The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  Berg drifted, like a jellyfish can drift in rough waters, but was pulled in by Faw from time to time. Over the protests of his teachers at school, Faw, having decided it was time that his eldest son learn something about how the world of commerce worked, announced that he was taking the boy with him to an island in the French West Indies. There he had intentions of setting up an extension of a foundation he had established the year before in Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream Trust. We none of us understood what such a project was about, nor what this Gulf Stream Trust meant, nor even where Cape Hatteras was, and when he attempted to explain any of it to us it only became more obscure. There was something about a church for drowned sailors; there was something about Columbus’s younger brother Bartholomew; there was something about a woman there who burned a candle every night, all night, for the mariners who had been lost at sea—something about how their souls could find their way across the dark waters to the safety of the church by following the candle that she’d set in the window on the side of a hill. It all sounded very mysterious (churches and Faw, as I have said, never having been attractive to one another).

  No matter what it was, both Desmond and I knew we were supposed to be envious of Berg’s new status. Mother did not throw a tantrum. She was anything but hysterical. She even seemed to be in favor of the idea, a response that surprised each of us in different ways. Speaking for myself, I was confused at first. Here Faw was doing something with Berg that he’d never done with Mother, taking his son to this exotic faraway place—it seemed unfair. Her disaffection quelled quickly what jealousy I might have felt on her behalf, and began to make me think once more about what I’d noticed that first day in her. Of course, I thought. She must want him out of here, and then she could do whatever pleased her. Was she that far gone? I wondered. Looking back, I think that she was. I also think she sensed I was watching her.

  When they returned, Berg more than ever distanced himself from us younger children; the transition in him that Faw had been looking to midwife seemed to have been accomplished. While the dinner at which Berg was invited by Faw to sit with the guests, while Desmond and I were told to play as quietly as possible in my room, may have signaled that this reconstruction of the hierarchy—as I viewed it—was to be permanent, later events would show that it would not turn out as my father might have hoped.

  Things were changing, nevertheless, in the family. Balances were being reweighed and reweighted. Faw and Berg were over there, Desmond and I over here, Mother elsewhere on her own. And what was I to think, before the guests arrived, when I overheard Faw telling Desmond, “Your brother is a scrapper, a fighter, and that’s going to stand him in good stead, you understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You could use a little more of that yourself, you know.”

  “I’ll try,” said Desmond, and though I couldn’t see him, given I was eavesdropping per my dearest habit at the time, it was easy to envision him standing directly before Faw with his hands in his pockets and eyes averted downward.

  “Don’t try, do.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “That’s my guy.”

  Stuart Hollander, the Pannett and Neden of Pannett & Neden who were producers, Beth and Howard Silliman, the del Russes who were the Geiger accountants—as best Djuna, with my help, could make out from Faw’s hand written notes about the dinner, which he scribbled out at her behest—all were showing up within the hour, and here were two dozen woodcocks skewered on their own beaks, heads skinned, trussed like intricate kites with baking string, standing in almost military order on the butcher block counter in the kitchen and turning before Djuna’s and my eyes from the sallow gray and pink a healthy woodcock ought to show, to the green tinge of the fungus that grew up the stone wall at the easternmost corner of the yard opposite the orchard. Djuna looked out the window at the wall. Her face was blank; the game was tainted. How was it possible? They’d been shot that very week (it was Saturday) in the Yucatan or in Guadalajara or maybe it was just Louisiana—wherever Faw and Berg had been on their way back up from the Gulf Stream trip, what did it matter now, now that they were removed from the container? It was nice, Djuna noted, that the guide had taken it upon himself to pluck the birds before he packed them in ice for the flight home. She had seen the pictures of him, a handsome, flat-nosed cowboy of sorts standing next to my father who had his arm draped on Berg’s nearest shoulder, each not smiling but rather looking straight into the camera even as they cast their shadows across the fan of game birds laid out on a palm-frond bed at their feet—were there palm trees in Louisiana?

  Well, but we were trailing off and away, as sometimes we did, Djuna and I, and especially in moments such as these, where two elements were coming together, forming a trap really—our island world, and the outside world of the people who were coming, whose names were written out on that piece of stationery, a beautiful heavy paper Faw favored for the letterheads of his companies, people all so important to him, we knew, important enough that they could not be sacrificed to putrid woodcocks. Djuna went to Mrs. Beeton’s book, her touchstone in running the house. In Mrs. Beeton the woodcock was shown in French as Bécasse, which naturally put me in mind of the question, “But why?”… but instead of saying anything about Bécasse, I said, “Where is Mom? She’d know what to do,” not meaning to slight Djuna, more meaning to redress my shaky image of Mother.

  I don’t remember what Djuna said, because the time was passing, frittering along with no concern for her or Mother or me or tainted woodcock or the brilliant green watercress that floated in the sink. She sighed a deep-throated sigh and it surprised her; that was the same tone she heard herself make whenever she was losing her cool (like when she made us turn off the box); then, one by one at first and soon in an armload she gathered the woodcocks and stuffed them into the trash compactor that Ernest had installed, and once they were all in the compactor—they filled it to the edge of the plastic liner—she pushed the drawer back into the counter, locked it, and pressed the black, rectangular button and listened to the birds being crushed together inside, their tainted skin and beaks and bones gliding into a single pulp. She pulled the compactor drawer out, lifted the remains, carried with some difficulty the bundle across the kitchen, and deposited them outside in the can.

  Another low groan as she looked at her hands, which were wetted with thin blood. Across the floor ran a feathery pink line of the same blood. She would have to go after that in the morning. There was no time to get out the mop and pail. She washed her hands then remembered how sticky blood could be when it dried, and how the flies would be attracted so she thought better of it and told me to take a linen hand towel—knowing how wrong it was to use such a fine piece of fabric, but what else could she do, there simply wasn’t the time to mop—and I dropped the linen on the tail end of the trail of red. “Women should endeavor to cultivate that tact and forbearance without which no man can hope to succeed in his career,” the venerable Mrs. Beeton observed. And I, who attempted to follow some avenue toward my father’s success by skating the rag under my hands along that bloody browning-pink line which crossed the kitchen floor, wonder now what kind of life Mrs. Beeton must have had, what kind of father, what kind of mother. Would she have been able to see a flare man in a tree in England? Would the tact she spoke of have extended to getting down on the linoleum and on all fours wiping up woodcock juice? Her answer, of course, would be that she wouldn’t have spilled the blood in the first place.

  And Djuna read again from Household Management, “Accidents, of course, will happen (though but rarely with proper precautions)”—what a scolding old bitch she was this Mrs. Beeton—“… fires will not always burn, nor ovens bake as they should …the gas supply may be deficient; but if the joint, or whatever it may be, cannot be done to time, do not send it up only partially cooked, but ask for a little grace …”

  For what? We laughed together, Djuna first, then I, and it seemed so funny to us (even though it wasn’t terribly) that I had
to run to another room and stamp my feet hard in order to stop. I looked out the window, to see that there were shadows cast by headlights from the side driveway. One of the guests was arriving, the headlights of a car reflected off the trees and trellises near the kitchen’s windows. Djuna had dropped Mrs. Beeton to the floor where the veneer of fowl blood—I hadn’t been very thorough in my clean-up—had already begun to dry into patterns; oh, indeed, we could already hear the flies pinging against the screen. She went to the wall phone and dialed the number in a kind of haze of defeat mixed with efficiency. Ernest was going to bring over some whitebait. Faw might wonder where his woodcock had gone off to, but the evening would not be lost.

  Berg came down into the kitchen, uncomfortable in his tie and blazer, but rather superior for his social apotheosis.

  “I see you’ve got your shirt on with buttons forward, Berg,” Djuna noted. “Isn’t that against your principles?”

  “Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn’t

  “Faw had to tie his tie for him,” I added, recognizing this as one of the few moments in my life when the tables were turned, and I could tease him without fear of immediate retribution.

  Djuna said, “I guess it would be a little hard to wear a tie with the shirt on backwards.”

  “Faw wanted me to tell you they’re here.” Then he left.

  I eavesdropped dinner, with Desmond at my side. The voices we could not connect with names. I heard Mother speak only to offer more wine, or to call Djuna out from the kitchen; her exclusion from the conversation was of her own choosing, but was not, so far as I could make out from my blind on the landing at the head of the stairs, contested by her guests, whose attentions were directed toward my father.

  Where sphinxes hide their riddles in silence, we mortals bury ours in banter. No need to recount the laughter and the jokes. Desmond, bored, tiptoed from our listening perch to my room, and climbed out into his treehouse to do whatever it is he liked to do out there. I overheard, after he left, two remarkable things, though—one, that in honor of their first trip as men together, Faw had decided to make Berg a vice-president of this Gulf Stream Trust thing, “to get his feet wet,” and Berg, over Mother’s mild protest, got to sample his first sip of champagne, having been toasted by Pannett, or Neden, or one of them. The second matter was much more perplexing, because Berg’s premature blossoming as the newest flower in the Geiger festoon I saw for the parental bribe that it was. Faw was buying some good behavior, was what I figured—after all, what good would Berg be to some French woman in some church on an island in the Caribbean?

  “What woman, what island are you talking about?” Neden asked. They all seemed drunk except for my father. He may or may not have explained to them what he was referring to, but the matter was so bizarre that I misunderstood along with the others. Whoever this woman was and whatever was her role in the Gulf Stream deal, were matters either so very tangential to what my father’s colleagues were doing in their roles as employees of the Sprawl that none of them wanted to commit a faux pas by expressing some opinion that would show them to be ignorant of the inner workings of Geiger, or else it was more complex than heads pleasantly adrift in champagne and wine would want to bother to comprehend. Everyone, it seemed, wanted instead to crowd in with his own bizarrerie.

  The hour had gotten late. Dinner had been cleared, Desmond had come in from outside because it had gotten too cold and went off to bed. Mother with Beth Silliman and Mrs. del Russe retired to the kitchen, where Djuna’d built her evening fire. The Sillimans were going to sleep in the guest room downstairs, and the others were staying at the Peconic Lodge over on the island. This was a weekend for these city people, in other words; it was going to be a late night.

  Faw and the men—Berg still among them—isolated themselves in the library, and I listened in through a heat register, pressing my cheek to the warmth of the grate, and straining to hear what was being said. They were discussing Gulf Stream in entirely different tones than what I’d discerned at dinner.

  “But what are the parameters on setting up a not-for-profit on foreign soil, Chas? I didn’t think you could do that,” Pannett, I believe it was Pannett, quietly said. The smoke of their cigarettes staled the heat that rose through the register. A decanter clinked against a glass, I could smell cognac. It made my tongue dry, and the back of my throat mildly sore.

  “No, you can’t,” Faw answered.

  “Well, how does it work?”

  “We operate out of Cape Hatteras, there is a storefront church we have there—actual church, the pastor we’ve got there is something like a Unitarian I think, so far not much in the way of membership about five families. But the church is nondenominational—”

  “You mean its denomination is money, right?” cracked Neden.

  And another voice came in, which was del Russe’s. “What we’re doing here is that 2 or 3 percent of profits of all the Geiger entities will be donated every year to this trust. It is an amount that is not unusual and should not attract any attention if someone is going over the books. Given that all the Geiger companies are incorporated in the state where the individual technology for each of the products is located, where the manufacturing base, or the warehousing base, say, is set up—like say, we make those baseball bats and the bowling pins with the limited edition star signatures out of upstate New York ash, turn them up there, both those companies are New York limiteds, you see—there’s no reason for anyone to connect them, the different companies, in any kind of interstate way, you see. It’s all generally legal.”

  “Generally?” again Neden pushed.

  “The purpose of the trust is to honor mariners who have given their lives in the interest of trade. And about this I’m very serious”—I wanted to laugh, knowing my father as I did, but no one laughed, and I bit my cheek—“and so as one of the outreach programs, missionary program as it were, we’re raising money to salvage derelict vessels from the Gulf Stream gyre and save them for posterity, making a contribution to the history of international trade—because these guys were the pioneers.”

  Pannett—or Neden, their guttural voices were similar, then did laugh, and said, “Absurd.”

  “You know what the Gulf Stream gyre is?”

  “Can we skip ahead to the point?”

  Faw continued, “The Gulf Stream gyre is a circle—”

  “This whole thing sounds more like circles than points—”

  “—or it’s shaped more like the outer edge of an amoeba or a squash or something, but it’s a circular path in which the warm water runs through the cold water of the Atlantic. It’s about a ten-month loop. You with me? So, historically, ships get hit by high water and storm-waves that are created by when this cold and warm encounter each other, just like storm systems when you get a thunderstorm because of cold air and warm air colliding. And the crew abandons ship, sometimes they’re saved, as often not. It’s all in the history books. And your ship is abandoned, and as often as not if her frame and skin are of decent wood and she’s still basically seaworthy, she’ll get pulled into the Gulf current and go round and round—”

  “A ghost ship, now, the point being?”

  “So, well, we’ve got this church, set up as a 501(c)(3) I think is what del Russe and his friends over at Internal Revenue call it, but whatever, it’s a nonprofit tax-exempt foundation, and in the charter there is this outreach program so that part of the organization’s activities can run something like this. To salvage antique vessels of historical importance from the Gulf Stream gyre, bring them if possible to port, dry dock, and undertake to restore, and then donate to museums to the Christian memory of the international community of pioneers and traders.”

  “Unutterably ridiculous, all right?”

  Someone else said, “For the final time, the point is what?”

  “We have an account in North Carolina, we have an account in the French West Indies, like I was saying earlier, the latter takes project outreach program funds from the donations given
to the former—goes through our banks in the city—the latter moves monies into another account overseas, you know, like for holding funds for capital as investment against the costs of repair, which would of course have to be contracted out to specialists in the field, of which I have already put one or two on the payroll, a couple of brothers who live in Gustavia, on St. Barthélemy—Bartholomew being a mariner, by the way, and so that’s quite an appropriate place I think to carry on this work, since from what I’ve been able to learn, he was a religious man as well as a man given to discovery. And to the point, these repairs will or will not eventually come to pass, you with me?”

  When he asked, no one said a word, and when he went on to say it didn’t really matter that they understood, I detected a tone of satisfaction in his voice; it was as if he had led them point by point through something with the hope that they wouldn’t get it. He asked del Russe, who had been quiet, a question, which I didn’t quite hear, and all of a sudden del Russe seemed to speak the same foreign language. He assured my father and the others that while over the years the trust would no doubt amass a surplus, quite a large surplus, and would therefore have to show activity, they, Geiger, had set up a religious objects company whose factory in Canton had a guaranteed client in the Gulf Stream Trust—the “Make Mary” ornament, for instance, a figurine of Mother Mary with a smiling face, could be produced in hundreds of thousands of units for not much money and sold at inflated prices to the church, which would then “distribute them.”

  “In other words, bury them in the sand,” said Faw.

  “Well, that would be one way to distribute them, to be sure. You could also give them away to believers if you had the time and inclination, though that might not be as efficient.”

  “All right, then,” my father finished.

  Whether no one spoke then because they all suddenly understood and had nothing to say, or they failed to speak because they wouldn’t know what to ask, I couldn’t surmise, but a silence ensued. Faw went on, and as he did, the hush downstairs developed further, and what I heard became fragmented, and engulfed, as it were, in the drift of my sleepiness, which was encouraged by the heat pouring upward from the register, and the lateness of the hour, so that what I am able to remember has become a palimpsest. I record it, because in retrospect, all of what has now come to pass was mentioned—if only in some kind of embryonic way—that night, and it has been the link in my memory that led me to St. Barts, so many years later, quite a different island than it must have been back then during the night of the Shelter Island dinner. What linked, what added up to something that made a one and one makes two kind of sense? In some way, all of it; in some way, none. That church mirage of Faw’s and the peculiar films that Pannett and Neden went on to discuss, however, I can now see as smoke and fire.