Brother, I'm Dying

  “Did you see how Karl wouldn’t let Edwidge go?” asked my father.

  “I don’t think Kelly’s quite sure what’s going on.”

  Somewhere below us, the train would clatter by, drowning their voices, and then there would be only silence again.

  In the dark, Kelly, whose Creole was a bit halting but clear, whispered, “Are you guys adopted?”

  “No,” answered Bob.

  “They say you two are older than me,” he continued, “but it’s not true. I’m the oldest.”

  Kelly’s words reminded me of a puzzling, until now, story that Granmè Melina used to tell about a young mischievous billy goat who came across an old decrepit and hairless horse on a narrow trail one day.

  Blocking the ancient horse’s path, the youthful goat said, “You should let me go first, because I’m older than you.”

  “You should let me go first,” replied the old horse, “because I’m truly older.”

  “Can’t you see I have a beard and you don’t?” replied the bouncy goat, laughing. “Aren’t beards a sign of old age?”

  Kelly’s time with our parents was his beard. Indeed, he had spent much more time with them than Bob and I had combined. How much had he and Karl been prepared? I wondered. Had my parents ever spoken to them about us? Had they even told them we were coming until today?

  Later they would both tell me that it was as though we’d dropped out of the sky. They had no memories of their trip to Haiti and my parents had told them nothing. (A fear perhaps, as in the letters, of shattering all the hearts involved.)

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” Bob whispered back to Kelly in the dark. “We’re really spies from space. We have spy stuff inserted in our heads.”

  I was continually amazed by Bob’s pool of knowledge. Where had he learned this? From comic books that only he and Nick had read? Tales that only the two of them had told each other?

  The next morning, before our parents woke up, Karl got out of his bed and crawled into mine. His fire-engine-covered pajamas also smelled like citronella and vetiver. I was beginning to think that all of America would.

  Karl was kneeling and had to press his hands against the wall to keep his balance as he leaned down to kiss my forehead.

  “It must hurt where you have the spy stuff in your head,” he said, raising himself up again.

  “It does,” I said, feeling myself on the verge of tears.

  Soon after he got up, Kelly climbed up on the kitchen counter and found a butter knife, which he carried back to the room.

  “I can get the spy stuff out for you guys,” he said, smirking as though to prove that he was not only the oldest but the smartest.

  “You can’t do it,” Bob said, closing his eyes to slowly massage the sides of his face. “No one can. What I can do to make us really brothers and sisters is to ask my friends from space to put one in your heads too while you’re sleeping tonight. Then we can talk more easily with each other without even speaking. Do you agree?”

  Kelly lowered the butter knife and pursed his lips. Karl looked up at my head as if searching for some clue, some sign of disfiguration, which he might also have to carry for the rest of his life.

  “Okay then,” Kelly said.

  “Okay,” echoed Karl.

  From that day on, we considered ourselves full brothers and sister.

  I still marvel now how Bob, then only ten years old, thought of all this, but as strange as it seems, it truly gelled us, started us on our way to becoming a family.

  That morning, while our new blood and spy brothers were introducing us to Saturday-morning cartoons, my father, still in his pajamas, carried in what looked like a large black handbag with a small silver latch and laid it carefully on my bed. And though his face was crumpled and there was sleep in his eyes, he seemed eager for me to open it.

  Grabbing the latch, I forced it apart, nearly smashing it. My brothers turned their eyes away from the television to watch me run my fingers over my welcome gift.

  It was a typewriter, a Smith-Corona Corsair portable manual. Once more, tears gathered in my eyes before I even had time to think of something to say. I remembered asking my father in one of my letters to send me a typewriter. The tellers at my uncle’s bank had them. The clerks at the Education Ministry had them. I’d asked my father for one because I thought my uncle should have one too. Not only for his school and church work, but to write back to my father.

  Looking down at the perfect beige keys, lined up like big ivory teeth, I couldn’t help but feel that I’d received the typewriter too late. What would I do with a typewriter all to myself?

  Then in a flash it occurred to me that I could write to my uncle, hundreds and hundreds of letters to impress him with my new skills, my new knowledge, my new life.

  “This will help you measure your words,” my father said, tapping the keys with his fingers for emphasis, “to line them up neatly.”

  He meant this literally. He and I both had slightly crooked cursive handwriting. Unlike him, however, I would often line up my pens against a ruler to keep a straight line. Still, they feel like such prescient gifts now, this typewriter and his desire, very early on, to see me properly assemble my words.

  In the end, after becoming better acquainted with the machine, I pecked out only one letter to Uncle Joseph. It was brief, telling him that Bob and I were all right, were getting along fine with our parents and brothers and were thinking of him and Tante Denise, Nick and Liline, Tante Zi and Tante Tina, Marie Micheline and Ruth, and everyone else. My letter was really a list of names, an inventory of the people whose faces popped into my head every day and whose voices echoed in my ear every night.

  My uncle did not write back, perhaps wanting to allow us some distance, some time to merge into our family without any meddling from him. He had written to my father, however, sending him a note whenever a friend traveled from Haiti to New York. After reading his notes, my father would always tell us that my uncle had told him to say hello to “Edwidge, Bob, Kelly and Karl.” Were Bob and I no longer special to him? I wondered. No longer worth setting apart?

  There’s a Haitian saying, “Pitit moun se lave yon bò, kite yon bò.” When you bathe other people’s children, it says, you should wash one side and leave the other side dirty. I suppose this saying cautions those who care for other people’s children not to give over their whole hearts, because they will never get a whole heart back. I wonder if after we left for New York, my uncle felt that way.

  A few years ago, I discovered, then lost again, a few lines I had typed, in red ink, a couple of summers after we arrived in New York.

  My father’s cab is named for wanderers, drifters, nomads. It’s called a gypsy cab.

  Unlike a yellow cab, a gypsy has no medallions or affiliations. It belongs entirely to the driver, who roams the streets all day looking for fares.

  Every Saturday morning after we arrived, my father left home extra early, at four or five a.m., to roam for fares.

  “Be careful,” my mother called out after him with sleep in her voice.

  Stirred awake by the shuffle of both their feet, my brothers and I also wanted to call out, “Be careful,” but we didn’t, because it would have worried my father to think that we too were fretting about him.

  After my father left the apartment, my mother would rush back to her room to open the window over the fire escape and watch him start his motor and pull away. My brothers and I would have liked to do this too, but our window did not face the street, and it would have troubled our mother to know that we were also worried about our father.

  Once, while working very early on a Saturday morning, my father cut in front of some teenagers in a stolen van and they shot three bullets at his car. He had a passenger dozing off in the back and miraculously neither he nor the passenger was hurt.

  He never told us these types of things directly. Instead he recounted what my brothers and I called his street adventures at the Monday-night prayer meetings, where famili
es took turns gathering at one another’s houses each week.

  “Even my family hasn’t heard this,” he would begin. “I didn’t want to worry them.”

  Another Saturday morning, three men held a gun to his head and forced him to drive to the Brooklyn Navy Yard, where they asked him to give them all the money he had in the car. When they found out he had only a few dollars in his pocket, they hit his face with a crowbar and ran away. His face was bruised, black and blue and swollen, but given the circumstances, he made out okay, which is exactly what he told the prayer group the following Monday. “I was only in the emergency room a few hours, most of the time waiting for a doctor to see me. Given the circumstances, I made out okay.”

  Once in a while, throughout my teens, I’d find myself riding in the front seat as my father picked up fares. Often he was taking me somewhere, but picked up the fare anyway.

  One afternoon, an old man called my father a stupid idiot because my father had mistaken one street for another. Another time my father picked up a woman who, when he asked her to repeat her address, shouted at the top of her voice, “No one who drives a cab speaks English anymore!”

  My father rarely talked back. “What would be the use?” he would say. “I need their money more than they need my service.”

  Every now and then a passenger would arrive at his or her destination, open the door and run into a building without paying. Others would say they were going to get money and never come back. My father never went after them. His crowbar and gunshot encounters had taught him that something much worse than getting stiffed might be lying in wait.

  Yet another Saturday morning, when I was fourteen, as my father was driving me to an extra tutorial at school, I began to ask myself what type of work I wanted to do. Would I be a doctor, lawyer or engineer, as most Haitian adults, including my parents, hoped their children would be? Or would I do something else?

  “Do you ever wish you could do something other than drive your cab?” I asked my father.

  “Sure,” he answered.

  I thought I saw his hands shaking, his lips quivering. He bit down on the lower one, hard, to make the trembling stop. He probably thought I was judging him, telling him that what he was doing was not honorable, prestigious, intelligent enough. However, having started, I couldn’t stop.

  “What would you do if you weren’t driving a cab?” I asked, watching his grip tighten on the wheel.

  He stared ahead at the busy street as though it were a screen onto which he could project his life. Had his parents wished him to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer? A farmer? A fighter? Had he nursed some other dream for himself?

  “If I could do something else,” my father finally said, “I’d be either a grocer or an undertaker. Because we all must eat and we all must die.”

  PART TWO

  FOR ADVERSITY

  A friend loves at all times,

  and a brother is born for adversity.

  PROVERBS 17:17

  Brother, I Can Speak

  In the summer of 1983, when I was fourteen and Bob was twelve years old, Uncle Joseph came to New York for a medical checkup. Knowing that we couldn’t wait to see him, my father took Bob and me to the airport to meet him. My mother had insisted that we wear our crisply ironed new clothes, a bright orange sundress for me and a pair of dress pants and an immaculate white T-shirt for Bob. It seemed to me that my parents wanted my uncle to see us at our best, perhaps even to show him that they were taking good care of us, that they’d washed the proverbial part of us that he and Tante Denise might have left dirty. As we stood in the waiting area, I shifted my weight nervously, all the while wondering whether my uncle wanted to see us as much as we wanted to see him.

  Emerging from Customs and Immigration, Uncle Joseph looked slightly different than I remembered. He’d gained some weight, and his rounded belly made him appear shorter. Bob and I both ran to him and wrapped our arms around his body. I was nearly as tall as he was now and it felt odd to reach his shoulder, to look him so easily in his eye. He tapped our faces and smiled, then pointing to our father, who was standing a few feet away, walked over to say hello.

  My father wrapped his arms around my uncle’s shoulders, embracing him, then he took a few steps back to formally shake his hand. Grabbing Uncle Joseph’s suitcase, Papa commented that it was heavy.

  “I’ll let Bob take care of it,” my father said. “He’s nearly a man now.”

  My uncle nodded and put his hands together, confirming that it was a good idea. The suitcase had a long strap and our father handed it to Bob, who, gawky but strong, pulled it forward easily. As Bob managed the bag, I found myself walking between Uncle Joseph and my father, with both their arms around me as if it were the most normal thing in the world.

  “How’s Denise?” my father asked.

  My uncle mouthed, “On ti jan malad.”

  I was amazed that I could still read his lips more easily than my father could.

  “What did he say?” asked my father.

  “Tante Denise is a bit sick,” I said.

  “She functions,” my uncle mouthed, “but struggles with the diabetes. And now her blood pressure is high too. Like mine.”

  “Why don’t you bring her to see a doctor here?” my father asked.

  “Li pa vle,” my uncle said.

  “She doesn’t want to,” I said to my father.

  “She relies heavily on her herbs,” my uncle said. “Her country medicine.”

  It was a humid afternoon. When we reached my father’s cab, Bob, sweating, stopped and waited for Papa to open the trunk. I stepped aside, joining Bob by the car. My father paused and looked into my uncle’s eyes.

  “Do you see your children?” my father blurted out as though he’d been waiting a long time to say it. “Do you see how much they’ve grown?”

  My father decided it was best that I take my uncle to his appointment at Kings County Hospital the next day. Unlike anyone else, I could now doubly interpret my uncle, both from silence to voice and Creole to English. Sitting next to him in the packed waiting room of the ear, nose and throat clinic, with the glossy posters of decaying necks and lungs looming over us, I saw his cancer come to life in the men and women around us. Some, like him, had had radical laryngectomies and couldn’t speak at all. Others had had partial laryngectomies and spoke in breathless whispers by pressing fingertips against various points along the neck. Leaning forward to listen, my uncle seemed to envy those in the latter category their ability to make some of their basic wishes known, even though they could no longer carry on long conversations.

  After examining my uncle, the doctor, a young blond man with a cherubic round face and a bowl-shaped mop of hair, pulled out a sausage-sized machine and placed it in my uncle’s hand.

  “Tell him,” said the doctor, “that this is a voice box, an artificial larynx, something that can amplify his whispers and allow people to hear and understand him.”

  The doctor placed his hand on my uncle’s fingers and helped him form a fist around the machine, then he guided it to a spot above my uncle’s gullet and told him to speak.

  “Speak?” my uncle asked.

  The machine buzzed, letting out a clamor of static. The doctor moved my uncle’s hand a few inches, then said again, “Speak.”

  Uncle Joseph opened his mouth and tried to utter a few words, but no sound came out.

  The doctor moved his hand a few more inches, then asked, “What did you have for breakfast this morning?”

  “Ze,” he said. Eggs.

  The sound of the word emerging out of his own body in a robotic monotone seemed to shock my uncle, who raised his eyebrows in surprise.

  “Keep talking,” the doctor said. “What would you like to have for dinner?”

  “I don’t know,” Uncle Joseph said, the mechanical voice a bit clearer now.

  His face lit up. He smiled, baring nearly all of his false teeth.

  “Where can we buy it?” he asked.

  Th
e artificial larynx was sold in a medical supplies store near the hospital. After the doctor’s visit, we went there and got one.

  Later that afternoon, when we returned to my parents’ apartment, my mother had not yet come back from her job at the textile factory, but my father was there, sitting on the blue plastic-covered sofa in the living room and sifting through his mail while occasionally glancing at the television set, which Bob, Kelly and Karl were watching from the floor. Uncle Joseph turned off the television, causing the boys to silently protest with grimaces. He walked over and sat down next to my father, signaling for them to also pay attention.

  “I was worried,” my father said. “I thought they’d kept you in the hospital.”

  The plastic squealed under my uncle as he leaned even closer to my father. Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out the voice box and raised it to his neck. The machine screeched with static when he turned it on. Uncle Joseph adjusted the volume, then pressed it more deeply at the curve between his chin and neck.

  “Mira, I can speak,” my uncle said, drawing out each mechanized word.

  The boys rushed over to the sofa, circling my uncle. My father pushed his face closer to my uncle’s. His eyes widened as he looked into my uncle’s mouth, dumbfounded.

  “How’s it happening?” he asked.

  “It must be a miracle,” my uncle said. “What else can it be?”

  “Science?” my father absentmindedly offered.

  “Science is God’s way of shielding miracles,” Uncle Joseph replied.

  My father took my uncle’s hand and led him to a lamp in a corner of the room, so he could better see the machine and its interaction with my uncle’s neck. This was their first two-sided conversation in many years and they both seemed to want to move it past the technicalities to a point of near normalcy.

  “How does it sound to your ear?” my father asked.

  “How does it sound to yours?” my uncle countered.

  My father paused to think, searching perhaps for the most tactful and encouraging description of what he was hearing.