2

Finn her first night sleeps hard. She has the sensation of being dragged, of friction’s warmth. She smells the pit of a horse’s mouth that’s lived years crushing grass. In waking, it’s the bivy pitched and she in it feeling dreamt, the lifetime of grass bent beneath through the night as a bed. Filmily, she recalls the girls watched as parts of the neighbor’s yard and then, when she’d cleared the car and its confines and hit the valley’s broad air, had looked for them again to make a sign of see and been seen, they were gone. In this first morning she imagines the swirl-haired one breaking a star’s hole in the sky.

Kingston, dusk bruised, stood the river’s far bank. He was joined by his sister Georgeanne, though Finn knew neither name and to call hello or how do or pleased to see you seemed, after all her quiet hours, too much. Vines ranged between them, building a leafy, curvy screen, and Finn arranged her hand, meant first for those girls, at the height of her jaw, the lobe of her ear. Brother and sister raised hands back and they all watched each other like new animals, aliens, until Georgeanne wasn’t anymore there and then neither was Finn, and finally Kingston couldn’t parse the dark. 

The morning sky is high and gray. Finn erects her stove and finds the percolator, the coffee’s end, in a slow pivot – a hillside jungled evergreen and oak and cotton, a field fit to mat for winter, glowing moss dripped off branches dryly – a spigot at the red building’s corner that when she reaches she cranks and it coughs, spits, and steadies with deep cold.
   
In the yard are the grayed tops of picnics and several overturned chairs, while the bulky rows of grape hold an old dog’s flying disc perforated by thrilled, sharp teeth; a lost canvas and turfed-through shoe; the sludge of smothered clover; a garden glove of just palm.
   
Last night we slept. Relieved by Finn’s arrival, we felt light and daring. We remembered in beds, in darks, in whispers, the farm’s once, next and then, remembered being younger but still older and out in the light of some moon doing love things and feeling fresh, what green we pressed and ground and dragged beneath us perfuming sweetly. We remembered wasps’ galls popping underfoot and the snip-song of autumns, the handkerchiefed heads out in rows to bend to pull and prune, to tie the next crop to wire, to re-guide cane from west to east or opposite, gently, with eyes and touch for juggling. The ponderosa’s fingers of pale new growth. The magnolias’ waxen blooms. Salamanders statue-standing in road. What our own farms and yards did similarly, what a universe it all made and makes still. 

Al, the youngest twin, arrives in the new light first, having seen Finn up picking, packing, un-, patting, tracking Finn’s mount of the splintered deck. I knew you’d come, Al says at Finn’s elbow as if cat or owl, a thing skilled in hunt.

Finn breathes deeper than she would’ve, her valves blur, and she chuckles, as it’s closest. She gasps, I had no idea, then regulates and asks, Are you the welcome committee? and puts out a hand, which Al takes well to snort and repeat, The welcome committee. No. I’m the first one up. And then she’s an effortless cartwheel, another, feet barely landing before gone again to air.
   
Last week Finn’s mornings meant third-story rooms, a steamy lake-city, heat waved routes, endless wilting and gridlock and blisters. Finn showered and dressed in good snaps and clean hems and hooks and cuffs to tuck in a cubby, the leg-hole of her desk, bread with etcetera packed, a carrot, a late mealy peach. She put her mouth on a shoulder to mean See you and Mine, and now that shoulder’s minus her and so is its twin, their buddy organs and limbs and head left behind.
   
Finn squints at Al, who’s practiced in mimic and squints back. Well, says Finn. Now that you’re here, she says, and ticks her chest.

Now that you’re here, says Al, and she says, The brothers say I’m better fed. Maybe if you ate, she shakes her head. She makes ticks of her own against her skull, above an ear. Maybe, she says, you’d be better.

Your brothers?

Al shakes her head. The brothers, she says. She flaps a hand impatiently, limberly, at her hip, then bursts into several more cartwheels, ending with a round-off and jumping in place. You’ll see, Al says. They’ll come. They always do. They’ve been baking, she says, and flexes her eyebrows. The welcome committee. 

The welcome committee, repeats Finn. I don’t, she says and shakes her head and stops. She feels murky, displaced, as if somewhere along the route she missed a real road, perhaps after the last diner’s bacon, and when she thought she was driving the scenic path through gold and green farmland burly with gleaming animals grazing, all the spindly ends of summer crops and the barreling runners of fall’s, really she’d entered some world parallel to the one she should occupy now, the one she’d apparently not reached, that was built in a language, and of gestures and nuances, bodies, she understood.

I’m Finn, she says, her mouth dry. She swallows poorly and coughs. She pours coffee and quickly burns, everything rushed. The flight of her is pinned beneath her skin and her hands won’t steady.

Al licks a sunburnt mouth. She’s freckles so thick they look like smeared dipping sauce forgotten. I know, Al says. We’ve known. We got the letter.

Two men begin to cross the road, and Finn watches them, their shared lengths and juts and arcs. Al sees them too and shrugs. I told you, she says.

You told me.

A little, says Al, nodding, I did. Her mouth suddenly wins her face, and Finn can’t decide where to look: at the girl’s wide grin or the men approaching, their long blurry beards and high-boned cheeks and each jaw narrow and nose thin and shoulders easy and back. One in overalls carries a basket filled with ruffled greens, and cradles something in his arm, while the other in cut-offs holds a vibrant, tall bouquet. 

The brothers, says Al, her predictive lips.

The brothers, Finn repeats. The letter, she wonders. She bites molar and releases and stills, and says, Hello.