Dwayne Brewer swung the iron door open for light so that he could see what was left of his brother. Standing there in the mouth of the root cellar, he felt the darkened room breathe against him, the smell a growing thing that had worsened since he last came. He took shallow breaths to keep from gagging and staggered inside carrying a heavy bag of lime over one shoulder and a tattered Bible in his hand. “You stink, brother,” he said as he set the bag by Sissy’s feet.
Carol’s skin was no longer bloated and tight. Over the course of that past week it collapsed and liquefied into an almost creamy consistency, the greenish-black of pond water. All of the fluids drained from his body into a puddle around him. His skin seemed to be ripping itself apart, splitting open and seeping black.
Kneeling beside Sissy’s body, he dug their father’s knife from deep in his brother’s pocket and opened the sodbuster. He sliced a wide smile at the top of the heavy paper sack and tossed handfuls of lime onto the body like he was sowing seed. When a thin layer dusted Carol’s clothes and flesh, Dwayne collapsed onto the dirt and leaned against a heavy pitched column with his legs hugged to his chest. Outside, leaves drifted about in a rust-colored clatter that rasped the ground as the wind came through the valley. Flies buzzed around his face and he swatted them away only to watch them light on his brother. Dwayne couldn’t bear to look.
It was the fourth Sunday he’d spent without him, and that was the day that was hardest. Their grandparents had been greatly religious, and growing up he and Sissy spent most Sundays listening to their grandfather read scripture with a pair of wire-rimmed glasses propped on the edge of his nose in the front room of the shack where he lived. In summer, he’d take them on the road to tent revivals that sprang up in remote hollers, and when they were with him, they were safe. Maybe it was that being safe that made the words stick, but either way Dwayne Brewer had read the King James cover to cover a hundred times if he’d read it once.
Despite being believers, he and Sissy were never ones for church, for sanctuaries or the people who filled their pews. They’d tried once after their grandfather was gone. When the bell rang in that tiny white church along the stream, they walked right up to the front row so that they’d be close to the words. The preacher kept cutting eyes toward them through the opening prayer and they could hear folks whispering behind them. They didn’t know any different, had never been before, so they didn’t find it strange. The preacher was about to deliver his message when Dwayne felt someone tap him on the shoulder. He looked up and one of the ushers, a red-faced man with bloodshot cattle eyes, leaned down and whispered in his ear that he’d like them to come with him. Dwayne told his brother and Sissy whispered, “Why?” and Dwayne told him he didn’t have the foggiest, but up they stood and down the aisle they went.
When they were at the back of the church, the usher opened his arm to a pew along the back wall. Dwayne told him he didn’t understand and the man explained that he and his brother were making some of the people in the church nervous, that maybe it’d be best if they sat there at the back. That old familiar feeling found him right then and he latched on to that man’s throat and squeezed till his eyes got buggy. People were turning around in the pews, men standing up and coming toward him, and Dwayne could see them out of the corners of his eyes, but he didn’t care, he couldn’t wait to explode when they were on him. All of a sudden he could feel someone patting him on the back, the nasally voice of his brother saying, “Maybe we ought to go, Dwayne. Maybe we ought to get out of here.” Something about his brother’s voice stopped him. He let go of that man right before the others reached him and he and his brother trudged out of there without so much as a word.
A few weeks later they were driving down the road and Dwayne saw on the church sign a message that read: GOD RECRUITS FROM THE PIT NOT THE PEDESTAL. He had guffawed at the thought, shaking his head as they passed, thinking, You don’t know a goddamn thing about it.
He was staring at the soles of his brother’s boots in a sort of illusory trance. “I was thinking yesterday morning about a passage in Isaiah,” Dwayne said, as he opened his Bible across his knees. “Figured I’d read that this morning, if that’s all right with you.” He paused. “What it says is this. It says . . .”
Dwayne began to read the passage, the fifty-third chapter of Isaiah, which told of Christ being born not to kings, but to nothing, a tender plant rooted in dry ground. It was from there that He came to know suffering, the grieving and sorrow of sin.
“He was oppressed, and He was afflicted, yet He opened not His mouth: He is brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers is dumb, so He openeth not his mouth . . . And He made His grave with the wicked, and with the rich in His death; because He had done no violence, neither was any deceit in His mouth.”
Dwayne thought of his brother and he thought of Christ and he could see no difference between. Both had been born at the bottom, their burden the weight of the wicked. Sin be the thorns in His head, the nails in His hands and feet, the spear in His side. Sin be the spit on Carol’s face, the ridicule of poverty, the beatings, the torment of silence. It pleased the Lord to bruise them, to put their hearts to grief, for only through that suffering, through bearing the sin of many, could they make open the doors for those who had done them harm.
When he’d finished reading the chapter, Dwayne slapped the book closed. He tossed it into the dirt beside him, a poof of dust rising from the floor. He looked up with a tremendous smile and said, “Brother, you are like Jesus.”
The room was still and in that stillness was a low static that sounded like crumpled newspaper. The noise came from his brother. Sissy whispered something Dwayne couldn’t make out from where he sat and he turned his head to the side to listen closely. The sound was still too low to make out, barely audible but constant. He gaped wide-eyed at his brother’s face, Sissy’s lips seeming to quiver, and watched in amazement, as what he’d been praying seemed to be happening right before his eyes. When he was a boy, he had an aunt who could stop blood, who could read a verse from the Bible and stop blood from leaving a body. Her name was Opal and she could blow the thrush from a baby’s throat by breathing into its mouth. There was a magic to this world. Dwayne had seen it. And right then he was sure he would see it again.
From where he sat, he couldn’t make out the words and so he crawled closer and leaned his ear to his brother’s lips. A whir of blowflies round as nickels circled their faces and lit on Dwayne’s shoulders and back. He stared at his brother’s arms where reddish-brown mites the size of pinheads scuttled over black skin, tiny eggs scattered over him like mustard seeds. The ground around him was pulsing with life, dull brown beetles, some iridescently green, centipedes spiraled like ammonites. The sound was low and constant, but he could not make out the words, and Dwayne leaned away so that he could read his brother’s lips. That’s when he saw it, a wriggling mass that moved as a cream-colored tongue, a single syllable broken into a thousand moving parts. The sight of it caught in Dwayne’s throat and he ran his finger into his brother’s mouth, scooping out all that he could. He slung his hand and the flies droned around him.
Amidst that horror, Dwayne Brewer was wrecked by a single heartbreaking thought. There was nothing he could do to stop what was happening. No matter what he did, the last thing in the world he loved was melting away like wax.
The smell he’d worked so hard to ignore turned his stomach then. He pushed to his feet and walked outside because there was no breath left in the room. Outside, a sharp wind stood the hairs of his arms on end and Dwayne closed his eyes and lifted his face to the sky. He could feel the sun warming his pale skin and he blinked awake to a golden light so piercingly yellow that it was as if he’d become a honeybee held in the palm of a dandelion. The air danced with the musk of dying leaves, an autumn crowded with oakmoss, oud, and leather. He breathed deeply and it filled his lungs with a calming sort of warmth.
How such wickedness survived amidst the beautiful had always baffled him. Why He would fill a world with this kind of suffering, a puzzle that carried no rhyme or answer and sat in Dwayne’s heart like a stone. All he knew was that all his life he’d been asked to carry and he was tired. Me and You been at each other for too long, he thought. The two of us, we’ve never seen eye to eye.