I stood in the front yard of the parish church on Ballinlough Road in Cork and watched the three of them in their dinner jackets making jokes and flipping their cigarette butts off the tombstones of the former pastors, making little explosions of bright ash, and I thought Nothing good can come from this.The three included my brother Michael, who was about to get married; his rich commodity trading friend Armitage, who was to be the best man; and their mutual cocaine-dealing friend Raoul from Chicago. All three of them were bored. The boredom was intensified by the cocaine binge that had started three days earlier with Raoul walking out the Dublin Airport Customs gate pulling a baggie chock full of pink flake from his shirt pocket saying Hey look! I made it through customs and no one spotted this! Raoul had always been known more for his ruthlessness than his intelligence and my brother had rushed up to him to give him a friendly full embrace that included clapping a firm hand over his mouth. But he was happy that that his best friend had arrived safely and he was glad to see Raoul as well.The three of them were bored standing in front of those graves, but they had to be there because my brother was marrying an Irish teenager whose strict Catholic patriarchal father had insisted that if the marriage was to take place at all, the full proprieties Would Be Observed. Michael had choked and squirmed on this like an eel with a hook down its throat, but the father-in-law was a good and firm man who loved his daughter and who had my brothers number and felt that the marriage would need all the tail wind it could get to even have a chance of working.It was only a few minutes later that we were called into the sacristy. My brother seemed rather composed for a man who had not seen the inside of a church for 30 years. I had pushed him as hard as I could to go to Confession; even Raoul the Puerto Rican drug dealer recognized the necessity of this. But my brother kept putting it off and now we could hear the organist warming up with Raindrops Keep Falling on my Head. The only one of us who seemed nervous and shaky was the best man Armitage, who as a Protestant had never been inside a Catholic Church at all. From the way he talked, I knew that he was desperately trying to remember every detail of the misinformation he had heard about Catholic church services over the years so that he could act appropriately during mass. I tried to reassure him that he was not required to kneel nor was he to partake in the Eucharist. Think of yourself as a guest I said. But this didnt console him because my brothers mischievous Irish brothers-in-law had spent most of the prior evening telling him that the best man was the utter keystone of any Catholic wedding.We heard the organist give the prearranged signal that told us it was time to report. The priest shook our hands before we filed out, including my brothers in a friendly but tense way that almost but not quite covered up the mutual hatred they felt towards each other. (Only five days earlier the priest had called my brother a rake and my brother had responded by calling the priest a son of a bitch.) Too bad about Confession I thought and at that very moment my brother, who was behind me, turned to the priest and said Can I have a quick word with you? The priest gave him an odd but shrewd look and took him back into the sacristy.How long could this Confession take? My brother had at one time been the biggest cocaine dealer on Rush Street in Chicago, beating his competition by providing nose candy in fashionable little glass jars. While he had never actually killed anybody, his body guards had broken the arms of a few competitors before observing the local custom of dropping them off at the Cabrini-Green Housing Projects. My brother was a legend, a large sinner famous for both his crazy escapades and the size of his libido. He had not only slept with uncountable numbers of women, he had slept with almost every woman I had ever introduced him to, especially the ones that I had explicitly warned about him in advance. He had a charm and a way with him that always seemed to trump anything I could say about his reputation.He had since cleaned up his act to the extent of giving up the drug trade and he no longer carried a Browning 9 millimeter automatic with a 12 round clip under his left armpit. He had further managed to find a job as a commodity trader at a major Irish bank in relatively drug free 1988 Dublin. But his new job and his new digs barely seemed to cramp his style. At his bachelor party just two days earlier, where he had rented out an entire basement lounge on Leeson Street in Dublin for the night; while his more proletarian Irish friends were giggling through a ten way split of a tiny hashish fortified cigarette in the Gents, my brother and his two Chicago pals were doing 18 inch lines of white power in the Ladies. I looked at my watch wondering how long his Homeric Confession might take.It took all of five minutes. Then my brother and the shaken looking priest emerged. We took our places and the wedding began.The bride was beautiful and she was obviously hopelessly in love. I believed that he loved her too, in his own way. He had certainly made significant motions toward becoming a family man, even without the unique event of his Confession. But his answer to my question as to why he was getting married in Ireland in the first place kept popping into my mind. Because Ireland is the only place that one can find a virgin any more he had said and the old rake had been dead serious.The wedding itself had everything, including a moment of high comedy when Armitage decided that he was going to genuflect just like everyone else. He noticed that people genuflected as they passed the altar on the way up and back from doing their readings. Why they did this he could not fathom. Then the obvious answer struck him. They must be bowing to the papist priest. Not to be outdone, when it came time for him to go up for his reading he threw himself down on his knees before the priest, head bowed, and stayed that way presumably to show his sincerity. The priest eventually had to give him a firm but friendly nudge with his toe and Armitage arose, looking very pleased with himself.The reception was a long, wild, happy, drunken, Irish affair with my brother even violating Irish tradition by having an open bar for an hour and a half before the cash bar opened up. At the end of the reception, the men hoisted the bride and groom on their shoulders and carried them from the hall to their car. I had never seen my brother so happy and I thought that if this man wants to make a new start, this was a most auspicious way to do it.Twenty years later I found myself in a cheap hotel in the Temple Bar section of Dublin placing on the dresser a twelve inch square wooden cube containing the ashes of my brother Michael. I had carried him with me all the way from Chicago. I was heading to Cork to bury him in the presence of the wife and children he had abandoned 12 years earlier and upon whom he had never laid eyes again. I was going out to get some dinner and of course I was leaving him in the room. But just leaving him on the dresser like an old hat seemed somehow cold. So I dug out a photo of him from a happier time playing with his toddler daughter and leaned it up against the box.His wife had kicked him out after an exciting but tough six years of marriage. She had since gotten an annulment and had remarried about a year before my brother had died. She had gotten the annulment several years after he had disappeared and I had helped her do it. His wild philandering was well known in his circle in Ireland by the time his wife had finally had enough. But she had told me that having a witness from his side of the fence as it were would go a long way towards convincing the ecclesiastical authorities in Ireland. I was happy to do this; my brother had abruptly disappeared from my life as well as hers and before he had vanished he told me that he was never going to cooperate with her in getting a divorce, since she needed to be punished for kicking him out. As he explained it to me, her actions had not been warranted, because it is the nature of a man to sleep with as many women as he could (unlike the nature of a woman, which was to be chaste.) And he believed that he had in fact tried very hard anyway. He had been telling me the truth at his reception when he said that his cheating days were over. When I found him with a strange woman when he came to Chicago on a business trip about a year later, he had explained that he was earnestly resolved never to cheat on his wife unless he was on my side of the Atlantic Ocean. Over time, I saw the Boundaries of Continence shrink as my traveling brother left Europe (but not Africa), the UK and Ireland in the exclusion zone; then Western Europe, the UK, and Ireland; then the UK and Ireland; then Ireland outside of the Pale; then Dublin when the wife was in town, and finally he religiously avoided adultery when his wife was physically in the same building that he was (usually). This part of the story seemed to tickle the ecclesiastical judge who deposed me in Chicago, if his giggling was anything to go by. My ex-sister-in-law ended up with an annulment in record time.Some years later, with my brother still missing, my sister-in-law decided to remarry and I discovered that the family patriarch had been so impressed by my changing sides during the annulment that he insisted that I be invited to the wedding.My brothers son and daughter were now older teenagers and at one point during the reception when the black beer had been flowing for a long while each one in their turn took me aside and asked me to try to find their father. I had looked for him on and off over the years. He moved around frequently and I always seemed to find myself about a year behind him. It had always been frustrating, and I had long since stopped looking. But having been cornered by his children while I was under the influence, I vowed to find him and I went to work on it as soon as I returned to the States.I found a live email address for him in two months. He was hiding in Australia. Since he had disappeared, he had lived in a number of cities in the US and Europe and had run through several fortunes. He reported that he was living in Sydney, that he had a small but profitable business, that he had given up drugs and alcohol, and that he was comfortable. It took me several patient weeks to get a phone number and an address out of him. I avoided at all times any discussion on why he had gone and anything that looked like a judgment of his activities. In a couple of months, he agreed to get into contact with some of our relatives. In a couple more months, to my delight, he agreed to allow me to broker contact with his children. I was very pleased with myself and I fantasized that I was truly helping him get a new start and that I might be able to help him make things right after so many years.I awoke from the fantasy one lazy Sunday afternoon to a phone call from a New York City detective. My brother had died suddenly in an explosion of blood from the bursting of the veins in his esophagus brought about by a liver destroyed by two bottles of spirits a day, every day, for 12 years.He had landed in New York (without telling me) broke and sick, staying with an old friend and going through half-hearted motions of looking for work. Being the only relative who could possibly afford a funeral, I became the next of kin. The New York police wanted to reassure themselves by doing an autopsy and I agreed. But then there seemed no point to have a wake for him in Chicago. Raoul was in prison, Armitage had become very civilized and most of the rest of his friends and our relatives were either scattered or not interested. So I had my brother cremated and sent to me. In typical fashion, he got lost in the mail for a few weeks and missed his own funeral mass. But when he finally arrived, I called the Irish and asked them if they would like me to bury him in Cork where his children were. They agreed and I soon found myself traveling with the horrible little box.Horrible, yes, but strangely intimate as well. From being larger than life this box of crumbs made him seem smaller than death. As we traveled together, in a sense I had his undivided attention or rather maybe I had my own as I reflected about him. I realized that as sad and angry as I was at the loss and the waste, I had always admired his largeness and presence in spite of or even because of how generally wicked he had been. My own virtue, such as it was, was pale milk next to the consuming fire of his self destruction. If a friend of mine and I got him to give us a ride someplace, and my brother handed an Uzi in a paper bag to my friend to stash under the back seat just as a police car pulled behind us, I was titillated by the act and my brothers laughter and the terror of my friend. If my brother got mediocre, plainly-dressed me into the London Limelight by claiming that I was his body guard and if I sat in a shadow and watched him work his way through the crowd and half a dozen bottles of Dom Perignon, it was like having my safe little virtuous cake and eating it too. I didnt want him to hurt himself, I certainly didnt want him to abuse himself to death, but oh, the stories! Did this make me complicit? It was more complicated than that. I realized sitting in that Dublin hotel and again when I put his urn on the Formica table in front of me for the train ride to Cork that I had defined myself relative to him pretty much all of my life. He was the most interesting person I had ever met. And while I may have wanted him to reform; perhaps profoundly wanted him to reform and become a responsible husband and parent, there was a part of me that needed him to be the way that he was. In being both judgmental and admiring I certainly hadnt helped him and perhaps I had made things much worse.In Cork, the Irish rallied around to throw an old fashioned funeral, with lots of people at the mass, at the cemetery, and at the pub. My brother had betrayed many of these people, some profoundly, but in death they seemed to have more or less forgiven him. The stories they told that night over the pints! And yet I didnt get the impression that any of this was really for him. Of course, any wake is as much for the mourners as it is for the guest of honor. But as the evening wore on, it became more and more apparent that they had actually done all of this for me, for the strange guy from the States who was crazy enough to schlep his dead brother all the way to Cork from Chicago. I was touched. But I was also ashamed of myself. For all I could see were the ashes.