Like You'd Understand, Anyway

“There, you son of a bitch,” my father goes, pulling out the magazine.

“What do you want from me?” my brother says when he holds it up. “A dance?”

After a minute my father starts cleaning everything up, dropping stuff back into the can's liner. I start winning at rummy.

“Fucking Cincinnati Kid,” my brother goes, watching me tote up.

“I'm the kid with all the answers,” I tell him. You can see him wondering how I meant that and then figuring it's not worth finding out.

“So here's the article I was talking about,” my father tells him. There's a muffin wrapper stuck to it.

“Very nice,” my brother goes. He's rearranging the suits in his hand. He's starting to look worse. He doesn't do almost anything but work out, and his arms when he flexes them rip the T-shirt sleeves.

“I'm out,” I tell him again and fan the cards out between us. I catch him with another big hand.

He sits there with his eyes on me, setting one molar on another. While he does the math I page around some more in the book. There's a drawing of something that looks like a shingle with some antennae. It looks like I'm showing off, beating him while reading a book. But it's somewhere to put my eyes, so I can't bring myself to shut it.

“You playing cards or reading?” my father wants to know. He can see my brother's face.

“The library,” my mother says from the other room. “That's the only place anybody in this family goes.”

“Where're we gonna go? It's a fucking downpour,” my brother tells her.

She doesn't answer. My father wipes his sponge around the rim of the sink, finishing the cleanup.

I'm given a dream hand — a run and a half — right off his deal. And the card I need after that is the first one he discards. I think about not saying anything. Then I go ahead. “I'm out again,” I tell him, putting my cards down to show him.

He pulls his hands back to his lap and sits there. Then he turns the whole table over. At its highest point the whole thing's up over my head. A few minutes after it hits, the neighbor across the street calls to see if everything's all right.

Later when everything's quiet I'm still in the kitchen. There's a divot in the linoleum where the table edge came down. I'm in the corner with my back to the cabinets. My brother's in his room. My mother's in hers. My father hurt his back wrestling my brother up the stairs. He's got the heating pad on it. One end of the pad's tucked into his belt so it looks like he's plugged into the wall.

There's tuna in my sock. My throat's still sore. There's not enough self-pity to go around. “Is he your brother or not?” my father's asking me.

“Yeah,” I tell him.

“So you wanta help him?” he wants to know.

“Yeah,” I tell him, tearing up.

“Well then why don't you help him?” he wants to know.

Because there's what we want, and what we do, I'd figured out, even then.

“You want to help him?” he asks me again.

“Not really,” I tell him, sitting there. Not really, I tell myself, now.

Hadrian's Wall

Who hasn't heard by now of that long chain of events, from the invasion by the Emperor Claudius to the revolt of Boudicca and the Iceni in the reign of Nero to the seven campaigning seasons of Agricola, which moved our presence ever northward to where it stands today? From the beginning, information on our campaigns has never ceased being gathered from all parts of the province, so it's easy to see how historians and scribes of the generation before me have extended the subject's horizons.

In my father's day, before my morning lessons began, I would recite for my tutor the story of the way the son of all deified emperors, the Emperor Caesar Trajan Hadrian Augustus, on whom the necessity of keeping the empire within its limits had been bestowed by divine command, had scattered the Britons and recovered the province of Britannia and added a frontier between either shore of Ocean for eighty miles. The army of the province built the Wall under the direction of Aulus Platorius Nepos, pro-praetorian legate of Augustus. I would finish our lesson by reminding my tutor that my father had worked on that wall, and my tutor would remind me that I had already reminded him.

The line chosen for the Wall lay a little to the north of an existing line of forts along the Stanegate, the northernmost road. The Wall was composed of three separate defensive features: the first a ditch to the north, the second a wide, stone curtain wall with turrets, milecastles, and forts strung along its length, and the third a large earthwork to the south. Their construction took three legions five years.

I have memories of playing in the freshly dug material from the bottom of the ditch. I found worms.