The Machete and the Dog

I had done something to my brother. I don't even remember what. With brothers it is never the crime you remember. It is the chase.

I had offended the one just above me, and I had done the only sensible thing a smaller boy can do.

I ran.

Now, you have to understand something. He could not catch me. Not that day, not most days. There was a fence between us, and a fence is a small boy's best friend. He goes left, I go left. He fakes right, I am already gone. We could have done that all night. I was faster, I was lighter, and, I will be honest, I was enjoying myself. He was not.

So he changed the game.

He found a plank, the kind we used to pin the clothes to the fence when the laundry was drying, a length of wood in place of a clothes peg, and he threw it. And credit where it is due: he won that round. Not to hurt me. Just to move me. It landed close enough that I had to break and run somewhere new.

And somewhere new is where the trouble was waiting.

Because where I landed, there was a machete. It was sanitation Saturday, back then the whole community turned out to clean on the same morning, and the blade had been left in the bush from the yard work, waiting for exactly the wrong moment. And I picked it up.

Now the game had changed again.

I was not running anymore. I was coming.

He turned and saw me, his baby brother, holding a machete, no longer laughing, and he did the only wise thing left. He ran for his life. Round the corner. Gone.

And then, a second later, he came back around that same corner. Straight at me.

I stopped. This did not make sense. I had the machete. I remember thinking, very clearly: this man has lost his mind. I told him: don't. Do not even try it. Just run.

He was already shouting the same word at me.

Run.

Because behind him, closing fast, was a dog. A stray. It had watched two boys tear around a compound and decided the bigger one looked like lunch. My brother had rounded the corner straight into it. And in one instant we stopped being enemies and became two boys with the exact same problem.

I dropped the war.

He grabbed me as he passed. He still had his speed up, and I had gone stupid with surprise. He pulled me along with him, and we ran, the two of us, the machete forgotten, the offense forgotten, everything forgotten except the gate.

We made it. Both of us, behind the gate, chests heaving, the dog on the wrong side of it.

And then we laughed. Of course we laughed.

That is the whole story. There is no lesson in it. And I am not going to pretend that wanting to cut my brother one minute and being saved by him the next taught me something profound about family. Maybe it did. That is not why I keep it.

I keep it because that was the house. We were boys. Like, boys. We fought like we meant it and forgot it by dinner. Enemies and keepers inside the same minute, and nobody had to decide which one to be. It was just how we were made.

That is a boys' house.

God, it was fun.