Stephen Davidson Cranberry lived and worked in glass. In fact, he died and was buried with his ashes sealed in a glass bottle. This was something no glass gaffer, resident of Terra Firma, Indiana, or in the grand scheme, any other human being before him had done. Being buried in a glass bottle isn’t as unusual as you’d expect, but Cranberry was granted exclusive rights to be buried in a trademarked and patented bottle, which he’d invented to help make a soft drink company world-famous. His life’s work had been that patent bottle design, and on his deathbed his only terrified wish was that he was buried in it, since he knew it to be true in all his boney frame that he was cursed.
Cranberry worked for the Harde-Knox Glass Company in Terra Firma, where he’d been born and raised God-fearing. As a man, Cranberry carried himself like Ichabod Crane, on spindly legs to match spindly arms covered by chronically short sleeves. He was a frail boy and took to modeling to avoid the sunshine. When both of his parents died in 1910, 18-year-old Cranberry shined his shoes, covered his goosey neck with a starched white collar, and left the family home to get a job blowing glass for Chauncey Knox and Whitman Harde at their glass factory.
Cranberry worked at Harde-Knox for seven dusty years, and became the company’s designer for specialty pieces— perfume and apothecary bottles and such. It was easy work for Cranberry who modeled most of his designs on his own long-necked, Alembic proportions. “If I were a bottle” was a tune he had invented, and hummed along in his head while he worked.
Then one hot day in July there was a terrible accident on the Harde-Knox assembly line and eight of the company’s young workers were maimed by molten glass. Whitman Harde was beside himself with grief, but Knox settled the labour half of the problem by hiring a migrant family of Haitians to come and work at the factory…
***
Cranberry stood on metal scaffolding that wound along his watchtower-style office on the factory grounds. His spindly arms hung over the railing as he watched the Haitians arrive. He counted them as they slumped out of the company truck to be greeted by Chauncey Knox. There were eight of them, with hard, dour faces. The father was tall and muscular. His head and face were cleanly shaven, and his dark skin shone with sweat from the tight ride. He held a wide straw hat in his hands that was frayed at the brim. His wife stood next to him wearing a simple, shapeless cotton dress, cut to the calf. Her hair was about an inch on all sides. There were four boys, two sets of twins, teenaged and strong. The daughter, Cranberry guessed, was about six. He wondered what kind of work she’d be able to do. On that line, Cranberry would have wondered what work the hunched grandmother would be able to do— he would have wondered if he didn’t feel so unsettled looking at her. The old woman had bare feet and mottled white hair. Her eyes were glassed over almost milky, like some myopic cavefish. All these things disturbed Cranberry, but his eyes were drawn to the curious object she wore around her neck. From that distance he couldn’t make it out. He would have to get closer, a prospect he didn’t look forward to.
The Haitians were put up on the factory grounds in a creaky wooden longhouse shack near the big smokestack. The boys were set to chopping wood for the boiler; the father learned the bellows in the production room; the mother blew the glass for Cranberry’s new designs and the daughter and grandmother worked as a carving team, etching seal stamps for cordial vases and wine jugs. They worked hard for a song and didn’t question Knox’s orders. It was a real coup for the Indiana businessman. His partner on the other hand was seen less and less around the factory, still stricken with grief over the accident.
After a few weeks, Cranberry told himself that going down to talk to the new workers was the proper Christian thing to do. He paced around the office for a quarter-hour working up the nerve. Finally he headed down the scaffold around lunchtime and walked over to the longhouse shack where the family was eating their midday meal.
“Hullo there!” Cranberry shouted as he came up on the wood lot where the boys had left their axes. Eight heads looked up from around the stew pot and quickly looked back.
“I’ll tell ya, whatever you folks are cookin’ smells a good lot better than what I ate for lunch,” Cranberry said with an affected jovial accent.
The Haitians continued their thick stew in silence.
Cranberry thought maybe his timing had been wrong, that maybe he shouldn’t have bothered the hard-working family on their one daily break. Still, he had come this far. He walked over to the father who had finished his lunch and was smoking a hand-carved pipe.
“That’s a handsome pipe, friend,” said Cranberry. “Did one of you all carve it?”
The father blew a smoke ring in the direction of one of the twins.
“Heem,” he said with a deep accent.
“Well aren’t you a talent,” said Cranberry smiling at the boy who said nothing in response.
Cranberry tried his last trick and held out the book he’d been holding at his side.
“Figured I’d make you all a present of the Bible,” he said.
The good book stayed hanging in the dead air for a handful of long seconds.
The father wiped the sweat from his head with a kerchief.
“Can’ read,” he said. Then after a pause, “But Gran likes books.”
He took the Bible from Cranberry and put it at the old woman’s feet while she stirred the pot, trance-like.
“Here you go Gran,” said the father. “A present from the boss here.”
The old woman nodded and set her milky eyes on Cranberry.
“Mesi,” she said in Kreyol and went back to stirring the pot.
Cranberry felt pleased with himself, and thought a formal introduction was in order. He was nervous being referred to as “boss” since it sounded like too much was expected of him.
“The name’s Cranberry,” he said. “Stephen Davidson Cranberry.”
The father sighed at the imposition of revealing himself to Cranberry.
“My name is Jean-Baptiste,” he said.
“Fine name indeed,” laughed Cranberry. “What about your lovely wife?”
“Marie,” he said.
Cranberry looked surprised, expecting the woman to answer for herself. Maybe she didn’t speak English, he thought.
“And the children?” Cranberry asked.
Jean pointed to the older twins, who stood up and walked back to the wood lot.
“Samdi, Samdi Dez.”
The younger two jumped up playfully and flexed their muscles like they were posing for a gag photo.
“Demen, Demen Dez.”
He swatted at them with his straw hat and they squealed off to join their brothers.
“Little Madi,” he pointed to the daughter with his pipe stem. “And Gran, who you know.”
“Her name is Aswe, but just call her Gran and she like you,” Jean-Baptiste smiled freely for a moment, but caught himself and stood up seriously with his arms crossed.
Cranberry was looking down at Gran. His eyes had caught sight of the necklace he’d seen earlier from the scaffold. It had an entrancing oblong shape— a fluke symmetrical blob of a seedpod of some kind.
The old woman turned her head and saw Cranberry staring at the thing. She quickly hid it in her hand and with surprising speed, picked up the Bible and ushered little Madi back into the longhouse to carve.
Cranberry began to wonder if he had done something to offend.
“Mista Cranberrié, you excuse us please for we must get back to work,” said Jean coldly.
He and his wife turned to walk back to the production floor, leaving Cranberry standing in front of the bubbling stew pot wondering what he had done wrong.
***
Word came across Cranberry’s desk fast. A memo from a lawyer for a soft drink firm that was seeking the most innovative bottle designs from across the nation. A bombastic Georgian druggist named Zachariah Wick ran the soft drink company with a shrewd eye for detail and a medicine showman’s flair for marketing and panache. The memo was sent out to all the major glassworkers and bottlers in the country. What they wanted was simple— a bottle with character, a bottle that people could recognize in the dark, a bottle that if broken you could still tell from a moment’s glance what type of bottle it was. In short: a bottle for the ages and a worthy home for Wick’s kola nut tincture.
Cranberry stared at the soft drink missive until it nearly burst into flames. He was a man possessed by the challenge. When the time was finally right he brushed everything off his desk in a sweep of one spindly arm. He pulled out his master-book of design sketches and started in with his pencil, to the tune of “If I were a bottle.”
The pressure had been on in the last few months, since the Haitians had arrived. Cranberry’s relationship with them had not improved, and his Christian patience had become as frayed as the straw brim of Jean-Baptiste’s hat. It was through no real fault of the Haitians, Cranberry knew, and was chiefly the unscrupulous Chauncey Knox who had been making him feel so slighted. The stoic workers had been buried in the kind words of Mr. Knox for so artfully rendering the designs on the latest run of bourbon snifters, with delicate water-lily stoppers. None of that praise had gone to Cranberry, without whom there would have been no snifters at all, at least not suitable for the paying gentry.
He had almost worked himself into a fever measuring the flawless slope of those water-lily stoppers, and with Mr. Harde holed up in his neighbouring estate, Cranberry felt the sting of a spurned son.
It was autumn in Indiana and Thanksgiving was a week away. Cranberry toiled at his desk, eager to win both Harde-Knox and himself the pride of having created the world’s finest soft-drink bottle— the perfect bottle.
Cranberry’s desk was littered with torn-out sketches and graphite dust; nubs of pencils and a small box containing the Waterman fountain men Whitman Harde had given him commemorating his fifth year with the company. Cranberry’s shirt collar was greasy at the neck and his eyes drooped like a sick bloodhound. He hadn’t shaved in a week, and his face was covered in even blonde stubble. Also piled on Cranberry’s desk were dried gourds of all shapes and sizes. This was not festive on his part, but an inspiration to model his newest wave of bottle designs off of familiar shapes in nature— the kola nut the drink was made from was far too blunt. The process was taking its toll on Cranberry. He had begun to ink sad little features on the smooth orange rinds with his Waterman, while singing: “If you were a bottle” to all the gourds, lined up like spurned sons.
He left the office that night at 10:00 p.m. long after Knox and all the other workers had gone home. He clutched his coat around his lanky frame, and his long cricketer’s scarf blew behind him as he crossed the scaffold and the stairs to the ground. He passed the production room and looked up at the great silent smokestack. There was frost on the windows of the longhouse shack and Cranberry wondered how the Haitians would handle the winter. He quickly said a repentant prayer at the wicked thought that they might not survive.
Once he found his perfect design, he would be the favorite son at Harde-Knox again.
***
“Gourds? Gourds!?” roared Chauncey Knox, raging around Cranberry’s office like a cyclone of angry whiskers.
“Boy, what the Devil has possessed you with these gourds?”
‘Mr. Knox, I’m quite confident that the iconic shape we’re looking for is a simple and familiar one. Something from the everyday lives of people. Something friendly and commonplace.”
“And pray, what hopeless ass will want to drink kola nut tonic out of a rotten old gourd Cranberry?” continued Knox. “Gourds don’t make me thirsty, they make me wish they were more useful! The hell’s the use of a gourd anyway?”
“They’re decorative, sir, and if I may, sir, protest your invoking the… Devil’s name so much, sir,” said Cranberry meekly.
“Cranberry, I’d love nothing more than to distill a thousand blazing infernos into a peppy little health tipple and force feed you that fire and brimstone through a folksy, gourd-shaped bottle!” yelled Knox, red in the face. “Wick’s deadline is in fourteen days. I expect some worthy designs from you by the end of the week.”
“Mr. Knox,” said Cranberry. “With all due respect sir, I did win us a valued commission from Brigadier Fisk for those water-lily snifters, and with all due respect sir I was hoping for a bit of recognition for that product line sir, and well, with all due respect sir, when will Mr. Harde be returning to the office?”
Knox set his jaw and gave a blighting look to Cranberry.
“Whitman is still beside himself over those scabby glasswrights who got scalded, and I’m sure you’re aching for his precious pats on the head, but maybe he’ll never come back Cranberry. And maybe if he doesn’t you’ll realize that this is a business, not a family, and if you don’t start seeing the bottom line here, maybe there’s a miserable Haitian tattoo artist out there who will do your job for a roof and three squares!”
With that the big man slammed the door and left Cranberry alone with his desperation, and his gourds.
***
Another fruitless day became another late night, and when Cranberry’s lamp oil finally burned dry he put on his coat and his scarf and walked on home. He rolled a pathetic gourd around in his palm before throwing it fiercely against the factory wall. As Cranberry passed the Haitian’s longhouse shack he saw that the door was open a sliver. He looked a moment back at the split gourd on the ground. His mind raced back to Gran and her mysterious necklace; the engrossing shape; the powerful allure. The perfect contours for the perfect bottle.
But she’d never let me sketch it, thought Cranberry. She recoiled when she caught me simply looking at it.
He didn’t hear any noise coming out of the sliver of open door, so Cranberry shuffled closer to peek without being seen. There was a hanging lamp in the middle of the room, but no bodies in the cots lined up along the wall. Cranberry pushed the door open another crack, quietly enough that it could be blamed on the wind.
No stir.
He strafed across the threshold to see if there was anything on the other side. Not a soul was in the shack.
Cranberry walked inside.
The place was well kept considering the floorboards were rotten when the Haitians moved in. The east wall was lined with cots and burlap blankets, the cast iron pot had been brought inside and was set down in what looked to be a kitchen area. Herbs were strung from the walls in bunches and wild onions and dried flowers festooned small log cutting boards and stump altars. Candle wax hung down the stumps and mock shelves, and deep red stains showed darkly on others. Rabbit fur was nailed to the north wall, along with some other pelts Cranberry couldn’t fix an owner to. Maybe they were out hunting? Foraging? He wondered. He cursed Knox aloud, since the thick bastard probably fed them on whatever chaff was easiest to come by.
This time Cranberry didn’t say a repentant prayer.
He turned to leave but found his eyes drawn to something on one of the cots. It was the Bible he had given to Gran.
He smiled.
Wonder if that old lady actually got some good out of my present, he thought, Suddenly Cranberry felt himself buoyed again by that Christian goodwill he’d been raised on. He instantly regretted all his resentment and suspicion of these poor honest people. He suddenly remembered a passage in Psalms that would be appropriate for the situation. He flipped open the old book and froze, as if the pages had been as cold as ice.
With a knife, someone had cut the perfect contours of an oblong pod deep into the pages of holy book.
Inside those perfect contours, was Gran’s necklace.
***
That night Cranberry couldn’t sleep. He didn’t know what possessed him to steal back the Bible he’d given to the Haitian family, he couldn’t say what exactly had drawn him to possess the seedpod necklace inside. But he needed it, and he had taken it, and now he was a thief.
His conscience ravaged at his internal organs like a weasel, killing in excess of its appetite. Cranberry clutched at the guilt congealing in him like Thanksgiving gravy. He couldn’t hope to sleep, so he sat up in his nightgown and placed the stolen Bible on his lap. He opened it and looked at the pod. It was almost hourglass shaped, but top heavy and bulbous like a tippler’s swollen nose. He picked it out of its crèche in the cut pages and traced his thin fingers along its perfect contours.
He lit a candle at his kitchen table and spread out his auxiliary sketchbook, some fine-tipped pencils and measuring equipment. He traced the seedpod on the page, and scribbled out dimensions and supplementary sketches of girth and form. He wanted whatever bottle he designed from this shape to hold the original allure— this was sacred geometry to Cranberry.
It was long past midnight and he had dozens of sketches from every angle, all Cranberry needed now was to see the thing split, from the inside out. His furious pace of work gave him no time for the remorse of before. No time to consider the growing fault of first stealing then dissecting the sacred property of another person. With a precision chisel and a ball-peen hammer, Cranberry lined up the strike and delivered it with expert force. The thing snapped cleanly in two like a split peapod. The two halves fell onto the table and realigned in perfect opposite— backwards Yin to backwards Yang— empty husks.
The room was suddenly very cold and a stricken terror clutched Cranberry like a wrap of ice. The seedpod was empty—had always been empty— but Cranberry could feel that something had come out.
He poured a small glass of bourbon from a water-lily snifter, one that had been warped. A second.
The liquor warmed his gooseflesh and settled the gnawing of his stomach, the boiling of his guilt. He finished the final drawings with a steady hand. His measurements were precise and the bottle on the page was perfect; a worthy home for Zachariah Wick’s kola nut tonic; a soft drink set for history.
A demented grin spread across Cranberry’s face.
He picked up the split husks of the necklace and held them back together in his hands, then he moved them up and down, like pantomime lips.
“If I were a bottle…” he made them sing.
***
Cranberry left his house just after dawn, with his scarf doubled around his gooseneck and his sketchbook tightly under his arm. He marched across the frosty dead autumn grass to the factory down the old dirt road.
The sun had begun to rise over the eastern fields and the trees and the friendly morning shadows were light blue and chill. He felt as though some slate had been wiped clean, and he could greet the sunrise like it was his first before a new adventure. His coattails clipped in the breeze like schooner sails as he walked through the rusty factory gates.
The grounds seemed oddly still. He expected to see the Haitian women cooking breakfast outside like always. There wasn’t a stir outside the longhouse shack. Maybe they’re cooking inside now that it’s cold, he thought.
When he got to the base of the winding metal stairs to his office, he stood struck.
The light was on inside.
He was certain he hadn’t turned on the electric light last night, and he had left as soon as his lamp oil had burned out. A dire gut feeling suddenly rose in Cranberry.
The Haitians, he thought. Do they know?
He clutched his sketches tighter under his arm.
Impossible, he told himself. A missing Bible and a silly charm, they’ll probably blame one of the twins. They’ll give them a switch hiding and that will be that.
Cautiously he started up the metal stairs, then found himself running. He ran with his book pressed against his chest until he made it to the office door. He threw the thing open and bore inside to set his mind to rest.
The suddenness of his entrance toppled over the man who had been sitting in his chair.
It was Whitman Harde.
“Mr. Harde!” Cranberry yelped and ran to his employer. “Are you alright, sir?”
“I’m fine young Stephen, quite fine,” Whitman said as he brought himself to his feet. “On the outside, mind.”
Whitman Harde wore a purple housecoat, lined at the sleeves and collar with downy, cream cotton. He was quite bald and pronounced in the forehead, and drew attention down to his frameless spectacles that pinched the bridge of his nose. Cranberry had designed those glasses himself.
“You’ve been cooped up some time sir,” said Cranberry. “It’s nice to see you back here and all, but you’ll excuse me for saying sir, you don’t quite seem dressed for work.”
Whitman scanned the items on Cranberry’s desk and paused when he reached the Waterman box.
“Do you get good use out of that pen Stephen?” he asked.
Cranberry lit up. He put his sketchbook down in front of Whitman and opened to the page with the perfect bottle.
“I certainly do Mr. Harde. In fact sir, I came in early to ink over my final sketches. This one. This bottle here is going to win us the kola nut contest sir, I’m dead certain.”
Whitman looked at the sketches, and ran a pale hand along the pencil contours.
“Exquisite work as always Stephen,” he said, detached.
Cranberry stepped forward.
“Sir,” he said trying a confident tone. “What happened to the glass workers wasn’t your fault. It wasn’t anyone’s. That was an act of God sir, and the best we can do is pray for the maimed to heal with all swiftness, and do our work the best in their honour.”
Whitman looked languidly at Cranberry then smiled sadly.
“You have a good heart Stephen, you were raised well. I wish I could share in your naivety.”
He paused.
“They’re dead Stephen.”
“Sir?”
“All dead. The burns were splintered with tiny shards of Burmese glass from the line… gangrenous necrosis, Stephen. Those poor men watched their limbs die. Half took their own lives before facing amputations. All that. Young journeymen, most. Some younger than you my boy. They never could have worked again those boys…”
“I hate to see you like this Mr. Harde,” said Cranberry. “What happened wasn’t your fault.”
“I’m tired Stephen,” said Whitman. “Walk me outside would you.”
Cranberry took the old man’s arm and led him back out onto the scaffold. The morning sun was now out in full and the crisp air was filled with commotion. The other labourers were milling around the longhouse shack.
“What’s going on Stephen? I can’t see what’s going on,” said Whitman squinting into the sun.
“It’s the Haitian’s quarters sir, something’s…”
Cranberry never finished his sentence. The gawkers parted from the shack door and the oldest twins exited, carrying a handmade shutter between them.
On it was old Gran. Quite dead.
“Stephen?” said Whitman, grasping.
“It’s the old Haitian grandmother sir,” said Cranberry absently. “She’s dead.”
Whitman Harde stood for a moment on the scaffold, the golden sun on his pale face looked cadaverous. He seemed to nod in agreement to some unseen understanding, and he removed his hand-made frameless spectacles and handed them to Cranberry.
“That will be all Stephen,” the old man said, then raised his arms from his sides and plummeted over the rail like a tin soldier flipped over a bar.
Cranberry screamed.
Whitman fell.
The gawkers turned their gaze in unison.
Chauncey Knox opened his own office window to bellow at the noisemakers, only to witness his business partner dashed on the dirt of their factory grounds like one of Cranberry’s sad-faced gourds.
***
Production had shut down that day. An outside crew had been brought in to collect and scour Whitman’s remains. No one at the factory could bear it, and the Haitians had been permitted to go bury their Gran in a private way.
Cranberry sat in his office and wept. He wept like a son, now three parents behind. When he had dried up, Knox entered the room. It was clear he had been waiting outside. He had a water-lily snifter of Brigadier Fisk’s special reserve, and two glasses.
“Hell of a thing to happen,” Knox muttered under his whiskers as he poured a long drink for Cranberry and himself.
He slid the glass to Cranberry who stared at it bitterly.
“Drink up,” scolded Knox. “It’ll make you feel better.”
Cranberry slid the bourbon down his throat, if only to replenish some moisture.
“Cranberry,” said Knox thoughtfully. “I know you cared a good deal for old Whitman, and God knows I’ve treated you as well as a boot-black’s spit. But you and I are holding this company together now, and what we need is strength and vision to be true for everyone else.”
“It… It was my fault…” Cranberry said weakly.
“Judas Priest, Cranberry will you knock that rubbish out of your skull!” bellowed Knox. “He slipped, it was an accident, an act of God! Now we’re the only brass left to buff this rusty turd of a factory and we have to put on a brave face for the rest of the fluff out there sobbing into their filthy sleeves.”
Cranberry said nothing, but put his empty glass aside and pushed his open book back to Knox.
Knox looked confused, and then the circuits clicked.
“By God, is this it?” he asked.
He stared at the perfect bottle, the contours and proportions listed to the millimeter, rendered in a flawless sketch from a dead old woman’s prized possession.
“Blow my bowels, this is genius Cranberry. I can picture this resting dutifully in the hands of all the drinkers in America! I’ll send a telegram to Wick immediately.”
Knox paused for a second as he saw Cranberry had been staring out the window this whole time. The big man walked over to the goose-necked one and put a thick hand on his shoulder. Cranberry looked up, confused.
“You’re a blessing in disguise young Stephen Cranberry,” said Knox with all sincerity. “This perfect bottle of yours will pull us out of these dark times and put Harde-Knox back on mint.”
He paused.
“I know all that hurt is raw as all hell, but old Whitman would be proud of you, boy.”
Knox took the sketchbook, left the bottle, and Cranberry’s office was again as silent as the grave.
***
Cranberry stayed on site until half-nine. He had listened to the workers clean up old Whitman and dig away all the fouled dirt. Cranberry rarely drank, but tonight he finished the Brigadier’s reserve while he spun the Waterman back and forth through his fingers.
He walked home without passing the longhouse shack. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the Haitians. His weasel conscience tore at him for failing to offer his condolences, but he faced the pain, fearing worse from them.
The night was cold as Cranberry walked the dirt road back to his little house. He walked in a drunken line, ricocheting off the edges of the ditch like a gambling ball. Only yards from his house, he overshot and landed beak-first into the cold ditch dregs. Cranberry wallowed for a few minutes, wheezing the muck out of his nose and throat.
He heard a laugh.
“I hear you bastardly!” Cranberry slurred. “Laugh at a drowning man you say? I’ll boil your head. Show me yourself!”
Cranberry pulled himself to his feet, and wiped the filth from his eyes, ready to point fisticuffs at whatever jester had laughed at his embarrassing fall.
Standing on the edge of the ditch, her hair in hanging braids, was little Madi, the Haitian daughter.
“Bonswa, Mista Cranberrié,” she said sweetly. “Are you lost?”
All of Cranberry’s drunken blustering fell to feathers. He looked with great regret at the little girl.
“M…Madi, sweet little Madi… What are you alone, child? Home is the’other way.”
Cranberry wiggled a thin finger back in the direction he’d come.
“I was looking for Gran,” the little girl said.
Cranberry may have well been in a drunken fight for the force that hit him with. Poor little thing out looking for her dead Granny, he thought. Heartbreaking.
“She lost her cacao, then we lost her,” said Madi.
The shock of the meeting and the chill of the evening air flushed the drunkenness from Cranberry’s pink face. He looked puzzled at the Haitian girl. For all the sadness of the situation, she didn’t look sad.
“Do you miss your Gran, Madi?” asked Cranberry.
She grinned and shook her head.
“No, just working. After supper she come and see me.”
Cranberry felt sick. Poor little thing thinks she sees her dead old Granny, he thought. He was worried he might vomit. Cranberry pulled off his scarf and wound it tightly around Madi’s little neck.
“You run along home,” he said. “Too cold to look for Gran tonight.”
The girl’s eyes lit up as she rubbed the soft scarf against her cheek.
“Mesi! Mesi, Mista Cranberrié. You always give nice presents. I wish the nice book you give Gran was not lost too…”
“Can you read English words Madi?” asked Cranberry.
She scrunched up her face and made a little pinch with her fingers.
“Piti piti,” she said.
Then she waved and ran back down the dirt road to the factory, with Cranberry’s long scarf waving behind her.
***
Some weeks had passed and the mood at the factory was unchanged. Everyone went about work somberly. Cranberry had finally set his nerves and was sketching pipettes in his office, when there was a great bellowing at the door.
Naturally it was Knox and he let himself in like always.
“Cranberry you magnificent bastard! You prodigal son! By Jove I’d love nothing more than to distill all my goodwill and pride into a gracious elixir and gently slide that charmed brew from one of your goddamned award-winning bottles, down your swan-like throat! You’ve done it Cranberry! Your design swept the board— it blew Wick away. Callooh! Callay! We have bottling royalties and everything, by spit-shined Jolly old Jesus, we won my boy— WE WON!”
Exhausted, Knox slumped into a chair, still waving the telegram from Zachariah Wick’s Kola Nut Concern.
Cranberry was elated. He’d done it. He’d done himself proud, and poor old Whitman too, God rest his soul.
When Knox had caught his breath, the big man saddled his chair up to the front of Cranberry’s desk and put his hands on the edges dramatically.
“Now Cranberry, I have something quite serious to discuss with you now,” Knox said.
“Sir?”
“You don’t have to be a witchdoctor to roll your bones and divine that this place has felt like a tomb since Whitman and the old woman met their unfortunate ends. Now this win is our ticket out of a serious slump, and I think we need to make a change. Are you listening boy?”
“Yes, Mr. Knox, go on,” said Cranberry unsure.
“Ghosts are lousy at running companies, and are even more lousy at representing them. This isn’t Tombstone and Ghoulish Glass House Limited, after all. You following Cranberry?”
It was a rhetorical question.
“Now, you know I’ve always thought of this place as a family, rather than a business, and old Whitman and I always thought of you as our foster son. Now that it’s just the two of us, what do you say to the sound of Knox & Cranberry Glass?”
Knox laughed like a hissing boiler and slapped his palms on the desk.
“Congratulations my boy,” he said. “I’m making you partner!”
Cranberry couldn’t imagine a thing to do, but stand. He took Knox’s hand in both of his.
“Good Heavens Mr. Knox, thank you. Thank you sir, I’m at a complete loss.”
“You can flick those formal manners out of you like a wad of ear wax Cranberry, call me Chauncey.”
“Chauncey,” said Cranberry experimentally. “Thank you Chauncey.”
There was a pause.
“What do we do now?” he asked.
Knox smiled and stroked his thick whiskers.
“We start production on those world-famous bottles.”
***
Winter had arrived, and with it, more money than Knox & Cranberry Glass could shake a ski pole at.
Knox had hired some Chinese railroad workers to help on the production floor. When Jean-Baptiste had seen the new bottle he requested to stay on the bellows. Knox was in such a good mood he couldn’t have cared less. He had cheap labour, a niche product, and his name was finally first on the big sign and all the stationary.
Cranberry on the other hand was staring at that same stationary, trying to wrap his head around the fact that his name was on it too. He was in his old office for the last time, packing up his itemized sketches and old leather-bound manuals and industry prints. Knox had bought him a bowler hat, which Cranberry was apprehensive about wearing. He didn’t feel fancy enough for it. Knox insisted he had to keep up appearances for Howard Hertz, Kola Nut’s general counsel, who was visiting the factory tomorrow morning. It would be a grand occasion, but Cranberry felt morose. Tying a tie, shaking hands with lawyers, bearing the ineffable weight of a bowler hat and a name with a sign and a set of stationary behind it.
He poured a drink. Brigadier’s Reserve wasn’t out of place anymore.
He wanted to stay in this dusty nest with his pencils and books. Cranberry had designed the perfect bottle. What now?
He leaned back and closed his eyes. There was a rattling that he thought was in his brain. He slapped the side of his head and it got stronger. It was ascending, a dull thump. He slapped again and it got louder, closer. This was just a coincidence. It wasn’t in his brain. Someone was slowly walking up the stairs to the scaffold.
Cranberry took another drink and the sound stopped for a moment. He held his breath and listened. The plodding continued, monotonous, like a sleepwalking soldier.
Cranberry put on his bowler, he pulled the brim down low, hiding inside. He clutched the glass with two hands.
“Who’s there?” he yelled hoarsely.
No one spoke in kind.
The shuffling step continued around the office, closing the corner of the west wall. There were no windows except in the door.
“Speak! You there!” yelled Cranberry again.
Still nothing.
The new factory co-owner was nervous. There was nothing in the office he could defend himself with: the bourbon bottle? The Waterman? Might blind an adversary, he thought.
Cranberry’s eyes darted back to the door.
There was no lock.
He had no time to push the desk. Cranberry leapt to his feet and wedged the chair under the brass knob. He backed away from the barricade and backwards into the centre of the room, as the owner of the shuffling gait turned the final corner.
Cranberry felt tremors in his thin hands; he pushed them in and out of his trouser pockets. His back finally hit the south wall, and he could see a figure form in shadow in the window. The intruder pressed their hands and face against the glass that read backwards, now outdated: Stephen D. Cranberry – Glassworks & Design.
Cranberry opened his mouth wide and no trace of a scream or a sound at all came out.
In the window was Gran.
It was her— just as Madi had said— only not her. The old woman’s milky cavefish eyes were closed, sewn shut, each with a thick, simple X. Her mouth also, an X at each crest of the lip. She made no gestures, no sound. She just held her face against Cranberry’s door, not quite able to stare.
Cranberry was petrified. He couldn’t bear to watch, and shut his eyes tightly behind the brim of his bowler hat. After a dread pause, Gran moved on. The dead Haitian half-marched, half-shambled several feet back past the stairs then stopped. Cranberry devoted every ounce of himself to hearing— he froze his body and was entirely ears. He heard the rattle of the metal handrail, and again nothing. Then came a thud, swift and blunt like a blackjack. Then after more heady silence, came the steps on the metal stairs.
A deep, dread realization clutched Stephen Davidson Cranberry as he heard the body outside pause again at the metal railing and fall.
She was acting out Whitman Harde’s suicide.
Reliving it again, and again.
Tormenting him.
Cranberry was trapped in his grave cold office, forced to contend with the two deaths that his sins had caused.
Again, and again.
On into the night.
***
When Cranberry awoke he was still in his office. He was huddled behind his desk with a broken bottle of Brigadier’s Reserve in pieces around him. It was well past noon.
Cranberry tried to remember. The night was a long drone of shuffle and thump, of the torturous lead up to a sickening show, like a long mallet dragged towards a horrible gong. He felt the bowler hat pulled tightly below its comfortable rest on his head.
Maybe it had just been a dream, thought Cranberry, pulling tighter into his nook. Maybe I drank too much and my imagination got loose.
The office seemed barer in the light of day, with all its trappings and effects packed into a few simple boxes. Nothing at the factory was like Cranberry remembered, even from the first months the Haitians had arrived. He wished he’d only dreamed being made partner too, but the stationary was there to callously remind him.
There was a quick knock at the door and Cranberry stayed hidden. Someone tried the knob, but the chair was still firmly in place.
“Cranberry?” asked Knox quietly from outside. “You in there Cranberry?”
Cranberry didn’t say a word. He couldn’t face a day of anything. He stayed hidden, until Knox sighed audibly and headed back down the stairs. Cranberry wrapped his loose new coat around him and fell back into restless, running sleep. Trying to escape.
***
Cranberry was eventually driven from his nest by hunger. He had no idea how much time had passed, while he lay hidden in his officious clothes. He smelled the familiar smell of Haitian stew and let it lead him out and down, back into his factory grounds. It was before dusk, and the wind blew empty through Knox & Cranberry Glass, the smoke stack was still and no one was working.
In front of the longhouse shack the elder twins Samdi and Samdi Dez were stirring the pot like clockwork loggers— back and forth, back and forth, in perfect unison. Madi was with them and she waved when she saw Cranberry.
“Mista Cranberrié! Bonswa! Come over!” she yelled.
Cranberry walked slowly towards the girl, his arms were crossed with his hands on his boney elbows.
She’s just a little girl, he told himself, just a sweet little girl. Cranberry looked at the boys who had their eyes fixed blankly on him. He blanched when he remember how good at carving one was.
“Madi,” he said weakly. “I forgot to have my dinner, and your stew smells very good. Maybe I could have some.”
Madi laughed.
“You only want stew? After you give me such a nice thing, and a nice book for Gran? That very simple Mista Cranberrié, like giving gold and taking straw.”
Cranberry was too hungry to feel guilty. Madi held out a wooden bowl and Samdi filled it. Thin carrots and knots of meat bobbed in the steaming broth. The girl gave the bowl and a spoon to Cranberry who was salivating like a summer storm. The hungry man devoured the bowl in big, greedy spoonfuls that scalded his tongue in futile attempts to slow him down.
Madi giggled and toyed with the striped scarf she wore bundled around her. The two boys lifted an iron lid three-quarters over the pot, and left to go inside the longhouse shack.
“Don’t forget your dinner tomorrow Mista Cranberrié,” Madi said when they were alone. “Or maybe you burn a hole in your belly.”
Cranberry sat down on a stump and put the lapped bowl at his feet.
“Thank you,” he said in a sigh. “Thank you very much.”
The sky over the two was red with the setting sun.
“Madi,” said Cranberry cautiously. “I think I saw your Gran last night.”
She smiled as if he’d said nothing surprising.
“Wi, wi,” she said in Kreyol. “I tell you. She goes for walks at night.”
“She seemed very strange,” Cranberry said.
Madi looked sad.
“She don’ talk now. But is better than gone.”
“What happened to her Madi?” Cranberry asked.
“She lose her cacao, and Papa have to change her.”
“Cacao?” asked Cranberry with dread.
“Wi, her necklace. It was magick, like Papa is magick. If Gran don’ have it, she go away, but Papa help her to stay,” Madi said matter-of-fact.
“I think your Papa is frightening, Madi,” said Cranberry.
Madi’s face fell.
“He don’ like you Mista Cranberrié,” she said. “He think you do bad thing, but not me.”
“Where is your Papa, Madi?”
“Gone with Gran and Mama, my brothers are playing,” she said.
Cranberry stood up. His mouth hurt.
“I think I have to leave now,” he said vacantly.
Cranberry began to walk and stopped.
“Madi, did you see Mr. Knox today?”
“Mista Moose-tache?” she said. ”He send other men home, then he don’ come out of his room, like Mista Cranberrié. We all lonely today.”
Cranberry turned on his heel and back towards the factory, to the top floor where Chauncey Knox had his office.
Madi tickled her face with the tassels of the scarf.
***
Cranberry leaned back onto the smokestack, which rose defiantly into the night sky, like a rusty nail daring to be tread on. On the tin factory roof he gazed out over his holdings, and saw them gaze back confused— why was there so much death at a glass company?
Whitman Harde.
Old Gran.
Chauncey Knox.
The fat man still swung in the office just below him. Cranberry clutched the note he had left. The meeting with Hertz had been replaced by a telegram from the Georgia office. The contest had awarded Knox & Cranberry Glass first production run rights of the winning bottle. After that a lottery stipulation clause hidden in the fine print made sure that the trademark was deferred to Wick’s Kola Nut Concern and the affiliates thereof. The perfect bottle was theirs and the contracts to commence mass production had been awarded to more established glassworks and bottling companies, owned by more established friends of the KNC. Knox & Cranberry would be paid for their production line, and the rest was what they called business. Knox had taken the blow as hard as it would take. The first run money from KNC was already spent in double. Knox was ruined. He’d paid the workers out of pocket, looked for Cranberry, and then let himself drop from the office rafters, crunching his neck in a noose like a medicine bottle underfoot.
Now Cranberry was like the groundskeeper of a family tomb, an ossuary of splintered glass bones and vessels of fine liquor. The moon yawned, full behind the spike of the smokestack and cast its light on Knox’s last words on the newly outdated company stationary.
Cranberry held his thumb over the fat man’s name at the head of the page.
Cranberry Glass.
The words seemed pestilent to him. Nothing, he felt had ever been so unwelcome or undeserved. In spite of self-pity though, he would not abandon this failing place. Stephen D. Cranberry would not let Harde-Knox become an epitaph.
***
The days that followed were handled in a bureaucratic trance. Cranberry settled the estates of Whitman Harde and Chauncey Knox with their Terra Firma lawyer. He sold Cranberry Glass to a Scotsman named Cornelius McCray who, on Cranberry’s insistence, changed the name to The McCray Company.
Cranberry had inherited Whitman Harde’s manse a quarter-mile from the factory, where he resolved to settle— at once his new and old family home. The logistical details Cranberry had handled with detached efficiency, he now faced the Haitians.
Cranberry had fortified himself with prayer and a plan to offer the family a severance package that would give them enough to settle, buy land, or move on at their wish with financial freedom.
He still found being on the factory grounds difficult. The walk to the longhouse shack was like a walk to the gallows. The metal stairs to his old office creaked in Cranberry’s mind, as if under the dead weight of Gran or the specter of Whitman Harde.
When he arrived at the weatherworn building there were no signs of life at all. The door was shut and painted on it in a child’s shaky script was the Kreyol good-bye, orevwa. Inside all the Haitian’s effects were gone, the dried herbs and candles, even the iron pot had been taken. The cots remained stripped of their bedding, but in the centre of the stretched canvas was a cold reminder for Cranberry from Jean-Baptiste.
The split halves of the cacao pod.
***
Years past and eventually The McCray Company was bought out by Zachariah Wick’s KNC subsidiary Nouveau-Ko, and produced nothing but Stephen D. Cranberry’s perfect bottles, which were now the instantly recognizable image of Wick’s kola nut soft drink.
Cranberry had remained in Whitman Harde’s Terra Firma manse, and let the thing fall to pieces around him. He lived modestly on the dividends of some re-investments and had become something of a local legend, the stuff used to scare children to bed. Tales of old man Cranberry and his curse, how his old black mansion was filled with shrunken heads in jars, and if you knocked three times at midnight on his old doorknocker, the Devil himself would come stick his boney fingers through your chest, and stop your little heart. The older kids who lived on the dirt road to the factory had a different end to the Cranberry legend. They said they’d seen an old black woman with wild white hair and her eyes and mouth sewn shut. They said they’d seen her shuffling along the Cranberry grounds and circling the old man’s rotting home. Those kids said that if you knocked at midnight it was that horrible old woman who would come and swallow your soul. Some questioned how she could swallow your soul if her mouth was sewn up, but most of the children of Terra Firma were too scared to talk back when it came to the Cranberry story.
One boy whose name was Jacob was an errand boy who delivered food to the Cranberry Manse and took the old man’s mail. He was quiet and mostly kept to himself, but one summer evening when all the kids had gathered for 4th of July fireworks in the field near the Nouveau-Ko Factory, Jacob arrived breathless from the Cranberry Manse.
Before, he’d always left baskets on the front step and knocked once, or taken the mail that was left for him in the box, but tonight as Jacob reached for the knocker, old man Cranberry had opened the door and swept the boy inside.
Red, white and blue fireworks glowed on Jacob’s frantic face as he told the others about the Cranberry Manse and how it was stacked full of old books about strange islands and black magick. Old man Cranberry had thrust a letter into his hand and told him it was of the gravest importance that he take it to the mailroom of the Nouveau-Ko Factory so that it get to KNC legal department as soon as possible.
The children asked what Cranberry looked like, and Jacob said he looked like a pickled goose, all wrinkled and pallid and long in the neck.
They all wanted to know what was in the letter, but Jacob insisted his oath of discretion as an errand boy applied even to the creepiest of old men and the most tantalizing of mysteries.
The next day as soon as the factory gates had opened, young Jacob was there with the letter for KNC legal and another, personal message for the factory owner, Casper Gray. Both were delivered with haste and the last wishes of Stephen D. Cranberry were put in motion.
Exclusive rights were granted from KNC legal and the US Patent Office to craft a single bottle of Cranberry’s original design, only with expanded proportions and an altered composition. A specialist glasswright was commissioned to set the bottle, with trace amounts of gold and stannic chloride to give it a rose-coloured hue. The method was used to create decorative glassware, and it was assumed by all that it was Cranberry’s intent to have a memento of his life’s work before he died.
Jacob knew better. He knew that the colour of the bottle was irrelevant, that the gold and tin was symbolic, to represent wealth and lack— like little Madi had once said— gold and straw. It was an incantation to protect Cranberry from sorcery in the afterlife; he had since ceased believing in God. The bottle, only Jacob knew was a dead man’s urn, not a trophy.
The arrangements had been made, and Cranberry was indeed dead when the bottle was delivered. He had left instructions to be cremated by Dean Root at Terra Firma Funerary, and the ashes were to be handed over to young Jacob Volk who had been given a handsome stipend to fill the bottle with Cranberry’s ashes and bury it without a marker as far as he could walk from the old Harde-Knox Glass Company in a day.
But before Jacob sealed the thing, Stephen Davidson Cranberry had left a rolled up paper document to be packed in with his earthly remains.
It was the only thing he had ever written on Knox & Cranberry Glass stationary, and the “Knox” portion he had inexpertly scratched out with the last legs of an old Waterman pen. In the same ink, Cranberry had written his own epitaph, apology, and message in a bottle to be cast out into the sea beyond:
“So I am a bottle.”
Posts
