It was no secret, Kyrie’s uncle, Fitzroy, was sick and everybody talked about it. He had been doing well for himself; he was a concierge at a fancy hotel in Charleston before he became really pale and people had to ask if he was ok. He didn’t know how it happened. One day he was alright, excellent actually, and then he came down with the flu and things never got better. He saw a doctor, but in those days, the early nineties, there were basically palliative measures for a man of his means. When he came back to Bluffton, SC, Fitzroy was ready to die from AIDS, and if not for the love of his mother, the man may have been homeless.
Kyrie had heard his father talk about his uncle, his own brother, how he deserved what happened to him because of his choices, his nasty choices that real men didn’t bother with. Everyone in the family who still lived in Bluffton felt the same way and they would have been happier if Kyrie’s uncle hadn’t contacted them at all and just gone off and died. But after he lost his job, he couldn’t afford the life he had made for himself and he needed help, help that only his mother was willing to offer.
In the last days of Fitzroy, in the humid heat of the summer, Kyrie would sneak away from the small and simple home he shared with his family; mother and father and three sisters; and he would make his way through the ancient, creeping oaks with branches like individual trees that meet at the root, and stringy leaves that wafted in the faint breeze, to his grandmother’s house where he would climb through the open window to find his uncle. His grandmother’s house was just like his, like a white cardboard box on stilts, and Kyrie had learned how to maneuver his way up the back of the house and through the window.
Kyrie had always really liked his uncle, even if it seemed that few others in Bluffton did. His mother liked him and Kyrie remembered seeing the two of them talking and laughing together at family functions before he left Bluffton, when his uncle was still a healthy and handsome man. When he was younger, and his mother would take him to Charleston in the summertime, they would always visit his uncle and sit in his small, but impressive house that was walking distance from the bustle of the tourist spots. They would drink sweet tea and Kyrie loved the sweets his uncle would have and then they would walk around the history of the downtown area. Kyrie liked the round church and all of the graveyards. They should have been spooky, but to him, they just felt cozy.
After Fitzroy came back to Bluffton, when Kyrie was ten years old, he was forbidden from seeing his uncle. His father was convinced that he would catch faggot and then AIDS just being around him, so he wasn’t allowed at his grandmother’s house. Instead, he had to sneak there and climb through her back window, because the neighbors would have seen him going through the front door and that would have gotten back his father.
Usually, he would find his uncle sleeping, and it was the only time that Kyrie figured he wasn’t in pain. He was gaunt, his head was like a skull with the skin stretched tight around it and he had sores that darkened his body like big pools of black ink in the ashen brown of his skin. Fitzroy would smile at Kyrie when he saw him climb through the window, and then Kyrie would find his grandmother and she would give him food that he could feed his uncle. She was happy to keep Kyrie’s secret from his father. She and her late husband had raised their children in a Christian household, the laws of which were the basis for her family’s rejection of Kyrie’s uncle, but she could never imagine that the God she loved and prayed to would want her to hate and abandon her own son. She had always wanted to protect him against criticism from everyone; family members, neighbors, even the pastor of the local church.
On what turned out to be the last day of Fitzroy in his physical body on Earth, Kyrie had climbed through the open window and after he had kissed him grandmother, he sat next to his uncle, slowly feeding him the meal that his grandmother had prepared. Everything was mush, it was easier to swallow and digest that way, and Fitzroy was grateful because he found it painful to move his jaw. But he didn’t really have an appetite, he had only tried to eat because of Kyrie’s enthusiasm to be helpful to him. Fitzroy had always wanted the love and acceptance of his brother, and he assumed that the care of his son, of Kyrie, was the universe giving him just that, and in the moment he was content to die. It would not happen until late in the night, just before the day changed over, and only after Kyrie had curled up on the bed next to him and fallen asleep.
Fitzroy filled the hours with talk, as Kyrie listened with rapt attention, enacting the roller coaster of emotions that the talk inspired, and it was truly a wonderful way to spend his last day on this mortal coil.
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