My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

had actually occurred hours before (though really he had been dead for at least a year before the breath left his body), I had vowed to tell her nothing about my brother and his illness and now his death. If I had spoken to her while he was just sick and even almost dying (though he was in a state of almost dying for a long time), I would not have hesitated to tell her about my brother’s illness, to tell her of his impending death (and also to bring up the fact that all of us face impending death). I could not speak to her of his just dying. I could not make sense of it just then. His death was so surprising, even though I had been expecting it; it hung in front of me, not like a black cloud but like a block of something hard and cold and impenetrable. I spoke to her and I spoke to her, she asked me questions and she asked me questions. All the things I said to her were true, all the things I said to her were filled with meaning. The day was cold, it was the middle of January, the sun was shining. For me such a thing is a paradox: the sun is shining, yet the air is cold. And as I was talking to this woman from the newspaper who kept asking me questions and questions and whose questions I kept answering and answering, I looked out a window and I saw that an animal, a deer, had eaten up some especially unusual evergreens that my friend Dan Hinkley had sent to me from his nursery in Kingston, Washington. And the sight of the evergreens, all eaten up in a random way, not as if to satisfy a hunger but to satisfy a sense of play, suddenly made me sad, suddenly made me wish that this, my brother dying, had not happened, that I had never become involved with the people I am from again, and that I only wanted to be happy and happy and happy again, with all the emptiness and meaninglessness that such a state would entail.
    I was walking up and down the floor of my kitchen, the floor was pine, a type of wood that reminded me of my father, who was a carpenter. This man was my brother’s real father and not really my own, my father was someone else I did not know, I knew only this man and to me he was my father. He was a man I loved and had known very well, better than his own children knew him (my brother who was dead, my brother who was a merchant in the market on Saturdays, my brother who had almost killed our mother when he threw her to the ground while trying to prevent her from throwing stones at him). My brother’s coffin was made of that kind of wood, pine; my other brother, the one who is a merchant in the market on Saturdays, had picked it out. It cost the least of all the kinds of coffins that were on sale at the undertaker’s, I paid for it with traveler’s checks. As a child I was afraid of the undertaker, Mr. Straffee; as a child, all the furniture I came in contact with was made of this wood, pine: the chair that I sat on at home, the floor that I walked on at home, the bed I slept in, the table on which my mother would place the meal I ate in the middle of a schoolday, my desk at school, the chair I sat on behind the desk at school—all of it was made from this wood, pine. The floor on which I stood that morning that my brother had died was cold and the planks had pulled away a little from each other.
    I called all the doctors who had prescribed medicines for my brother to tell them he had died. Their names were Scattergood, Hart, and Pillemer. Only when I had called them, standing by the telephone, did their names stand out to me, as if their names had drawn me to them all along. They said how sorry they were to hear of it. I called the pharmacist to tell him that my brother had died. His name was Ed. He had been very kind and sympathetic, often trusting that I would pay him the hundreds and sometimes thousands of dollars’ worth of medicine that I had charged; no matter how much I owed him, he always gave me the medicines that had been prescribed to ease my brother’s suffering and prolong