My Brother (14 page)

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 real 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.

It was in that funeral home in which he lay that I first encountered the dead. The dead then was a girl with a hunchback and I did not know her, I only saw her on the street in her school uniform, but her deformity had made her well known to other schoolchildren who were not deformed at all, and so when she died I wanted to see what she looked like. Seeing her lying in her coffin created a sense of wonder in me; seeing my brother did not, but that might have been because by the time my brother died I was so old that the idea of death seemed possible, but still only possible, something other people might decide to do. When I had seen the girl with the hunchback lying dead in her coffin, my brother was not yet born, and even my own life, the life that I now live, was not yet born, and so I could not imagine, would not have been capable of wondering, if this place, Straffee's funeral parlor (the funeral parlor where the girl lay, the funeral parlor where my brother lay), would resonate in me, would come up in any way in my life again. My brother's body lay not in the same room as hers, he lay in the room next to the one in which her body had been; the funeral parlor had expanded, and in any case, the room in which she had lain held another body, another funeral, a man thirty-five years old who also had died of AIDS, or the virus that causes AIDS, or something like that; whatever is the right way to say it, he had died of the same thing as my brother. Mr. Straffee, the owner of the funeral parlor, died in the same year as my brother; Mr. Straffee was very old then, and I cannot tell if he got involved in such, the business of burying people, to accustom himself to the idea of his own death, or if he hoped such an intimacy with death would protect him from its actual occurrence, or lessen his fear of its actual occurrence.

My brother's coffin was most plain, it was in the category of the ones that cost less, pitch pine stained with a very dark varnish. I had known how much it would cost, and so before I returned for his funeral I went to the bank in the small town in which I lived and purchased traveler's checks. The undertaker took payment in traveler's checks.

His funeral procession was not large, and there might have been many reasons for this. He had died of a disease that carried a powerful social stigma. People in the place that I am from are quite comfortable with the shame of sex, the inexplicable need for it, an enjoyment of it that seems beyond the ordinary, the actual peculiarity of it; only then when you die from it, sex, does the shame become, well, shame. Then he was not a well-known person, a famous person, and this would have disappointed him, he so longed to be well known and well thought of. Funerals in Antigua have always been social events, especially the funerals of young people, but he was not so young, he was not well known, he died of a disease that had a great shame attached to it.

His death, and so his funeral, was not like that of the little boy, only four years old, who died while taking a swimming lesson with his schoolmates in the seawater at Fort James, just died suddenly, fainting, losing consciousness and then dying, and that is what was said of his death: he just died suddenly, while learning to swim; he fainted and lost consciousness and then died. He lay in a refrigerator in a funeral home, the same funeral home that took care of my brother's burial, while his mother's and father's relatives who were living in various parts of the world, all far away from Antigua, in climates different from the one in Antigua, returned to Antigua. His mother and some close female relatives of both his parents all wore brand-new dresses made from the same material, though not in the same style, and also, they did not show their feelings of sorrow at the same time. The church service part of this little boy's funeral was held in the same church in which my brother (and I) had been christened and confirmed (the Methodist church, though in that tradition you are received not confirmed), and I had no real feelings when I saw that his coffin was in the same place, in front of the altar where I had taken my first communion and just plain communion many times after that. I was, at that moment I was seeing his coffin, trying to find my brother's doctor, Dr. Prince Ramsey. The church was filled with the dead four-year-old boy's relatives and their friends, people were standing on the steps of the church trying to see the little coffin and of course the family, because the sorrow expressed by the family, the sorrow shown by the family excites observers, evoking pity for the mourner and, ultimately, superiority, for to see someone suffer in a moment when you are not suffering can inspire such a feeling, superiority, in a place like Antigua, with its history of subjugation, leaving in its wake humiliation and inferiority; to see someone in straits worse than your own is to feel at first pity for them and soon better than them. And so it was that a large number of people who did not know this little boy or any member of his family but had heard of his death through hearsay had come to see his little coffin, something made out of cheap wood and then covered with white velvet, and had come to see his family suffer over their loss. His little classmates stood not far from the coffin, and later they sang a song about Jesus and his particular love for children. The children were not at the graveyard, and so they did not see his mother as she wept over his coffin being lowered into the ground and his mother weeping and throwing up nothing but mucus, the only thing left in her stomach. The children did not see this, but many onlookers did, they saw the mother vomiting nothing but mucus at the sight of her son's coffin being lowered into the ground, and the father, her husband, holding her up after she had slumped to the ground, and then leading her away from the grave to sit on a grave nearby, a grave of someone I do not believe they knew, yet it was a good place to sit all the same. I was at the graveyard still looking for Dr. Ramsey, but he was not there, and when next I saw him in the graveyard, it was at my brother's funeral, and between that boy's burial and my brother's death I saw and spoke to Dr. Ramsey many times, but on that day I did not see him.

And so my brother's funeral; the undertaker (and it was not at that moment that I first made the observation that an undertaker often looks like a corpse in one way or another: bloated like a dead body that has been neglected, or thin and emaciated like a dead body properly preserved so that it decays slowly, dryly, or like a dead body that has been carefully manicured and tended to make the relatives doubt slightly the sight they are witnessing: I am looking at the dead)—the undertaker called us, his family, to take a last look at him, and this call for a last look only reminded me of scenes in other narrative forms in which there is a bartender and just before the bar closes there is a last call for drinks. We all looked at him, I and his and my mother, my brother who no longer speaks to my mother even though they continue to live in the same house, and my other brother, who broke my mother's neck by throwing her onto the ground in the process of trying to stop her from throwing stones at him because she disapproved of him bringing a girlfriend, or any woman with whom he had a sexual relationship, into the structure where he—they all—lived; this structure was so near to my mother's own house that she could hear all their conversations and all their sounds, and the conversations and sounds were an abomination to her (and that is the word for the feelings that roiled in her heart toward his actions, his wanting to live: abomination!), and when he would not cease this behavior of which she disapproved she first quarreled with him and then threw stones at him, and while trying to stop her from stoning him (and this was not exactly a defense of himself, for I say a defense of himself would have been to throw stones back at her), he threw her to the ground and broke her neck; it was a break so serious that she should have died or become a quadriplegic, yet she recovered so completely that she has buried one of her own children. When once she was complaining to me about her health, I jokingly said, “Oh, Mother, you will bury us all”; she said in reply, “You think so,” and she laughed, but I did not laugh, I could not laugh, I was—am—one of the “us.” There were her two sons still alive, and then there was me, her only daughter, but not Devon's only sister in the world, for his father, Mr. Drew, had had other girl children with other mothers, but I was his only sister at his funeral, and I, too, went to take a last look at him, but it was unreal the way he looked: his hair styled in a way I had never seen it styled when I knew him alive; his eyes closed, shut, sealed, like an envelope, not a vault; his body was delicate, fragile-seeming, all bones, finally stilled, not ever so slightly moving up and down; his farawayness so complete, so final, he shall never speak again; he shall never speak again in the everyday way that I speak of speech.