Free The Almanac Branch by Bradford Morrow Page A

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 laughter 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