me “Tom-Tom.”
“He was in shock, and only partly conscious, but didn’t you feel the way he reached out to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“He asked your name. He asked you to comfort my mom.”
“True. That rattled me.”
Mikesh’s reaction was not unique. People were unsettled by the effect my brother had on them. What he said could jar you. Some got angry and turned that against him. Those people and the media saw my brother as a wolf. They circled the wagons, protecting themselves and their flock against him.
I, your story teller, have to admit that Josh had finally unsettled me, too. I worked as a contract archeologist through fall 2007, but after that digging season ended, I moved in with Mom and Josh. More than moved in. After I’d filed my final reports, I helped Josh with his work and decided that from then forward I would divide my year that way. I wished I had a way to tell Mikesh, over coffee, that stepping back into the long shadow cast by my twin brother after having freed myself of him for ten years was neither automatic nor wholly pleasant. It threatened my pride. Deciding whether I was going to continue that work now that Josh was dead was the next issue to face: once the shock passed and the grim business of my brother’s death got completed. That morning in the coffee shop, I had little to offer but questions.
“The people who followed Josh are going to want to know about what you saw and heard. It’s going to sound crazy to you, but those people are very definitely going to want to hear from you whether you saw my brother die, whether he quit breathing.”
While I pictured the faces of the ones who were not going to believe, would never believe Josh was dead, the thought at the front of Arnie Mikesh’s mind was just the opposite: remembering the feeling of his fingers in the airway of my brother’s mouth after he quit speaking, and the silence that pounded in Mikesh’s brain after that last breath. Josh’s dying moment was not an experience Mikesh wanted to speak about to a group of religious fanatics, much less think about himself.
“My mother and I don’t care about an autopsy. We want to bury Josh and move forward. But the sheriff says it has to happen. He feels there could be alcohol or drugs involved. In a way I’m relieved that we are going to get a doctor’s signature on a report that will detail exactly what killed Josh—that it was nothing illegal.”
My phone rang: our friend Simon. I told him where we were, and soon Mikesh, heading back to the parking area, felt my hand—the unfamiliar hand of the dead man’s brother—on his back, guiding him toward a pair of people. One was my mother, Maria, and the other was the bearded man who Mikesh saw when he stumbled into the Sheriff’s office: Simon Peña, Josh’s assistant. Standing outside in the cold, looking into Mom’s splotchy face, Mikesh told the story again, thinking about my brother’s last request: “Comfort my mother.”
“You are sure he didn’t say anything else?” Peña pushed. “You are sure he didn’t say why he was on that road or why he went off it? Something maybe you forgot?”
Mikesh could taste his dislike for Peña. He thought back to what he saw in the sheriff’s office: this man saying he didn’t know what Josh was doing on that road. Peña had nerve to press Mikesh on the same question.
“No. I remember it. I wish I could put it more out of my head.”
Mom placed her hand on Mikesh’s arm. “Of course that’s how you feel.” Mikesh looked into her face: a fifty-one-year-old woman, with the nylon collar of her jacket turned up against the damp, her eyes puffed up from crying, and her sandy hair flat on one side. Her tousled appearance made Mikesh warm to her. She was fingering the zipper of her jacket, where the tab on the slider had broken. And Mikesh heard her give the first sensible judgment he’d heard about the accident: “It was weather, Simon. Bad weather took Josh.”
chapter 3
If Mikesh thought he knew what my mother was talking about, he was wrong. As she looked into his face, her hair messed and eyes puffy, she was, for that moment cheerful, thinking of what she told my brother and me many times in the little house she ruled, her story of how she wasn’t sure we would make it into the world because of weather. How when she was carrying us she wasn’t due until late January. How she was on her own. How she and dad were going to marry. How Dad needed the cash, and went south to work some high-paying construction after hurricane Carmen hit in the fall. But Dad stopped calling or writing. My unmarried mom was left living with her parents on the farm, sleeping in the bedroom in which she had grown up, eating from the same flowered stoneware she had known from childhood. Except that now she was pregnant and the man who was responsible had left with a promise on his lips and then, like the hurricane he had followed, disappeared. It was 1974. Mom said they were not so careful about getting ready for babies in those days. She saw the doctor once, and only knew from that visit that she was pregnant and that the due date would be in the new year. Mom should have gone back, seen Dr. Razavi again, but she was stubborn and angry. She thought that before the end of the year, Dad would come back with enough money to set them up independently. They would marry, and as a new bride she would see the doctor. But Mom promised Grandma that at the end of December she would set up a new appointment, and make arrangements for the hospital stay by the time her due date arrived.
Late December of ‘74 was cold. No matter the season, my grandfather listened to the farm report and the weather at six o’clock every morning. The day before Josh and I were born, Grandpa announced to Mom and Grandma that a blizzard was forecast. On the morning that Grandpa announced the blizzard, Mom, in the frozen farm country of Clayton County, craved fresh pie cherries she could pick by hand in midsummer from the tree in her parents’ lawn, just a few yards away from the garden where beans would be ripe for the harvest under velvet leaves. Mom’s craving was so powerful that she felt like she would walk to get ripe cherries, even if she had to put one foot ahead of the other all the way to south Florida. But Grandpa was firm. The three of them were going to sit tight, make sure the animals were cared for and everything buttoned down, because heavy snow was coming on a strong wind. True to the forecast, by noon the air was white. While Grandma and Grandpa and Mom listened to the weather bulletins coming in on KOEL and the wind howled in the eaves, Mom daydreamed of biting through the fragile skins of cherries and wiping the juice from her lips. Around bedtime, when the storm was at its worst, her water broke and contractions started.
Mom had not yet turned nineteen, but she knew what was happening. Neither she nor my grandmother anticipated this would be her delivery date. Neither thought ahead to get Mom into town to be near Community Hospital. Grandma called Dr. Razavi. He said with a first baby it might be a long wait before Mom actually needed to get to Elkader. That night with Grandma on the phone, and the winds ready to shake the house off its foundations, the waves of pain knocked Mom sideways. When the contractions grew close, Razavi contacted the sheriff, who said it would be a slow business for the plows to get out to my grandparents’ road through the piling drifts. Their best bet for speed was for my grandparents to get Mom to the state highway, meeting the plow and ambulance there.
On its own, Grandpa’s tractor might have gotten through, but Mom was in no condition to climb on, and a wagon would get hung up in the snow. Then Grandpa thought about Nels Myhre’s sleigh. Nels had the roughest farmland in their neighborhood, steep, all woodland and pasture. Nels kept sheep and was the last farmer in the area to use horses. His place was one farm over. You’d have had to drive twenty miles to find another farmer who still kept work animals or a sleigh. But Nels used a bobsleigh to get hay bales out to the sheep in winter, driving a team of black half-Percherons who weren’t put off by snow. About three in the morning, Grandpa called Nels and asked if he thought the team and sleigh could make it. Nels would try. The snow had quit but was still blowing. Grandpa got out with
