Gumbo: A Celebration of African American Writing Part 26

"Oh, I'm sorry. He's in my cruiser." He pointed to the police car parked at the far end of the block.

"Is he alright?"

"He's shaken up. He was holding the Donald boy when I got to the scene. Trying to put some slack in the rope. It was already too late. You look out for your brother-he'll be alright."

"Thank you, Mr. Kincaid."

I had to walk past that tree to get to my brother. I didn't look. I didn't want to see Michael there. I looked instead for the blue lights of the squad car and I saw my brother sitting on the pa.s.senger side.

When I opened the door, he was sitting with his hands folded in his lap. Mud was all over his work s.h.i.+rt.

"I'm sorry, Roy. The doughnuts," he said, looking over my shoulder to where the crowd stood. "Roy, I left your doughnuts under that tree. I'm sorry."

"Don't worry about it, Paul."

"I'll go get you some more. I can get you some fresh ones."

"Paul, it's alright."

"No. No it's not."

I didn't walk him past the tree and the crowd. We took the long way around the block to where my father had parked.

Our father was standing there with Sgt. Kincaid. Mr. Kincaid had asked my father to ride with him over to Mrs. Donald's house. She didn't know yet. Daddy put his arm on Paul's shoulder and asked him if he was all right.

"No sir," he said, picking the dirt off the name patch on his s.h.i.+rt. "Not yet." That was the last thing he said before I put him in his truck and drove him home.

The next day, the Donald family asked us to prepare Michael's body. My father told me I didn't have to be there when they worked on him.

"I'll understand," he told me. "He was your friend."

He didn't mean that. He wanted me there. Before I started working full-time with my father, we talked about times like these. He reminded me of the people I might see on the table. Friends and family. If this were to be my profession, he would tell me, I would have to be ready for them.

"No one dies before their time," he would say. "The call comes when it's meant to. It's not for us to question."

So I stayed and helped him prepare Michael Donald. There on the table, his face was so swollen that he looked like a stranger. My father addressed the swelling and bruises. I washed his hands and cleared his fingernails of the blood, gravel, and mud. My father stood over me as I cleared the sc.r.a.pes and cuts on his knuckles.

"He put up a fight," he said.

Seeing Michael, his hands and his face, I thought of my schoolyard fights and neighborhood brawls. I thought of the fights I'd won, remembering how the rush of victory dulls the pain of taken blows. I thought of the fights I had lost, when I felt the full force of heavy fists on my face. Hard blows, knuckle on bone, followed by the hot rush of blood to the surface. These blows would take the fight out of me.

Turning Michael's hands, there were more cuts and bruises. "Defensive wounds," they call these.

My grandfather was in the room. Long retired, he had come to help prepare the body. He knew how to dress rope-burned skin. He knew how to wire the broken bones of a neck and make it straight again. He knew how to arrange the high, starched collar and necktie so they hid the marks that makeup could not conceal. I watched him as he worked, cradling Michael's head in his hands.

He held it like he held mine in the waters here along the bay, on the summer afternoon he tried to teach me to float. I floated for a while, but when I opened my eyes and realized his hands were gone, and what I felt along my neck and back was just a memory of his fingers, I sank like a rock.

On the morning of the funeral Paul came downstairs in reeking work clothes that he must have slept in. Mr. Lewis told him to take some leave time, but he went to work anyway.

"Do you want some breakfast, Paul?" Mama asked. We had started talking to Paul in questions. Sometimes he would answer.

"No, ma'am."

"You don't have much time, sweetheart. Don't you think you should be getting dressed?"

"I'm already dressed. I got some overtime this morning."

"Aren't you going to go pay your respects to your friend?"

"I already did. I talked to him when he was in that tree. We talked for a good while." That was the last thing he said before he went out the door. As we pulled out of our driveway, my mother tried to dab away the redness in her eyes.

"Talk to your brother, Roy," she said.

"I'll talk to him, Mama. He's going to be alright." This was the a.s.surance I made to my mother as we drove to the funeral.

The sanctuary of New Canaan Baptist Church was filled that day. Hundreds more waited outside for the funeral procession. The pulpit overflowed with the reverend doctors of the world, known and unknown.

After the service, I stood in the vestibule with my father as the pallbearers carried Michael's casket down the aisle. On the wall behind them, in stained gla.s.s, Jesus stumbled on the road to Calvary. Next to him stood Simon of Cyrene, the man who helped him carry his load. As Simon reaches down over Jesus, his mouth is near the ear of Christ. Whenever I am in New Canaan, whenever I am burying one of their own, I look at that wall and wonder about the Cyrenean. I wonder what he said.

The pallbearers reached the door and met the sunlight of the March afternoon. The man at the front right looked down as he walked over the threshold. He looked back to the others and whispered. They nodded and lowered their heads as they crossed over. They looked down as they left the church, careful of the spot he warned them of-where the carpet had rolled away from the tacks-careful not to stumble.

Paul had been a heavy sleeper before Michael Donald died. In the weeks after Michael's death, his sleep was uneasy. I could hear him through the walls, saying the same words over and over, words I tried in vain to understand. Then he stopped sleeping altogether.

He stopped eating with us, and I would miss him for days at a time. Some mornings I'd wake up hoping to see him on the edge of the bed, hoping to smell the stench of sulfur that filled the room when he entered and lingered, refusing to let me get back to sleep. I started to miss that. But the only sign of him was the piles of work clothes that built up in the washroom until my mother soaked them, cleaned them, and hung them neatly in his closet.

He worked when he should have been sleeping and when he should have been at school. With only a few weeks left in the semester, he stopped going to his cla.s.ses altogether. He worked double s.h.i.+fts and overtime whenever he could get it. He had that tiredness about him that eight hours of sleep couldn't shake. My mother believed the tiredness caused what happened. It was the tiredness, she said, that caused him to fall asleep at his machine.

"h.e.l.lo? Deacon residence."

"Mr. Deacon, I'm so sorry to-"

"Mr. Lewis? It's me, Roy."

"You sound more and more-Is he home? I need to speak to him."

"He's out of town. What's wrong?"

He said nothing, but there was no silence. I heard commotion over the hum of the combines at the mill.

"Can I speak to your mother?"

"I'm the only one here, Mr. Lewis. Tell me what's wrong."

"It's Paul. He had an accident-"

The combine had sliced through the bone and tendons just below his right wrist. It could have been much worse, Mr. Lewis said. Paul's hand could have been caught between the teeth of the blades, and his entire arm could have been pulled through on the intake. I've heard the stories of men whose arms were pulled from the socket. They die sometimes from blood clots or trauma. They said Paul was calm. They said he kept his head about him. I slept at the hospital with him for those first few days. Paul got out of the hospital a few days before Memorial Day.

The investigators said the same thing my mother and Mr. Lewis believed, that it was an accident caused by fatigue. When he came home, he slept more than he was awake, and the medication kept him drowsy. Outside of doctor's appointments, he rarely left the house. I would take his dinner to him in his room, and try to talk to him while he ate, but would only speak when you asked him a question. And then in one word answers most times. Yes. No. Fine.

My mother wanted him to talk to someone, a doctor or maybe someone from the church. But he never did. Mama asked me to talk to him. I tried. When he did start to talk more, it was always about the pain in his arm.

"You know it still hurts, my hand. Nothing even there and I can still feel it hurting. The nerves don't know the difference."

"Do you want me to get your medicine?"

"Pills don't work on something that's not there. It's in my head."

He lifted his bandaged arm, turning his forearm and staring where his hand should have been. He never looked at me when he talked like this.

"I'm sitting right here, looking at it, knowing d.a.m.n well that it's gone, but I can feel it just the same. If I close my eyes I can wiggle the fingers. See? I'm doing it right now."

He'd say these things then he would go silent again, and the only noise would be was the sc.r.a.pe of utensils against my mother's good plates. I told myself, and my parents, what we all wanted to believe. That he was going to work it out in his own time.

The seat my parents saved for him at my graduation was empty when my name was called. But when I walked across the stage, I saw him standing in the back of the auditorium. He waved. When we got to the parking lot, he stood by my father's car waiting for us.

"Sorry I was late, but tying this necktie was a motherf.u.c.ker." He laughed for the first time in a long while. We all laughed then. That's when we all believed that things would be alright.

Before we could leave, the man in the car next to us, the father of a cla.s.smate I barely knew, congratulated us, patting me on the shoulder and hastily shaking hands with my father before extending his hand to Paul.

My father had taught us the proper way to clasp a hand, a firm, single squeeze without too much shaking. Calibrated just so, for the hands of peers or elders or the children of the deceased. My mother taught me the protocol for taking a widow's or grieving mother's hand in both of my own.

In the days after the accident, I had watched Paul reach for things. Bottles, doork.n.o.bs, books. He would forget for a second that it was gone. Paul had that same expression now-standing in the auditorium parking lot, tie loosely knotted-as his left hand was clenched awkwardly in the embarra.s.sed man's right.

I skipped the graduation parties and talked to my brother for most of the night. There was small talk, of Sanford & Son, and of many things unspoken during the weeks after Michael and the mill, and rea.s.suring words he said to me before I went to bed.

"You need to stop worrying about me, Roy. It just took me some time to get right. I've made sense of all of this now."

Instead of a big party when I turned eighteen, we had dinner at the house, eating the gumbo my mother made. My daddy played his records. Paul danced with my mother until she got tired and went to bed. When she was gone, my father went to his liquor cabinet, pulled out the big bottle of Crown Royal he saved, and poured thin layers into three of his good gla.s.ses.

"To my sons. The d.a.m.n-near twins."

When I swirled it around, it was just thick enough to stick to the sides of the gla.s.s before it rolled back down. That was the same way it felt in my mouth before I swallowed.

This was the first time I'd had good liquor outright. We'd stolen tastes, of course, every once in a while slipping shots into Styrofoam cups and obscuring the taste with too much ice and store-brand ginger ale, but this was the first time I had tasted whiskey full on.

"You can pour yourself another one, Roy," my father said. "You won't be able to drink with the Right Reverend Paul Deacon."

Paul stared out the window like my father would sometimes. He hadn't taken a drink yet.

Then, "To Michael," he said, raising his gla.s.s.

That next day, I found on my chest of drawers a note: "Jubilee."

I folded the note in my pocket. Around the wastebasket, I saw the discarded sc.r.a.ps of paper. Imperfect letters that Paul had tried again and again with his left hand, incomplete early versions of the single word he had finally gotten right.

He always got to the eastern sh.o.r.e before me. I saw the truck parked on the side of the beach road. He left the park lights on so I could find him.

"Old man Roy Deacon."

After looking out at the lights, it takes my eyes a minute to adjust so I can see my brother. At first I can only hear his voice. But slowly he comes into focus. Whenever I see him, I am reminded how the years have treated me. I am much rounder at the middle, even when I suck in my gut. My hairline has gone its own way. He's still the same. If other people could see us together, it might be hard to imagine that we were born so close together.

"How's forty treating you?"

"I have five minutes left. Let me enjoy it."

"How does it feel to be on the verge of a grand transcendental moment? On the cusp of something greater than yourself?"

"I'll tell you in five minutes."

It's warm on the beach, and Paul has his shoes off. He has those high-arched feet that look like they're always ready to run. He used to stand in the water and wait for the fish and the crab without looking for them. He'd just feel them as they started to brush against his ankles.

"Transcendental moments need to be marked. Did you bring some punctuation?"

I show him the purple Crown Royal sack.

"You always come through, Roy. Always did."

I give him a sip, and pour a bit more on the ground.

"For the brothers who ain't here," I say.

"For the brothers who ain't here."

I look down at the ground. The bit of Crown I poured is soaking into the sand between me and my brother.

"I can't stay. I just wanted to wish you a good one," he says. "I wanted to see the kids, too. Where are they?"

"I let them play in the water for a while. They'll be back in a minute."

The scars on his arm have healed as well as can be expected. The ones along his wrist, from the accident. And the other scars that he put there. When I'd gotten to the eastern sh.o.r.e that night, I'd seen the park lights of Paul's truck along the beach road. When I'd found him, I thought he was sleeping.

"It's good to see you again, Roy."

On that Jubilee night in 1981, I had planned to meet my brother here on the beach. Instead I found him in the back of his truck. Since it had been hard for him to sleep soundly those months before-with Michael Donald and the pain in his arm-I'd decided to let him sleep until the tide came in. It wasn't until I came back and tried to wake him that I realized.

"You know Roy, when we were kids I wished I could stay here forever."

When I'd turned my flashlight on him, I'd seen the places where the blood had run down the rivets of the payload, soaking the dirt and leaves that had collected there. Some had leaked through the rusted places and pooled on the red clay of the road.

"Forever's a long time."

He didn't leave a note. My doctor said they don't always leave notes. And even if he had, the doctor says it might have caused more questions than it answered. He didn't leave a note, but he left a message, spelled out carefully in neat razor-drawn letters along his forearm. MARK 8 24. Some time later I would find it in his Bible. The verse he had underlined and crossed out again and again until the pen ripped through the parchment.

Tonight, Paul put his good arm on my shoulder. The scars along the arm that hangs at his side have healed as well as could be expected. The red open wounds have closed. In their place, swollen keloids have risen like braille against him.

This is the peace I have made for myself. Here in the place we like to claim. This I need to hold the rest together. While I wait for a harvest I don't understand, while I watch my children play in the water, while I watch how sand adheres to the good liquor I pour for brothers and friends.

I see my brother but I cannot feel his hand along my shoulder. I only feel my daughter's shovel as she taps me on my thigh. The alarm on her watch is beeping. She's singing "Happy Birthday" along with the electronic melody.