My Brother

It wasn’t eight in the morning and the kitchen was already hot, sticky, and miserable when I walked in. Texas weather was never what you wanted it to be, but in August it was the worst. My Aunt Helen was standing in a thin yellow sundress in front of the oven, sweating, and waiting for what smelled like biscuits to finish. She turned and looked at me and smiled.

“Have you seen my dad?”

“I think he’s in the barn.” Her smile faded a bit before she turned back to the oven. I walked out into the yard. There was an old barn on the far end of the driveway, red stained and lopsided, with a roof older than me. It looked like it was on its last leg when my dad bought the house when I was just out of diapers, and I remember my mother complaining about it right up until the day she left. He might’ve torn it down if she had stayed but knowing how much she hated it seemed to reinforce my fathers desire to keep it right where it was.

I pulled my can of snuff out of my pocket, packed it, and put two fingers worth of Copenhagen in my mouth before I knocked on the door to the barn. I wasn’t expecting him to answer, he never did, but I always knocked before I went in it. I turned around, spit on the ground away from the door, and walked in.

The barn looked old on the inside, too, but not as old as it did on the outside. It was hot in there, like it was in the house and everywhere else, but the barn was big enough and drafty enough that it felt a little cooler than it had in the kitchen. The lights were on, and my dad was sitting on a rusted steel chair facing away from the door and towards the corner. He had his head down and didn’t pick it up when I walked over the concrete floor towards him. I made sure that I walked loud, so that he would hear me coming, but he didn’t look up. His attention was on whatever was in his hand.

I walked right up behind him and stopped, breathing his air for a minute and taking a peek at whatever it was that he was looking at. I had a feeling that I knew what it was, but I thought it best to make sure before I disturbed him. It pissed him off when I interrupted him when he was doing something Jeff related.

“What do you need, Rufus.” He was holding a picture of my mother holding my brother and I.

“I hadn’t seen you in a few days. I wanted to see if there was anything that you needed.” I knew that I was begging for him to yell at me, but I made it a point not to let his temper or impatience with me convince me not to do the right thing, and right now the right thing to do was check on my dad.

He didn’t yell. He looked up at me. His eyes were red and tired and his face was flush and wet. It looked like he had been crying for weeks instead of days. His gaze was distant, as though he wasn’t really looking at me but at something behind me. He took a deep breath and let it out in a sigh and got up from the chair and handed me the picture that he had been holding.

“Where’s Helen?” He wasn’t looking at me again.

“She’s in the kitchen. It smelled like the biscuits are about ready.” He walked towards the barn door and out without saying another word to me. I wasn’t surprised. He didn’t normally talk to me unless he had to, or if he was drunk or feeling particularly venomous. I’d learned to ignore it by the time I was ten. Most of the time Jeff would defend me, but since he left I was on my own. Aunt Helen was on my dad’s side, being that she agreed with him that I was the reason that my mother, her sister, left. I could never figure out what it was that she was so mad about. She got a husband and kids without getting fat or having to stand up and say I do to anybody in front of anyone.

I put the picture back where it had come from, the corner that my dad was standing in. Over the years he had turned the barn into a shrine to Jeffery. There were pictures of him as a baby and of him playing Pop Warner football, trophies that he had won in football and baseball, ribbons from school. One time, before I was ten and knew better, I asked my dad why he never put any of my trophies or ribbons up in the barn. He told me that there was enough space in my room.

About the time that my brother was a junior in high school the pictures changed. There was a newspaper clipping of the car accident and a piece of the cast that he had on his ankle and a letter from the doctor saying that he wouldn’t be able to run on that ankle like he used to, and as such wasn’t going to be able to play football or baseball anymore. The next year was pretty rough on all of us. Jeff stayed in his room and felt sorry for himself, Aunt Helen didn’t say much to anybody, and my dad drank. Anytime that his whiskey wasn’t going into his mouth insults towards me were coming out of it. “Why weren’t you with him?” and “He had a future, it should’ve been you.”

He hadn’t said that to me in years, “It should’ve been you.” Not until the other night.

During Jeff’s senior year he got drug out to a dance hall with some buddies, and they thought that it would be funny to all take turns on the mechanical bull. When it was Jeff’s turn they said it was like a light switch went off and that he stood in line for the rest of the night and just kept waiting his turn to ride it over and over again.

Over the following two weeks Jeff had managed to find someone with a practice mechanical bull and put in enough hours that he thought that he would be ready for the real thing. He was eighteen, so he didn’t need my dad’s permission, and he went to a small rodeo outside of town and put his name down, paid the fee, waited his turn, and lasted three seconds before the bull tossed him ten feet in the air and he ran screaming for his life. He went back the next weekend and lasted the full eight seconds.

From then on Jeff’s life revolved around bull riding. He studied the greats and the not so greats and got to know the rules inside and out. He even had me study so that I could help him if he needed it, but my dad wouldn’t have any of it. He said that I should study my schoolwork and leave Jeff to him. Jeff tried to tell me that it was because he wanted me to do good in school, but I knew the truth. It was because my dad thought that if I got involved, I would cause Jeff to blow it.

Right after Jeff graduated, he started working on his amateur card, then his pro card. His first pro bull threw him by the time he was nineteen, he won his first buckle by his twenty first birthday, and they sent him back home to us three days ago. He was twenty-two. I’m seventeen.

When my dad picked up the phone I wasn’t in the room, but when I heard him drop the phone and it hit the floor, I rushed downstairs to find out what was going on. He looked like he had seen a ghost. He was sitting on the kitchen floor looking so pale I thought that he had died. I didn’t even notice that Aunt Helen had picked up the phone and was listening to the receiver until she started screaming and crying. I went to take the phone out of her hand so that I could ask whoever was on the other end what they had said to everyone to make them react so, but my dad jumped up and pushed me and snatched the phone out of my hand. I walked out of the room and waited in the living room for them to finish before I walked back in to find out what had happened.

Aunt Helen wasn’t in the kitchen at all. She went out the back door to have a cigarette. My dad was sitting at the kitchen table with his snuff can in one hand and his head in the other. He was crying.

“Dad, what’s going on.?”

“It should’ve been you.”

He had said that to me before, but this time felt differently. The tone had a finality to it that I wasn’t prepared for, and I started to tear up.

“What?”

“Jeff’s dead.” That’s all he said. He stood up and followed my aunt out the back door, leaving me alone in the kitchen. I felt like I was going to be sick. Was it another car accident? Was it a bull? Was it something else entirely? I had so many questions, and I knew that my father had all the answers, but I also knew that going out there and asking him would’ve been a mistake. He was in too much pain and there’s no telling what could happen.

I was in pain, too, but it was different. I had lost my brother, my protector, but also the object of my father’s affection and the focus of all his attention. I had spent plenty of time hating my brother, the way he moved so effortlessly through our lives, only noticing how his existence effected mine when it was so loud that it was inescapable. I spent my life not knowing if I loved him more than I hated him or if it was the other way around. Hating your father was one thing. A son is expected to hate his father, but your brother is supposed to be your friend, the person that was going to be there for you and defend you and support you.

I sat down at the table. I had been holding my breath so that I wouldn’t get sick on the floor, and the effort made me lightheaded and dizzy. I was alone in the house. Really, I’d been alone for a while, but this was the first time I had really felt that way.