Ties

cool at the same time. Life is hard for the young and the scared and the timid. And the old and the brave and the sure. Poised on the edge of potential disaster, I sighted certain calamity approaching, towering, silent, and carrying a burlap bag. My brother had never been particularly slow-witted or slowfooted , but that autumn afternoon I beat him easily in the race of life—my life and his life. My strategy for times of clear and present danger is infallible: Run faster. I did. And I didn't look back. But I am looking back now, here, with this man who is my brother. And what I see is this: that kindness and betrayal need not be large to be powerful , only unexpected. The seat of my chair had been repaired the next day. A man, towering and silent, had stopped on his way home from a long work-day and taken bark, soaked and stripped, from his burlap bag and had made the seat of my chair better than new. He doesn't know that he became my hero that day, and that I walked around for weeks and weeks with a pillow in a pillow case over my shoulder. He is my brother, my people, and I am obliged to forgive him. But I am not obliged to forget, lest my lessons learned in fear and solitude, or joy and good company count for nothing. My brother doesn't know this either, but the one, small betrayal of my trust is the other reason I didn't go back to first base the day he hit the ball high and long and hard. f TIES Biding time in the log cabin's top bunk, I stir to whinging sound, intimate listening to their black nearby bodies as they caw my tongue across the woods, one only half-a-wing away. I hear them over fence rails, closer, calling me: for a moment tongue and ear embrace dew-mist places, cochlea of the pine-needled cove Jenny C. Chenault I U 61 ...