Free Ghost Dance by Carole Maso Page A

miniature jellies, tiny liquor bottles, air sickness bags, and numerous pamphlets for Fletcher. Fletcher took my grandfather’s hand. “She’s coming!” he gasped. The wheels came down. They took a deep breath and watched her land.
    A most unlikely line will come into my head when the cockroaches gather force around the toaster or a new hairline crack appears in the plaster of my tiny, crumbling New York apartment. This is when I need Fletcher most: when an anonymous sigh, as loud as if it were my own, floats in on the breeze through an open window or a car screeches to a sudden stop, when I must face the dark water at the bottom of the kettle. Then the first sentence of a speech my brother gave at a rally here in New York returns to me. “It is no secret,” he says, his voice like a trumpet, “that, with every breath, we are taking toxins into our bodies; it is no secret,” he says, “that we and everything we love will die from it if we don’t do something now.”
    My brother still believed in change then. The quality of his voice, the conviction of his meter, his simple faith prod me on when I am in trouble. Fletcher always believed that we might live in a different way and, judging from his voice as he spoke in the afternoon light to a crowd of thousands that had gathered in New York’s Central Park for Earth Day, I think the dream must have seemed attainable to him, still within his reach. His voice does not falter; it does not back away.
    “Look,” he said, “even here in our largest city, the earth is more eloquent than I,” and he pointed to the various trees and named them, the hardy wild-flowers, the wonderful rock formations. I looked to my mother, who sat on one side of me, and then to my father, who was on the other side. I looked back at Fletcher. In his adultness I could see the little boy I had grown up with. I could see what propelled his words, gave them their shape and color and momentum this day. It was the blueness of the lake, it was the woods around our house that early on he had learned he could not do without.
    His voice had the clarity and depth of the lake itself. Had I been up closer, I would have been able to see that lake still sparkling in his blue eyes. There was no dispelling that first childhood notion of beauty; it persisted, against all odds, like the wildflowers around the band shell, it lived, like the city trees girdled in cement. It lived. That tiny lake, not more than a mile wide, had played a big part in shaping my brother’s life, the contours of his concerns. We both doted on it, we both loved it, but it spoke to Fletcher.
    A large and various crowd of people had assembled under the dark, dramatic sky. In the distance we could see the shape of the city, all rising geometry, all energy, quilted, patterned; beautiful, too, not as hard to love as one might have thought, abstractly, from a greater distance. It was beauty that united us that day. Though vastly different, we were all lovers of beauty, lovers of a place called home. An old woman several rows in front of me, trembling with emotion, began to cry. “This is our home,” Fletcher said, “and despite everything we must find the way to love it, to care for it, to claim it for ourselves—to make it ours.”
    A division of the Gray Panthers, an activist group of senior citizens, had been bussed in from Long Island. They wore straw hats and buttons that said, “Save our children.” Students, professors, lawyers, doctors, housewives, children—all these people were there. Way, way in the back, the Socialists from Union City stood on tiptoe with the curious dog walkers and the joggers who had just finished their runs. I imagine they could only see a blur where my brother stood, but they could easily hear his voice, hooked to an elaborate sound system, and they were compelled to stay.
    There was a confidence in Fletcher’s voice that made it irresistible, I think, to those less sure, to those whose convictions