Sunday morning in the tiny town where I was raised, no, make that reared, as my sister would immediately correct me. Although it has been 40 years since she taught English, and that for only two seasons at the local high school, she still considers it her calling. On a day long years ago we sat together at our parent's kitchen table, her brow furrowed with frustration, determined to teach me spelling by having me memorize Latin root words. She was in college at the time and I was worshipfully delighted to have her attention, even for such an onerous task. It was one of the more useless hours we ever spent. Bright and eager, but with the wiring for spelling missing from my brain, my blotched and scribbled handwriting was full of skipped words and reversed letters. To her eternal frustration I rarely misspelled large complicated words. She gave up in exasperation when her tutelage made no improvement and yet I usually surpassed her in grades and tests.
For my part, I not so secretly envied my sister's naturally curly black hair, such a contrast to my ordinary stick straight gold brown. Mother loved putting my sister's crowning glory into the big spirals she called “banana curls”. She would stand back and look admiringly at her creation and then it was my turn. I would approach with dread, knowing there would be a lot of pulling and angry hissing noises as she struggled to french braid my uncooperative locks into the less appetizingly named “pig tails”. When we both reached our full height my sister took pride in pointing out that I was only 5'6 and one half inches to her 5'7” and I fumed at this taunt regardless of the fact that our height made both of us taller than over half the boys in our class. She is still every inch my big sister on a rare visit to Beaver Dam and a morning walk along the quiet depressed streets of my hometown.
The coal companies came and went from this once clean comfortable farm village, leaving behind many unemployed immigrants, now too poor or too old to try to make a new start elsewhere. The flat sidewalks, poured fresh in my youth, are now puzzle pieces of cement shattered by tree roots that have lifted and tossed them in slow motion. The trees, exhausted from that effort, seem to wither and twist into unnatural shapes, a match for the odd scraggly foliage in overgrown yards. For me the houses have blank scarred faces, but for my sister they are mini history lessons. The shadows of occupants flit across my brain and for a second as she speaks and I almost remember a few of the people she mentions. Most of her sentences start with “You didn't know them but...” and then she narrates Greek tragedies in her best Spoon River anthology style. Her voice pitches down to a stage whisper to tell me about the child molester that once lived in this one. “He's in prison,” she assures me, “but we thought they might shock him out”. I have no idea what the term means, but I have heard her use it often enough that I have a mental picture of a man, hair standing on end, cheap suitcase in hand, walking out from the barbed wire and steel enclosure with no particular destination except to do evil.
I smile on the Q.T. at that image as we move on past his house to the next, her voice droning on about the child he hurt, a niece, how the family reacted, and all the people they are kin to by blood or marriage. At the same the time I am awkwardly trying to follow her lead on the direction we are headed. She somehow thinks I should know each turning she makes. When I remind her I am now unfamiliar with the small town streets and her routine, she reacts with disapproval. She recites the route for me again, right on Fourth street, left on Magnolia right on Second, left on Render, etc., like I will remember it next year if we happen this way again. I zone out at the useless information and we fall back into the well worn rut of our relationship. I grow quiet and seem to acquiesce but feel the familiar bile of defiance rising in my throat. Twenty five years ago I tried to change the old pattern, but that resulted in three years of unbearable silence between us. Perhaps her astonishment was sincere when I finally apologized and took back my old position, two steps behind her, holding my tongue as she finds new ways to remind me that I will always be third in the three horse race of siblings in our family.
We arrive back at the house, and finally seeing my destination, I make a straight line to her back door. She circumvents my path, adding a few hundred feet to our short walk.
“I always go this way.” she advises smugly.
I do not question her choice but I continue steadfast on my direction. Back inside the house her husband waits in the recliner where he spends most of his waking hours attached to an oxygen tank. My sister busies herself fixing his breakfast. When we sit down to eat my brother in law struggles to make conversation by asking me how far it is to Richmond, how the drive went, and what kind of gas milage I got. He is unaware that we had this same conversation last year, and the years before, not to mention last night. A glance around the room and their life fills me with incredible gratitude that I escaped this numbing sameness, this sad winding down of days. The pity in her voice and the guarded look in her eyes when she evaluates my choices make it evident she is equally grateful she stayed in her safe harbor.
Despite all the differences between us she is generous in spirit, and while I am sure she does not like me or respect me, she loves me as God loved the prodigal son. As a gesture of her good intentions she hands me the newspaper to read before she has even opened it. I again explain that I have no interest and leave it lying. A few minutes later she reads it aloud to me, some headlines, but mostly obituaries and incarcerations, spicing them with side notes about the principal characters and their relatives. Her husband listen attentively and then he asks, “Which way did you walk?” My sister answers him with the same litany of turns she has given me earlier. "Oh," he says, "the usual way then?" Their conversation is ritualistic, a memory of days long ago when they had actual information to exchange. In those days my parents were living next door to them instead of lying near my mother's ancestors in the the small Baptist Cemetery a few miles away. Then my Mom and sister took their walks together, with my sister right in step by Mother's side. I never took that walk with them, but I find myself wondering if in this, as in all things, my sister still follows my mother's path.
