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

himself from the strict boundaries of sculpting busts and begun to move in a more abstract direction, using found objects and utilizing collage in his art. Twombly now inspired Kim as much as Wyeth once had.
    The galleries opened and we headed upstairs. On one of the upper floors we turned a corner together and I saw my brother stop in awe to find the Twombly sculptures suddenly before him instead of his having to study them in photographs. “You can’t get the feel of it, the scale, without seeing the real things,” he said, a reverence in his voice he usually saved for church, for my brother is also a religious man. Born again, he’d claim. Kim is comfortable talking about God’s grace in a way I feel a bit awkward being around. And yet I often feel the need to broach the subject with Kim as a way of justifying myself to him.
    One Twombly sculpture’s worn patina reminded me of the wooden crucifix—an altarpiece—from the 1840s that I had bought at a flea market the weekend before. I had responded to the crucifix’s own sculptural qualities, not its religious ones. The long, thin Christ figure no longer had its arms and had been worn to a soft tannish hue that animal hides often have. There were grooves carved in its sides where Christ’s ribs would have been. The only color was the faintest bit of pink in two of the grooves to symbolize the blood of his wounds. The long, thin, worn figure had been in a booth filled with religious relics, but I was drawn immediately to it alone and had picked it up. It had fit perfectly atop my forearm as I had stood staring at it for several minutes, unable to put it down. It was from a Catholic church in the Philippines, I was told by the booth’s purveyor, yet it felt as if it had always belonged to me.
    I mentioned all this to my brother, whose brow furrowed a bit as he looked more closely at the Twombly. I knew that familiar furrow. Kim was disguising it as an appreciation of Twombly, but it was the furrow that creased his brow when he prepared himself for another of my justifications.
    “I then went across the street from the flea market to an antique store to pick up a vase I’d bought,” I continued, following him as he studied more of the Twomblys. “I go there a lot. The woman who runs it and I are kind of friendly with each other without really knowing one another. I told her about the armless Christ figure and she asked, ‘Are you a believer in Jesus?’
    “‘Yes. I believe there was such a person,’ I said.
    “Her whole demeanor changed,” I told my brother. “She grew stern. ‘But do you believe he rose from the dead?’ she asked me.
    “‘I’m not so sure,’ I told her.”
    My brother sighed.
    I found an odd satisfaction in the sound of my brother’s troubled sigh, which was so like that sigh my father could make at my presence. It was one of the ways Kim resembled my father without even knowing it. I continued. “‘It’s a historical fact,’ she said, pointing her finger in my face.”
    I then abruptly pointed my own finger in my brother’s face to demonstrate how adamant the woman had been, but he just as abruptly pushed it away to get a closer look at the most elongated of the Twombly sculptures.
    “‘He rose from the dead,’ she wouldn’t let up.” I wouldn’t let up either and followed my brother to the next Twombly. “‘There’s no denying it. It’s a historical fact,’ she kept saying as if that were all the argument she needed to make. But when I got home I couldn’t get our conversation out of my mind. So I went back.”
    “Oh, brother,” my brother said.
    “When I walked back in the store she wouldn’t look at me. But I told her I came back to tell her what bothered me about her making the resurrection simply a historical fact was that she took something wondrous and made it dry and commonplace. I told her that, yes, I had my doubts about it. But without doubt one doesn’t have faith. Faith without doubt is really