On a warm summer day in 1982 I fly to Toronto. Years have passed since I last saw Jeff. His hair is streaked with grey although he is only thirty-three. My brother looks smaller and frailer than I remember as he lies in his casket, his face fixed in a ghastly sardonic smile. I think it unfair because it’s not what he was about at all. More appropriate would have been something more earnest, less cynical. A furrowed brow perhaps as he struggled to understand. Or best of all his real smile, like a child who takes his very first bite of an ice cream cone. A smile he owned all his life. But this funeral is a bargain basement affair and you get what you can afford.

An hour later we gather for a small reception. My mother, father, sister and two of my brother’s social workers huddle together. One of them, a young plain woman, sobs uncontrollably. Her grief touches me. She must care deeply. Later I will discover that what I took for sorrow might be guilt. My brother suffered from paranoid schizophrenia. A miscalculation in his medication may explain why he leapt from the Bloor viaduct. From now on my father’s hands will tremble whenever he drives that way. Michael Ondaatje featured this same bridge in his book Skin of the Lion, a novel that will come to hold a fascination for me. From a cop, I will learn that the bridge is a favored choice of jumpers.

A balding plump man in a cheap brown suit clutching a bible in his right-hand approaches. He reminds me of a used car salesman except he’s selling Jesus. The sermon he gave barely mentioned my brother. Instead he exhorted the audience to accept the Lord Jesus Christ into their hearts before it’s too late and they end up in hell – like my brother is the subtext. I try to stand as far away as I can, but he homes in on me like a heat seeking missile. I know I’m going to need a drink. I look around vaguely for a wet bar. Then I remember where I am. I cross my arms and brace myself against a wall.

“So, I understand you work in aviation,” he says.

I admit that I do. He smiles.

“I fly myself. Single engine aircraft. I’d like to start a ministry up your way.” He means in the Yukon.

“Oh?”

“Yes, I’ve heard God’s voice. He told me that’s where I’m needed. I could fly from one small village to another. It sure would be good to have a few contacts.” His smile widens. I can see a gold crown in the back of his mouth.

I nod. He waits for me to say more. I don’t. When he goes away my sister Bonnie comes over.

“He had to be here. He’s the pastor at Mom’s church.”

I guessed as much. For years, she’s been giving money to guys like him except usually they’re on TV.

 

Later, when Bonnie and I are alone, and I finally fold my hand around a drink, I tell her a story about the time Jeff and I played hooky. She was too little to remember. A few years later Jeff succumbed to his first psychotic episode. He spent much of his adolescence institutionalized.

* * *

I was my brother’s best friend, his hero even, and he trusted me more than was wise. Sometimes I let him take the blame for things I did. I’m not sure why we decided to skip school on one of those fine Indian summer days just before the leaves began to turn. Our dog, Happy, must have had something to do with it. He was a Husky cross who always wore a goofy grin. It didn’t seem fair to leave him alone all day. He loved our forays into the dense forest that surrounded our small Ontario village.

Even then Jeff was smaller than me although he was two years older. We both attended the third grade in a two-room schoolhouse that was heated by an old-fashioned pot belly stove. Our classroom was divided into six rows, one for each grade. Sometimes we could hear the teacher on the other side of the school shouting at the older students. At other times, we could hear the rustling and squeaking of nesting mice. The winter before, our teacher, Mr. Lynch, earned everybody’s admiration when he caught a couple. With a shriek of delight, he tossed their tiny corpses into the fire. He cut an almost dashing figure despite his horn-rimmed glasses, maybe because he was young enough to seem boyish. He was a wonderful storyteller and because of him I learned to appreciate poetry. Emotion and enthusiasm filled his voice when he recited from memory a poem called Sea Fever by John Masefield: “I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life/ to the gull’s way, where the wind’s like a whetted knife/And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover …”

His pedagogy could be a tad peculiar. Once, after a series of dismal spelling test results, he announced that he would resort to corporal punishment for those who failed yet again. He kept his word. The next day a sad and anxious procession dragged itself to the front of the class. Quivering students extended their hands. Mr. Lynch delivered the ‘slugs’ with a standard issue rubber strap which was a little over a foot long and hung ominously from a hook on the wall. Two on each hand. A rush of air and then whack! My brother was one of the unlucky ones.

“Did you see me get the slugs? I didn’t cry like all those girls.”

He proudly held out his reddened hands. It was typical of how his life went. He didn’t look for trouble; he just couldn’t see it coming fast enough to get out of the way. From that day onward my spelling improved dramatically.

The Friday before a long weekend we scrambled up the roof of an abandoned shack to watch the other kids file into the school. Happy stood guard underneath. We gave it another fifteen minutes before we came down and followed a path into the bush. Birdsong and the smell of damp earth replaced the whine of highway traffic and the odor of exhaust. With each step, we grew larger, transformed into fearless explorers, maybe not as important as Columbus or Cartier, but pretty close. Eventually we found a stream and devoured the lunch that Mom had packed for us. There, cocooned deep in the embrace of nature, with full stomachs and full hearts, I saw that smile. A smile that captured his whole face. A smile of delight triggered by the perfection of the moment, the three of us as close to bliss as we would ever get.

Hours of following animal trails and crawling through tangles of vegetation meant we had lost our way, but we didn’t care. Wrapped in the cloak of childhood invincibility we were immortal, too young to worry or to know the pain of loss. In the end, Happy found a way out. Long before us he heard some heavy equipment. We just had to follow him. We came out about a hundred yards from where we started.

We wondered what we were going to do when we had to go back to school. Memories of the spelling test loomed. Jeff suggested we say we got lost on the way. Since we lived within sight of the school this seemed a little weak. I decided the answer was prayer. Back then I really believed. God was my guy in the sky. So, we closed our eyes, got down on our knees, and asked for deliverance. We crossed our fingers for good measure. On Tuesday, we went back to school to face the music. Our steps became slower and heavier as we got closer. When we got to the schoolhouse door, we found it was locked. One of the other kids told us that Mr. Lynch was away. Nor was he there on Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. By the time he got back he had forgotten all about our absence. It turned out that his mother had died. In church, I had already learned that the Lord moves in mysterious ways. Her death pricked my conscience, but well, better her than us.

* * *

More than fifty years have passed since those sweet days of innocence. I have long since lost faith in a higher power, or even sometimes in the better angels of human nature, but when I sink too deeply into that morass of cynicism all too typical of modern life, memories of my brother’s smile help to bring me back to firmer footing.