Ivory Shoals Read online

  PRAISE FOR IVORY SHOALS

  “What a grand adventure, beautifully told, marbled with wickedness and small miracles, glowing with heart.”

  —Jack Pendarvis, author of Movie Stars and Your Body is Changing

  “John Brandon writes with a simple-looking declarative thrust that rarely permits subordination, or what Ian Frazier calls “riders,” and riders make for fey yammering. Brandon tells you what his characters want, and you want it too. The effect of this strong forward telling is not entertainment, not story, but hypnosis. Brandon does not yammer. You won’t put the book down, you won’t want it to end.”

  —Padgett Powell, author of Edisto and The Interrogative Mood

  “From shades of Homer and Twain, Cormac McCarthy and Charles Portis, John Brandon has conjured a poignant and heart-racing adventure story all his own. Twelve-year-old Gussie Dwyer’s journey across the ruins of post-Civil War Florida feels at once as old as time and mysteriously modern, as we navigate our own wounded American wasteland.”

  —Brett Martin, GQ correspondent and author of Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution, From The Sopranos and The Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad

  “I opened John Brandon’s new novel and fell hard. An adventure full of grit and wonder, far-flung and yet uniquely, specifically American. I hope I never recover.”

  —Daniel Handler, author of All The Dirty Parts and Bottle Grove

  “John Brandon is a marvelous storyteller. With diamond-cut elegance and wit, Brandon’s suspenseful tale depicts a young man’s search for kinship in a beguiling and often terrifying world. Ivory Shoals is a book of grit, heart, and intricate beauty.”

  —Patrick Cottrell, author of Sorry to Disrupt the Peace

  IVORY SHOALS

  Copyright © 2021 John Brandon

  All rights reserved, including right of reproduction in whole or in part, in any form.

  McSweeney’s and colophon are registered trademarks of McSweeney’s, an independent publisher based in San Francisco.

  Cover illustration by Keith Shore

  ISBN 978-1-952119-17-0

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.mcsweeneys.net

  Printed in China

  IVORY

  SHOALS

  A NOVEL

  JOHN

  BRANDON

  CONTENTS

  ______________

  BOOK I

  BOOK II

  BOOK III

  IN THE ECHO

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  BOOK I

  THE WATCH WAS AN eighteen-carat, rear-winding Waltham. The gold of the casing was smooth and by now warm in Gussie’s fingers, the weight of the piece an unexpected comfort as he wheeled it this way and that in the scant light, the hands frozen at mid-afternoon, the black numerals quiet and proud as country deacons. Close to hand on the table was the deed box that for so long had housed the watch. The lid stood open, the velvet lining inside torn loose in places from the wood. The box had never been shut with a lock, only a length of twine, and that string now sat loosely coiled at the bottom like a starved serpent.

  Gussie swore he heard the slow theck, theck, theck, but the watch hadn’t been wound in many years, the key long lost. When he held the Waltham to his ear, the sound vanished. Above the tiny hole in the plate were engraved the letters M J S. Gussie brushed the pad of his thumb over the initials to and fro, wanting the slight scratch, to and fro again. He arose from his chair and crossed the room, closed the watch and enfolded it in one tattered dustcloth and then a second, crouched to his pack and buried the piece at the bottom of it.

  When he stood again, he looked about himself lost and awed, as if the humble cottage parlor were a vast square in some foreign city. After a time, he turned and walked back to the tiny hind room that served as his quarters. His mattress there on the floor, stuffed with brittle beech leaves. His battered one-drawer bed table. He picked up his canteen where it rested in a corner and returned to the parlor, padding in bare feet over planks he’d scoured the day before with hot sand, leaned the canteen next to his pack. He’d polished the rented table with linseed oil, scrubbed the larder shelves pale. The whole of the premises was spotless, save his mother’s room, which he’d scarcely set foot in these past days.

  He sat back down at the table, nudged it flush against the broad front-facing window. He shut the deed box gently and drew closer his paper and pen and ink. The light outside was spectral, gray day giving out to gray night, the alley obscure and lifeless behind the window. Gussie took the pen in hand. He picked up the nearest sheet and read what was already there, word to word and line to line, then replaced the sheet atop the others and centered them on the tabletop. He slid the pen back in its quiver. Gifts of the past Christmas, these scribe’s implements. His mother had scarcely convinced him to use them, so highly he prized the set. They would be sold now, not things he could take along. He picked up the pen again and struck a line. Struck the next. Struck an entire paragraph. He’d recomposed the letter a half-dozen times, the prose growing handsomer but the sentiments no more suitable.

  He situated a fresh sheet and ventured a sentence or two, then his hand stilled and shoulders slacked. The wind picked up, the verbena outside the window whumping its heavy blossoms against the panes, momentarily breaking the quiet. Quiet in the cottage. Quiet out in the empty alley. Quiet, it seemed, up and down the coast and over the length and breadth of the great peninsula. Quiet, perhaps, through the whole of the vast, smoldering, bested Confederacy.

  He was the only person who knew, and this made the knowledge feel suspect. His mother had carried the secret so many years, and now had passed it to him like some priceless seedling that must be kept alive. Gussie felt sly and desolate, the lone soul aware that this man named Madden Joseph Searle—the name itself suppositious, marbled and outsized on Gussie’s tongue when he pronounced it aloud—was his own natural and rightful father. This man, Madden Joseph Searle, had no inkling he had offspring on the opposite coast of Florida, a stunned, scraggly boy of twelve who was at this moment endeavoring in vain to write him, to wave an arm in the crowd, to call in the night. Searle had not the remotest notion. An inventor by trade, Gussie’s mother had told him. A personage of great learning, in command of a lavish garden of intellect. Whatever unfathomable math and philosophies the man’s mind held, it did not contain the fact of his own child. The fact of Gussie.

  He arose and fetched a candle and lit it, set it at arm’s length on the table. He could see only himself now in the window. It was hot in the cottage and he stripped off his shirt and raised the window, then went and raised the back one. His mother had felt chill at all hours these past months, even after the brief winter had chased off, and Gussie had grown accustomed to sweating in their closed-up rooms. He looked at his mother’s shut door. Behind it, part-burnt candles still slouched on the bed table and on the sill and about the floor. Gussie had been unable to straighten up, to take inventory, to strip the bed. His mother’s friends, the other ladies who worked at Rye’s, had come over the afternoon after her death, and he’d begged them not to touch the place, to allow him to tidy and sweep in his own time. He’d accepted their offerings of puddings and allowed them to sit with him that first night. None of them knew Gussie was leaving. They’d been dropping by in pairs and threes, gloves clutched in their fists, exhausting him with their sad ogling and drawn sighs.

  Gussie took up his pipe. He plucked a match from a box on the mantle and wrapped his forefinger about the pipe’s stem and puffed the bowl alight, set the matches on the floor next to his pack along with his half-full leaf pouch. He picked up the candle from the table and wandered into the kitchen.

  He didn’t wish to make an opera of departing t
his humble dwelling where he’d grown from a child. It was merely a place, he told himself. Walls and roof and chimney. Somewhere to spoon up meals and grab shut-eye. Scores of folks had occupied the cottage prior to Gussie and his mother, and scores would live here yet. Other books. Other worn rugs. Even through the pipe smoke he could smell the cold, black stove. And the walnut water with brandy his mother had taken for appetite. He could see in the candlelight a dent in the floorboards from a kettle of lamb stew she’d dropped trying to cook for Gussie when she was much too weak.

  His mother had been on the mend after the last frost had lifted. Or so it had seemed. She had begun taking strolls to the docks on Gussie’s elbow in the strongest sunshine of the day, keeping down an egg for dinner, humming along in the kitchen as the neighbor children sang down the dusk in the weedy yard out back. And then suddenly she was ill as ever, abed long hours, shaking her head at offered plates, shuffling out to the porch but never stepping off it, as a hound tied short with rope. Then the week of ceaseless, drumming downpour from which her lungs never recovered. Those rains that turned her eyes docile as a sheep’s. She’d held on until the end of April, until the close of the war, the formal surrender of the state, as if satisfied at last that her boy would see none of the front. As if the abeyance of hostilities were permission to let go.

  Gussie sat motionless before a late supper of stewed prunes one of the ladies had left him. He’d unwrapped a soda cake with currants, and it sat neglected on the parlor table, as tempting to him as a round of soap. His mind was half-numb and seemed to keep a distance from him, more elusive the harder he chased, as wild turkeys in a wood. He had attempted over the passing hour to spur himself into gathering his mother’s possessions for sale, but still her door stood closed. Her fine quilt, checked toast and cinnabar, tossed unfolded into the bureau. Candlesticks and snuffers of pewter. Purses and shoes and nine types of hats. Hanging in her wardrobe, tobacco leaves tucked into them to ward off moths, were her silk dresses, her corsets and bustles. Beneath the window, a wicker basket of tat-lined shawls. In the washroom, bottles of eau de Portugal she’d brushed into her hair, the wee casks of melon-seed face cream, legion rinses and blossom waters. All of it in a lot might draw a sum—something at least. There were still those of the shore islands with means. There was Jacksonville. St. Augustine.

  Gussie spied a dark-glossed ant trekking across the table, describing a jagged course toward the cake. There was a colony otherside the window that enjoyed the shelter of the verbena. Gussie had routed the hill and found it rebuilt, routed it and found it rebuilt. The ant had no fellows Gussie could see, a lone scout on the range. He poised a thumb overtop the antic little creature and it paid him no mind. He did not press down, and after a moment withdrew his hand. He waited until the ant was very close to the cake and then broke away a morsel and left it there, watched the ant begin to drag the sustenance away.

  He fetched his busted, stitch-bare boots and slipped them on and yanked the laces. Stood and buttoned his shirt and smoothed its front. He moistened his fingers and brought them to the wick of the candle and then felt in the dark for the door handle, drew it to and stepped out into the night and shut the door behind him, waited a minute on the step until the familiar forms lining the way emerged—all the low, plain, flat-faced homes; the leaning palms; the rocking chairs on the weather-warped porches. He strode his way into the alley and then up toward Palmina’s chief thoroughfare, peace prevailing though the hour was not so late. The uneasy cries of gulls were absent. The scents on the air were of things sun-beaten and now cooling—tin roofs, weeds in bloom, the dusty alley itself.

  Gussie walked past a darkened coppice of plum trees where on his workdays he’d often taken shade of a dinner hour. Past the masterly facade of Sirk Hall with its mosaic of a knight on horseback, his oblong shield concealing all but his armored boots and helmeted head. He saw the town bureaus, a large coquina structure that glittered madly in the day sun and remained faintly aglow even now. A block of failed clothes shops. And soon he began to hear the boisterous din of the Night District, an assemblage of taverns and plate joints that had collected about Rye’s place and used that steady establishment as their anchor. Lamps were lit in the windows. Horses at the rails. The clinking of glass. Gussie heard jubilant hoots he knew in a moment could turn bitter. Drinkers on porches regaling their companions with tales from the contested wilds. Men made the butts of wisecracks, fleered in full, hoarse chorus. Rounds treated and the favor returned and returned.

  Gussie lingered a beat on Rye’s front steps, hitching his trousers and blowing out a hard breath, steeling himself before this interview with his mother’s longtime employer. He held himself high and straight. Wiped his forehead dry. This would be his final visit to this particular house. There was strength to be drawn from the thought. The very last time in his life he would set eyes on this place.

  He ducked through the cramped coatroom, unused this time of year, and entered the high-raftered and noisy barroom. A line of men posed along the thrown-open windows, their drinks resting on the sills. Others teetered in ladderback chairs or hunched forward over tables arranged haphazardly along the inner wall, whose fleur-de-lis paper was yellowed and peeling. The bar itself was deserted but for two gaunt-faced men leaning on the far end, their hats perched on their heads at impish tilts, their faces wan and shining with sweat.

  Gussie approached the bar, and the tender—a man called Fozzy—set down a glass he was wiping and tucked the rag neatly into it. By degrees he deigned to lower his gaze to Gussie. It was a look Fozzy called upon often, that seemed to size the world as brimming with persistent, predictable annoyance. But in the next moment, remembering Gussie’s circumstances of grief, his face softened a share.

  “What’re you doin here?” he said. “You’re well aware mister don’t abide youngins here business hours. You huntin somethin for your belly?”

  “Huntin somethin for my billfold,” Gussie said.

  Fozzy’s face wrinkled tight under his trimmed salt-and-pepper hair. He folded his powerful forearms against his chest. Gussie had seen him plenty of times before, but the two had never said more than hidy. Gussie knew Fozzy had come from inland, a runaway who’d shown up and claimed for himself all the least pleasant tasks at Rye’s, who’d worked himself into Rye’s graces and now found himself brigadier of the busiest barroom in half the county. Gussie’s mother had taken this as another demonstration of Rye’s unequaled cunning: taking on an escaped slave would ingratiate him with occupying Northern forces and moneyed Union sympathizers, but knowing Fozzy could hope for no better situation, Rye paid him no wage.

  “I do wish you best of luck,” Fozzy said. “This ain’t no almshouse, far as I gathered. Money comes in. It don’t go out.”

  “I ain’t needin no alms,” Gussie said. “Just needin to shut my mother’s dealins.”

  Fozzy tugged the sleeves of his coat in place, a smoking jacket detailed in satin that he’d adopted as his uniform. The tinny gong of tobacco in the spittoon could be heard. A man sitting near the windows yawped for more whiskey, and Fozzy tilted his head in acknowledgment.

  “Set’n yonder chair and be out of the way,” he told Gussie. “Most usual he comes out to the bar to do his figures. You just keep put till he calls on you. Just like school.”

  Gussie nodded. If he had to wait, he would wait. He walked over and sat where he’d been instructed, feeling jittery and exhausted. He watched Fozzy limp whiskey here and there and collect money and make change from the till and rinse glasses and at regular intervals check himself in the mirror that backed the bar. Every so often a man would scrape his jaw with his arm and saunter down a narrow hall and out of sight toward what Gussie knew was an inner parlor where the ladies waited. Fozzy would pull a cord that rang a bell at the back of the house so Miss Ardelia could ready the room. The lovesome wares, Rye sometimes called the ladies—they weren’t allowed in the barroom and the men didn’t retire to the parlor until they were set on doing b
usiness. Gussie knew full well this was only because Rye didn’t want any carousing he couldn’t charge for, but his mother had often cited the practice when she felt the need to defend Rye. He never let anyone get rough with his girls, they ate and drank like heiresses, had a doctor within the hour for the asking. Gussie had heard it a few too many times.

  On a tabletop nearby sat a shallow pan of poisoned sugar water, a means against flies. No victims afloat. Gussie dipped his fingertip into the pan, unsettling the malign little pond. He sat straight, slouched, sat straight again. Whenever the disordered party along the windows quieted, Gussie caught snatches of talk from the two men at the bar, their voices clear and hardy, mismatched with the haggard aspect of their faces and posture. They spoke of Nassauville, which was now being policed by Black Union troops. The mayor couldn’t do a thing about it—he was trying to rule a foreign land. Soon they’d be the ones in chains, one of the men said, fondling a great gasper of a cigarette that he left unlit. White men like them with no pot to piss in. The man spoke reverently of islands in the Indies where one could live on the fruits of the jungle and fish in crystal lagoons. No fighting. No churches. No taxes. No mayors.

  Gussie had a hankering for his pipe but refrained. He stared up at the rafters, stared down for a time at his boots. Scraped clean his thumbnails. The monotonous minutes dragged by like wheel-broke wagons, parties arriving and departing, the smell in the place growing closer and closer, and Gussie nearly started from his chair when, finally, true to Fozzy’s telling, Rye strode forth from the narrow, shadowy hall, clicking over the planks in his shined half-boots and wiping his mouth with a handkerchief, and installed himself front and center, sitting at the near side of the bar like a customer. Gussie arose, but Fozzy, who’d been wiping down tables, took a lumbering step in front of him and said again to stay put till Rye called him.