eal thing, something so important that I wanted my own children to witness it. I had taken them with me to visit him, I had taken them with me when he died, and they, too, viewed his body before the undertaker had transformed him from someone just dead to someone ready to be seen just before his burial. And so, goodbye. My mother looked at him for the last time, his brothers looked at him for the last time, I looked at him for the last time, my children looked at him for the last time, my mother’s friends from her church looked at him for the last time, some men his age who knew him from school, who had not seen him when he was sick but now attended his funeral, looked at him for the last time. Oh, the indignity to be found in death; just as well that the dead seem unable to notice it.
My Brother Page 11
