My Brother Michael By Janis Owens

Winner of the Chatauqua South Award for Fiction “Owens’ fine writing and the ring of her natural voice will carry readers along like a tale told on a porch on a sultry Southern night.” —Publishers Weekly “These pages sing with an energy that is rare and wonderful. Janis Owens’ book is strong and true and all her own.” —Harry Crews “Of all the novels written about families, very few have been able to make the reader blood kin. My Brother Michael does this.” —James Dickey “A luminously written first novel.” —Kirkus Reviews “A heartfelt and poignant novel rooted in the beauty and sorrow of ordinary lives.” —Connie May Fowler “A haunting, unforgettable work of singular authenticity . . . surprising in its accrued power." —Doug Marlette

My Brother Michael

O

ut of the shotgun houses and deep, shaded porches of a West Florida mill town comes this extraordinary novel of love and redemption as told by Gabriel Catts. On the eve of his fortieth birthday Gabe attempts to reconcile a family shattered by his betrayal of his older brother, Michael. As Gabe contends with a host of personal demons, he recounts his lifelong love for his brother’s wife, Myra— whose own demons threaten to overwhelm all three of them. Circumstance and passion push them beyond the moral boundaries of their closeknit community in this intimate view of a Southern family.

Janis Owens

$12.95 51295

cover photograph courtesy of the Florida State Archives

9 781561 643431

“ N o t h i n g s h o r t o f s t u n n i n g .”

“ Janis Owens is one of the f inest n o v e l i s t s o f o u r t i m e s . " — Pat Conroy

Sarasota, Florida www.pineapplepress.com cover design by Carol Tornatore

My Brother Michael a novel

—Librar y Journal

ISBN 1-56164-343-2

Pineapple Press, Inc.

N ow w i t h a R e a d i n g G ro u p G u i d e

pineapple press

Ja n is Ow e ns

M

Y BROTHER MICHAEL

Also by Janis Owens Myra Sims The Schooling of Claybird Catts

M

Y BROTHER MICHAEL



Janis Owens

Pineapple Press, Inc. Sarasota, Florida

Copyright © 1997 by Janis Owens First paperback edition 2005 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to: Pineapple Press, Inc. P.O. Box 3889 Sarasota, Florida 34230 www.pineapplepress.com Lyrics from “Lay, Lady, Lay,” by Bob Dylan © 1969 by Big Sky Music. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Owens, Janis, 1960  My brother Michael / by Janis Owens.-- 1st Pineapple Press pbk. ed.        p. cm.   ISBN-13: 978-1-56164-343-1 (pbk. : alk. paper)   ISBN-10: 1-56164-343-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)  1.  Brothers--Fiction. 2.  West Florida-Fiction.  I. Title.   PS3565.W5665M9 2005   813’.54--dc22                                                   2005016658 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Design by Carol Tornatore Printed in the United States of America

for

WRO: Thank you for

letting me be myself

A historian is a prophet in reverse. Friedrich von Schlegel

1

Chapter

O



n the day my brother Michael died, I was standing at a lectern surrounded

by fifty-seven bored freshmen scribbling notes to my concise dissection of FDR and New Deal politics. With no knock, no warning at all, our department secretary, Mrs. Weeks, walked in with a small yellow telephone message that said simply: Call home.

Before I could react, before I could even ask why she had taken it

upon herself to interrupt my honors-level American history class with a routine phone message, she said, very gently, “Dr. Catts, your brother has died.” She paused to let the news sink in, then: “I’m so sorry. I know you were close.”

Seeing my stunned face, my tears, my total lack of control, she

dismissed the class and, with remarkable Yankee efficiency, had me on a plane to Tallahassee within hours. She even packed me a suitcase, though to this day I don’t know how she found my apartment (I’d just moved) much less the socks, the underwear, and the dark funeral suit, still clean and crisp in a dry cleaner’s bag.



Janis Owens



But whatever her method, she had me in Florida late in the after-

noon of his death, renting a car in Tallahassee and driving west to the town of my birth, arriving with two days to spare, but checking into an interstate motel room quite anonymously, refusing to let the family know I’d arrived. For they have long memories, my people do, and are not the kind to forget old indiscretions, no matter how far removed. And with Michael dead, dead at forty-three of pancreatic cancer that was only diagnosed during routine gallbladder surgery in October, I could not imagine them in a very forgiving mood and was too broken myself to withstand them.

So I stayed holed up in that seedy motel room for the better part

of two days, drinking whiskey for courage, sometimes dialing Michael’s home phone, but hanging up when unfamiliar voices answered, for despite Mrs. Weeks’ kind words, my brother and I had not spoken in eight years. We had not communicated at all beyond a quick visit by his daughter Melissa when she flew out of LaGaurdia on a student trip to Europe a year and a half earlier and the standard Christmas cards, quite impersonal, his name printed in calligraphy, as befitting a small town aristocrat, an impatient signature scribbled below. But not another word until shortly after Thanksgiving when he called from his hospital bed to remind me of a promise I’d made him the last time I ever saw him alive.

A promise that was causing me actual physical pain as I dressed for

his funeral, for I am a Tagamet addict and, what with the whiskey, had gone through a week’s supply in three days. By the time I’d knotted my tie and started for the church, I was actually spitting blood and hoping to God I wouldn’t do something humiliating at the service, like pass out. It would really be too much for these God-fearing folk to bear—the prodigal son stealing the limelight at the funeral of the older son—so I forewent the family section to take a seat among strangers in the back row, slumping passively and quietly bleeding into my handkerchief like the gentleman my mother raised me to be. I could see Mama, in fact,





My Brother Michael

seated twenty or so pews ahead of me in the front and corner of the mob that packed the small sanctuary. Despite her diminutive size, she had a distinct set to her shoulders and a headful of white hair that made her easy to pick out of the line of bowed heads on the family row.

My brother’s widow was not so easily discerned, for her brown

hair that showed red only in the sun was covered with a fine netting, her body was clothed like half the other women, in solemn, pagan black. But I tried. I have to say I tried. Even at his funeral, God help me, and if her brother Ira had seen me, I believe he would have killed me for it.

But providentially, no one noticed me there in the back, with the

place packed to perhaps twice that of normal capacity, folding chairs blocking the aisle, even the choir loft filled with sobbing mourners, all in evidence of the fact my brother was a mover and a shaker, a man of ideas. The owner of the town’s most prosperous factory, president of any civic organization he ever cared to join, the largest contributor to any and every charity in town—and those are just the laurels the first speaker, Dr. Winston (once GP to every snotnose and dogbite in the county, more recently, mayor) could get out before he was overcome by emotion and gave the pulpit back to the preacher. I was surprised to see this was still Brother Sloan, the same pastor who’d weaned us on salvation and damnation as children, who, with his fifty-odd years in the ministry, might have been expected to have something fortifying to say, but didn’t, only standing there an uncertain moment, then blowing his nose and asking Brother Cain, the AME pastor, to please come to the front.

It was the first time I’d ever seen a black man without a tool belt

step foot in Welcome Baptist, and I listened with a little more interest as he managed to sputter a few things about Michael, how he had hired the first black manager in the county, how that small act of tolerance had unlocked doors they never thought would open. He was trying to make some statement, some plea this practice not be abandoned when he, too, was overcome, not really crying, but shaking his head and returning



Janis Owens

to the deacon’s bench that was packed with ministers of every description, all mourning in various degrees of sincerity. Fresh from the land of rationalism, I couldn’t help but wonder if they weren’t weeping more at the death of those computer-generated checks than at Michael’s actual passing, but this small cynicism did not distract me as our old childhood friend from Magnolia Hill, Benny McQuaig, took the pulpit and managed between snorts and shuttering breaths to spin a pretty accurate eulogy.

Foregoing the titles and civic niceties, Benny painted a truer pic-

ture of Michael, a portrait of a man who was a natural optimist, a pragmatist who was born poor but worked his way out of it one grinding, clocked-in hour at a time. Randomly jumping here and there, he recalled the summer Michael tried out for the majors in Sarasota, his lifelong love of the Braves, the tough years in the seventies when the plant had almost rolled over—years I was away, years I came back, years I wasn’t so fond of remembering.

Benny’s flat country sincerity, along with his red face and many

pauses to cry unabashedly, was whipping the audience into an even greater frenzy of remorse, but I was suddenly diverted by a flash of red hair in the front pew and for a moment was too mesmerized to bother anymore with grief.

But it wasn’t her; I could see that fairly quickly. The red was bright

carrot orange, not deep auburn, edging close to brown. It was—yes, surely—it was Melissa, my niece, the one who had dropped by between flights last year. On the pew next to her was a tall young man—that would be Simon, the oldest son, named for our father, and next to him Clayton, the baby, his hair fair and light. And next to him was an averted head, bowed in prayer or prostrated by grief, I could not tell, as my heart began its old relentless gallop.

From the moment I spotted her till the last amen, the service

slipped by with unexpected ease. There were the usual hymns and a fast, predictable sermon by a young minister I’d never seen before. Then





My Brother Michael

suddenly, we were all standing, singing “Amazing Grace” a cappella and then filing up the aisle for the last viewing. In this, my careful retreat to the back betrayed me, for the ushers brought us out first, herding us up like so many sheep, trying to move things along so the family would be spared a prolonged wait. But I would not be hurried. I was too stunned for that and walked on heavy, leaden feet past pews and pews of people I’d left once, twenty years ago, then again, nine years ago, and never with many regrets, for we were not so compatible, my hometown and I.

But I paid them no mind that day, my eyes on the long oaken cas-

ket that was so amassed in flowers that the air was almost stifled with the particular waxy smell of the florist shop. Roses, carnations, arrangements and sprays, all pressed in such profusion that it bewildered the eye, and I had paused to see, in wonder, how they covered the very walls, when someone hit me from behind in a powerful, hysterical embrace.

For one incredible moment I thought it was Myra and was filled

with a fast scramble of emotions: shock, shame, and yes—I won’t lie— pure joy. Then I heard my mother’s voice, rough, country, telling the world, “Gabe, Gabe, I knew you’d come. I knew you’d come—my son, my son—”

And while she punctuated her every word with a solid knock of

her hard little West Florida head, I turned and found myself facing my brother’s family: Melissa, with a red, shattered face, who stepped forward to hug me over Mama’s head; Simon, dark and controlled, offering his hand like a grown man, though he was hardly more than a child, just outside sixteen, a vague breath of a memory of Michael, only taller and broader through the shoulders, a legacy of his mother’s blood, of the hardy frame of the North Alabama Celt.

But that was all, no one else stirred, for the younger son, Clayton,

was a stranger to me, watching me with level, neutral eyes that were mad and sullen, young enough to be petulant with something as relentless as death as he stood at his mother’s side, supporting her in her grief. And



Janis Owens

though she was very close, barely an arm’s length away, there was no recognition at all in her face as she looked at me, only a blank silence, and something in her very immobility reminded me desperately of the day her bastard of a father broke my wrist for showing her how to make a hopscotch board in the dirt of her backyard.

She had backed away slowly that day, one baby step at a time, till

she was flush against the fence that marked the iron-clad border of her hellish little world and stood there passively, with no word of protest spoken, none allowed. And just as before, when I had been too afraid of that monster of a father to do anything but stare, I abandoned her, giving in to my mother’s embrace and turning and looking on the corpse of my brother Michael.

And instead of the true confession I was afraid I might blurt out, or

the useless words of regret, I only blinked at him, then murmured aloud in a very plain, controlled voice, “God, he looks like Daddy.”



My Brother Michael by Janis Owens

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