He was running from the law again, in a flatbed pickup that wouldn’t outrun a riding lawn mower, but on the narrow and twisting roads of home, speed is less important than nerve. A man who can live with the fact that he will almost certainly sooner or later drive head-on into a tree can almost always outrun a man who expects to live to see his children when he clocks out that evening. The man who doesn’t have any fear, who has so little to lose, hell, he can almost fly.
It helps to have a little bit of liquor in you, and Mark did, even on a Sunday. I only heard about it after the fact, but I can see him hunched over the steering wheel, cigarette in his mouth, rumbling between the ditches in a cloud of blue smoke, the engine running red-hot, about to come apart under his feet, slinging rods like shrapnel. He had a good head start and was already well out of sight, but to get away he needed a hidey-hole, a place to duck and cover for just a little while, until the deputy gave up. (One of us, it seems, is always running from the law, or something.)
That was when he saw the little church, the Church of the Nine Gifts, and saw the cars pulling up in the parking lot for the Sunday service. He hit on a plan. He whipped the truck in among the sheep, and together they filed inside, for the worship. Mark sat drunk in the back row. “Welcome Brother,” they said to him, and he stayed for the entire service, the preaching, the singing, the altar call, everything.
They are good people, there at that church, my momma told me. The preacher told her, when he came to visit her some time later, that the sinners are the ones he wants to find in God’s pews. The Saved are doing alright already. They treated Mark so good that he kept going back for two years.
But, like me I guess, he never heard the call.
I could not make that story up if I tried. At best, it sounds like a scene out of the whiskey-running days of the 1950s, like pages ripped from my own ancient family history. It was just a few years ago.
Time doesn’t mean much to Mark. In many ways he is frozen in a generation he never even saw, and all his adult life he has lived life pretty much like he wanted. The price, from time to time, is jail, and every time he goes in my momma dies a little more inside. I know it is a cliché to say that, but if you had ever seen her sit in that living room and talk to him on the phone when he is in jail, knowing there was not one thing she could do to help him beyond a little cigarette money, it would be clear to you what I mean. It’s not the shame of it. The shame she can stand. She has experience at it, at standing before judges and bailiffs, pleading. She learned to do it with my father.
No, what kills her is the helplessness, the worry, the fear that someone will hurt him while he is in there, separated from her love and protection by razor wire and iron bars. I have seen her, a dozen times, stare at the ringing phone like it was a coiled snake. But I never saw her not pick it up, because company was the only thing, I guess, she could give him.
Maybe it is because the boy is my brother and I am blind to some things, but I do not believe, not for one minute, that he is cruel, that he is inherently mean, the way that my daddy could be. But at times it seems like he is possessed by the same demons that drove my daddy, as if he inherited them, the way some rich man passes down a silver pocket watch. Sam escaped them. I escaped them, except on some particularly bad nights. In a way, I guess Mark was just a victim of odds.
I know he is a decent man, when he is not drinking. I also know that there is nothing he would not do for me, sober.
I have seen him almost cry over run-over dogs, and seen him gently lift them in his arms to care for them. I have seen the pride that he takes in building things—like the house he built with his own hands—and I have marveled at how there is nothing he can’t do, given the right tools.
There are times, many times, when he makes me laugh, like with the story of the church visit, and times when I want to drive my fist through a wall. Mostly what I do, just like my momma, is worry. Unlike my father, whose story came to me in time, I have no idea what he is trying to wash away. I only know that he hurts my momma, and doesn’t seem to know.
He would never hurt her intentionally, never. There is only the worry he causes from the drinking, fighting and recklessness. I know how close he has come to dying so many times. He carries one bullet in his arm, between the bones, and his back is crisscrossed with knife wounds from a man who cut him up from the backseat of a car as he tried to fight his way out the front. I’m afraid of what it will do to her, if he is hurt much more.
She told me, once, that the reason it hurt her so to see him so angry, so unhappy, was because it made her feel as if she failed, as if she did something wrong, or didn’t do enough.
“I know you can pass hate on,” she told me. “And when Mark was being born, I was so angry at your daddy. I’d write him letters, and I was so full of hate, I think maybe I give it to Mark.”
I told her she was acting crazy, that if my brother’s life was a result of genetics, we all knew where it came from.
Our family is patient with drinking men. I hope, someday, that I will be surrounded by so much love, so much loyalty and patience, as that boy engenders. Kin, angry over insults, butt-kickings, over being used again and again to pay off his bails and debts, still help him, protect him. I begged him, once to change, for her. He only grinned.
My momma has grown old beside him, afraid.
My father took her youth, boy.
Let her have her old age.
My momma had been hoping again for a girl, when he was born. He had light brown hair, darker than mine or Sam’s, more like our daddy’s hair. She used to let it grow a little too long, when he was a baby, because she thought it was pretty. He was the only one in the whole family who ever had a curl—mine and Sam’s and even her hair hung straight as a board, but not his. When she finally cut it, he was almost a year old. She put the curls in an old envelope, and saved them.
We called him Freckles when he was little. You could take one look at him and know, in that half-joking way, that this boy is going to be trouble. In his school pictures he is not smiling so much as he is grinning, grinning like the devil. Our barbers had improved at the time, so his bangs were cut more or less straight across his forehead, and the eyes underneath were alive with mischief, and you knew he was going to get into something as soon as the photograph was taken and he climbed down off the stool.
He was not spoiled any more than Sam or me, because there was nothing to spoil him with, except attention. After the fourth son had died, Mark was still just three, and maybe it is true that Momma made him the baby again, making him her greatest responsibility, the focus of so much of her attention, her life. In her eyes, he is still “the baby,” still her greatest responsibility on this earth. When Mark was sick, especially after her baby died, she was frantic.
He grew up thin as a rail, and stuck on one speed: wide-open. When we played football in the schoolyard, I was the quarterback and Mark was the only one I ever threw to, because he would catch it and knock anybody down who was in the way. The only way to fight him was to sit on him, carefully. He bit.
He was also the best rock thrower I have ever seen. After that time he hit me in the hand with a rock from so far away I didn’t even see him, we put him to work in right field for my uncle Ed’s softball team. He was the youngest player there. If the outfielders inched in on him, grinning at the skinny boy at the plate, he slapped it over their heads and they would chase it, cussing and red-faced, to the fence.
He didn’t care much for school, but he was a wizard with tools. When he was still too young to drive, he could take a car apart. He was a bricklayer, a plumber, a roofer, a carpenter who could sight down a board the way some people sight down a gun, and tell you if it was true or not.
When he was sixteen, he had a job that was hard but steady, a nice car and nice clothes. And that was all I knew about my little brother for a while, because it was about that time that the road in our life fragmented, that I stopped riding to work with him in those huge dump trucks, that I began a life that only faintly included him.
I heard, once, that he had found a girl, but that she was mean inside and ultimately left him, and broke his heart. People tell me he was never the same, after that. I don’t know. I can’t believe one woman can wreck a man. Maybe I’ve just never met the right one.
Out of sight and mind, he built a house with his own hands, far back in the woods, and used a handsaw to cut the boards. When I finally made it to see him, I was amazed. It was no shack, it was a real house. He was proud of it. He dug a catfish pond. He planted a flower bed. He filled the yard with dogs and chickens. When I went home on Thanksgiving, we would take my shotgun up into the woods behind his house and, with Sam, take turns throwing Purex jugs into the air and blowing them into scraps of white plastic. I guess I fooled myself into believing everything was fine; maybe I just wanted my new life to be free of any reminders of the old days.
But every now and then when I called home, I would ask Momma how she was and she would say fine in a way that told me she was lying. Always, there was some news of Mark, a wreck, a run-in with the law, and she would always say the same thing. She didn’t call me because she didn’t want to worry me. Once they sent him off for a year, and she suffered every day of it, afraid for him. You hear people say all the time how someone ages ten years in one. I have seen it.
I should have gone to see him. I told myself it was because I couldn’t bear the thought of it, seeing him in a cage. The truth is a damn sight uglier than that. That was a time in my life when I was so conscious of who I was, working hard not just to survive but succeed, and a brother in prison did not fit in.
I should have gone. I should have taken him a carton of Camels and some money for the prison store, and talked to him as long as the guards would let me. Instead, I gave the money to my momma, and let her take it.
I didn’t do right by him any more than I did right by my momma all those years I was content to let her live in the background. There is time, I tell myself, to make it right. But while I know what I have to do for her, I do not even know where to begin with my baby brother. There is an anger in him so much like my father, but I cannot tell how it developed, where it came from in his own life. It is enough to make a man believe in ghosts.
He calls me sometimes, usually when he is drinking, and tells me he loves me.