“I have music,” Moro said. “Some nice flamenco guitar, very soothing.”
The acoustic melodies lulled Brand to sleep. She dreamed of drowning, then violently of murder and mayhem. She woke once in darkness. She leaned over, upchucked into the ice bucket, and realized Moro had covered her with a rough wool blanket. Then she fell back asleep.
51.
A great saucer-flowered magnolia stood on the Dalgren farm in Jamestown, New York, spreading shade on a hill overlooking the farmhouse. The tree served as Brand’s refuge during her childhood, when family tensions got too intense for her. She would climb into its limbs with a book, or just lie beneath it and gaze at the sky through its generous branches.
As a child she wasn’t often at the farm in spring. But once she was, and the vision of the magnolia in extravagant bloom stuck with her later in life. Beautiful, yes, but beauty in such profusion that it toppled over into excess.
“Too much of anything is never a good thing.” The two sisters, her great-aunt and grandmother, had always emphasized the point. The message was largely lost on Brand. She came of age in the increasingly excessive lifestyle of American culture at the end of the millennium. She found that too much vodka, for example, could be just right.
But the vision of the magnolia stayed with her well into her adult years. The tulip-like pink-white blossoms garlanded every branch, their perfume sweet, overpowering, a little sickly. Then, in the space of less than a week, it was over. The petals sprayed down like baby pink snow, or they turned brown and died while still attached the limbs. Rotting on the ground, they formed a thick, slick mass, slippery underfoot.
“It seems a lot of effort to go through just for a couple of days of being pretty,” Veronika said to her great aunt Alice. “I’m going to have to change my opinion of that tree.”
Alice gave a gentle laugh. “It is trying to attract a mate.”
“Really?”
“That is what flowers are for, yes. You know that.”
Brand was then thirteen years old. Her mom and dad’s marriage was crumbling. She thought she understood all about the birds and the bees. Not the physical act but the boy and girl thing, as she would sardonically come to refer to love and romance later on, remained a stubborn mystery.
Her mother said she was sending Veronika to the Jamestown farm every summer “to keep her out of trouble.” She meant to save her daughter from the influence of the fast kids on the streets of New York City. Brand believed it was more a case of Marta parking her somewhere, anywhere. She needed to go about her business, whatever it was, unhampered by a tagalong child.
Her mom grew up on the farm herself. Evidently she didn’t recall that farm kids were in a way a lot more advanced than city kids. The example of the barnyard taught them all about sex. Plus there were many more places away from prying eyes in the country than in the city.
As an adult she rarely thought of her childhood loves. But that tree near the farmhouse, flowering so extravagantly, lingered in her mind.
“There’s not another magnolia anywhere around here,” she commented to Aunt Alice. “I don’t think there’s one within fifty miles.”
“No, dear, they’re not that common.”
“So that means all the frou-frou about putting out blossoms is for nothing.”
“I guess so,” Alice said. “But the tree doesn’t know that.”
“Poor thing.” The idea struck Brand as unbearably lonely.
She was that tree. Putting out her flowers for nobody.
Her grandfather died the spring she turned thirteen. There were three barns on the property. He perished by fire in the oldest and smallest one. A few minutes past eleven o’clock one night that year, Brand woke from sleep to women screaming. A disorienting orange-yellow glow turned dark to day outside her bedroom window.
In her white cotton nightdress she rushed downstairs. She slipped on a pair of rubber boots in the mud room off the kitchen and stepped outside. Her first emotion, before she knew the full scope of the tragedy, was one of excitement.
The old barn—that’s what they always called it, to distinguish the ancient structure of gray, weathered wood from the new barn and the cow barn—would not be that much of a loss. No livestock were ever housed in it. The haymow was full of moldering bales too rotted to offer much good nutrition to the cows. A lot of useless junk packed the lower floor. The structure practically pleaded to be put out of its misery.
So Brand’s eyes were shining as she crossed to the spectacle in the lower yard. Divorced from the natural human concern over property loss, a fire in an unoccupied barn can be a magnificent sight. She halted to stare, shivering like a human tuning fork. A whole crayon box of tints, shades, and colors blew out of the barn roof. Deadly looking whips of yellow, orange, blue, illuminated huge billows of sooty smoke. The fire rolled upward into the night, accompanied by a hellish freight train of a roar.
“I will never forget this night,” thirteen year old Brand whispered to herself.
The fat bellow of the fire at first drowned out what her grandmother was shouting. She and Great-Aunt Alice clutched each other, sinking to their knees at the very edge of the blaze, screaming and moaning. Brand saw their silhouettes framed by the flames. It took her a moment to grasp Klara’s words.
“Gustav, Gustav, Gustav!”
Outlined in the square of the barn’s open double doors, the fire painted the interior a bright sun yellow. Brand could see all-consuming heat turning everything inside shimmery and strange.
In the middle of the roaring tableau, a figure hung by the neck on a rope attached to a beam that crossed the roof of the barn. The black form looked Biblical
