A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall...

In which I share a story from my memoir.

Hi, Y’all! Glad You’re Here—

For the last few months, I have been packing up books and getting rid of clothes and having last hangouts with friends, preparing myself for our eventual move to Philly this June. At least, I hope we will be up there by June. We are currently stuck in that weird, liminal space that makes me feel like when you’re drunk at your front door but can’t seem to find the key to your home. I got rid of so many books, but I know that once we get up there, we will have to get rid of even more. I know that I won’t be able to stop worrying about my Granny and Momma, who are both being as supportive as possible, and having a harder time than I had anticipated. I also know that moving anywhere without the guarantee of a new job is risky, and that everyone seems to be having a hard time finding jobs right now—but I know that my current job hasn’t been a good fit for me anyway. I’m hopeful that Tyler and I will be able to find a community, that he will be able to express himself more fully in a space that isn’t Florida, and that I will hopefully find more opportunities for things I have only ever dreamed of. I’m excited and also more scared than I have ever been about anything.

I’m hoping that once I move, I’ll be able to get back to this newsletter in the capacity I started it in. When I started my National Book Award reading project, I was working a much less demanding job, with a much shorter work commute, and had way more free time. I was able to read at least three NBA books a week, which felt substantial enough to write newsletters about, and I also had a lot of thoughts about the new releases I managed to squeeze in on the weekends. I miss making my way through each year’s longlist, discussing all of historical things I learned about that related to these books and being able to discuss them with you all. Fingers crossed I can get back to that, once we are all settled in.

While I don’t have a letter discussing books today, I did want to share a story I wrote six years ago.

When I was twenty-four, my stepbrother died. His actual date of death was 4/20, which was surprisingly fitting, given that he was a pothead. I didn’t really know how to process his death, except to talk to him about it, and so when I got back home the day of his funeral, I wrote him a letter. It was mostly just to tell him what happened, since he wasn’t alive to see it. Looking back, I can tell that it’s not my best writing, that it’s not the most groundbreaking thing, and feels a little spiteful and melodramatic—but it’s also my life, and it’s who I was and what I was going through at the time. Maybe even trying to offer this explanation is an attempt for me to stall, since I’m nervous to get back to sharing vulnerable things. The truth is, I’ve just been holding onto this grief for this long, holding on to my old life this whole time, and before I move, I want to be able to let it go. I think sharing it might be the only way for me to do that.

So, here it is.

*

A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall

I have this memory of us before we were brothers—me thirteen, you fourteen—swirling around in the lake. You’re shirtless and the sun catches the new hairs on your chin, which you refuse to shave, and every time I turn to see you I begin to sink. Part of me knows that you see me, trying to see you. Your eyes peak through gold foil lashes, and there’s a crease at the corner of your lips. But instead of acknowledging me, you backstroke further into the lake, never wavering from the surface. Your body found this form of levitation so easy. That’s why I don’t believe it at first, when they say you drowned.        

            The drive to your funeral today is beautiful. It’s April, and as I cross over from Florida to Georgia, I catch these men planting gold flowers at the median along the highway. They were supposed to plant them earlier this week, but it’s rained every day since you died. It might’ve rained before then, but I don’t remember.

            I look to see if any of these men have your face. I’ve been doing this for years, out of habit. Trying to find you in places I know you can’t be found. Part of me even wonders if, now that you’re dead, God will let your features be cast over another persons’—a small gift to me. I pass by them and only in their absence do I realize I’m crying.

Hunter, you still there, Granny asks, from the car speaker. I called her when I left the house, asked if she’d stay on the phone with me for the drive. She’s grown so accustomed to grief; there’s a beauty to her familiarity. I don’t answer her now, but she still fills the silence. She’s watching Bonanza and the pew-pew of the bullets fall in cadence with her voice.

            It’s been almost a week since I first found out. It was last Sunday. I was on the couch with Tyler—my husband, who you never met—and he said he thought something had happened to you. He handed over his phone. There were posts all over social media; people saying they were going to miss you and that they couldn’t believe that you were gone. My hands went numb and I dropped the phone. I stood up and paced around our tiny living room, knocking over stacks of books and stepping on my paint brushes and art pens. I don’t know why I thought pacing would help anything.

            I grabbed my phone and called Granny. When she picked up, I screamed into the phone that you’d died. She was confused at first, asking me to slow down. We have a cousin named Zach, so she thought I was talking about him. When I mentioned your dad’s name, it finally clicked. I was so mad that it took her so long to get it that I threw the phone down and ran to the back of the house. Then I came back and picked up my phone. She was still on the line, saying my name to see if I was still there. I told her I was sorry, and then I said I had to go.

            That night, I wrote down every memory of you I had. I couldn’t remember small details and I panicked in moments when my mind changed your shirt from green to brown, or when I thought you had braces at the time but then remembered you’d gotten them off the summer before. I called you a few times, to see if maybe it was a mistake, but they’d already turned off your phone, so I couldn’t hear your voice asking me to leave a message.

            It takes me two hours to get to Blakely. That’s where they’re burying you, next to your grandma. I stop for gas, since I’m early, and then head down the road to search for the funeral home. The GPS takes me to the wrong spot—some church near your old high school—and a cop car pulls in and asks if I need help. The funeral home is three mailboxes down.

            At the funeral home, a man stands by a sign for county mayor. He’s bald, wearing a black suit and red tie, and he signals for me to roll down my window. As I stop, he leans in, redolent of moth balls and death, and asks if I’m family or a friend.

            “Well, that’s complicated,” I say. “I used to be Zack’s stepbrother, back when Eric was married to my Momma.”

            “You Grant’s son?”

            “No,” I say, “my mom is his ex-wife; the second one.”

            “Oh okay,” he says, wiping crust from the corners of his mouth. “So, not close family anymore. You can just park in row three.”

            I roll up the window. Whoever did his sensitivity training should be fired. The last thing I want to hear today is that we aren’t close anymore. He smiles through the window as I drive around and park in the third row.

            I keep my head down when I go inside. There’s a group of people standing in the parlor, whispering about you. It’s dark, mood lighting. Your real brother, Dustin, is facing away from me. His voice is a sharper, whinier version of yours. He’s talking to your mom. She’s standing in the center. Her black and silver shirt ripples every time she lets out a sob. She looks my way and asks Dustin, is that Hunter?

            I can’t blame her for not recognizing me. She only met me once; right after your dad left her for Momma. Her eyes are puffy, but I think they were always that way.

As she gives me a once over, I feel my back straighten, my pose become more ‘masculine’.

            “That picture you drew of Zack was real pretty,” she says, walking up to me. She’s talking about the one I sent you a picture of a few weeks ago, before I finished. You said it was real nice, and you liked how I covered the whole thing in lace. I posted the finished piece on Facebook, a tiny way to claim you. I tell her I’ll make a copy. She looks around then, like she’s not sure what to do, and then we cry against each other, two strangers. That’s something I’m beginning to notice about people; you don’t always have to know them to give them comfort.

            Katarina comes around the corner, two boys tugging at her arm, asking if I need any tissue. The last time I saw her was at her and Dustin’s wedding. She’d only been in America a year then, and her German accent was so thick I could barely understand her vows. She’s lost weight now; the accent is smoother, undercurrent of twang. She hands me a box of Kleenex and asks, “Want to see him?”

            You already know this, but I haven’t seen you in six years. That’s six years of opportunity I didn’t take. At first, when you didn’t answer my phone calls or cancelled our plans, I thought it was because you weren’t ready. But then you reached out, just a few months ago. I lied, when I said I didn’t have the money to help you. I just got scared. I thought you would use the money for drugs and it would be just like what happened with Momma, and I didn’t want to see you that way. I couldn’t jeopardize my whole life for you, because I knew part of me was willing, because I still love you that much. Katarina gives me her arm, and I realize it doesn’t matter if I’m scared, if I’m the one who isn’t ready. This is the last chance I’ll get.

            Your casket, draped in an American flag, is displayed like something out of a museum. They’ve dressed you in some military suit; blue blazer with gold pieces glinting from the cheap overhead lights. I don’t know what any of the badges mean, but I remember you said you were a parachute rigger. I wish you’d told me why you were discharged. Momma said it was cocaine, but the obituary says it was because you were having seizures.

            Kat pushes me closer to you. There’s this old couple I’ve never seen before sitting in the third pew behind us. When I look back at them, they get up and exit to the parlor. I figure they can sense my irritation. Kat says how good you look, but it sounds like a question, so I nod in agreement. You don’t, though. They’ve forced your head forward, giving you a double chin, and your skin still looks bloated from the water. I’m surprised they’d even allow a drowned man an open casket.

            Why couldn’t they have just made you look like you did when you were sleeping? You always had this silly frown, a crook at your left brow, face imprinted with the fabric of your pillowcase, lower lip hanging, drool spilling out, stubble because you never kept a clean face. They’d taken it all away. Sewn your mouth shut, lips pursing. Shaved you, so you were smooth as stone, softened you, and taken away that silly frown. How could they do this? Maybe no one knew. Maybe that was the luxury of sleeping next to you for so many years; of falling asleep after you and waking up before you. I knew you when you were at peace.

            Kat rests her hand on my shoulder. I want to ask if she still likes Bollywood movies or if she’s still happy with Dustin, now that his bald spot catches the light, but refrain.

            “The shock still hasn’t set in,” she says, still smiling. “He was just so young, you know?”

            “Quarter decade,” I say.

            It hits me, all of a sudden, I’m only twenty-four; one day I’ll be older than you. After all the fights we had where you won because you were older, after all the times I relied on you to take care of things because you were older, there will come a day, very soon, where I am older, and that wasn’t supposed to be possible.

            Kat leaves to check on the boys. I look back at you one last time. Before I got here, before I knew they’d ruined you, I imagined I could break off a piece of you and keep it to myself; just a small piece of you. I thought I could take a finger or an earlobe and crush it, fit it into a vial, carry it with me wherever I went. Then I’d know you were there. You don’t have to tell me how sick I am. I know, and as I walk out, I shame myself for even thinking it. Don’t worry, though, I still leave all of you in the casket.

            When I finally see Dustin face to face, especially after seeing you, my knees buckle. From his face, your eyes stare back at me. Eyes like lying in the woods in the summer, all green and golden. Dustin’s hair is gone and he has this unseemly beard, but you are here. As I look at him, I see everything they took away when preparing your body for disposal.

            He hugs me, the way people hug when the moment is right and the person is wrong. I ask how he is, and he says the first few days were the hardest. You’d have called him a titty baby after hearing his voice wavering, seeing his Adams apple bobbing like a fishing lure. The hairs of his moustache are wet with snot. He talks like you two were war buddies. Somehow, his memories of you, all the ways he hated you, disappear. I still flinch at the memory of him hitting you with that Yule Log on our first Christmas with your family. I know brothers do those things…we did those things; but something about what he’s saying doesn’t sound right. But maybe it’s just that he’s too ensconced in mourning to remember the worst right now.

            “You know what’s crazy,” he says, laughing to himself. He looks down when he laughs the way you do. Did. “Out of everybody in our family…out of every single person, Zack was the one we didn’t have life insurance on.”

            “Y’all should’ve done that the first time he burnt his hand off.”

            I think of you, flicking that old BIC against a gas can, the blush of fire suddenly swallowing your hand. The way your skin shed so quickly, as you stuck your hand inside this rose-pink bowl filled with water and hollered for me to get momma.

            “I guess it don’t make no difference now,” Dustin says, going on about all of the funeral expenses. Granny always said money talk at weddings and funerals was tacky. I can tell he’s asking, in a roundabout way, if I’ll give any money. But I don’t want to give money towards shoving you in the ground. I smile and look around. Our polite conversation withers and a tide of people rush up to him to make sure he’s okay.

            I stand around, waiting for people to comfort me in the way they’re comforting the rest of your family. Random people walk up to your real family and they hug them so tight, say how sorry they are, recycling words of comfort they’ve read in a Hallmark card. One person gives me a pitying smile for a moment, but they walk away without saying anything.

            On the other side of the parlor, in the corner avoiding the new rush of guests is Georgeanna. She’s glassy eyed, rocking a baby. Her black hair is pulled back, slick with grease, skin pock-marked, yet somehow she looks better than I remember. When she sees me, she comes over and says thank God someone else she knows is here.

            I hug her and tell her how beautiful the baby is. It’s not yours, sadly. I ruined any chance of that. But she doesn’t seem to hold anything against me.

            “Wanna sit down,” I ask.

            “I don’t know what I want to do, but I don’t want to sit. It’s hard to stand, but it’s hard to sit, and it’s hard to see him and it’s hard not to,” she says. “I can’t stop crying.”

            “I understand,” I say.

            I used to hate Georgeanna. I first met her the summer your dad set up the pool with the broken filter. The water turned green after a week. You and I would skinny dip in the slime while our parents were down the street getting high, and I still remember this one time you pretended to be a shark, and you kept diving in after me and grabbing me, tickling my ribs. I’d never been that way with a boy before. We’d break into your dad’s porn stash and fill up these purple medical gloves with KY and go to town in the living room. I swooned at the rhythmic moving of your arm.

            Momma and Eric didn’t come home one night. As we sat waiting, you made me eggs and asked how I learned to jack off. I told you I was four, and that this woman showed me how. You said your much older cousin showed you when you were six. I didn’t realize that we were once again bonding over trauma. At the time, I just thought we were so deeply connected by our experiences that only the two of us could ever understand each other. I created these futures for us, where we’d live in a ranch house together, hiding away from everything that tried to ruin us and live a happily ever after.

            The next day, you drove me back to Granny’s and on the way, we stopped by this church. We walked inside and there was Georgeanna, running up, leaping into your arms, the two of you spinning around and kissing, your camouflage baseball cap falling onto the floor. This illusion I had instantly fell apart, and I blamed her for it.

            As I look at her now, and I think about everything I did to tear you guys apart, I realize that part of me is responsible for your death in some way; because she was your life preserver, and I took her away.

            “That picture you drew of Zack looked real nice,” she said, sounding just like you. “You got the eyes just right.”

            “Thanks.”

            “At least the weather’s nice today. Ain’t real cloudy or nothing.”

            Behind us, a woman walks out of the chapel, squalling like a spring chicken. The sound wakes the baby and Georgeanna goes off to the bathroom, leaving me alone to watch this woman fall to the ground. Her large breasts and stomach cushion her fall. She melts into the ground like butter, fat pooling as she asks God why he had to take you away. I realize then that she barely knows you.

            I probably wouldn’t admit this if you were alive, but I’m spiteful to these kinds of people; the ones who loved you less than me. I sit and watch more people go in and sob over your body in the way Pentecostal’s do when anointed by God. I spit at them and their ridiculousness. You’d have seen right through them.

            Your dad seems to be the last to arrive. I don’t think it’s on purpose. He looks in a daze, more so than he ever did when he was jacked up on cocaine or twelve beers into the night. Grant holds him up the way Momma never would have. He passes me without notice, and I’m almost grateful. This is the first time I’ve seen him since he told me to get the fuck out of his house.

            Distant relatives and used-to-be relatives walk up and shake my hand, tell me they miss me even though they don’t. Uncle Michael’s stepdaughter, Samantha, stands beside me for a good five minutes before she sees who I am.

            “I didn’t know you were coming,” she says.

            “I figured I might as well.”

            “It’s a shame he was getting in so much trouble right before he passed. Michael wouldn’t even let him come over anymore,” she says. She’s pulling at her hair, which is crisp and milky white.

            “What kind of trouble?”

            “You know Zack,” she says, not realizing how much I know you. “Joyriding, breaking into houses, stuff like that.”

            It’s all the things we used to do before we had adult consequences. I can tell she likes that she’s more in the loop than someone else.

            “Did they ever figure out what happened,” I ask.

            “The autopsy said he had a seizure,” she said. “Fell in the water, and no one found him for a while. Water just filled his lungs, I guess.”

            “Where was he?”

            “You know that lake y’all used to go camping at over by the RV Park? I think it was that one.”

            The memory I have of us before we were brothers. It was in that lake. You’d been humming some country song your dad loved, Whiskey Lullaby, I think. I thought you were so cute, and I was so confused because I didn’t understand what it meant to like a boy in that way. But when you caught me looking at you, you just smiled and swam further away. I said not to go too far because there might be gators, and you said we were safe there. It feels like the water betrayed us, now.

            Samantha walks away, feeling awkward I’m sure, and then I’m alone again. Then Eric is beside me. He’s facing away from me and hugging Dustin. He’s just seen your body. And then he turns to me and I wait for whatever righteous fury he plans to unleash on me.

            You always loved this man so much, but I can’t understand why. He was so cruel. As he faces me, all I can see is him slinging a candle at Momma’s head. The glass and wax rain down on the floor and the dogs skitter to the other side of the room. I see him catching the glint of silver in your ear after you’d pierced it upstairs the night before, ripping the ring out and pinning you against the kitchen tile and asking you why you’re such a faggot. I see him in my face, eyes bulging and sweat dripping down his neck after I told him to stop yelling. I see him now, and he collapses into me and his arms are around me and I can’t breathe because he smells just like you, tobacco and pinewood, and I want him off me and I want him to crawl inside me, and as I feel a tenderness in him, I realize why you loved him so much. He’d never been like this with me, but after years and years of his disapproval, some kind of validation felt like I’d done something right for once in my life.

            “That picture you drew of him was real pretty,” your dad says. I look at him, and I see that part of him left with you. I pat his shoulder and thank him for being so kind. Then he’s swarmed by people who want to prove that they offer more condolences than the last person.

            The service starts and people flood into the chapel. They elbow each other for a good seat, like they’re going to miss your reprisal as Jesus Christ from the church play back when you were fifteen. But no one will rise today.

            Georgeanna, behind me, peaks into the chapel, her sleeping baby on her shoulder. I take the loveseat by the door and turn it to face the pulpit. Some song about a man with a troubled life booms through the overhead speakers. The bald man with the red tie gestures at a man in the back room to adjust the volume.  It calms to a hum and then growls to a galloping bass, up and down, over and over until they get the sound right. Everyone acts like it isn’t happening; they just continue to stare at your casket and cry, like it isn’t absolutely ridiculous how much these people are screwing up. I turn to Georgeanna, and I am thankful to see she is just as frustrated as I am.

            “When’s the last time you guys talked,” I whisper.

            “About a month ago. For a while, any time we talked it was just butting heads over everything. But the last time we talked it was…calm.” Tears catch on her frail lashes, but she’s happy as she says it.

            “Did y’all talk at all, before…” she asks, before shaking her head like she didn’t mean to ask it that way.

            “The last time we talked, we cleared the air about a lot of stuff,” I say. “We apologized for being assholes as kids and I told him how much I missed him. He’s the only one who knew what it was like, going through what we did in that house. He’d promised to always be that person.”

            The music stops and we both look down as the preacher gets up and goes to the podium. He speaks a lot about how hard your life was. He says that you’d been troubled, like the man in the song, but that you’d chosen to give your life to Christ and that meant no matter what, you’d make it into heaven.

            I roll my eyes. Granny always said that just because you got saved didn’t mean that you got a get out of hell free card—that you could still screw up bad enough to burn for eternity. I agree with her, on that point. Eric was saved when he tore that earring out of your ear. He was saved when he locked Momma in their bedroom for three days and held her at gunpoint. After seeing him today, I do think he’s changed. But if he’d died at that moment, having just done those horrible things to you or Momma, would he have gone to heaven, too?

            If you’re in heaven, I wonder what you think of it. If heavenly you is anything like earthly you, you’ve probably already tried breaking into everyone else’s mansions, lit all the trees on fire, wrecked everyone’s cars and knocked up all the girls. They say you lose those parts of yourself when you get to heaven, which would mean you’re not really you. Did they list out all of the bad things you’d done? I don’t think sneaking booze to school in your backpack was the worst thing, but maybe breaking that boy’s nose is bad. You made poor choices, but you were a genuinely kind person, and I think that counts for something. If you’re in heaven, could you give me a sign? Just give my heart ease.

            The preacher says another prayer, his third or fourth, and I wonder why he can’t just say it all at once and save time. It’s like he forgot something and has to add a P.S. Your dad looks like he could cry at any moment, with his lip tucked into his teeth, biting back tears and nodding along to the prayer the way he nodded along to Stevie Nicks when he drove us around as kids. I look around at all of these people crying over you, and I wonder how many of them have felt a grief like this before.

            After the final prayer, your body is taken to the hearse, and the preacher announces that close family and friends will meet at the site for your burial. I remember what the bald man said, about not being close family anymore, and I run outside. If I can just see you one more time, it will be enough. I just need to see you, not the distorted version of you, but the real you, one last time. I figure if I ask them, they’ll open the casket one last time, for a grieving friend. I look around for the hearse, but it’s already headed down the road.

            I follow you on foot. My new shoes scuff against the pavement and my hair falls into my eyes, and the hearse moves faster, but I know if I want to see you bad enough, I’ll keep up. Thoughts of you flood my mind; camping across the lake when we were sixteen, smoking cigarettes by the fire, that time I was sad and lonely and you kissed me, and I apologized because I thought you’d hate me once you’d done it. My stomach hurts and the back of my throat stings from sucking in so much air, but nothing hurts as bad as saying goodbye, so I still run. I run until the hearse stops and I wait for them to take you out.

            I ask if I can see you. They say no.

            Cars pull in and line up along the cemetery fence. I watch them walk over to the site and find a seat under the tent. I hide behind the hearse so I won’t be asked to leave. Eric and your mom and Dustin and Kat find seats up front. These men who wear the same suit as you are there to fold the flag and to play some song on a horn. I don’t know what any of it means. I’ve never been to a military funeral before.

            I listen to the horn blare into the grey sky, and then there’s the familiar smell of tobacco and pinewood, and I imagine you making fun of me for crying over you. After the military people fold the flag, four men stand up to lower you into the ground. It’s quiet, and the wind blows so that the rope strikes someone’s leg like a snake. Everyone waits. Something is wrong. People are looking around. The bald man makes an announcement that the casket will have to be lowered after everyone is gone, because the hole is filled with water from all the rain.

            People shuffle from the tent, hug and say goodbye, and I watch from a distance. Each person searches for comfort in someone else. Georgeanna wanders around with her baby in her arms. I hope she finds solace in someone. I know I can’t be the one to give it to her.

            Slowly, people drive away. I feel the heels of my boots sinking into the wet grass as I wait for the last of them to turn out of the cemetery. The men by your casket are waiting too, respectfully, before submerging you. If they find humor in the fact that a drowned man’s grave has flooded over, they don’t laugh. They just keep their heads down, staring into the muddy pool. I imagine it seeping into your casket, staining the fresh white silk, bringing you back to levitation. I want all of the water that’s ever been on your body on mine.

            Granny once told me, back when I thought that taking multiple showers a day could wash away feelings too, that you’re never going to get people entirely washed off of you in this life. She said, at some point, the water that touches you has touched everyone else. That’s how water works. It rises up and becomes a mist that soaks the clouds and then it rains down into the rivers and is filtered into the pipes that rain down on our bodies and then starts again. If that’s true, it means that at some point the water that filled your lungs and bloated your skin and cleansed you of your sins, in that one way—it will be all over me. It touched you, and it’ll touch me. It killed you, and it’ll touch me.

Once everyone is gone, the men from the funeral home walk up to your casket. I find myself getting closer, just so I can see the rosy glint. The men gather up the ropes, hold them taut, and then let them go slack in their hands. Your casket falls and water spills up, out of the grave, slithers through the grass. And God, I’m so close now, it washes over my feet.