The Brother My Father Never Named

Thirty Years Of Letters Never Sent

I asked Lavonne why the watch was in the box at all, if Hollis had kept it that day at the graveside.

She looked at me a long moment before she answered.

“Because Hollis mailed it back,” she said. “Care of your grandmother, about a year after he left. No note. Just the watch, wrapped in newspaper, in a box with no return address. Your grandmother gave it to your father not long before she passed herself, and told him it was his to make right, one way or another, whenever he found the nerve.”

He never found the nerve. Instead, he built a room to keep it in, and started writing letters he could not bring himself to send either.

I untied the twine on that bundle that same night, back home, sitting on the narrow bed in my father’s sealed off room with Lavonne’s account still fresh in my ears. The letters were not in any order I could find, but the earliest ones, dated not long after my grandmother’s funeral, were short and stiff, the words of a man who did not yet know how to say what he meant. Later ones ran longer. In one, dated the year I was born, my father had written that he wanted his brother to know he had a niece now, and that he hoped, someday, before either of them got too old for it to matter, they might sit on this same porch again like nothing had ever come between them.

Every one of those letters ended the same simple way, no matter the year or how much or how little there was to say in it: Your brother, Emmett. Reading his own name signed forty separate times, in forty separate years, to a man who never once wrote back because he never once received a single page, was the closest I have ever come to hearing my father speak from beyond his own grave.

The last letter in the bundle was dated six weeks before he died. It was unfinished, the handwriting shakier than the ones before it, breaking off partway through a sentence that read, I have carried this too long and I do not know how a man puts down a weight he built with his own two.

He never got to finish that sentence. He never got to mail a single one of the forty he wrote. He died still believing his brother was somewhere out past the ridge line, unreachable, when the truth was Hollis had been only two states and one long overdue phone call away the whole time.