Mercury

“Try and pick it up,” my older brother Wendel said. “It’s kind of tricky.” He opened a glass vial and dumped the silver substance on the desk in our bedroom. I was immediately entranced watching it skitter around. I moved my microscope off to the side.

“Piece of cake,” I told him, reaching for it.

I didn’t know at the time that it was mercury, and who knows how long I would have chased it around that old wooden desk trying to capture it between my thumb and forefinger before Wendel took pity on me.

He put his hand on my shoulder and said, “Don’t sweat it if you can’t do it, little brother. It’s almost impossible.”

“Why’s that?” I asked, not ready to give up, chasing it some more.

“He smiled and swiped it off the desk into his hand. “It’s a special kind of substance called mercury. It’s kind of magic.”

My eyes went wide. I’d heard about mercury before, it was the stuff in the thermometers. I’d just never seen it live. “Really?”

“Yeah.” He grinned and dropped the glob into my hand. It shown brightly like a new coin in the warm sun and felt cold to the touch. I thought it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen.

I picked up my magnifying glass and examined the shimmering blob closely. It was otherworldly it was so smooth. I rocked it back and forth in my palm, entranced with how it held together without falling apart.

I set my magnifying glass down and poured the magical substance from one hand to the next. “Where’d you get it?”

He looked quickly away and then looked back to me, a sure sign he either was going to lie or had done something wrong. Or both. Turned out to be the latter.

“I stole it from Dad,” he said, shrugging his muscular shoulders.

“Oh, shit.” Now I was worried. Our father was a big man both in size and stature in our little town of Orchard Lake. We were located an hour's drive west of Minneapolis, and he was the local doctor or GP general practitioner as the title was back then, and people loved him. He was tall and handsome, quick with a joke, and had a smile that, as they say, could ‘light up a room.’ He also was a closet drinker and mean when he was drunk, and my brother and I would swear even to this day, that he was certainly a man who didn’t like his two sons very much.

We lived with just him and our housekeeper, Mrs. Benson. Mom had been dead for three years. I was nine and Wendel was twelve when he stole the mercury.

“I’m going to teach the bastard a lesson,” he told me.

I immediately got nervous and gave the mercury to him. “Why? What’s up?” I whispered. I looked over my shoulder, convinced our dad had suddenly teleported from his office in the clinic downtown to where we were on the second floor of our home out in the country three miles away from him. I breathed a sigh of relief when I saw that he hadn’t.

The old man didn’t like me much, mainly because I was a little slow in school. Mentally deficient is probably what the school counselor Mrs. Swenson said behind my back. It was the fifties and because of Dad’s sterling reputation in the community, it meant that no matter what was wrong with me, no one was ever going to say it out loud, especially when I was around. I’m sure she assumed my lack of brain power was a result of the car accident that had killed Mom and left me with a severe concussion. She may have been right. All I know is that I spent weeks in recovery in the big hospital in Minneapolis. When I was released, Mom had already been buried. As I said, it was three years ago and I was six at the time. I’ll never forget on the way home from the hospital Dad was driving a big, new Cadillac. “Best forget about her and move on, Elroy. Time waits for no one.”

Can you imagine saying something like that to a six-year-old? When I got older, I realized that Dad was probably just trying to compensate for such a horrific loss. Which made sense, especially if that was the case. But the more I thought about it, I had to wonder: did he really miss her that much? Anyway, the first part of his statement I understood (although try as I might, I couldn’t forget Mom), and the second part, all these years later, I’m still not sure what he was getting at.

The only good thing that came out of Mom’s death is that Wendel and I became close. Up until then, he ignored me. He was an athletic prodigy and excellent in baseball, football, and basketball. He was always either captain of whatever game was being played, or chosen first. And, because sports were a big deal in our small town, he was very popular.

Dad was incredibly proud of him. “You’ll go far someday, son. You’ve got what it takes to be a success. Just stick with it.” If I heard that phrase once growing up, I heard it a thousand times. After a while I just ignored it. Tried to, anyway. Honestly, it kind of hurt because, believe me, he never said anything like that to me.

I was the exact opposite. I couldn’t throw or catch a ball to save my life. We found out soon after I started school that my vision wasn’t the best either, and that may have contributed to my being uncoordinated. But that was okay. I got brand new, black-framed, glasses with thick lenses and discovered the joy of reading. Armed with them and my new library card I began to take out books and read them on a regular basis. A whole new world opened up for me. I liked Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain the best.

I also liked the outdoors and discovered a love for nature. Just a few months before she died, Mom bought me a microscope which I loved but didn’t use much because my vision was so bad. After I started school and they told me about my vision, boy, I’ll tell you, other than Wendel and books, that microscope became my best friend. I used it all the time, looking at the veins in leaves, tiny pieces of bark, and tiny organisms in a drop of pond water. It was all very cool. Sometimes I wished Mom was still around so she could see how much I liked that microscope she’d given me. Maybe she’s looking down from somewhere and can see. I hope so anyway. If she is, “Mom, thanks a lot!”

So, in one sense, after Mom died I was okay. I had my hobbies and that was good. But then there was school. Dad had it in for me because I wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack. At least that’s what my first-grade teacher said to him. “He’s just not focusing,” is what I remember Miss Erickson telling my dad during one of those parent-teacher meetings. “He’s just sort of wiggly.”

I remember my ears turning red. Dad’s, too. Afterward, driving home, he smacked me across the back of my head and said, “Shape up, Elroy. Or there’ll be hell to pay.”

I tried to shape up. I really did, but to no avail. By the time I was nine and in the fourth grade, I had a reputation as slow. My fourth-grade teacher Mr. Axelrod had me sit in the back of the class with the admonishment to “Just be quiet” which I tried to do with varying degrees of success. I passed the time counting the minutes on the clock until school was out and I could go home to my microscope and my books.

I suppose I could kind of understand the old man having it in for me, but after Mom died, he started getting on Wendel’s case, too. I have no idea why, but my guess is that after Mom passed away and Dad started dating a young nurse at the hospital, he just decided that being a father was too much trouble. He hired a nice elderly lady, Mrs. Benson, to keep house and cook meals while he started spending more and more time away from home. In a way, he just kind of gave up on being a father.

So, by the time the third anniversary of Mom’s car accident rolled around, we’d pretty much gotten used to the old man not being home very often, and certainly when he was not being much of a father. Truth be told, that might have been okay. After all, Mrs. Benson was a nice lady. She came in the morning and did the cleaning and cooking, along with supervising our chores and making sure we didn’t get into trouble.

But there was something in my older brother that to this day I still admire. He had a great sense of right and wrong. He mentioned it again that day when he showed me the mercury.

“It’s just not fair that he treats you so badly,” he said. He turned to me as we both watched the mercury shimmering in its plastic container on the desk in the sunlight. He had a weird tone to his voice. I sensed danger and looked at him. There was a faraway look in his eye.

“I don’t mind,” I told him.

“It’s still not right.”

Wendel swirled the vial some more. I had to admit the mercury was beautiful to look at. We both watched it for a minute and then he said, completely out of the blue. “I think I’m going to kill him.”

“What?” I yelled. I was caught completely off guard. “What? Kill who?” My mind raced. Why would my brother, the straight-laced athletic star of Orchard Lake want to kill someone? Especially, our father?

Wendell set the vial down on the desk and looked out the window. He grinned. The Cadillac had just pulled into the driveway. Dad was home. I may have been slow, but I wasn’t an idiot.

“Oh,” I said.

“Yeah.” Wendel nodded. He picked up the vial and swirled it some more. I’d never seen him look so menacing. “The old man’s going down.”

Can you imagine hearing something like that? Here was my brother, someone I admired one-hundred percent. Someone who was my best (and only) friend in the whole world. Someone who stuck up for me whenever other kids (or even our father) gave me a hard time. In my world, he was Mr. Always Do the Right Thing. And here he was sitting in our bedroom holding a vial of mercury saying, that he was going to use it to kill our father. Well, it gave me pause, I have to say.

He grinned at me. “Don’t worry about it.” Then he put his arm around me shoulder. “Let’s go wash our hands,” he said. “This stuff’s pretty toxic.”

I’ll cut to the chase right away. He didn’t. He did not kill our father. Dad did it all on his own. The weekend after our discussion upstairs in the bedroom, while Wendel was still playing about how he was going to murder our father, dear old dad drove off country road 10 on the way home from his girlfriend the nurse’s house. He was drunk at the time and smashed that Cadillac into a tree about a mile from our home. I guess he died instantly.

Mrs. Benson and her husband, Gabe, a kind-hearted retired mailman, became our legal guardians and life went on.

Wendel and I don’t talk about it much: his desire to kill Dad. I mean what’s there to say? Wendel thinks the old man deserved it and maybe he did. But I come down on the side of the argument that maybe Dad would have changed. Maybe as he got older he would have seen the fallacy of his ways and quit drinking and started to pay more attention to me and Wendell. That would have been nice and something positive to hope for. At least as far as I was concerned.

But we’ll never know, will we? Nope. In a way, that’s too bad. Dad missed out on a lot. When he was a senior in high school, Wendel took the football team to state in the Class A championship and threw a pass for the winning touchdown. Do you know who caught it? Me. Yeah, I started running for exercise after Dad died and found I had a talent for it. I was pretty fast. Wendel coached me. I tried out for the varsity football team as a freshman and made it. Wendel said my speed was like that Greek guy Mercury. Maybe. All I know is that when he threw that ball to me and I outran the defender and scored that touchdown, it was pretty exciting.

Too bad Dad missed it.