San Antone. V. J. Banis

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      He supposed that Gregory was a fool, too, in his own way. To some extent Jay Jay found his brother more maddening than their father was. At least their father was drunk, and the same drunkenness that muddled his thinking or sent him sometimes into rages, or clumsily falling all over himself, could just as easily turn into hilarity, or even—though this was infrequent now to the point of rarity—a maudlin sort of affection.

      Foolish or not, it was possible to love his father in a way that he could not love his brother or his mother. Their very competence set them apart—you felt as if you had to reach up to them. Somehow Jay Jay never felt tall enough when he was with them.

      Gregory was plodding. To see father and son together, you would have thought he was the old man and Lewis his barely adolescent child.

      Most boys as they neared young manhood entered a period of rebellion against their fathers. Jay Jay felt a secret kinship with the man who had sired him, but he sometimes couldn’t stop himself from waging war on his brother. There was the time, for instance, when their father had given them rifles for Christmas. It was Jay Jay who had managed that, who had badgered and hinted and finally, with no pretense of subtlety, begged. He’d come very close to admitting that he could already shoot, had for the better part of a year been surreptitiously taking the guns from the cabinet in his father’s den and practicing in the distant fields at Eaton. Luckily his father gave in and bought guns for the boys before Jay Jay had to confess.

      Of course, he’d known he would have to suffer instruction from his father, who could not even hold a gun properly, let alone hit anything. He had even practiced shooting astray to conceal his expertise. What he hadn’t counted on was that Gregory would be given a gun as well. The mere thought of his older brother, who couldn’t hit a tree throwing a rock, getting a rifle presented to him gratis, after Jay Jay had spent weeks and weeks coaxing for one, had very nearly spoiled the occasion for him.

      In compensation, he had stolen into the den the night before their first promised shooting lesson and, with a hammer wrapped in one of his brother’s socks—Gregory never did understand how that sock had gotten a hole in it—he had managed to knock the gunsight well off kilter.

      Gregory’s shot the following morning went right through the window of one of the slave cabins, ricocheted off Big Pearl’s cast-iron pot that she kept simmering on the hearth, and embedded itself in her wall.

      “Liked to kill me with it,” she complained loudly and incessantly for several days, though as far as Jay Jay could see, to have been in any real danger, she would have needed to be hanging from the rafters.

      Gregory’s gun was put away “till he was older,” and not brought out again. Jay Jay, who’d hit the target dead on his third shot (he could as easily have hit it the first time, but didn’t want to tip his hand), was allowed to keep his.

      One time he took the tip of his penknife to the seat of Gregory’s best britches—this was the occasion of an enormous lawn party at Chester Glen. Chester Glen was not only the grandest of the plantations in the neighborhood of Eaton Hall, but the home as well of the Quincy girl, Diana, whom Gregory had recently been at some pains to impress. Jay Jay, with a neatness he did not often display, had carefully cut from inside every other stitch in the seam running down the seat of the trousers. The threads remaining were just sufficient to hold the pants together when his brother put them on. Gregory had alighted from the family carriage and mounted the great steps of the Quincy house in front of an army of people, Diana Quincy included, before anyone noticed his moon-white derrière protruding from a gaping wound in his velvet britches.

      Then another time he had...but what was the use? The pleasure, for Jay Jay, was always short-lived. No matter what he invented to bedevil his brother, Gregory always seemed to come out a victim rather than a dunce, as intended. Even the time with the trousers, their mammy had taken the blame.

      You couldn’t make him cry, either, which particularly infuriated Jay Jay, who, for all his reckless derring-do, was maddeningly tearful; sometimes they welled up in his eyes for no reason at all that he could think of, even when he was not hurt or scared—he never cried then.

      “My little man,” their mother used to call Gregory, and “the man of the house.”

      Jay Jay’s youngest memories of his brother were of an old man masquerading as a boy—just the opposite of him and Melissa, dressing up in their parents’ clothes. Gregory had never done that. He’d never needed to.

      Melissa, of course, was the oldest, but being a girl, she didn’t count. To make matters worse, she was stubborn. And stuck-up.

      And afraid of everything, from mice and ghosts to her hair coming undone at the wrong moment. (Jay Jay used to try to snatch a strand loose whenever the time seemed particularly ripe, but his sister got wise to that little trick, and these days, like as not, was ready with a sharp elbow for his ribs when he tried it; he was still trying to think of a good alternative.)

      In fact, Melissa was the embodiment of everything you could think of to be wrong in a person, and it infuriated him to have to defend her to others, for no better reason than that she was his sister.

      Not that he often had to. Over the years, the family had traveled less and less often to other plantations for rounds of visiting, and the visits to Eaton Hall had grown briefer and less frequent. “It’s a good idea,” their mother had informed them, “to get used to doing without others.”

      Of course, she wasn’t stuck with just a sister and a stodgy brother for companions, or she might see things differently.

      But the point was, people did disapprove of Melissa, which never failed to embarrass him. You could see it in other women when they looked after her, particularly when they didn’t know anyone from the family was watching. And not just the women, either; the men watched her, too, though naturally they were better at concealing their true feelings than their wives were.

      Jay Jay blamed his mother for everything, if only because his father was only too obviously inept to be held accountable. If you were going to be the strong one, it seemed to him, you had to expect things to be left up to you, didn’t you? Where would Gregory be, after all, or Melissa, without his leadership?

      “Papa says we own half of Texas.” Their father, in fact, had said nothing of the sort, but Jay Jay had hit upon the remark as a means of getting an accurate perspective from Gregory, who was sure to know, without the necessity of stooping to ask him directly, which Jay Jay avoided at all costs.

      “Not even a fraction,” Gregory said. “Texas is enormous, the largest state in the Union. Better than eight hundred miles north to south, and almost that much east to west.”

      “I think it’s awful,” Melissa said, screwing her face up into a pout. Their mother had often warned her that someday her face would freeze into such an expression. At one time Jay Jay had watched daily in happy anticipation of the event, but it had unfortunately proved one of those times when their mother had turned out not to be right—and wouldn’t it just have to be something he’d really wanted to see. “In South Carolina we were wealthy, we were somebody, and now here we are, living in a boardinghouse like Gypsies.”

      “Gypsies live in caravans, not boardinghouses.”

      “Well, and where do you think we’re going to be living when we leave here? It’ll be just horrible, I know it will.”

      “I wish we were ready to leave,” Gregory said. “I think the journey will be interesting.”

      “I’m СКАЧАТЬ