My father’s sister came to fetch my brother,
even as Ma’s body cooled.
She came to bring my brother back to Lubbock
to raise as her own,
but my brother died before Aunt Ellis got here.
She wouldn’t even hold his little body.
She barely noticed me.
As soon as she found my brother dead,
she
had a talk with my father.
Then she turned around
and headed back to Lubbock.
The neighbor women came.
They wrapped my baby brother in a blanket
and placed him in Ma’s bandaged arms.
We buried them together
on the rise Ma loved,
the one she gazed at from the kitchen window,
the one that looks out over the
dried-up Beaver River.
Reverend Bingham led the service.
He talked about Ma,
but what he said made no sense
and I could tell
he’d never even heard her play piano.
He asked my father
to name my baby brother.
My father, hunched over, said nothing.
I spoke up in my father’s silence.
I told the reverend
my brother’s name was Franklin.
Like our President.
The women talked as they
scrubbed death from our house.
I
stayed in my room
silent on the iron bed,
listening to their voices.
“Billie Jo threw the pail,”
they said. “An accident,”
they said.
Under their words a finger pointed.
They didn’t talk
about my father leaving kerosene by the stove.
They didn’t say a word about my father
drinking himself
into a stupor
while Ma writhed, begging for water.
Billie Jo threw the pail of kerosene.
August 1934