Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

She was silent for a moment.

“Tell me, Adelaide. I’m your brother now. Tell me why you are sad.”

“My mother wept at the wedding. She is sorry that I am moving away.”

“Not so far away,” I told her. “Just a few miles.”

“A few miles. So far. I’ve never been so far from my family.” A moment of silence. “You can’t understand how far that can be. You are never more than a foot away from your family.”

I could feel my brother’s heart beating, through the flesh that joins us. “That is not always a good thing,” I said.

“At home, I always knew what they were doing. I could hear my mother in the kitchen when I was falling asleep. I could hear my brother’s snoring from the next room. Sometimes it bothered me, but now I miss it. I could hear my sister, beside me in the bed.”

“I will do my best to snore for you, sweet sister-in-law,” I said, “if that will make you feel at home.”

“You are a sweet brother to me,” she said, her tone lighter.

I remained awake after Adelaide fell asleep, listening to the steady rhythm of her breathing and my brother’s snores. I wondered what it would be like to be so far away that I could not hear my brother’s breathing, not feel his heart beating in rhythm with mine. I could not imagine it.

The next day, before my wedding night with Sarah Ann, my brother and I drank toast after toast with people who had come to wish us well. I was not accustomed to drinking and I was drunk by the time the others left. I vaguely remember joking with Sarah Ann as I pulled her dress over her head. I remember seeing my brother grinning at her naked body. She laughed as she tossed a corner of the blanket over his face to hide his staring eyes. I pulled her onto me, driving myself into her, overcome with my own animal nature.

“Let us go to bed, my husband,” Adelaide says. The children have already gone to bed and she does not speak to me. My brother and I quarreled yesterday. He wants to buy more land and I think we already have more land than we can handle.

We began by talking about land, but in the end, it went beyond that. He had been drinking again and I lost my temper. I told him he was a fool and a parasite and he told me I was a coward. I told him that he had no soul and he told me that I had come into the world with my head tucked between his legs—that was the story our mother had always told. “Your head was between my legs when we were born, and I’ve protected you ever since,” he said. I said I would not sign my permission to buy the farm that adjoins mine, and he has not spoken to me since. He would be angry with Adelaide if she spoke to me. So she does not speak, though she acknowledges me with a glance.

Adelaide walks to the bedroom ahead of us, holding the lantern to light the way, her dress pale in the yellow light. My brother is clumsy in his drunkenness, and it is all I can do to keep us upright as he stumbles down the hallway. He curses under his breath, but he does not address me.

He is watching his wife’s hips sway as she walks ahead of us. Though she is old, though she has given birth to many children, she is still slender and lovely. Her beauty is not just a beauty of the body, but a beauty of the soul. I think about the soft touch of her hand and I know my brother is thinking about that too. But he is too old and too drunk to act on his desires.

We undress and lie down in the large bed that my brother and I built many years ago. In the dim light of the lantern, I watch Adelaide unbutton her dress and hang it from a peg on the wall. In her thin cotton chemise, she sits on the stool by the dressing table and reaches up to take the pins from her hair. Such a familiar gesture, the same since she was a young girl. Her hair, still thick and brown, tumbles down around her shoulders and she begins to brush out the tangles.

My brother is already snoring, sedated by whiskey and talk.

“Adelaide,” I whisper. “How are you tonight?”

“I am well, my brother-in-law,” she says softly. She glances at her husband. His head is thrown back; his mouth is open.

“I wrote you a poem yesterday,” I tell her. “When I was watching you peel potatoes for the stew.”

“A poem about peeling potatoes?” She laughs. “How can this be?”

“You are beautiful when you peel potatoes. The sunlight was shining on your hair and your hands were so graceful that I would rather watch you peel potatoes than see the finest dancer in New York take a turn on the dance floor.”

Every evening, when my brother is asleep, we talk like this.

“You are a foolish man, my brother-in-law.”

“I am foolish only for you.” I pat the bed beside me. “Sit here on the bed,” I say. “Let me brush your hair.” She blows out the lantern. A beam of moonlight shines through a gap between the curtains. In the moonlight, I brush her hair and whisper to her, telling her of how beautiful she is. I whisper my poetry, foolish poetry, appropriate only for the flower-scented darkness. Love poetry to my sister-in-law. Her hair is warm beneath my hands.

“Lie beside me,” I say.