Wait Softly Brother

Chapter 2: Day Two

Day Two

The pig shed boxes contain multitudes. A photograph of Mum, twenty years younger than I am right now, newly married and just before she became pregnant with Wulf. I hold it up and she grabs it from my hands. “In the Poconos,” she says, “they had these honeymoon packages. Heart-shaped beds, everyone there newly married. It was a place of blissful beginnings.”

“We have the same body,” I say. “Those are just my legs.”

“Well, I certainly do not have that body anymore.”

“No,” I say. “Nor do I, I suppose. But what a babe you were.”

“I was a catch,” she says, squinting at it.

“And so happy.” I peer into the frame, willing it to give me more, to offer up its story. I have never seen my mother smile so openly as in this picture. “Maybe we can put the best pictures aside and make an album, and get rid of the rest.”

But no, she will not get rid of photographs. There is something particular about them, some magic to them that makes them impossible to burn or bury. “We will archive them,” she says. By midmorning we have worked our way through one and a half small shoeboxes. The material in the pig shed seems suddenly insurmountable. We will never succeed in cleaning it up. “Wasn’t it one of Hercules’s labours to divert a river to clean out a barn?”

“Tantalus.”

“No, Mum, he was the guy with the rock.”

“That was Sisyphus, I think.”

“At any rate, maybe the question to ask is ‘Will you miss it?’ Or maybe, ‘Will someone else enjoy it more than you?’”

“How can you know what you will miss before you miss it? Just when it’s too late?”

And I can feel the dig, so I stop and glare at her for a bit. She’s impervious to my moods, though. She has been barricading herself from them for as long as I can recall. I am her creation, so whenever I misbehave, she just carries on until I adjust to whatever she expects. That way, I get to maintain my role as transgressor instead of occupying the one I would much prefer – that of being myself.

“What exactly are you working on these days?” she finally asks, by way of oiling the crank in our conversation.

“Autofiction,” I say.

Mum’s eyebrows flare. “Whatever that is.”

“It’s a sort of memoir.”

“And how do you expect to write a memoir? Given your memory, I mean.”

Mum and Dad used to say that if my head weren’t screwed on to my body, I’d forget where I left it. “There will likely be lacunae,” I say. “That is kind of the point.”

She nods.

“Since it’s about Wulf,” I say, and I can see her freeze again.

“We keep telling you. There’s no story there.” She huffs a bit and then shrieks a quiet “That’s my story,” which is factual. Wulf is her stillbirth, her old wound, her story. “I do wish you’d stop all this nonsense.”

“The nonsense of the writing or the nonsense of leaving Matthew?”

“It’s all the same, isn’t it?”

This is a curve I hadn’t expected. The thought that she sees clearly how one thing unleashes the next. How thoughts cascade into actions. How vulnerable we are to our traumas, as we write. One is the other; it’s all tangled together.

“You won’t solve yourself by picking at this,” she says.

I dare, then. “It’s just this, Mum. I was telling this friend of mine, she’s a sort of therapist, about Wulf, about your stillbirth, and she said it’s common for mothers to be depressed afterwards, especially when they don’t have support.”

“I never had time to be depressed. You came right afterwards.”

“That is my point. It occurs to me that you might have had a lot of unworked-through grief and, who knows, self-blame.” I don’t mention that some of this unworked-through grief has become her legacy to me. Instead, I pull out another box, c***k the tape with my Opinel knife. It’s a box of porcelain women experiencing pastel motherhood, drinking tea and wearing long swirling gowns in meadows. It’s a box of idealism that the Royal Doulton brand invented to keep women nostalgic and thoughtless. “Charity pile, right?” I say.

“These are going in my bedroom,” she says. “Why do you hate women so?”

What I hear is: Why do you hate me so?

“I love you, Mum. I love women, too,” I say. “I just wish they wouldn’t buy into this.”

“Buy into having pretty things?”

“Yes. No. That’s not it.”

“What is it, then?”

“Mum, what if all women did what I’m doing?”

“Left their families?”

“Left mediocrity, left unhappy situations, sought joy.”

“I’m not unhappy. Why do you get to proclaim that we’re all unhappy? Maybe there are a lot of happy women in happy situations. Besides, what would the men do?”

I laugh of course. Because: What would the men do? And as I laugh, my eyes catch hold again of the photograph of my mum at twenty-one, her smile opening up the universe. I pick it up and smile back at her. “Do you remember who you were?” I say.

“It’s a long time ago,” she says. It’s true. She’s an old lady now, thick with age but still attractive.

“I wonder if these happy memories sustain us in unhealthy ways.”

“There you go again. It’s not because you’re unhappy that the rest of us have to be, too.”

“I’m not even sure I care about happiness,” I say.

And then I hear Dad pushing a wheelbarrow into the pig shed.

“I care about freedom,” I say. “I care about my body rediscovering joy.”

And Dad, because he would do almost anything to avoid conflict, says, “Load her up!” And because we would do anything to avoid dragging him into this, we comply.

For days, I haul bags of photographs and document boxes from the pig shed, and we pore through them deciding what to file, what to throw away, what to keep. Everything I think I might be able to use, I set aside to digitize, promising Mum that I won’t damage anything, and that once I am done, I will archive everything in plastic bins, safe from mould and from the rains, which have, incidentally, not abated.

Toward the end of the week, at breakfast, Mum ceremoniously hands me a manila envelope.

“It’s for your memoir,” she says. “Some correspondence mailed to your great-grandfather. You might as well have it. It’s about his father, Russell Boyt, who would have been your great-great-grandfather. Though there was little great about him by all accounts. I was thinking this will help you with the Civil War bits of your book. He fought, you know. They say he was cuckoo – even before the war.”

“First of all, Mum, we don’t say ‘cuckoo’ anymore, and second of all, you’re kidding, right?”

“Nothing is really known about him,” she says, like she hasn’t heard me. “Well, a little is known.”

“I’m not writing a family history. I’m writing an extended fictional essay about my dead brother.”

She purses her lips in that dangerous way she has. I have crossed a line. She says, “You never know. You might need it,” and starts to walk away.

I look down at the envelope in my hands. I pull the letter out. It’s on blue airmail paper. There’s another envelope inside the first. The gist of the note on the blue paper is that the enclosed much older envelope was found in an archive of dead letters at a post office being dismantled in Richmond, Virginia, in 1969. The archivist is certain we are the proper recipients of this letter. “Wait,” I say. “Was I there the day this came in the mail?”

“Oh, no, you’d have been at school.”

Private Russell Boyt is the name on the front of the envelope, and he is, in fact, my great-great-grandfather.

“He was more or less disowned by the family,” Mum says. “Insane. He was institutionalized after the war.”

I gently pull the older letter from its envelope. It’s foxed and yellowed, brittle, a scrawl of dainty grey quill-pen cursive:

Dear Pvte Boyt. I do not know why you did what you did and I suppose you must have reasons of your own. For my part I wish I never was tangled in your business and you never got tangled in mine. And yet if you send me back my rightful property I think I can carry on some. Otherwise wee Charles requires new breeches and a decent flaxen shirt. Please do send money and news when you can.

Sincerely, Cristiana Muldon.

“My God,” I say. “Have you read this? Who was she?”

“I think she was a mistress.”

I hand the letter to Mum. “I’m really not planning to write anything particularly historical,” I say. I do not want this. This is the last thing I want.

She pushes my arm away. “Throw it out if you don’t want it.”

Bait.

I am stupid. I bring the letter up to my room. Sit on the bed and read it over. It smells of some kind of perfume – rose, maybe, and dust and a hint of barnyard, which might be its years of sitting in the pig shed. I know Mum gave me the letter to distract me from my fixation on Wulf. But I won’t be waylaid.

I tell myself this, but who am I kidding? The thing has its hooks in me already. They say that everything you write, just like everything you dream, is a replica of you, or your unconscious self. They say you can’t write a character who is not, in some true way, an aspect of yourself. If this is true, then all fiction is autobiography. All writing is self. Maybe I can find my way to Wulf this way. Maybe it’s the only way to him. I set the letter on my dresser and sit down to write. I try to become Russell Boyt, my mentally ill ancestor.