The Protector

My brother, Rodney, was born premature. He weighed only 3.5 pounds. In those days, not having the medical knowledge or equipment, Premies were sent home with their mothers to live or die. Mom fed Rodney with an eye dropper. He grew to be six feet tall and very handsome. His personality could dazzle anyone. Unfortunately he also grew to be a heroin addict. The following is what I wrote about him following is death at the age of 46. While I never witnessed him shooting up, the rest of the story is true. I have never seen him do it, this practice of more than 30 years. I have seen it done on TV and in movies by strangers who meant nothing to me and who weren’t real anyway. I watch him ready the needle and tighten a tourniquet around his arm. He looks at me from the shadow that is now his face, all but his flesh and bones eaten away by AIDS. “Are you sure you want to see this, Sis?” he asks. I want to say no, to yank the needle from his hand and throw it 30 years away. But after so many years that have left him dying, stopping no longer matters. He looks at the veins in his arm realizing that none are useable. “I knew they wouldn’t be any good, Sis, but I thought it would be easier for you to watch.” He moved the tourniquet to his thigh and again searches for a vein. Then he wraps the other leg, his hands shaking now. If I had not been watching he would have quickly used any part of his body, his stomach, his groin, anywhere to hurry to take him to where he needs to be. I am touched he still wants to care for and protect his older sister. The drugs and illness have not taken that away. I watch his eyes close as blood trickles down his calf. His face seems to show a great relief as he empties the liquid into his weak vein. Then he sat with his head hung over and his eyes closed. “Brother,” I say. He looks up and says, “Huh?” then nods again. My brother is no longer present. I leave the room feeling my heart drain. This is the life he has chosen or that has chosen him from the first time he put the needle into his arm. Is this where he goes to escape, this place between joy and sorrow? I could no longer hold back the tears. The mixture of drugs and the diseases have so ravaged his body; his six foot frame is a thin rail. When I hug him I feel only bones and the smooth softness of his skin. He looks so old - as if he has lived a long hard life. Mentally he has become foreign to me, but I still love him and him me - brother and sister from the same mother and father. Lying in the casket a few months later, the coroner had restored his face so it was no longer sunken. His wasted his body which aged him beyond his 46 years, appeared to be healthy. His death is the first of the 10 siblings. Our mother looks at his body lying so cold and still and quickly holds a tissue to her eyes. She is escorted by another son to the car as she tries to hide her tears. That brief moment will stay with me forever, the look of the unbelievable pain of a mother burying her son. What made him begin such a practice of leaving the world for a while only to leave it again? Watching him drain the needle does not help me understand this stranger who is my brother. It must have been easier when he was sixteen and his veins where young, fresh and healthy, eagerly swelling to accept the poisonous sting. Which needle was the one that infected him, causing his body to waste away and his life to draw short? My brother who I never really knew is dead. With him goes part of me. My brother was the family protector. Fear from his reputation kept others from attempting to harm us. Once our youngest brother was threatened by a man in a building our bother managed. Word went to the protector who rose from his illness. Forgetting the sister who drove him was standing near; the protector raised the man by his collar and held him against a wall. The protector told him what would happen if any threats were carried out against our youngest brother. My sister, seeing the fire in the protector’s eyes, worriedly spoke his name. The protector looked around as if shaken from a dream. “Sorry, Sis, I forgot you were there.” While this same sister was visiting in New York her van was graffitied. The protector paced, “No body’d better mess with Dee Dee. I don’t want to go to New York. At least they let you smoke in Rikers.” The protector spent several years in prison for two armed robberies and finally gutting a man in a fight. It was a violence I could not understand. I also knew his drive for cash to fill the needle he needed to feed into his arm drove him. In prison he thrived, taking control, exacting payment from his fellow inmates on commissary day. Men followed his orders, no matter how brutal they may or may not have been. Now they will spend the rest of their lives in prison. They will die on cold metal lonely beds while the protector died in his mother’s arms. At the funeral, family and friends gather in the stillness. There were three flower arrangements – two from my job. After kissing his lifeless cheek, I sit beside my mother and stare at my little brother, wondering what he had thought of his life. He was a Christian, a Lutheran by faith. He was dyslexic. Despite being a high school graduate he learned to read in prison. He struggled to read his Bible daily. He was the father of a son he missed seeing grow up and the son of a father who missed seeing him grow up. He was a poet who poured his soul in colors on paper and in the end apologized for all he hurt during his life. He was an artist whose paintings should have hung on gallery walls. He gave me a little stuffed penguin the day I was injured. He ran down the stairs to hold me and to tell me he was about to go to correct the men who injured me. He checked on me as I rested, always the protector watching out, caring, loving. I knew the last time I visited home would be the last time I would see him alive. I held him longer than usual and refused to let him see me cry. Then I walked away from him, from his pain, from the needle marks on his body, from the life draining out of him. The night I return from the funeral I look out my kitchen window. There was a big glowing full moon. Airplanes leave a trail of smoke making a cross in the sky and I know my brother is home in heaven with our father. I keep a wooden sign that reads “JOY” next to the penguin. The sign has never fallen, but on the night the cross showed in the sky it did so. The protector is there, still watching over me, still my brother.