The Almanac Branch (31 page)

She continues to play with a strand of her hair, but says nothing.

“They sent me down to take care of things.”

The camera has been moving during his brief dialogue, backing away and around them. The coarse bark of the trees comes into view, blocking them from us, and then again as the camera keeps traveling, we can see them again. He is still talking, she listening, and though the dialogue is obscured by the music of birds, we can tell that something is about to happen between them. The boy seems slouchy, confident as a young cougar. He kneels at her feet, reaches hands out and gently clasps each of her ankles. He lifts her ankles up off the blanket, and her knees fall away from one another. Pushing the backs of her feet toward her raised hips, he has made of her an acquiescent butterfly. We see her face, and know that she has worked herself up into a state of the most dirty desire. Her head rolls to left and to right, and her teeth are gritted in erotic pain. “So that's what you want, eh?” the young man whispers, a satiric smile swarming across his curled lips. “I never say no toanything. If that's what you want, it's what you're going to get, because I hate disappointing anyone,” and his tongue now probed the raw, ruffled, floral bloom between her thighs.

“That was how it began,” the girl's voice narrated calmly over the image of the young man and the girl now more or less performing a stock pornographic sex act teasingly half-hidden behind the branches of the fruit tree. “Yes. He was my brother. He knew I needed to have him, because it was the only way for me to keep my sanity. He knew I would submit to whatever he wanted, and gladly so. I've always been grateful for those times we had together, and might have stayed with him forever had he not—but I'm getting ahead of myself.”

The arrogance of what he was doing had a very different effect on me than I might ever have guessed. Is it possible I was flattered? No, nothing so unambivalent as that. More likely what I felt was respect for Berg's new level of cool delinquency.

Rather than march into my house—yes,
my
house, because it was as much mine as his—and announce to him that this indulgence he was allowing himself was not as closely kept a secret as he assumed, I was suddenly (and strangely) inclined to leave him and his associates alone. Who was I to try and change things now? Let them make their portrait.

If anything, I thought, I ought to go in and warn him about this Council of Churches man, whom I had decided was himself as phony as any storefront church. The eastern sky was by then beginning to turn green and blue, and hum with yellows and pinks, and I knew that I had to make up my mind what to do. It was curious, unaccountable: I felt protective of Berg. I decided to back off, into the field. I retrieved the borrowed bicycle, and rode over the causeways toward the hotel where I had put up. Most of the island was still asleep, and everything seemed pristine and right and calm. Behind me the first lines of dawn light continued to spread over the horizon. To feel as tired as I felt, given that I'd had such a long sleep in the carriage house, was strange, but when I reached my room it was everything I could do to get out of my chilled, damp clothes, and slip into bed.

Maybe I had taken on my brother's exhaustion and needed to sleep for him. Besides, I had nothing better to do than sleep the day away, since I intended to go back again that night, and resume my role as voyeur.

The film is farther along than one might have guessed. At the edge of the orchard we see a figure who has been spying on the boy and girl who made love on the blanket. This is Max. We will know his name very soon. We see the smirk on his face as he looks on, his right hand shading his eyes in such a way that it looks as if he is saluting. Max is not saluting, though. He can see that the lovers are his sister and brother and this doesn't make him happy. He spits. Here is Max, older than his siblings, more wise to the ways of the world, and yet he is still a virgin. The jealous anger he feels at having discovered them here in the orchard is apparent to us when we see the way he grits his teeth, and turns away. His virginity is as yet unrevealed to us, at least in a direct way, but there is something awkward and immature about his gait, in the hands swinging gracelessly at his sides, in the tilt of his head to one side. He is a boy.

On the shore, gathered around a driftwood fire, a group of people is gathered together, drinking from a shared bottle. They are laughing, and singing at their clambake.

Standing sheltered from view at the edge of a woods along the dune is Max, who is shivering a little, because the wind coming in off the shell-shaped waves is cold. It is aftersunset, and the moon is a dog's tooth low in the wispy sky beyond where the people linger by the beach fire. Max listens to them, trying to sort out his contradictory thoughts about what he saw earlier, and what he was going to do about his virginity. He didn't feel like going home, knew he wouldn't be able to sit there like a stupid mute at the dinner table, and face his sister and younger brother and his mother, too, knowing what he knew. So he had decided, he guessed, to run away, at least for a while. He would rather be at home, he felt, than out here in the freshening night, but what choice did he have? None whatever.

The fire dances in each of his eyes. If he had had a single ounce of courage, or knowledge about the ways of the flesh—which, he is convinced, are different from the ways of the world—he would have walked over to the two lovers, his siblings, and asserted himself, being the eldest. He would have pulled his brother Dante by the hair, and thrown him to the ground, or else hit his head against the trunk of the tree under which they'd so promiscuously luxuriated. Then, he would have done it to Grady himself, until she came screaming, begging for him to stop, not because she wanted him to stop but because she couldn't take the ecstasy a real man could provoke in her. He didn't know how, though; he didn't know how.

Never could he let Grady and Dante in on his terrible secret, because they would have no respect for him ever again. He was a liar, he knew. A terrible, worthless prevaricator who had never so much as seen a woman with her clothes off, until today of course, when he'd witnessed his own sister from a distance. He'd never touched a woman's skin. He had never kissed anyone except for his mother, and the priest's ring finger once at Mass.

They were so drunk, these partiers on the beach. One of the women was singing by the thick fire, in a slow dirge, mocking herself and the words as she clasped her hands over her breasts:

“
Some men go to heaven
,

Some go to hell
.

Some men buy
,

And some men sell
.”

And Max tried to remember what he had seen, wanted to remember what Grady looked like between her legs, he closed his eyes, and we could see a distorted, parallax view of the orchard, blurry, and we could make out Grady leaning against one of the trees. She wore a sailor's suit, now, with a sailor's white cap tipped to the side of her head, and there was a moustache painted on her face. With her finger waving back and forth like the hand on a metronome she was reprimanding us.

“
Some men buy
,

Some are bought
,

Some men are lovers
,

And some are not
.”

Max told himself that he could have walked right up and grabbed Dante, turned him around and slugged him, wouldn't that have given them both one big surprise.

“
Some men row
,

Some men bail
.

Some men are cops
,

And others go to jail
.”

He walked out, tentatively, toward the festive group. The twilight waves whipped the sand, frost clouds spat out at the earth-fringe, and the heat of the fire wiggled up through darkness past the trees and toward the stars that swirled with the rest of the bonfire sparks thrown up into the air. “Come on over here, boy,” one voice cried.

“
Some men are crazy
,

Some are sane
.

Some are strong
,

But most are lame
.”

Max joined the group.

“What's the difference between a refrigerator and a sodomite?” one of the drunks queried. Well, what?“A refrigerator doesn't fart when you take out the meat.” That was disgusting. Max tried to smile. The others were laughing so hard. Max shook his head and licked his thumb to ascertain which direction the wind was coming from. Northwest; later tonight it would pour rain. He knew that he had to find himself shelter for the night. He also knew that this haphazardly pitched tent, shelter though it might be, carried quite a cost for what protection it promised to afford. As he is standing there asking himself whether he should stay, or seek cover elsewhere, the camera focuses on an old man who has been sitting closest to the fire, and who looks up in Max's direction with blind eyes, and says—as if he'd been able to read the boy's mind—“Max, listen to me. Don't
should
on yourself.”

Max makes his decision to stay. Acceptance into any group is easier than the outsider thinks. Always easier. That there is no secret is the biggest secret of any secret society; that there is nothing special about anything that is deemed to be special. There can't be. If something were special everybody would want it, and what people want they get, because they learn how to take it, and then it isn't special anymore.

Max thinks this. Max knows he is about to learn some solemn, some fundamental lesson. And yet what is there to be learned from this woman who has taken down her panties, grand white bloomers of a bygone era, and put them on her head? And the fat fellow with the checkered pantaloons, sort of circus clown pants, who is barking like a healthy puppy, leaping around on the sand, and licking her naked feet, what pleasure is he seeking, what gaining, and what administering—and what can be learned from such behavior? Max isn't even noticed as he sits next to the blind clairvoyant and warms his hands over the fire, having joined the group, half a dozen men and women of variousages, and they don't even seem to mind when he begins to eat their food, quite a marvelous spread of mussels, clams, olives, pickles, large loaves of bread, and so forth.

One of the women, another circus beast, a moll of sorts with a heavy moustache and hair that roils around a pair of big brutish shoulders, hands him the bottle and nods and gives him the invitation to drink up, by pinching her lips tight, jutting her chin forward and thrusting it up a couple of times. Oh, he drinks, he drinks good and deep does he, does Max. And the fire burns and burns into the clouding, spar-bleak night.

Sleep is a natural antidote to exhaustion. But I wasn't exhausted. I was afraid. Sleep is good medicine against fear, too, much the same way amnesia can protect us from our past.

I couldn't remember ever having slept so much, and still, when I woke up later that afternoon, a cloud of sleepiness lay over me.

I went out into the bright afternoon to get a cup of coffee. No one knew me in town. I didn't recognize anyone, either. That was curious. Here was a small place, the place where I'd grown up, and I was very much a stranger. It made me realize just what an introverted world, a small, half-invented world, we children had grown up in. I could tell you the life histories of so many people on the box, so many characters in books, but of these people out here walking along the streets while the leaves were giving out in the breeze and fluttering along the paling grass, I knew nothing. It was just something I noticed. I didn't feel bad about it. I didn't feel that I'd missed out on anything in particular. Indeed, at the moment it worked out for the best that we didn't know each other. I would have nothing to say to any of them who might have come up and said, “Grace Brush, how nice to see you, how is your fatherdoing, how is your brother getting along, what is life like in the city, I was so sorry to hear about your marriage but someone told me that you hadn't got a divorce does that mean maybe you two are rethinking things?”

The coffee steamed in the cup before me, and I looked out the window. I ordered another cup and drank the second one with sugar, but it seemed only to make me more sleepy.

Home sweet home, reads the valentine card taped on the window. We pull back into a kitchen. The tablecloth recalls the pantaloons of the man on the beach. Here there is no wine flowing. The meal on the table is simple, delicious looking yet rather indifferent in the sense that it doesn't make us feel so much hungry as simply satisfied that it would taste all right if we were forced to sit down and eat it ourselves. There are some sweet potatoes with little melted marshmallows like fish eyes peeking from their slit skins, there is a roast on a platter. The kitchen is tidy. All its appointments and furniture are old-fashioned and homey. There is an octagonal cat-faced clock on the wall, whose hour and second hands are black whiskers, and whose pendulum is a curly tail, and the clock says it is ten-thirty.

No one is eating, because everyone is worried about Max. Grady looks down at her plate in silence, avoiding her brother Dante's occasional stolen glance—boys are such dolts. We can't tell whether she feels ashamed of herself because of her wanton behavior this afternoon in the orchard, or whether her sad mood arises from the disappearance of her older brother. None of the coarseness we saw in her face, none of the lewdness in her lips and rolling eyes, is present now as she sits there, awaiting some word about Max.

“We don't know where he is,” the officer tells them. Andyes, while they are all waiting for some word from the search party, he wouldn't say no to having just a small slice off that roast beef. Contemporaneously, he couldn't be faulted for asking himself, where was this woman's husband? Three children, out here alone with them on an island like this, it wasn't hardly proper.

“Excellent,” he says, commenting on the meat.

“Thank you,” the mother says, her eyes appropriately grave, but with a kind of correspondent shine to match his own, which glow with human hunger. “Why don't you have some more.”