28

WHAT BROTHER?

Your father always meant to fix the fence, his mother said. She was wrapped in her bathrobe and wearing a vacant expression as if not knowing who or where she was. She and Colburn sitting together at the kitchen table. Every day he meant to fix it but he never got around to it. He’d hear that dog barking in the middle of the night and he’d roll over and mumble I got to fix the fence as if he was talking to himself in a dream. Or we’d be drinking coffee on the porch and the dog would stick its head through the gap over behind the bushes and he’d say I’m gonna get it fixed this weekend but he never did. Jacob wasn’t but two years old. That was your brother’s name. Jacob. Your father had picked it out. He wasn’t but two, almost three in another month or so. But that fence. Between our house and the neighbor. Had a gap in it big enough for that dog’s head to start with but I guess it just kept on pushing and pushing until it could get its whole body through. It had already come in our yard a few times and your father had run it off. And it was a mean dog. I remember when your father tried to scare it away it didn’t do nothing but look at him. Didn’t jump or scatter like most dogs will do when you stomp at them. It was a mean dog, had eyes that would look right through you. Like it was already thinking about what it would do to you if it had the chance. Its face was tight, seemed like the coat was pulled back so far it might just tear off. And its coat was gray like a storm cloud except for this white streak right between its eyes. I never trusted it and I told your father that and he said he was going to fix the fence. Every day he said it. But he never did.

She shifted in the chair. Stared at the tabletop. Colburn had begun to feel nauseated while she spoke as if falling from a great height that offered no safety below.

It had already killed, she said. Dragged up this other dog one day. Didn’t nobody even know where it came from. It just came walking up the street dragging this dead dog. Held it by the throat, clamped down in its jaw. That dog walked up and down the street holding the dead dog by the throat like it was showing off some trophy. Like it wanted to prove to everybody what it could do. Your father went over there then. Told the man he better do something about his dog before something really bad happened and the man didn’t argue but I don’t know how he could have anyway. He tied it up for a little while in his backyard. It actually took a real chain that dog was so strong. And I remember the ping of the man driving an old railroad spike down into the ground to hold the chain and hold the dog. It was fine for a while and we stopped thinking about it and I guess your father stopped thinking about the fence but some way or another the dog ended up wrestling itself free and wandering around again. So we wouldn’t never let your brother anywhere outside unless it was in our yard cause we had the fence. But the fence still had the gap at one of the posts and your father kept saying he was going to fix it. I don’t know why he never got around to it. I still can’t figure out who to blame.

Her eyes seemed to retreat further back into her head as if sliding out of existence. Outside the clouds had covered the sun of the cold December day and a muted light filled the kitchen and gave the feel of an old photograph. As if she were some image of the past that could not be reconciled or manipulated. Colburn listened to his mother but it seemed as if she wasn’t his mother but only wore the skin of the woman he had known. As if her confession of this previous life was a final transformation. Into what he didn’t know.

Her hair was tucked in a loose bun on the back of her head and she had taken her fingers and twisted several of the stray strands. She sniffed. Took a deep breath. And then she said it was my fault because I knew better than to let him out there alone. I just didn’t think nothing of it and I don’t know how you’re supposed to be able to imagine something like it happening. How your mind is supposed to go that far. It was a hot day and we had all the doors and windows open. Fans blowing. I was doing something. I don’t even remember what. And Jacob kept pushing at the screen door and hollering to go out so I flipped the latch and let him go out there. I swear I didn’t think nothing of it. You don’t think about stuff like that. Your father had run down to the store and right about the time he came in the front door we heard it happen and I remember we looked at each other right at the second we heard it and we both knew before we could even get out into the yard. We both just knew like it was something that had been planned since the beginning of time. Maybe it had.

She folded her arms on the table and she laid her head down to the side. Her eyes filled with trepidation as she saw it all again and her breaths began to skip. Colburn did not move. Did not speak. It replayed in her mind and she watched it and heard it and her mouth parted in the same terror as it had so long ago when they had run into the backyard.

What brother? he thought.

This brother.

She raised herself up and said I don’t know why we decided to never tell you about him. It was your father’s idea. It was his idea to leave town and start over somewhere new and we didn’t figure we’d ever have another child. Didn’t neither of us want to. I think we both thought we could run away from what all happened. Like it was some bad story we’d heard somebody else tell.

She then replayed their arguments in her mind but she did not tell Colburn what his father had said when she told him she was pregnant. Four years after it had happened. Four years gone and neither talking about it. Only going through the motions of a life. She did not tell and would never tell her younger son that his father said no. You aren’t having it. I don’t want it and I’ll never want it. We’ll go somewhere and get it taken care of. I want it, she had told him. I don’t care if you do or not. I ain’t going nowhere to get that done, not to our baby. It won’t be our baby, he answered. It’ll be your baby. And she had said you don’t mean that but he did mean it and though she had believed it was a sentiment that time would wear away he had never acted any differently than the way he promised he was going to act. That child will live in my house and I will provide but my son and my only son is dead and I killed him because I didn’t fix the goddamn fence and I won’t be a father to another child in this lifetime. I’ll take you to get it done if you change your mind and you better think on it. I ain’t thinking on it, she had said. And I hate you for even saying it. Hate me then, he said. And he would walk the floors at night as she lay in bed with her belly growing and imagining this child as a vessel of recovery but she listened to him pacing in the hallway and talking to himself. He prayed to God that God was bluffing. That this wasn’t really happening and can’t you do something about it and I won’t love it and I don’t care what you do to me cause you done enough already. I can’t believe you would do this to us again. Pacing on the hardwood floors in his sockfeet not wanting to wake her but talking to God without censor about the child he did not want and would not love and she lay there and listened and tried to close her eyes and sleep. Lying on her back and her hands on her belly and whispering to the child. Don’t listen to him. He don’t mean it. Please don’t listen. Her hands on her belly where she thought the child’s ears might be. Don’t listen to him. Please don’t. He will love you and so will I. She had swallowed all of this down, never speaking a word of his father’s resentment to another soul, hiding it below the surface of living in hopes that some miracle of love would somehow find its way into their lives.

What did you do about it? Colburn asked.

About what?

The dog.

Oh.

A dishtowel lay on the table and she picked it up and dabbed at her eyes and then she said I don’t even know if your father had ever shot a gun before. But he went and got a shotgun and a box of shells from somewhere and then he went over to the dog who was back on the chain and he shot it until it was nothing but a puddle. He shot it so many times and for so long the people in the neighborhood came out of their houses and wandered over to see what was going on. A crowd stood around and watched while he shot the dog again and again and some of the women cried and I don’t know if they were crying for the dog or for your brother or some of it all. If I remember right a policeman even pulled up and he only got out and watched with everybody else. That man who owned the dog stood there with his arms folded. Leaning against a tree in his backyard. He didn’t say nothing and when your father had shot the dog to the point where it couldn’t be shot no more he raised the shotgun and held it on the man. I was watching over the fence and I wanted to tell him to do it. I wanted to scream it. Kill him. Please just kill him. And me and everybody else thought he was about to except for maybe the man who never moved. Kept his arms folded and kept his shoulder leaned against the tree and he just looked at your father like he wouldn’t blame him. But then your father lowered the barrel and he knelt down on one knee. He propped the butt of the shotgun on the ground and he turned the barrel around toward his own face and he put his mouth around the end of it like he was trying to swallow the whole thing. And nobody moved. Not that man and not the policeman and not nobody else who had come to see what was happening. It was like time came to a stop. He stretched his hand down to the trigger and held his finger on it and I closed my eyes and waited for the sound of the rest of my life falling apart. But it didn’t. Not then anyhow. I opened my eyes again and he had taken the barrel from his mouth and he tossed the shotgun on the ground and he stood up and walked off down the street and I didn’t see him until the next day. I don’t know why we never told you. It was an awful idea and I’m sorry because I think your life and your father’s life might have been different if we had.

She passed the dishtowel from one hand to the other and then she laid it out flat on the table and smoothed it.

Even at fifteen he understood. He understood the indifference and the disinterest and the feeling that he was nothing more than a bother to his father. The questions he asked that his father would not answer and the pleading to go with him when he walked out the door and his father ignoring him and cranking the car and leaving him standing on the front porch waving his small hand. He understood the silence of the house and the deepset eyes of his father and the way they had always looked right through him as if he was only a shadow, some useless silhouette. I do not love you and I do not want you he had heard his father say a thousand times with the way his father glared at him when he did something wrong or when the boy tried to tell him about something that happened at school or when the boy touched him on the shoulder to tell him good night. I do not love you and I do not want you and he understood it now that his mother had admitted the grief they both had sucked down and digested for his entire lifetime and he saw his father’s sunken face when there was quiet in the workshop and he heard his father’s voice when he told him to get the hell out of here and he saw his father hanging from the beam of the workshop. He understood that he had been right in the moments when he wondered if he had done something to him. If he had committed some unforgivable sin. And he had.

He had been born.

His mother reached across the table and held out her hand to him. I’m sorry, Colburn.

But he did not take it. And he did not answer. He was fifteen years old and with her hand reaching out to him in a feeble gesture of apology he began to calculate how much longer he had to live in that house. He looked at the study guide for the driver’s test that was still in his hands and he did not see pages filled with the correct answers to the questions but he saw instead the possibility of leaving. Of having the legal right to get into a car and drive away from her and away from here and away from the photographs of his father that hung on the wall and away from the simulated life they had all lived together. He looked again at her empty hand and it was the hand of a stranger. Not the hand of a mother and not the hand of a friend and not the hand of comfort and though she had given birth to him against the wrath of his father she had not loved the way she should have loved. She did not fight the way she should have fought. And he understood and she had wanted him to forgive but in that instant he set his eyes toward the day when he would leave her to deal with it on her own. To sit alone and wonder if he gave a damn. Just like they had done to him.