The Hypothesis

I don't know that I'd have lived if I wasn't born after two boys who spent most of their time trying to kill me. Brothers are something special; they built me a thick suit of skin and set me into it before I ever even knew I'd need it. I certainly wouldn't have made it through the third grade if I hadn't already heard every way you could get at a person's fat from my brothers. When I thought my wings made me look like a fairy princess, my middle brother, Granseur, pointed out the rolls created by the elastic straps digging in to my baby girl arm pits.

“Ew, what is that? Pork chops?” he said.

Skinny girls can't touch put-downs like that.

“Hey! Look! It's See See my DICK!” the older kids would yell at recess. They thought they were clever, that maybe they were enlightening this young girl to the true meaning of her last name. They were wrong. I'd already heard it all, every interesting and seemingly harmless combination of names had already been paraded before me in my own backyard, in my bed room, in the hallway upstairs where we used to play. My Grandfather's name is Harold. He never went by Harry, but most people liked to tell me that he did.

I can never remember every particular event, and some I think I made up in hopes that tragedy would somehow find me and make my life more interesting. When I was six, Granseur took a nine iron to a chunk of quartz rock. He told me we would find crystals if we could break it open.

“See the lines of gold in there? That means there's diamonds inside!” I followed his long skinny fingers as they traced the lines of soft metal, squished between fat rows of milky white, hard rock.

“Diamonds?” I asked, with my little nose scrunched up in confusion. I thought diamonds came from Linville Caverns, or the Great Smokey Mountains, or somewhere else too far away to reach.

“Well, crystals, but it might as well be diamonds!” He said, his eyes settling somewhere between green and brown in a flash of excitement.

“We'll be rich! Now stand back!” he said. So I did. Or at least I thought I did. Or maybe I really did and Granseur's arms were just six feet long each. I can't be sure. What I do know for sure, is that he swung back, hard as he could, and following through to contact with the rock, made no impact on it's dense geological composition.

“DAMN!” he hollered.

Then I hollered. But not because the rock hadn't broken and released the crystals waiting inside. I hollered because I was on the ground. My cushy little bottom had plopped hard into the dirt. I did see stars. Then I saw red. Then I saw Momma running out of the house with a look of half despair, half outrage, her hands already carrying the first aid kit and a wet paper towel.

Granseur was too strong, even at a lanky eleven. His back swing had caught me right in the middle of the forehead, one of the few places I had no fat to cushion a blow. The impact of nine iron to skin to bone had ripped a hole in my head, and blood was pouring down my face, spilling down my shirt, and filling the spaces between my toes. It felt like he had run the club all the way through my head. I imagined chunks of my brain were splayed against the well house behind me, buried like old evidence in the layers of ivy. I could visualize the jagged pieces of bone scattered across the ground like arrowheads on Edisto Island. I knew I was covered in blood, my favorite Minnie Mouse sweatshirt, pink and gray, was definitely ruined.

“Shhhh, calm down baby, what happened?” Momma said, in those soothing dulcet tones only a mother can produce. She hunkered down on the ground in front of me and pressed the wet paper towel to my head. I was taking deeper breaths. The tears were slowing and I sniffed a little, just to see if I could. I could still think. I opened my mouth to tell her how Granseur was trying to kill me, but he beat me to it.

“I told her to get back but she just stood there!” he blurted out.

“No, I moved! I moved! I did too move!” I yelled, the tears pushing to the fronts of my eyes again.

“No you didn't! You just stood there! I told you to step back and you didn't move!”

“Then YOU should've looked!” Momma said, before I could begin my second round of protests. I smiled. It was Granseur's fault. Not mine.

“Am I going to die, Momma?” I asked, looking up at her.

“Nohooho,” she said, her laugh breaking the most serious of words to pieces. 

“You're going to be fine, baby girl, it's really not that bad. Just a scratch.” She lowered the paper towel for just a moment, and I saw there a quarter-sized splotch of red rust blood.

“But, but, I'm covered in blood!” I said, obviously confounded by the majority of white area on the paper towel. “I can't feel my face and he's ruined Minnie!” But when I grabbed my shirt and looked down to show her, there was nothing there. Not one drop of blood. I looked up at her again, surprised.

“See, you're fine,” she smiled, “just a scratch! Let's go inside and get you cleaned up. You can stand, come on. Granseur, be more aware of yourself when your sister's around. Please.”

“Yes ma'am,” he said, lowering his head.

“Tell me you're sorry!” I demanded.

“I'm sorry you didn't step back,” he said, like a total prick ass. Momma shot him a look, the one that I used to get when I would tell her that I didn't have a bedtime any more, and the same look she would give me no less than one hundred thousand times throughout the remainder of my years.

“I'm sorry I hit you, Cici,” he said. And then he smiled at me. And then he kissed my cheek and patted my back, gently. And then I smiled at him, and then I smiled up at Momma, who took my hand and guided it to my forehead, so I could hold my own paper towel against my own forehead, that I now realized was not the Grand Canyon. She took my other hand and led me back to the house.

Sitting on the kitchen counter, swinging my legs and sucking happily on an orange freeze-pop, I had already forgotten about the pain in my head when my oldest, wisest brother came down from his sanctuary upstairs.

“Hey tickle toes, what's happening?” he said.

“Granseur was trying to kill me so I wouldn't get rich off the crystals,” I told him. Momma laughed a little as she dabbed Neosporin onto the cut on my forehead. She looked right in my eyes, somehow splitting her gaze so that part fell on my body, and part dipped into my soul.

“Your brother was not trying to kill you, Cici,” she said. “He loves you.” I believed her. She picked out the biggest band aid she could find in the old first aid tin and stuck it square in the center of my forehead.

“There, all better!” she said, and with a kiss to the wound and a pat on the knee, she turned and left the room to return to whatever activity she had left when profanity and cries had called her outdoors.

Jonathan moved in closer to me and put both hands on my knees and kissed my forehead, right where Momma had. Then he just stood there, looking at me for a moment.

“I believe you,” he said, playfulness in his gaze.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I believe Granseur was trying to kill you,” he said. “No, actually, I know he was trying to kill you.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, really.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because he tried to kill me,” Jonathan said. I searched his eyes for silliness, but it was all gone. He must have been telling the truth! I turned around to look out the kitchen window, out over the yard to the well house where Granseur was still swinging away in disdain at the quartz rock that could not, would not, be broken open. My scrupulous gaze narrowed in on him. His face was turning red. He was growing angry and frustrated. I could almost sense the tension from my safe place upon the counter.

“Okay,” I said, “tell me when he tried to kill you.”

“Are you sure you want to know?” Jonathan asked me. I recognize now that this was a tease, his way of working me to where I just had to hear the story, working me to where I would have to believe him. I weighed the consequences of knowledge and ignorance in my little six year old brain. If he told me how Granseur tried to kill him, I no doubt would be afraid. If he didn't tell me, I'd always wonder. Knowing was better than wondering, I decided.

“Tell me.” I said, turning back to Jonathan with the most serious look I could muster.

“All right,” he said, “I'll tell you.”

When Jonathan was seven or eight, and Granseur was three or four, they were after each other every moment of every day. They would push, shove, pull, grab, scratch, bite and roll around with each other constantly in hopes that one would get sent to their room and rid themselves of the other's presence for a while. They hated each other, Jonathan assured me. See, Jonathan was born first. He was the perfect, sweet, dark little boy child, first heir to the Dick throne, and loved immensely by both of our doting parents. Then Granseur was born, and everything changed. No longer was Jonathan the center of attention. No longer was he the perfect child of mother and father. Now he was part of a perfect pair of boys. And that was bullshit. Something had to be done to get this boy out of their good graces! He would scatter Granseur's toys about the upstairs hallway. He would spill Granseur's breakfast all into his lap and onto the floor. He would go into Granseur's room at night and watch him sleeping, allowing Momma and Daddy to catch a glimpse of a sweet older brother's watchful eye, then the second they left the room, he'd grab both of Granseur's legs and pull them between the crib rails, ramming his crotch over and over and over again. But he never tried to kill Granseur. He thought it was all fun and games. He thought Granseur thought it was all fun and games, until one day, little Granseur decided to kill Jonathan.

Jonathan was playing Lincoln Logs, peacefully and quietly, at the bottom of the stairs. Granseur spotted him there from the balcony at the top of the steps. He crept silently to his bedroom and grabbed the biggest, heaviest Tonka Dump Truck he could find. He proceeded quietly to the landing in the turn of the steps. He counted. Eleven steps. He eyed Jonathan's position, two feet from the steps. He calculated angles, right triangles, and hopped just once, quietly, to test the springiness of the wood. Lifting the truck high in the air, and letting it drop to his waist three times, he heaved it up one final time, steadied his eye on the back of Jonathan's head, and pitched the truck as hard as his three year old arms could, straight down at his big brother. The truck crashed into the second step from the bottom, and in a perfect arch, bounced from the step right into the back of Jonathan's skull. Jonathan fell forward, wailed, and Granseur sat down right there at the top of the steps, folded his legs under him, and smiled. Momma came running, ready with wet paper towels and the first aid tin. When she sat Jonathan back up, Granseur's little boy smile faded, and he returned to his room, grumbling as Momma shouted up at him.

“Be careful, honey! You dropped your truck!”

Jonathan told me he heard Granseur mumble something as he retreated to his room, defeated by the human body's ability to withstand brute force.

“'Almost,' I heard him say. He was trying to kill me, once and for all!” Jonathan said.

“Gosh!” It was all I could say.

“But, look,” he said, and turned around and parted his hair in the back so I could see the smooth, mounded skin where no hair would grow.

“I've got a scar there, and that skin is so thick, that if anything ever hits me there again, no matter how hard, it wont be able to break through!” he said, turning back around to flash his grin at me. For a moment I thought I saw green in his eyes, just like Granseur's and just like Momma's. But when I looked closer, they were just plain brown. Like mine.

“So Granseur's trying to kill us, then.” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, “but that's a good thing. If he wasn't trying to kill us, then we would know he didn't really like us that much.” I thought that was ridiculous.

A scream from outside broke my train of thought, and Jonathan looked over my shoulder, back out the window at Granseur in the yard with his nine iron and that quartz rock.

“He's done it!” he proclaimed, and lifted me off the counter with a grunt and set me on my feet on the kitchen floor.

“Come on, let's go see some quartz crystals,” he said, holding out his hand for me to take. I hesitated a moment, frightened still by the story I had just heard. What if we went out there and it was all a clever ploy? What if we got outside and Granseur took the nine iron to both of our heads?

“It's okay, tickle toes,” he said. “He wont try to kill you any more. He knows your head wont bust now.”

Taking his hand and walking back out into the yard, I spotted Granseur as he called to us excitedly.

“We're all going to be rich! Look! Just look!” And there, on the ground was the quartz rock, busted open revealing dozens of clear crystals jutting out from the center.

“I'll buy you a new head, Cici!” he said. I smiled at him as he took the biggest whole crystal and put it into my palm, closing my hand around the little treasure. He held my hand there for a moment, then kissed my fat little fingers before letting go to run around the yard whooping and hollering.

“See, I told you.” Jonathan said. Then we both joined in the celebration along with Granseur, shouting and pumping our arms into the air in communal ecstacy.

On My 35th Birthday

I let a hand lead me home for grace,
and were it not for grace I would have
stayed to see you pass the time.
But I am old in my young years,
and 35 seemed much too fine an age for me.
I left it for you to do, as for me, I had
to walk the soft lips of eternity
and could not stand the gravity of earth.
It hurt my feet. It pounded my ears. It made me heavy.
I lay my weight with you, my sister,
with our brother, our mother, and our father.
I lay my weight with you, and
sit for a spell under the river birch
to rest and watch as life blossoms into night.
I write in my book of you and press my dreams
onto your spirit like flower fragments
forgotten in an old dictionary somewhere.
And you will be bright like red stain paper.
And you will be tough like a pig skin bag.
And you will write in your book of me
and follow grace home when the hills call.
And I will catch you there, on the flip side.

Surfacing

I can't write this story. At least not right now, not this minute. No, probably not any minute. Every single time I start to think I'll write the first line, I feel that sensation of everything inside of me pushing out. I felt it that morning. 

It was definitely that morning.

“Come in here.” 

I don't know if it was a whisper. It was Daddy's voice and it could have been a whisper. It must have been because Meghan and Jennifer and Michele kept sleeping. Poor Michele. She remembers everything and had to sleep on the top bunk alone, separate, always. She was never allowed to play with the big girls. She always had to sit, and watch, and remember every wrong thing we'd ever done.

“Come in here.”

Granseur is sitting up in bed and wiping his eyes. Momma is sitting on something in front of the window. No, she's sitting on the edge of Granseur's bed. I don't know where I am. I mean then I didn't know where I was and I still don't know where I am. I think I'm standing, next to the bed. And Daddy's standing, in front of the window. 

This isn't real. This isn't real. 

I already know and this isn't real. I always already know and I hate knowing.

I knew that Nanny wouldn't make it through that last week of life, and I already knew that Granddaddy wouldn't make it long without her. I knew that Daddy was gone before he left. And I knew that something was very wrong this morning.

“What is it?” I say, annoyed, disguising the fear inside of me with a tone of anger. Pressure builds in my ears, everything inside of me, pushing out. I can't believe Daddy can speak. Can Daddy speak?

“Your brother's been in an accident.” Is he dead? Is he dead? Is he dead?

“Is he going to be okay?” I felt four. I felt three. I felt small. My voice comes out in a whimper. A true whimper. It's raspy and frightened even in my throat. It pauses at the roof of my mouth before everything inside of me finally pushes it out.

I have no idea what he said. I have no idea what my father said to us.

Momma hugs her arms close to her. Her fingers are just beginning to look old, like Nanny's. The ring hangs there loosely. Nanny's ring. One gold band so thin it will eventually break, but Momma wears it loosely there on the one finger whose knuckle hasn't yet swelled too large to fit a ring over it. She's holding herself tight and stroking her arms with those skinny fingers and I have no idea what Daddy said.

“No.” That's it. That's what whatever he said meant, anyway. “No, he didn't make it.”

Granseur is everywhere in my mind. Jonathan is dead and I turn to Granseur, whose lips, heavy with sleep, dangle in shock. His understanding eyes stare straight forward, out the window and into nothing. We are not the perfect three any more. We are two siblings left of a trinity that was meant to make it all the way through life with one another to rely on. It will be only us for the rest of our days. The middle brother has become the eldest, so what now, am I? I fall into his lap and cry seventeen tears for every year I had with our brother before realizing we're all crying, and I cannot have that.

“You're it, then. It's us.” I say to Granseur. And I wiped my eyes and did not cry again for a month.

“I watched you when Mabel and Aaron passed, and I watch you now, and I'm just so proud of how strong you are,” Uncle Eldon whispers in my ear. His breath hints of liquor. He smells like Thanksgiving morning, and I wanted to cry then but Daddy had tears in his eyes so I stopped mine. I did not even cry when the bagpipes started playing. There was no body to see. We burned him up.

“You just look so like him,” Heather said to me at the visitation. She has loved him since she was born. I will play a song for her and the words will be different from when I sang them before. We sit outside by the fire pit because I cannot stand in a row in the house and receive the guests who want to cry on my shoulder. We had traffic control for my brother. The cars made the alfalfa in the field lie down in such a way that it looked like dogs had been playing there. Everywhere and all over the tall grass had been laid down by people who wanted to tell us how much he meant to them. Everywhere and all over, it had been laid down.

“Meghan, wake up.” My confidante in crime lies there sound asleep. She hates this part. She would have me never tell this story.

“Meghan. I need you to wake up.” I do not sound like my mother. I do not sound like my father. I sound like drowning. I cannot begin to compare a parent telling a child they've lost a sibling to telling your best friend that the man she meant to marry has died. They are different, and the same, and I am drowning in the possibility of words. 

“No. What is it?” she mumbles. Hot breath. My face is cold but I had no idea until her hot breath hits my face. She wakes me up.

“Meghan, wake up,” I say. “Jennifer, wake up.” I grab the bunk post and shake it. I shake it with gentle urgency. “Michele,” I call out. Strong. “I need you guys to wake up.” Their sleepy faces greet me, and I wonder how Daddy felt, only moments ago, when all it took was a whisper to raise me from this bed. I wish now more than ever that telepathy were a gift of mine. I'd place the words in their minds, gently, and never have to say them aloud. I'd never have to tell Jennifer and Michele that their favorite boy cousin drove a white Cadillac straight off a curve into a tree. I'd never have to tell Meghan that we wouldn't be sisters, because Jonathan has died. 

“Is breakfast ready?” asks Michele. 

There is no breakfast. We wouldn't be having country ham or eggs. We would be having the Thanksgiving dinners of too many families. I ate chips and pound cake for three days. Meghan and I hungrily gobbled the Nance's Boston Butte for a solid seven minutes. When Meghan handed me Jonathan's guitar I threw it all back up. It looked like confetti, and I couldn't smell anything at all besides fire pit. I played Say It Ain't So by Weezer and the words were different than when I had sung them before. Each lyric caught in my throat, burning worse than all of the smoke of the world inhaled at once. 

The fire was lit before I went outside that morning. Daddy had stood beside it long enough to already smell like smoke when he told me that my brother had died. 

“Is there a fire?” I ask Jimmy, on my way down the stairs. One of my father's oldest friends knows the history of everything. He knows how we fight, and how we pretend we never fight. He knows the cars we buy and the schools we went to. He knows my favorite color is purple. His face is round, and kind. 

“There is.” He smiles. We wont say any more. 

“We almost got him there,” my Daddy tells me. The next spring we sit under the umbrella on the porch and Daddy tells me how he feels like we almost got him there.

“Almost got him where, Daddy?” I ask. I always thought Jonathan and I were where we were. It hadn't occurred to me that there even was a “there” to get to.

“Almost got him there. Almost got him better,” Daddy says. He is referring to legs broken during drunken falls, and the plague of reason that strangled Jonathan each day of his quasi adult life. He is referring to the final semesters that would have completed Jonathan's eight year attempt at a bachelor's degree. He is referring to a relationship between father and son that would not mend with ease, to a relationship that simply would not mend. Almost is a comfort word. It means failed without saying failure. But to my recollection, no one failed. 

 

“I think he was there, Daddy,” I tell him, and hold his hand. “He was there, and I guess he is there.” 

 

I have been wearing Jonathan's glasses. I know his astigmatism is worse than mine. I know he was near-sighted, where I see mostly far. But I want to see like him. So I wear his glasses. And I wear his sweaters with scarves and my AP English teacher tells me I look Hobo Chic.

“Don't you mean Boho Chic, Mrs. McKissock?” I ask her.

“No, Cynthia, Hobo Chic,” she says. She calls me Cynthia and she is the only teacher I do not correct because when she says my name it feels soft and circles into my ears and calms my mind. Her voice is melodic, like Jonathan's, and gentle as a breeze pushing hot air out of the way. It soothes me. She reads Shakespeare aloud and makes us memorize the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English dialect. When I go home I stand on top of Jonathan's trunk in the room that will not change for six years and belt it loud as bagpipes. I shout it for the story he never finished, for the degree that does not hang on his wall. I shout it for the memory of a shared love of words. I shout it for him. I spend hours a day trying to hack into his computer. I go through the drawers of his desk and find that Granseur has already been there and removed anything that would upset our parents. I sit in front of his bureau and stare at myself in the mirror, trying to find the parts of my face that look, like Heather said, just so like him.

Sometimes I think I am becoming him.

Granseur wrote a poem the morning our brother died. My parents found it and thought it was the last thing Jonathan wrote and worried over rumors that it was suicide. I was ashamed that they couldn't tell it wasn't his style. It didn't mean it wasn't good poetry. It just wasn't Jonathan's. I try to write like him, but it doesn't fit. It looks the same sometimes but the placement of the words is all wrong. Everything is all wrong. 

 

It's all wrong. It's all wrong, wrong, wrong.

Everything inside of me begins pushing out. I'm at Appalachain. I walk the same hills he walked. I stand in front of Walker Hall when it's snowing and take a picture, smoking a cigarette. I fuck up. I drop out. I move home. I don't break any legs during drunken falls, but I think about it. I wait for things to get worse. I become the black sheep piper and this house is falling rocks, and I laugh my way out of it. I get married. I get divorced. I read The Atlantic and pretend like I care. I cry, sometimes, when no one is looking.

And then, I lose my brothers glasses. I've moved too many times to find the silver ring he gave me. His lighthouse lighter runs out of fluid and I leave it in a box marked “trinketry: to remember”. I stop trying to write like him, and the writing gets better, easier. I remember like wet paper dried on a surface remembers the shape of the thing it dried on. I do not forget his face. I do not forget “tickle toes” or riding his back around Mawmaw's living room floor. I do not forget the piercing sound of tenor drones invading my ears when I am trying, desperately, to finish a paper. I do not forget the roughness of the stone wall leading us to the games, and I do not forget his warm legs during cold rain. I become a simile of the man that died. I act like Jonathan. I read like Jonathan. I look like Jonathan. But I am not Jonathan. You can look at me and see him, but only because I am the surface his wet paper dried on. 

 

No, I cannot tell this story. Not now, and perhaps not ever. But maybe, I can begin to explain why we never died.

McIver

The black sheep piper
is laughing in and out of the house.
He understands that door is unstable.
This house is falling rocks and
his breath is spinning in the dust.
Happiness is a mountain
Merry-Go-Round of misconception,
stuck in indifference.