The Almanac Branch

by Bradford Morrow

  He was looking for the scarf because she, my poor unwitting mother, asked him to look for it, and already he was so trapped by his conviction that he wanted to have her for himself that he would do whatever she wanted. How these desires revolve in such ironies. Segredo’s needs and his wants slowly rotated around his belief that this Erin Brush, while married, and while a mother, was not an impossible target; and yet, despite his pluck, he was never, in my eyes, a strong person—emotionally—not then, at least. Strength as often as not can work against you, and so in Segredo’s case I believe it was in part his emotional weaknesses that drew my mother into his orbit as much as anything. With him, she could have her own way, for once, or so she thought, and in that capacity he was dutiful, whether he meant to be or not.

  If she had shown the courage to pack her belongings and leave her family on her own, I can’t help but think my brother Desmond might be alive today. The same thought has bothered her over the years, I know because she’s confessed as much to me. We’ve each seen our way clear to forgiving her—indeed, Desmond’s responsibility in his own demise has not escaped us—but forgiveness never quite washes anger out of all the dark corners where anger clings. It may not be fair to feel anger toward her after having truly forgiven her, but I don’t see by what standards I’m supposed to be fair at all times. Fairness is part of my nature, it is deep in my skin and bones; it’s not in my blood, though. Blood judges for itself.

  I knew he was in the house that day because I noticed, from the library window, his car parked down the road, and from a second window saw him walk—a large, heavy (strong, not fat) man dressed in loose, drab clothes, a red and black kerchief tied around his neck—across the field toward our house. There was an air about him, maybe it was the deliberate way his hard shoes came down to meet the dirt as he moved toward the house, maybe it was the way he kept his eye averted and his bark-brown hair toppled down over his forehead, that informed me not to run out and say hello. He seemed grim, determined, powerful. I heard him stamp the dust off his boots on the mat on the porch, and stayed where I was. Their voices, rather more quiet than they should have been if nothing was afoot, I strained to hear; soon enough their intentions became clear. He brought a few suitcases up from the cellar, and he commented, I heard him, on the mildew that had begun to destroy them. “Set them out in the sun for a while and let them bake it out,” is what he told her they would have to do with the luggage sometime. He was trying so hard to make it sound as if nothing of any special importance was going on, so soft and purposely even was his voice, and so ostensibly simple were his concerns. The suitcases, the damp basement, the mildew. It was all so easy, in fact, that despite my pounding heart I failed to notice when it was they had gone upstairs, to the master bedroom—I forget what I was watching on the box, but for all my natural inclination to know everything I wasn’t supposed to know, see things that were supposed to be hidden from my sight, I continued to stay where I was, agitated, but not inclined to move upstairs after them. Djuna was over in Orient, her day off. Faw was, as I’ve said, in New York. Berg was down at the shore shooting his air gun into the crests of waves, like the Irish king Cuchulain that Mother said was one of her distant relatives, using pellets instead of a sword to slay his phantom sea monsters. It was all so well planned, plotted, timed, in other words, Segredo’s arrival, the discreet placement of the car in which they would leave, the way in which they carried on inside the house, I can still scarcely believe it. Time has its way of piling experience on experience, crowding data and whim and reaction and error and triumph together, one upon the other, so that whatever a person experiences in a life will someday, like the person himself, be buried under by his own myriad gestures (this is, by the way, why suicide out of shame never makes sense)—but, sometimes, to this day, I have wondered how she could look back to that August evening, and stand herself.

  You see, just as Desmond is the hitch that prevents me from being able to care much about what was behind her desire to get out of her arrangement with Faw and the rest of us—I have no quarrel, objectively, with her desire to make a different life for herself—Desmond was the hitch in her own considerations. He was supposed to be off with Berg by the sea, or in with me watching television. He could generally be counted on to be with either of his siblings. But this once he’d gone out on his own, climbed into the cherry tree. Of course, when he fell, Erin and Segredo’s plan collapsed. It occurs to me, did someone break the law? Did Desmond have a clear moment, before he slipped off his branch, in which his eyes met those of this man who was about to betray him? If I knew more about the Bible, would I find it ironic that the last person Desmond would ever see in his life shared the name of an angel? Or would I merely find it disgusting? The television was projecting its beehive of grays and blacks and rollicking with its canned laughter—once I knew what was happening in the house, in a general sense, I’d turned up the volume. A helplessness spread through me like megrim apricot. I wonder, since none of us heard him fall, how long my poor brother was out there all alone before my mother’s screams carried across the yard? I wonder how she managed to put me to bed that night, knowing what she knew, knowing that by waiting until morning to tell me she would save her Gabriel from the implication of any guilt. I wonder why it is that canned laughter sounds like the chatter of waves when they come into a rocky beach. The waves made the most sultry and unique sounds that night. They laughed and laughed. I believe to this day they were laughing at my mother. That is what I’d like to continue to believe, because otherwise they were surely laughing at me, who stayed in the library, watching whatever was on the screen, as I pressed my hands tightly to my ears.

  Grace wasn’t alone in observing the beginnings of Erin’s revolt. She saw it all starting to fall to pieces not because she had nothing better to do with her time, but because it seemed to her that more and more Erin had something better to do with hers. The way Erin had left it to Djuna to get Desmond and Grace dressed and fed and out of the house to school on time. The way she told Djuna that if Berg was being tiresome she ought to take it up with his father the next time he was in from the city. The way she said she had to run some errands, and she might be late for dinner. The way when Charles did come on Saturday afternoon to be with the family, some of Erin’s stories about what happened during the week didn’t align with what Djuna herself had thought happened.

  For a while she was content to believe that what she thought had happened maybe hadn’t. Djuna didn’t for the life of her want to confirm what she’d begun to suspect, but as she well knew, what one wants and what one gets can be different as cats and canaries. This is what she told her uncle Webster—in whom she’d confided her fears, since Webster never bothered to gossip, indeed hardly ever condescended to talk with anyone besides himself. Webster told his niece he thought Mrs. Brush might have the right to feel lonely.

  “Why is it married women are always the ones who’ve got the right to feel lonely?”

  To that, Webster had no reply, and went back to his task of cleaning with a penny nail the facets of the fanciful white pavilion carved into the bowl of his meerschaum pipe.

  A friend in town clued Djuna in as to what Erin Brush was up to that October, but Djuna felt it only right to say, “Jenny, mind your own business, would you?” And Jenny said something honorable like, “I’m only trying to protect you, Djuna,” and Djuna thanked her, and changed the subject to weather, or sea conditions, or old Ann Nicholls and how silly she was to keep up the pretense of going to town in her buggy drawn by draft horses.

  But, no, it was no good, this business of Mrs. Brush being away from Scrub Farm so often and for such long stretches of time. The farm had come a long way since they had moved in, but still much remained to be done before the winter set in—the orchard was a mess, half the furniture in the house needed fixing still, or replacing, the carriage house roof leaked though Djuna didn’t feel it was her place to complain and rather than tell Mr. Brush she simply set out pans and pots o
n the second floor of the little stone building whenever the rain swept through—and with Charles away six of seven days a week, and now with Erin out and about as she saw fit during her husband’s absence, much fell to Djuna’s lot to keep up with.

  Sometimes she only wished she didn’t like the children so much. She didn’t care about the money, nor about the prospect of having to go back to living on Web’s charity. Historically, Djuna harbored no great love of children. Kids, she had always averred, were put on earth to destroy things, heirlooms and valuable things primarily. They were here to produce unbearable noises and make unreasonable requests, and register complaints that later in their lives, if they had the misfortune of remembering how they had acted, they would recognize as callow and selfish. They were unformed, as a rule, they were manipulative.

  Djuna had discussed her fears with Uncle Webster the day she had him drive her over from Dering Harbor, and had warned him not to be upset with her if she declined to take the Brush job because she thought the children were unmanageable. When they were returning from the Merriam place out at the end of Ram, Webster could hardly believe his ears.

  “The poor girl suffers from they don’t know what, has these horrid bouts … persecuted by the pain of it, from what her mother was saying.” Her uncle was glad, if astounded, for he himself had no interest in going back to work and, at any rate, hadn’t he already carried a better part of the load since Hibby died and he’d offered to let Djuna come over and live with him? He thought, Hibby would have a coronary listening to her go on about this Grace and Desmond, if he hadn’t already had a coronary; he was buried right near where he was born, over in Orient, but they might just as easily have thrown him out into the harbor for what good he’d bothered to make of his time on earth, was what Webster believed. Social security only goes so far, and therefore Djuna’s moving out to live with these Brush people made a lot of sense to him, who would be partial beneficiary of her labor.

  “Besides,” he told Djuna, “being around children will keep you young where hanging out with an old fossil like me will just wrinkle you faster than a soak in tea.”

  Djuna was in her late forties, and yet it was true she looked to Grace like a grandmother, given how silver her hair was, how heavy were her wrists and ankles, and with what warm, old, knowing blue-gray eyes she looked at the girl. All her dresses were old, too, and the prints she wrapped about her stout middle were invariable in their large floral patterns and fifties colors—once vivid, now rather faint with hundreds of washings. It was a style of dress that Grace would later pick up herself; through her early twenties she fancied secondhand dresses, layers of clothing, vests over open forties blouses over silk tops. For all her girth, Djuna seemed fragile. One sensed that there lingered just beneath the sturdy outward carapace of competence and forthrightness, of stamina and strong opinions, very delicate nerves, which if strained would produce serious melancholy. In this, she believed that she and the Brushes’ daughter shared a bond. Djuna knew what was under her own skin, and she sensed she knew what was under Grace’s. She hadn’t been around Grace for long before she came to think she understood the girl better than anybody else. She didn’t suffer physically in the way Grace did, but she did carry around inside her, she felt, similar problems she wasn’t about to let anyone see. It didn’t, in the end, matter whether she was correct in all her assumptions of morbid kinship with the girl; the very fact that she identified with her, empathized with her, came through in the various ways she behaved toward Grace. And that was, in itself, a healing thing.

  Grace’s father must have observed this sensitivity of Djuna’s toward Grace because he was not only supportive of her, but was attentive to her needs—in some ways more attentive to her than to Erin. He liked Djuna, though there wasn’t much for them to talk about, since they held so little in common, and since neither of them could claim to understand the other. They seldom exchanged more than a few words when Charles was on the island, during his sojourns with the family; nonetheless, the bond was deep, at first because of a mutual affection for Grace, and over time grew deeper out of a common, simple respect.

  Perhaps because of her own curiosity, or else because she felt protective not just toward Grace but toward Charles as well, within a week or so of talking with Jenny, Djuna took it upon herself to make some casual inquiry. She’d known most of these islanders since she was a child. She understood that there was no way for her to be subtle enough about it that they wouldn’t see through her questions, and therefore she chose to be direct. She asked about Erin, and her suspicions were confirmed. There was no reason to take much of an adverse view toward Erin in a moral way, as such, she told herself; Erin wasn’t doing something terribly unusual. She didn’t, however, approve of Erin’s choice in Gabriel Segredo, and considered going to Erin to tell her, warn her maybe about the downside of what she was about out here.

  Instead, she determined to remain silent. All her energy would go toward making the house solid against the trouble that was surely going to be coming its way. She wanted to see Scrub Farm survive. And she didn’t want to hear Erin Brush tell her in the same words she herself had used with Jenny to “mind your own business, would you?”

  Mother’s learning how to drive an automobile was the great moment of liberation for her, it gave her not just the means to effect her freedom but in a way provided her with the reason to take her chances. If she hadn’t wanted to drive she wouldn’t have needed a car, and if she hadn’t gone out looking for a car she wouldn’t have met Gabriel Segredo—this was the equation I had constructed, at any rate.

  Webster was the one to instruct her. He was rewarded with a water glass filled with stout at the end of their several lessons, and would run his commentary on her progress at the kitchen table while all of us—Segredo included—listened. “She done fair on the straights down the beach road there, but you got to work on the brakes, Erin, too heavy on the brake pedal, nearly blowed us both through the windshield.”

  “I did, I did,” Mother admitted, herself drinking cocoa-brown stout from the bottle, leaning forward from the edge of her chair in her black jeans, tapping the floor with the heels of her cowboy boots (red, like the car), which I had never seen on her before. “It felt wonderful,” and she spread her knees, put her hands on them, and hunched her shoulders up. What a beatific smile there was on her face. She was transformed before us. I had to confess to myself that if this is what my mother looked like when she was truly happy, it was a happiness that was alien to her, and to me who was witnessing it.

  And we all laughed, perhaps all of us laughing with her, with the freedom to which she seemed so openly to have exposed herself, the same freedom that must have suggested to her that it was all right for her to unbutton the top three buttons of her blouse, and let her hair tumble down, literally, over her cheek and one eye. She sat next to Segredo, and he studied her with loving solemnity. I could sense so easily what was between them, as human beings, as physical beings. Who was I—though I loved Faw so much, or at least the idea of Faw, since as an absentee father he became more and more an abstraction—who was I to deny her an unfurled blouse, and this open-mouthed smile and the stout and all this unusual sexuality she was now so casually, even innocently, expressing to those of us she adored at the kitchen table?

  She caught right on with the driving business, which surprised all of us. Maybe she surprised herself the most. Nothing seemed to make her giddier; yes, it was her independence she was gaining, and she was learning what she wanted to do with it. I noticed that I had never viewed her as a person before, but that she was, and within a month, so quickly the transformation occurred, she graduated from being just my mother to being more beautiful than any woman I’d ever seen, there in her car with her delicate neck craning to left and right, Webster beside her directing as they began driving down the gravel lane toward the beach road. I might have asked why it was that now both my parents found their greatest joy in being away from Scrub Farm, and, above all, away
from me, but it’s the kind of question a child has no will, nor way, to put forward. I was, instead, pleased for her, just as I was overly understanding of my father’s crazy mercantile picaresque, and I didn’t quite have enough experience with life to know that what all this boded for me was—abandonment. Yet what was I, who had no authority anyhow, to say to this blossoming woman who before now had been devoted only to dead petals in cold vases? I kept my mouth shut.

  So she brought over her new friend, whom she met, she told us, after she bought it, this red treasure shaped like a horseshoe crab confident with its fresh wash and wax, its chrome and all its curves, angles, and fins. The pretext was the car needed some body work, was rusting as all cars rust on islands, and the guy who sold it to her said Gabriel was good at such things. Already, though, I believe—this remains hazy to me—somehow they had met before. I was convinced she actually wanted Desmond and me to meet him, to show him off to us almost as if he were a confident red roadster too. “I think you’ll like him,” she said, as if she were the youth and I the adult to whom she might look for judgment. From my perspective now, and knowing what I know, not only about her, but about myself and how the world and love can work, I admire her for her lack of restraint.

  Segredo lived across Coecles (pronounced like “the Cockles of my heart”) Bay. At the end of the poorest street on the island he worked on cars in his yard in the day, whenever work came his way, and made sculptures the rest of the time. He worked with metal, he told me. He had tried carpentry, and given it up. He’d tried his hand at a number of other things, but he kept coming back to iron and steel and welding torches. The way he said the very word “metal” was reverential.

  Leaning against Mother’s car, he said, “People take it for granted, but metal is one of man’s greatest inventions.