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Cry Not the Labor

Robert Brabham

    It all depends on your definition of love and whether or not you believe that no good deed goes unpunished. Depends on what you think good is too. Maybe it changes over time. Back when I used to pray I asked God not to make me stop crying, but to give me more tears. That was before I knew what suffering really was.
    My kid brother was only twenty-two when he shot himself over that goddamned slut of a wife of his. He had got her pregnant and he made her marry him. She didn’t seem to care one way or the other. She cheated on him before during and after and I don’t like to wonder whether or not my niece is my niece. Doesn’t matter. I’ll always love her. Her name is Carrie and when she was two, she lost her daddy, my brother, by his own hands. He had been out of work and having no luck finding a job and that slut of his was hot-assing around every night she could. She banged a bastard in her car while she was parked outside the house. I think he knew she was out there. It haunts me to think of what he looked like, half-dead already and unable to defend himself. I didn’t know how bad he was cause I drank a lot. I sobered up fast when a buddy told me what happened and when I saw what was left of him. Christ, he had used a shotgun.
    The idea of that trash raising my niece was more than I could take and if I had failed to save my brother, I was going to save his daughter. My beautiful niece. So help me.
    Most people know me by my past which I will forever have to live with unless I move to a different world, but I dug my pit and I’ll sit in it. Anyway, I’ve been known to be a persuasive man when I’m motivated. I sold my Trans-Am and I handed that pile of cash money to that no good whore and told her she was going to sign over all parental rights to me. Looking back on it, I guess she figured she won the lottery cause she didn’t give too much of a damn about her daughter, at least not the work of raising her. She got a funny look when I told her she had to move out of state. It was almost a deal breaker for her, but like I said, I’m a persuasive man when I’m motivated. Caught her around town one time and when I found out where she was staying I paid a visit. She never came back.
    That’s how I wound up raising my niece like my daughter. I can’t say she never wanted for nothing cause I still haven’t found my oil well. But she never went hungry and she got almost every type of clothing she wanted, like when she was a teen and it was so important to her; well, hell, that starts before they’re ten. She never went hungry and I never let her know my finances so she never knew the burden of struggling to keep alive. Along the way I learned how to talk. And I think she and I had some good conversations, the two of us, sitting out under the stars at night. She trusted me and she used to tell me what she thought about, what she dreamed about. I never thought I would be able to do that. Quitting booze helped. So did flouting my daddy’s parenting: Beat ‘em straight. I learned the lesson of how to learn from a child. People are so worried about making their kids do the right things, they sometimes forget how to let their children teach them how to be adults. It’s one of the most important lessons I ever learned. You can’t imagine something like that when you spend your life alone and drunk and chasing the occasional piece of tail.
    Carrie did real good in school cause she was so smart, even more clever than her old man. I never hid the truth about him, the good or the bad, from her. She can tell when I lie. Even when she was a little kid. Anyway, to be the daughter of a working man, she did all right. Could’ve been worse, which is what people say when they fear their incompetence.
    When she was a senior she told me she had won a full academic scholarship and I don’t think I ever bawled like I did that day. It was pride in my Carrie, but it was the relief of knowing she would get to have a college education which no one in our family had ever done. I prayed and worried over it for years; how I was going to pay for it. A working man never gets a break if he’s honest. I was always an honest mechanic which means I always directed the customers back to my boss man’s shop when they suggested I take a little work on the side, a break job or such, that someone didn’t want to pay the shop for. Many a man got the ax trying to score on the side. I never had to worry about it cause I never done it. That’s how you keep a job.
    I didn’t just love my niece, I respected her. I would about bawl with pride when she said, I love you, daddy. Everyone knew I was her uncle, but she insisted on calling me daddy. You wouldn’t think that little word could break a man up so much. She is the finest person I have ever known and I ache when I think she’s in need of something. It’s a pain I never thought I would feel, never felt it for myself. That’s why I cried so when she got that scholarship.
    She made all A’s the first semester, the president’s list. I wasn’t surprised, she’s as sharp as they come and she works hard to boot. The next semester she got pregnant. First thing that jumped through my mind, I hate to say, was that slut mother of hers, but that wasn’t the same thing. Not the same at all.
    There ain’t none of us perfect and I was as much to blame as anything. She wasn’t used to the freedom and I kept the boys off her. Too much. I should have let her date more. I caught her kissing a boy in his car after a date one night and I visited the lad the next day. Snatched up his nut sack in one hand and promised him he wasn’t going to see it again if he ever disrespected my girl. The little punk didn’t just quit dating her, he left town. Hindsight is the best teacher, damn us. Thought I was doing the right thing.
    I told Carrie that she didn’t have to worry about nothing and she told me she was keeping the child. I told her I would help her with anything she needed as long as she kept going to college. Seemed like we had it figured out. I talked to the old lady down the street from me, who’s raised near every adult in our neighborhood, got a real gift for patience, and set up some baby-sitting. I took out a little savings and started buying some second hand baby stuff, clothes and such.
    I promised my girl I would take care of her and her child. Those are the things you say when you’re sober and when you love.
    She had a baby boy and named him Robert after her daddy and I cried like an old woman. We called him Robbie and our journey changed forever.
    The boy never slept. He almost never ate. But he did cry. You expect that with a baby. But this one never stopped. Especially at night. There was no consoling him and it wasn’t food he wanted or changing, or petting or anything we could ever figure out. He just bawled all the time, all night long. Carrie never slept, or me for that matter, and then she would have to go to her classes an hour away at the college. I would leave Robbie with the old lady, Mrs. Faulks. When he was with her he ate once and slept most of the day. In the afternoon he would perk up and I would get home and he would play maybe an hour with those long skinny arms of his and he would commence to fussing about the time his momma got home. Then crying. All the time crying. I never could figure out how he could fuss so hard from eating so little.
    He was a year old and he could barely crawl. You could tell his face wasn’t shaped like other kids and you can deny it really well until you see pictures of him. It’s harder that way. We finally had one of those honest talks late one night when Robbie decided to sleep for about an hour. She told me she was going to have to quit school and I got mad and I shouted at her. I wasn’t mad at her and I tried to tell myself I wasn’t mad at the child. I was mad at the idea of her quitting college. I told her if she stopped now she might never go back. I told her I might have to see if she could sleep elsewhere so she could get rest, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said we’d make it. I love her and I said yes, we would make it.
    The doctor wanted to do genetic testing so he could make a diagnosis and I asked him if that would change anything. He started to get uppity with me but my eyes must have shined the way they do when I’m mad. He settled down and said it would help him determine how to properly treat him. I said he probably had a good idea anyway and he finally admitted it. My niece was devastated. We had tried believing he was just a little behind, just some delays in his milestones they talked about, but it was finally shoved in our faces. Robbie was never going to be like other kids and that’s that. I hugged my girl and said it didn’t make any difference and she cried. She said she couldn’t love him any less. It was true.
    She finished her first year of college with a 3.1 average. She never made her second year. I begged her not to stop, but Robbie was getting sick all the time and he was getting to be too much for Mrs. Faulks. She looked at me hard one day and said she had a friend who had a child like that one. She thought Robbie was the same. I told her he was just fine and I wanted to throttle her, but she was completely right and it didn’t make any difference. She said she couldn’t keep him anymore and my daughter stayed with him all day.
    I took all the extra work I could get, but I still had to try to get home as soon as I could to help her. Neither one of us slept from the crying. That went on for six years.
    Carrie went from being a pleasantly shaped young woman to stringy. Her face was pulled tight and there was a darkness in her eyes she couldn’t hide no matter how much she patted it with make-up. She was sick all the time, always sniffing, like Robbie. That girl never complained, not once, not one damn time. She never failed take care of him. I woke up one night from the silence(and that’s a special kind of hell when you can’t sleep from the silence)and I found her face down on the floor with her hand on her son’s back, sleeping soundly in her bed. I don’t know how they wound up like that, but my heart broke that night. She was going to die before she quit taking care of that boy.
    One day the boy’s father showed up for a look-see. I guess he was feeling big-hearted. He asked what was wrong with the boy and I hit him hard enough to drop him cold and break his jaw in three places. Carrie said he was going to sue but he didn’t. He never came back though.
    I had to run Carrie to the emergency room one night cause she got pneumonia. I’ll be all right, daddy she kept saying. It was the last time she called me daddy. If she hadn’t passed out she would have fought me the whole way. They said it was in both lungs and they cut into her back and shoved a tube in her lung and strawberry cream came out.
    My boss screamed at me to come to work and I told him I had to stay with Robbie with his mother in the hospital. I called Mrs. Faulks but she had gotten too frail and she had some dementia, old-timer’s they call it. I got to where I started throwing things around the house and breaking them and got Robbie scared and he started crying.
    I took the first two shots, I said, so I could calm down and not make so much noise, settle the nerves, get under control, calm it. I drank a fifth in an hour and started a new bottle and wondered when I had bought them. I never let myself remember.
    I always figured if there was a caring God, he would have given me some help that night. I don’t presume to know his will and I no longer care. I had passed out in my bed, but the boy woke me crying. It felt like cold water was poured all over me and someone had stuck a live cable to it. My heart was thumping so hard it ought to have burst. Robbie stumbled into my room, his face all wet with tears; I could see him in the moonlight coming in the window. He crawled up on the bed and started hitting me with his head. I prayed for help and I didn’t get any. I haven’t prayed since.
    One of the boy’s favorite things was riding in my truck. It’s an old Ford I keep running for no other reason than so far I can keep her going and she’s paid for. It was well after midnight and I told that boy, why don’t he take a ride with me, and he made all those happy noises. He could say some words which only his mother and I understand. Mostly he makes noises.
    I finished the other fifth before I got in the truck with him. He sat up in the cab with me, no child’s seat and that’s why I could only drive him around the yard and the field next to us. No back seat to strap in a child’s seat. I took off down the road with him.
    My drunken logic was telling me it was okay to be running down the road with him, cause I was just trying to get him to settle down to get to sleep. Lots of folks ran their kids around without strapping them in the safety seats. It seemed like it would be okay, like no one would wonder how I could be so stupid. That’s drunk thinking.
    And there’s another kind of thinking. The boy loved any kind of door handle he can find and he’ll work it til he opens it. I saw him with his hands on the door handle, kind of yanking on it and it was tough for anyone to open, cause it was an old truck and the door was heavy, and we were running down the highway about fifty miles an hour.
    Here’s the answer, I thought. I was trying to calm him to get to sleep and he opened the door before I could stop him. It was just an accident I forgot to lock the door when I let him in; there’s no electric door locks on the old truck, just a...just a tragedy. There he was, pulling on the door handle and I couldn’t breathe. I just sat there. I was turning the wheel on the truck to keep it in the road and staring at that boy pulling on the handle. I could see it jerking open suddenly, could see his thin little body falling out. I wondered if I jerked the wheel a little to the left it might help him pull it open. He started crying in frustration cause he couldn’t open the door and I felt my mind slip away like I was watching it from above and this goddamned thing behind the wheel was just watching. I saw my hand reaching out and trembling, like it was going to reach across the cab and help him open the door.
    All at once I started screaming and I jerked my hands back and I done it so hard I turned the wheel too far and mishandled the truck off the road. I hit the brakes hard enough for the boy to whip forward and I heard him hit his head on that metal dash.
    The pictures kind of stopped and started and staggered from there. I was out on the road and it seemed so cold and hard and I got Robbie out the front seat. The door opened very easy. I pulled him out and let him squall in my face, his mouth like a little cave of terror, blood running down his face. I was yelling God God God and I stumbled down the highway with the boy clutched against me. This pain was hitching up and tearing itself out of my mouth as I ran along the road that was my rock bottom. I was screaming something, some kind of damned thing, like speaking in tongues, something like a soul breaking free. My face was all wet with tears and I remember feeling every muscle trembling so bad, but I kept that squalling boy pushed against me and both arms around his warm, thin body. He stopped crying pretty quick, but I kept on screaming as I ran down the road. Ran and ran. It was the longest trip of my life and I didn’t think it would ever stop.
    Robbie was taken from me and carried to the hospital and I was taken to the sheriff’s office. They got Robbie a room down the hall from his mother. I was charged with driving under the influence. Later they charged me with child endangerment, but all that was dropped in favor of me losing my license and having probation for the DWI. It was the same sheriff from years ago when I was a young man with those little eyes that said, What you been doin now? Didn’t yer daddy beat you hard enough?
    I always regretted not getting jail time. I always figured I deserved it. And I did, but not for what they thought I done. What I had wished.
    That was two years ago and I’m off probation. Carrie called and said she wanted to see me. I asked her if she might want to meet at that little diner where I would take her sometimes for Sunday breakfast when she was a girl, but she said no. She said she would meet me at the truck stop by the interstate and get a burger or something and for the first time in two years I moved like I was alive.
    Carrie had taken Robbie and moved out of state to live with her aunt, the sister of the bitch that had her who turned out to be a pretty nice person. The aunt wrote me a letter one time saying everyone was doing okay and that Carrie was taking some college classes online. You couldn’t do that years ago.
    I walked to the truck stop and took a bench seat by the window and kept looking. I had no idea what she might be driving so I watched every vehicle.
    She knew that I had gone off driving with Robbie while I was drunk. She knew that he was put in protective custody while she recovered from pneumonia and she caught hell trying to get him back. Luckily they were able to blame everything on me. I thought I should tell her about watching him trying to open the door. Maybe it would drive her all the way away from me. Maybe that’s as it should be. She can always tell when I’m lying. I don’t deserve her forgiveness and would never beg for it. I cursed an innocent child for destroying his mother but it would only destroy her if she lost him. Another lost lesson of love.
    I still don’t know how long I watched him pulling on the door handle. In my dreams it goes on and on and he usually gets it open and I have to hear his body strike the pavement and...
    My niece never did show up, but I waited about five hours. I got a text on my little phone:
    I couldn’t do it yet daddy
    And so I left.

;
#


    I sit and drink more often than not. I don’t know of any reason why I shouldn’t. I think about my brother I couldn’t save and his daughter I couldn’t save and the boy I almost destroyed. I still work and I’m still honest about it. I saved that text. I look at it every night because of that one word, daddy. Two years since I heard it. It’s like a little seed of hope that’s planted deep in my heart. If the word can come back then maybe the feelings and maybe...
    Then I take a big drink and I let the pain wash all over. Oh Christ, it don’t pay to care.



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