Brothers and Keepers. John Edgar Wideman

learn my brother’s story I visited him in prison and listened to what he had to say. I’d take a few notes—names, dates, sequences of events—then, some time later, after I’d had an opportunity to absorb his words but while they were still fresh in my mind, I would reproduce on paper what I’d heard. Robby would read what I’d written and respond either when I visited him next or by letter. His suggestions and corrections usually concerned factual matters, although his sense of larger issues, of truth and correctness, his feelings for narrative tone and pace, as well as the invaluable quotes from his letters and poems, added immensely to the final result. As a novelist, I have had lots of practice creating written versions of speech, so I felt much more confident about borrowing narrative techniques learned from fiction than employing a tape recorder

      I read many books about prison and prisoners, talked long hours to family members, especially my mother, reviewed court transcripts, newspaper files, and police reports in order to document events and educate myself. I gratefully acknowledge these sources, but also take full responsibility for the final mix of memory, imagination, feeling and fact. Reconstructing the tragic chain of circumstances that caused one young man to die and sent three others to prison for life has been a harrowing experience. In the hope that there is something to learn from this account, something to salvage from the grief and waste, I’ve striven for accuracy and honesty. Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of people mentioned in the text.

       VISITS

      When I was a very little child, oh, about six or seven, I had a habit of walking down Walnut and Copeland streets; you know those streets. As I walked I would look at the cars and in my mind I would buy them, but they only cost nickels or dimes. Big ones a dime, little ones a nickel, some that I liked a whole lot would cost a quarter. So as I got older this became a habit. For years I bought cars with the change that was in my pocket, which in those times wasn’t very much.

      Now this was a kind of wish, but more than that it was a way of looking at things—an unrealistic way—it’s like I wanted things to be easy, and misguidedly tried to make everything that way, blinded then to the fact that nothing good or worthwhile comes without serious effort. What I’m trying to say is that while I was walking through life I had a distorted view of how I wanted things to be rather than how they really were or are. Always wanted things to be easy; so instead of dealing with things as they were, I didn’t deal with them at all. I ducked hard things that took effort or work and tried to have fun, make a party, cause that was always easy.

      I heard the news first in a phone call from my mother. My youngest brother, Robby, and two of his friends had killed a man during a holdup. Robby was a fugitive, wanted for armed robbery and murder. The police were hunting him, and his crime had given the cops license to kill. The distance I’d put between my brother’s world and mine suddenly collapsed. The two thousand miles between Laramie, Wyoming, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, my years of willed ignorance, of flight and hiding, had not changed a simple truth: I could never run fast enough or far enough. Robby was inside me. Wherever he was, running for his life, he carried part of me with him.

      Nearly three months would pass between the day in November 1975 when I learned of my brother’s crime and the February afternoon he appeared in Laramie. During that period no one in the family knew Robby’s whereabouts. After the initial reaction of shock and disbelief subsided, people in Pittsburgh had settled into the inevitability of a long, tense wait. Prayers were said. As word passed along the network of family and friends, my people, who had long experience of waiting and praying, braced themselves for the next blow. A special watch was set upon those, like my mother, who would be hardest hit. The best was hoped for, but the worst expected; and no one could claim to know what the best might be. No news was good news. No news meant Robby hadn’t been apprehended, that whatever else he’d lost, he still was free. But knowing nothing had its dark side, created a concern that sometimes caused my mother, in spite of herself, to pray for Robby’s capture. Prison seemed safer than the streets. As long as he was free, there was a chance Robby could hurt someone or be killed. For my mother and the others who loved him, the price of my brother’s freedom was a constant, gnawing fear that anytime the phone rang or a bulletin flashed across the TV screen, the villain, the victim might be Robert Wideman.

      Because I was living in Laramie, Wyoming, I could shake loose from the sense of urgency, of impending disaster dogging my people in Pittsburgh. Never a question of forgetting Robby, more a matter of how I remembered him that distinguished my feelings from theirs. Sudden flashes of fear, rage, and remorse could spoil a class or a party, cause me to retreat into silence, lose whole days to gloominess and distance. But I had the luxury of dealing intermittently with my pain. As winter deepened and snow filled the mountains, I experienced a comforting certainty. The worst wouldn’t happen. Robby wouldn’t be cut down in a wild cops-and-robbers shootout, because I knew he was on his way to find me. Somehow, in spite of everything, we were going to get together. I was waiting for him to arrive. I knew he would. And this certainty guaranteed his safety.

      Perhaps it was wishful thinking, a whistling away of the miles and years of silence between us, but I never doubted a reunion would occur.

      On a Sunday early in February, huge, wet flakes of snow were falling continuously past the windows of the house on Harney Street—the kind of snow not driven by wolf winds howling in from the north, but soft, quiet, relentless snow, spring snow almost benign in the unhurried way it buried the town. The scale of the storm, the immense quantities of snow it dumped minute after minute, forced me to remember that Laramie was just one more skimpy circle of wagons huddling against the wilderness. I had closed the curtains to shut out that snow which seemed as if it might never stop.

      That Sunday I wrote to my brother. Not a letter exactly. I seldom wrote letters and had no intention of sticking what I was scribbling in an envelope. Mailing it was impossible anyway, since I had no idea where my brother might be. Really it was more a conversation than a letter. I needed to talk to someone, and that Sunday Robby seemed the perfect someone.

      So I talked to him about what I’d learned since coming west. Filled him in on the news. Shared everything from the metaphysics of the weather to the frightening circumstances surrounding the premature birth of Jamila, our new daughter. I explained how winter’s outrageous harshness is less difficult to endure than its length. How after a tease of warm, springlike weather in late April the sight of a snowflake in May is enough to make a grown man cry. How Laramie old-timers brag about having seen snow fall every month of the year. How I’d almost killed my whole family on Interstate 80 near the summit of the Laramie range, at the beginning of our annual summer migration east to Maine, when I lost control of the Oldsmobile Custom Cruiser and it did a 360 on the icy road in the middle of June.

      The letter rambled on and on for pages. Like good talk, it digressed and recycled itself and switched moods precipitously. Inevitably, one subject was home and family. After all, I was speaking to my brother. Whatever the new news happened to be, there was the old news, the deep roots of shared time and place and blood. When I touched on home, the distance between us melted. I could sense Robby’s presence, just over my shoulder, a sensation so real I was sure I could have reached out and touched him if I had lifted my eyes from the page and swiveled my chair.

      Writing that Sunday, I had no reason to believe my brother was on his way to Laramie. No one had heard from him in months. Yet he was on his way and I knew it. Two men, hundreds of miles apart, communicating through some mysterious process neither understood but both employed for a few minutes one Sunday afternoon as efficiently, effectively as dolphins talking underwater with the beeps and echoes of their sonar. Except that the medium into which we launched our signals was thin air. Thin, high mountain air spangled with wet snowflakes.

      I can’t explain how or why but it happened. Robby was in the study with me. He felt close because he was close, part of him outrunning the stolen car, outrunning the storm dogging him and his partners as they fled from Salt Lake City toward Laramie.

      Reach out and touch. That’s what the old songs could do. I’d begun that Sunday by reading a week-old New York Times. One of the beauties of living in Laramie. No point in frantically striving