TheBanyanTree: At Camp With My Brother

[LLDeMerle]

My brother and I caught up.  Years of work and family life have come between
us, yet, nothing comes between us as we reminisce over previous summers,
here, childhood summers, where our initials got carved into trees and a
younger brother with hair, red as sunlit rust, brought a snake to lunch,
hidden in his pocket and a cousin mistook a raccoon for “the biggest
squirrel I’ve ever seen in my life!”
My uncle gets confused, now and tells other people's stories as thought they
are his own, yet the new one he tells is of "Manhattan Night." One Manhattan
Night was followed by a Hangover Morning, when my grandmother awoke on the
path after sleeping there all night.  My brother echoes my horror with
"Didn’t anyone notice she was gone?"  
"Everyone was asleep!" My uncle laughs his evil cackle which chases the
years away and he is young, again.  "No one make any noise, here!'" he mocks
my grandmother.
"Been a long time since I had one of those,” I say.
"A Manhattan?" asks my brother.
"No. A hangover," I answer.
We chuckle a bit, me in my cautious stage of life, the stage which avoids
hangovers and running down the bluffs to the lake which peering over, now,
makes me swoon with disbelief at my daring, my litheness, my youthful
abilities, evaporated over the years to that place where all of these things
retreat to.
The dragonflies hit the table with a crash as the male mounts the female
They fly away together, gracefully, oblivious, it seems, to their direction,
bobbing and weaving in the yellow grass.
“Impressive multi-tasking,” I say, “but, boy, they sure are rough.”
“Rough?” my brother repeats.
“:Sex.”
My brother laughs, then grows quiet.  He tells me of the year the Whites
came to camp with us.  He tells me that Mom caught Dad with Mrs. White.  He
tells of the shouting and clatter, and the Whites packing up early and
leaving.    
I barely remember this.  Mrs. White, or, Jeannie, had been my mother’s best
friend from childhood.  It took years of subdued memories like this to form
a wall of solidarity in my brain and nudge me into the awareness that Dad
did not find being married a deterrent to dating.  Extramaritally.  When Mom
was dying and seemed to figure that she didn’t need to be polite, anymore,
she spent a good deal of time “filling me in.”  One thing, she said, is that
Dad didn’t love anyone as much as he loved himself.  Another?  That she
wouldn’t be in the ground 3 weeks and Jeannie White would be standing on our
doorstep.
“It wasn’t thee weeks,” said my brother.  “It began at the funeral.”
“The funeral?”
“At the funeral,” he said with disgust.  “Jeannie was leaving, and she said
to Dad, ‘Call me.  When you’re ready.’”
We marveled at this, together, in a different way than we had the
dragonflies.  Dad had dropped hints to some of us that he was seeing someone
before a week and a half had gone by.  So, Mom was off her game a little
bit, but she still hit the target.
I told my brother how Dad locked me in the cabin one night with him and
wouldn’t let me go to the campfire.  I was being disciplined for something
I’ve forgotten, but the trauma of being locked in the cabin with him looms
large and still quickens my heartbeat.  I told how Grandpa rescued me, how
he marched onto the cabin and took me out.  I was terrified to go with him,
but Grandpa said, “It will be all right.”
“Dad never liked Grandpa,” he said
“Grandpa never liked him, either,” I said, “and, as it turns out, with good
reason.”
One story led to another until we fell into the quiet, painted into a corner
by the truth.
“What will we do when he dies?” I asked.
My brother thought for a moment and then shook his head.
“I don’t know.”
Still more quiet, and then I heard myself say, “Just one more thing I would
like to say to him.”
“Yeah?”
“I would like to tell him that he hasn’t fooled anyone and what a cheating,
beating, drunk he is.”
My brother laughed and nodded in approval.
“Yeah,” I continued, “All that other stuff I told him?  About how if
depriving a 4 year old of ice cream made him feel like a man, then it was
the closest he was ever going to get?”
“Yeah?”
“That was the frosting on the cake.”
He grinned.
“This?  This would be the candy rose on top of the frosting in the corner,
surrounded with extra icing.”
He laughed.
“The ROSE.”  I savored the words with the greatest of satisfaction.  
He nodded and sipped his beer.
 
LL