Sprout

time ago.”
    “He was your brother.” I turned to the mud again. “Quicksand?”
    Ty let out a little blubbery laugh. “Nah, no quicksand.” He pointed to a line on the surrounding hills. Tufts of grass fell over an eroded patch of bare dry soil like bangs combed forwards to cover a receding hairline. Ty’s arm traced a wide circle around us, and as it traveled I could see the area fill up with water, making a small pond.
    “In wet years that’s how high the water gets. It was our swimming hole.”
    The line Ty pointed out was three, maybe four feet above the valley floor. The pond would’ve been smaller than our clearing, as shallow as a hot tub. Shallow enough that I felt compelled to ask:
    “He … drowned?”
    Ty nodded his head, then shook it. Then nodded again. “Oh, man. I’ve never said this out loud before. Man oh man.”
    It took all my strength not to put my dirty hand on his knee.
    “It’s okay. If you tell me. I won’t tell anyone.”
    “It didn’t make any sense.” Ty pointed at the waterline again. “It wasn’t but three, four feet deep.”
    “How—”
    “Tall was he? ’Bout, four, five feet.”
    “—old was he?”
    Ty turned from the mud and looked at me for a moment. He shook his head, let his eyes fall.
    “Ty?”
    Before I knew what was happening Ty had thrown his face in my muddy lap and his sobs echoed eerily in the wet valley.
    “He was my twin, Daniel! He was my twin brother, and he drowned himself and left me all alone!”
    He was younger by eighty-two minutes. That’s a long time between twins. He didn’t want to come out, Ty said. The doctor had to go in and get him.
    Technically they were identical but you’d’ve never known it. Holly was always smaller than Ty, shyer. Hid behind his bigger brother, did whatever he said. He took it hardest of all four children when their mom disappeared—they were only seven, but Holly always acted as though Ty knew something he didn’t. Knew where their mom had gone, when she was coming back, or when they’d escape their dad’s house to join her. As the years passed and she didn’t come back or send for them he stopped talking about her, but Ty knew he thought about her all the time. He liked to draw, but their dad thought drawing was sinful, so he drew in the dirt. He drew stick figures, with a stick, a woman with a boy on either hand, and afterwards he’d rub them out with his bare feet. When he forgot to wash his feet before he went in the house his dad would whip the blackened soles with an electrical cord.
    Ty said Holly always forgot to wash his feet.
    By the time he was eleven, he’d become a recluse. Ty had to get him out of bed in the morning, make him shower, dress, eat. Nothing caught his brother’s attention, roused him from his stupor, not even the threat of a whipping. He just stood there and stared at Mr. Petit as if willing him to do the thing they both really wanted him to do. But it’s no fun hitting someone if it doesn’t make him suffer, so their dad took to ignoring Holly instead. He’d pass plates of food over Holly’s head at the table, hand out playing card–sized Bible verses to L.D., June, Ty, but leave a blank card in front of Holly. Holly didn’t protest, didn’t even seem to notice. He used his thumbnail to etch stick figures of a woman and two boys into the blank laminated cards and stare at his empty plate in silence unless Ty put some food on it, put a fork in his hand, said, “Eat.” Which is why, Ty said, he didn’t notice Holly wasn’t in bed that night.
    “He put clothes under the sheets. You know, like a person. He even—” Ty moved his hands through the air, traced a shape. When I didn’t understand he showed me with his body. Curled up on the ground in a fetal position with his knees only inches from his snuffling nose, caked with dirty mucus. “Like a baby,” Ty said, “cuz that was how he slept.”
    Ty said: “No one realized he was gone till the next morning.”
    “We didn’t find him till the day after that,” Ty said.
    “He was on his back,” Ty told me. “On the water, on his back. Everyone said it was like he’d gone to sleep on the bottom of the pond and floated to the surface. But I told them he didn’t sleep on his back. He slept on his side, like a baby.”
    Ty drew a stick figure in the ground beside him, arms and legs akimbo.
    “He was like that,” he said, and then he rubbed out the drawing with his feet.
    He showed me the gravestone.