After Eli

I
t’s been over a year since I last heard from Isabelle.

She sent me a postcard a couple months after she left, the way people do when they’re pretending they’re going to stay in touch, and I remember taking it out of our beat-up mailbox at the end of the road, and how the sight of her swoopy handwriting in red fountain pen made my heart beat faster for a minute. Isabelle always writes in red so that all her days will be red-letter days, and she uses a fountain pen because it’s elegant.

Elegant
was always one of Isabelle’s words.

Today the mail was a couple of bills and a schoolteacher magazine for my mom and a flyer for a sale on fence posts at Tractor Supply, which looked like a good deal if you happened to want fence posts. Nothing from Isabelle.

I still have that postcard though. It has a big full moon on the front, the picture side, with a bunch of little animals dancing in front of it. A couple of rabbits and a dog and a cat and a cow. On the back she wrote, “Looks like us, doesn’t it? Remember the Moon Elves!” with a couple of kisses that didn’t mean anything and then her name.

Isabelle.

I remember the Moon Elves.

I remember everything about the summer Isabelle was here.

M
y name wasn’t always Daniel (E.) Anderson. My real middle name, the one on the birth certificate in the fireproof box in the back of my mom’s closet, is James. I added the (E.) after my brother, Eli, died.

There’s this tribe in Paraguay that whenever somebody dies, everybody changes their name so that the dead person’s ghost can’t come back and find them. But I put Eli’s name in mine as a way of keeping him around. Not that I would ever tell anybody that now, because it sounds dumb. It sounds like the sort of thing girls do when they run around wearing their boyfriends’ sweaters. But I was only a kid then and I didn’t know crap.

I like to think that now that I’m older, I understand why Eli did what he did, which ended up getting him killed. Though I guess I’ll never really know, not all the way. Walter says that human motivations are complicated, and that when it comes right down to it, nobody knows all the reasons we do the things we do. Most of the time we don’t even know ourselves. But I didn’t know Walter then, and what I mostly felt about Eli, way deep down, was mad as hell. Dying was his own damn fault is what I thought, and now look at the life he’d stuck me with.

I used to think Eli was like George Mallory, the mountain climber guy. I’ve seen these old pictures of Mallory on the Internet, and in a couple he even looks a little bit like Eli. Mallory got killed in 1924 climbing Mount Everest, which he set out to do
because it was there.
That’s what he actually said when people asked him why he wanted to climb the world’s tallest mountain. Walter, who reads everything, once told me that “because it’s there” are probably the three most famous words in the history of mountain climbing, which indicates to me that mountain-climbing history could sure use some better words.

Anyway, that was the end of Mallory. His freeze-dried body was found on Everest’s north face in 1999 with a broken leg and a hole in the skull. Nobody knows if he died while he was still going up or while he was on the way back down, so he may never have made it to the top of the world’s highest mountain at all. Which would really suck.

But face it,
because it’s there
is a dumb reason for getting killed. I wonder how Mallory’s wife and kids felt about him batting off to the Himalayas to climb some stupid mountain and leaving them on their own. When he left for India or Nepal or wherever, his oldest daughter, Clare, was only nine. That’s younger than I was when Eli died.

Eli got killed in Iraq on April 16, 2004. The truck he was in ran over an Improvised Explosive Device, which is one of those bombs they bury along the side of the road. They sent him home in a coffin with a flag.

I was eleven then, and I’d been waiting for Eli to come home so we could see
The Return of the King.
He’d taken me to see
The Fellowship of the Ring
and
The Two Towers,
but
The Return of the King
wasn’t being released until after his tour of duty in Iraq started. So we had a pact that we’d wait until we could see it together, even though by then it wouldn’t be in the theaters anymore and we’d have to watch it at home on DVD.

All through the funeral and everything, I kept thinking how Eli was looking forward to that movie and how now he’d never see how it all came out in the end. Eli really liked those movies.

Except for the elves. He thought the elves were dorks.

Practically the whole town came to Eli’s funeral. Almost everybody from his old high-school class was there, and most of their parents, and all the teachers, and Mr. Bingham, the principal. Chuck Bowers, the football coach, was there, and all the guys on the Catamounts football team that Eli used to be captain of his senior year, dressed up in navy-blue Sunday suits that looked too tight around the collar. Even without their shoulder pads, they were way too big for the funeral parlor’s little folding metal chairs.

Mr. Corrigan closed the hardware store for the afternoon, and he and all his employees came, because Eli used to work there part-time in the summers. And Bev and her husband, Roy, came, who own Bev’s Caf, the restaurant in town, where Eli’s picture is up on the wall. And then there were all the neighbors and a lot of relatives and Eli’s college buddies, and his girlfriend, Rachel Crowley, who cried so hard that you could hear her above the organist playing “Stairway to Heaven.”

What I remember about that funeral is how my aunt Wendy made me wear a tie. Aunt Wendy was pretty much in charge at Eli’s funeral because my mom was stuffed full of sedatives and my dad was wandering around like a zombie. The slow, dumb kind of zombie, not the fast kind with the teeth. He was in shock, is what people said.

“I don’t want to wear a tie,” I said.

“Stand still, Daniel,” Aunt Wendy said, making a lunge for my throat.

Aunt Wendy works for the U.S. Post Office. She is the size that women’s clothing stores call “queenly,” and Eli used to say that Aunt Wendy in her regulation blue Bermuda shorts was about as scary a sight as he’d ever seen, even counting the part in
Alien
where the monster jumps out of the guy’s chest.

“I won’t,” I said.

I kept thinking how Eli would have teased me about wearing a tie, poking me in the ribs and saying who did I think I was, Donald Trump? But Eli wasn’t there. All that was left of him was in a six-foot box. I didn’t want to think about what was in that box.

“Eddie, please,” Aunt Wendy called, holding up the tie and waggling it in the air. “Just give me a minute over here. I can’t do a thing with him.”

Eddie is my dad, but only Aunt Wendy calls him that.

“Christ,” my dad said.

He jerked the tie around my neck and tied it with a twist that reminded me how he and my aunt Wendy and uncle Al had been raised on a farm in Ohio, where they used to kill their own chickens.

“Don’t make things harder for your mother than they already are,” my dad said.

Though it seemed to me my mom was pretty much okay, being next to unconscious.

“Go sit down and behave yourself,” my dad said, giving me a little shove.

Right then I wished my dad had been the one to run over a bomb.

Lots of people talked at Eli’s funeral. Mr. Bingham, the principal, called him “the best and the brightest,” and Coach Bowers said that they sure broke the mold when they made Eli. Pastor Jay, the minister from the Methodist church where Eli and I went to Sunday school, talked about how the Lord works in mysterious ways, and Miss Myrna Walker, who was Eli’s favorite teacher back in high school, said a poem.

“Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.”

Her voice cracked up a little when she came to that last line, and all of a sudden, even though I’ve always thought that poetry was pretty much crap, my eyes stung and my throat tightened up so that it hurt under that stupid tie.