My Brother Read Free Page B

pieces of dust would become dislodged. This was not a good thing for someone who had trouble breathing. He had trouble breathing.
    Sometimes when I was sitting with him, in the first few days of my seeing him for the first time after such a long time, seeing him just lying there, dying faster than most people, I wanted to run away, I would scream inside my head, What am I doing here, I want to go home. I missed my children and my husband. I missed the life that I had come to know. When I was sitting with my brother, the life I had come to know was my past, a past that does not make me feel I am falling into a hole, a vapor of sadness swallowing me up. In that dirty room, other people before him had died of that same disease. It is where they put people who are suffering from the virus that causes AIDS. When he was first told that he had tested positive for the virus, he did not tell our mother the truth, he told her he had lung cancer, he told someone else he had bronchial asthma, but he knew and my mother knew and anyone else who was interested would know that only people who tested positive for the AIDS virus were placed in that room in isolation.
    I left him that first night and got into a car. I left him lying on his back, his eyes closed, the fluorescent light on. I rode in a hired car and it took me past the Magdalene maternity ward, where I was born, past the place where the Dead House used to be (a small cottage-like structure where the bodies of the dead were stored until their families came to claim them), but it is not there anymore; it was torn down when it grew rotten and could no longer contain the smells of the dead. And then I came to a major crossing where there was a stoplight, but it was broken and had been broken for a long time; it could not be fixed because the parts for it are no longer made anywhere in the world—and that did not surprise me, because Antigua is a place like that: parts for everything are no longer being made anywhere in the world; in Antigua itself nothing is made. I passed the prison, and right next to it the school my brother attended when he was a small boy and where he took an exam to go to the Princess Margaret School, and in the exam, which was an islandwide exam, he took third place of all the children taking this exam. I passed the Princess Margaret School. It was when he got to this school that he started to get into trouble. My mother says, about the friends he made there, that he fell into bad company, and I am sure the mothers of the other boys, his friends, thought of him in the same way—as bad company. It was while attending this school that he became involved in a crime, something to do with robbing a gas station, in which someone was killed. It was agreed that he did not pull the trigger; it is not clear that he did not witness the actual murder. At some point, years ago, my mother told me that he had spent a short time in jail for this crime and she got him out through political connections she then had but does not have any longer. Now she will not mention the murder or his time in jail. If I should bring it up, she says it is an old story (“e’ a’ ole time ’tory; you lub ole-time ’tory, me a warn you”), and for my mother an old story is a bad story, a story with an ending she does not like.
    The car then turned onto Fort Road and passed Straffee’s funeral establishment. I did not know then whether Mr. Straffee was dead or alive; when I was a small child and saw him, I thought he looked like the dead, even though at the time I thought that, I had never seen a dead person. I passed a house where my godmother used to live; she was a seamstress, she had been very nice to me. I do not know what has become of her. And I passed the road where an Englishman, Mr. Moore, who used to sell my mother beefsteak tomatoes, lived. This man also had cows, and one day when I was going to visit my godmother, they were returning from pasture and