My brother Sam grew up to be a good man. He works at the cotton mill in Jacksonville, unloading the big trucks outside that massive old red-brick building. It’s a good job, compared to the work he has done before. The pay isn’t a whole lot but it allows his family to have decent health insurance, and that eases his mind. It’s hard to put a price tag on peace of mind, he says, and that’s all he’s really working for. So he always comes to work on time and works as long as they will let him, and like any man who works with his hands in America today, he wakes up wondering if this morning might be the last time they let him in the gate. Still, his loyalty to the people who give him his check, his livelihood, his life, is boundless. The plant awards hats, shirts and jackets for bonuses for perfect attendance. I have seen him when every single piece of clothing on his lanky body read “Fruit of the Loom.”
In the slow times—no one likes to say the word layoff—he cuts firewood and loads it on his old ’63 Chevy pickup to sell to people in town. He will work on your car for five dollars and sometimes for nothing, but somehow he always manages to keep just a little ahead of the bank on his little wood-frame house with the rose garden in back and the state flower of Alabama, the satellite dish, off to one side, even if that means working with a drop-cord light and a fistful of tools until 1 A.M. under a broken-down tractor, and getting up just a few hours later to pull a twelve-hour shift.
Teresa, his wife, works at the Food Outlet: we still just have two supermarkets. She has been good to him, and good for him.
The education he didn’t get so many years ago, as he fed that school’s coal furnace and plunged the toilets to earn his free lunch, doomed him to manual labor. When he was thirteen he was working full-time for my uncle Ed, pick-and-shovel work, loading those boxcars with fifty-pound bags of clay and lime that left fat blisters on his shoulders and arms.
He is not ashamed of work. If he is bitter about it, about any of it, he has never said. He built a decent life from absolute nothing and is content, and does his dreaming in a healthy way, forward. He rarely drinks and only cusses in moderation. (I respect him, in case I haven’t made that clear. I always have.)
Much of my young life he spent coming to rescue me, with his fists—on the playground—or just his hands. He is one of those men who can fix anything. I would break down on the side of the road and sooner or later there he would come, shaking his head, calling me a “chucklehead,” but he always got me running again, or pulled me out of the ditch, or at least wrapped a chain around my bumper and towed me out of the embarrassment of the middle of the road.
Sometimes I wonder what will happen if Sam and I are called to stand before Saint Peter on the same day, and my sins include everything from trifling with loose women to sleeping in church, and Sam just says, “Well, Pete, once I did fish on a Sunday.”
It is what Sam does if he is not working. He has the patience of Job and I like to watch him play his lure across the pond, so easy, smooth, peaceful, waiting for the tug on the line and an explosion of water as the fat bass climbs into the air, mad, shaking its head left and right, its jaw big enough to stick your fist in. “Son!” he always hollers, then pulls him in, slow and steady. He looks the fish over a little, not gloating, but admiring, and eases him back into the murky water, free. He is damn near a genius at fishing. When I was a little boy he would hook a fish, then hand the pole to me so I could pretend I caught it.
He watches over my mother, giving me opportunities to roam, to discover things. He cuts her firewood, and patches her water pipes when they freeze. He is the one who always comes to see her on her birthday.
All he demands is that once in a blue moon I will sit with him in the barn where he stores his pickup and bass boat and tell him about where I’ve been, what I’ve seen.
In return, he brings me home, all the way home, telling about layoffs at the mill, about who died and where the funeral was. He tells me about babies born, about how his new saw can cut through a green pine in nothing flat, and how ol’ Chuckle Head in Websters Chapel got locked out of his trailer again. He is a grand storyteller, much, much better than me. Sometimes I laugh so hard I have to go lie down.
We plan, every time we talk, to go fishing. Me, him, Mark, if he will. We plan it and I always ruin it, because of work. He never gets mad at me, he just nods his head.
Work. He understands.
Funny, where boys find their heroes. We find them in wars, on football fields in Tuscaloosa and Auburn, on the hot asphalt at Alabama International Motor Speedway. I wanted to gallop with the football like Johnny Musso; I wanted to crash and live, like Jimmy “Smut” Means.
But the one I wanted to be just like for the longest time was the one who beat me up every other Thursday, who chased me around and around the house with a slingshot loaded with chinaberries, who lied and told me that a sunk-in septic tank outside the house was really an unmarked grave, who rigged up a trapeze in the barn and let me go first, to test the ropes, and who hid with me under that bed in that big, hateful house, and, as the tears rolled down my face, put his arm around my shoulders.
I wonder a lot if Mark would have been different, if he had just had me, like I had Sam. Maybe not. Probably not. I guess well never know, and in a sad way, that will be my salvation.
We finally got to go fishing, Sam and me. Mark was nowhere around.
We fished in Paul Williams’s pond, about a mile from home, using bright-colored worms to compensate for the murk of the water. “Look,” he told me, pointing to where a water moccasin, thick as my arm, moved in slow undulations across the still water. “There’s fish in here,” he said, “that can eat that ol’ boy.”
But as usual, he was catching them and I wasn’t. I cranked the bait too fast, he told me, but I’ve never had any patience for anything. Any bass chasing my bait would have had to have been on roller skates. The hours slipped by and he caught six. I lost half a rubber worm.
I told him I reckoned I needed to be getting home. We fished the next few minutes side by side. One of his casts hooked a fat, four-pound bass, in the shallows near the bank. I could see its gills expand as the huge mouth, like a bucket, scooped up the lure.
Then he handed the rod to me, so I could reel it in.