by Carole Maso
My dramatic brother.
“This is our fault,” he said to those who looked on. The rotting, open-eyed fish clung to my body, changing me, the shape of my arms, making me understand: it was my fault, too.
“This is what we’re up against,” he said, coming into my bedroom late one night when he could not sleep and showing me what I could not help but see ahead of time in his eyes: a fox, a bear, a dog, a raccoon, their legs in steel-jawed traps. Some of them had died there finally. Others had gnawed off their own legs to get free. He made me look at every picture.
“This can be stopped,” he said. That he believed so fervently that it could be stopped prevented him from being consumed with rage. “It will stop because it must,” he whispered. My just brother—my restless brother.
Each day Fletcher lived life with the strange urgency of someone about to leave it forever. It should have exhausted him, but he seemed only to grow stronger. My diligent, my hard-working brother—he never rested.
If college gives you direction and confidence, then Fletcher did not need it. If it keeps you sealed off from the rest of the world, then he did not want it. And when he looked into colleges he could not find one he might be interested in that did not own stock in South Africa.
Fletcher finished high school in three years and so he and I graduated together. I chose to go to my mother’s college, and Fletcher that year moved into a special residence, not far from the house, where he worked with the emotionally disturbed who had been released from a nearby institution.
“I am more happy here than I can say,” he wrote to me that fall at college. These are the words I love to hear—my loving brother, my patient, happy brother.
“The soul,” my grandfather said, and we smiled, hoping that soon we’d be standing on chairs up near the ceiling. “The soul,” he whispered. “To help make the soul pure and the body, too, the Indians have something that they call the sweat lodge ritual. Heat and steam are made by sprinkling water on huge white-hot rocks.
“They laughed when I went into one for the first time and told me stories of other white men who had stopped the ritual by standing up and tearing off the top of the lodge or by running away because of the heat.
“‘Now don’t run away on us, little white man,’ Two Bears laughed.
“Even before the water is sprinkled on the rocks it’s so hot in there. It’s impossible to lean back without burning yourself. Even as the first rock was put in, I was sweating a lot. Imagine being in there with thirty or forty of these enormous rocks.
“‘Sit by the door, little white man,’ Lone Star said, ‘so you can get out in a hurry if you have to.’ The other Indians, sitting straight up with their eyes closed, chuckled.
“‘Too hot,’ Running Antelope said, water flowing from his body as the rocks were handed in.
“Once the door is flapped closed, everything is dark except the light that comes from the rocks. I sat there with them, sweating, and they took me into their prayers. The sacred person prayed to the spirits of people who had died, of animals, of birds, calling everyone Tunkasila, Grandfather. He prayed for his people, for his family, for health, and for important decisions that had to be made with President Nixon. And he prayed for me—that I might go back home and speak the truth about what I had seen and done. ‘Help the man who sits with us holding in his heart the whole burden of his race,’ they chanted.
“We sang many songs,” my grandfather said. “I grew large like an Indian in the steam. I sang out my sadness. Then Running Antelope sang—then Two Bears.” Help the little white man, they chanted, through the unbearable heat.
Fletcher once thought he might rescue my mother from that vast country that she wandered through if he learned how to predict the weather. He did not know that, even then, years before he was grown, it was already too late.
The day the thermometer and barometer came, wrapped in brown paper from Dayton, Ohio, Fletcher stared at the package a long time, not opening it, not touching it, just staring. It seemed unlikely to me that this small brown package could change the course of mv mother’s life, but Fletcher was convinced that, with some personal knowledge of the weather, life would be more reliable, the element of surprise would diminish, plans could be made.
He’s not made for this weather. A man like that sweats through his clothes in summer in less than an hour or two. His heart strains in his chest. It’s too much.
He is bent over a counter in his small shop. He sweats. The large slow fan hanging from the ceiling is not enough. He is clumsy in such a confining space.
A man his size in New York is always doomed to be uncomfortable—small theaters, small restaurants, narrow streets, subways. It’s a city of few Checker cabs, few Madison Square Gardens.
I dream that his thick fingers would know just how to touch me and that he would enter me skillfully. He is someone who is well aware of the texture and shape of muscle, the placement of bones, the flesh that surrounds them, the body’s cavities. He holds the entire body of a deer in his arms, draining the blood. He knows just where to cut, just where to hold. He turns deer into venison, pig into pork, cow to beef. He cuts his brothers into pieces in order to live.
Blood covers his apron. His arms to the elbow are smeared with it. He’s a little shy, but so capable, so handsome. His hair is short, much shorter than is the style of the time—anything to keep cool. He washes before coming to the front room of the shop, but under his nails I can see the browning blood still. He wipes his brow. He can’t go on. It’s too much.
A man as hot as that gives in easily. All you would have to do is brush against his hand when paying for veal or sweetbreads—or whisper to him, “how much,” or “I need two pounds, please.” Let him watch you wipe sweat from your own brow, show him your shoulder, or rub the calf of your leg. Call him by name: say, “Thank you, Jack.” Invite him to your apartment just down the street—so close by, surely he’ll come. He’ll stoop at the doorway. He’ll wipe his face on his sleeve.
My mother always looked exhausted to me. Some nights I massaged her neck for a long time just to watch those great lids of hers lower for a while. Other nights she would come to me in my bedroom, brush and hairpins in hand, and say, “Vanessa, darling, would you make me a hairdo?” It was strange to hear the word hairdo coming from my mother’s mouth. It sticks in my mind—her saying hairdo, me dividing the hair on the sides of her head into three equal parts, braiding them and tying them on the top of her head. I can’t decide now whether her hair felt heavy or light in my hands. It was wonderful hair, though, coarse and golden. It stayed exactly where I arranged it; I remember it perfectly. “Oh, another one, please,” she would always say after I had finished one and she had admired it in the mirror for a long time. “It feels so good,” she would say. My mother loved to feel my hands running through her hair, and I loved to see her relax there with me for a moment.
Her smile, her whole body wavers. Her eyes seem about to go out, to extinguish themselves. She looks from person to person. “You’re exquisite!” she gasps, looking at a woman only a few years older than I am. “You’re lovely,” she whispers. She laughs her high laugh and tosses her head back confidently.
“It is not enough, Vanessa,” Jack says. “A daughter combing her mother’s long hair, a brother who saves animals—all these sweet memories. They are not enough. This mildness will kill you.”
He hugs me close. “Don’t be afraid,” he says. “Try not to be afraid. There is no wav to stay safe.”
We walked silently on the turning earth with our grandfather. “Look,” he said, pointing to the sky. “Look,” he cried, “over there! Eagles!”
We looked up. I looked at my father’s pained face.
“Those aren’t eagles, Dad,” my father said quietly. “Those are just barn swallows.”
My grandfather’s eves widened. In his sky there were eagles.
“Barn swallows,” my father whispered, “that’s all.”
In the dream the snake e
ntered through White Feather’s ear and came out her mouth. She awoke to a wailing that seemed to rise out of the earth itself. Now she could not help but hear it. It was as clear to her as if it were Dark Horse, lying next to her, who was wailing.
She rose and walked down to the brook where she sat for a while. She felt a pain in her left breast. Her son was not going to come back alive; she could see a man in a blue jacket pressing a bullet into his head. The brook flowed red. The earth’s wailing rose into her mouth and filled it and became her own.
The postcards from Fletcher have stopped coming. My brother has traveled deep into the center of the country where I can no longer touch him, deep into the center of silence.
“Anza-Borrego Desert State Park in California,” the fat man reads, “claims two unusual features: a limitless carpet of wildflowers and elusive bands of bighorn sheep. The wildflowers bloom in spring, drawing thousands of flower-sniffers, as the residents call the springtime tourist invasion. The wild sheep inhabit remote canyons and crags, their buff coloring blending with the landscape and making them difficult to spot.”
“Look, here’s a picture of them!” Christine giggles, passing the newspaper to her mother.
“Where is this?” the mother asks.
“California,” Christine says.
Gershwin, Ives, Cage, Glass.
We could feel great silence moving in, and we spoke little words trying to break it.
“Does the second planting start today, Grandpa? Do you think Maizy will have her kittens soon?”
We were deep in spring and our words got caught in trees thick with bird song, in pockets of billowing clouds. Almost as soon as we spoke them, our words seemed to be absorbed by the plumpness of the vernal earth and all was quiet again. There was no dispelling the silence. Grandpa heard it best of all—it was coming for him.
I tried bigger words, greater ones, to try to break the heart of it.
“Are you dying, Grandpa?” I asked. He had not gotten out of bed for two days. “Are you going to die now?” This would scare death off, I thought—to point a finger at it, to name it.
But it did not dispel it. “Yes, Vanessa,” he said, “I think I am.” And as soon as we heard him say it, we knew it was true.
“Oh, it’s a lovely day to die,” my grandfather said. He hated to see us upset. “The weather is clear, the trip will be easy.” He paused. “A cinch,” he smiled.
“Don’t die today,” Fletcher said. His head was resting on the bedspread. He did not look at my grandfather. “Please don’t die, Grandpa.”
“It is not such a bad day to die,” my grandfather said, turning his head toward the window.
He spoke slowly against the silence and we felt the terrible friction in his voice. It must have weighed down on him hard now. Still his voice rose. “It is not such a bad day to die, Fletcher. Everybody has to die someday.”
“Please don’t,” Fletcher said.
My grandfather smiled weakly. He tried to lift a finger up from the bed to Fletcher but he couldn’t. His fingernails were luminous, white. His hands were a deep brown.
“Don’t forget about the soul, Fletcher,” he whispered. Grandmother walked in. How often she had caught us standing on chairs following the flight of the soul from the body in rehearsal. “Don’t forget the soul,” he said again.
She shook her head. “All right, children. That’s enough. Now let your grandfather get some rest.”
“But, Maria,” he whispered.
“Oh, no,” she said, “it’s time for you to rest now.”
“Please, Maria. Observe a dying man’s last request,” and he smiled slightly.
“Be sensible, Angelo, please.”
“I’m dying,” he whispered.
“Oh, Angelo, do you really think you’re just going to turn over and close your eyes and die? Do you really think it’s that easy?”
“I’m telling you, Maria.” She turned her face away from him toward the bright window and looked at the hay he had just stacked a few days before.
“Oh, Angelo,” she sighed as she had sighed so many times before. “Be sensible.” She put her hand on his cheek. “Please,” she said. “This is no time for games.”
Be sensible, she said, but this time it was Grandma who was not being sensible. In less than an hour, as he had predicted, Grandpa would be dead. She left the room. We listened to her heavy, black shoes going down the hallway—their denial of death.
“Take care of her,” he said, looking to me. “She needs you.”
I nodded.
Fletcher could not stand the formality of this ending. He tried to stop it with the power of his love.
“Grandpa,” he said, “don’t die yet.” He got into the bed next to him and hugged his shrinking body.
“You’re a good boy, Fletcher,” Grandpa said, and he closed his eyes and watched Fletcher grow up there, the growing up he would not be alive to witness. “You’re a fine young man,” he said.
“Remember the shrinking story, Grandpa?” Fletcher said. “Could you tell us that story again?”
“Oh, yes, I remember—the shrinking story.” He spoke slowly. “It’s true. Ask your grandmother someday.” He told this story now once more, for us. He saw the panic in our faces. He saw our fear. He was our friend. He was our ally; he never wanted to scare us. Don’t leave us here alone, I said to myself.
The only times I ever saw my grandfather look like an old man were when he thought about us being alone, when he thought about how our parents ignored us, how strange they were, how silent. This in itself had prolonged his life, I thought. But he could hold on no longer now. His hand was smooth on the bed, a part of it.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s true. I used to be tall, oh, a long time ago, way before you were born. It was even before your father was born. Tall,” he said, and he looked up to the ceiling, “tall as Abraham Lincoln,” and his hand lifted from the bed for the first time. He was only five-foot-six now. “Old people shrink. It’s a fact. We shrink. It’s how everybody else gets used to the idea of us not being around anymore. I’m shrinking right now under the covers,” he whispered.
“I’m afraid,” I said.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of, really,” he said with his kind, kind voice. “It feels good to be so little and light, not so attached to the world anymore and the things we love. It makes it easier for me, too.”
“Tall as Abraham Lincoln?”
“Yep. Ask your grandmother. She’ll remember.”
“It feels good to be so light?”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s to help us get used to the idea?”
My grandfather nodded.
But my grandfather was wrong about that. Whenever I think of his shrinking story, think of him shrinking into nothingness before my eyes, I do not feel better or miss him less. I have never gotten used to the idea.
We were surrounded by silence and in that silence each of his words stood out: difficult, precious, discrete.
“Is it hard to die, Grandpa?” I asked.
“Look at me, children,” he whispered. “Imagine,” he said slowly, “never to smell the spring again or feel the silky hair of corn, never to hear your sweet voices. Yes,” he said, “it’s very hard.”
Grandma walked into the room and toward the bed and took my grandfather’s hand. They were saying good-bye. He whispered something I had never heard before. I had never seen his mouth form such shapes. It was Italian. He was talking in the forbidden language; the language he had given up in this country now came streaming back. My grandmother squeezed his hand. She talked back to him. He responded again. He looked at her and rubbed his face against her strong but trembling hand.
“It’s got a strange, sweet taste, Maria,” he said finally in Lnglish, “this dying.” And he licked his lips and sucked in the sweetness as if someone had placed candy in his last mouth.
“Take care of her, Vanessa.”
“I will, Grandpa.”
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��Don’t forget about the shoebox,” he said to Fletcher. “Don’t forget to do everything I told you. It’s important.”
“I won’t forget, Grandpa.”
“Promise me you won’t forget.”
“We won’t forget.”
“Good,” he smiled. “Good,” he sighed.
It was time now. He looked out the window into the bright sunlight and his eyes grew wide. He pointed to something. “Look,” he sputtered. “Look.” What did he see there in the sun in these last seconds?
“Look!” he gasped. We stared into the sun, then back at him, then into the sun again, and in one moment I saw his look change, in a turn of my head, from wonder to horror. What rushed before him?
Instead of the past, the future must have flashed before his eyes. Instead of his whole life, our lives, the ones yet to come, appeared before him.
“My God,” he gasped. “Dear God.”
“What is it, Grandpa?”
We held onto his hands. “Oh,” he sighed. We were losing him in light.
“My God,” he cried.
“What is it, Grandpa?”
“Try to forgive them,” he whispered.
He shook his head and looked at us.
“Try to forgive them—as I have tried.”
My father walks down the crooked lanes, past squares. In this light the tall, gabled houses, the steeples, look eerie, bizarre. Torches are lit. He can’t bear to look at them—or any fire; he turns away. A fierce wind blows off the bay.
“Try to forgive them,” I whisper to my father, but he’s so far away—Denmark or Sweden, or maybe Norway.
“Fly me to the moon,” my father sings, “and let me swing upon the stars. Let me know what spring is like on Jupiter and Mars. In other words, hold my hand.” The Frank Sinatra record is on. “In other words, darling, kiss me.”
My grandfather’s dream of water was not far away now.
