(about)
Burning Taffeta
Cormorants
by B.L. Long
mm
mmIn the morning, rain dripped from the eaves of the roof. It had come without lightning or thunder, no wind to carry it; not falling even, more a condensation of greyness onto grass, branches, docks, the battered yellow boathouse. There had been no sunrise either, only an evanescent receding of night into uncertain shades of day, like the ebbing of a dark tide, leaving the rain behind on the damp sand. Water trickled down the porch screens in sparkling rivulets, writing and revising something in an writhing secret script, like a protean ogham. Grandfather Burdon, up again before daylight, spent the morning watching quietly from an old chair on the porch, listening to the rain and the aches and pains that murmured in his limbs.
mmNormally he enjoyed the quiet and the solitude, but this morning his mind was restless. When the time seemed right, he rose and limped stiffly inside the still night-soaked house to call. Standing at his desk, murky light seeping in at the doorsills, he lifted the receiver and dialed a long distance number. Alone in the room, he grew increasingly uneasy as he listened to the phone ring on the other end. He began to anticipate each rude buzz and, even more, the ever widening silences between. Somewhere in that unbearable space between the fourth and fifth ring, he gave in to the anxiety and changed his mind. But as he reached to hang up, the voice of a middle-aged man — strained, impatient — and the unmistakable, insuppressible background sound of office business and city broke into the quiet, into his living room, and he stopped, holding the receiver at arms length. The small tinny voice erupting into the quiet of the house grew irritated, and demanding. He tried to speak, and his own voice echoed into the room.
mm“Um . . . Norman. I hope . . . I hope you weren’t busy. Norman, this is . . .”
mm“Daddy?”
* * *
mmWalker Burdon stood hunched over in the rocking boat, struggling to maintain his balance as he tried to untangle the fishing lines. The boat and all the gear were almost ready. Then the only thing left would be to wait for Uncle Henry and Uncle Buck to arrive with bait, for the tide had started in. Because he was the youngest – the son, the grandson, and the nephew – most of the work had become his to do alone. He had decided it was better that way – to do certain things himself, and get them over with – than to wait along with the others, also putting it off, until they decided it was his job anyway. So he did the work.
mmThe routine had become familiar. They will sit patiently on the front porch, he thought, not talking much, looking out at the horizon, sipping at warm cans of beer until enough time has passed for him to finish the most tedious work. Then they will shuffle down from the house on tender bare feet, with their gear and their coolers. Then they will stand on the pier next to the boat and watch him finish, like kids with rubber life rings around their bellies waiting for the pool to fill up.
The tangle in the lines was getting worse. The wind tied new knots as he undid others, weaving a translucent bird nest in his hands. He stood up to stare at the blank, white face of the house crouching back from the bluff. No sign of them, yet. He swore. He pulled the knife from his pocket and cut the lines. Well, at least this time, he thought, something will be different; this time Kathleen had come along.
mmAlready in a bathing suit, she sat on her hands on the edge of the pier, watching him work. His mind seemed on other things, though his movements were smooth and efficient. It pleased her that now and then his attention was drawn away, for an instant, from life preservers, oars and fishing tackle, to her bare legs hanging over the side of the dock, swinging back and forth over the water.
mm“Somehow I get the feeling you’ve done all this before.”
mm“Yup, that’s right. How did you guess?” He stood up with his hands pressed into the small of his back and bent over backwards. “They sent you down to check on me, didn’t they?”
mmShe was surprised. “Yes, but how did you...”
mm“I’ve done all this before, remember?” He stuffed the last of the rigs under the gunwhales.
mm“I see.” She pursed her lips and locked her ankles together as they swung. “So how many other girls have you brought up here?”
mmHe laughed. “No, none. You’re the first.”
mmShe thought about this, watching him, but he didn’t look at her.
mm“This must be some event.”
mm“Not really. This fishing trip comes around every year, sooner or later.” He gave the gas tank a shove with his foot. It was full. “It’s no big deal, though; always the same thing. Every year they all pile into this sorry excuse for a boat and take it out into the Bay looking for the same place, The Spot. They get a little drunk on the same beer, they sing the same songs, they even tell shorter and shorter versions of the same jokes until they’re nothing but punch lines, and still they laugh at them. They’ve done it all so many times every one of them knows their ridiculous, meaningless lines by heart.”
mm“And?”
mm“After a couple of hours, depending on how the fish bite, they come back in, drink some more, and talk about it for two days. And that’s it. Then it’s all over ‘til next year. It’s a little ritual we go through. We’re pagans, you know.”
She laughed. She drew her legs up and crossed them in front of her, rocking.
mm“Sounds pretty silly.”
mm“Hell, most of them don’t even belong in a boat, much less with a fishing rod stuck between their knees. Half the time they don’t even have bait on their hooks.”
mm“C’mon, you can’t tell me that your dad comes all the way from Asheville every year for nothing. There’s obviously more to this than pretending to fish, and you know it.”
mm“No, That’s what I’m telling you,” he grunted, braced his feet on the stern, and pulled forward on the old outboard motor, “If it wasn’t for this fishing trip, my dad would never take the time to come up here. It’s an excuse. He wouldn’t come just for the visit; he and Grandfather aren’t close enough for that. I wouldn’t swear they’ve said a worthwhile thing to one another their entire lives. And it’s pretty much the same with Uncle Hank and Uncle Buck.”
mmShe was not convinced. There was too much order, too much trouble and planning. She remembered how strangely earnest he had been when she asked to come along, though he had tried to sound casual. They had only known each other a few months, but had become close friends quickly. She often stopped by late in the evenings, and had always found him up alone reading or writing letters, or sitting on the front porch swing in the dark, under the wisteria. They took long walks late into the night all around the small quiet town, past darkened houses behind walled gardens, the smells cool and damp. The first night, he led her down a long sandy alley to a small tree that hung over a high stone wall. He swung quickly up into the tree and held out his hand for her to follow. She watched him walk out to the end of a branch like a tightrope walker, pause for a moment, then jump off, dropping into the darkness. She had held her breath until she heard the soft thump below. Then she too had let go, and remembered the exhilaration of falling blind, not knowing when or where she would land. “Welcome to my world,” he had said, and with a nod of his head revealed an elaborate, magical garden. There was a lily pond where two swans drifted silently about, luminous and blue in the moonlight. Beyond was a ghostly topiary of animal shapes, a maze, and a gazebo. “No one lives in the house. A gardener tends it year round. The owners visit twice a year. I come here often.”
mmShe realized, now, how little they had actually talked on those walks. She gave her head a quick turn and let the wind take the hair out of her face, tossing it gently behind her like a soft brown flag. Across the water nearby was the shallow end of a fish trap – a series of long slender poles driven into the bottom ten feet apart, connected by netting. The poles ran in a straight line, like a fence, a hundred yards out to deep water, ending in the trap. The whole arrangement looked like an arrow, pointing out to the open bay. She noticed that on almost every pole perched an oily black bird with a long neck, each in some state of unrest.
mm“So what about the women, what do they do while all this is going on?”
mm“Nothing. They don’t have anything to do with it.” His voice was sharp. He was still struggling with the motor; it wouldn’t lock in place.
mmThe strange birds swayed in the breeze on the long poles. Some fell off into lazy, languid flight, though never for very far. They made no sound at all.
mmShe sucked at her cheeks. “Okay, so why am I... No wait, maybe I can make this easier: Why are you here?”
mmWalker, exhausted, let go of the motor and fell back onto one of the seats. “Hell, I don’t know.”
mmThe motor tilted from side to side with the rise and fall of each wave. He threw up his hands. “Maybe I like doing this. Come to think of it, maybe I brought you along just to bother me with a lot of stupid questions so I could find out for myself.” He gave the stern a kick and it clicked as the motor snapped into place. He rubbed his forehead, squeezing tufts of hair between his fingers. “Yeah. Well, I guess that does it, doesn’t it.”
mmHe climbed up onto the pier beside her. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m a little stressed out. You’d hate it out there, anyway. Besides, Grandma’s not such bad company. You’re lucky it’s just you and her this time. When the other women are here it’s unbearable — even for me. And when some of the local women stop by it really gets wild. My Uncle Henry says they’re all a bunch of fish-eating whores. He keeps promising to fix me up with one of them.”
mm“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
mm“Yeah, I’d get fixed, alright.”
mmWalker rolled over and stretched out on the planks under the hot sun. The wind was sweet and heavy with smell of things rotting on the beach, and it caressed like a warm blanket sliding over his arms and legs and chest.
mm“Walker, what kind of birds are those?”
mmHe raised his head to look, then laid back down. “They’re Cormorants, Sea Ravens. Back in Ireland they call them Black Divers. They’re nasty birds; got voracious appetites. The watermen around here hate’em, say they eat all the fish out of the traps. Seems like there are more of them every year.”
mmShe found some of his description hard to believe. There were perhaps a hundred birds in view, and none of them seemed to be looking for food — just sitting and waiting. “Why do they do that with their wings?”
mmHe looked again. There, on one of the tall slender poles, sat a bird with its beak pointed at the sky and its wings spread out to the sides as though pinned there. Then the whole bird shuddered, but hung there still, and was motionless again. Walker rolled over on his stomach and laid his head on his arms.
mm“They haven’t quite adapted to the water, yet. They do that to dry out their feathers; otherwise they can’t fly. Kind of eerie looking, isn’t it?”
mmShe looked down the row of poles at the sullen birds. Every fifth or sixth one was a swaying, quivering, black cross. She forgot to answer. Something about them made her chills.
mmThe bang of a screen door up at the house broke the trance, and they saw a group of four men walking toward them, all similar in height and build. Old Mr. Burdon, his trouser legs rolled high and bare-chested, was leading them all down. He limped slightly from an accident he remembered happening a dozen different ways, his nose was crooked from a break that had set badly. Behind him were Uncles Henry, in pressed khakis, and Buck, in blue coveralls. Behind them was Walker’s father in a bright green golf shirt and plaid shorts.
mm“Right on time, as usual.”
mmOld Mr. Burdon waved a beer can in salute as he started down the pier toward them.
mm“Now I ask you, does that look to you like a fisherman?” Walker nodded to his father. He was hopping on one foot, whipping a fishing rod and a red plastic tackle box in the air as he tried to pull a sand burr from his foot. The result was a short series of short arabesques into the weeds, and more burrs in both feet. Kathy winced, and felt the soles of her feet itch.
The other three men came up, rattling the loose planks, and waited for Norman to make his way down the length of the pier. He was walking on the heels and sides of his feet, his pink toes curled in. Grandfather Burdon, tiny veins in his nose and cheeks showing purple through his sunburn, smiled and winked at her, then he turned to Walker.
mm“Buzz’ll be along in a minute with the bait.”
mm“Buzz ?”
mm“That’s right. He’ll be coming, too.”
Walker leaned over to Kathy and started to whisper something in her ear, just as a high pitched halloo was heard from up the beach. Trotting across the sand, in an excess of useless motion, came Buzz. He was a single, middle-aged man who shucked oysters and did odd jobs on the wharves to support himself and his mother. He leapt, in a manner of speaking, onto the pier and pogoed down to them, arms and head swinging. His voice rose and fell gently, like a hand-cranked siren, an adolescent W. C. Fields, and he hit them with it at full speed in a flurry of gestures, barely pausing to breathe. She noticed he had an amazing overbite.
mm“Well, hello there Mr. Burdon, boys, I swear: Norman, Henry, Buck, and you too, Walker, by golly. And you must be Kathy, there, well I swear aren’t you a pretty one. Well, I tell you, it’s a good thing I showed up when I did or you boys could of got yourself into some real trouble there.” He had gone for the bait, instead of Uncle Henry or Uncle Buck. “Yessir, you shouldn’t never drink-an-drive; no sir; you could get yourself into real trouble there. Yeah, I came up here all set to go you know, and here are old Hank and William just a-drinking like dogs and making like they was going to drive into town for bait. And I told ‘em, I said, ‘No sir, gentlemen, you shouldn’t ought to drink-an-drive,’ and I offered to go for them, yes I did, and I didn’t mind going for them one bit, no sir, not one bit.”
mmThe barrage ended as quickly as it had begun, and in its aftermath he stood grinning around his teeth, nodding and blinking. Uncle Hank coughed. Walker rolled his eyes at her; Kathleen was simply dumb-struck and amazed. She thought: This man is a cartoon. Old Mr. Burdon finally broke it off, saying something about the tide not waiting, and with little ceremony the men stowed their gear, found seats and shoved off. With Walker’s father coaxing the motor, they headed out for open water, following the direction of the fish trap over the advancing waves.
mmKathleen watched them go, streaming behind them the ribboned wings of a wake and the purr of the motor. She felt her hand in something wet and sticky. Under her palm she found a thin, dark smear of blood about the size of a quarter on the bone-gray plank. It was the place where Walker’s father had stood on the pier. She looked again and watched the skiff and the five men, smaller now, their faces turned away. They looked strangely motionless as they moved away from her, like a picture hung from the sky.
* * *
mmThe afternoon wore on. Kathleen lay draped on a creaking wicker divan in the cool shade of the porch where a breeze drifted through. On the table she leafed through a thick old book, so frayed and faded that the title on the cover was unreadable. It was an old encyclopedia of ornithology. Many of the torn and yellow pages had fallen out and were tucked haphazardly between the covers. Among loose pages in the back she found the entry on cormorants. It confirmed most of what Walker had said; but there was more. One part in particular caught her attention. They were diving birds, it said, with oily feathers that allowed them to swim under water for long periods of time. In the Orient, they were used to catch fish drawn to small boats by firelight at night. Tethers were tied to the birds legs so they could be retrieved, and metal rings placed around their necks so they could not swallow what they caught. She set the book in all its pieces aside. From where she sat she could see them, the cormorants, swaying gently, quietly on their slender perches. It was odd, really, the way no gulls or other birds came near.
mmGrandma Burdon came out of the empty house onto the porch. She never talked much, to anyone. She was the kind of person who hummed half songs while she hung her sheets in the wind and the sun to dry; and that is what you remembered of her — the chanting and murmuring, and the flapping of white sheets — so that you heard it and felt it when she was near, regardless of what else she was doing. She sat in her chair and rocked for a long time before she spoke.
mm“That boy trusts you, you know. ”
mm“Ma’am ?”
mmShe waited, and then went on. “My Walker. He’s the one standing in the bow, either feeling like he’s running the show or trying to get out of it.”
mmKathleen could see nothing through the rusty porch screens. She got up and stepped out onto the lawn for a better look, where all she could see was a small blemish on the water in the hazy distance. Taking binoculars from a nail on the porch, she found and focused on the colorless silhouette of the boat and the men, and saw what she assumed was Walker standing and fishing over the bow. She went back onto the porch and sat near Mrs. Burdon, whose eyes were still fixed on the horizon.
mm“You take care of that boy, Kathleen. He doesn’t understand things, yet.” Not an order, nor a plea, that was all she said. After a while she began to rock in her chair, and hummed something low and soft.
* * *
mmWalker half sat, half lay in the bow with the anchor and the ropes, searching the water ahead absently, ignoring everything behind and beside him, looking only at what he could see without turning his head. The others seemed to be listening to the water rather than watching it, waiting for the place to feel right. Finally Walker’s father cut the motor and they waited for the boat to settle. Then the anchor went over the side, followed without haste by six lines.
mmThe sun laid a hot hand on necks and shoulders, and the boat rose and sank with the steady breathing of the sea. After awhile, Grandfather Burdon started a low, broken chorus of “Tiny Bubbles,” pausing between phrases for swallows of warm beer. Uncle Buck, who had never married, raising and lowering the tip of his rig to the rhythm of the song and the rhythm of the sea, which were the same, pulled his cap down lower over his eyes and stared intently at the surface of the water. Uncle Henry, older, sulky, sat hunched over, elbows on knees. He had the same crew-cut, though much thinner now, that he’d had since the service. Walker’s father, a rod and a cigarette in one hand, leaned over the side and washed bait slime from the other.
mmOne at a time, tentatively at first, the older men began telling stories. They recounted things they had all done when they were younger: trips they had taken together, trouble they had been in and got out of, people they had known, all full of humor and irony and sadness. Now and then Buzz burst into a volley of words that sprayed across the water like a fistful of pebbles; though no one pretended to listen. Walker had heard all the stories before. He felt bored and frustrated, though he could not have said why. Eventually, the heat and the crowded quarters became oppressive. He reeled in his line, lay down in the bow, and went to sleep.
* * *
mmKathleen waited on the dock as the boat came in. When it coasted into shallow water, Walker jumped out with a rope and pulled it up snug on the beach. The others piled out and she went down to help them unload.
mm“How did it go?”
mm“The same as usual, nothing new. A few fish. How ‘bout you?”
mm“Oh, alright, I guess.” She stood awkwardly in the way, digging her feet into the sand and looking at them, until Walker handed her something to carry up to the boathouse. He and Buzz grabbed the handles of the cooler with the fish in it, stumbled over the sand under the sloshing weight, and hoisted it onto the low end of the pier. They had caught the least fish, and therefore had won the honor and privilege of cleaning them all; this also being the consequence for catching the most, had that been the case. Uncle Buck brought them the cleaning tools, a cold six-pack, and tipped his hat, retiring with the others to their vigil on the front porch.
mmWithin the half hour the two were busy with knives and scalers. They stood knee deep in the surf and waist-high against the side of the pier where an oak table top was nailed down to the planks. Kathleen sat at a safe distance, her arms around her knees. Buzz talked so much, so constantly, that it occurred to her he could talk the fish out of their guts and scales. He stopped working often while telling his stories, waving his scaler around for emphasis. He told her about the time he first had met Walker. With what little extra money he earned, he told her, he had bought a small telescope, and taken a vocational school course in Astronomy. It was while standing out on the beach at night with his telescope that he had met Walker and become a friend of the Burdon family.
mmOtherwise they worked quickly. Buzz, in spite of his apparent lack of attention, was well practiced from years working on the docks. He scaled, gutted and cut off the heads of each fish with only a few strokes. Before long, their arms were completely covered with scales. The discs, clinging to their skin like thousands of sequins, glittered opalescent in the late afternoon sun. Walker made a teasing move to grab Kathy with his fish-filthy hands. She shrieked and kicked, in not entirely feigned surprise, and they all laughed. She found herself glancing often, uneasily, at the long row of black cormorants, stationary except for the stretching of their wings. A flock of gulls, she thought, would have boiled the water diving for the scraps.
mmBuzz rattled on and on, sometimes telling the same story twice when he couldn’t think of anything else to say. Every now and then he reiterated that one should never “drink-an-drive.” Kathleen, growing weary of the endless monologue, finally asked why he was so set on the point. He told her, briefly, a story about how his fiancee and her girlfriend had been following him home one night from a pre-wedding party, and how he had watched in his rearview mirror as their headlights wavered, then disappeared. They were both killed. And then he went on, “Hey, Walker! Why don’t you hand me that flounder there and by golly I’ll show you how to fillet that sucker there by golly.”
mmIt was too much. She wanted to cry, to pound her fists on the planks until they bled; but she couldn’t — the sounds, the feelings, caught in her throat. She looked to Walker for something, anything, but his face was white and drawn, muscles tense beneath the skin. He only worked more methodically, more determined, at cleaning the fish. Finally, he stopped and looked down the end of the pier, and seemed to come to some decision. Then he turned and looked at her for a long time.
mmShe suddenly felt, full inside her, in her face, in every limb, a sensation she could only describe as melting, and she realized she could breathe again. She felt both drained and oddly at peace, and she understood. He smiled at her and returned to his work.
mmThe sun was getting low, turning everything pink and gold as they finished, washed off in the surf, and began to pack up. Across the water the cormorants were leaving by ones and pairs. Rising from the poles, lifting up on their long black wings, they peeled off the sky in great wide arcs, and headed for their nests under the darkening twilight sky.
