The Half Brother Read Online Free

soldier,” I said. “Marines. Enlisted man.”
    He turned back. “Is that so.”
    “He died in Vietnam,” I said. “Before I was born.” It was the story my mother had always told me. I believed my father had been a man (a twenty-one-year-old high-school dropout, just barely a man) named Jimmie Garrett, USMC, PFC.
    Booker regarded me. A long second passed. “I am sorry to hear that.”
    I nodded. This time he let me turn away first.
    I REALIZED HOW TERRIFIED I was of teaching on the night before I was to begin. The next day, beams of adolescent attention trained on me, I was nearly flattened. At first I thought only about survival. But then a stubbornness I didn’t know I had kicked in. Somehow I didn’t undermine myself by thinking about all I wasn’t doing, how unextraordinary I was being; I just clung to a new persona I was makingup on the spot, a tweedy, knowledgeable, unflappable self. Pretending to be someone I wasn’t was, in itself, comfortable, or at least familiar.
    I’d heard that I should move around while I taught, and so I walked, I paced; I strolled to the window; I lifted mine eyes unto the hills. My classroom was on the second floor, facing west, away from the quad, with a sugar maple right outside the window, and beyond all was openness—rolling green dotted with neat buildings of gray stone and white clapboard, a little farm of learning.
    Sometimes I wished we were facing the quad and its honeycomb of crisscrossing paths, but I developed an appreciation for looking away instead, out beyond to the edges of campus. I wasn’t thinking of escape but of mystery, discovery. And that tree became an anchor. Day after day, I would gaze at that tree, at the autumn sun filtered through leaves gradually transforming. I thought of other bygone teachers watching the same tree. When the sun sank in the late afternoons and threatened to become blinding, I lowered the shades reluctantly.
    And then I’d turn back around. Miss Myrick. Mr. Bratton. Miss Aaron. Miss Rourke. Yes. No. Absolutely. Due on Friday. Good God, do you think that plural needs an apostrophe? Please tell us why. Exactly .
    I thought that if there were any tactics I could use to age myself, then I should use them. I’d copied the formality, the misters and misses , from an old teacher of mine. It held them at arm’s length, but it was an equalizer, too: I was Mr. Garrett; I held them to my own standard.
    I was exhausted by the expansion of myself into these new, sturdier outlines, but I felt myself growing stronger. I allowed myself to believe I’d made this particular new person, who could withstand the force of their energy, all alone, from almost nothing, from bits of cloth and borrowed words.
    Yes, please read, Mr. Bratton. John Donne was quite a sensuous writer. What’s the central image here? Mr. Sprague. Is there more than one type of compass? Sometimes you have to take hold of the end of a sentence and pull. Miss Garard. Mr. Maxwell. Yes, absolutely. See me after. Good work. Today, Miss Hobson, you are on. Mr. DeAngelis, you’re off. Yes. Keep going. Exactly … exactly .
    Every day, I tried to pull it out of them. What? More than they knew they knew. More than they knew they had. I found that I couldgather the force of them into reins in my hands, steer, and then let them lead. At the window of my classroom, looking out, I was in the prow of a landship, forging ahead with my new self, built on the scaffolding of these names; then I turned around and my own energy went forth, joined theirs, became something new and larger. I had not expected to feel my own self slowly emerging as I tried to draw out theirs. I had not expected to love anyone, is what I’m saying. Sometimes they looked at me in amazement at what came out of their mouths.
    THE FIRST FULL CHAPEL of the year, Preston Bankhead gave the homily.
    He looked even taller in his robes. His hair seemed to have grown and, while still respectable, flowed over his collar