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.