Building Blocks (11 page)

He bit on his lip. He couldn't focus his mind on anything, but he could keep silent. Mr. Connell was whipping so hard you could hear him grunt. Three, four.

Brann bit down hard and squeezed his eyes closed. Five. His body trembled and he couldn't stop it. He made a picture for his mind, of the bright hot air and the cool green of the trees around the swimming pool. Inside his mind, he dived into the pool and floated all alone, in the cool blue underwater.

Six. Wait. Seven. Brann tasted blood. Eight. He made himself think cool and blue, while telling himself it couldn't last forever. Kevin got seven. Why should Brann get more? Nine. It had to end soon. Unless the belt would keep falling until Brann cried. If he howled, would that stop Mr. Connell? Ten. Brann waited.

It was over.

“Get up now,” Mr. Connell ordered. Brann opened his eyes and stood straight, facing the man. His legs quivered, but he made his face stay quiet. Mr. Connell was looking at him oddly. “You're the oldest, you should have stopped them,” he said.

Brann could have argued, but he just nodded his head instead. His mouth was filling with blood, and he swallowed it. He guessed he'd bit through his lip.

“You said you were one of mine. That was a lie,” Mr. Connell said.

“Yes, it was.” Brann stared back at the man, thinking his own thoughts about that.

After a while Mrs. Connell called out, “Andrew's here,” and Mr. Connell told Brann to wait in the living room. Brann didn't look around as he walked out and stood by a window.

“You didn't have to take down your pants,” Suzanne said in her normal voice. “You got it easy.”

“Shut up, Suzanne,” Brann said, without turning around. He didn't know how Kevin could stand it, with this horrible sister and that father and his mother who didn't even act like a human being.

“It's not usually this bad,” Kevin said. “Brann?”

“It's OK,” Brann said. “I'm just angry.”

Kevin came to stand beside him. “Angry? Why? They're right. We were trespassing.”

“That's not it,” Brann said. It was fair enough to be whipped, he guessed. “It's the way he does it.” He didn't like to think about all the long years Kevin Connell had lived in this family.

“It's the only way he knows,” Kevin said. “It's because he's scared.”

“
He's
scared?” Brann snorted.

They were called into the kitchen. Suzanne plopped herself down into a chair and sat with her hands folded on the table in front of her, looking like a perfect angel. Brann and Kevin stood. Brann knew how much it would hurt to sit down.

A tall, thin man sat with Mr. and Mrs. Connell at the table. His hair was thick and white, his face
was tanned red-brown, and his black eyes snapped with life. Kevin looked across at him and the man winked. Kevin's whole face lit up. His broad mouth stretched into a smile that was about the happiest thing Brann had ever seen. There was no sadness to this smile.

They all seemed to have forgotten that Brann was there. Nobody introduced him, nobody looked at him. The man, Uncle Andrew, if Kevin's expression was any clue, sat across the table from where Kevin and Brann stood. “And how's the world with you, lad?” he asked Kevin.

Kevin didn't answer, just smiled and nodded.

“I've been talking to your uncle,” Mr. Connell said. “Look at me when I'm speaking to you, boy.”

Kevin's eyes turned reluctantly to his father.

“Billy will go to the farm this summer. You'll stay here and work for me. You'll be here to help your mother with the new baby.”

Kevin fell absolutely still. Brann didn't dare look at him.

“But why?” Brann asked.

“It's your responsibility. You can begin to learn my business.”

Kevin bolted around the table and grabbed his uncle's brown hand. Uncle Andrew looked at Mr. Connell, his eyes laughing as if to say, Didn't I tell you so?

“But why?” Kevin asked his uncle.

“It's what your father says, lad. It's what he said to me, I'm lucky to get the free labor.”

“But you said—” Kevin protested. “You said I was the best worker you'd ever had. You said you didn't know how the farm would do without me.”

Brann sucked at his lower lip. It had stopped bleeding, but the taste of blood was still in his mouth.

“You know how I blather, lad. Not that it's a lie, you've done a man's work, more than my boys ever did at your age, and with a better heart for it. But a man blathers and sings and tells stories—and he can't be held accountable for everything he says.”

Kevin clung to his uncle's hand. “But you said you couldn't imagine a summer without me coming to help out. And he doesn't like having me around and you said you did.

“It's all decided,” Mr. Connell said.

“But what if I don't want to?” Kevin demanded desperately.

“What?” Anger turned Mr. Connell's face red.

“I don't want to work for you. You never said I'd have to work for you. You never said I had to stop going to the farm.”

“That's enough,” Mrs. Connell spoke. Her eyes were not angry, just tired. “There'll be no more out of you.”

“Didn't I warn you, Thomas?” Uncle Andrew asked. Then he laughed, easily, and looked up at Kevin's face. “It's not the end of the world, lad. Look at it this way, life has its ups and it has its downs. Right now, you're in what you might a call a down.” Kevin nodded agreement. “That's better now. What I say to myself, from the bottom of the pit, looking up, you might say, at the stars or at the sun, I tell myself: Lay low until life gets back to an up.”

“Does that mean I'll be able to come back next summer?” Kevin asked.

Even Brann knew that wasn't what the man meant. What the man meant was that there wasn't anything he was going to do for Kevin.

But Uncle Andrew burst out laughing, as if that was the funniest thing he'd heard. “What a lad,” he said. “What a lad.”

“Does it?” Kevin insisted.

“No, it doesn't, so set your mind at rest about that,” Kevin's father said.

“And do you know anyone can talk Thomas Connell out of anything he's made his mind up to?” Uncle Andrew asked his nephew, with an easy smile.

Brann saw Kevin curl back up into himself. Then he made one last try. “But you didn't ask me.” Big tears spilled out of his eyes. “You didn't even
ask
what I wanted to do.”

“What children want can't be counted,” Mrs. Connell said. “It's enough trouble keeping them fed and clothed.”

Kevin ran out of the room. Brann heard him pounding up the stairs. He didn't know what he was supposed to do, and he was busy trying to swallow past a lump in his throat. Whether the lump was sadness for Kevin or anger at Uncle Andrew and the Connells, Brann couldn't tell.

Mr. Connell stood up. “I could use a beer,” he said. “Andrew?”

“A cool beer would not come amiss.”

“Then we'll be back in a while,” Mr. Connell told his wife.

“I'll have supper waiting.” She watched them leave, then pushed her hands on the table top to stand up. “You, Brann,” she said. “There's peanut butter and bread. I'm going to fetch the children home, if you'd make up a plate of sandwiches. I don't know how long that boy will sulk in his room—the old people need their tray. They won't like it but pay them no mind.

Brann nodded. He watched her leave, watched the door swing closed behind her, watched her descend the steps with one hand on the railing.

“I'm hungry,” Suzanne said.

Brann made her a peanut butter sandwich and poured her a glass of milk. Then he made six more sandwiches, four on a plate for Kevin's grandparents, two for Kevin. He put three glasses of milk on the tray. He turned on the light, put the heel of the loaf back into the breadbox, capped the peanut butter and lay the spreading knife in the sink. He looked at Suzanne. She stuck out her tongue at him.

“When you finish, wash and dry our dishes and go to bed,” he told her. She looked like she wanted to say no, but didn't dare. “Whether it's early or not,” Brann said, because he knew what she'd say
next. “Or you can go out—and get yourself killed or something. I don't really care a bit.”

He heard what he had said. One day with these people and already he was changed by them. How did Kevin stand it?

Brann was stopped by a sudden cold thought: Kevin stood it because he wasn't like them; but Brann was enough like them for them to have an effect on him. He didn't want to be like them. He wanted to be like Kevin—not exactly like, of course—but not like them. He picked up the tray. “Leave the light on for when your parents get back. OK?” Suzanne didn't answer.

Brann carried the tray carefully up the two flights of stairs, watching the milk to keep down the sloshing. Before he went into Kevin's room, he took a plate and two glasses down the hall. Kevin's grandfather stood alone in the sitting room down the hall, looking out the window, his back straight. “I've brought you supper,” Brann said loudly.

“No need to shout. I can hear you,” the man answered, without turning around.

Brann took the tray to Kevin's door. It was closed. He knocked. “It's me—Brann.”

There was no answer. He balanced the tray on one hand and turned the knob.

Kevin was lying on his back on the bed. He didn't bother to look at Brann. Brann put the tray down at the foot of the bed and looked at the boy. His light, spiky hair and his expressionless face and his deep gray eyes—Brann saw them all. He had seen them before, too, on his father.

“Buck up,” Brann said, as his mother often said to him. “How bad can it be, after all?”

An unwilling half-smile moved Kevin's mouth. “Couldn't be much worse,” he answered. He was holding a scrunched-up piece of paper.

“Could too,” Brann said, still sounding like his mother. “Look, I made peanut butter sandwiches. You want one?”

Kevin sat up. He dropped the paper onto the floor. It was a picture of Uncle Andrew's farm. “Yeah,” he said. “I'm hungry. I wish I wasn't. I thought that what I had to do was stand up for what I wanted. I wish I hadn't—”

Brann sat gently on the bed facing him. “Never mind wishes,” he advised, biting into one of the sandwiches.

“You're braver than I'll ever be,” Kevin said. He began to take an interest in the conversation and to chew hungrily. “You kept your pants on. I didn't think he'd let you.”

“He had to,” Brann said, pleased himself now that he was remembering it.

“Why?”

“Fate,” Brann said. He changed the subject. “What did you mean your father is scared?”

“What's it matter? Anyway.”

“I can't figure it out,” Brann admitted. “It seems to me he's got everyone pretty scared of him.”

“Even Uncle Andrew,” Kevin agreed.

“Do you think,” Brann asked, “that he minded because you like your uncle better than him?”

The gray eyes looked at him, sad. “Naw. He doesn't think much of me, or of Uncle Andrew. He's not scared like that. He's scared that if he ever stops working, he'll lose the business. If there aren't any jobs. Before we came here, and when he was out of work—and he's scared that if he lets up for a second it'll all happen again. I guess I can understand that.”

“Do you really have to work for him?”

“What else can I do? If Uncle Andrew doesn't want me on the farm. Anyway.”

“You could refuse. You could run away.”

“Can't,” Kevin said. “Besides, my mother's going to have that baby and I'll have to be in charge here. There isn't anything to do. It's just as bad for them as for me. But it doesn't seem right, because we were so glad to move here. At first. But things change and people change to go with the things. I don't know. But there isn't anything I can do. Even if there was—but they need me here and I have to be where I'm needed. Even if I'm no good at it.”

Brann knew Kevin was right, but he couldn't accept that. Kevin could, he realized. Kevin could accept losing his summer at the farm and being hammered on and taking care of the little kids and being whipped that way; and he didn't even get angry. It was giving up, in a way, but it was something more too. Brann had a glimpse, just a vague idea, of the kind of courage Kevin had. Courage for facing the truth, inside himself.

Brann didn't know if he had that kind of courage. In fact, he was pretty sure he didn't, but he
hoped he could learn it. And add it to the kind of courage he did have.

“Listen,” Brann said, moving the tray down onto the floor, “I have an idea. You'll think I'm crazy, but listen.” Kevin lay back and folded his arms behind his head, his face blank. “I have an idea that this baby isn't going to be a boy at all. It's going to be a girl, and you're going to like her, and she's going to like you, and you're going to be friends, all of your lives.”

Kevin closed his eyes and shook his head slowly, from side to side. “You are crazy.”

“Maybe,” Brann allowed, “maybe. But I'll tell you what. Don't say anything, don't even think anything, but if it's a girl and they name her Rebecca—then I'm right.”

“Anything you say,” Kevin said, his voice sleepy.

“You'll remember?”

“I'll remember everything about today. Except for meeting you, it's been the worst day of my whole life.”

“If I was you I'd forget today,” Brann advised.

Kevin lay silent for a long time. “I guess so,” he finally said. “What about you? Nothing's changed
for you, has it? Whatever was wrong before, when you came in last night, is still wrong. Do you want me to help? Do you want to tell me? I don't know what I could do, but there might be something.”

Brann looked at Kevin's face, the eyes closed, the mouth half open. “Tell you what—if I'm still here tomorrow, then I will. OK?”