The Cast Stone by Harold Johnson

there more of them?”
    â€œI’m sorry?”
    â€œIt’s okay. So what you want with Ben?”
    â€œYou know him?”
    Rosie nodded. “Oh yeah, some days I know him better than I want to.”
    â€œHe lives near here?”
    â€œRight through there.” Rosie pointed with her mouth to the beginning of the path through the trees. “Come on, I’ll take you there.” She stood up quickly. She wanted to be there when these two met.
    Ben’s son was here, her daughter would not be too far behind.

    Leroy was eleven months older than Elroy. Their mother must have been too tired to have much imagination left over when she named the second son, still angry that the myth, you can’t get pregnant when you’re breast feeding, wasn’t true. People who knew the boys occasionally mixed up which one was older, Leroy was born January tenth and Elroy celebrated his birthday a month earlier on December ninth, other people thought the boys were twins. Twelve siblings knew the boys’ correct ages, but even their mother Agnes occasionally mixed them up. She mixed up the names and ages of all of her children, and had to recite their names in chronological order to find the one she wanted. “Rudy, Barbara, Martha, Elizabeth, Leroy, Elroy, Mary, William, Jonas, Stewart, John, Peter.” Never in Agnes’s life had she blamed the church for inflicting the denial of birth control on her, and had dutifully attended, a ladder of children behind her, every Sunday.
    Tomorrow, Elroy would be in that church for the last time. Tonight he lay in his finest, white buttoned-up shirt, hands folded, head on a satin pillow, eyes closed, his long bright white hair shiny in the fluorescent light. He looked to be almost smiling. “Peaceful” people remarked when they looked into the casket. “He looks so peaceful.” It gave them comfort that Elroy’s suffering was over.
    Leroy was at the wake. He sat with his friends at a table near the exit doors of the school gymnasium, close to outside where he slipped every once in a while for a cigarette. Later in the night when the crowd thinned out he would exercise Elder’s privilege and smoke inside. It would piss Elroy off if he knew. Elroy had never smoked, probably because Leroy had started first.
    The competition between the boys had begun as soon as they laid eyes on each other. There were some here tonight who remembered when Leroy and Elroy played hockey, never on the same team, each pushing to excel over the other. If Elroy scored a goal, Leroy would be nearly manic to get one as well, skates shattering ice, driving for the net. The boys played hard, elbows and shoulder checks, and sometimes, but not often, a teammate might think that he could drop the gloves against the opposing brother, only to find that brotherhood was far more powerful than team spirit. Fight with one brother, you had to fight both, regardless of which team they were on.
    Ben sat across the gymnasium from Leroy at the same table as Rosie and Elsie and little Rachel whom Rosie had on her lap. Benji was there, not knowing what to make of the situation. This was completely foreign to him, not only that an entire community would attend a wake, but that they were all Indians, and he was half-Indian too. He didn’t know how to behave, didn’t know the protocol. This should be a solemn occasion, the death of an Elder, but people were teasing and laughing as though it were nearly a celebration. All of the stories he heard were either ribald or otherwise twisted to evoke laughter.
    There was the story of how Elroy had beaten Leroy in a poker game and went home wearing Leroy’s jacket and driving his truck. Time blended and someone else — Benji could not remember the person’s name, had trouble remembering all the names of all the people he was introduced to, all the new relatives — this someone, this relative, told of another famous poker