Kara Whittenbrook is an unlikely heiress. Down-to-earth and lovably quirky, she's never fit in with the stodgy Whittenbrook clan of Connecticut. Growing up at her parents' rainforest preserve in Brazil, she has a quaintly off-beat view of life. Now her beloved parents have died in a plane crash, and Kara's learned a stunning truth.
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Ben
The day my life changed, 1977
My baby brother, Joey, was born smiling. I knew from the get-go it was just a matter of time before he died, but life is a long, slow river if you don't give up hope. The black cypress rivers of our Florida—of the real Florida, not the Mickey Mouse plastic-flamingo Florida—promise people they'll live forever. That's why so many old people move here.
Pa and me sweated it out that day, waiting for Ma to give birth at a government clinic. We stood outside in speckled pieces of oak shade under a flat-out blistering sun in the middle of the south Florida swamps, wiping cold dew on our faces as it dripped from the clinic's air conditioner. We spent the rest of our time slapping mosquitoes and dodging wasps that lived in the saw palmettos. It felt like there was nothing else around us but forest and gators. I tried not to complain, because Pa said not complaining was the cowboy way.
He'd driven Ma and me over two hundred miles due south from the beef ranch near Ocala where he worked as foreman—we lived there cheap, in a rusty double-wide dented by a tornado—just so she could get treated for free on the Seminole reservation.
Pa was half-Seminole, so he could get Ma into the clinic for nothing, even though she was white. He had his cowboy pride, and taking hand-outs from Grandpa Thocco's people was better than taking hand-outs from strangers.
Here was the crazy thing: There we were in the piss-poorest part of nowhere, where the Indians still lived in thatched huts, called chickees, and tourists still paid to watch Seminoles like Grandpa wrestle gators.
But drive northeast two hours and you could watch rockets head for the moon at Cape Canaveral. Drive southeast about an hour and you could sit on a beach in Ft. Lauderdale watching nearly naked college girls.
I was nine years old, it was 1977, and I wanted to see me some college girls in string bikinis. But I was stuck outside that clinic, with Pa.
"Look there," Pa whispered, thumbing his straw hat back from his forehead. He'd been pacing for hours. Pacing and smoking and looking at the clinic. I was glad something finally distracted him. "Yonder. At the edge of the oaks."
I squinted under my palm and saw wild horses peeking at us from behind the trees' Spanish moss. They were lean little mud-daubers, but they sniffed the air with royal attitude. "Them hosses ain't much to look at," Pa went on, "but don't you forget the sight of 'em, Ben. They're Crackers. Like us."
In our part of Florida, lots of things were called Cracker: Fried gator tail, Indian cornbread, tin-roofed houses, tough little horses, longhorn cattle, wild pigs, and kiss-my-ass poor people. It wasn't about color, and it wasn't about creed. It was about survival. Survivors were Crackers.
"Those hosses come from the old Spanish stock," Pa said. "Like Mustangs out west. There's nothing prouder or smarter or tougher on four hooves. Some of 'em even got fancy gates, like the Spanish hosses straight off ships way back, hundreds of years ago. Not many of 'em are left now. They make fine cattle ponies, and some can run like the wind. It'll be a shame if they die out."
"Let's catch us some," I whispered. Like Pa, I was keen on saving what we could be proud of.
He nodded. "When I earn up enough money to buy us a ranch, we'll get us a whole herd of Cracker horses."
That promise stuck in my mind. His dreams were mine. If he couldn't make 'em come true, I would. "We'll sure do that," I agreed. "Us and the new baby. Hope it's a boy. Or a girl who likes hosses, at least."
"Mr. Thocco," the doc called out.
Me and Pa went running. The doc stopped us at the clinic door. He was a big, chunky dude with thin, blonde hair and a raw mole on his cheek. Blonde and fair-skinned is a bad combination under the Florida sun. He wiped sweat off his face despite the air conditioner. He faked a smile at me. "Son, why don't you take a little walk while me and your daddy talk?"
I gave Pa a determined look. Cowboys didn't take walks.
"Naw," Pa said. "Ben's a man. He knows how to listen."
"All right." The government doctor didn't beat around any bushes. "Your wife's fine. But you've got yourself a baby son with a lot of medical problems."
Pa lost some color under his dusky skin. It went from oak to pine. That scared me. "What kind of problems?"
"He's got a heart condition. It'll get worse as he grows up. I'm sorry, but my best guess is he won't live more than a few years."
My knees went weak. Pa put a cigarette between his lips and lit it with a lighter shaped like a horse's head. His hand looked steady but the flame shimmied. "That the worst news?"
"No sir, I'm afraid not. Your son's…he's what we call a Down's syndrome child."
Pa pinched the cigarette between a thumb and finger. "What the hell is that?"
"He's…retarded. Feeble-minded. 'Mentally handicapped' is the polite term for it now. The retardation could be severe, or it could be mild. Either way, it's not good."
I thought my heart would stop. A retard. I knew about retards. I'd seen 'em at the shopping centers in Ocala. Retards drooled on themselves and made stupid faces. You had to work hard not to stare at them. It was rude to stare, Mama said.
But everyone knew a retard was something to hide away so normal people weren't forced to look at it. Retards weren't real people. If one was born in your family, it meant something was wrong with your whole bloodline. If you were a horse or bull, no one would want to breed their mares or cows to you, after that.
Pa slowly dropped the cigarette on the sandy ground then crushed it with the scuffed toe of his boot. "I gotta see for myself."
The doctor ushered us in. There was just a cramped front office and three little rooms off a narrow hall. A Seminole nurse with blotchy brown skin and tight black hair glared at us from a cluttered desk. After all, we were kin to a retard.
The floor was linoleum and everything smelled like cold metal and liniment. I wanted to vomit. The doc pointed toward one door. "Your wife's in there." He pointed at another door. "The baby's in there."
"Wait here," Pa told me. He headed for Ma's room with the doctor behind him.
I walked toward the second door. "Don't you go in there, boy," the nurse called. "You don't want to see that poor little ugly baby."
"He's my brother, lady, and you shut the hell up."
I'd never spoken to a woman like that, before. I'd been raised right. But I'd never been the big brother of a feeble-hearted idiot before, either. Shame and pride fought it out inside me. I started defending my baby bubba from the first, even when I wished he'd never been born. I went in his room.
He was wrapped in tight sheets inside a small metal crib with a see-through dome. An oxygen tank fed air into it, hissing like a snake. I clutched the crib's side, swallowed my bile, and slowly, squinting in fear, peered down at him.
He looked back, or tried to, as best any baby can focus.
His head was too big, and his face was flat. His eyes slanted like the eyes of a Chinese boy I'd seen at a rodeo in Tallahassee. He was scrawny. His skin had a weird blue tint.
But he wasn't ugly. He had mine and Pa's black Seminole hair. He had Ma's cute, brunette-white-girl nose. He had my serious look on his face. And he smiled. He smiled at me.
I put my forehead against the clear dome that separated him from me, and I cried. It was the first and last time I'd let him see me shed tears over him. That's when I realized: He's a Cracker horse. I have to see him as special, and that means worth saving.
Pa came in eventually, looked the baby over without a word, then finally spread one big, callused hand on the crib's dome. He put the other hand on my shoulder. I felt a tremor in it. "What d'ya think, Ben?"
"He's a Cracker," I said hoarsely. "If we don't give him a chance to prove hisself, who's gonna?"
Pa squeezed my shoulder. "Then we're agreed. Your Mama'll be proud of you. Proud of us both. She loves him."
"Then so do we," I said.
"There are places you can send this baby, Mr. Thocco," the doctor said behind us. "The state runs some institutions where he'll be cared for. There's no cost, if you put him there. Would you like to discuss a place for him to…"
"His name's Joseph," Pa said. "It was my granddaddy's name."
"A place for Joseph…"
"Joey," I said. "He's got enough to do without toting a long name. Don'cha think, Pa?"
"Joey," Pa agreed. Pa and me traded another nod. Joey would need all the help we could give him. It'd take two men and a Mama to carry Joey along. I steeled my spine. We could do it. It was the cowboy way.
The doc kept trying. "A place…"
"Yeah," Pa said. He turned to the doc with a face that could set concrete. "We call that place 'home.'"
We took Joey and Mama home to Ocala the next day. We made the best of it. And you know what? Joey was worth the best. Even though me and Joey would end up alone in the world a lot sooner than I knew. Even though finding a home for us would take more sacrifice than I realized.
I never again wished he hadn't been born.
But sometimes, I wished I hadn't.
Ben
Twenty-eight years later
"Ben, you've kept your brother alive all these years," the cardiologist said. That's amazing, considering his odds. But this time, there's nothing else you, I or medical science can do for him."
"Doc, that's not true, dammit, and you and me both know it."
The doc sighed. "Heart surgeons won't even consider a Down's syndrome patient for a transplant. Insurance companies? Forget it."
"If I could find some way to get the money—"
"It's not about money, Ben."
"Doc, everything in this world's about money, one way or the other. It's what greases the wheels. It's the system. Look, I've read that a heart transplant for my brother could cost a quarter-million. I can sell a piece of my ranch, raise that much cash—"
"It wouldn't matter if you were the richest man on the planet. Joey's not a good candidate for a transplant. It really isn't about the money."
I'm a hard ass. Hard man. They say. Pa died in a ranch accident when we were kids, then Mama when I was sixteen and Joey just seven. I had to run off to Mexico with Joey to keep him out of an institution.
We spent ten years in Mexico, and I saved enough money to come back home and buy a ranch. What I did to earn that kind of money was honest labor but an embarrassment that haunted me still. What I said about working the system? Yeah. It's all in how you play the game, and how the games play you.
Now the nest egg from Mexico was running out, time was running out, and Joey was running out. I wanted to smash the doc's window with a fist. Instead I looked out that skyscraper window over downtown Jacksonville.
Just stared east at the broad, sunny promise of the St. John's River, Florida's Mississippi, some call it. Like I might take Joey fishing in the tidal marsh one more time. Like maybe he'd die happy if he caught another flounder.
I felt like my heart was dryin' up inside me. I wished I could take it out and trade it to Joey. "How long has he got, Doc?"
"I hate to tell you this, but patients with his test results don't live more than six months to a year."
I looked out the window for a long time before I could trust myself to speak, again. The doc let me be. Finally, I said, "Joey coulda had surgery when he was a kid. His heart coulda been fixed, if it'd been diagnosed early enough." I paused, gritting my teeth. "If he hadn't been the son of poor people."
The doc sighed. "Yes, that's true. I'm sorry."
"See, Doc? It's always about money, some way or other."
"Point taken."
I faced him. "Make me a promise. Don't tell him what you just told me. I don't want him to know."
"All right, Ben. You have my word. But you need to share this diagnosis with someone you trust. Don't try to deal with it, alone."
I gave him a thin smile. "I've had a lot of practice dealing with things alone."
The doc wrote out some new prescriptions and told me to up Joey's oxygen as needed. He also slipped a pamphlet about hospice care in my hand, but I threw that in the trash on my way to the waitin' room.