Brother Love

Willis and Marion 1945

I was born at home.

The reason?

My father had written our local hospital

prior to the event

asking for a guarantee,

should he put his wife in their care,

that the child they brought home

would for certain be

theirs.

The hospital never answered,

which he took to mean

they could offer

no guarantee.

(Later, I found very different meaning

in that silence.

I was certain the hospital

thought my father

a kook.)

I was born at home.

Whether my mother had any say in the matter,

I never thought to ask.

She was so in love with babies—

carrying them,

birthing them,

nursing them,

keeping them babies—

that I assumed she would happily

have given birth to me

behind a rock.

So, on November 20, 1938,

I arrived in the early morning

in my parents’ bedroom

in our tiny mill house.

My big brother,

exactly two years,

two weeks

and two days old, 

woke that propitious morning—

propitious for me, anyway—

climbed out of his bed,

and ran to see his mommy.

Had he heard sounds

in the early morning dark?

Had he run to her for comfort

or, perhaps, to comfort her?

His side of the story is lost

to two-year-old memory.

But on my first morning in the world,

he burst into our parents’ bedroom

and threw himself onto the bed

to greet his mommy.

Our father,

ever the protector of the wife

he called “Mommy,” too,

snatched his son up

and

spanked

him.

My mother told me this years later,

face and voice revealing nothing

of what she felt to see

her eager little boy

spanked.

But my heart ached for the brother

whose mother loved babies.

And I, so perfectly a baby.

The brother,

whose father loved the mother,

needed, desired, adored

the mother.

Only her.

Another story from my mother,

also about my brother,

two years,

two weeks

and two days older than I.

In the days and months that followed my arrival,

if Will was anywhere near my crib

when I began to cry

(and in that four-room house,

where else could he be?),

Daddy

spanked

him

again.

No wonder, I thought. No wonder!

And the big brother, who,

from my earliest memory,

stood far off,

cool,

disdainful,

contemptuous,

suddenly came clear.