The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  One of the men said, regarding the films, “You have the equipment here to show it?” and the women’s voices in the other room rose and fell down in the kitchen, mingling with the voices of their companions in the library.

  “—but those birds, they would have been tasty, though I admit it’s sort of horrible the way you have to do them, snip their beaks off and stick them up their … oh. But they were going rancid or something—” Djuna talking, and I could tell they thought she was quite a pip.

  “I think I’d rather not,” Faw told the man.

  Djuna, again, saying, “Blanch-ailles. It’s very fast but it’s pretty hard to do, too, so Grace should get some of the credit, she’s such a dear, so how you do it is you get the flour, clean linen, the wire drying basket, and you start with the lard to melt into hot liquid in the biggest copper frying pan you can find.”

  “Is that false cypress or viburnum in the yard out front?”

  “So, on this plantation where they grow asparagus—”

  “And Neden and I were thinking about making this new one, it’s called Oriental Affairs, in which these Chinese women—”

  “Well, they don’t even have to be Chinese, they can be Vietnamese, Korean, it doesn’t matter you can’t tell the difference, tell them the copy.”

  “Well, you know you start with the advertising materials and build backwards to the product itself, of course. That’s the only way to assure profitability. And so we’ve been working on the copy, which goes something like this, goes, The pulsing heart of their sensuous, mysterious souls to each and every man with every sinewy shudder … lift their geisha skirts and squirm under—”

  “Those aren’t called skirts, they’re kimonos.” My father didn’t sound pleased with any of this talk; in his voice there was not only discomfort but (was it possible?) fear.

  “It’s true that a copper pan’ll heat faster than steel—”

  “—while silver chains and the emperor’s handcuffs clink, they drop their silken stockings, these angels of passion trained in the mysterious ways of the East, where a man’s satisfaction comes above all, in the tradition of a thousand suns.”

  “Very poetical.” And yes, I could hear Faw’s fear through the sarcasm, though I doubt any of the others could.

  “The lead female character’s name is going to be Jade. You like?”

  “—and here it was something the whatevereth?” and they were putting on their coats and saying goodnight and Berg was sent up to bed, I think, “if the real thing is your cup of hemlock, is how the bit will run it’s a little rough still but, if you want to see it all and touch it all, if wet and deep and up and down and in and out’s your thing, you’ll never know how good it is until you see the most steamy seduction scene ever filmed …” such laughter, as I myself began to sleep on the floor, and—

  Faw had never spanked me before, he did it so gently that although I cried and though it hurt I could tell his heart wasn’t in it. My cheeks showed the marks of the heat register the next morning, and I didn’t come down because I didn’t want to embarrass him. I’d burned my face through my own persistence, but didn’t want his guests to think that it was his fault in any way. They must have heard him spank me, must have heard me cry. I was ashamed.

  When I woke, Faw was sitting in his reading chair beside my bed. “Grace,” he said, “I have something I want to tell you.”

  What was he going to say? I was sure he was about to tell me that I was going to be sent away somewhere.

  “It’s difficult to be a parent. You’re too young maybe to understand that now, but someday you may understand. What I want you to know is that I’m not happy with what I did last night, and I want you to forgive your old Faw, all right?”

  His eyes were dark and tired. Of course I forgave him. I made up my mind that night to doubt everything I had heard; a dream was what I assured myself it was for years, rather than my first insight into what peculiar and possibly grotesque outposts Geiger ranged in search of its ascendancy.

  The osprey, an eaglish bird, was disesteemed by fishermen, who took it upon themselves to trap and hunt and poison it wherever it was found on the island. The osprey’s skill at fishing was well-known to its human counterparts, who viewed it as a competitive nuisance; and because the ospreys are given to cyclical behavior and return to the same nest every spring, it was quite easy for the fishermen to trap and kill them. It was a slaughter. What traps didn’t get them, what buckshot failed to down them, hard pesticides that were insinuated into the food chain did. Once large, the population of course had been all but eradicated on the island. And even though we were too young to know about these particular wars, and who was winning, who losing, at the time, the osprey nest that was perched atop the utility pole, which leaned away from the sea winds down at the farthest edge of our orchard, seemed to us a thing of rarity, a talismanic thing to marvel at.

  Marvel we did. That spring, after Desmond (I know I have thus far avoided speaking of him in detail in my almanac. The only justification I have for this is that it is difficult for me to address him as a topic, or a character, or with words. I find him elusive, because he meant so much to me) and I first spotted the nest, aloft, a vast, stable cloud of brown sticks in the sky, we kept coming back, to watch and see if its owner would return after the winter. When she turned up, we were astounded, so wide was her wingspan we dropped to our knees in the marsh hoping she wouldn’t catch sight of us. It became one of our preoccupations, to hide and watch her as she tended to her enormous home, repairing and adding to it, as she must have done every year for years, with fresh sticks, strips of bark, vines. Whatever she happened to find lying around in her landscape, discarded by us wasteful human beings, she saw as potentially useful in her endeavors. So we watched, in awe, as she knitted into her nest rope, bits of fishnet, an old shoe, half the brim of what looked to be someone’s straw hat, a rag doll and toy boat (yes, we saw her import these and fiddle them both into the weave), and who knows what else to dress out the house.

  I’d seen things dead but never killed before. It rattled me. She hatched out her brood from pinkish cinnamon, rich-red-blotched eggs, and with her mate brought plenty of slippery, death-wiggling fish back to feed her babies, whom we could hear high up on the pole. She was a crafty and able killer.

  When her young broke out of their shells we listened to them as they carried on like banshees, maybe two or three in the brood, screeching with ravenous voices when she soared in with their food, a pike, or a small bluefish ridiculously struggling in the osprey mother’s talons at the end of her blue-gray legs.

  What struck me most about being witness to the way she glided in, crooking her wings to land, and then went to work pecking the soon-stilled fish to pieces to feed it to her hatchlings, was not that the fish’s dying was horrible, or anything like that. I didn’t (wouldn’t still) philosophize about how nature giveth and taketh away and how all things eventually die so that other life can rise up, strong, to keep the stream of existence going along or any of that stuff. No, what bothered me was how ridiculous the fish looked. It displayed no dignity, it showed no knowledge of its situation, it flipped and flopped and flapped and squirmed and its tail quivered in panic. It showed no evidence of being aware that it had not the slightest chance of escape, and this was a sorry sight to witness. I prayed, with the innocent valor of youth, addressing whatever godless guardian angel looked over me, Please never let me act as pathetic as that fish. And yet at the same time I empathized with the poor beast, or tried to, and believed I was able to understand its terror. What made me feel sad was that I knew that I would behave the same way under the circumstances. I’d felt this empathy for the victim once before, at the circus at Madison Square Garden, when we saw a clown who swallowed some Mexican jumping beans and writhed in the sawdust, center-ring, until some other clowns with faces painted in expansive orange frowns and black eyes came to take him away. How he flailed his arms and whimpered! Everyone, myself included, howled with la
ughter at that clown, when we should have been revolted or at least left cold by such a stupid joke. Promises to oneself about courage are luxuries, I’ve since learned, and are often abandoned under the pressure of real terror. Still, then, my empathetic sadness must have passed because I began to giggle or cough softly at the fish, with the same nervous whimpery sounds with which I might have greeted the dead bird in the mudroom had I been the one who found it.

  Desmond turned on me. “What are you dumb or something? How would you like it if some big bird went cutting your eyes out?”

  “I’m not dumb,” I must have answered, whispering in the cover of the purple-budding bushes.

  Desmond looked at me, with eyes I’d never seen before, and said, “Sometimes I think you’re crazy, Grace, you know, sometimes I just don’t get you.”

  “I’m not dumb, and I’m not crazy.”

  “If you’re not crazy, how come Faw made us come all the way out here?”

  “But you said you liked it out here.”

  Desmond shrugged; he was picking apart a cattail head and putting its white filament feathers into the air, which gusted and puffed. He said, “I know there’s no such thing as any lights in any tree, all right?”

  Desmond never talked to me like that, and I remember my eyes getting hot, like I was going to cry. “But there is.”

  “Right, and they talk, too.”

  “They talk sort of, yes.”

  “Well, how come I can’t hear them?”

  “They don’t talk to you is all.”

  “Berg says you’re wacko. He says you think you’re that witch on that show and that you can make things disappear, but that you’re just dumb and you can’t.”

  “What does he know, he doesn’t know anything.”

  “He says he heard Mom tell Faw you’re a nut.”

  “That’s a lie,” I said, and stood up; I nearly threatened to make him disappear, to freeze him like Samantha can freeze whomever she pleases, but I knew I didn’t want to prove Berg right (or myself unable).

  Desmond grabbed me by the arm and pulled me back down. “Don’t let that bird know we’re here.”

  I then must have started to cry, because he told me, “Listen, Grace. I didn’t mean it, I don’t think you’re crazy, I believe you okay? I just don’t get it’s all, here I go up in trees all the time and I never seen no flare man.”

  “Flare man doesn’t know you is all, he knows me, he leaves you alone.”

  “Okay, okay. Stop crying, Grace.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek, and dug my fingernails into the palms of my hands, and was quiet, then asked, “You believe me?”

  He looked out toward the water, which was partly obscured by the long dune of sand.

  “You think he’ll find me out here, the flare man I mean?”

  Desmond looked up at the osprey nest; the chicks were quiet now. “Fire don’t cross water, okay. Now you can stop your crying, okay?”

  “You believe me, that they’re real.”

  Desmond shrugged. “If they come I’ll protect you, how’s that?”

  Looking back at what he said I’ve wondered whether, at some depth in his child’s mind, he didn’t foresee that afternoon—in those moments of his awe at the osprey and disgust at how the fish was killed—as the osprey launched herself off again back toward the bay to hunt once more before the light failed, that he and Berg didn’t belong up in trees, where they loved to climb, the both of them, because boys and people weren’t supposed to be up high in the air like that any more than fish were. But I know this idea of mine, this abstraction, is what Faw has always called “privileged thinking,” privileged in the sense that such thinking was only done by people who had nothing better to do with their time and themselves.

  “I’m freezing,” I said, and what happened errs into a misshapen curiosity in my memory. I was teary; I was sorry to have seen the bird murder the asinine fish, was sad to hear my brother call me crazy, was upset to have been the cause of so much disruption to my parents and Desmond, and even Berg. The fog was moving into the darkening evening, and my brother took his glove off (for an instant I flinched, thinking he was about to slap me for not completely having stopped crying) and brushed as gently as he could the tears off my cheek. I must have smiled at him, and he kissed me, on the lips, which I didn’t like very much for him to do, but with all that had been said, I knew better than to resist. He made mistakes, he touched me all over. I didn’t know what he was doing, I didn’t know what I was doing, either. My dress was being muddied, which concerned me. So small, so bare, such flesh with its ungrown and falsely promising slash, white and sad as the pike’s gills, is where Desmond tried like a tainted soldier to empower himself, impale me, be the king of the marsh. I knew what I looked like because I had looked there before; at Desmond I didn’t look. I couldn’t. Nothing was consummated, of course, nothing could possibly have happened given how young we were still; but we did hold each other, and it’s not impossible that my memory isn’t being sabotaged by sentiment, here now by this hostile teller inside me, isn’t fabricating my belief that he was weeping, too, although I have to admit to myself he might have been laughing—my theme for the story: they seem so similar at times. If he was sad, or laughing-sad, it was because he truly did think I was a nut (what kind, as they can be so beautiful—just think of the walnut’s lush ridges) or else why? He was safe from the osprey. He’d surely forgotten about death. If I could go back and make him cry I might now want him to have cried for different reasons. I’d have him cry because he couldn’t be older, be my man not my brother, be some man I never knew. Inside those tears would be a comical joy.

  He said, “Grace, don’t tell.”

  I stood up, and examined the mud on my clothes.

  “Promise?”

  I said I wouldn’t tell, and until now I haven’t.

  “Never complain, never explain,” was our father’s fondest aphorism. I never told to anyone else, nor have I ever admitted that afternoon to myself in the full richness of its injury or comedy. Maybe no one was injured. The scars I may have are scars I can live with. Maybe it was funny, in the way things that seemed so traumatic can sometimes seem funny once they’re safely confined to the past. If Berg hadn’t revealed to me, years later, that he had seen us in the marsh, there never would have been any need to explain, or feel vindictive. Vindication is never satisfying, at least to my way of thinking, though everyone around me seems to thrive on it as an addict on her drug. He hinted—as deftly as he was able (Berg in my opinion cannot count deftness as a trait)—that he felt he had come on us in the act of doing something that only he, as the eldest of us children, should even have known about. Yet there was in his voice enough self-doubt to betray to me that he didn’t know as much as he wanted me to believe. I had the presence of mind to seize on that doubt. I suppose I lied. No, I did lie. However, we were protected, Desmond and I, by my denying Berg the confirmation he so desperately seemed to want. And that was my objective.

  “Grace, you want to look at some of the stuff?” Berg would ask, and to be sure I would, because the films interested me as much as they interested him, but then I’d say, “No,” and he would go on, just like the flare man might have gone on, as if I’d just said “Sure,” and he’d take me by the hand, and we would go into the library and Berg would tell Desmond to draw the curtain and tilt a chair up under the knob of the door, and then ask, “You ready?”

  And I would be ready. And on would come the films, which we watched, Berg running the projector, one of the three of us posted as a lookout (we were able to engage in this activity only when both Mother and Djuna were away from the house), the other two absorbed by the black and white bodies without their clothes, without even bathing suits, as they stuck their tongues out and put them in each other’s mouth and in other places, and acted—“acted” is the word, and we were not convinced of the sincerity of all their panting and closed eyes and shivering and so forth—as if they were having fun. To me th
ey were like horror movies, I watched them with the same combination of enchantment and revulsion.

  “This is what you and Desmond were doing but you didn’t know how,” Berg asserted once, when our brother was not there.

  Why wouldn’t he just let me watch and see, without having to comment on everything? Here he was, doing his best to be independent, not associated with the family, and most especially with our parents, and yet what was this but an attempt to assign meanings?

  “I saw you,” and off he would go trying to trip me up into talking about it.

  Still, the unhappiness I felt at having had to dissemble, and deny to him everything about our awkward, initiatory, unresolved moment down in the marsh, only turned me away from Berg. Later, when we were in our early twenties, and Djuna threw a small party for me and my one brief husband (more later), Berg—his own tongue freed up by some family champagne (I must link Berg and champagne for some reason, in part because people seem to like Berg and like champagne, while I have all my life had an uneasy relationship with both)—turned to my Warne, and slurred some claim about, “If you want to have a really good go at it, get her out into the mud, she excels in mud, good primal wet gooey vernal mud.” It was, in a way that I probably will never be able fully to explain, a moment of Brush behavior in the extreme. Canted teeth and the ability to use them to bite at the most effective moment—yes, this was something of a Brush trait.