I often found myself opening that dictionary and trying to learn all that foreign. Mom and Dad didn’t bother with learning it. It was enough for them to be able to look the meaning up quickly, if at all. But for me and Grand, the foreign was something we had an innate desire to learn.
“Kind of young to be the devil, ain’tcha?” Grand smiled at Sal.
Grand was traditionally handsome. His hair was not worn long and loose like mine or his friends’. His was short and tight like that of a father in the 1950s.
I think about the way the world wanted him to be. As classic as a front porch post. Clean direction, straight up and down. But really he was as wild and as twisting as the honeysuckle vines. Bending and exploding in uneven wonders. Moveable and crooked, crossing in awesome curves and beautiful bends.
As far as small town fame goes, my brother was a star. The boy who always did what was expected of him in every aspect of his life. He looked like a heartbreaker, so he broke hearts. He looked like a brain, so he never missed making the honor roll, and he looked like an athlete, so he became the one Breathed pinned its Major League hopes to.
As fate would have it, Grand was born with an arm for pitching with a precise windup and an acceleration and follow-through that everyone said would get him to the Majors.
His forkballs and curves were guaranteed strikes that palsied the batter into a trembling swing. In the games of light rainfall, he would throw a God-given spitter the ump wouldn’t be able to shout illegal on. His cutters might’ve been a swarm of midges, for the bats hit the air more than those pitches, while his four-seam fastballs were always food for the catcher’s mitt.
Grand was the very meaning of his name. I wanted to be just like him. There wasn’t a sport I was really great at, but I could climb. That was why Elohim asked me to join him on his jobs. He’d seen me climbing the tree in front of his house. As I was climbing, one of the branches broke beneath my foot. I was quick and fell only for the second it took to find another branch. I didn’t panic. I merely accepted the fact. That particular branch was gone, and I had to find me another. It was because of this that Elohim said I had the feet of a steeplejack.
“Where you goin’?” Mom gently grabbed Grand’s arm.
“I got baseball practice.” He leaned in for a kiss. “See ya later.”
“In time for dinner?”
“не пропустите это для мира.” He took his smile close to her ear, where he whispered the translation, “Wouldn’t miss it for the world.”
I looked at his shoelaces and their reddish brown staining. He saw me and tipped his ball cap before jumping to the ground from the top porch step. And I smiled, as in love with my older brother as any young boy could be.
“It’s volcano weather ’round here.” Mom slung her head back, trying to toss her long black hair. As usual, the ends were tied up in her apron strings, looking like a tail at her backside. A tail Dad would’ve come up behind and tugged, if he’d been there.
While Grand took after Dad’s brown hair and blue eyes, I took after Mom. Our hair, in its rib-cage shape, fell in a blackness that wisdom calls night. Its winding way was a narrative of the hills, it was the snakes swimming the river, the crow strapped with worms. Dad called it scared hair, the way it curled up into itself at the ends.
This scare would fall to my shoulders then, as it would for the rest of my life, as it does now. Though in youth it was described as swept by the wind, now, in its white and dark gray staying, it is merely disheveled, falling across my shoulders like claws settled in. As is my beard, like a talon on my chest, but I like to think it is my best Walt Whitman.
I tried to count my moles once. The same flat ones she had and which she called chocolate chips. When I was a real small kid, I actually believed the moles were chocolate chips and that if she stood too close to the oven, they’d melt away, so I’d tug on her apron strings and she’d laugh as I led her from the heat.
There was something smeared about our eyes, mine and Mom’s, like contact made with ink before it has had the chance to dry. In my youth, such eyes used to look exotic. Now they’re just something tired.
“So.” Mom lightly clapped her hands once and turned to Sal and me. “Where would you boys like to go first? We can go to Chile, Egypt, Greece, New Zealand. And all in one afternoon.”