The summer I was 18 and getting ready to head off to college we buried Billy Braithwaite, the son of Will Braithwaite, the same Will Braithwaite who had denied Santiago’s father a loan to keep the mills going. Pap had passed not too long before. I’m sure he would have found some irony in the situation with Santiago burying the son of the man who’d helped to kill his father; depending on which form of the legend you believed.
Billy Braithwaite was in his late 30s at the time of his death, close in age to Santiago Holmes. The two were a year apart at Berwick High School, but traveled in similar social circles due to their fathers’ respective successes. For a time they had been friends, as much as anyone was anyone else’s friend at Berwick High.
When the Holmes Mills began to fail, the friendship had died with it. Billy began to lead the jeers at Santiago from their peer group. When he was home from college, he’d make a point of driving through the cemetery with a group of his friends to taunt Santiago.
Billy followed his father into the banking business and became the youngest vice president in the history of the Berwick Savings and Loan. He became fat on success and evenings spent drinking 100-year-old scotch at the Tavern. He never married, which folks about town took as the reason for the uneasy irritability that was a dark cloud over his shoulder.
Why such a successful son of Berwick never married was a mystery to everyone, and was to remain one in perpetuity when he was found hanging from a sturdy oak behind the Tavern.
I was still young enough I didn’t understand suicide. I couldn’t understand why people wouldn’t want to be alive. I hadn’t been hurt by anything or anyone yet. I hadn’t felt the weight of life crushing my shoulders, people’s expectations, and my own hadn’t broken me.
I wasn’t an insider, or a popular kid, in high school, but I wasn’t on the outside either. I missed the cruelty of youth. A loving mother and a general sense of obliviousness protected me from many harsh truths.
I understand much better now we all have our ghosts and our burdens. Desires and needs to fit in. Events and memories we carry with us. Responsibilities. The past. The future. Chemical imbalances. Sometimes it is all too heavy. It is too much, and we have no one to turn to in our perceived shame or despair or hopelessness or need.
I thought about it once, during a darker part of my life, when I couldn’t see a way out. I was directionless and low. Everything I touched or did felt washed in blackness. It was the fear of it that stopped me. I didn’t have the courage to go through with it. Or maybe I had the courage to keep on living in the face of the blackness. The calls with my mother, and a few good friends in the City were the light I clung to.
When I was 18, I didn’t understand what any of it meant, so I took a Santiago Holmes-esque approach to the burial: everyone has their time and this was just another body. At that point, I ‘d buried quite a few townspeople; some I’d known better than others, and had developed the hard shell you needed to not feel for each dead soul.
Santiago didn’t care who was being buried, he gave the same indifference to each burial. He did care the job was done right. That made his rage at the burial of Billy Braithwaite so difficult to understand.
