A Sprawl of Brothers

Sometimes we would all be sprawled on the floor, and for once there would be no grappling and wrassling, and we would be peaceful, with legs here and arms there and one brother using another for a pillow. If you lay flat you could imagine that you were surrounded by mountains and foothills of brothers, ridges and ranges of brothers, a burly wilderness of brothers. One would twitch and the others would rustle and shuffle and then we would recompose for a while. Maybe we were watching television or listening to the murmur of uncles. Our sister would stalk through like a heron sometimes, lifting her feet gingerly. Sometimes you would doze off for a few minutes and startle awake and everything was the same except for the conversation overhead. Their legs were like logs and their arms were like branches. Here and there you could see a grumble of hair. Somewhere in the pile there might be a cousin. Sometimes the fire was lit and we would sprawl by the fire like bears. The fire would warm half a brother and then he would roll away and another brother would slide in and so on and so on. Sometimes the smaller brothers would fall asleep in the pile and our dad would eventually step in and with a mere glance part the waters and reach down like Zeus and elevate the child so gently that he never awoke until the next morning when he was startled to find himself in bed and not on the raft of his brothers.

Sometimes there would be wrestling and grappling and jockeying and edging and pinning and elbowing, and occasionally there would be fisticuffs, and mom would grow grim about the mouth, but that is not what I want to remember this morning. I want to remember when we were scattered on the floor like stalks and husks, like sticks and poles, like skitter and duff. I want to remember the indolent sandy sneakery scent of my brothers heaped around me like piers and jetties and beams. It didn’t happen that much. It needed an occasion. The cousins are visiting in flocks and gaggles. The neighbors are stopping by in sheaves and delegations. Jesus is just born and wrapped in rough cloth or just arisen and bound in the finest linen. It is a late summer afternoon and we have been at the beach all day and we are lazy and weary and salted with sand and we smell like sunlight and mustard and somewhere among us is a moist towel. One of us is telling a story and the others are half-listening and I am trying to listen but the story begins to ripple and fade, and soon we will shower, and then it will be dinner, and soon our sister will stalk through the wrack and drift of her brothers, looking silently for that wet towel, and she will snatch it suddenly like a heron snatches a minnow, the towel wriggling desperately as it is hauled to its doom, but that will not be for a while, and I have my legs flopped over one brother and my head propped against another, and somewhere in the pile a brother is telling a story about something green and liquid-fast, a fish or a car or a bird, and you would think that such seemingly slight moments as these would fade over the years, crowded and jostled as they are by facts and pain and love and loss; but your body remembers what your mind cannot. Your body forgets nothing.