Free I Left It on the Mountain: A Memoir by Kevin Sessums Page A

Named Desire on Broadway, which somehow led to a story about how Howard met our mutual friend Edward Albee, which led Howard, through some path known only to him, to discuss with me John Keats for the first time. Howard’s voice was more like a low hum, a thrum of sound I had to lean in to hear more clearly and then decipher. As he offered me a quick discourse on Keats I began, in that twentieth-century poet’s generosity toward the nineteenth-century one, to see my younger brother more generously as well.
    I relaxed that day in Howard’s thrum and, as I so often found myself doing, followed somehow the thread of his thoughts by sinking more deeply into my own. As he explained Keats’s “negative capability” to me I began to conjure an image of Kim as a little boy carrying his pellet gun out into our yard. Such a sight always bothered me, for I knew that what often followed was his killing the cardinal or blue jay or occasional robin that alighted above him in the grove of pine trees. I would hide wrapped in a curtain that first autumn my brother became obsessed with the killing of birds and would spy on him through the window as he took careful aim. The pinecones and straw around him on the ground had fallen from the trees, leaving the limbs bare above him, so that when the birds perched there they would stand out more starkly and would enable him to get a better shot. I’d stand at that window waiting for the moment my brother, his little cheek puffed out with a mouthful of pellets, removed one from his mouth, which allowed him to lodge the thing, lubricated with his saliva, more easily into the gun. Often he’d get the kill in one shot and the stunned creature would fall to the silent thud of its death on all that freshly fallen pine straw carpeting our country yard.
    My brother had begged my grandparents to let him take a correspondence course in taxidermy and they had relented. After he’d shoot a bird, he would bring it into the house and gently lay it on a kind of plinth-like altar he had made back in his room so that he could more easily follow the instructions from the course manual opened up beside it. I hated it with all my heart when he shot a bird. It was just more death to be dragged into our lives. But he was trying to have dominion over death. I had suddenly realized it as it all came together for me that day when Howard Moss first held forth on negative capability and John Keats, the sound of Moss’s low incessant mumbled thrum mixing with the soundless straw that broke a shot bird’s fall. Kim, so lost after our parents’ death, so alone out there in the yard, longed to find a way to preserve life. But in his longing he had to kill something to learn how to do it.
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    “You know what finally stopped me from killing those birds?” my brother asked me when I was talking with him about his taxidermy days. “I looked through the sight of that pellet gun one day and a red-winged blackbird turned and looked right back at me. It was the first time a bird had done that. I felt seen.”
    Kim and his wife had stopped in New York on their way to Maine, where he was going to check in with the Farnsworth Museum and its Wyeth Center, which had purchased a bust of Andrew Wyeth that he had sculpted. It was the only bust Wyeth had ever sat for and in his flinty way he had developed an affection for my brother and a respect for him as an artist, so much so that Wyeth had stated in his will that he would furnish the endowment to purchase the bust for the Farnsworth’s collection. Andy Wyeth had been my brother’s idol when he became interested in art after his detour into the details of taxidermy, so this was a kind of completion of a circle in his life.
    Before he headed up to Maine he wanted to see the Willem de Kooning retrospective at MoMA as well as a grouping of Cy Twombly sculptures he’d read about. My brother’s art had once been realistic. Lifelike. He had recently, though, freed