The City of Lovely Brothers (11 page)

"I s'pose you two are glad you'll finally be getting bedrooms of your own," Calvin said cheerfully.

Caleb did not respond. He looked uncomfortable

and let his gaze wander about the room.

"I dunno what Caleb's thinking," Caliban said, "but 13as for me, I wanna go on sharing sleeping quarters with 'im if he don't mind. Now that the family's split up like this, right down the middle, me and Caleb in different rooms'd feel like another split-up, like we broke into little pieces.

Wouldn't mind taking over Calhoun and Julia's old room, though. It's bigger."

With its five bedrooms, one of them almost the size of Calvin and Darcie's front room, there was even more space in the Johnson house for Calhoun's family to spread out. The boys were ecstatic. They would each have their own room, and they had a whole house to horse around in without their girl cousins getting in the way. Julia thought the place felt lonely. Calhoun felt relieved that he no longer would have to see or deal with Calvin. When Julia spoke to him about the family getting together on Sundays, Calhoun swore he would not set foot in Calvin's church while he had breath in his body.

"Our kids go to school there."

"I don't mind its being a schoolhouse. I don't like its being a church."

"Then I'll go with the boys and you can stay home or worship in town. I owe it to Darcie. We're both owing to her. Please, Calhoun. If you won't do it for her, then do it for me."

Calhoun went to Calvin's church, but he wouldn't let 13their families sit together. It was two more years before the men would agree to a family lunch Sundays after church for all four brothers, their wives, and the children.

The family fell apart after Calhoun moved to the Johnson house. Caleb said that if he and Caliban went on living at Calvin's it would seem they were siding with him against Calhoun.

"If you set out on your own, people will think you're taking sides against me," Calvin said when Caleb told him their plans.

"No, it will look like we're neutral. And I don't care what people think. I care about what Calhoun thinks."

"So, you wanna build a house."

"Yep, that's just what I was thinking."

"Just for yourself?"

"For me and Caliban."

"Calhoun won't think Caliban's turned against him if he stays here."

"Me and Caleb's sticking together," Caliban said.

"Whose share you gonna build on?"

"Caliban's. That way if I decide to get married, he'll have his house already built for 'im. He can't do much carpentry work."

"You thinking of getting married, Caleb?"

"Not yet, but I probably will someday. Caliban, 13too."

"I ain't gonna marry," Caliban said. "My leg gets a little worse every year, and I don't wanna be no burden to some woman."

"I think you'd make any woman a wonderful

husband," Darcie said.

"A wonderful husband who can't support her and who she'd hafta take care of. No, I ain't getting married.

Made up my mind about that long ago."

* * * *

"I don't think Caleb'll ever get married," Calvin told Darcie later. "He has too much fun being single."

"But Caliban… I mean, don't a man need to have sex?"

"He don't need to get married to have it. Look at Caleb. Or Calhoun, for that matter. He had to get married because he
was
having it. Besides, I ain't all that sure Caliban can give a woman what she needs."

"
I
am. I seen when he was only thirteen, when he had the accident. Yours ain't no bigger."

"It's big enough."

"I ain't complaining. I'm just saying what Caliban's got is as good as any man's. You think it shriveled up since 13then? I bet it's grown."

"It ain't, if you're that curious to know, but it ain't shrunk none neither."

"How'd you know that?"

"Caleb told me."

"The things you men talk about!"

"Anyways, I wasn't talking about 'is… I was talking about 'is hip. Is it limber enough for 'im to move it right?

…hard and fast and long enough? Won't it start hurting and make 'im hafta stop?"

"Him and his wife will figure something out, lover-boy. Don't I sit on you and ride it sometimes?"

Calvin was sulking; she had been hard on him. So she winked and said, "Wanna do it now?"

* * * *

Having told his brother everything he knew short of a hands-on demonstration, Caleb considered Caliban's pre-experience sexual education complete. They still talked about sex in their bedroom at night, because Caleb liked talking about it. On Caliban's sixteenth birthday, Caleb had told him it was time for him to have his first woman and said he would help him find a whore. Caliban refused. He said he wanted to do it on his own. A few months later, 14Caleb asked if he had had sex yet.

"Yeah, I done it."

"You gonna tell me about 'er?"

"Not her, them. And no, I won't. You know what it's like, and I remember you told me all men feel it the same.

You expecting a blow by blow description, like I give you that time about beating my meat?"

"Nah, just wanted to know if you was doing it."

"Don't worry about me. I have a good time."

Caleb had asked because he had no idea when

Caliban could have been with women, if he really had been.

On the other hand, his brother was not playing with himself as often as before. He heard him at it maybe once every three or four months, so he figured the kid must have found an outlet. It was none of his business, he knew that, but if Caliban refused to tell him about it, how could they talk about sex? All men liked talking about sex, didn't they? But when he and Caliban talked sex, it was different. It wasn't like bragging about it to other guys. It was special, a kind of bonding, and it made him feel close to his kid brother.

* * * *

Caliban's quarter was on the far side of the ranch from the Johnson house. Caleb built their house there the 14following summer with the help of half a dozen ranch hands, using plans Caliban had drawn up. It was a small house, smaller than any Calvin had built for his married workers, but it had two bedrooms, one for each of them, because, as Caleb put it, "A house ain't a house if it got only one bedroom."

It was unlike any of the single-story houses they used to build on the frontier in the mid-1890s. The floor was only six inches off the ground, and it had no porch.

You took one step up through the front door and directly into the main room, a combination sitting room, dining room and kitchen, which stretched from one side of the house to the other and occupied the entire front half. The open kitchen area was recessed at the back, wedged between the two bedrooms. It contained a pot-bellied stove, a stone sink with a pump, in addition to the outdoor one in what became the front yard when they put up a fence, and a few cupboards and shelves. The ceiling over the bedrooms and kitchen area was lower, and formed an open loft accessible only from the main room, which Caliban could reach if the ladder was placed at not too steep an angle.

There was a window in each bedroom and another near the front door. The bedrooms extended to the back of the house, farther than the kitchen. There were no closets, only pegs to hang their clothes. What one would have taken for 14their closet doors led to the section behind the kitchen, a kind of indoor woodshed, cold pantry and coal bin, which they could also enter —and most often did— from behind the house. They had a shallow storm cellar under the rear of the house, with entrances outside and through a trap door in one of the bedrooms.

For outbuildings, they had a carriage house for the wagon and the sled, with two stalls for the horses and a hayloft above it, another hayshed, and a tool and work shed, all well behind the house on the south side, uphill from the privy. The carriage house was nearly as big as the one they lived in. They also had chicken coops built right up against the house on the south side of the front room, so they were not right under Caliban's window. The following summer Caleb built a free-standing outdoor shower, with a plank floor and a chain you pulled to release a spray of water from a barrel fixed into a hoop on a frame above you.

To fill it, you had to get the water from the pump in front and climb a ladder, which Caliban couldn't do, so it was seldom used.

No improvements were ever made to the house,

except after Nick came they enclosed the yard, but not the outbuildings, in a high plank fence they called the stockade.

They said barbed wire was no good for keeping varmints away from the chickens, but the stockade proved no better. It did, however, provide an excellent windbreak that protected the house from the iciest blasts and kept the yard clear of deep drifts in winter. They had to pump all their water by hand. However, they did have a cistern in back to collect rainwater.

Over the years they would put on two new coats of paint, but otherwise the house was exactly the same when Caliban left twenty-eight years later as it had been the day he and Caleb moved in. After he left, it was abandoned and fell apart. The stockade and outbuildings were taken down and the planks used to build a cattle barn for Mr. Troilus Pardoner, the man who eventually came to own the land.

The house stood alone and exposed more than ten miles out on the range and crumbled away. The fresh paint peeled off, the pump rusted shut, the window panes broke, the fence fell over, the roof sagged and eventually caved in, bringing one of the walls with it. Of Caliban's house not a stick remains, but the barn built with the lumber from the outbuildings still stands, weather-beaten and decaying.

The house took less than a month to build, and they had sunk the well, but they had not yet built the privy and other outbuildings, and they needed furniture. Even if they had had furniture and all the rest, Caliban could not have lived there. He could not sit on a horse or walk the twelve miles back and forth every day to the stables in 14Caladelphia. It took most of the summer to build a dirt road so he could go by wagon, or horse-drawn sled when the snow was high in winter. They had planned to build a windmill pump like those at Calvin's and Calhoun's —and at Caleb's, too, when he got married and built his own house— but putting in a road was a more pressing priority, and for some reason they never got around to the windmill after they had moved in.

Jaggers liked the new house because he was

allowed inside it and got to run behind the wagon every day to and from the stables. He slept at the foot of Caliban's bed. Now that they had separate bedrooms, Caleb did not know whether his brother was masturbating a lot. They had grown accustomed to long chats before they fell asleep, so unless they had had a grueling workday, they generally sat in the main room talking late into the night before going to bed. No one came to drop in on them after they had showed everyone the house, and they went about inside causally, a lot of the time in their underwear, or naked on exceptionally hot days. They would even fetch water from the pump naked.

The house was so far from everything that one

summer day they took Jaggers for a naked stroll on the prairie wearing only their boots. Half a mile from the house, they saw two people on horseback come over the rise about three-quarters of a mile to the north. Caleb turned and high-tailed it back to the house with Jaggers at his heels, but the best Caliban could manage was a limping half-lope, his penis and ball-sack hanging free and swinging between his legs as he hobbled swayingly from side to side. Clay and Jared, Calhoun's fifteen-and fourteen-year-old sons, overtook their twenty-two- -year-old buck naked uncle before he had made it halfway back.

They circled round him, turned their horses back and reined them in, and sat in their saddles laughing.

"Whatsamatter?" Caliban asked, blushing to his hairline and feeling like an idiot. "Ain't you never seen a naked man before?"

"Plenty, we're in a house full of boys," Clay said.

"Just ain't never seen one loping across the prairie. Even the Indians used to cover up, Pa says."

"I thought you all got your own rooms. I can't remember ever seeing your pa or your Uncle Calvin naked. Now me and Caleb, we were in a room together from when I was five, and my brothers all slept in the same room until your grandpa died."

"Us three were all in the same room together sorta before we moved outta Uncle Calvin's place, and us and Zeke spend alot o' time at the swimming hole."

"Which means you go running around the prairie in the raw too."

"But we can hide our you-know-whats in the water if anyone comes by. What if our ma'd 'a come riding with us and seen you without a stitch on?"

If Julia had seen him, Caliban would probably have crawled into a hole and stayed there a week, but he made a show of nonchalance. "Your ma seen me when I was about your age, time I broke my hip."

"Ma ain't seen me since I was three," Jared said proudly.

"Did too," Clay said. "When we got the chicken pox. I was eight and you were six and a half."

Faced with such damning and irrefutable evidence, Jared countered, "She saw alot more o' you than she did o'

me on account o' where them pox was. She even put vinegar all over your wiener."

"It wasn't vinegar; it was something else."

"That don't matter. She put it on you, didn't she, and 14it burned something fierce. I remember how you used to holler."

"You also remember how I beat you up for giggling at me hollering? I can do it again."

Caleb trotted up with a pair of pants for Caliban.

"You teasing your uncle?" he asked the boys. "Damned if I can see anything on 'im to tease about. Go ahead and drop your pants if you think you got something to brag about. I sure as hell don't."

"I didn't mind the boys ribbing me, Caleb, but now you're really embarrassing me."

"If you ain't embarrassed showing off your goods to the world, I think I'll just hang on to these here pants and bring 'em back to the house."

"You may as well do just that. I can't get into 'em without taking off my boots, and for that I'd hafta sit on the ground and get my rear all dusty. Might hafta spend the rest of the day bending over the table so you can pull the nettles out of it."