CANOPIES

Autumn was in the yard and we ran in the tall grasses like thieves. Armed with wooden swords given to us at Christmas, we gave chase to one another in the waning sunlight tinged ochre with warm October comfort as dinner time approached and always too soon. If I laughed, he laughed. If I cried, he cried. Such was the way of us. Shaun and me. Baby brother in the last sun.

I don’t remember that evening’s meal. Not that one specifically. It was one among hundreds around the large black oak table Dad built years before. A table that could seat a dozen with ease and countless times did. We always sat at the far side before the bay window to the drive, now bluing with twilight, and under which rested the long wooden bureau for linens and placemats, china and serving platters and the silver set given to our parents on their wedding day.

And upon that bureau on some nights Shaun and I gathered all the stuffed animals we were ever given and ensuring none were left out because I knew they would feel sad. I would get Dad’s tape recorder and in our own improvisational theatre we’d make up murder mysteries where each doll played a character as we gave voice to each one uniquely. The stories were a rambling narrative full of betrayal, intrigue and double crosses and utterly unlistenable. Each precisely an hour as I’d watch the end of the tape spooling out and knew we had to reveal the killer, the tale always ending in a shootout.

There were dozens of these. Shaun in his blue pajamas bouncing each doll around in the air with the gruff voice only a four-year-old could muster. All those tapes are long gone now - lost like most physical histories are lost – by being overlooked, mistaken for something lesser and now decomposing somewhere in the anonymous dark. Yet these stories exist somewhere in the unseen catalogues of memory simply because they were imagined, spoken and for a time believed.

In childhood all imaginations become fables existing in their tandem world behind a curtain we could always open. When magic was immediate, the fir trees along the driveway were our guardians and our bed was a pirate ship. And if Shaun and I told these stories it’s because we were told stories.

In the beryl dusk, upon the trundle bed my father had made, my brother and I would bury ourselves in our Star Wars sheets drawn about our heads like monks as our parents spoke the great tales over us while the glow-in-the-dark stars shone above us in a plastic canopy. Gentle, protective, sacred.

Always on the same corner of the lower bed where Shaun lay, my parents would read by flashlight and I imagined we were at a campfire somewhere deep in a forest. The Haunted Mansion, The Frog and the Toad, Dr. Seuss – Wind and the Willows.

The latter took a luxurious month, maybe longer and in that span, the river ambled below our bed floating us past the tall reeds which reached high along the bedroom walls, on our way to Mr. Toad’s. They intoned each character with thoughtfulness and complexity and in my memory, when I return to those words, I hear the voice of my father.

And I have never felt more safe, been so safe as I was then, secure in Mr. Badger’s living room rescued from the storm above and biding by the warm hearth near his simple table of simple food hidden deep beneath the snows of the Wild Wood.

And I never felt that sense of safety again. Not like that at least.

In time, the Star Wars sheets wore thin, the Show ‘N Tell record player given away and our books placed on bottom shelves as the plastic stars slowly fell one by one from the sky of the ceiling.

Then inevitably came the complexities of adolescence, the burdens of college and the obligations of adulthood. In my brief orbits home, I would pass that bookshelf, still in my brother’s old room, and those books still remained. Each waiting just as ardently to be read anew as when the pages were first opened decades before. Each a Puff the Magic Dragon longing for his Jackie Paper to return.

But not forever.

Shaun was the one to marry as I remained in perpetual bachelorhood on the west coast destroying my clothes with oil paints in the service of art. While my parents bought me new clothes as Christmas because I was too lazy to shop, they joyfully packed up our books in the anticipation of grandchildren to come. And in short order they did - My niece and nephew. And over cribs, then tiny beds, my brother would invoke the same stories in a theatre of his distinct creation. For in his adulthood, Shaun became a child of the theatre – a stunt actor, writer and teacher of stage combat, even performing as a pirate for the crowds upon the Gateway Clipper which coursed the rivers of Pittsburgh. He became the embodiment of the characters we had grown up with, a story book unto himself.

And though I was not witness to those nights when he now inhabited the voice of Mr. Toad, he would recall them to me with the pride that can only be known by a parent. The glee and wide eyes in the faces of his children. And for all his gifts, his true art was fatherhood. ‘Kevin, I just want to do what Mom and Dad did.’

And he did. Yes, baby brother you did. Jackie Paper had returned.

But then came the dissolutions, spanning five years, as his wife spiraled down and away in a litany of betrayals and the marriage collapsed in ruin. Yet the children remained, but now unhindered by her dalliances and chaos, he bought an old house and transformed it into a magic-scape as his children grew and on the upper floor whose walls were sloped by the A-frame roof, he created a modest kingdom dedicated entirely to play where all toys, forts, dolls were devoid of electronics and batteries – a pure world of analog where the stories were read and read again, where my niece’s ridiculous heap of dolls was called Stuffy Mountain and all the beauty he fought for became realized. His dry-wall, however was utterly atrocious.

How the terrible things to come were not seen in advance is complicated and useless to explain. Perhaps in my brother’s worldview he saw through too narrow a lens where he only apprehended the good in those around him and which blinded him to malevolence and, tragically, possessed by those closest to him.

Narratives like lies are creatures of fire and once spoken can never be returned to their cage. And a lie was spoken. A false narrative conceived and executed. The kind which destroys lives and namely for those who are teachers. And it was carried out by his son. Malignant, intractable and fatal.

My brother never recovered and we lost Shaun to suicide.

Four years ago now. My mother found him. Police told us in the week after, ‘Had he just waited.’ He would have been cleared in mere days, but now it was all too late.

And in the dark irony of him being the protector to his children against the wiles of his ex-wife, by death he removed himself as their guard and she snaked them away into her unyielding control. In time, my parents were forbidden to see them ever again. A loss compounded upon another loss. A grandparent’s love that can no longer be passed down, a love that was stuck in their chests with no place to go.

Entering his house will be the worst memory of my life. I spiritlessly look out over the living room, the couch where they gathered, the remotes on the table beside a half-filled coffee cup now marked with the dark rings of evaporation and staleness. All that he built. This sudden arresting of a life in a pink tableau of princess dolls and toy castles. Everything not just still, but silenced.

But I knew exactly where they were. Our books.

There they waited, lined reverently along the shelf which was crowned with Disney figures and childhood albums – an altar of memory distilled onto one wall which was adorned with their photos from their vacations. I reach down and draw it from the shelf. Wind and the Willows and turn it over in my hands, open the achingly familiar pages. Hello again, Mr. Badger. I have no children and likely never will. But I take it anyways. I will return for the rest.

Healing comes in seeing friends. Lauren and I had known each other from high school, a woman who too has known loss. Her husband gone, her parents long since passed. She raises a child now on her own. A child who had seen Shaun as a pirate and thought him legend. And as we laid out the fragments of our lives, counted the pieces that were gone and the ones that remained, we saw it in the same moment. And we laughed. And we laughed…

It was a Saturday I believe and Lauren came over to the house with her son. ‘Mom? Dad? This is Casey.’ It takes a while for everyone to settle. But not a long while. Then Lauren leans over and whispers almost surreptitiously, ‘Casey? Do you want to hear a story?’ Casey bounces his head excitedly and grins, his front right baby tooth so completely missing he looks like a little boxer. ‘Then we have a surprise for you.’

Mom’s voice had now grown thin from age and she now bears the crooked fingers of my grandmother which trace over the worn cover as she holds it up for him to read. ‘Wind and the Will…Willows?’ as Mom nods slowly. Enraptured, Lauren rests her chin in her hands.

‘The Mole had been working very hard all the morning, spring-cleaning his little home…’

Mom reads for over an hour...yet Casey is still enthralled. Lauren leans over to me smiling, ‘You know, he’s never listened to anything for this long ever. Mrs. Rolly? You know you can stop at any time.’ Mom folds the book, ‘Casey, have you had enough of me yet?’ Casey shakes his head, his hand on his cheeks. Dad, who has been silent the entire time stirs in his chair, ‘You know, Casey. This was Kevin and Shaun’s favorite book when they were your age.’ Casey lifts his head straight back, ‘Mine too!’ I look over at Mom who catches my gaze and I silently mouth, ‘I love you.’ Mom smiles and opens the book again.

'But what has become of them all?' asked the Mole.

'Who can tell?' said the Badger. 'People come--they stay for a while, they flourish, they build--and they go. It is their way. But we remain.

Lauren covers her mouth as her eyes meet mine, the tears creeping into the corners of her eyes. I smile sadly and nod.

And for an afternoon, the reeds grew tall again along the living room walls and the river ran languid beneath the boats of the couches, now many years ago.

All citations from "Wind and the Willows" by KENNETH GRAHAME