MY BROTHER'S KEEPER
ESSAY BY PETER DERBY

The family story goes something like this:  Sean was relieving himself in the weeds with his gun strapped over his shoulder when an eight point buck made its way into the field.  As Sean zipped up and turned, he spooked the buck standing behind him in the clearing.  A male deer doesn’t live to grow a formidable rack of antlers because it’s been waiting to see what a teenager with a gun might do, so it started to run.  Sean swiveled around, swung his rifle around to his shoulder, and he started to run too, running and shooting.  It takes a steady shoulder and a steady hand on a rifle for good aim, and a marksman’s accuracy goes down drastically when attempting to make a shot on the run.  But Sean was fast.  He received all state honors as a cross-country runner, and he shot with unmerciful aim.  My younger brother—the fourth of four boys—had managed to combine two of his favorite skills, running and shooting, when he killed his first deer.  We have a family photo of Sean’s kill.  With his long brown hair tied back by an orange bandanna, eyes beaming intensely, and a rifle strapped across his back, he looks like a revolutionary.

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My brother Paul is also an avid hunter.  In the late fall, he spends more hours in the field than a naturalist, puts more bullets into the air than the Michigan Militia, and provides a living example of why gun control is necessary but why hunting doesn’t equate to the population control of animals.  I was sitting at my grandmother’s kitchen table on Thanksgiving morning when Paul illustrated this remarkably complex point.  Grandma and I heard at least a dozen shots in quick succession.  We puzzled through the possibilities.  No one would fire off that many rounds at one animal. We thought there must have been more than one gun or more than one animal, since the shots were numerous.

When Paul came in from the fields, he explained that a tree or a branch had moved or that a bird had made a branch move.  Then he said something about how the branches somewhere in front of his blind looked like deer antlers.  Paul began to rub his face slowly with both hands.  We knew that Paul’s blind, like many hunting blinds, was a small homemade camouflaged wooden structure on the edge of the woods near an abandoned apple orchard.  He had supplied it with a space heater and a stool.  So we knew he was capable and comfortable killing a deer.  We didn’t know, as he started to explain, that he would be comfortable with killing anything that resembled a deer.  The story stopped abruptly as if he suddenly realized how stupid this all sounded when he said it aloud.  No one knew what Paul was trying to say, so Dad, who had also been in the woods hunting that morning, bailed him out, “Geeze, Paulie, I thought I was at the O.K. Corral.”

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Sean and Paul approached hunting with unpredictable methods and for different reasons.  In our family’s terms, Paul was born with a spinal cord like a corkscrew and unlucky odds—the kind of long odds that would prevent you from betting on a racehorse and certainly never a person.  Technically speaking, Paul, the second of four, was born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus.  His birth defects caused a fissure in his spinal column, resulting in an abnormal increase of fluids in the cranial cavity.  My grandma told me recently that when Paul was born, she cried.  After bringing her own two boys into this world, she had never seen anything like Paul before.  She described him in radioactive shades of pinks and reds balled up into a unity of tiny sadness; she thought he was going to die.  Of course, Paul didn’t die, and he’s been beating the odds ever since and with an outlook of infinite optimism that I have personally yet to find elsewhere.  

Although Sean’s and Paul’s abilities naturally differ, Paul tried to prove himself to be an extraordinary marksman by damn near killing that tree, bird, deer or whatever. 

When Paul finally did shoot an animal that sort of looked like a deer, it was a sensational event—a miracle.  The deer he shot was so small, we couldn’t figure out how he had hit it except from the divine intervention of God’s trigger finger.  The family congratulated him; he killed one of the biggest dogs we had ever seen.  He was certainly proud of himself and that poor canine he killed was magnificent.  

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Among four brothers, from oldest to youngest—Scott, Paul, Peter and Sean—we are an eight-year spread and we are all different.  As brothers and hunters Paul and Sean have vast personality differences.  They have exactly two things in common:  they consistently and unanimously find a way to disagree and they are brothers.

These differences became more apparent when we were all teenagers.  My parents built a log house on a golf course with more than enough room for a bedroom for each boy, yet they envisioned us sharing two bedrooms between the four of us.  We were all Cold War kids, and I think my parents attempted to prove that containment was more than a political idea and that it worked in their house.  Lodging two brothers to a room did not make us model children—far from it.  Still we existed in each other’s space as more of a social experiment.  And living near a golf course, the spirit of games invaded the house. 

When we first moved into the log house, Scott and I shared a room and listened from down the hall as Paul and Sean tried to share a room. Their bedroom provided a laboratory of reverse political correctness and destructive social cohesiveness.  Their combined talents provided a permanently hostile environment; they could argue over the smallest details of who had done what, when, where and for how long.  They hated the idea of agreeing so much so that it was their only constant agreement.  From our bedroom, Scott and I could hear the two go at each other.  Paul’s rebuttals resembled his disability and his personality.  He was steady, but slow.  Even the simplest negotiations, like switching off the lights, took on the tone of a two drunks in a bar fight.

“Fuck You.  Get your lazy ass up and do it yourself.”

“You…are…a…fuckin…foot…away.  Fuck you.”

“No Fuck You.”

“No…No… Fuck You.”

“Paul, why don’t you fuck yourself, really could you do that and then turn off the lights.”

“No……I will…NOT…and I will not…turn…off…the…lights…Fuck...you… Sean.”

They could go on as long as it would take to wake Mom from her sleep, and sometimes they would continue even after that.  I never did figure out who turned out the lights.  I imagine some nights they just slept with the lights on.

 Eventually Sean’s and Paul’s conflict led to a switch of territory.  Scott and I had lived in relative peace, so Sean moved into my room and Scott moved into Paul’s room. But Paul and Sean had other problems, even after that—aesthetic problems and inherent problems, as we all do.

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As brothers, we took it upon ourselves to make sure Paul didn’t see himself as handicapped.  Sean took this assignment especially seriously.  When it came to the limits of Paul’s disabilities, Sean became a vigilante.  While others see Paul as defective, as a result of his circumstances, Sean sees new circumstances.  And since we were younger than Paul, Sean and I never understood the idea of his birth defect.  He had always been our older brother Paul.  He moved and walked a little slower, eventually using a cane, and he talked like a hospital functioned.  Paul spent his middle school years in the University of Michigan hospitals in surgery, recovering from surgery, or getting ready for surgery.  As he reached puberty, his back hairs started growing into his spinal column, which disrupted sensory information moving to and from his spinal cord.  Paul, as a consequence, missed middle school, the great socialization period of life, and he developed what I call a bureaucratic personality.  Instead of the active socialization process developed in middle school such as being rowdy in the halls, getting in trouble for throwing food, and getting C’s on his math tests—Paul was socialized in a passive sense.  He had to wait in doctors’ offices.  He waited for paperwork, for the secretaries to finish the paperwork, for the doctors to finally look at him, and for the doctors to tell him to wait for more paperwork. 

So having a conversation with Paul, the timing and the way he strings his sentences together, places a listener squarely within a bureaucracy.  “So Pete….tell me……about your….ughh…ughh…what’s happening…with you.”  He makes you wait, just like he waited for the doctors to see him, or for someone to provide a diagnosis.  And eventually, Paul gives you his professional opinion.  You sit and wait for him to finish his sentences in a deliberately slow and painful way as if your very health depended upon it.  Paul processes his listeners.  As in the case of the light switch diplomacy, Sean did his best to take Paul and himself out of this bureaucracy.  

If you spend any amount of time with Paul, you realize that you must be stuck in a waiting room where the music keeps repeating between Jimmy Buffet and the Righteous Brothers.  Paul’s choices probably had something to do with wanting to be in a different place or time.  Maybe he wanted to be in some movie that took place in the 60’s at a cheesy middle school dance with “Unchained Melody” playing in the background, but instead he was in a hospital bed in the 90’s missing a bad middle school dance.  And I think I understand why “Cheeseburger in Paradise” sounds appealing on repeat if you’re staring out of hospital windows in Ann Arbor in the winter.  In this way, back at home, Paul’s and Sean’s aesthetic differences came to a head.  And so it was, that one day Sean got tired of waiting for Paul to listen to another band.  He took Paul’s stack of tapes, picked up his twin bed at the corner and placed the tapes directly beneath the bedpost. When he dropped the bedpost it split the tapes into two.  Compact Disks had started to replace tapes at this time, so with Paul’s next surgery he received the entire collection all over again, and despite Sean’s efforts, you still have to listen to Paul’s two bands.

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 Sean always has been a self-proclaimed prophet of tough love.  We played with Paul and treated him the same way Sean and I treated each other:  cruelly and with no distinction.  Dad especially did not like this, and told us angrily that Paul did not have the same advantages we did.  Mom was a moderate and fell somewhere in between.  We knew Dad had a point, but we wanted Paul to find his own advantages because when other people see Paul they treat him differently.  When people in church, family friends, or even his own friends saw him struggling, they naturally gave him a hand.  When other people viewed Paul as helpless, he became more handicapped, and, to some extent, we all become what others see in us. 

Every time Paul didn’t have to walk across a room to get a glass of water, or somebody said, “Let me get that for you,” or when we skipped to the front of the lines at Disney World, Paul got a little weaker.  That extra glass of water, grabbing the door for him, and Disney World taught him that if he looked handicapped he could take advantage of being handicapped.  And thinking of himself as truly being handicapped did not reinforce Paul’s capabilities. 

Political correctness, as a social idea, acts on the premise that people like my brother who appear to have disabilities receive advantages.  This is supposed to create social equality and level out the playing field.  But feeling sorry for an individual because of his disabilities only exacerbates his disadvantages.  The strengths Paul did have were diminished by an idea that taught him to take advantage of how other people understood weakness.  We knew that Paul was capable because we had seen him end an argument over the T.V. remote, and many others, with physical violence.

“Sean hand…me…ughh…the remote…”

“No.”

“Why…not…Sean?

“You know why, Paul.”

“No…I don’t…Just…hand me…the remote…Dammnit.”

“Paul if you don’t know why then you do know why. Get it yourself. It’s on top of the T.V.”

“Just…get up…and get me…the damn…remote…Sean.”

“See you know and you know you’re a lazy moron.”

With this, Paul pressed both hands against the cushion to spring up from the couch into a standing position.  Sean jumped over the armrest and took off down the stairs, but Paul hustled close behind swinging his cane at Sean.  Paul’s knees bent woodenly, but his feet met the ground with a rapid turnover.  He braced his hands against the hallway and the stairs railing. Sean would get to the bottom of the stairs laughing and saying,

“See Paul, you could of got the remote.”

“Fuck you, Sean.”

And this happened frequently enough while friends were around.  Paul chasing Sean after tremendous agitation and Sean running to escape became a routine known around school.  My lab partner in chemistry asked, “Hey, I hear your brothers are worth seeing fight.”  I never thought about charging admission to watch Paul resort to his own means, but entertainment value aside, Sean was right.  Paul became extremely resourceful.  Once when I gave him crap, he whacked me with his cane before I could get away.  Quick swatting with his cane was just one way Paul grew adept at fending for himself.  So Sean and I did not cut Paul any breaks.  It was Sean, especially, who saw that when Paul was struggling, he was succeeding. 

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Paul’s struggles have always been a source of disagreement within the family, but Sean and I had been united.  If he started a fight either Sean or I would sit on him until he fought back or told us he couldn’t breathe, which of course wasn’t completely true because he was telling us he couldn’t breathe.  So we’d say: “What’s that Paulie you can’t breathe?  Well that’s what the world is going to do to you.”  He would laugh, and we’d laugh.  And it would be over.  It seems cruel, and we both knew it was cruel, but that was how we loved Paul.  And Paul never snitched.  If he snitched, I think Mom would have told us to treat him as we wanted to be treated, which would have continued the process.  And Dad would have been pissed off.  But we never got in trouble for sitting on Paul.  We also never thought sitting on him was the best thing we could have done for him.  We didn’t know how right we were about the world at the time.  Or that my dad would later concede, as he recently told me, that our treatment of Paul was the right thing to do.  He told me, with red rings forming around his eyes, he didn’t understand at the time how the world would see Paul.  How did the world see Paul?  It’s because the world is too quick to give people with disabilities advantages that it’s also just as quick to take away by labeling my brother.  It’s a cruel world after all, a theme park of political, superficial correctness, a wrongness that disables my brother every time he walks into a job interview.  Paul is never quite right for the job.

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Paul also had his own way of showing love for us.  Scott, Sean and I were good high school athletes.  Paul was the manager of the cross country teams my brothers and I were a part of.  Cheering us as we ran into the shoot, Paul became a fixture at the finishing line leaning on his cane and shouting, “Go Scott.” “C’mon Pete.” “Push, Sean, Push.”  Our coach loved Paul because he never complained.  Paul did everything he asked from holding asthma inhalers for the runners to talking to other coaches about the score.  I think he just did what he could to be a part of it, to support us.  One day, I started to wonder if he ever thought, “what if I had been born first or third or fourth?”  I know I would have asked that question.  So I called Paul and asked what it was like to watch us run races and win.  He said, “Honestly…Pete, it sucks. It really sucks.”  So, Paul counted up the points from the races Sean and I won that gave the Derby name the headlines, and he always approached his duties with a professional demeanor that bordered on absurdity.  Once, after getting off the bus at a Cross Country meet, Paul introduced himself to another coach,

 “I am Paul Derby, Administrative Assistant.”

Sometimes he over compensated, but his self-title, Administrative Assistant, accurately described what he wanted, to assist us.

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One day, after Scott had already left for college, Sean challenged the ideas of political correctness with a proposition and a paintball gun.  Sean remembers the story differently, but from what I remember, he addressed Paul and me:

“So one of us is here on the deck shooting at the one running around in the yard.  It’s over when the ammo runs out.”

“O.K.,” Paul said.

Before he could even consider the potential problems and circumstances of Sean’s proposal, Paul had begun rubbing his hands together slowly in a complete vigor of confidence.  Watching him, it seemed to me as if the friction between his hands was the shape and texture of his younger brother’s stupid idea.  He reveled in it.  From Paul’s deep cavernous eye sockets, he blinked a quick Morse Code showing Sean that he was happy with the agreement.  Sean smiled and slowly began to describe how the game worked: one gunman, one live target, and all three of us could play.  Sean’s soft, subtle hand movements expressed the clarity and ease of his brand of fun which had a very convincing tone of equality.  And it all seemed logical to Paul.  But Sean used this expression of cunning and his subtle approach to convince Paul he thought the game was fair, too.  “Pete?” I heard Sean say, encouraging me to join.  I thoughtfully declined and sat down to watch.  I knew they were participating in their own “unique” tradition of brotherly love.

Sean stood on the deck giving Paul hell.  Paul wanted to run, and he did his damnedest to run that day.  His feet dragged through the lawn as quickly as he could move them. Where Paul’s feet had not quite left the ground, the grass zig zagged and matted in foot print trails.  As he pressed his cane into the ground, his head bobbed up and down.  As Paul ducked and weaved quickly from Sean, I could see his coarse black hair groomed into a part over the scars of his surgeries.  He moved in the quickest combination of a hobble and a drag, and I know now that I might never see him move that fast again.  But, at the time, he wasn’t moving fast enough.  Round after round snapped out of the gun.  Paint pelted his shoulders in small circles of green and orange.  He looked like a billboard advertising khakis and polo shirts plastered by inner city graffiti, and he didn’t seem to care.  He had to have known the game was unfair.

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My brother—the sniper pinpricked my brother—the target—from his elevated position.  There was a quick rhythm between the two of them.  The deck was perched over the backyard.  In the sixty-yard semicircle of partially trimmed grass, no brush for cover and only a giant maple tree in the middle of the yard, Sean had Paul exactly where he wanted him.  The yard ended in a border of thorns and unattended rose bushes where the golf course began, and without any assistance from the outside world, Paul saved himself.