GOLD IN THE ABRAHAM
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For years, I thought of this as my best story. The one I would direct people to if I wanted to show my best work so far.
It’s an angry story, and as I’ve mentioned in other story notes it became clear to me over time that all of my stories were about loss, love and deep anger.
I can link the anger I was feeling to a very specific time in my life, where I experienced something being stolen, and I channelled it into the protagonist’s desperate anger at losing his brother.
Writing these notes, more than a decade after writing the story, makes me feel the way I did when I was screaming through the forest with him, knowing why he chose to eat the ashes, and being right behind him as he started his tale of revenge.
I began turning this story into a novel, because I felt the character had more to say. I only got as far as the beginnings of a new chapter, but I enjoyed continuing the story even just a little.
You can read the abandoned chapter here
RJ
Before you read any further, you must agree to the following.
1) I will abandon my ambition.
2) I will not carry my brother.
3) I will follow, where others lead.
4) I will not show charity.
5) I will pass on my pain to my children.
☐ I agree to the terms and conditions.
Now read those again. Read them out loud. Write them down.
Congratulations. You’re a nobody.
Now panic.
I am the man who kills nobodies.
•••
Let me tell you how that works.
You’ll be in a queue, gripping your heavy basket with white knuckles. You’ll be leaving the aeroplane after arriving on holiday. You’ll be walking across the hot tarmac.
And you’ll be gone.
You’d probably be so engrossed in the free newspapers that your final thought would be about cheap flights to Tokyo. How embarrassing.
Imagine. 75 years of biting your fingernails, picking the shell out of your scrambled egg, changing the channel. An entire life of trimmed lawns, greenhouses and inside out rubber gloves.
•••
I grew up in Forthspring, Idaho. Back then we had a ranch by the River Abraham on a plot of land which stretched three miles south to the forest and across to the clay mines. We had warped pantry shelves which were always full, my mother always used to say, “As long as you’re workin’.”
With shelves of plates looking for all the world like the local bakery, looking back I have no idea how she kept it from going stale. Homemade treacle tart, sitting out for just long enough that the filling had a chance to soak into the crust. Cakes, biscuits, jam. Bags of sugar, bags of flour.
As long as we kept ourselves busy we were allowed to eat whatever we liked.
We chopped up the fallen trees into firewood for hours on end. We would have to use the axe with the worn down wooden handle which had a grain running along the sides in small ridges, giving us blisters the size of dimes. When we couldn’t hold the axe any more we fixed fences, fed the livestock and most afternoons my father and I would go hunting for dinner.
Sometimes he would even let me hold the rifle. I was young back then, and though I practised on the bird feeders in the yard when he wasn’t around, I didn’t find it easy. The pea-sized dents in the shutters and the embedded pellets in the bark of the oak tree were enough to show that. When I got older I was good enough to be able to hit something that was completely still, but as soon as it was a moving target I had as much hope of hitting it as I did of reaching puberty before Mary Elizabeth got home from Summer camp.
You’d better keep moving.
•••
On the first warm day of the summer my brother Danny and I were panning for gold in the Abraham. It was always the first thing we would do when the chores were done. Danny had this big metal pan which he’d scored marks into with his penknife. He said it was his secret to always finding more gold than me. We’d found our usual spot along the riverbank and already had flakes of colour in the big glass collecting jar.
So Danny, he turns to me and he says, “When I’m a grown up,” oh and by the way he’s standing knee-deep in the river, gold pan in hand when he says this, “I’m going to be rich.”
I don’t know if it was the smile in the corner of his mouth or the fact that he didn’t take his eyes off the rubble in his pan, but as I looked over from the shallow water, I believed him.
Danny was my older brother by a year. He was first to kill a deer, first to break a bone, and was the first person I could ever imagine moving away from Forthspring and making a life somewhere else. He was my hero. He was so confident for every moment I was timid and where I wobbled on the stones across the river, he leapt two to three at a time. He would fall in, of course, but being cold and wet-through was, according to Danny, “what being alive felt like.”
He sat by my bedside when I had glandular fever. He would cheer me up by reading telegrams from our father’s desk in funny voices. We laughed so much that day that it hurt more than my swollen tonsils.
When I stepped out of line, Danny corrected me. I feared disappointing him more than anybody else.
And then came the day I walked home from hunting with my father to see my brother’s body being carried out through the back door of the kitchen.
My brother Danny.
Later I’d find out about the Pollard brothers who had been working on the roof of the farmhouse. I’d hear how they found a large glass jar in the master bedroom of the house and how they tried to steal it. I’d be told how Danny had stood in their way.
I’d learn of my brother’s plans to leave Forthspring. How he’d been collecting in the river to leave something behind for my parents. So that they could finally retire. He’d filled that jar with every speck of gold dust he had found over the years we’d spent sifting through the still waters of the Abraham.
•••
You’ll be at home on a Saturday night flicking through the free ads.
You’ll be sending the waiter back with the wine.
You’ll be the deer in the woods and if you’re not moving, I’ll kill you.
After Danny’s funeral, my father and I went home. We didn’t have the energy to lift our voices above the rain hitting the windshield, so we sat in silence. My father held the steering wheel with wide arms, as though he was wrestling a bear. I held Danny’s ashes in the jar from my mother’s bedroom.
I held it tightly against my chest. The same jar I’d carried to the river and back so many times. The Abraham was so rich with gold back then it made it so much harder to carry home. But now it carried my brother and it was heavier still. Now it carried more gold than when it was full to the brim on my mother’s nightstand.
I had never felt more alone. Danny’s ashes were inches from my nose and I swear I could smell his breath. He was right there but he couldn’t answer me back. I felt like a nobody.
I reached into the jar and buried my hand in the warm grey dust. I ran my fingers through what felt like icing sugar mixed with sand and dirt. It surprised me how big some of the pieces were, but I figured, not everything burns.
There was something of him there. But nothing that felt real.
I knew that the ash sticking to my sweating palm was his body and bone, but it wasn’t my brother.
I needed him now. My mother hadn’t left her bed since that night and my father didn’t think I’d noticed the empty bottles of Kansas in his study.
When he drank, we would go down to the river.
I was making a mess of Danny’s ashes. My tears were making them stick together and my hand was completely covered in his useless, dead body. I wanted him alive. I wanted him close. I lifted my fist to my mouth and licked the back of my hand.
He felt closer.
I opened my hand and swallowed a fistful of his burnt skin and bone.
He felt closer.
I started frantically feeding myself the dry contents of the jar and I choked as I tried to give my brother a new lease of life. I scooped handful after handful into my mouth. I was chewing on tiny pieces of bone and crunching on broken teeth, all hidden amongst the dusty ash. I needed to empty that jar.
My mouth became too dry to swallow and I looked around for some water. There was a bottle next to my father but I knew that wouldn’t help.
I was struggling to breathe, fearing that my brother’s death would be the thing that killed me too. I wound down the window of the pickup, which was broken and only opened half way so I held the half empty jar between my legs and lifted myself out of my seat. That night I held my head as far out of the window as I could manage and opened my mouth to drink the rain. All the pieces of ash were washed from my face and I caught enough water to quench my thirst. We were driving through the Isaac Forest on the freeway which led to the turnoff for the ranch just a few miles down the road. I’ll never know how fast my father was driving but with the heavy rain beating down it felt like we were flying.
And then I screamed.
I shouted my brother’s name into the storm and into the forest.
I screamed until my voice gave in and I had to open my mouth wide to the rain again.
And then I screamed some more.
When my legs grew tired from holding me up I sat back down and closed the window. My father didn’t say a word.
For the rest of the journey I sat, staring out into the forest, finishing the ashes. Fistful at a time, until the jar was empty.
He would have been an ornament, and I rescued him.
•••
If you’re not out there in the world, sifting through the gravel to find the gold.
If you’re not shivering from the freezing river.
If you’re not driving through the forest at a hundred miles an hour.
Me and my brother Danny, we’ll kill you.
My mother never spoke to me again, after my father told her what I did. That big glass jar was thrown in the trash.
That night I sat in my bedroom and felt sick in my stomach. I could hear the wireless coming from the front room. There was a health programme on about the mentally ill and severely disabled, and it sounded like there was a debate going on about who has the right to choose when somebody else dies.
Since they can’t make a decision, somebody more capable has to.
Perhaps they’re in a coma, never to wake up.
Or awake, but unable to move.
I came to a conclusion that night. Death is best for everybody. For the one in pain, and for those who look on. Both helpless and powerless.
I started thinking about the Pollard brothers. Stealing somebody else’s gold instead of finding their own.
I thought about my father and his ambition for collecting empty bottles.
And so I started finding the nobodies. Those wasting the chance Danny will never have.
Those in a coma.
I went down to the pantry in the middle of the night and filled a bag with all the food I could find. I picked the big glass jar out of the trash and used some garden wire to tie it to my rucksack. I took a box of matches and some lighter fluid. I stole the key to the shed, slung my father’s rifle over my arm and started the long walk to the freeway.
You’ll be doing as you’re told.
Happy in your rows of houses.
You’ll be subscribing. Stockpiling. Collecting. Upgrading.
You’ll be giving a speech about your rights when it happens.
I’ll be watching you play it safe.
Watching you fold on every hand.
I am the man who rescues the ornaments.
I am the man who kills nobodies.