My Brother Michael Read online

  MY BROTHER

  MICHAEL

  Also by Janis Owens

  Myra Sims

  The Schooling of Claybird Catts

  MY BROTHER

  MICHAEL

  Janis Owens

  Copyright © 1997 by Janis Owens

  First paperback edition 2005

  978-1-56164-708-8 e-book ISBN.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Inquiries should be addressed to:

  Pineapple Press, Inc.

  P.O. Box 3889

  Sarasota, Florida 34230

  www.pineapplepress.com

  Lyrics from “Lay, Lady, Lay,” by Bob Dylan

  © 1969 by Big Sky Music. All rights

  reserved. International copyright secured.

  Reprinted by permission.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-

  Publication Data

  Owens, Janis, 1960-

  My brother Michael / by Janis Owens.— 1st Pineapple Press pbk. ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-56164-343-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  ISBN-10: 1-56164-343-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)

  1. Brothers—Fiction. 2. West Florida-

  Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3565.W5665M9 2005

  813’.54—dc22

  2005016658

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Design by Carol Tornatore

  Printed in the United States of America

  for WRO: Thank you for

  letting me be myself

  A historian is a prophet in reverse.

  Friedrich von Schlegel

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  The Writing of My Brother Michael

  Questions

  Chapter

  1

  On the day my brother Michael died, I was standing at a lectern surrounded by fifty-seven bored freshmen scribbling notes to my concise dissection of FDR and New Deal politics. With no knock, no warning at all, our department secretary, Mrs. Weeks, walked in with a small yellow telephone message that said simply: Call home.

  Before I could react, before I could even ask why she had taken it upon herself to interrupt my honors-level American history class with a routine phone message, she said, very gently, “Dr. Catts, your brother has died.” She paused to let the news sink in, then: “I’m so sorry I know you were close.”

  Seeing my stunned face, my tears, my total lack of control, she dismissed the class and, with remarkable Yankee efficiency, had me on a plane to Tallahassee within hours. She even packed me a suitcase, though to this day I don’t know how she found my apartment (I’d just moved) much less the socks, the underwear, and the dark funeral suit, still clean and crisp in a dry cleaner’s bag.

  But whatever her method, she had me in Florida late in the afternoon of his death, renting a car in Tallahassee and driving west to the town of my birth, arriving with two days to spare, but checking into an interstate motel room quite anonymously, refusing to let the family know I’d arrived. For they have long memories, my people do, and are not the kind to forget old indiscretions, no matter how far removed. And with Michael dead, dead at forty-three of pancreatic cancer that was only diagnosed during routine gallbladder surgery in October, I could not imagine them in a very forgiving mood and was too broken myself to withstand them.

  So I stayed holed up in that seedy motel room for the better part of two days, drinking whiskey for courage, sometimes dialing Michael’s home phone, but hanging up when unfamiliar voices answered, for despite Mrs. Weeks’ kind words, my brother and I had not spoken in eight years. We had not communicated at all beyond a quick visit by his daughter Melissa when she flew out of LaGaurdia on a student trip to Europe a year and a half earlier and the standard Christmas cards, quite impersonal, his name printed in calligraphy, as befitting a small town aristocrat, an impatient signature scribbled below. But not another word until shortly after Thanksgiving when he called from his hospital bed to remind me of a promise I’d made him the last time I ever saw him alive.

  A promise that was causing me actual physical pain as I dressed for his funeral, for I am a Tagamet addict and, what with the whiskey, had gone through a week’s supply in three days. By the time I’d knotted my tie and started for the church, I was actually spitting blood and hoping to God I wouldn’t do something humiliating at the service, like pass out. It would really be too much for these God-fearing folk to bear—the prodigal son stealing the limelight at the funeral of the older son—so I forewent the family section to take a seat among strangers in the back row, slumping passively and quietly bleeding into my handkerchief like the gentleman my mother raised me to be. I could see Mama, in fact, seated twenty or so pews ahead of me in the front and corner of the mob that packed the small sanctuary Despite her diminutive size, she had a distinct set to her shoulders and a headful of white hair that made her easy to pick out of the line of bowed heads on the family row.

  My brother’s widow was not so easily discerned, for her brown hair that showed red only in the sun was covered with a fine netting, her body was clothed like half the other women, in solemn, pagan black. But I tried. I have to say I tried. Even at his funeral, God help me, and if her brother Ira had seen me, I believe he would have killed me for it.

  But providentially, no one noticed me there in the back, with the place packed to perhaps twice that of normal capacity, folding chairs blocking the aisle, even the choir loft filled with sobbing mourners, all in evidence of the fact my brother was a mover and a shaker, a man of ideas. The owner of the town’s most prosperous factory, president of any civic organization he ever cared to join, the largest contributor to any and every charity in town—and those are just the laurels the first speaker, Dr. Winston (once GP to every snotnose and dogbite in the county, more recently, mayor) could get out before he was overcome by emotion and gave the pulpit back to the preacher. I was surprised to see this was still Brother Sloan, the same pastor who’d weaned us on salvation and damnation as children, who, with his fifty-odd years in the ministry, might have been expected to have something fortifying to say, but didn’t, only standing there an uncertain moment, then blowing his nose and asking Brother Cain, the AME pastor, to please come to the front.

  It was the first time I’d ever seen a black man without a tool belt step foot in Welcome Baptist, and I listened with a little more interest as he managed to sputter a few things about Michael, how he had hired the first black manager in the county, how that small act of tolerance had unlocked doors they never thought would open. He was trying to make some statement, some plea this practice not be abandoned when he, too, was overcome, not really crying, but shaking his head and returning to the deacon’s bench that was packed with ministers of every description, all mourning in various degrees of sincerity. Fresh from the land of rationalism, I couldn’t help but wonder if they weren’t weeping more at the death of those computer-generated checks than at Michael’s actual passing, but this small cynicism did not distract me as our old childhood friend from Magnolia Hill, Benny McQuaig, took the pu
lpit and managed between snorts and shuttering breaths to spin a pretty accurate eulogy.

  Foregoing the titles and civic niceties, Benny painted a truer picture of Michael, a portrait of a man who was a natural optimist, a pragmatist who was born poor but worked his way out of it one grinding, clocked-in hour at a time. Randomly jumping here and there, he recalled the summer Michael tried out for the majors in Sarasota, his lifelong love of the Braves, the tough years in the seventies when the plant had almost rolled over—years I was away, years I came back, years I wasn’t so fond of remembering.

  Benny’s flat country sincerity, along with his red face and many pauses to cry unabashedly, was whipping the audience into an even greater frenzy of remorse, but I was suddenly diverted by a flash of red hair in the front pew and for a moment was too mesmerized to bother anymore with grief.

  But it wasn’t her; I could see that fairly quickly. The red was bright carrot orange, not deep auburn, edging close to brown. It was—yes, surely—it was Melissa, my niece, the one who had dropped by between flights last year. On the pew next to her was a tall young man—that would be Simon, the oldest son, named for our father, and next to him Clayton, the baby, his hair fair and light. And next to him was an averted head, bowed in prayer or prostrated by grief, I could not tell, as my heart began its old relentless gallop.

  From the moment I spotted her till the last amen, the service slipped by with unexpected ease. There were the usual hymns and a fast, predictable sermon by a young minister I’d never seen before. Then suddenly, we were all standing, singing ‘Amazing Grace” a cappella and then filing up the aisle for the last viewing. In this, my careful retreat to the back betrayed me, for the ushers brought us out first, herding us up like so many sheep, trying to move things along so the family would be spared a prolonged wait. But I would not be hurried. I was too stunned for that and walked on heavy, leaden feet past pews and pews of people I’d left once, twenty years ago, then again, nine years ago, and never with many regrets, for we were not so compatible, my hometown and I.

  But I paid them no mind that day, my eyes on the long oaken casket that was so amassed in flowers that the air was almost stifled with the particular waxy smell of the florist shop. Roses, carnations, arrangements and sprays, all pressed in such profusion that it bewildered the eye, and I had paused to see, in wonder, how they covered the very walls, when someone hit me from behind in a powerful, hysterical embrace.

  For one incredible moment I thought it was Myra and was filled with a fast scramble of emotions: shock, shame, and yes—I won’t lie—pure joy. Then I heard my mother’s voice, rough, country, telling the world, “Gabe, Gabe, I knew you’d come. I knew you’d come—my son, my son—”

  And while she punctuated her every word with a solid knock of her hard little West Florida head, I turned and found myself facing my brother’s family: Melissa, with a red, shattered face, who stepped forward to hug me over Mama’s head; Simon, dark and controlled, offering his hand like a grown man, though he was hardly more than a child, just outside sixteen, a vague breath of a memory of Michael, only taller and broader through the shoulders, a legacy of his mother’s blood, of the hardy frame of the North Alabama Celt.

  But that was all, no one else stirred, for the younger son, Clayton, was a stranger to me, watching me with level, neutral eyes that were mad and sullen, young enough to be petulant with something as relentless as death as he stood at his mother’s side, supporting her in her grief. And though she was very close, barely an arm’s length away, there was no recognition at all in her face as she looked at me, only a blank silence, and something in her very immobility reminded me desperately of the day her bastard of a father broke my wrist for showing her how to make a hopscotch board in the dirt of her backyard.

  She had backed away slowly that day, one baby step at a time, till she was flush against the fence that marked the iron-clad border of her hellish little world and stood there passively, with no word of protest spoken, none allowed. And just as before, when I had been too afraid of that monster of a father to do anything but stare, I abandoned her, giving in to my mother’s embrace and turning and looking on the corpse of my brother Michael.

  And instead of the true confession I was afraid I might blurt out, or the useless words of regret, I only blinked at him, then murmured aloud in a very plain, controlled voice, “God, he looks like Daddy.”

  Chapter

  2

  Now Daddy was a yard man. And a mechanic. And a painter and a cook. Daddy was, in fact, a job-hopper and a dreamer, and my mother has excused my behavior many times by pointing to my progenitor. But I never complain, not me, for he was also a man of great sensitivity and fine intelligence who had the great financial misfortune of being born in Coffee County, Alabama, during the Depression. Not the Great Depression, as I was once fond of telling my students up north, but the Great Depression: the one that arrived with the first pioneer in South Alabama and was still not over, last time I looked. Not that anyone ever laughed as loudly as I at my little joke, for no one in the Ivy League gives a damn about the South, except, of course, for Faulkner, who in my humble opinion they quote more than is necessary to impress—but, here, I’m digressing. I was speaking of my father.

  Simon William Catts. No relation to Sydney, though Mama would have loved to have claimed him. No relation to anyone in West Florida for that matter, but merely one of a thousand rural immigrants driven from the land by the boll weevil and lured south by the commercial appeal, namely a job in a Washington County turpentine camp that he managed to hold onto until perhaps 1937, when he moved into town and began his great round of semi-permanent employment, trying his hand at whatever struck his fancy: machine work, farm labor, street sweeping. It was only when he met a defrocked Baptist preacher’s daughter, a tiny blonde girl of fifteen, who was warned not to marry him, that he settled down to a regular job and a mill house on the northwest end of town, the house where my sister and brother and I were born, the house my mother lives in to this day.

  But back then, in ‘42, it may have been seen as a purely temporary situation; temporary, that is, till the babies came, the first daughter in ten months, the second, a boy, arriving the month my father was called up to active duty. Michael Simon, he named him, in what he thought might be his last act of fatherhood. The next week he left for the Islands, where he spent two bloody, vicious years as a private in the infantry, doing the dirty work at MacArthur’s back.

  But he survived—for we are nothing if not a family of survivors—and returned home to bestow on my mother one final child, another son, who she named Gabrielle by mistake, intending Gabriel, though she was too stubborn to admit it, and when anyone would subsequently point out her error, she would cock her head to the side and ignore the spelling of the matter to say defiantly, “These boys looked like angels when they’se borned and I named them for angels.” Never explaining why she’d named me in the feminine form, never bothering to write and have it changed once she’d discovered the mistake, and such was the rock solid power of my mother’s convictions that people would never argue, but merely smile and nod and say things like “How nice.”

  So that’s how I came to be born to a mill worker and his wife in a five-room Cracker house on an orange dirt turnaround called Lafayette Street in a section of town literally across the tracks known locally as Magnolia Hill. Now God alone knows who first applied this ridiculous antebellum tag to the area, which was not exactly a slum but not quite middle class either, the small houses haphazardly built of wood or block or sometimes tarpaper, the yards hardly ever grass, but the overall effect softened by monstrous trees, live oak and camphor and pecan, that grew in abundance, for we lived on the tip of the Florida aquifer, and there was never a tree that died from lack of water, not on Lafayette Street. Nor was any child lonely, unless it was by choice, for if there were one thing these people were adept at, it was producing children. At one point in my life I remember having nine best friends, all of whom lived within a
two-block radius of my house, all of whom attended Welcome Baptist at the corner, where Mama taught Sunday School and Daddy took us out back if we misbehaved. Which we seldom did, for Mama was a consummate storyteller, and the Old Testament stories of Samuel and Saul, David and Bathsheba, Balaam and Samson were the height and depth, the circle and moral circumference of our pale little world.

  Blighted is the sociologist’s term. Magnolia Hill was blighted, but the adults were children of poverty themselves and never seemed conscious of the bare, tree-shaded squalor, as they went about the business of desperately holding onto jobs and raising thin, crew-cut children, with no talk of regret, no brooding over might-have-been. Perhaps they were too busy with the routine landscape of their lives, the doctor bills and rent and putting food on the table, but I suspect they were also tired. Bone tired, for there is nothing more exhausting than poverty, and my earliest memories of my father are of him sitting at the dining room table every night after supper and patiently cutting new soles for his shoes out of cardboard box. Every night, without exception, then, with his feet properly outfitted for another day, he’d go out and sit on the porch till bedtime, for there was nothing else to do when it was too hot to sit inside, too hot to do anything but rock and pull up chairs for neighbors and listen to the strings of gossip that stayed fairly innocent until the children were sent to bed, then delved into the realm of head-shaking shock.

  I had an appetite for innuendo, even then, and late at night, long after the other children had been exiled to bed, I’d wait till my brother Michael was snoring, then creep into the front bedroom and press my ear to the window fan and listen to news of the underbelly of Lafayette Street. And it was there, sometime in the summer of—oh, it must have been ‘60, when I was twelve or so—that Mama and the other women first began discussing the Sims. Endlessly, endlessly, and I could not understand why it fascinated them so.