The brothers’ sister and brother courted out where the two blood-brothers lived, in the country’s waist, the courting brother having learned bronze and steel and arcs and shields, then workhorses and timothy and clover and alfalfa, planting and cutting and threshing and baling, while the sister studied first the sockets and cavities and joists of the brain, how to stretch and drill and bolt them, to clean and fill them, and next the depth for bulbs and the germination of seeds, to thin sprouts down to single kings and queens. The two had their mouths in the heads of winter pints when they found each other; the bar was wood and shellacked and farty with damp wool. They traded tastes, which turned quickly to sleep and all its fiddling beneath goosey quilts and then sheets and then nothing but a wide, blinking sky, they all the while schooling and perfecting flavors and presses and rhythms. Theirs were chests as expansive for each other as any definition of outer space they’d each ever learned.
The sister and brother returned to their brothers, their towns and outskirts, brother not far from where he and the sister that cold evening met, and sister to the Mary’s, its valley in which she’d grown through skin and bones and blood to the shape and height and head she left with to meet, and then return from, and then speak of, that brother, in: My bags and A boat and A sling and The toll and A mower, A spade, I prefer, Please, Always, Look. She and her brother blackened their tongues with hours of berries. He said: I've missed you. She said: He won’t disappoint. They watched the sky turn a zoo of clouds until it honeyed with evening and the ocean air salted shapes to specs.
Quick came the wedding, right where Finn’s landed, between summer oaks in the yard’s sleek green hide, on a day of rain, the brothers remember – when Ada wants to hear, when Al or Ara ask:
Rain, breathes a brother.
It poured, nods the other.
Your mother had a tick in the morning on her spine that we all called a mole.
But it swelled through the day.
And we smacked our cheeks and had her sit.
So neat-lapped and calm.
Always.
Really, always. A patient patient.
And we monkeyed it out.
And she laughed and she clapped.
And she wet her pants!
Such happiness.
What commitment.
You could say.
And then the clouds split, as if that tick or her joy held a key.
Its perfect teeth.
Indeed.
And we all stayed out in it, our faces streaming.
Wet cats!
And your father’s mouth caught her mouth when it was told to, and filled with her sounds.
They were fish.
Geese.
Your father’s brother sang his beautiful voice.
The brothers look at each other here as if no one’s in the world but them. It was those two, and we, to watch their brother and sister marry. To watch the brothers watch each other first like they’d never seen anything like the other, astonished by such cavernous heart, what pull surfaced from beneath the skin, biding this long time to find its mate. And so, as sometimes is the case when romance strikes a first two, along come another related two to fall in love, too.
The As listen – to the brothers, sometimes to us – always the story new, the newest cells in their bodies to learn it, memorize it, repeat it from heart.
The married left for a landlocked plot to build a road, a house, a daughter, two more, and the three As lived first there, up high beneath even higher skies, in less addled land, in plains of yellowed grass and red dirt and hollyhock planted house-side. This is what Al remembers, Ara’s younger by minutes: their first driveway’s end, a long mile out, its gravelly lip hanging into poorly paved road and from there a glance back at their house risen from sage and greasewood and the pale spring pasque, aspen leaves quaking, aphids in flutters, and spears of valentine colors up the house’s bright white boards.
We don’t say she was young, much too, to have known and locked such sights in place. And we don’t mention it’s been nearly her whole life and that of her twin’s, two-thirds of Ada’s, that they’ve been here instead – in the brothers’ house and grown by them, the valley’s jungle and dew, its seasons’ abundance, all the roots’ shoulders and the furry squash stems and the broccoli trees, prunes and pears between petals, such vitamins and iron and potassium and fibers to boost the girls’ immunity to sickness, to sadness.
We only whisper, and only in our own closed quarters, behind our shut windows, far away from any screens, about the sisters’ two muscled, sunstruck parents, rolled suddenly front over end over front again, down a road and then off it into textures similar to home – the soil’s strip, the sandy loam, the sage shrubs and scrub brush and remnants of tooth and claw and bone and even a lone, blown ribbon caught on a point and bleached – before halting at last on the hood, supple parts bent and hung as terrible garlands and boughs from and between and instead of seatbelts, all the car’s glass and door and roof dented to graze them, press them, to feel and rest nearer than any rest to them.
Luckily not the girls, our many mouths say, not us, keep watch.
The girls in Ada’s care, Ada then not entirely old enough and not entirely not, left to guard her twin sisters’ sleep, their skittery lids, and to see them wake and punch and roll lips to bare tongues, widen eyes to jockey sight, Ada bent over cradles as she’d been asked while a daddy and mama drove quick to town to fill the wagon’s back with needs: grains, papers, diapers, mash, detergents, cans, tarp, seeds, all of it scattered so easily, as if never with any hope of meaning anything at all.
Then came the brothers, not called Uncle or Uncle but Brother, Brother. Who held each girl in turn to their beard smothered chests, their brother breastbones high beneath their skins and less forgiving than either parent’s, and one with a mama’s mouth and the other a daddy’s eyes and the girls all watched and still do these caves, hoping for what they’ve lost to show, to burst from a hazel bullseye or else gangplank a tongue and increase each step in weight, width, until a father or mother at last stands again before them, a ship, their very first home.
