Richard
Memories of a childhood
by Elizabeth Eugenia (James) LaBozetta

On the few times I have had the opportunity to ride a train I have always been careful to choose a backwards-facing seat next to the window. From the vantage of the backwards-facing seat, the scenery passing along seems to whip from behind to my shoulder, pauses there to be hooked with the eye, then drags out a lingering good-bye before shrinking to nothing upon reaching the horizon.

I might examine this thin strip of world in more detail before it disappears forever, from this backwards-facing seat, to learn more of where I have been and where I am going than if I had chosen the more traditional forwards-facing seat and the viewpoint that would flash what is coming into my face rapidly, flashed behind me and gone before I can catch hold of the least detail.

It is nearly midnight. All is quiet in the house except for the occasional bark of a city dog in the distance and the low din of crickets singing ancient songs to each other in the darkness. It is cool tonight, cool for July, and a soft breeze lifts the curtains of my bedroom in rhythmic waves, carries in the scent of sun-scorched pavement, damp earth, freshly mown grass. Summer could not be better than it is right at this moment.

I write at night, long past midnight usually. Few distractions enter to break my train of thought or upset the momentum that has built slowly in the daylight hours, the light-of-day hours filled with children and husband wanting and needing.

In these late hours, when all are asleep and past the need of me, I take inventory of the day, clear my head, gather myself together, and await the Ghosts. Tonight, however, there is no wait. The Ghost I entertain this night came in the daylight hours and patiently, but persistently, waited for the night to come and the freedom to be heard uninterrupted.

It comes uninvited, gaining entry by way of a handful of common pennies this morning — I had a handful, looked at them and thought: "Richard's hair was the color of a two-year-old penny, burnished copper..." Tonight, the Ghost is my brother and a penny, the door. We do not lose a person all at once to Death but in bits over time; this morning I saw Richard's hair in the color of a common penny and a little more of him slipped away...

Richard and I were both four when his mother married my father. Our first meeting set the stage for what was to become the main character of our entire childhood relationship: I had never before had an arm twisted painfully behind my back, never before been forced to say things to appease a voice hissing into my ear from behind: "tell me I am better than you and I will let go!"So began the relationship and the first of such humiliations to come, inflicted by a boy I was immediately made afraid to love with a free heart.

I suppose conflict was inevitable, given the differences in our upbringing: Richard was among the youngest members of a large, boisterous, German family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and was the oldest of the cousins. He learned early to be heard above the crowd, learned early to get what he wanted by whatever means necessary.

He was raised in the city that was loud and fast. When he spoke it was with conviction: "I WILL, I WANT, and NOW!"

He never knew his father. He was told by his mother and her family that his father was a race car driver that disappeared as soon as it was known his mother was pregnant. In contrast, I was raised by my father's parents: an elderly, ailing, English/Welsh/Irish/Scottish couple with many rules of propriety to follow in all things: never run, never shout, never demand...our home was quiet. So still, in fact, that I could hear flies buzz as they bobbed against the window screens in summer.

We made our home in the country; there were no other children nearby so I never had the opportunity to have my starched edges softened by the natural abrasion of one child's will in playful conflict with another. My playmates were imaginary, pieced together in detail from things I had heard in stories told to me by my grandfather or seen in infrequent journeys to town with my father. "I'd like to, I might, possibly later..."were thoughts seldom given the opportunity to pursue in the quiet family I was raised in. My mother had abandoned me almost at birth and while I knew her she seldom visited: "she is part-Indian and wild, not fit for raising children and managing a suitable home!" I would be told when I'd ask about her absence.

Richard and I couldn't have been more different if we'd come from different planets but in spite of our differences, there were pockets of peace between us and he'd have periods of calm where whatever demon drove him to violence would step back and let the best in him shine through.

And how he shined through then, however briefly. Richard could be fascinating. It was his idea to sew a hot-air balloon and attempt to send it into the sky, his idea to build a raft and navigate the river near our home. It was him who showed me how to make paper airplanes, him who showed me the fossils of sea creature's shells in the gravel lining the house driveway and him who found the ancient stone ferns pressed into the sandstone pavers that edged the garden. We'd build eccentric boats of wood and nails and float them in the street gutter after a storm...and this was the brother I loved, the brother I told all my secrets to and not once did he betray me.

Then there was the ‘other Richard', the one I met that first day, the boy who could be ignited to violence in an instant by a single word of disagreement, by a moment of hesitation that would be interpreted as a challenge to his will. The demon that possessed him then sent him flying onto me, fists flying and legs kicking, and I was no match. He dominated the house of ten children and was well-known as a vicious bully at school, fighting nearly every day. As the next oldest to him by four months he saw the biggest threat to his place of power within the family coming from me.  This "other Richard" demanded the biggest and best for himself always and made sure things came to him first. He took only what he was certain he could get and keep.

Once, in a rage but frustrated to act on it, I climbed the stairs of the house to my bedroom and, pausing at the threshold, lifted a loose flap of old, faded wallpaper beside the door frame. Taking a pencil from my desk around the corner I wrote: "I hate Richard", dated it, and signed it with a flourish, the pencil lead digging deeply into the horsehair plaster. It felt good to give my anguish visibility, an anguish I dared not express openly. It felt good to know what was hidden there, beneath the wallpaper, in so obvious a place, when my enemy did not.

Each time he passed that place, and especially during the times of strife between us, I smiled a little inside; it was my childish secret. Sometimes weeks would pass that I would not have cause to think about what I had written, but it was never forgotten.

The marriage of our parents soured almost at once and it was to the despair of Richard and I, as the oldest children in the household, to protect he others from the poisonous resentment growing between the adults: the quarrels increased and grew in violence, vile names and accusations were tossed back and forth, terrible things were said and not taken back.
Richard and I would herd the younger children out of harm's way at the first sign of a fight brewing in our parents but stood by, sentinels, and were forced to listen by proximity at what was shouted above us, around us. We'd giggle nervously or recoil in tandem.

In the years that the quarrels increased between the adults, the quarrels between my brother and I became fewer. Then ceased altogether. After a time we'd retreat to his bedroom, or mine, to plan our escape when we'd come to the age of eighteen and freedom.

His mother loved him and not me; my father loved me and not him: we were living proof of importance to the jealous heart—our parent had loved someone else before. My brother and I were called to account for the failings seen in the opposite spouse when the disappointment and rage could not be sated in quarrel alone; we were forced to extend the adults enormous resents by proxy.

In this, Richard and I were together: we were not disliked for ourselves and our own shortcomings but rather for the shortcomings of the parent of blood-tie. The pain this wrought in each of our hearts was enormous but for Richard, I think, it was unbearable.

He made a talisman to protect himself from the hatred of my father and during the quarrels when we'd retreat upstairs he'd share his talisman with me in great detail: he would go to college and become a geologist, move to Hawaii, marry a Hawaiian woman, build a large home of his own design and with his own hands, would fill it with furniture of his own choosing.
As the years passed this dream became more elaborate. Sometimes we'd draw pictures of his talisman in great detail: colorful crayon drawings of Hawaii and the tropical garden behind the house. Other times, with a quarrel raging out of control below us, we'd draw up the interior of his Hawaiian home and fill it with furniture cut from a Sears catalog or discarded magazines, laying on our stomachs side by side on his floor, deciding on fabric color, wall paint, rug design... We'd go together to the small public library in downtown Nelsonville and choose books about Hawaii and geology and study them, extract details for our next drawings and facts for his dream to grow upon.

I had no plans of my own then, rather none to share, and was content to help my brother build the biggest talisman he needed to feel safe, help him build his lifeboat. It was the early 1960s and in that time and place women were not encouraged to plan and dream or choose. In school, where Richard and I shared classrooms some years, I'd learned early to keep my real dreams to myself: a teacher went around our classroom, from student to student, with that age-old question: "what do you want to be when you grow up?" But I was not experienced enough to know she did not want the truth but rather ‘the right answer'. All the little boys said: "fireman, policeman, doctor..." and the little girls said: "mommy, teacher, nurse..." Then it was my turn.

I said the unthinkable: "farmer or cowboy". My classmates giggled. The teacher's jaw dropped disapprovingly. "Pick something else!" I was ordered. "Girls can't be cowboys or farmers!"
Richard had taught me to want something and to become bold enough to say so, but I did not thank him for it then.

I suppose I had always taken it for granted that we would grow up, marry, live near each other, raise our families side-by-side even if it had to be in Hawaii. That is the way things have always been done in the region where I was born. Our children would be inseparable friends and play together always.

But I abandoned my family at fourteen and chose to live among the forgotten and unwanted in State-supported childcare institutions until given my freedom at age eighteen.  I came to adulthood a free agent.

Or so I told myself and wanted to believe. At least that is the story I tell when asked, the story our parents have agreed to and believe even now after all has been said and done; this is the story the family clings to, must believe: "nobody made me leave home, leave everyone and everything I had ever known and loved. I left home of my own accord for reasons known only to me."

But it isn't the truth and only Richard and I ever spoke the truth about it later: the bitterness in our home encrusted our spirits, enslaved our hearts. There came a day when I knew I could not continue there, that something necessary for survival would be irretrievably lost if I stayed even one more day. So I left home and Richard was soon to follow.
I lost touch with Richard in those years.

But every now and then I would catch a bit of news of him: Richard sent to prison for aggressive acts gotten out of control, Richard making eight years of the two originally sentenced to him by continually refusing to defer to prison authority, Richard released at last, changed somehow, all fight and defiance gone. Richard returned to his hometown and family again.

I had married and moved to the city that was loud and fast, had three children, went to college some, had invested in a house and made it a home...the past had little place in the present, here in the city that is loud and fast, so I had gone on and made a new life and a new family, without my brother, and had forgotten him, left him behind...or so I told myself and wanted to believe.

And I was left to wonder, but not to know, about what I had heard. To wonder what had worked such change in him.

Did the solitude of prison life cause him to reflect on his behavior and move him to change? Or did something more sinister force him to cherish and value his freedom such that when it finally came he'd do anything to keep it? I never went to see him to ask; I was never to know.

I did learn why he spent so little time back in our hometown after release from prison: his bosses ‘forgot' to pay him his full wage on payday, or any wage at all sometimes. He'd work so hard at menial jobs, the only kind he'd be offered with a prison record behind him, and when he'd come to collect his rightful pay at the end of the workweek he'd be turned away on petty excuses. Snickering at his distress, he'd be told: "Don't like it, Jailbird? Then go someplace else!"  But there was no place else to go.

The price of remaining where he had grown up was poverty and torment. One day he'd had enough and packed his car for Utah and the oil rigs there: he'd start fresh, he told the family before leaving, and go away where nobody knew him.

I saw him twice, briefly, before he left--accidental moments where he was in the same place I was, unplanned. Then not at all for many years after; no words passed between us.

One evening in summer I answered a quiet knock at my door, here in the city that is loud and fast, and found Richard standing on my house porch, hair the color of burnished copper glowing in the evening sunshine—hair the color of a two-year-old penny.

He said he'd like to talk to me, had come all the way from Utah to walk the back-roads of childhood and to sit on the riverbank of time.

He was searching for my backwards-facing seat at the window—wanted to examine where he'd been in order to discover where he might be heading. And he needed a traveling companion, someone who'd made the journey before him, so that he would not get lost and never find his way home again.

I opened the door.

And I think about that evening often now, all loose ends were tied up at once, twenty years gone without the other, all that life lived apart to talk about.

And, finally, all that life lived together.

We had powerful enemies in the parent that could not love us. His mother could not love me and my father could not love him, what it did to us. The truth of it all spoken aloud at last.
Driving away, to return to Utah, waving, he yelled from the open window of his station-wagon: "write to me—please write!" and I waved and watched him go away until I couldn't see him any longer.

It was the last time I would ever see him alive and so I waved good-bye onto forever. Only I did not know, had no way of knowing, it was forever then.

I wrote, he did not write back. He couldn't write back: he'd fallen asleep at the wheel driving back home to Utah and had gotten hurt, was hospitalized. He'd write when he felt up to the task, would come to Ohio for another visit as soon as he could get back on his feet.

And he did recover, was on his way to Ohio again and would stop by for another visit just a year later. This time, if he felt the least sleepy, he'd pull to the side of the road for a rest, he assured the family, saying: "I learned my lesson the last time, don't want to fall asleep and wreck again!"

The drive from Utah to Ohio is a long one and, tired from the effort, Richard pulled his van to the side of the Missouri highway for a quick nap—just like he said he would.  As he slept, his killer opened the unlocked door of Richard's van and stabbed my sleeping brother once through the heart. Richard jolted awake to find his life running down his chest to pool at his feet, started the van and tried to drive away to find help but got just a few feet before collapsing and dying. A passing truck-driver found his body slumped behind the wheel the next morning.

Robbery was not a motive, the State police told the family later: nothing was taken from my brother but his life.

The shock of Richard's death, the arbitrary senselessness of it, jolted a wave of memory of him — of things I had forgotten or rather assigned little importance to while he lived: we are in the house yard digging a hole to China. Richard has promised that if we dig straight and fast we will come out on the other side of the Earth soon.

He believes, so I believe.

In another, we are outdoors at night camping inside boxes we have dragged home from the rear of a local appliance dealer's shop. We are laying on our backs looking up into the night sky at the moon and stars, eating popcorn and drinking Kool-Aid, laughing and talking.
It is a night very much like tonight—cool for July and quiet, the low din of crickets singing their ancient songs in the darkness.

He says, suddenly, like he has saved it up all day and cannot wait a moment longer: "When I build my house in Hawaii I will build you a big room too. You can live there with me and my family—if you want to. I won't let anyone tell you that you can't be a cowboy or a farmer! I just can't imagine my dream without you there too somehow."

I am inexplicably touched that he'd include me in his talisman dream and tears fill my eyes uncalled. I pretend I am choking on a piece of popcorn so he will not know I am crying.

It is Christmas Eve. Richard and I are sitting together at the sill of my bedroom window shivering in our thin pajamas against the cold. We are searching the December sky for Santa Claus, looking out the window-glass through the bare branches of the walnut tree just beyond the sill. Into a black night dotted with stars, the air crisp and clear, clouds pass across the face of a cold moon slowly. If I close my eyes I can see my brother beside me, see that night, feel the cold, hear his voice...

Our warm breath hits the cold glass and lays a foundation of fog to be turned into a forest of ice ferns overnight: I know this, it has happened before. So I make a pact with myself that when the first light of Christmas morning comes, and the rising sun bounces orange and blue sparks off the tips of the ferns of ice laid upon the glass by magic, I will run into Richard's room and wake him, and only him, to see.  It is not much of a gift but all I am able to give: the gift of a memory, of beauty and magic that will come just once and never come again.

I have nothing that was his but a few old photographs of us together as children; they are in black and white so everyone, except those who knew him, would have no way of telling that his hair was burnished copper.

For a time after his death I was driven to look for markers of him, things left behind of connection.

Once, in fit of grief, I drove sixty miles to the home of our childhood and found it abandoned and rotting. Termites had eaten the frame to the roof, the foundation sat unsteady from too many spring floods, light poured into the upstairs rooms from great, gaping holes in the roof. The home we'd shared as children was waiting to be razed, ruined past repair.

I went inside for a last look around, just had to see one more time then never again. So, I walked through the rooms downstairs, climbed the shaky staircase to the bedrooms above, and went to Richard's room first. There was nothing of him there but memory... and a few stray crayon marks on the floor.

Then I crossed the hallway to my own room. Pausing at the threshold I lifted the loose flap of wallpaper to view what I had written in anger long ago, the words, exposed, uncovered for the last time, glared out against the darkened interior of the hallway and shone against the whiteness of the horsehair plaster protected by the wallpaper for so many years passed. " I hate Richard", dated October 16, 1963, signed in my childhood handwriting with a flourish, dug deeply into the plaster wall and hidden.

The insignificance of these words to the present, after life and experience have taught a few lessons, made me feel hollow inside and ache for him: he never saw even one of his dreams.

As a child he had the biggest and best of everything, made certain these things came to him first. His mother loved him and not me. He fought to get only what he was sure he could get and keep.

These things, for his own reasons, meant so much to him.  Had I known that these things were going to be all he would ever receive in life I might have been more charitable.
.
It is morning now. I can hear the birds singing in the trees outside my bedroom window. The low horn of the night train sounds in the distance as it approaches the last crossroad on its way out of town. It has gotten cooler since midnight but somehow I did not notice until now.

The Ghost has gone with the light of day. I am alone now and should sleep.