Waiting for the 1812 Overture to Go Somewhere

That fall was the first fall in almost two decades that my brother did not attend school. For the first few weeks, he went into the basement and lay on the cement floor for hours listening to Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. We could feel the violins sweeping like a river of sound while he waited with closed eyes for the solution to his involuntary inertia. Some mornings my father would try to give him a list of tasks, but my mother would just hold up one hand and slightly shake her head. It was a brief caesura no one expected to last: my father’s will was like a cannon that catapulted its demands through our hearts once he had reached enough momentum.

After school I would go downstairs and listen to the music with him, suspending myself in the same cacophony of trying to move forward but always repeating a variation of intractable pattern. I was small, but I understood what it felt to be lost in a rhythm of circumstances that left a person with no clear path to follow.

You can only listen to the 1812 Overture so long before it convinces you that laying low is not an option. One day my brother borrowed the car and came back with the news that he had joined the army. It was the only way he could think of to finish college. My mother instantly regretted her policy of silent compassion. Where else could the 1812 Overture lead your child but to war? My father faked approval, but even I knew he was disappointed to lose the resources that my brother embodied.

Throughout his teen years, my brother had “earned his keep”(as my father called it) by doing the hardest and dirtiest work on the farm. He shoveled knee high manure out of the cow stalls and loaded the heavy hay bales into the troughs. He chased escaped sheep in the bitterest cold when the snowdrifts made bridges over the fences. He helped build the house, the barn, and the chicken coop. He strung two miles of barbed wire fence using the wire stretcher that could build up enough tension to slash three inches into the skin if the wire broke.

When my brother was sixteen, my father said he hadn’t earned the right to use the car to drive to a paying job. My brother balked. He applied to the nearest Osco and walked the five miles to the mall for his shifts. He didn’t save up his money for a car, though. He put every dime into a savings account for college. In two years, he saved up $1500 with his two dollar and thirty-five cent an hour job. With his learning disabilities, he had no hope for scholarships. He squeaked into a public school with his hard-won mediocre GPA. It was a victory for him. A chance to prove himself worthy and my father wrong.

It took two years for him to exhaust his funds. The fall that Tchaikovsky rumbled through our house, my father spent $250,000 on a new farm…and refused to spend a single nickel on my brother’s education. There was $500,000 in the stock market and not an ounce of hope for my brother. In the short term, my brother outmaneuvered my father: he joined the army instead of coming back to the farm. But my brother was forever carried along on that symphony of desperation: too proud to tell my mother he’d run out of money, too determined to give up completely, too stymied by his own challenges to get where he really wanted to go. This crescendo of years of stifled aspirations became the major movement that reverberated through my brother’s life: for his entire life he’s been caught up in a revolution that goes nowhere.

Author: Beth Avery
Word Count: 635