My Brother Read online

  What would my brother say were he to be asked how he became interested in growing things? He saw our mother doing it. What else? This is what my family, the people I grew up with, hate about me. I always say, Do you remember? There are twelve banana plants in the back of his little house now, but years ago, when I first noticed his interest in growing things, there was only one. I asked my mother how there came to be twelve, because I am not familiar with the habits of this plant. She said, “Well…” and then something else happened, a dog she had adopted was about to do something she did not like a dog to do, she called to the dog sharply, and when the dog did not respond, she threw some stones at him. We turned our attention to something else. But a banana plant bears one bunch of fruit, and after that, it dies; before it dies it will send up small shoots. Some of my brother’s plants had borne fruit and were dying and were sending up new shoots. The plantsman in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop.

  I am so vulnerable to my family’s needs and influence that from time to time I remove myself from them. I do not write to them. I do not pay visits to them. I do not lie, I do not deny, I only remove myself. When I heard that my brother was sick and dying, the usual deliberation I allow myself whenever my family’s needs come up—should I let this affect me or not?—vanished. I felt I was falling into a deep hole, but I did not try to stop myself from falling. I felt myself being swallowed up in a large vapor of sadness, but I did not try to escape it. I became afraid that he would die before I saw him again; then I became obsessed with the fear that he would die before I saw him again. It surprised me that I loved him; I could see that was what I was feeling, love for him, and it surprised me because I did not know him at all. I was thirteen years old when he was born. When I left our home at sixteen years of age, he was three years of age. I do not remember having particular feelings of affection or special feelings of dislike for him. Our mother tells me that I liked my middle brother best of the three of them, but that seems an invention on her part. I think of my brothers as my mother’s children.

  When he was a baby, I used to change his diapers, I would give him a bath. I am sure I fed him his food. At the end of one day, when he was in the hospital and I had been sitting with him for most of the time, watching his body adjust to the AZT, medicine I had brought to him because I had been told that it was not available in Antigua, I said to him that nothing good could ever come of his being so ill, but all the same I wanted to thank him for making me realize that I loved him, and he asked if I meant that (“But fo’ true?”) and I said yes, I did mean that. And then when I was leaving for the day and I said good night to him and closed the door behind me, my figure passed the louvered window of his room and from his bed, lying on his back, he could see me, and he called out, “I love you.” That is something only my husband and my children say to me, and the reply I always make to them is the reply I made to him: “I love you, too.”

  He was lying in a small room with a very high ceiling, all by himself. In the hospital they place patients suffering from this disease in rooms by themselves. The room had two windows, but they both opened onto hallways so there was proper ventilation. There was a long fluorescent light hanging from the high ceiling. There was no table lamp, but why should there be, I only noticed because I have become used to such a thing, a table lamp; he did not complain about that. There was a broken television set in a corner, and when there were more than two visitors in the room it was useful as something on which to sit. It was a dirty room. The linoleum floor was stained with rust marks; it needed scrubbing; once he spilled the pan that contained his urine and so the floor had to be mopped up and it was done with undiluted Clorox. He had two metal tables and a chair made of metal and plastic. The metal was rusty and the underside of this furniture was thick with dirt. The walls of the room were dirty, the slats of the louvered windows were dirty, the blades of the ceiling fan were dirty, and when it was turned on, sometimes pieces of dust would become dislodged. This was not a good thing for someone who had trouble breathing. He had trouble breathing.

  Sometimes when I was sitting with him, in the first few days of my seeing him for the first time after such a long time, seeing him just lying there, dying faster than most people, I wanted to run away, I would scream inside my head, What am I doing here, I want to go home. I missed my children and my husband. I missed the life that I had come to know. When I was sitting with my brother, the life I had come to know was my past, a past that does not make me feel I am falling into a hole, a vapor of sadness swallowing me up. In that dirty room, other people before him had died of that same disease. It is where they put people who are suffering from the virus that causes AIDS. When he was first told that he had tested positive for the virus, he did not tell our mother the truth, he told her he had lung cancer, he told someone else he had bronchial asthma, but he knew and my mother knew and anyone else who was interested would know that only people who tested positive for the AIDS virus were placed in that room in isolation.

  I left him that first night and got into a car. I left him lying on his back, his eyes closed, the fluorescent light on. I rode in a hired car and it took me past the Magdalene maternity ward, where I was born, past the place where the Dead House used to be (a small cottage-like structure where the bodies of the dead were stored until their families came to claim them), but it is not there anymore; it was torn down when it grew rotten and could no longer contain the smells of the dead. And then I came to a major crossing where there was a stoplight, but it was broken and had been broken for a long time; it could not be fixed because the parts for it are no longer made anywhere in the world—and that did not surprise me, because Antigua is a place like that: parts for everything are no longer being made anywhere in the world; in Antigua itself nothing is made. I passed the prison, and right next to it the school my brother attended when he was a small boy and where he took an exam to go to the Princess Margaret School, and in the exam, which was an islandwide exam, he took third place of all the children taking this exam. I passed the Princess Margaret School. It was when he got to this school that he started to get into trouble. My mother says, about the friends he made there, that he fell into bad company, and I am sure the mothers of the other boys, his friends, thought of him in the same way—as bad company. It was while attending this school that he became involved in a crime, something to do with robbing a gas station, in which someone was killed. It was agreed that he did not pull the trigger; it is not clear that he did not witness the actual murder. At some point, years ago, my mother told me that he had spent a short time in jail for this crime and she got him out through political connections she then had but does not have any longer. Now she will not mention the murder or his time in jail. If I should bring it up, she says it is an old story (“e’ a’ ole time ’tory; you lub ole-time ’tory, me a warn you”), and for my mother an old story is a bad story, a story with an ending she does not like.

  The car then turned onto Fort Road and passed Straffee’s funeral establishment. I did not know then whether Mr. Straffee was dead or alive; when I was a small child and saw him, I thought he looked like the dead, even though at the time I thought that, I had never seen a dead person. I passed a house where my godmother used to live; she was a seamstress, she had been very nice to me. I do not know what has become of her. And I passed the road where an Englishman, Mr. Moore, who used to sell my mother beefsteak tomatoes, lived. This man also had cows, and one day when I was going to visit my godmother, they were returning from pasture and I saw them coming toward me, and I was so afraid of those cows that I threw myself into a ditch facedown and waited until I knew they had gone by. The road has been widened and the ditch is no more. I passed the place where the Happy Acres Hotel used to be. It, too, is no more. On a road that led from this hotel a friend of our family used to live, a friend who
m my brothers would not have known because by the time they were born my mother no longer spoke to this person. The friend reared pigs and guinea hens and chickens and also cultivated an acre or so of cotton. At the height of their friendship my mother had bought shares in a sow this friend of hers owned, and also, since it was at the height of their friendship, I was sent one year to spend August holidays with her. This part of Antigua was considered the country then, and I was terrified of the darkness, it was so unrelieved by light even from other houses; also from the house where I lived I could see the St. John’s city graveyard, and it seemed to me that almost every day I could see people attending a funeral. It was then I decided that only people in Antigua died, that people living in other places did not die and as soon as I could, I would move somewhere else, to those places where the people living there did not die. After another minute or so of driving, the car arrived at the inn where I was staying and I went into my room alone, my own isolation.

  My mother and I almost quarreled over this, that I would not stay in her house with her. She told a friend of hers, a woman my age, this, knowing that her friend would repeat it to me. I could have said to my mother, You and I do not get along, I am too well, I am not a sick child, you cannot be a mother to a well child, you are a great person but you are a very bad mother to a child who is not dying or in jail; but I did not say that. A few years ago, when she was visiting me in Vermont, we had an enormous quarrel and I then asked her if she could at all say that she was sorry for some of the pain I believe she caused me, whether she meant to or not. And she said then, I am never wrong, I have nothing to apologize for, everything I did at the time, I did for a good reason. Even now, years later, I am still surprised by this, because I spend a good part of my day on my knees in apology to my own children. That time when my mother was visiting me and we had the enormous quarrel, she told a friend of mine, a woman who she knew was very devoted to me, that the reason I did not like her was that when I was a girl she had been very strict with me and if she had not been I would have ended up with ten children by ten different men. It is a mystery to me still why my mother would think I would not be grateful to someone who saved me from such a fate. As an illustration of how strict she had been with me, she told my friend that I loved books and loved reading and there was a boy who used to come around looking for me, and to hide his true intentions, when he saw her he would say that he had come to me to borrow some books; she grew sick of listening to this excuse for his coming around to see me and one day she told him not to come to her house anymore because it was not a library. My friend only told me all this because she wanted to say to me that my mother feels that she loves me very much. But after my mother left, I was sick for three months. I had something near to a nervous breakdown, I suffered from anxiety and had to take medicine to treat it; I got the chicken pox, which is a disease of childhood and a disease I had already had when I was a child. Not long after she left, I had to see a psychiatrist.

  My brother who was lying in the hospital dying, suffering from the virus that causes AIDS, told the brother who is two years older than he is, the brother I am eleven years older than, that he had made worthlessness of his life (“Me mek wutlessness ah me life, man”). He told my mother that he was sorry he had not listened to her when all the time she told him not to behave in the way he had been, not to conduct his life so heedlessly, not to live so much without caution, that he had been too careless. He was sorry now that he lay dying that he had not listened to her and used to think all the things she said she had said only because she was an old lady. He said to me that he couldn’t believe he had AIDS (“Me carn belieb me had dis chupidness”). Only he could not say the words AIDS or HIV, he referred to his illness as stupidness (“de chupidness”).

  After I saw my brother that first time and returned to the place I was staying, the place that was not my mother’s house, I went to the manageress and said, “I need a drink.” I have heard people say just that before, “I need a drink,” but I thought it was a figure of speech, I had never needed a drink or any other kind of mood alterer before; I have taken mood-altering substances many times, but I never felt I needed them. I drank five rum-and-Cokes. I do not like the taste of rum, really, and I do not like the taste of Coke, really, but I drank five of these drinks all the same and could have drunk more than five but did not. The manageress, a very nice woman, sat next to me and we struck up a conversation; I told her my brother was sick and in the hospital, and when she asked me the cause of his illness I told her he had AIDS. This disease, in Antigua, produces all the prejudices in people that it produces elsewhere, and so like many other places, the people afflicted with it and their families are ashamed to make their suffering known. It was for my own peace of mind that I said it; I wanted it to be real to me, that my brother was suffering and dying from AIDS; hearing that he was sick and dying was new to me and so every opportunity I got I would say it out loud: “My brother is sick from and dying of AIDS.” But my announcing it to this woman led to something. She told me of a doctor in Antigua who she said was always on the radio or television talking about the danger of AIDS, how it could be contracted and how to avoid contracting it. He was considered the leading authority in Antigua in regard to this disease (though in fact he was the only doctor in Antigua who was publicly involved with this disease). She said his name was Dr. Ramsey. The next day I looked him up in the telephone book and called him.

  The reason my brother was dying of AIDS at the time I saw him is that in Antigua if you are diagnosed with the HIV virus you are considered to be dying; the drugs used for slowing the progress of the virus are not available there; public concern, obsession with the treatment and care of members of the AIDS-suffering community by groups in the larger non-AIDS-suffering community, does not exist. There are only the people suffering from AIDS, and then the people who are not suffering from AIDS. It is felt in general, so I am told, that since there is no cure for AIDS it is useless to spend money on a medicine that will only slow the progress of the disease; the afflicted will die no matter what; there are limited resources to be spent on health care and these should be spent where they will do some good, not where it is known that the outcome is death. This was the reason why there was no AZT in the hospital; but even if a doctor had wanted to write a prescription for AZT for a patient, that prescription could not be filled at a chemist’s; there was no AZT on the island, it was too expensive to be stocked, most people suffering from the disease could not afford to buy this medicine; most people suffering from the disease are poor or young, not too far away from being children; in a society like the one I am from, being a child is one of the definitions of vulnerability and powerlessness.

  When I called Dr. Ramsey I asked him if he would meet me at the hospital and examine my brother and give us, his family, medical advice, as to what we could do, what we could not do, what we could expect and, perhaps, when to expect it. He agreed to meet me and at the time he said he would arrive, he arrived. I only mention this because in Antigua people never arrive when they say they will; they never do what they say they will do. He was something I had long ago thought impossible to find in an Antiguan with authority: he was kind, he was loving toward people who needed him, people who were less powerful than he; he was respectful. He greeted my brother as if they were old friends; he spoke to him of cricket, of calypso, and of a trip he had taken to Trinidad to celebrate the carnival there. He examined my brother with his bare hands, he felt his neck, he listened to his breathing through a stethoscope, he looked in my brother’s mouth, at his throat, and he made me look at the large ulcer that was near his tonsils. After he was done, he sat and talked to my brother some more; he spoke to him in broken English; I could not understand what they were saying, they spoke very fast, it was the most animated I had seen my brother since I first saw him lying there dying. He even laughed out loud at something Dr. Ramsey said, something I did not understand.

  Afterward Dr. Ramsey told me that since my brother
did not yet have diarrhea, one of the symptoms common to AIDS sufferers in the Caribbean, there was a chance that AZT could slow the progress of the disease and allow my brother to live longer than we thought; certainly it would alleviate some of his immediate suffering. When I had heard about my brother, I asked my mother with what medicines he was being treated and she said they were giving him something for pneumonia and something else for thrush, medicines a doctor at the hospital had given her a prescription for and she had gone to a pharmacy in town and purchased. These medicines common in the treatment of AIDS-related illnesses are not kept in the hospital; people who are not infected with the virus that causes AIDS do not get an extreme case of thrush, do not get a terrible kind of pneumonia, and so the medicines that would treat these afflictions are not on hand at the hospital. But then this: one night my brother had a terrible headache and needed something to ease the pain; there was no aspirin on the ward where he was staying and no aspirin in the dispensary. A nurse on duty had some in her purse for her own personal use and she gave my brother two of them. There are people who complain that a hospital in the United States will charge six dollars for a dose of Tylenol; they might wish to look at this way of running a hospital: bring your own medicines.

  When my mother told me AZT could not be obtained in Antigua, I called someone I know, a friend who is a doctor, and I asked her if she would write a prescription for a month’s worth. She said yes immediately, and said she would give me more if it was necessary. I was used to this sort of kindness. I did not know then if even a month’s worth would be of any use to him. She gave me a prescription for a more powerful drug than the one he was taking to treat the pneumonia he had and a more powerful drug than the one he was taking to treat his thrush; when I first saw him, the thrush had made it so difficult for him to swallow anything that the pills had to be crushed before he could swallow them.