I suppose, all along, he was in search of the sublime. I didn’t know it at the time, I was only twelve and I didn’t understand beauty the way my brother did. In my eyes, my brother was a god; he saw the world as if he had created it. Trees were not trees, but ladders to the sky. Grass existed as carpet to safeguard our toes, rocks were the bricks lain to build the walls of our worldly home, and all of the animals were our family and friends. The river, however, was something more to him. It always had been something more. It was his escape, and in the end it was mine too.

We used to visit the river at night. The stars in the sky would reflect off her waters and for a while we would forget which way was up. We would stand barefoot and pants rolled up tight around our thighs in an infinite universe, the galaxies swallowing both our feet and psyche.

My brother called it Heaven.

“‘But if man would be alone, let him look at the stars,’” he once said. “That’s Emerson. But we aren’t alone, that’s where Emerson has it wrong. How could we possibly be alone? Look at all that space out there. The way I see it, the sky is just the plastic pulled over our glass-jar earth, and the stars are the holes God poked in it to let us breathe. Breath being wonderment, brother. It’s a metaphor.”

And we could really breathe there, in the river. The river seemed to breathe as well. Her waters were wide and deep in the summer, and as they moved along, they seemed to speak in a language our hearts desperately wanted to understand. The sunflowers listened, their heads immersed and gently jostled by her current. The bats did too, snatching mayflies off her skin. Even the train that ran alongside the opposite bank whistled to her when it passed early every morning. My brother seemed to converse with her as well, they had a relationship assembled on grounds of mutual curiosity. While he overturned rocks and collected empty snail shells in his pockets, she nibbled at his ankles and legs. Both explored their respective foreign lands.

In places, her current was strong enough to sweep us off our feet. But my brother was never afraid of being cast downriver. I think he wanted to be, in a sense. Sometimes he would lose his footing but instead of panicking, he would laugh and float downstream a little ways. He craved the deep, it was his escape. His escape from our home and, more importantly, his escape from our father.

Our father was a traditional man with traditional values. He was the pastor of the church in town. The one where old ladies and their perturbed husbands would go to sit in pews and raise their feeble hands up into the air to feel the righteousness of the words our father spoke. He stood there behind his podium with his black hair slicked back against his scalp and his shirt tucked in, his nice Bible spread out before him like a meal; you might even say he looked kind. He shook old lady hands after the service and blessed their souls like he was kind. But my brother and I knew him cowlick and bare chest.

Church was not optional. He pulled the sheets off our resting bodies as the sun pulled night off the resting land Sunday morning. He shoved Bibles under our arms and left us to clamor for our nice shoes and ties that we kept in cardboard boxes under our beds. We never ate breakfast. There was no time for breakfast. Just time for the silent ride into town in our father’s red pickup truck, the only noise being my brother and I attempting to hold our breath against the smell of sweaty leather and pomade. Our father made it a point never to say a word before his sermon those morning. I suppose he thought that even a simple “good morning” could leak Lucifer into his homily, especially one given to his sons.

We never sat in the pews with the old ladies, rather, my brother and I stood at the front doors until the piano started wailing, and then we’d slip out and around to the back the building where the wooden cross protruding from the roof of the church cast crooked shadows onto the unkempt lawn. We sat in the grass and smoked weed, watching clouds roll by and listened to mumbled “amens” from the outside of the institution that haunted our every Sunday morning. But we didn’t think ourselves unholy.

“Deism,” my brother would say, smiling, “worshipping God through the nature he created for us.”

He’d take a long drag on the blunt.

My brother was smart. He knew words like Deism and understood that our father didn’t love us. I, perhaps, was the fool for thinking parental love was unconditional, like God’s. But my brother was smart. He walked around with a rolled up newspaper in his back pocket and Ralph Waldo Emerson on his tongue. He had a look in his eyes that my father thought was mischief, but I understood it as wonder. Wonder for an existence beyond the 18 years he spent in our home. His soul traversed mountain ranges he had never seen before, all from the sanctity of the room we shared. He wrote poetry and letters and folded them into paper boats, sometimes bringing them to the river to sail them off to God’s harbor on the other side of the horizon. He had a way of explaining life so that it made sense to me, saying, “the world thus exists to the soul to satisfy the desire of beauty.” He called it the ultimate end.

Our father didn’t bother with the newspaper or romantic literature. His King James version leaked from the passages he encircled with moats of blood-red ink. He wrote his sermons at the dinner table and practiced them passionately in the bathroom mirror. My brother called him Jonathan Edwards behind his back. He feared God, and he wanted us to fear Him too. But sunsets tasted like roses to us, not blood. Rather, we learned fear from the look our father gave us when we came home at two in the morning smelling of smoke, sweat, and reverence. We stopped trying to sneak quietly out our bedroom window because somehow he always knew when we had gone. He’d be there when we came home, sitting in the chair he made himself in the corner of the living room, rocking gently in the soft light of a dying lamp, King James in his lap. He’d look up with only his eyes and would refrain from raising his head until he could see us both, standing, arms limp at side. He’d be silent.

It was the silence that scared me the most. He was, at best, unpredictable. I began to understand how heavy his hands were by the bruises he’d leave on my brother’s arms and back. He never touched me, but he couldn’t seem to keep himself from my brother. He’d always leave the door ajar when he’d summon my brother into that forbidden room at the end of the hallway. They were louder when I was younger, but my brother learned quickly to take my father’s hands with gritted teeth. I then could stop hiding in the coat closet near the door, my hands covering my ears.

My brother began wearing the black and blue with pride, like the flag of his own nation pressed into his skin. The nights after, he would lie in bed with a smile on his swollen face and softly chant, “deep calls unto deep, deep calls unto deep” over and over again until it was stained into the walls. I suppose we created our own church there, in our room, with our own righteous words.

The winters were the hardest time of the year. Nebraska air proved bitter, and it’s snow made it near impossible to journey to the river. We were trapped indoors, and besides our weekly visit downtown on Sundays, we hardly left the house. Black and blue wove days and nights together. Our father’s sermons echoed off the walls of our house and of our heads. My brother once equated his voice to a poorly played saxophone in a perpetual jazz routine, and unfortunately it wasn’t the only instrument he knew how to play. He played my brother’s ribs like the marimbas and his shoulder blades like snares. He played both of our hearts with folly, and he attempted to trap our minds within the confines scripture my brother said he didn’t truly understand.

“He’d love us if he did.”

But “love” never fell off our father’s lips, and my brother was certain that he was not a man of God, for there is not a god that doesn’t love.

We prayed for spring kneeling before the windowsill, and watching buds form on barren tree branches proved agonizing. But eventually it came, and when it did, there came a new energy inside of my brother. His dreams of exploration, maybe, had rubbed his brain raw and finally, he was going to do something about it. He began packing his bags. In a short amount of time he had filled a backpack with soda and crackers, but left enough space for tobacco paper and weed. He collected the sparse amount of money he acquired over the years in a paper bag, and found the handgun our father kept under his bed. That he put in his jean pocket, not in the pack.

When we left that night, there was no moon. My brother had planned it carefully knowing that even waning light would cast our escaping shadows from the front lawn onto our father’s face where he slept upstairs. We snuck out our window, careful not to wake the house from it’s slumber. The path to the river was dangerous and undefined, but we knew it by heart, even with a winter’s wait between our visits. My brother didn’t speak as we walked, and I thought it was odd that he had nothing to say. He couldn’t even look me in the eyes, and kept a steady pace ahead of me so that I was only forced to stare at his back. Somber nights called for earnest journey, I suppose. I didn’t raise my voice.

By the time we had arrived, the river had already morphed into its galaxy stream. We rolled our pants quickly and tied our shoes together by their strings, draping them around our necks. The water was cold, and we jumped from sandbar to sandbar with haste, creating chaos among the cosmos. My brother was in a hurry to get to the opposite bank. It was almost two in the morning, and when I heard the train holler from around the bend, furor gripped my stomach. We were not simply going to float downstream.

Every morning, when the train neared the river, it slowed down as to not disturb the rhythm of her nature. It reduced to a pace lazy enough that we might be able to jump onto it without getting hurt. My brother knew that because he had been studying it for years, every night we visited the river. He’d count box cars as it passed. As soon as we reached the bank we began running, unconcerned for our barefeet. It wasn’t long before the train overtook us, beating our backs with wind and permeating our heads with grinding gears. My brother pulled me along, deciding on a red car that trudged along not far ahead. The train slowed and we could see that it’s inside was black. That’s how we knew it was good. No light meant no company, and trains were better traveled without another. My brother tugged my shoulder so that my head was close to his.

“Remember,” he said through nervous breath, “if you are ever alone, look at the stars.”

I nodded.

We ran.

We came alongside it and I felt my brother’s grasp on my arm. At once, he pulled me up off of my feet and tossed me straight into the car the same way fall wind tosses frail leaves. I didn’t realize that I had made it in until my head hit the wooden floorboards. The backpack landed a second later with a thump before my eyes. I sat up, scrambled to the edge, and leaned out. I saw my brother still running alongside the car, arm stretching but not quite reaching.

I held out my own hand and I swear, for an instant, our fingers touched. Then the train jolted forward with some new surge of energy and whatever connection we might have had was lost. He stopped running.

I might have shouted, I can’t remember, but I do remember watching his shadow fade into the distance. As he grew smaller and smaller, I saw that with one hand he reached into his pocket and pulled the gun he put there before we left. He held it limp at his side, and that was the last time I saw my brother.

The train turned behind a corner and his shadow dissolved into applauding tree branches. I don’t know if I yelled or cried, in fact, I don’t know if I fully understood the gravity of what had just occurred. When I pulled my head back into the car and crashed into the cold, metal wall behind me, I couldn’t breathe. I gasped, but my lungs couldn’t seem to let the air go. In desperation, I began to repeat to myself, “deep calls unto deep, deep calls unto deep. Oh God, deep calls unto deep.”

And God let me breathe.