The PowWow

The word hung in the room like a struck bell that wouldn't stop.

I didn't decide to close the door. My hand did it on its own, gently, the latch catching with a small click that was somehow louder than the shout had been, and I turned around, and the whole rest of the family fell away to the edges of my vision, because all I could see was Jacob and the thing coming off him in waves.

I have watched my brother fight men who were built the way he was built. I have seen him take hits that rearrange furniture and give nothing back but patience. I had never, not once, been afraid of him.

I was afraid of him now.

He stood — and it was slow, the way the worst things are slow, the way the ground moves in the half-second before you understand it's moving, a mountain deciding to relocate. The potential in it was terrible. Whatever he'd shouted with, there was more behind it, a great deal more, and for one bright cowardly instant every animal part of me understood exactly how much stronger than me my brother actually was, and had always been, and had spent thirty years choosing not to be at me.

Then he mastered it. I watched him do it — watched the strength that had nearly come off its chain get taken back in hand, gathered, controlled, the way he'd been learning to control it since a gym floor years ago when a smiling man taught him the difference between having strength and being had by it. His jaw worked once. His hands opened at his sides.

And he raised one arm and pointed at the couch in the living room.

I went. God help me, I shuffled — thirty years old and I shuffled like a boy sent to wait for a father, because this Jacob I did not know and would not test. I sat.

He turned and pointed at Roiya. Then at the couch beside me.

She came slower, with a set to her shoulders that had a make me buried in it somewhere, but she came, and she sat on the far end of it with her arms crossed, as far from me as the cushions allowed. Across the room, Naomi had one hand pressed flat over her mouth, and beside her Rebecca had the other, the two of them mirror images of the same held breath — the wives of this family watching the men of it arrive at something that had been coming for months.

Jacob walked into the living room. He stopped in the middle of it. And he stood there a moment, visibly, physically collecting himself, breathing the anger down into somewhere he could keep it, until when he finally spoke his voice had come most of the way back to the one I knew.

"Do you remember," he said, "the case with Fletcher."

Of every sentence I'd braced for, that wasn't one. I'd expected the wall. The hunt. The meanness. Rachel. I blinked at him.

"Yes," I said. "Why?"

"When we worked it." His eyes did not leave my face. "You looked for the Fallen. Everywhere. In every broken thing about that man, you went looking for Suriel's hand." A pause. "Did you find him?"

"No—" The word came out reflexive, and then the whole thing tried to come with it, the defense, the context, the but that was different, that was the opposite problem, I was seeing him everywhere and you're the one who told me to stop, it wasn't him then — "No, it wasn't him then, but—"

His hand came up.

One finger. That was all. A single massive raised finger and a look that shut my mouth the way a hand shuts a book. I stopped.

He let the silence do a full turn of the room. Then he lowered the finger, and when he spoke again it was gentle — that was the thing that started to get under my ribs, that after the thunder and the earthquake he'd chosen gentle — and he asked me the question that has taken up residence in me and never once moved out since.

"Why did you stop looking?"

I didn't understand it. I'll be honest, I sat there and I did not understand what my brother was asking, because I was still three-quarters submerged and the black hole was still running and Fletcher and the Fallen were words about a case, and the only case in me had a wall and a name in a parking lot.

Jeremiah came in and sat in his chair. The good chair, by the good lamp, and he had his Bible already open in his hands, and he didn't look up right away. He let Jacob's question hang there working on me while he found the place, and then he read, quiet and unhurried, the way he'd read a thousand true things across that lamplight.

"'Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.'"

He looked up.

"Romans," he said. "One twenty-five. We've been calling it the disease under the paintings, and it is. Worship, meant to go up and out, bent back on the self instead. The creature in the place of the Creator." He closed the book over one finger, keeping the place. "But I want you to hear the thing I've been slow to say plainly, Levi, because it wasn't only in the paintings." His eyes were very kind and they did not spare me a thing. "The art turns worship inward on purpose. Grief has been doing the same thing to every one of us for free."

He didn't push it. That was Jeremiah's whole method and it had raised me and I knew it and it still worked. He set it down in the middle of the room, the true and terrible thing, and he sat back, and he let it start to do what true things do when you stop holding the door shut against them.

Beside me, Roiya made a sound.

Small. A scoff, half under her breath, a flash of something across her face — defiant, dismissive, here we go with the sermons — and it was so fast I almost missed it, and I would have thought nothing of it at all except that I felt, rather than saw, the whole rest of the room register it and go still. Naomi's eyes. Rebecca's. Jeremiah's slight, sorrowing pause. They all saw it. And what they saw, and what I was still too far under to see, was that the thing that had flickered across my sister's face in that scoff was not hers. It didn't belong to Roiya. It had moved in behind her eyes and used her mouth and gone again, and everyone in that room with clear vision felt the draft of it pass through.

Jacob felt it most of all. His attention went to her, hard, and then came back to the two of us together, and he pointed — one hand at me, one at her, both of us on that couch, the two he'd sat down side by side on purpose.

"He is at work again," Jacob said. "Both of you. Hear me. This is not grief being ordinary. He told us, in that archive, that he saw us — that he was watching. Well. Watching was never the whole of it. He has had his hand on this house for months, on all of us, working the exact cracks he was always going to work." His voice dropped, and the whole weight of him came down into it, not thunder now, something steadier and worse to withstand because you couldn't be afraid of it, you could only be loved by it. "Do not let him win."

Here is the strange mechanics of what happened to me next, and I've turned it over enough times now to tell it true.

I half-heard the content. I want to confess that even here, even now, at the bottom, with my brother's whole soul poured out across a living room — Byron was still the loudest thing in my head. The wall still ran under everything. I heard Suriel and he is at work and some cold habitual part of me was already filing it, already reaching past it toward finding Hawk, because that part didn't know how to do anything else anymore.

But underneath the words, I heard something the black hole had no filter for.

I heard the love in my brother's voice.

That was the thing that got through. Not the argument — I was still too submerged for the argument. The love. Jacob had shouted at me, and stood over me like a coming storm, and asked me questions with an edge that could cut, and every single bit of it, all the way down, was love — was a man fighting for his brother with everything he had, the same way he'd once dropped to a gym floor to keep my arm from finishing what my rage had started. And I heard, all at once, sitting on that couch, what I had actually been starving for the whole time I'd been feeding a wall.

Righteousness. Real righteousness — not the counterfeit justice I'd been trying to deliver with my own two hands in a parking lot, but the true thing, delivered by God, the way He's always delivered it, through the hands and the voices and the stubborn unkillable love of the people He puts around a man. It had been coming for me this whole time. Through Jeremiah's patience and Rebecca's set place and Naomi's Sunday dinner and Jacob's silences and Jacob's shout. The body doing its work. God reaching for me through the exact people I'd been stepping around on my way to the door.

And I'd been turning away from it. For months. Turning my back on the righteousness God was trying to hand me, so I could go manufacture a cheap and bloody version of it myself.

I hung my head.

And I wept.

Not gracefully. Not quietly. It came up out of me the way it had come up in a waiting room the night everything broke, except this time there was no flatness waiting on the other side of it, this time it was just grief finally pointed the right direction — up, and out — and it took me apart. I heard myself saying I'm sorry, over and over, to Jacob, to Roiya, to Jeremiah and Rebecca and Naomi, to a whole family I'd left standing in doorways for three months. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

"Everything," I got out. "I lost — do you understand what I—" I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. "Three months. To that — to that wall." And I laughed, a wet and wrecked and terrible sound, because naming it was the first true thing I'd done in a season and it deserved the only name I had for it. "That damned wall. That's exactly what it is. That's what it did. It damned me, and I built it with my own hands, and I hung her — I hung all of you — out in the cold so I could stand in front of it."

Nobody rushed me. This family knew better than to rush a man out of the first honest weeping he'd managed in months. Rebecca had come and put her hand on my head at some point, the way she used to when I was small, and Jacob had come down onto the couch on my other side, and the couch complained about it, and I laughed again through the wreckage because of course it did, because some things are constant, because the world was still the world and it might still have me in it.

It was later, at the door, that the last of it happened.

I was leaving — to sleep, finally, or to try, and then to do the thing I could not do fast enough now that I could do it at all. Jacob walked me out. On the step he stopped me, and he put both arms around me, the whole granite continental mass of him, and he held on the way he'd held Rebecca in a living room the night we brought a broken man home, unhurried, complete.

"I want my brother back," he said, into the top of my head. "I have missed him." He held on a second longer. "And I want our sister. Both of you. Do you hear me. We are not finished with this."

I pulled back enough to look at him, and then past him, into the house, at Roiya — who had not wept, who had not apologized, who sat on the far end of that couch with her arms still crossed and something still set and defiant behind her eyes, and for the first time in three months I looked at my sister with the machine running clean, and what it read put a cold hand on my heart. She wasn't coming with me out of this. Whatever had reached me hadn't reached her. It hadn't even tried her door.

"Jacob," I said, slow, the concern arriving in me like feeling coming back into a limb. "Roiya—"

"I know," he said. Quiet. "I know. We will get to her. Together, the way it should have been." He squeezed my shoulder. "One thing at a time. Fix the thing that’s breaking first."

I nodded. I knew exactly which thing that was.

"I need to talk to Rachel," I said.

Something eased in my brother's face — not a full smile, Jacob doesn't spend those cheaply, but the structural work a smile does, the whole load of him lightening by a degree. He put one hand on my shoulder, and he said the thing our family has said to each other going out the door for as long as I've been alive.

"Go with God."

I looked down at my own feet on the step, and I felt the whole size of what I was about to walk back toward, and the whole size of what I'd have to be forgiven for first, and I gave him the only honest answer I had left.

"I will," I said. "If He'll still have me."