My Brother Read Free Page A

to do something she did not like a dog to do, she called to the dog sharply, and when the dog did not respond, she threw some stones at him. We turned our attention to something else. But a banana plant bears one bunch of fruit, and after that, it dies; before it dies it will send up small shoots. Some of my brother’s plants had borne fruit and were dying and were sending up new shoots. The plantsman in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop.
    I am so vulnerable to my family’s needs and influence that from time to time I remove myself from them. I do not write to them. I do not pay visits to them. I do not lie, I do not deny, I only remove myself. When I heard that my brother was sick and dying, the usual deliberation I allow myself whenever my family’s needs come up—should I let this affect me or not?—vanished. I felt I was falling into a deep hole, but I did not try to stop myself from falling. I felt myself being swallowed up in a large vapor of sadness, but I did not try to escape it. I became afraid that he would die before I saw him again; then I became obsessed with the fear that he would die before I saw him again. It surprised me that I loved him; I could see that was what I was feeling, love for him, and it surprised me because I did not know him at all. I was thirteen years old when he was born. When I left our home at sixteen years of age, he was three years of age. I do not remember having particular feelings of affection or special feelings of dislike for him. Our mother tells me that I liked my middle brother best of the three of them, but that seems an invention on her part. I think of my brothers as my mother’s children.
    When he was a baby, I used to change his diapers, I would give him a bath. I am sure I fed him his food. At the end of one day, when he was in the hospital and I had been sitting with him for most of the time, watching his body adjust to the AZT, medicine I had brought to him because I had been told that it was not available in Antigua, I said to him that nothing good could ever come of his being so ill, but all the same I wanted to thank him for making me realize that I loved him, and he asked if I meant that (“But fo’ true?”) and I said yes, I did mean that. And then when I was leaving for the day and I said good night to him and closed the door behind me, my figure passed the louvered window of his room and from his bed, lying on his back, he could see me, and he called out, “I love you.” That is something only my husband and my children say to me, and the reply I always make to them is the reply I made to him: “I love you, too.”
    He was lying in a small room with a very high ceiling, all by himself. In the hospital they place patients suffering from this disease in rooms by themselves. The room had two windows, but they both opened onto hallways so there was proper ventilation. There was a long fluorescent light hanging from the high ceiling. There was no table lamp, but why should there be, I only noticed because I have become used to such a thing, a table lamp; he did not complain about that. There was a broken television set in a corner, and when there were more than two visitors in the room it was useful as something on which to sit. It was a dirty room. The linoleum floor was stained with rust marks; it needed scrubbing; once he spilled the pan that contained his urine and so the floor had to be mopped up and it was done with undiluted Clorox. He had two metal tables and a chair made of metal and plastic. The metal was rusty and the underside of this furniture was thick with dirt. The walls of the room were dirty, the slats of the louvered windows were dirty, the blades of the ceiling fan were dirty, and when it was turned on, sometimes