It took some time for her to make up her mind about me. She was one of these that is never going to be wrong, period. As regards to me: (1) No flesh and blood of hers was getting turned back over to the do-nothings at DSS. (2) She’d sooner shoot herself in the head than raise a boy, so. Getting her way was going to be a problem.
Her opinion on her brother Dick: most people thought he was brainless, but really he was the smartest person they knew. She wanted me to hang out with him, which I was a little scared to do, honestly, due to not knowing how. I asked what happened to him to get in the wheelchair. She said he was born with a spinal type of thing, but that life hadn’t helped his case any either. Whenever they were little, the boys at school bullied him to the extent almost of death. Stuffing him in a feed bag, hiding him in a culvert, stunts like that, just for being so small he couldn’t fight back. Also for liking to read and knowing the answers in school, which everybody knows is asking for it. She was the big sister and got handy at warding off the boys with whatever weapon fell to hand, but their father had other ideas and put him in a home in Knoxville. He didn’t get a lick of schooling over there, so she took him books if they went to visit. The father wanted him out of sight, with people at church saying a cripple was punishment from God. Poor little Dick was there for years, until the rest of the family passed away and she could go get him out.
Damn. I was still nervous to go talk to him, but less so after she told me all that. One no-toucher kid knows another, you have to think.
His room was downstairs for the wheelchair, and usually the door stood open. The first time I went in, he didn’t notice me because of reading a book. Not regular reading, I mean gone. He and that big book were not in this house, nor maybe this world. His room was basically a living room with a bed in it. Chairs, lamps, desk, plus some medical and bathroom stuff I tried not to look at. The desk had a lot going on there, including a kite. Every wall had shelves of more books than I’d seen anywhere, school library included. Some few had the skinny spines and the colors I knew were kids’ books. I’d not seen a lot of those. Somebody one time gave me the one where the boy is hateful and sent to bed with no supper, and in his head he’s a monster and goes to this island where it’s all wild monsters like him, seriously ticked off, making their wild rumpus. I loved that. But preferred comics, which I didn’t see any of at all in Mr. Dick’s room.
Finally I said, “Hey, Mr. Dick,” and he looked up and smiled, not that surprised. He motioned me to come in. His throat or voice box was messed up, but you could get used to it and mostly tell what he was saying. It took me a minute though to get to that point. That first day I checked out his books, asking what this or that one was about, and pretended I understood the answer. I didn’t find the wild boy one. His kids’ books had the old-timey pictures that kids now would get bored of. He must have kept every book he ever read. I asked if those were the ones his sister brought him in the cripple home, and he said yes. Which kind of wrecked me, how tragic that was. Jesus. But here these two were now, living happier-ever-after than most.
Mr. Dick didn’t take offense at much of anything, so in time I asked some nosy shit, like how did my grandmother get such a nice house (by outliving everybody else in the family), and what did the others die of (being meaner than snakes). Did he remember my dad? Yes! At the time of my grandmother fetching Mr. Dick back from the cripple home, after her husband died, my dad was a teenager. That tripped me out, to think of him walking around in this exact house, alive and a kid. I was used to thinking of my dad as another category of being, like Ant-Man or Jesus. But a real person. That looked like me. I wanted to know a million things, like what was his first car, what sports did he play. Mr. Dick was vague on that, saying just that he fought a lot with the religious father, and then without any dad in the house to lay down the law, fought with my grandmother. Then turned sixteen and moved out. What he did between leaving this house and taking up with Mom in Lee County, which was a lot of years, Mr. Dick had no idea. Possibly nobody did. I wished I could find the book of my whole dad in that house and read every page.
So, taking crap from a teenager that looked like me: Was this the start of my grandmother taking her dim view of boys? I had to ask. Mr. Dick smiled and shook his head no, motioning over his crooked shoulder like, way, way back. Of course. The big, stinking guys that shoved his little wishbone arms and legs in a feed sack, laughing their nuts off. She’d made up her mind long before she had her redheaded baby boy. He probably never had a chance.
It was after her son ran off that she’d started taking in girls for their so-called educations. I asked Mr. Dick what she taught them that they wouldn’t learn in regular school. I’d already seen how Jane Ellen hit the books every single evening, homework spread out all over the kitchen table. My grandmother would quiz her or give pointers on history or even math, trig and such, which surprised me that an old person would know about. I’d thought it was a newer invention. Mr. Dick said she taught her girls to be the best in their class and not let anybody talk down to them. Same old song in other words: steer clear of the hateful boys. Mr. Dick said yes, that was it. I asked him how the girls graduated from their educations and moved out. He said generally by getting married.
It was a long couple of weeks I waited around. Some days she’d put me outside on garden chores. Jane Ellen also, if she wasn’t at school or work. We spent a morning turning over dirt where she wanted to put in her fall collards. I could get Jane Ellen tickled over the smallest thing, talking worms etc. But that only takes you so far. There wasn’t any TV. It was usually Mr. Dick or nothing. We guys had our laughs. Sometimes we made fun of my grandmother a tiny bit. He loved her of course, but to a certain extent, she was batshit. Our little secret.
One morning I found him wheeled up to his desk working on something, and he meant business. Not reading, he was writing. On the kite. I’d had dollar store kites as a kid, but his was not normal like that. It was homemade, out of tobacco lath and the plain paper in rolls. He said to pull up a chair, so I sat and watched him write on his kite. He had the neatest, littlest writing ever to come out of a human person. To be so crooked in his body, his lines of writing were straighter than straight. Also, slow as Christmas. It took forever for him to finish one sentence: So wise so young, they say, do never live long. Words that made no exact sense, but probably true. He’d written other sentences all over that kite. Like, a hundred of them. My eye picked out: Dispute not with her: she is a lunatic. Uh-oh, I thought, trouble with sister dear. But another one said: I am determined to prove a villain, and hate the idle pleasures of these days. I couldn’t make heads or tails. No beast so fierce but knows some touch of pity. And in the center, in bigger print:
And if I die no soul will pity me.
And why should they since I myself
find in myself no pity to myself.
I asked what it was about, and he patted his book on the desk that he’d just finished. Did he aim to write out the entire book on the kite? No. Just certain parts he liked the best.
“And then what happens?”
He pointed out the window. His hand motioned up, up.
“You fly the kite?”
He nodded yes. He said after he read a book he oftentimes wanted to thank whoever wrote it, but usually they were dead. His book had a name on it I’d heard of, Shakespeare. Dead, evidently.