Chapter Ten - Asher #2
Glen sits in the rocking chair next to me. My great-grandfather made them. He went out into the woods and cut down two sweet gum trees. He did it the old-fashioned way, with an ax, and sanded and stained until they were perfect. He set them on this porch and they haven’t moved since.
We sit in silence for a time, rocking in the chairs like two old men who’ve never known another place but this. I finish my cigarette and light another. I finish that one and light another.
Glen says, “We’re thinking about planting pumpkins for the autumn.” He scratches his chin. “Let the kids in town come to a pumpkin patch.” He shrugs. “Dad talked about it enough, but never did it. About time we did, maybe.”
I take a drag. Exhale.
“Pumpkins and some squash.” He leans forward, elbows on his knees.
“There’s plenty of space for it. It just takes a lot of time.
” He pauses for a few seconds. “Last couple years, Dad’s been really tired, you know?
He’d talk about things. Make all these plans.
Then he would sleep through breakfast and we’d just let him.
He was so tired. Mom made him go into town, see Doc Winters and Doc Winters said he had to take it easy. He could have a stroke. And, well…”
There’s no malice in Glen’s voice. No irritation.
No reason to think he’s telling me this to make me feel worse than I already do.
But it’s the fact that he’s talking to me so normally.
As if the last ten years were a torn seam sewn up by the last few days, patched and good as new. I don’t deserve it.
“Pumpkins will be nice,” I say, my voice like a plateau. “And the squash.”
“Lorianne and I are thinking we can buy more horses. Have a horse-riding business. Just for fun. Nothing like all that equestrian jumping and stuff.”
The mentioning of horses makes me stiffen, but it’s mostly the fact that he’s going to bring his bride home.
Here. Because who else would take care of all this?
Planning for a future that I was never to be a part of.
The family he’ll create. The life he’ll build. It was all going on and on without me.
“More horses will be good,” I say.
He glances at me. “It’s been real nice having you here, Ash.” He pauses and turns away, looking out at the north pasture where the evening sun grazes the landscape like a painting. “I’ve missed you.”
It’s not an easy thing to say. I can tell by the strain in his voice and how he’s turned away from me. I want to offer him something in return, but I stay silent like a fool.
“I know it’s”— he shifts in the rocking chair— “I know it’s…strange for you. Being back home. I always wondered how you were. Always kind of hoped you’d come back.”
I close my eyes. “Glen —”
“No, it’s all right.” He’s talking to the empty space beside him. “I don’t need anything. I don’t need to know why. I just…”
I open my eyes and look at the empty space beside me. How we must look, speaking without even looking at each other.
“I just,” he says, “wished you said something. I wouldn’t have been mad or told Mom and Dad. I would’ve understood.” His voice is soft, careful. “You were always not one for mediocrity.”
The words hang between us like smoke. I shift in the rocking chair and it creaks.
“I don’t think that’s true,” I say just as softly back.
“It is. And I would’ve kept it a secret for you. Hell, I would’ve helped you.” He’s quiet for a long time. Then he says, “I just wanted you to know that.”
Over the years, I’d successfully suppressed any thoughts about how Glen must have felt when he found my bed empty.
I told myself he was better off. I couldn’t be the big brother to him that he was owed since I’d caused the death of his real one.
We were supposed to grow up in awe of Jimmy, forever in his shadow and forever accepting of it.
We were supposed to grow up in a mutual place of afterthoughts, only-ifs, and backup plans.
I didn’t want to consider, didn’t want to dwell on how Glen might have reacted that morning.
Or the morning after. Or the morning after that.
For ten years I let him be my little kid brother, frozen in time, head bowed at the dinner table.
I left him with nothing. No explanations, no reasons.
And now I’ve done the exact same thing to someone else. Someone who deserved far better.
It’s what I do, it seems; I leave empty spaces, blanks in sentences, and endless dots to be connected, filled, and written in by someone else. I can’t bring things full circle. I can’t bear it to find myself at an ending, and the best way to avoid an ending is to never create a beginning.
“I didn’t leave because of you,” I say. “If you ever thought that, I’m sorry.”
He says nothing. I turn to him. He’s still gazing out at the north pasture, the piece of inheritance I still believe would have been Jimmy’s. I let my gaze focus there.
“When I look out there,” I say, “it just reminds me of him, you know?”
Glen nods. “Yeah. I know.”
“I couldn’t do it.” My voice sounds small. “I couldn’t live up to what they expected after he was gone. And maybe I handled it all wrong, but it was either leave and make my own way or stay and fall short of all their expectations.”
Glen turns toward me, only slightly. “Did you really think I was going to do any better, Ash?”
“Better than me.”
He looks at me finally. “How could you possibly know that?”
I hold his gaze for a minute, then I look beyond him to the place our brother lives in memoriam. I don’t have an answer for him. Not one that I can actually ever say, so instead I say, “I’m sorry, Glen.” I stand. “I’m sorry for hurting your feelings, for not telling you goodbye, for…everything.”
I feel like a bastard just walking off, but I’m drained suddenly.
I find my mother in the sitting room. She’s on the sofa with her sewing. I sit in the chair adjacent to her, watch the needle and thread and feel like a kid again.
For a minute, it doesn’t seem like she knows I’m there. When she looks up, it’s only brief.
“Is there anything you need, Asher?”
“No.”
I watch her needle and thread, her steady hands.
“It’s good to have you home.” She looks at the stitches. “Both my boys home.”
“Yes,” I say. “Home.”
But it would be better if there were three.
After the funeral, I decided that the nice thing to do would be to stay a little longer.
There isn’t much I can do that Glen can’t already do, but our father’s death leaves a gaping hole in the chores.
I fall back into line, like I haven’t forgotten a thing, and get up before dawn.
I feed livestock, pick zucchini and rhubarb.
I pump water from the well and carry it to the stables.
I wipe sweat from my brow, rub my back, and fall heavy into the cot just after the sun goes down.
I’d forgotten it could be like this: endless, laborious, carrying a certain rhythm of life and seasons I’d completely erased from my memory.
We both try to get our mother to rest. She habitually wakes to put on the coffee, the expectation that our father will be down to have some before beginning his day. But the two men in her house are not the same as before. My father has been replaced, and I am not adequate.
One steaming afternoon, I come in from the north pasture.
My mother is up from her sewing as soon as she sees me and tries to serve me a Coke from the icebox and make me a sandwich.
I gladly take the Coke, but I tell her to sit back down, remind her she doesn’t need to do all this, but it’s ingrained.
She listens to me, though, goes back to her sewing.
I sit with her for a while, and we don’t speak until I tell her I’m going up for a bath.
In all the days I’ve been here so far, I’ve passed by Jimmy’s old room several times. This time, I stop and stand outside of the door. I open it carefully, bracing for some awful creak, but there’s none.
His room is the same.
Exactly the same.
The same quilt folded across the end of his bed. The same pair of shoes waiting by the door. The same books and pencils on his writing desk.
I take in a slow breath and step inside.
There’s not a speck of dust anywhere. The bed is made neatly.
It’s as if he’s just gone out to the pasture and will be back in a minute.
Everything is suspended in time, as if I’ll turn and he’ll be in the doorway, a smirk on his face, chiding me for going into his room. My mother has dutifully come in here to dust and freshen up for almost two decades. I selfishly wonder if she would have done the same if it was me.
I see a picture on his desk of us, taken not long before everything went to hell. We look like stair steps — Jimmy, me, and Glen in our Sunday best. And even though it was taken long ago, it still feels as if it was taken a million years too late.
I pick up the picture and stare at it, at the little details of my brother I’d forgotten.
The way he always liked to stand, just slightly askew, and the tiny dimple in his chin.
I think about that fateful day, that awful day, about how I wasn’t supposed to be near the stables, but it was Sunday afternoon.
The after-church-and-Sunday-supper lull.
I was bored. It’s the silliest thing now.
Ridiculous. And the pastor talked about the Devil and idleness and I just didn’t think.
I didn’t think.
My father had just bought Emerald Lady from the Jessups.
She was mostly tamed, but still had a little wildness in her.
I scared her, is what happened. I must have walked into something, or she was just startled to see me.
So she reared up, kicking her legs, whinnying.
She got out somehow and I ran away from the stables.
And Jimmy was outside. I don’t know why or what he was doing, but he shoved me out of Emerald Lady’s way, and she was just running, spooked, scared. Like any animal.
Two days later, I heard the gun shot echo through the fields.