My Cross to Bear Read Online Free Page A

to it, he would grab it; even though he only had a few little teeth coming in, he would bite down to the bone. I still have a few little scars on my hands from him. From that time on, little by little, he was toughening me up.
    My brother had a great sense of timing, and he used to pull shit on me all the time. We were sitting down at the table one night, and my mother was already a little bit pissed at me. I think I had gotten some bad grades, and she was on my ass about it. I was remaining silent, hoping that if I didn’t think about it, it would go away.
    So we’re all eating in silence, and we’re sitting on these hard, flat chairs. My brother was wearing a bathing suit, and it was still a little bit wet. All of a sudden, he farted like a fucking moose, and that wet bathing suit on that hard chair amplified it even more.
    The thing is, Duane was able to keep a straight face, and he went, “Gregory—at the table?”
    My mother gave me one look and said, “Get up from the table and go to your room.”
    All I could get out was “But, but …” as I tried to tell her that his butt did it, but my mother was like, “Shut up.”
    So I go without supper because he farted! It’s a wonder that I didn’t get the belt as well. He had the devil in him, boy.
    Duane actually hung me one time. My brother had light skin—people with red hair should not get out in the sun. Every time he got a sunburn, he’d get big bubble blisters. One day when we were real young, he had one of those blisters on his shoulder, and he had his shirt off. He didn’t want it to pop, because the skin underneath was raw. We were climbing a tree, and I put my foot down on what I thought was a limb, but it was his shoulder. That blister popped, and he was screaming. All I thought was “Oh shit”—I knew he was going to whip my ass.
    He went in the house for a minute, and then he came back outside. He had this long rope, and he could tie a knot, man—Duane loved rope. He made a perfect hangman’s noose, and he told me, “Try this on, man.” He put it around my neck, and it was real rough rope, real stiff. He tied the other end around a limb of the tree that he could reach, and he said, “I’ll be right back.”
    He went inside the house, and then came out and said, “Bro, they made some cookies. C’mon inside!” I come running after him, and I got to the end of that rope and—bam!—it jerked me right off the ground and tightened around my neck. My mother came out, and I’m choking, because I can’t get a breath of air. She got it off my neck, and she wore his ass out for that. “What do you mean by hanging your little brother? Where did you learn to tie a knot like that? What is wrong with you?”
    Duane was only a year older than me, but in his mind it might as well have been twenty years. He was a world traveler compared to me, even at age five. I was a bigger kid than he was, and when we got older, I was a bigger man than he was. His chest had no definition at all, and had one little patch of hair on it, while I had a whole chest full. He hated that. Later on in life, when everybody found out that the girls loved hair on the chest—like Sean Connery as James Bond—he was not happy with me.
    But the thing was, I respected him and I loved him, and he didn’t have to beat me to get that. He was my hero, even while he was beating me. That sounds a little sick, but I knew that he wouldn’t let nobody else mess with me. Most of the time, he’d only give me one lick, just to let me know who was boss. I’m not holding a whole lot of scars from it, just a few—some inside, and some outside.
    I suppose it could have gone the other way, and I could have believed that he didn’t love me or care for me, and we could have grown up just hating each other’s ass. Who knows, though, because the guitar might have solved that.
    W E MOVED TO D AYTONA B EACH , F LORIDA, IN 1959, RIGHT SMACK dab in the middle of the fifth grade. My mother loved