THE ONLY THING ON THE TELEVISION IS A WAR STORY WITH John Wayne. Sometimes Jesse’ll talk like him joshing me but not tonight. He’s been quiet since we got back from bowling. I ask him does he want to play Crazy Eights or Nickle Nock. Watch your show, he says, I’m thinking.
I lay there petting Abby and thinking too. I think about Mama. I’m having trouble remembering her again. I can see her shape but where her face should be is like rippling water. Same with Daddy and J.P. and Peggy and Aunt Beulah. They’re fading away.
Mama used to say all we got is family. Which means I got nothing now. Nothing but Jesse and him barely. He tells me I’ll grow into being alone. But that’s him not me. We ain’t all alike. There’s good men and bad men. Brave men and cowards. Some are on the run from the past and some want to keep it with them.
I can’t help it I’m crying. Abby climbs on my chest and licks my face. What’s the matter? Jesse says. I don’t want to tell but it busts out of me. I’m missing Mama. You want to look at the pictures? Jesse says. He goes to his grip and takes out the album and I sit with him on the bed.
He points to the first picture. This is Mama and this is Daddy, he says. On their wedding day, I say. They went to Mr. Borden’s studio directly from church to get a photograph made and Mama said to Mr. Borden, I better look pretty in it or we ain’t paying. I got the same eyes as her the same nose. Jesse always says whenever I forget her I can look in a mirror. Jesse favors Daddy. Not so tall but seeming bigger. Crow-black hair and eyes. A girl’s pouty lips. He’s got a smile like Daddy’s too. One you don’t see much but when you do makes you smile too. I think he looks like Elvis Presley. He says I need glasses.
The next picture’s the whole family. Mama Daddy Jesse when he was seven sister Peg when she was five brother J.P. when he was three and me just born. Jesse says, You remember what we called you? You all called me Butterbean, I say. ’Cause you looked just like one, Jesse says. I say, You know what they should’ve called you? What? Jesse says. Turd, I say, ’cause that’s what you look like.
Jesse turns the pages. Daddy kissing a shovel at the mine. Peg in her coffin after a fever took her. All us on a trip to the ocean. I say to Jesse, You’re fourteen here and I’m seven. See, Jesse says, you remember. I say, I like this picture of Mama where she’s smiling. I run my finger over her face. You’re my special child, she told me, the one’ll be with me forever. The one’ll take care of me when I’m old. I will, Mama, I said, don’t you worry. And I did. I was the one took care of her after J.P. moved to Norfolk to work at the shipyard and after Jesse went away. He run off one night and we didn’t see him again for thirty years.
’Cause you turned, I say to him. It wasn’t safe no more for him in Monongah. He had to hit the road. He had to light out for the territory. I asked him was he an outlaw in those days. He said, Buddy I was whatever I had to be. Claudine the girl who turned him the one he run off with got dusted somewhere along the way and he’s been sad ever since.
In Monongah the world kept turning as Mama would say. Daddy got blown up in the explosion at the mine. J.P. broke his neck falling off a destroyer he was building. Aunt Beulah ate a bad mushroom and her liver quit. In the end only me and Mama was left. When she got sick she sent for Jesse. Turned out she knew all along where to write him. I asked why she was calling him home. I said, I can keep looking after you. I don’t doubt that hon, she said, but who’s gonna look after you?
It snowed the day she died and for a week after. The gravedigger said he got blisters on blisters planting her in the frozen ground. Jesse bought her a new dress to be buried in and a casket with white silk lining. I didn’t tell nobody he was back. Only me and Cousin Ray knew. Jesse said he’d give Ray the house for holding the funeral and keeping his mouth shut. If you give him the house where’m I gonna live? I asked Jesse. He told me not to worry.
The next night he sat me at the kitchen table and said he was leaving again but this time taking me with him. I asked where we was going. Out West, he said. Where the buffalo roam. I asked him could I get a horse because I didn’t know nothing then. I hadn’t been anywhere or seen anything. That’s why he was able to trick me like he did.
He made a cut on his arm and told me to drink the blood that come up. Said it was a ceremony we had to do before we left. Like when you was baptized, he said. Mama made pancakes when I got baptized. That’s what I was thinking while I did what he asked: Maybe I’ll get pancakes. I put my mouth to the cut and drank the blood never guessing my own brother was fucking me.
Because that’s how the Little Devil snuck inside. He hid in a bubble and I swallowed him down with the blood. A week later he started whispering in a voice so soft I first thought it was my own mind. Every day he got louder until finally he was howling so I couldn’t hear myself think and thrashing about like a salted slug. Feed Me You Sonofabitch You Cocksucker You Fool. And I been grappling with him ever since.
I feel better after looking at the pictures. I can see Mama again hear her laughing at my foolishness. I tell Jesse we should get a camera. What for? he asks. I tell him to make pictures to remember things. There’s nothing worth remembering, he says. All right, I say, how about a CB radio? He puts the album back in his grip. We don’t have any use for a CB radio either, he says. Firecrackers then, I say, for Fourth of July. How about that? That’s all I need, he says, for you to blow your fingers off.
I try not to hold against him what he did to me. I understand it’s the only way we could stay together and I understand that’s what Mama wanted. But if I knew in the kitchen in Monongah what I know now that I’d be at the beck and call of a blood-sucking monster till the ocean dries up and the sun falls out of the sky I’da taken that knife and cut Jesse’s heart out right there. That’s a sin even to think but a small one considering.