Free The Almanac Branch by Bradford Morrow Page B

turned on me. “What are you dumb or something? How would you like it if some big bird went cutting your eyes out?”
    â€œI’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.”
    â€œI’m not dumb, and I’m not crazy.”
    â€œIf you’re not crazy, how come Faw made us come all the way out here?”
    â€œBut 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.”
    â€œRight, and they talk, too.”
    â€œThey talk sort of, yes.”
    â€œWell, how come I can’t hear them?”
    â€œThey don’t talk to you is all.”
    â€œBerg 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.”
    â€œWhat does he know, he doesn’t know anything.”
    â€œHe says he heard Mom tell Faw you’re a nut.”
    â€œThat’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.”
    â€œFlare man doesn’t know you is all, he knows me, he leaves you alone.”
    â€œOkay, 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.
    â€œYou 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?”
    â€œYou 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.
    â€œI’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