My Brother (10 page)

And so one day during the time when my brother was dying, I insisted that my mother and I pay a visit to the cemetery in which my father had been buried; I had the sentimental notion that perhaps my brother could be buried nearby, as near as possible to his own father. We passed through the door of that Dead House, she and I together, and as we did so, my own complicated and contradictory feelings about the dead came up and lay on the ground before my feet, and each step I took forward they moved forward, too, like a form of shadowing; all my feelings about the dead, determinedly unresolved and beyond me to resolve, lay at my feet, moving forward when I moved forward, again like a form of shadowing. The dead never die, and I now say this—the dead never die—as if it were new, as if no one had ever noticed this before: but death is like that (I can see); it happens every day, but when you see mourners, they behave as if it were so new, this event, dying—someone you love dies—it has never happened before; it is so unexpected, so unfair, unique to you. The dead never die, let me just say it again.

She and I, I and my mother, walked through the graveyard looking for my father's, her husband's, grave, the place he had been buried, the plot, but she could not remember where it might have been. It was not in the place where Anglicans are buried, or the place where Catholics are buried, or the place where Moravians are buried; it might have been in the place where Methodists are buried, for when he was born he had been christened a Methodist, but when he died he was no longer a practicing Methodist (he was no longer a practicing anything, really, by the time he died), and because my mother had no money to pay for a burial, the Methodist minister would not bury him for free. My mother and I walked up and down in the graveyard looking for his grave; she thought it might be near a tree, she remembered a tree, but there were many trees in the graveyard; she stood at many angles trying to remember where it might be, what she could see the moment his coffin was being lowered into the ground, but she could not remember. She did know that he was buried in the part of the cemetery reserved for people who were not Anglicans, not Methodists, not Moravians, not Catholics, just people who belonged to the other Christian sects, only she did not know where. She was wearing a blue skirt, a blue that is the color of seawater, Caribbean seawater when it is seen from far away; I cannot remember the color of her blouse, and this must be why: as we were walking about, going to and fro, looking down at the ground, we could hear lizards scurrying around in the dry brush that surrounded us; the graveyard looked like everything else in a place like that, as soon as you turn your back, everything will collapse into a state of dry decay; she and I stopped walking and we were just standing still when suddenly a lizard came over to my mother and leaped up the front of her skirt and started climbing as if it were bent on scaling all the way up her front. She did not shriek and run away, as I would have done if this had happened to me; instead, she stood there and shook the lizard off her, not in a calm way, not in a frenzy, not with fear, just in her way, she shook the lizard off. As she shook the lizard off, she said that she hoped it wasn't one of those people, meaning the dead, come to tell her something that would make her want to join them (“Eh-eh, me ah wahrn you, dem people no get me, you know”), and she said this with a laugh. It all happened so quickly that I did not have time to shriek and run away, which is what I feel I want to do each time I remember this; I was not full of calm, I was not full of frenzy or full of fear; I am only all of these things at once each time I remember this.

It was on this visit that I began to speak of my mother in the old way, the way I did before I had written of my life with her, in a voice of awe, as if I, even I, could not believe the things I was saying, could not believe I really knew such a person. When I told my husband about the lizard, he said, “Really?” and he smiled as he said it, and I wondered if I seemed to be telling a tale, like a child in books I used to read when I was a child, or like a child in some of the books I now read to my own children. To “Really?” I would reply, “Yes, yes, really!” This, too, did happen: inside the house, my brother was slowly evaporating; outside, everything was itself, not orderly, not disorderly, just itself. I was watching my mother do something ordinary, scale some fish under a tree, but then I noticed that the tree, which used to be a soursop tree, was no longer itself; all that remained of it was its charred trunk. In my now privileged North American way (my voice full of pity at the thought of any kind of destruction, as long as my great desires do not go unmet in any way), I asked my mother what had happened to the tree, and she, without paying any real attention to me, told me that the tree had become a nuisance to her and so she had set fire to it and burned it down. And it is in this way that the tree became a nuisance to her: My mother had gone to visit some of her remaining relatives in Dominica, the ones who were not dead and were still speaking to her. While there, she ate a passion fruit and its flavor so pleased her that she pocketed its seeds, and when she returned to Antigua, she planted them and they grew with such vigor that they outgrew their first support, a trellis made of a bedstead and corrugated galvanize, and then leaped up into the soursop tree, which grew weak from this burden. The weakened soursop tree then became attractive to a colony of parasitic insects, and while living in the soursop tree the parasitic insects prospered and multiplied; this was not surprising at all, it was predictable. The parasitic insects, in their comfort and prosperity, expanded and began to infest the house. My mother tried to contain them with insecticides (imported from North America), insecticides with ingredients so toxic they are unavailable to consumers in North America. The parasitic insects could not be contained, they could not be eradicated, and that was what my mother wanted, that the parasitic insects should be eradicated. Her impulse is not unheard-of, the desire to eradicate all the things that are an annoyance, all the things that interfere with the smooth running of your day, a day which should produce for you a feeling of complete satisfaction, a kind of happiness even; such a desire appears quite normal, it even has historical precedence. The parasitic insects would not go away, and so one day she doused their source, the soursop tree, with kerosene and set it alight. The soursop tree burned; its parasitic partner, the passion-fruit vine, burned also. I was not there to witness this inferno, the burning of tree and vine and parasitic insects. But I was plunged into despair, for I recognized again that the powerful sense my mother has of herself is not something I had imagined and I was grateful that only a soursop tree, a passion-fruit vine, and some insects had gotten in its path. It's possible that in another kind of circumstance the shape of the world might have been altered by her presence. But this woman, my mother, had only four people to make into human beings.

I did not see the soursop tree and its parasites (passion fruit, insects) perish in the blaze my mother caused; I could only imagine it. Much time after it had occurred, a lone seedling of a passion fruit sprang up just outside the gate that separated my mother's house from the street. It grew to about eighteen inches tall, it lasted at just that height for a long time; after the hurricane occurred and when I saw my brother for the last time, I noticed that the passion fruit no longer existed. So much was occurring at the time I noticed this, the absence of the passion fruit's existence, that I could only notice it, not attach any significance to it, but there is significance to it all the same. And from the place I could look down at the stunted passion fruit—for it was that, stunted, unable to go on, unable to go back, it could not yet die—I could no longer see the soursop tree, I could no longer see the remains of its charred trunk, only the blue sky above it. I could only imagine it below that blue sky, an innocent sky, a sky that looked as if nothing important had ever taken place beneath it. But a glance away from the charred soursop trunk is where my mother's old stone heap used to be, and it was in this place that once my brother's and my life intersected, and this now has a meaning only because my own life can make it have one. At that moment in my mother's life, when her youngest child, my brother who was dying, was born, my mother's life (a life she might have had in mind, or a life that had become a nightmare; how could I, how can I know) collapsed (I could feel that then, I can see it now). Her husband (the man who was not really my own father, my brother's real father) was old and sickly and they could not properly support the family they had made. I was always being asked to forgo something or other that had previously occupied my leisure time, and then something or other that was essential (my schooling), to take care of these small children who were not mine. At thirteen, at fourteen, at fifteen, I did not like this, I did not like my mother's other children, I did not even like my mother then; I liked books, I liked reading books, I did not like anything else as much as I liked reading a book, a book of any kind. My youngest brother was two years old when one day he was left in my charge, my mother placed him in my care while she ran errands; perhaps I knew what these errands were, but I no longer do, I cannot remember what it was she had to do and so left me alone to care for him. Mr. Drew, our father (though his father, not really mine), was not at home. But I liked reading a book much more than I liked looking after him (and even now I like reading a book more than I like looking after my own children, but looking after my own children is something I cannot, describe in terms of liking or anything else), and even then I would have said that I loved books but did not love him at all, only that I loved him because I was supposed to and what else could I do. All day I was left to look after him, and all day, instead of doing so, I read a book, a book whose title and plot or anything else about it I cannot remember just now. The day must have passed in the same rhythm as the pace with which I turned the pages (and I recognize this way of phrasing this event as romantic, even literary, for the day must have passed with its own usualness and did not care about me in particular or in general), and so when I finished reading the book I realized the day was ending and my mother would soon return home. Between my coming to the end of the book and the time my mother should return home there were not many minutes remaining, only minutes were left for the chores that should have taken me an entire day to complete. I did the things I thought my mother would notice immediately; changing my brother's diaper was not among them. This was the first thing my mother noticed, and only now I can say (because I can see) “Of course.” My brother, the one who was dying, who has died, who while dying could not take himself to the bathroom and freely control his bowel movements, then as a little boy, two years old, wore diapers and needed to have someone change them from time to time when they grew soiled. That day (and I cannot remember if it was a Monday, a Tuesday, or a Wednesday, but I do know with certainty that it was not a Saturday or a Sunday) when I had been reading instead of taking care of him, I did not notice that in his diaper was a deposit of my brother's stool, and by the time my mother returned from her errands—and she did notice it—the deposit of stool had hardened and taken the shape of a measure of weight, something used in a grocery store or in the fish market or the meat market or the market where only ground provisions are sold; it was the size of that measure signifying a pound. And in it, this picture of my brother's hardened stool, a memory, a moment of my own life is frozen; for his diaper sagged with a weight that was not gold but its opposite, a weight whose value would not bring us good fortune, a weight that only emphasized our family's despair: our fortunes, our prospects were not more than the contents of my brother's diaper, and the contents were only shit. When my mother saw his unchanged diaper, it was the realization of this that released in her a fury toward me, a fury so fierce that I believed (and this was then, but even now many years later I am not convinced otherwise) that she wanted me dead, though not in a way that would lead to the complications of taking in my actual existence and then its erasure, for she was my mother, my own real mother, and my erasure at her own hands would have cost her something then; my erasure now, my absence now, my permanent absence now, my death now, before her own, would make her feel regal, triumphant that she had outlived all her inferiors: her inferiors are her offspring. She mourns beautifully, she is admirable in mourning; if I were ever to be in mourning, this is the model, the example, I would imitate. At that stage of my life I was fifteen, my brother was two years old—I was unable to help her make sense of her life. The man she had married was sick and could not really build houses anymore, he could not really make furniture anymore; she might have loved him for a moment, she might have loved him for many moments, I never knew, but there was a child almost two years old, there was a child almost four years old, there was a child almost six years old. These were all his children. I was not his child, I was not a part of the real debacle of her life, and then again, worst of all, I could not help her out of it. I insisted on reading books. In a fit of anger that I can remember so well, as if it had been a natural disaster, as if it had been a hurricane or an erupting volcano, or just simply the end of the world, my mother found my books, all the books that I had read, some of them books I had bought, though with money I had stolen, some of them books I had simply stolen, for once I read a book, no matter its literary quality I could not part with it. (I then had no sense of literary quality, literary quality being a luxury, luxury being absent from my existence unless I saw an illustration of what this might be on a tin of cheap powder imported from England, and this picture of luxury only demonstrated what it might look like if one did not have to work at all, and so luxury was presented as contempt for working and any association with the dullness of the everyday.) A cauldron of words, even a world perhaps, may have passed, but not between us, though by then it would have been only one way, for I could make no response. But there was a moment when in a fury at me for not taking care of her mistakes (my brother with the lump of shit in his diapers, his father who was sick and could not properly support his family, who even when well had made a family that he could not properly support, her mistake in marrying a man so lacking, so lacking) she looked in every crevice of our yard, under our house, under my bed (for I did have such a thing and this was unusual, that in our family, poor, lacking a tradition of individual privacy and whether that is a good thing, whether all human beings should aspire to such a thing, privacy, their thoughts known only to them, to be debated and mulled over only by them, I do not know), and in all those places she found my books, the things that had come between me and the smooth flow of her life, her many children that she could not support, that she and her husband (the man not my own father) could not support, and in this fury, which she was conscious of then but cannot now remember, but which to her regret I can, she gathered all the books of mine she could find, and placing them on her stone heap (the one on which she bleached out the stains and smudges that had, in the ordinariness of life, appeared on our white clothes), she doused them with kerosene (oil from the kerosene lamp by the light of which I used to strain my eyes reading some of the books that I was about to lose) and then set fire to them, What I felt when this happened, the exact moment of the burning of my books, what I felt after this happened, the burning of my books, immediately after it happened, shortly after it happened, long after it happened, I do not know, I cannot now remember. In fact, I did not even remember that it happened at all, it had no place in the many horrible events that I could recite to friends, or the many horrible events that shaped and gave life to the thing I was to become, a writer. This event, my mother burning my books, the only thing I owned in my then-emerging life, fell into that commonplace of a cliché, the repressed memory, and there it would have remained forever if one day, while paying me a visit, while staying with me in my home, a place whose existence seemed especially miraculous—her presence only served to underline this—she had not said to a friend that if it were not for her vigilance, I would have ended up not in the home and situation that I now occupied but instead with ten children by ten different men. And she had a story to illustrate this fact: apparently, when I was about the age at which my brothers' existence—all of them—became also my responsibility (even though they were not my children, I had nothing to do with them being in the world), a boy named Lindsay used to come to our house and ask if he could borrow some of my books. This boy only pretended to love books (my mother knew this instinctively then, and she knew of this with certainty at the time she came to visit me); what she believed he wanted was to seduce me and eventually become one of the ten fathers of the ten children I would have had. One day, she said, when she grew tired of his ruse, she said to him that I had no books, that I was not a library, didn't he know. The person to whom my mother had told this story only repeated it to me when she thought my judgment of my mother had grown too harsh, had only repeated it to me to demonstrate that my mother had done the best she could and was only acting in this way to prevent me from experiencing a harsh life, to make it possible for me to have the life I had when my mother was then visiting me. I had forgotten the burning of my books, I remembered it when my friend told me the things my mother had said. And then this detail: the boy's name, Lindsay, just this boy, his name, his authentic interest in books, an interest I shared with him, and then his absence, though at the time of his sudden absence I did not note it, I did not miss it, anyway I do not remember doing so. And then so many years later, after the burning of my books and the events that led up to it, and my mother's visit in which the powerful revelation occurred, long after all this, when my brother, the one I had neglected when he was left in my charge, the one who was dying of AIDS, was hospitalized because he was almost dying before he really died, lying in the hospital room where my brother first lay when he was diagnosed with this disease, was a man named Lindsay, and when I went to visit him, this Lindsay, for I had to, no one else did, he was being treated with the same neglect and slight and fear as my brother had been by the staff of the hospital. He looked familiar, he looked like that same boy who used to come and ask me for my books, but I could not really tell if it was he or if I just wanted it to be he, so that all these events in my life would come together: my brother dying, the memory of my books being burned because I had neglected my brother who was dying when he was a small child, a boy named Lindsay who might have been one of the fathers of my numerous children, the what really happened, the what might have really happened, and how it led to what was actually happening. And then again, and then again.