Talking among Ourselves

In the rental cottage it comes to me, how the four lives of myself and my brothers crisscross like tracer bullets, and how, from a distance maybe, if you had the right kind of glasses, there might appear to be a target we all were aiming at beyond that black escutcheon of cloud above Santa Rosa Bay as we lie on the deck drinking tequila and beer, our voices growing vague and weary as time passes, until one of us tells a story, more cordial than precise, about climbing to the top of a magnolia tree when he was ten, and falling. The rest of us draw closer around the story as we watch the great flattened cloud raise its triangular wing over the state of Florida. It is night in Florida and, in a moment, one of us will recall the time our father, in a gray suit, climbed the steps of an airliner bound for Paris and never came back. And one, or another, will tell how our mother, more blond and beautiful than ever that spring, said, You must now be soldiers, and screamed and screamed. We will each raise his head and stare for a moment through the lighted gate of the living room window at our wives, who are putting away the last of the supper dishes, speaking among themselves with the easy familiarity of women whose husbands are brothers. And one of us will begin so sing an old song that our father sang before he went away, a song about losing a fair woman in the foggy, foggy dew, and as the late chill rises off the bay we will all remember what we thought as children when we heard him sing of the woman who was not, and never could have been, our mother and of how an emptiness, bigger than an ocean, opened inside us, and one of us will say, I think it is going to rain, and we will get up and go back inside.