Being Dead in South Carolina Read online

  “All right.”

  He rolled onto his side and coughed, curling in his shoulders atop the quilt like some nomad.

  “Bet you’re tall now,” he yawned, and we let off at that so sleep could bring him the rest of the way home.

  Next morning, a bitter rot scorched the air in my room. His quilt was creased rather than rumpled, flattened with a stale sleep. I opened a window.

  From downstairs came the warble of dishes hitting the table; bacon was frying, and Mother was already in her hard-shoes, crossing and recrossing the receding linoleum. I put on a red snap front and tucked it into my jeans, looked in the mirror, then took it off. I cuffed the sleeves of a tee shirt and headed down.

  “Why, that ain’t my boy,” Mother said cheerily. “Not no more.” She wiped her knuckles with a dishrag and gestured out the window. “Out there chopping since six.”

  “Where’s Pop?”

  “Out with him. Tell them breakfast is on.”

  Out in the yard Corey was just lifting into his backswing, his figure arcing tall, his hind foot about to bust through the side of a water-rotted sneaker. His back was to me. He wore the red plaid flannel and jeans he must have arrived in—I never saw a duffel. Hair hung over his ears, oily and darker than I remembered. He did have a beard—mostly scraggle, wiry black half circles: a boy’s beard. The part of his jowls I could see didn’t look boyish at all, though—rubbery and pocked, swollen with the long-sickened, gray-meat pallor I’ve since grown used to seeing on hitchers.

  It was about here I forgot about the bear hide nonsense, and not long after till I left off Conan altogether.

  The screen door clapped behind me. He glanced back—“Pickle”—then broke the quiet suspension of his arc with a jerky, violent swing whose impact was murderous and effective, sinking in with a sad thunk and setting his greased hair atremble. White splinters shot out and slowed against the air; cloven wood clinked onto more wood.

  Just outside the circle of kindling stood my father. A white tuft lifted from his scalp in the breeze. He was squinting in the morning light and smiling.

  He’d grown big, my brother. But it was a sunken weight. A carried weight. He bent for another log of pine, grunting, the flannel pulled tight across the meaty bunch of belly and breast. Standing back up, palming the nine-inch diameter of a log, he faced me for the first time, half grimacing, half smiling, his eyes closer set than I remembered.

  Over breakfast, my folks didn’t ask what he’d been doing or where because it would’ve come out as reproof. In talking to us Pop had always to restrain the reproof from his voice, never understanding that it was the restraint more than the reproof that set Corey off most. Pop held back with me too, but differently. Like I was too tender for his judgment. Or, more likely, like I was never really his to judge. I was called a sweet boy. Pop and I never fought much, not like he did with Corey. Lying in bed once, I heard him and Mother talking low on the porch. They were talking about something, not me, but my name came up and Pop sort of let off a minute. Then he uttered something in which I made out the word “drifty.”

  “Ducie, we got ten winters of wood out there!” Pop said now, leaning back his chair. His eyes were wide and slapped pale with cheer. He watched Corey hang his big arms across the table, scooping up biscuits, bacon, jelly, shakers, butter—absorbed in piling his plate like when he was a kid. Pop was pushing bowls of grits and eggs toward him, laughing—“Eat, boy! Eat!” We got tickled.

  Corey swallowed down a biscuit, a fork trembling in his hand, then said, “You finally sell them cows, Pop?”

  Pop’s eyes went flat for a moment. He had sold the Holsteins and given up the dairy racket five years before Corey left. He was visibly stung.

  “Corey!” Mother said, pausing before she poured his coffee. “Your daddy’s been running the hardware near twelve years now.”

  Corey nodded vaguely. He sucked some food from his teeth, and I saw the missing molar—saw it was a stranger sitting at our table. “How’s that, then?” he said.

  Pop raised his eyebrows, nodded. Over the last six years he’d had to sell half his floor space to a florist and let go all three of his employees. He ran the little corridor of a store himself now, and it’d been drying up for years. People didn’t want much to do with our family. School was tough. “We’re getting along, Corey.”

  “The store’s fine, honey,” Mother said, “long as your daddy gets his tail up there quick to open up.” She pulled Pop’s plate away. She knew to get him out the door.

  But Pop kept up his dogged cheer, his stiff smile. We all saw the sour strain in his eyes—from being forgotten by a son; from the thought, too, of a few folks milling outside the store right now, checking watches. “Let ’em wait!” he said, leaning back for five silent minutes before standing and toasting Corey with an empty mug, grabbing up his balance books, and leaving us with the sound of his truckbed rattling up the drive.

  Mother and Corey and I sat there quiet. Then Corey let out a loud, unselfconscious belch. “Corey!” Mother said. We all looked at each other and laughed.

  And that’s the happiest part of this story.

  All that afternoon, I sat on the porch watching my brother—a man no one remembers now, not even as a murderer—mow the pasture’s highgrass. It was August, and though school had started up, Mother let me stay home. Corey swung the tractor hard down each row, sliding and gunning the wheels, popping the gearbox. Pop would’ve killed him. It broke your heart to see how Corey abused machines or clothes. Anything lent him was doomed to his subtle ruin and came back missing bolts or buttons hardly noticed in the first place, left with stains noticed only in certain lights—in every case rendered useless. He’d sweated through his flannel but would not take it off. Whenever he pulled the shifter, a shoulder seam gaped open on his back.

  He was doing a shit job of it, grass finned and clumped in his wake. He always rushed hurly-burly through any piece of labor, impatient to be done with it. He was like this with living: his shallow, fitful breaths; his shaky fingers; his skittering black eyes.

  After he finished mowing, I helped him stack the wood he’d cut under the eaves. Sister limped around nearby, but at a distance, glancing up at us—neither of whom she trusted—as if for permission to leave. Beneath her ashen face she seemed to remember Corey, to remember why she’d bolted home six years ago. Mother kept peeking out the window.

  “Head to the pond?” I said. We’d finished with the wood and Corey was jiggling the loose porch railing with a mind to fix it. The mosquitoes were bad.

  He looked at me, and what I saw in his eyes was: What pond?

  The pond for which Pond Forest was named had no name of itself. It sat about a half mile into the forest that began across the dirt road. As kids we’d catfished there and sometimes swam.

  I tossed my clothes at a felled trunk and squished down the soft bank, then floundered in. Corey watched on. “Come on, Corey. Cool in here.”

  He began to unbutton his shirt, his eyes roving the far bank. Over there a tornado had ripped through two years back and left a litter of felled pines, snapped off six feet or so from the ground. Corey got down to his grimy underwear and waded in. He went under, came up, and stood belly deep, staring off at those shorn trunks, his face nowhere close to being drunk on play like in the old days. The pond had always been a place where he could ragdoll me around without me crying, hurling me through the air with his long, loggy arms, his knuckles skidding off my ribs underwater in a way that hurt but only made me laugh harder. Today though, as I jumped and belly-flopped nearby, he stood there stirring water with his hands, blinking. He clearly didn’t care much for swimming anymore. He was here out of some tenderness for his kid brother. I cut out the splashing nonsense and crabwalked along the bottom for a while, my head just above water.

  “That’s enough,” I said. “Let’s dry.”

  We slogged back towa
rd the bank, him in front. I grabbed my shirt from the oak trunk. Behind us the sun lay heavy and cicadas sizzled around the pond. It used to be on a day like this we’d lay across that mossy trunk and sun dry. Exhausted from tossing me around, Corey’d splay his arms, let his chest bow out. His shunted breaths would settle into a more relaxed rustling. As he blinked up through the leaf shadow, his mouth would fall open as if about speak from the depth we all suspected was there. But that didn’t happen today. We both dressed wet and he followed me back through the woods.

  We came out on the dirt road, in sight of our house. Pop’s truck was sidled by the kitchen door. When I turned down our drive, which cut between the two pastures he’d just hours ago mown, Corey stopped and said, “I’ll wait here.” His shirt hung open. He stood there, staring down the road, which dead-ended into a neighbor’s drive just around the bend.

  “‘Wait’? Wait and what? We’re home.” I looked at him, and he looked back, seeing that I’d seen: He hadn’t know where he was.

  He shook his head and followed after. “Goddamn, Pickle.”

  After dinner, Corey said he was feeling tired and headed upstairs. My parents and I sat out on the porch and talked cautiously.

  “It’s like he’s not even my boy,” Mother said, meaning it in a good way, a hopeful way.

  “He sure has calmed down,” Pop said. He tried to act calmed down himself.

  “How about it, Pickle?” Mother said. “Good to have your brother back?”

  “Yeah. It’s good.”

  “It sure is,” she said, starting to rock again.

  “College of hard knocks,” Pop enunciated, adopting the expression for the first time ever, I’m sure. He stood, gave a nod out our screen at the cords of wood. “Hitting the damn eaves. Look at that.”

  “He lost Skoke,” I said.

  Mother said, “Well,” and kept rocking, as though it were a sad lesson for us all but one best left behind now.

  Pop turned from the screen like he wanted to ask what did I mean “lost.” But he didn’t ask. He looked back out. He’d had an affection for Skokey.

  Up in my room I found Corey sitting on the edge of his bed. I sat across from him, on the edge of mine. I took off my shirt. We hadn’t said much all day and now stared at the floor between us. The window was open and I wondered what he’d heard.

  “You and Pop won’t forgive about that dog, will you?” he said, half smiling.

  I shrugged. “Pop’s a ghost now.” I tossed my shirt at the closet.

  “Nah. He ain’t a ghost yet.”

  “Yeah. That, from a ghost.”

  He fingered his beard. He looked at the floor, then up at me. “I ain’t a ghost either.”

  “I mean, it’s like you’re here and you ain’t, Corey. You been gone.” It came out in a rush; I could feel my face redden, tears welling.

  “Hell, boy,” he said, lying on his back, his voice seeming to recede away for miles. He looked at the ceiling. “I loved that dog. You all know that.”

  “You left him in the woods. Skokey! You let him get lost.”

  “Pickle”—he chuckled at my ability to feel tenderness for a dog six years gone.

  “Well, you been gone. I don’t feel much, I guess.”

  “All right, Pickle.”

  “I don’t.”

  “All right.” And he had the heart at least not to laugh at me.

  It became clear that my brother was changed by more than years. Even with a few good meals in him, that sick pallor wouldn’t leave his face. His eyes, shadowed and narrow-set, seemed blacker, too black to really fix on anything. Inscrutable as cypress water. To see those eyes as I’d seen them at the pond was to understand the thin line between hate and nothingness. As though whatever burned in him for so long had finally carbonized. There was no point asking where he’d been. You could see he’d been nowhere.

  That second night, I woke up and saw him standing in the middle of the room in his underwear. I was staring at him a while before I realized his mouth was moving; before I picked up the rapid murmur of whispers . . .

  Fixin fixin fixin fixin fixin fixin fixin . . .

  Corey missed breakfast the next morning. Mother laid out a spread like yesterday, but after half an hour waiting, Pop collapsed his paper and snapped the rubber bands around his balance books. He stood to leave—not without shooting a glance first at Corey’s over-piled plate of cold food, then at Mother. It was a glance that spoke of his tolerance for womanish wastefulness.

  Later, when Corey did come down, it was to sit on the porch. His show of doing chores had quickly run its course, as usual. I sat in the other rocker. Ignoring his smell, his dead-flesh face, I asked what he was going to do now. Inside, mother stopped sweeping.

  He stared across the pasture, at the edge of Pond Forest. He shook his head.

  “Well,” I said. I flicked a mosquito off my arm. “You been places, at least.”

  He sat lost in his stare. “Yeah,” he said. He yawned. “Worked up in Duluth one summer. Helped out some roofers. Saw Superior.” He reported these facts as if remembering something he’d read.

  “Pickle,” he said, turning to me. “How long you think it’s been?”

  I said six years. He nodded. “Well, yeah, I been some places.” He got up, stretched, and went back inside. I heard him slow-climbing the stairs and realized he’d brought back nothing of the places he’d been, only the heaviness of his body.

  Corey’s slow climb up the stairs that second day marked the end of his visits with us. He began to sleep through the afternoons. He must have heard Mother and Pop worrying out on the porch one night—about him still being wanted and all, about what problems were bound to come—because when he did get out on the porch he took care to sit on the shaded south side, by the kitchen door, so not to be seen by our neighbor, an old widower a quarter mile down who drove past our house every day to town. I’d come home from school each day and there he’d be, staring at his feet. Mother’s face would be wrung out from trying to give him space all day. Corey and I didn’t talk, usually, except for when I got ready for bed at night. Even then it wasn’t much.

  Then he rarely left his bed at all. The room began to soak up his vinegar stench, and I took to sleeping on the couch. He often hollered out in his sleep, frightful sounds that made Mother turn off the sink and walk out to the yard for a few minutes. Pop didn’t stick his head in the room but after dinner each night, knowing he couldn’t but irritate Corey. All week he left for work sullen and distracted, unable to understand or control this new shift in our lives.

  Two weeks passed like this. One afternoon I was walking back from my friend J. T.’s, taking a cut we used through Pond Forest. The path took me along the pond’s south shore, through the queer silence of those tornado-speared pine trunks. I stopped when I saw up ahead, squatted among some saplings of pipebrush, my brother. I saw the back of his head trembling, working at something. I got close and saw he held a slivered chunk of pine up to his mouth, gnawing on it, his eyes rolling back like I’d seen Sister’s do tossing raw meat around in her mouth. Blood painted his thin lips; a rivulet had come down his throat, disappearing under his collar.

  I stood behind a dead trunk farther down the bank. I don’t know if he knew I was there or if it was someone else he was addressing when, dropping the chunk from his mouth to the pine needles, he looked up, his head gone still, and said in a flat tone, “Can’t get the sweet out.”

  Then he lowered his head and picked up the wood with his mouth. I walked over and got in front of him and said, “Stop that.”

  He looked at the front of my shirt, gnawing still.

  I slapped the wood from his hand. “Shit, Corey.”

  His eyes kept looping. “I can’t—”

  I slapped his mouth. “Get on home.”

  I never said anything about the forest business, but by
the end of the week Mother had stopped saying how he wasn’t her boy. It became clear he wasn’t. He was sleeping around the clock now—hollering out nonsense all afternoon. Ga ma heels! Ga ma heels! or Watch’er hooves! or Fixin fixin fixin fixin fixin! In those rare moments he was awake, lumbering down the hallway, his old surliness had returned. Pop ducked his head into the gloom one night after work to ask “How we doing?”—We done with this yet?—and Corey, sounding strangely sensible, told Pop go to hell. Then he called Pop some awful, thorny curse.

  For the next few days Pop went about his business, trying to imitate the simple economy of our lives before Corey’d come back. Then the following Saturday morning he flung wide the bedroom door. “Rise and shine, sandbag!” he clapped, opening the curtains and laughing. “Got to earn your keep round here.” He began to wrestle Corey out of bed. “Help us out, Pickle,” he called over his shoulder. I stood watching from the hall; I didn’t move. Corey resisted, but with none of his former fire and spit. He was little more than flesh now. Somehow Pop got him dressed and out in the yard, where he had set up some sawhorses. Across them lay a bundle of ten-foot two-by-fours.

  “I figure Pickle can rip out the old porch railing while you and me measure and cut,” Pop said. He snipped the bundle’s twine with a pocketknife.

  As Pop and Corey set about measuring the old railing, I idly dangled the strange heft of a sledgehammer, and it occurred to me that my brother had at my age been far more useful to my father, for all his hellraking.

  Mother appeared in the doorway. “Oh, Lord,” she chimed with mock worry. Pop winked up at her from the yard. Just needs a good day’s hard work.

  In the shade of the porch I began to knock out the soft-rotted railing. Out in the sun, both of them were sawing and sweating, Pop spurring him on every now and then with a Come on, now or Hold it straight, Corey, hold it straight. It wasn’t half an hour before the adventure came to its predictable end: Corey clumsily miscutting and halfing a precious length of wood Pop needed because he hadn’t wanted to buy extra; Pop spitting out an acid-edged “Goddammit, son!” despite himself; Corey eyeing him back and kicking out a sawhorse as he told Pop to fuck himself before heading back in. After the scene, I stood by for a few minutes until Pop waved me off, saying he could manage. Which he did. He had the new railing up inside two hours.