Men We Reaped Read Online Free PDF

between clusters of friends and cousins from DeLisle and Pass Christian. He stood at the edges of pictures with a haul of big purple and green and gold beads on his neck, the kind that in normal years we’d plead the loudest for the pleasure of wearing them for a day. My sisters and I huddled under umbrellas and watched the press of people, ignoring the beads that pelted our umbrellas. My three-year-old nephew, newly bereft of his uncle and bewildered by thecrowds, hugged my leg. My grief was so great that the sheen of the colorful beads, the music sounding from the floats, the celebration of that day felt like a farce, an insult.
    On the day of the first Mardi Gras parade I’d attended after my brother’s death, the reality of Joshua’s absence was soothed by Rog, his easy smile, his arm casually slung over my or my sisters’ shoulders.
Hey
, he said. And then:
What’s up
?
    I don’t know why Rog returned home to Mississippi for good in 2002. I imagine that it was because he was homesick, because he missed the narrow, tree-shaded streets of Pass Christian, the houses scattered here and there and set twelve feet high on stilts to protect them from hurricane storm surges. Maybe he missed Mrs. P., his sisters Rhea and Danielle, his large extended family scattered through Pass Christian and DeLisle, his cousins. Many leave and never come back, lured away by cities where it’s easier to find working-class jobs, where opportunity comes easier because those in power are less bound by the culture of the South. But I’ve heard others who’ve moved away from Mississippi, worked for five, ten years of their adult lives somewhere else, and then moved back to Mississippi say: “You always come back. You always come back home.”
    The first night Charine and I went to Rog’s house in that summer of 2004 after Aldon and I had driven home from Michigan, we didn’t go inside. Our cars lined the street, bumper to bumper. The night swooped down in great black swaths,and the streetlights, spaced far apart, shone weakly. Insects swarmed in foggy clouds around the bulbs, dimming them even further so we were dusky shadows, and the stars dozed on the dome of the sky like larger, distant insects.
    The boys turned the bass up on their car stereos, and we sat on their trunks and hoods, jiggling to the beat, sweating and sliding down the steel. Rog walked over, his Budweiser in one hand, his other hand waving like a child’s slicing through the air out of the passenger window of a car.
    â€œAaaaawwww,” he said, and hugged all three of us at once: me, Tasha, my brother’s last girlfriend, and Charine. He half jumped on us. Threw his leg over the row of our feet.
    We laughed. We could laugh when we were drunk, even in the summer of 2004.
    â€œAll right, Rog,” Charine said. “You messing up.”
    â€œWhat you mean?” Rog slid off us.
    â€œI can’t feel the trunk with you jumping like that. Do you feel that?” she asked me.
    â€œLike a massage, huh, Charine?” Rog said, and then he passed her a black cigar. “You dead wild.”
    He danced around the trunk that night, kept us laughing. His smile never disappeared from his narrow face. While the other boys huddled in their cars, having conversations that we were not privy to, discussing and doing things I had no idea they did, Rog held court with us. He reminded me of Aldon. There was something gentle about him, considerate. Good. The first time he saw one of his younger cousins experimenting with weed in the street in front of his house, he stopped him. He walked up to him in the dark and said, “Aw, man, what you doing? You need to cut that out. Youdon’t need to be fucking with it like that.” His younger cousin laughed; he was already high.
    We partied inside the house only once that summer. We were drinking. We were always drinking. But it was a different kind of drinking from what