My Brother (9 page)

I did not kiss him goodbye when I was returning home to my family, I did not give him a goodbye hug. I said to him at the end of my visit (four days), Goodbye, and he said, So this is it, no hug no nothing? (and he said it in that way, in conventional English, not in the English that instantly reveals the humiliation of history, the humiliations of the past not remade into art); and I said, Yes, this is it, goodbye, and perhaps I will see you again, and I was aware that when I said it—perhaps I will see you again—I was assuming something that was not true at all: seeing him again was left to me, seeing him again was something that I could decide. I did not feel strong, I felt anger, my anger was everything to me, and in my anger lay many things, mostly made up of feelings I could not understand, feelings I might not ever understand, feelings that everyone who knows me understands with an understanding that I will never know, or that someone who has never met me at all would understand as if they had made up my feelings themselves.

Two months before I saw him alive for the last time, there had been a big hurricane, and then weeks later a smaller one. The first one raged over the island for thirty-six hours and caused the usual destruction that goes with a hurricane, but what people talked about afterward was the sound of the wind and the rain; it sounded as if someone were being killed and the someone being killed was screaming “Murder! Murder!” My brother could only lie in his bed. He heard that sound that seemed to be someone saying “Murder! Murder!” He must have heard the sound of large trees crashing into houses, water flooding the streets, the poles holding up the wires that carried electricity splitting, then hitting the ground. When the poles that held the wires carrying electricity hit the ground, the house in which my brother lay, his mother's house, our mother's house, became dark and then filled with a light that had been absent for many years; for my mother got out the old kerosene lamps and lighted them. The light of the kerosene lamp was the only light I knew at night when I was a child.

Everyone inside the house was frightened; they could hear the disaster of the hurricane affecting other people in a dramatic way: dwellings being ripped apart, children crying, people calling in panic, in fear, certainly not in joy, certainly not in welcome. In that room, inside that house, my brother lay still, while outside it was not still at all, and what did he say, what did he think, what did he feel? He felt nothing, he said, he heard the noise of the wind and the rain, he did not hear the people; the light from the kerosene lamp only made him wonder (“De noise bad, man, but me no pay it no mind; dem people, dem people, me a warn you, deh no good, deh no good; de light you know, 'e like dem old-time days”). And in that moment (and by moment I mean a length of time that does not correspond to a scientific definition, and by moment again, I do not mean just a figure of speech) I felt (and perhaps incorrectly, but all the same these are my thoughts on his dying and on his life—and that is one of the reasons to outlive all the people who can have anything to say about you, not letting them have the last word) that I understood him again—nothing new, an old insight, this one—that he was a dreamer, that he liked events best when he could be in them but not have them ask anything of him, that he could observe and have the sensation of something, but while doing so he must not be expected to save himself or anyone else. I remembered then being with him for the first time after twenty years, and lying on his bed in his old shack of a house, the little one-room house that was the house I had grown up in; it had seemed so big to me when I was a child, I lived in it with my mother (the woman who later also became his mother) and my father (the man who really was his father and really was not mine), and I was very happy in it when I was a small child, and then I was very unhappy in that house when I was growing out of my childhood, and my unhappiness in that house coincided with his birth and the birth of the two other boys (my brothers and his brothers) who were born just before him; and so that time (1986 in January) when I saw him again for the first time after twenty years, I was lying in his bed and he was sitting in the doorway speaking to a friend of his, they were planning a career, or something like a career in Dub music, and they were both smoking marijuana, which they did not call marijuana; they called it the Weed, as if that name, the Weed, made it something harmless, something not to be taken seriously. They laughed at me when I told them not to smoke so much marijuana, and then they started to smoke cocaine. And later, as my brother lay dying in his mother's house, I ran into this boy, his friend, as I was visiting my other brother who sells things at the market, whom I was helping sell things in the market, and this boy, my dying brother's old friend, came up to us to buy some soda, and he had with him a woman and a child, not his wife, just the mother of his child. The three of them were together and they were a family and they looked so very nice, like a picture of a family, healthy and prosperous and attractive, and also safe. This old friend of my brother's did not recognize me, and so I reminded him of how I knew him, and even so, he didn't ask after my brother, and even when I told him in a quite frank way about my brother's condition, it didn't seem to interest him at all, and I urged him to visit his old friend and he said he would, but he never did, he never did at all.

When I was lying on his bed that time in 1986, I was looking up at the ceiling; the little house was then old, or at least it looked old; the beams in the roof were rotting, but in a dry way, as if the substance of the wood was slowly being drawn out of it, and so the texture of the wood began to look like material for a sweater or a nightgown, not something as substantial as wood, not something that might offer shelter to many human beings. Looking up at the roof then, rotting in that drying-out way, did not suggest anything to me, certainly not that the present occupant of the house, my brother, might one day come to resemble the process of the decaying house, evaporating slowly, drying out slowly, dying and living, and in living looking as if he had died a very long time ago, a mummy preserved by some process lost in antiquity that can only be guessed at by archaeologists.

As I lay there I could hear our mother busy outside. In a climate like ours we live outside. When I was a child and my mother was trying to teach me European table manners, this was done inside, with the three of us—my mother, my father, and me—sitting at a table that he, my father (that man I knew so well, better than his own children—and that was how I came to know him so well, I was not really his child) had made, they both approving of the way I managed knife and fork and food, and my mouth all properly arranged. All things foreign were done inside, all things familiar and important were done outside; and this was true even of sleep, for though we fell asleep inside the house, as soon as the eyes were closed and sleep came on, no one stayed inside, all dreams, or so it seemed to me, took place outside; and in any case, as soon as we woke up, the first thing was to observe the outside of our house to make sure it had stayed the same as when we last saw it the night before. But at that moment, again in 1986, when I was lying inside the house in which my brother was living, my mother was outside talking to herself, or to a chicken that got in her way, or to the cats she had adopted which were just recovering from fish poisoning, as was my mother, but the cats were lagging in their recovery. Our mother—and sometimes I think of her as my mother only, and then sometimes she is the mother of my brothers also, and when she's our mother, she's another entity altogether—had recovered almost at the same moment she became sick from eating some fish, grouper, that must have fed on something poisonous in the sea and had sickened everyone and everything that had eaten it. A dog got in her way and she cursed him; my brother's friend got in her way, she cursed him and he laughed; she cursed my brother and he laughed. I did not get in her way, I was inside on the bed lying down, but in any case, I no longer got in her way, I had removed myself from getting in her way, I was in a position in my own life that did not allow for getting in my mother's way, she could not curse me, I no longer needed her. Even so, I still ate the food she cooked, and that was what she was busy outside doing then: cooking some food for me. She was a very good cook; I did not like her cooking when I was a child, but when I was lying in my brother's bed I loved all the food she cooked, all the food I would not eat as a child: fungi, saltfish with antroba (eggplant), breadfruit, doukona. I longed for these foods and was so glad to have them cooked for me, and not just cooked for me but cooked for me by her. It was while my brother was ill and I began to visit him (I did not take care of him, I only visited him and took him medicines, his mother took care of him) that I decided not to eat any food she cooked for me, or accept any food she offered me at all. It was not a deliberate decision, it was not done in anger. My brother, the one who sells food in the market, the one who had stopped speaking to my mother even though he lived in the same house as she, cooked his own food and would not let her cook anything for him and would not eat anything she cooked no matter how hungry he was. He did not like his mother anymore, he did not love his mother anymore. He called her Mrs. Drew, the name that ordinary people called her, just that, Mrs. Drew; he called her only, used her name only when he could not avoid it, when to address her without speaking her name would cause attention to be drawn to himself (someone might wonder, Why does he not speak to his mother directly?). My brother who was dying (and he was dying; there were times when he seemed sick, just sick, but mostly he was just dying), he too before he got sick called her only Mrs. Drew, but as the life of his death overwhelmed him, he came to call her Mother, and then only Muds. “Muds,” he would say, “Muds.” At that point in his life, that moment in 1986 when I was lying on his bed, looking up at the beams of his ceiling that would eventually remind me of his dry, rotting, shriveling body, he too no longer ate the food she cooked; this was part of a separation he wished to make between himself and his family. It was at this time that he proclaimed himself a Rastafarian and spoke constantly of Jah. The impulse was a good one, if only he could have seen his way to simply moving away from her to another planet, though perhaps even that might not have been far enough away.

And so I stopped eating my mother's food, inspired by the acts of two of my three brothers, who were much younger than I (by eleven and thirteen years). In my case, my case of not eating the food my mother provided for me, this act was full of something, I do not know what, but this occurred to me long after I was in the midst of doing it: that just as I was deciding not to eat my mother's food anymore, and thinking (and feeling) that this decision was really a decision to rid myself of a profoundly childish attachment to her, I was only reliving a memory, for when I was a child I would not eat the food my mother cooked. When I was a very small child, I would eat food only if she chewed it first; then I must have outgrown that, because I remember the difficulty I had with eating was in eating anything she cooked at all. And so not eating food my mother cooked for me as a sign of distancing myself from her was a form of behavior I had used a long time ago, when I felt most close to and dependent on her.

When my father died (this man who was not my real father; my real father eventually died also, but I did not know him and his life and death do not at all concern me, except when I am visiting the doctor and my medical history becomes of interest), I had been living away from my family for ten years. I learned of his death three months after he had died and been buried. My mother and I were in one of our periods of not speaking to each other, not on the telephone, not in letters. In the world I lived in then, my old family was dead to me. I did not speak of them, I spoke of my mother, but only to describe the terrible feelings I had toward her, the terrible feelings she had toward me, in tones of awe, as if they were exciting, all our feelings, as if ours had been a great love affair, something that was partly imaginary, something that was partly a fact; but the parts that were imaginary and the parts that were only facts were all true. She did not like me, I did not like her; I believe she wanted me dead, though not actually; I believe I wanted her dead, though not really. When my father died and she wrote to tell me three months later, I could not have known that such a thing, the death of this man, would make me feel as if I could not be moved from the place I was in when I read of his death. I had received the letter just before the onset of the Christmas season, and it made a time when I was always unhappy even more so. I had many friends, but they were not my family, they were only my friends; they had their own families, I was not their family. I wept. I did not think I should die, too, not consciously, not unconsciously.

In the letter telling me that my father (that is, the man who was not really my father but whom I thought of as my father, and the man who had filled that role in my life) had died, my mother said that his death had left them impoverished, that she had been unable to pay for his burial, and only the charitable gifts of others had allowed him to have an ordinary burial, not the extraordinary burial of a pauper, with its anonymous grave and which no proper mourners attend. The letter was not designed to make me feel guilty. My mother did not know of such a concept, guilt outside a court of law, feelings of guilt resulting from accusations made among ordinary people in their lives as lived day to day; she only knew of guilt as it existed in a court of law, with its formality of accusation and deliberation and then judgment. To her, she had simply described the reality of her situation, but I felt condemned because I had so removed myself from my family that their suffering had gone unnoticed by me, and even as I wept over my father's death, I would not have done much to prevent it, and even as I wept over my father's death and my mother's description of emotional pain and financial deprivation, I would not do a thing to alleviate it. It was ten years after I left my home that he died, it was ten years after he died before I saw my home again, and among the first things I wanted to do was to see the place in the graveyard where he was buried. But no one wanted to take me there; my mother said that since they had not bought the plot, most likely by then someone else was buried in it, for a plot was reused if it had not been bought by the family of the dead within seven years' time. The grave had never had a tombstone; no one in his family had visited his grave since the day of his funeral.