The Almanac Branch Read Free

world would I remember more about—and thus be able to better record—what our family was like before we left for the island? I’d like to think that I would have sharper memories of my brother Desmond. As it is, I do not.
    There were other houses on the island that dated from the same period as Scrub Farm, mid-nineteenth century. Families lived on and on in them, passing them down to children who married some cousin or another, in the island tradition. There they settled, just as their ancestors had, and stayed put, rather than to risk launching themselves like sea-battered coracles out toward the world beyond their shores. Like most islanders, they preferred to live among their own kind, and together survived all the hardships that poverty and ignorance and bad weather brought their way.
    But while Scrub Farm’s owners got through the Depression, the widow Merriam outlived every relative she ever had, and died heirless at the beginning of the new year, 1964. Scrub Farm was hardly a farm. For one, there wasn’t much land to cultivate. The wind had for centuries blown across its stony fields, bending the trees, drying the soil. Whenever a storm came in off the ocean, Scrub Farm would have been the first to be hit, set as it was at the foremost edge of the island.
    The house hadn’t been kept up, and it attracted on the day of the bank auction no bidders except Faw, who bought it over the phone, having seen a photograph of it. He acquired the house and all its contents for less than five thousand dollars. “As is,” was the phrase used by the auctioneer. Within a week of closing—early March then—he made arrangements and out from the city we came, the Brush family, in a borrowed truck stacked high with our belongings.
    Never give up a known for an unknown, who said that? Still, the way we piled into the front of the truck made for a kind of physical, animal togetherness that shadowed the currents of anger that were running, especially between my parents, in a binding way—the same way a prisoner’s striped pajamas bind him with the prospect of being in his barred cell.
    Dr. Trudeau’s idea was coming to pass and at least in the beginning Mother was willing to play her role in it, because of me, and because she was so surprised that Faw had decided to take the advice of one of my doctors, something he had never done in the past. She had doubts, to say the least, however. If I didn’t improve, would she be stuck out there with all those inbreds and fishermen, hated by the natives as a summer person who got it in mind to live there year-round? Mother never liked even leaving our neighborhood in Manhattan, thrived in her way on the city’s chaos, loved nothing better than to look out from the roof of our building, on summer nights, into the steamy black of Central Park limned with lamplight down its lanes and at its borders. Was she to be not just exiled to this island, but to a remote part of it as well, there at the end of a causeway? She had looked at the photograph of Scrub Farm—that Polaroid glazed with streaks dark as the skin of the eggplant she sliced for our last supper, boxes stacked high in every room of the apartment, the place oppressive with that combination of melancholy and anticipation which fills rooms about to be vacated.
    The photograph showed a weathered exterior of bleached-out, sun-cupped clapboard. Two stories with a filigreed widow’s walk dangling like a tottery derrick, or one of Gumby’s ant-enemies, from the peak. A carriage house, fuzzy in the background behind a row of decrepit trees. A single bayberry bush caught in a moment of shivering in the low scampering air. A yellow cactus clung to the stony soil. It didn’t look like such a place could be in New York State, it looked foreign. Everything appeared dilapidated, bare, and, but for the house on the slight rise and the sizable cherry tree next to it, low—no doubt