I May Have Named My Brother Jeb

     The unspeakable and the horror. And he saw it and he carried it. He thought it out on his own but couldn’t tell me in time. How much he cared and how much he knew. So he showed me the way by doing. He called to say he forgave me, before he died. Before I knew what I had done wrong. I think I know now, and I’d like to tell you. You know that stuff about your brother not being too heavy to carry? “He’s my brother, he’s not heavy.” You’ve got to learn how to carry your brother, or sister. It’s not gendered, though they talk about it that way in the Bible or wherever. If you want to know what love is, at every level, in my humble opinion, you’ve got to learn about carrying, with your arms and with your legs, your back and with your breath. With your words.
    There should be a way of telling, similar to a mother holding a baby. That is the basis of attachment, the holding. The baby can feel the ground through the one who holds, and the holder feels the ground that way also. Babies can pull the holder away from the earth, the rocks, float away. The soul of a baby floats, in the dream of the womb, in the thoughts and feelings of the mother as she bears the child. There is no heaven or hell. And then forever after birth, there is only carrying.
    My grandmother Margaret loved the image of cherubs, those fat cute babies with wings. How would anyone understand as well as she, who lost her mother when she was three. To an illegal abortion in 1906 (nothing is pressing my buttons more then the state of Texas right now). Margaret’s father was a train man, he inspected tracks. Was he away from home quite a bit and was her mother, ____ lonely? Her aunt ___, was a suffregete and later a progressive textbook author. In other words, she was taking the prejudice out of young impressionable minds. She was the first in their small town of Silver Creek, NY, to get a car and how proudly she must have driven that four wheeler.
    All those names and faces are smooshed together for me in my post modern brain, I paid no attention to my heritage. Or perhaps no one thought about how it is that I should know. Until later when Grandma Margaret took up geneology as a hobby. The faces and names were old fashioned and far away, Whipple, Underwood, ______. My own last name echoed this ancient quality but with a ridiculous quality, Wattles. Undoubtedly the name will be gone by the next genneration since the four cousins of us siblings are girls, in their 20’s. But we carry way more than a last name, we carry a first name and we listen for how people might say our names in the world. That is what we carry, or pretend to carry. And amongst family, the nuclear family, the sound of a name carries endless amounts, flows that we don’t understand until later.
    In my family, us older three kids actually gave Jeb his name when he was about 4. Maybe it was me, I remember the moment. We’d been calling him J.B., I think because he didn’t like Joel and his middle name was Brownlee. Joel was my Dad’s pick, from the Bible and seemed onerous, kind of heavy. Too formal. Jeb just had a ring to it, and did I actually say “lets just call him Jeb!” Yes, I should own that, though the responsibility nearly breaks my heart. When he passed away in ’96 nearly 200 people came to his memorial in Philly. Though he’d never lived in Philly, he’d visit and stay for months, and all my friends were his friends too. It’s as if we were almost twins. Though he traveled restlessly always, across the country and back, I knew where he was and he knew where I was. I’d get a feeling, and then he’d call me up and tell me the news.

Make the Angels

 Today my two remaining siblings and I are going out to visit the two sites where our younger brother Jeb’s ashes are melted into the earth. One spot overlooks the Schuykill River. There’s an Amtrak railroad bridge nearby and down below this bluff is the West River Drive. The cars actually drive through a tunnel cut through the bluff where half of his ashes were placed. There’s a long ago deserted hillside garden that you walk through to get there, stone steps and walls. But first you walk across a lawn and step over a small stream set into concrete. Always a bit trashed and neglected, the sound of the cars zooming by is a random rhythm.

I went to a drum circle there at least once, further back on the bluff. The remains of the fire pit are still there. I’ll look today to see if it seems still active. Pot fumes rising, the beat predictable and relentless, squawks of a sax or shrieks of flute invade my memory. But perhaps I am remembering the sound of an actual Rainbow Gathering, I went to four nationals, starting with Washington State 1980. I’d set off for that Rainbow because I’d heard through some far reaching grapevine that he might be there. After two years of not hearing any word from him, I did find him, he walked right into our camp when we were setting up. But then he ended up here about 15 years later. Well, half of him.

The other half of his ashes are under a tree next to Walt Whitman’s tomb across the river in Camden. I Sing the Body Electric changed America, and it also changed me. I’d read Whitman out loud, almost religiously, in my early 20’s when I’d gone to live with my Grandmother in her shady home in Florida for a year. More than something to do, I felt he was kind of a saint, along with the likes of John Coltrane and John Lennon. If felt good to read the words aloud, just like it felt good to read the Pablo Neruda aloud, in Spanish as well as English. Even if I didn’t know Spanish hardly at all. I could guess how the meanings connected. Neruda also liked to celebrate the body. My girlfriend at the time, Maria, whose mother Chonita was from Mexico, we’d read Neruda aloud together. But when I was in Florida, a separation from Maria for a year, I’d read aloud, sitting in the hot water of the old cast iron tub.

Jeb actually passed away in ’96, when my daughters were two, or perhaps it was January of ’97. I always get a bit mixed up on dates, seeing as how I was born in ’59. He was born in ’61, and we’re a year and about 10 months apart. Somehow there seems to be quite a bit of difference between 1 and 2, and it confused me early on. There seems to be no comparison between the space between 0 and 1 and the space between 1 and 2. The confusion remains like an echo and I always have to think twice about certain kinds of math operations. Being a carpenter, it comes up quite a bit.

Jeb, the youngest of us four however, was kind of a runt and he had sight problems, teeth problems, leg problems. Apparently towards the end he may have known he had heart problems. In his belongings was a list of numbers which I’ve always wanted to back check to see if they were for health centers. Why would an apparently homeless person have a list of numbers? So, in comparison, my math problems that translate into time memory problems are nothing. I learned that early on. And I remember the moment. I was wrestling with him, which may have meant picking on him since I was always bigger and knew I could always win. I was dropping a ball of spit towards his face, with my knees on his arms so he couldn’t move, and I thought, This is terrible! Don’t do this! And I stopped. It seems to me that we became best of friends and brothers after that. There were never any resentments, at least on my part. And I always tried to help him and be there for him. Though in the end I failed.

That is the harsh truth, and through working to understand this truth, I feel like I am learning to make the angels, so to speak. There was a phone call from Jeb about 6 months before he died where he told me that he forgave me. For what, I did not understand at the time, but perhaps now I do. I've been thinking about these things ever since, and I think he knew way more than me when he called that day. I too went through alcoholism, and continuing depression. That ogre of suicidal ideation still hovers nearby, even in this moment. As it must have for him, perhaps from a very early age. My parents say that he almost died when he was six months old. The medicine he was given permanently stained his teeth yellow. But if we talk to the angels they can help us. Grandmothers, friends, acquaintances. Saints from the media of music or arts. Joan of Arc perhaps. Her testimony from her trial shouts across the ages about fairies that her grandmother saw under a certain ancient tree. They called it the Fairy Tree and put wreaths there. She says she may have danced there with the other girls but she sang more often than she danced.