The Five Years My Brother Kept Us

The Kid Who Braided My Hair

My brother is four years older than I am. Our mother, Arlene, left Wellfield on a Tuesday in March when I was eight and he was twelve. She packed one suitcase while we were at school, left a casserole in the oven with a note that said what temperature, and drove to a man’s house in Colorado. She sent a birthday card the next year, and the year after that. Then the cards stopped, and so did my asking.

Our father, Don, was a lineman for the power district. If you have never lived with one, you do not know what the job does to a house. The phone rings at two in the morning because ice has taken down a line, and he is gone, and storms in Nebraska last days. When a man like that is raising two kids alone, the kids learn to raise each other.

At twelve Curt learned to make macaroni, then scrambled eggs, then a Sunday roast out of a library cookbook. He learned to braid, because my hair was long and I cried when Dad pulled it, so he sat me on the kitchen stool and practiced until his braids held through recess. He signed my permission slips in a handwriting a lot like Dad’s. He sat in the front row at my third-grade program with his hair still wet from the shower, the only twelve-year-old boy in the gym.

One night in an ice storm, when I was nine, Dad’s radio crackled at midnight and he was gone before the porch light had finished swinging. Curt put me in one of Dad’s flannel shirts, the sleeves rolled four times, and sat me on the kitchen floor against the warm oven door. He turned the scanner low and listened for the district’s call numbers, and every time one came through he said, “That’s Dad’s crew. They’re fine.” I think he made up half of it. I fell asleep on the linoleum, and at dawn I woke in my own bed with the flannel still on, and I never once saw him carry me.

Dad died eight years ago, a heart attack at sixty-three, on a Thursday in the yard. Curt was the one who found him, and the one who called me, and the one who stood in the funeral home foyer for three hours shaking hands. I sat in a chair. At the lunch afterward, somebody’s aunt said, “You’ve got a good brother,” and I said, “I know.” I have said “I know” about Curt my entire life.

I knew. I just never let it cost me anything to know.