Michael Kimball - The Way the Family Got Away

These and the even bigger things they carried out across the front yard—ice box, bathtub, bathroom sink, kitchen sink, the kitchen table and chairs. They carried out boxes full of other stuff and carried other stuff out that did not fit into boxes. They rolled the carpet up and rolled the carpet up and folded it over their shoulders and shouldered it up into the truck. They pulled the cupboards from the kitchen walls down. The floors they pulled up—all the tile and board.

They took the windows out of the walls and took the way we looked out of the windows away with them when they did that. They took the doors off the hinges and banged them shut inside the walls of their truck so that those closed doors left us outside but also opened the rest of America up for us.

The men pulled the stoop away from the front door and took that away with them too. All that stuff wasn’t ours anymore and their truck was packed. The men climbed up into the truck and into the truck and into the truck. They sat down in the chairs at the kitchen table and among themselves and all the insides of our house that they had carried out. The last one of them pulled down on the rope that rolled the truck’s rolling back door closed. He climbed up through the truck driver’s front door and drove the truck and all our stuff that was inside the truck away from our house in Mineola to somewhere else in America.

My mother and father and brother and sister along with the other and smaller things that we had left were all that we had left of us in that house of our family and stuff. My mother and father packed the suitcases, boxes, and crates up with the rest of the stuff that was still ours. My mother and father packed my brother up in his casket and packed his casket up in the trunk. My mother and father carried everything else out to the car and packed it up too. My mother and father packed my sister and me up with the rest of the stuff that we had left and we left too.

They dug the baby-sized hole deep enough for any of the big-people to go down into it. One man pounded stab-holes with the bone-stick he pulled out of his shoulder and back and swung down out of his arm and into the ground and dirt-world. One more man did it with a big-spoon he dug out of the hole and bone of his leg and foot. They dug all the way down into the hole until we couldn’t see them anymore but for their hands and arms and dirt and spoons and bones and sticks. But they didn’t make the hole go all the way through. Neither one of them dug the baby-sized hole deep enough or far enough away or down enough under for my little brother.

But they could both go all the way down inside the hole and still be alive when they climbed back up and crawled back out of it. They were both too big to die and lay down inside the hole. But they pounded the nails down into the top side of the toy box so my little brother couldn’t get out of it and they tied him up inside it with ropes too. They swung my little brother up over the hole with the ropes and they knocked the toy box back and forth against the side-walls all the way down to the bottom where the hole stopped.

But they didn’t cover my little brother up with anything so he could stay warm and go away to sleep. They left the hole open so we could throw dirt on top of him but none of us were going to do it. They left the ropes with him for him to crawl with back out but we had to go and pull him back out of the ground and dirt-world with our hands and arms and backs and ropes. The toy box hit and knocked back and forth against the side-walls and the dirt and rocks all fell down under my little brother and started filling his baby-sized hole back up. We got the toy box out and knocked on its sides and listened for noises but my little brother was quiet inside. We unpounded the nails from the top side of the toy box and pulled it open and looked inside but my little brother was still inside there and he was still dead.

The pile of dirt and rocks by the side of the hole wasn’t high enough and far enough away or up for him to climb on up into the sky and cloud. But we pushed the dirt and rocks back down into the hole and filled it back up with our hands and bones and shoes and hot and string and down and sun and burn and hills and ways and years and names and big and in and dolls and blood and dead and we kept my little brother up above the ground and dirt-world and with us.

We drove away from our house and away down the road. We drove past some other houses that were all broken at the walls and didn’t have any families living in them anymore. They had broken windows and broken doors. They had broken cars in the front yards that didn’t have any tires on them so that those people that had lived there never left but stayed there and died.

We drove all the way out to the far part of Mineola where there were houses that had people and families that were still living in them. We stopped and got out of our car and walked up to this one house and looked in the windows but they were only old people that lived there and they didn’t have any babies left in their family anymore so we didn’t even knock. We needed to find a house with a family that was going to have a baby in it.

We knocked on doors and looked in windows until this other family that needed a baby came up to their door and answered us. Their faces were the only things we could see through their screen door—their mother and father, their brother and sister, and the way they looked like a family in there. Their family stood there behind their screen door and in their doorway and inside their house and with all their stuff. Their father pulled their brother and sister in close to him and his leg and hip and their mother stood next to him too.

Our family stood there in the same way but outside their house and on their porch and without anything with us but us. My father asked their family if they were going to have a baby in it and their father nodded that they were and their mother held the bottom of her stomach up with her hands. My father asked them to stay there and wait there and we went back to our car and opened the trunk up. My father got my brother’s cradle out and my mother got my brother and the other baby stuff out. My mother gave my sister and me the small blankets and the little pillows, the stuffed animals and the other baby toys, and we all carried all that baby stuff back up to that family and their house and stood there on their porch with it.

My mother cradled my brother in the blanket in her arms and touched her hand over the blanket and my brother even though he wasn’t crying or moving his arms and hands or even doing anything anymore. My mother kept my brother with her inside herself and in her arms. My mother wouldn’t let anybody else hold my brother even when their mother talked like a baby talks and held her arms out for him. Their mother said that she wanted to practice with him some but my mother said the baby might break and she wouldn’t let go of him. Their family’s baby wasn’t born yet and their mother cradling my brother in her arms might have killed the baby inside her stomach. Nobody else was supposed to touch my brother anymore or somebody else besides him might die in some other family or house.

The thing that killed my brother was that the cradle didn’t have anymore baby years left in it. My mother didn’t have anymore baby years left in her arms anymore either. My sister and me had already lived them all up and the other baby stuff didn’t have enough baby years left in any of it to keep my brother alive. My brother’s cradle was probably going to kill their family’s baby too but they could not have known that yet.