Send Down the Rain(22)

In 1963, when I was eight, my dad gave my mom an ocean-view house for their anniversary. It wasn’t waterfront, but you could see the water from their second-story bedroom window.

The home behind us belonged to a family that owned a restaurant called the Blue Tornado. Judging from the sound of the screaming that erupted from those windows, they were living with another one.

Given the remote location of the island and the cost of connecting to the main line, indoor plumbing had made it to the restaurants and businesses, but most homes still used outhouses. One night I got up to go to the bathroom around three a.m. and found the daughter, eight-year-old Allie, sitting on her back porch. Legs bouncing. Eyes and ears focused on the outhouse.

I whispered across the backyard, “You okay?”

A single shake of her head.

I walked closer. “Something bothering you?”

She pointed at the closed outhouse door.

“You scared?”

A nod.

“Of what?”

“Whatever’s in there.”

We hadn’t been living there long, but we’d already overhead a couple of her father’s outbursts. I looked over my shoulder. “Where’s your dad?”

She thumbed behind her.

“He been drinking?”

No response.

I held out my hand, she took it, and I led her to the outhouse where I found the door unlocked and three curious raccoons rummaging around inside. I turned on the light, shooed them outside, and was walking to my house when I heard Allie’s voice speak to me from behind the door. “Jo . . . um . . . Jo?”

“Joseph.”

Her voice cracked. “Jo-Jo?”

I seldom tell people that the origin of my nickname rose up and out of an outhouse. “Yes.”

“Will you walk me back?” A pause. “Please.” The tremor told me she was scared of more than raccoons. I walked her to her house and waited until she waved at me from her bedroom window. We did that a lot.

As her father’s drinking worsened, so did the destruction he caused. Many a night I stood in the backyard listening to what sounded like a bull wrecking a china shop. The sound would start on the first floor and then travel up the stairs. As the sound of the havoc grew closer to Allie’s room, her window would slide open and Mrs. Eleanor would pass Allie down to me from the second story. Both would climb down the lattice attached to the side of the house, and me and Momma would sit with them at the kitchen table while Mr. Billy deconstructed their house and Allie shook like a leaf in the chair scooted up next to mine.

Given that the beach was our backyard, and the fact that she didn’t like being home with her dad, we spent most of our daylight hours outside. And most of those we spent combing the beach. Shells, driftwood, pieces or parts of boats with foreign writing. Every new discovery excited us because it was proof of a world beyond ours. Our favorite was finding sharks’ teeth after sundown. When the sun dropped below the horizon, the receding tide rinsed the shells, and the teeth shone like black diamonds. We found thousands. Allie’s father favored a brand of bourbon sold in blue Mason jars, and we put the empties to good use. We lined a shelf in her bedroom with jars filled with various sorts and sizes of shells and teeth.

But not all of my life was Eden.

When I was nine, for reasons I never understood and my mom never talked about, my dad ran off with another woman. Deserted us. I couldn’t explain it then. Can’t now. To quote my brother, Bobby, “He just left.” His absence left a hole in my chest the size of the Milky Way. The man who was supposed to pick me up when I fell, put his arm around me, tell me I had what it took, and say, “I’m proud of you,” didn’t. For me, the whisper of his departure said, “I’m not proud of you.” For Bobby, his departure whispered, “You don’t have what it takes.” Both were lies. But in the absence of any voice to the contrary, they sounded true.

The silence of my father’s absence sent some bad signals through a young boy’s mind. My mom tried to raise us, but as much as we loved her, she couldn’t fill that hole. Couldn’t speak the words we needed to hear. That empty place, in both Bobby and me, began to fill with some ugly stuff. Maybe the best way to describe it is to say that I reacted outwardly, while Bobby reacted inwardly.

Bobby was two years older and didn’t have a mean bone in his body. Whenever we played neighborhood sports, I was picked first and he last, if at all. Same mother, same father, different gifts. Bobby’s gift was empathy. He picked ticks off stray dogs. Fed homeless cats. He was quick to listen and never in a hurry. His body posture, along with a thick set of glasses, told you that what you needed to say was important. Folks used to say that Bobby was “more sensitive.” They said it like it was a weakness, but I never saw it that way. I felt like Bobby drank life through a fire hose; if I felt an emotion, he felt it ten times as strong. It was as if his emotions were hooked up to electricity. Magnified. As a result, I think our dad’s absence may have been harder on him.

Given his willingness to listen, everybody talked to Bobby. I was a 98-mph freight train with no ears. I charged headlong, didn’t really care what others had to say, listened when it suited me. Complicating matters, I had found a switch inside me. When I flipped it, I could get angry fast.

Bobby had anger, but no such switch. Or, if he had a switch, its effect was internal. Not external, like mine, where the world could applaud what it accomplished. Medals and wins. The defeat of others. Whereas my gifting tore down, his built up. The world around us perceived me as brave and dismissed him as not, but Bobby was no coward. He just reacted more slowly. More measured.