Bridge of Clay(66)

And still it wasn’t quite over.

“YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE ON MY SIDE, MICHAEL!”

“I am!” he said. “…I am.”

And the quieted voice, even worse. “Then how about actually showing it.”

Then after-storm, and silence.



* * *



—

As I said, though, such moments were isolated, and they would soon reconvene at the piano: Our symbol of boyhood misery.

But their island of calm in the maelstrom.

Once, he’d stood beside her, as she recovered by playing some Mozart; then he placed his hands on the instrument, in the sun on the lid by the window.

“I’d write the words I’m sorry,” he’d said, “but I’ve forgotten where all the paint is—” and Penelope stopped, momentarily. An inkling of smile at the memory.

“Well, that and there’s really no room,” she said, and played on, on the handwritten keys.



* * *



—

Yes, she played on, that one-woman band, and while sometimes the chaos spilled over, there were also what we’d call normal arguments—normal fights—mostly between us boys.

In that regard, at six years old, Clay had started football, both the organized kind, and the one we played at home, front to back, around the house. As time went by it was our father, Tommy, and Rory versus Henry, Clay, and me. On the last tackle, you could kick the ball over the roof, but only if Penny wasn’t reading on a lawn chair, or marking that flow of assignments.

“Hey, Rory,” Henry would say, “run at me so I can smash you,” and Rory would do it, and run straight over the top of him, or be driven back into the ground. Every game, without fail, they would need to be prized apart—

    “Right.”

Our father looked at both of them, back and forth:

Henry all blond and bloody.

Rory the color of a cyclone.

“Right what?”

“You know what.” He’d be breathing hoarse and heavily, with scratch marks on his arms. “Shake hands. Now.”

And they would.

They’d shake hands, say sorry, and then, “Yeah, sorry I had to shake your hand, dickhead!” and it was on again, and this time they’d be dragged out back where Penelope sat, the assignments littered around her.

“Now what have you two been up to this time?” she’d ask, in a dress, and barefoot in the sun. “Rory?”

“Yeah?”

She gave him a look.

“I mean, yes?”

“Take my chair.” She started walking inside. “Henry?”

“I know, I know.”

He was already on hands and knees, collating the fallen sheets.

She lengthened a look at Michael, and a collegial, cahootsful wink.

“Goddamn bloody boys.”

No wonder I got a taste for blasphemy.



* * *



—

And what else?

What else was there, as we skip the years like stones?

Did I mention how sometimes we’d sit on the back fence, for end-of-morning trackwork? Did I say how we’d watched as it all got packed up, to be another forgotten field?

Did I mention the Connect Four war when Clay was seven?

Or the game of Trouble that lasted four hours, maybe more?

Did I mention how it was Penny and Tommy who won that battle at long last, with our dad and Clay second, me third, and Henry and Rory (who were forced to play together) last? Did I mention that they both blamed each other for being crap at hitting the bubble?

    As for what happened with Connect Four, let’s just say we were still finding the pieces months later.

“Hey, look!” we’d call, from the hallway or kitchen. “There’s even one in here!”

“Go pick it up, Rory.”

“You go pick it up.”

“I’m not pickin’ it up—that’s one of yours.”

And on. And on.

And on.



* * *



—

Clay remembered summer, and Tommy asking who Rosy was, when Penny read from The Iliad. We were up late, in the lounge room, and Tommy’s head was in her lap, his feet across my legs, and Clay was down on the floor.

Penny tilted and stroked Tommy’s hair.

I told him, “It’s not a person, stupid, it’s the sky.”

“What do you mean?”

This time it was Clay, and Penelope explained.

“It’s because,” she said, “you know how at sunrise and sunset the sky goes orange and yellow, and sometimes red?”

He nodded from under the window.

“Well, when it’s red, it’s rosy, and that’s all he meant. It’s great, isn’t it?” and Clay smiled then, and so did Penny.

Tommy, again, was concentrating. “Is Hector a word for the sky, too?”

That was it, I got up. “Did there really need to be five of us?”

Penny Dunbar only laughed.



* * *



—

The next winter there was all the organized football again, and the winning and training and losing. Clay didn’t especially love the game, but did it because the rest of us did, and I guess that’s what younger siblings do for a time—they photocopy their elders. In that respect, I should say that although he was set apart from us, he could also be just the same. Sometimes, mid-household-football-game, when a player was secretly punched or elbowed, Henry and Rory would go at it—“It wasn’t me!” and “Oh, bullshit!”—but me, I’d seen it was Clay. Already then his elbows were ferocious, and deliverable in many ways; it was hard to see them coming.