My Mother's Child

 

He was every inch my mother’s child.

By the summer my brother turned 10, he was a vandal, a petty thief and a consummate liar. I hated him with every fiber of my being and avoided him whenever possible. Like my mother, he was short, stocky, and slovenly. He had a lazy eye and wore a perpetual smirk, was mean to the dogs, and liked throwing rocks, plugging up toilets and setting small fires. He was grimy and dirty and usually smelled of rotting food and stale sweat. Like all bullies, he terrorized everyone he could but at heart was a coward and a low fighter and never took on anyone who might break him. He was what my grandmother dismally called “a nasty piece of business” with no conscience, no empathy, no thought for others and no remorse for whatever harm he did. When I was young, he terrified me. When I was older, he repulsed me.

That particular summer, he’d been grounded for stealing cigarettes and selling them to the younger Albright kids and then re-grounded for trying to kill Aunt Lizzie’s chickens with a stolen pellet gun. In retaliation, he and the Sullivan boys poured bleach into her well and then set her barn afire. Uncle Shad and Uncle Willie saw the smoke and the volunteer fire brigade arrived within minutes but it was too late to save the barn – it and several chickens perished and why the fire hadn’t spread to our house next door or to Ms. Mary’s on the other side was entirely due to favorable winds and happenstance. It was all too much for my grandmother and the day after the fire, she had my mother pack a suitcase and ordered her and my brother home for the rest of the summer. There was a terrific quarrel but Nana refused to relent.

“I won’t have it, Jan,” she told my mother, “Boy’s dangerous and got no more sense than God give a fence post. He goes and you go with him!”

The scandal rocked the tiny village and cost my grandmother a pretty penny to have the barn rebuilt and the chickens replaced. Most everyone believed it had been intentional but nobody could prove it so there never were any consequences although Nana stayed very angry for a very long time.

Not all that long ago, I happened to find out that my brother died a few years ago. I don’t think he had much of a life but I couldn’t find it in me to either mourn or celebrate. I cared as much as I might care about a stranger who I didn’t know even existed and who died a half a world away.

He may have been my mother’s child but he was never anyone I knew.