SIBLINGS: — Little Brother
by Susan G Holland
The little redheaded baby that was my brother grew up a funny, precious, smart, sensitive, stubborn, and a left-handed person. He was born in 1941. I was three and a half. My father had just found out his illness was diabetes, and was not ready for a second child.
My mother had pretty much finagled the existence of this baby, and she was protective of the little fellow while my father was never altogether happy he had come into the family.
Plus Carl was left-handed. That was considered a correctable defect in those days. Try as they might, no one was going to make my little brother right handed, and he was left handed and a brilliant, somewhat dyslexic kid from the get-go.
But he was an amazingly creative and intelligent soul, and did some significant things in his life. Acerbic in expression and words as a little kid he was sent so often from the table for not eating right or sitting right or being appropriate at dinnertime.
As often as he would get paddled in his room upstairs (and he always refused to cry) I would also leave the table early and grieve with him from the other side of his bedroom wall… my room. I would hear the squeaks of suppressed brokenness from the other side of the wall And I would slip bits of dessert through the rather wide gap under his bedroom door.
Later I actually removed a picture from my bedroom wall, and carved a hole through the plaster that made a talking hole into my brother’s room. We would say alarming things about parents, and life, and hatred, and defiance through that hole, and pass notes back and forth.
Maybe that’s why I was an honored secret visitor to his and his little friends’ dug out fort in the tangle wangles of our woods…just beyond the honeysuckle snarls and a few trees into the woods there was a place on the floor of the forest that had a lot of leaves and branches on it. I got to see them brush those away and lift a plank to reveal their hiding hole…big enough for maybe five small boys.
And in my case, one slender girl, whose admittance was bought with the book I had discovered in our attic…it was a book about breastfeeding infants! With pictures!
I was the teacher as we all gaped at those mysterious breasts. A dirty book, we were sure, and to be smuggled back into the attic once we were through with it so no one would ever find out I had given a sex lesson to a pack of very young and curious boys.
Carl and I were close like that through our childhood, and even into our 20’s during which we had adventures that were more daring than most of our school friends…we would save allowances and actually take the train down to the Jersey shore to spend the day getting sandy and sunburned, and then get back in time to sneak our sunburned selves off to our rooms with parents puzzled about our lacks of appetite.
Surely they knew from the sand and the sunburn, but they didn’t let on.
Then he was sent to military school in Virginia by my father, and after that he enlisted in the Army. The last time I was closely involved in his life was when I was a bridesmaid in his first wedding (of three) to a local family’s only daughter.
That was the end of our special buddy-ship, simply because the new wife was part of a different world altogether. Special holidays were tense, though civil. There were two other marriages…no children. My brother was sweet with my kids, no surprise. He loved kids. He adopted his second wife’s kids and was a loving father to them.
He never let on if he was unhappy. We would find out afterwards. The last time I visited him was when I visited his home at the Jersey Shore from my home in Washington State. I found that there was a really bad discomfort during dinner.
I had mentioned something that pointed to the subject of “political correctness.” The expression on his wife’s face immediately told me I was in trouble. She sat back, wiped her mouth and folded her hands and looked at them. My brother was immediately a tiger, expounding his disdain for “things PC” and all this fuss about talking about things that were real and obvious and not secrets at all. He certainly was not going to back off from offending anyone with anything he had to say, and that was that!
That incident was the worst of that visit, but there was a sweet incident that balanced it out and I still keep it in my heart as an emblem of the closeness we had in our history, my brother and I.
It was the day he said “let’s go down to the beach, okay?” Well, yes! It was very okay! He was very ill at that time, and had been for a long time, with a colostomy bag and as thin as a rail. The swimmer in him had long vanished, he was really too weak to swim or even take his beloved sailboat out into the bay. So he didn’t plan to swim but he gave me a “beach tag” and went down with me to the familiar sandy beach where I peeled down to my bathing suit and waded out into those saline waves with the special smell and buoyancy that I always loved so much.
Carl did not come into the water; he sat on the rock jetty near where I was swimming back and forth in my beloved Atlantic Ocean and just watched and smiled, that companionable old smile. It was a bond across the water. He was visibly very very happy to see me there in our old familiar setting. We walked home while I toweled off and we were back in childhood for that little time.
A year or so later I was living about 25 miles inland from his house in NJ, having moved for a few years back to the east coast. He had called me the day before asking if I would be willing to drive him to the Philadelphia hospital where he had a doctor’s appointment. Sure I said. His condition had worsened and he was in very fragile health. But early next morning the phone rang.
My brother said, “I called to say I won’t be able to go to Philly today, Sister.” (he had called me that affectionately all our lives.) He told me he was sitting in the tub, having lost all his digestive tract control and was simply not fit to go anywhere.
He told me his wife was at her work.
He told me it was okay, that he would manage, but he wanted to talk to me.
We talked for at least an hour in the same way we used to talk way back in sister — brotherhood times. He specifically asked all about every member of our family — all the ones he knew — and about my children whom he had never gotten to know well. All about our mutual friends from childhood. About my plans for my art and life. About memories from growing up…the fort…the adventures…the people…the happy times and the awful times.
It was the longest phone call I ever had from him. It was weird and wonderful and surprising and unusual. He was in no hurry. Just talked along.
Then we said we would try to go to the hospital again another day when his innards were behaving.
That evening I got a call from his wife. She was at the local hospital and, she said“…after all you ARE his sister…” as if she had wished not to talk to me.
She told me he had been unconscious when she got home from work, and now he was at the hospital and it didn’t look as if he would make it.
“I’ll be right there”, I said.
She said “No, that’s not necessary; I just thought you should know.”
I said..”I’m coming anyway.”
He had just died when I arrived there. The nurse was struggling with his hand. His wife said “she can’t get the wedding ring off his finger.”
The nurse was saying “I think we will have to cut the finger to get it off.”
I was saying, “Please let the undertaker do that for you…he will know how.”
His new widow shrugged and waved the nurse away. I held her and we both wept.
After a while it seemed we should go home. I touched my brother, all splayed out the way he used to sleep when he was a kid. You couldn’t touch him in those days — he would lash out and slug you automatically. I always touched his toe and ran for my life if I wanted to wake him.
He was not moving, now, of course. I stroked his head and began to gather my stuff. She got her stuff. We went out together, saying that we should make time to get to know one another. Had a hug, and she went to her car and I went to mine.
Next time I talked to her on the phone, I asked her about the funeral. She said she had decided to arrange his burial another way, later. I asked if she would let me know. She didn’t answer at that time…and I have not been able to get her to respond to either calls or letters since then.
He is still my little brother. Rest in Peace, Little Brother. We always did love each other.
He made sure I knew that before he died.
Originally published at cowbird.com under the pen-name Old Traveler.
