The Brother My Father Never Named

The Cedar Box Goes Home

Hollis met me at his own front door leaning on a cane, and I knew him instantly from the photograph, the same set to his jaw my father had carried his whole life, softened now by eight decades instead of hardened by them.

I did not know what to say to a man I had never met who was, somehow, my own blood. So I only held out the cedar box and let it do the talking I could not manage.

He carried it to his kitchen table without a word and opened it with hands that trembled more from age than from anything else. He held the watch a long time before he set it down. He looked at the photograph of the two of them as boys and pressed his thumb over it like he could feel the mill smokestack behind them if he pressed hard enough.

Then he found the letters, and I watched an eighty three year old man read his own dead brother’s unmailed apology, one letter at a time, at his own kitchen table, while I sat across from him not knowing whether to speak or to simply let the silence hold whatever it needed to hold.

When he got to the last one, the unfinished one, he read the broken off sentence twice, and then he set it down gently, like it might still bruise if he was rough with it.

“I wrote him letters too,” he said, so quiet I almost missed it. “A good many of them, over the years. I never sent a single one either. I suppose we were more alike than either one of us ever had the humility to admit.”

He told me then what he had never told Lavonne in eleven years of careful, half told letters: that he had left that graveside not out of anger so much as shame, ashamed that he had not been there enough in those last months, ashamed that his own brother’s grief had found the exact wound that was already raw in him, and too proud, every single year after, to be the one to drive back first.

“I loved your father my whole life,” he said. “I never once stopped. I only let the road between us get so long I convinced myself it could not be walked back.”