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Beyond

Posted on April 12, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

“I am going to look at you like I know what you’re saying to me but let’s never pretend that we understand each other, okay?”

With those words my father walked out of our lives to be neither seen nor heard from for fifteen years. My brother was eight at the time.

I was dead.

We lived in a nice house on a nice street not too far from the cemetery. It was very little trouble for me to climb out of my tastefully simple grave and make my way to the family home. Walls and doors no longer kept me out but I had to remember to leave often enough so that I wouldn’t scare anybody. See a dead person can go wherever he or she wants to and stay for as long as he or she likes. The only trouble with staying too long in one place is that a presence begins to manifest itself around the dead person, a presence that gives the living a sense that they are being watched. If the dead person stays around even longer that presence gains enough substance to become visible to the naked eye.

I wouldn’t want to do that to my mother or brother. Not when they had to deal with the fallout from my father’s very selfish actions. It’s not that I blamed him for anything too much. He was still unable to cope with my death. He didn’t understand why a baby had to be taken away like I was. He didn’t see the justice in any of it.

I might have wanted to stick around long enough to explain it wasn’t anyone’s fault but he left, went to a place far away from the family home. I didn’t follow him because I wasn’t sure I could find my way back, and to avoid causing any disturbance in the world of the living I needed to return to my grave from time to time.

It really wouldn’t do for people to see a lost three-year-old hovering on the periphery of their vision. At first they would be concerned and then they would be very, very scared. So I couldn’t follow father even though he needed to understand that my dying was no one’s fault.

Not really.

When my father returned, my brother was already the man of the house. He had been so for over seven years. At sixteen he turned away creditors who threatened dire consequences and then made it a point to find the money to pay them off. My mother and he didn’t ever need a helping hand again after that day. It was a strange thing to watch them go through their lives over those fifteen years.

She, alone and focused inwards.

The grief she carried clawed away any hope of finding renewed happiness because she felt guilty for leaving me alone the day I fell.

He, unsure of what was expected of him.

I watched my brother act out in ways I suppose eight-year-olds might do. He wet his bed but not while he was asleep. He stood up on the bed after bedtime prayers, took down his shorts and soaked the entire mattress. He did this for two whole years before my mother found him, beat him to within an inch of his life and forbade him from ever doing something like that again. He stopped immediately but the kids in school called him Piss Face for two whole years after that.

Around the age of eleven my brother discovered boxing. He had been idly flipping channels on the TV, not particularly bored, not particularly interested in what was going on until he came to a replay of the infamous Holyfield-Tyson fight. He watched as a couple of punches were thrown, he watched the men go into a clinch, he watched the muscular man grab his own ear in anguish and he was hooked. At the library my brother would seek out video clips and photographs of old boxing matches. He watched them with interest, he got funny black and white printouts of the pictures of boxers he liked and taped them up to the roof of the bunk bed he slept in.

I watched my brother fashion a punching bag out of a cloth bag and dirt from the yard. When he broke his wrist for the first time he told my mother he fell. She yelled at him for an hour about how money was tight and they couldn’t afford for him to get hurt like that. He didn’t say a word but I watched him cry silently that night. It was the first time since I had died that I felt like staying around long enough for him to feel my presence. I didn’t because he scared me with his intensity, and because I thought he was mad at me for dying.

Nearly a year after that incident, one of the kids in school tossed out the Piss Face insult again when my brother walked by. It wasn’t as common for those words to be said around him and I guess the bigger kid had thought he was going to be ignored the way my brother always ignored that and other insults uttered in his presence.

Not that day, not that time.

My brother punched the boy and when his toughened knuckles connected with the boy’s face, they broke his nose. My brother might have been expelled if it hadn’t been for a teacher who was in the corridor at the time. The teacher vouched for the fact that the attack had been provoked, not just on that day but by a history of verbal abuse against my brother. He was suspended for two weeks all the same and my mother yelled at him again.

Mother yelled at my brother several times over the next few years, all the way until he stood up to the creditors who came knocking that day a few months after his sixteenth birthday. My brother never really had a birthday after our father left and so his turning sixteen had been marked by little other than the passing of another day. My mother didn’t even remember and he didn’t remind her.

Things improved around the house after that day with my brother’s face off against the creditors. Every since that day he had broken the bully’s nose in school, people of various ages had feared my brother. To begin with he had only put fear in the hearts of the small children but as he grew older and stronger, his appearance kept most people at bay. He didn’t go out of his way to hurt people and he wasn’t particularly unpleasant but life had dealt my brother a harsh hand of cards and he played with what he was given, without complaint but also without remorse.

And then one day, nearly fifteen years after he had left, my father came home. He walked through the gate and up the path like he was returning from a hard day’s work, except that it was still daytime when he arrived.

I suppose he had kept a key because he simply slipped it into the lock, turned it and let himself into the house. My brother was in the back yard and my mother was in the kitchen. My father walked past the kitchen and spoke without stopping, nearly killing my mother of a heart attack as he said, “What’s for lunch Vera?”

She turned around and looked at the face that had haunted her dreams for fifteen years. Except it was no longer the same face. Weathered by fifteen years living God knows where, there were lines and spots and a much darker skin tone where her husband’s face used to be. Her hands went white and her eyes went wide but she was unable to find her tongue.

The back door opened and my brother stepped into the house, hung his coat up and came face-to-face with a stranger outside his mother’s kitchen, “What the hell?”

My father turned to face the exclamation, “Watch your tongue boy.”

“Who the hell are you?!”

“I said watch your tongue. I’m your father.”

My brother had continued boxing. He had been boxing for more than half his life. It was always him and huge bags of dirt and though they didn’t hit back they caused him enough pain to take some of the sting out of what the world said about him. It was not enough however to take away the sting of having to look upon the face of a man who had abandoned his mother and him all those years ago. It wasn’t enough to replace the childhood that was taken from him. With a roar and surprising speed he launched himself at our father and before the older man could plant his feet or prepare for the attack, it was all over.

He went down like a tackle dummy, hit his head and splashed his blood across the floor. The longest streak nearly came as far as where my feet would be if I were to manifest as a visible entity. I looked up to find my father standing next to me and we watched as my brother tried to revive him. Then we watched him pick our father up and wrap him in an old carpet.

We watched him drive the carpet to the cemetery later that night and bury our father in the same grave I had been laid to rest in.

When he went home my father said to me, “It won’t belong before your mother is here with us. It’s finally time for us to spend time with you now.”

I just watched my brother go.

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