Howard Elman's Farewell

The Greek Chorus

THE GEEK CHORUS % birch latour was the sole heir of the Salmon estate and steward of the Salmon Trust Conservancy. Howard thought he took his legacy too seriously for his own good. Even before he went to college Birch had committed his life to the guardianship of the Trust, inspired by his own boyhood experiences on the land, his peculiar upbringing, and the spirits who lingered on the land—his mother, Lilith Salmon, who had died giving birth to him on the ledges of the Trust and, his grandmother Persephone Butterworth Salmon, who raised him, and perhaps most important, his other grandfather, the Squire, Raphael Salmon who had created the conservancy that everyone called the Trust and who had also died on the ledges before Birch was born. Birch had a bachelor of arts degree in environmental studies and a master’s degree in computer science from Dartmouth College, and upon gradu­ ation had moved into the Manse, bringing along his friends to work in the company that he and Missy Mendelson had founded, Geek Chorus Software. Birch got around on dirt roads of the Trust in a vintage Ford Bronco. His grandfather Raphael had bought it new in 1983. After the Squire died, his widow—a madwoman behind the wheel of any vehicle— kept the Bronco going. After she died, the Bronco sat untouched in a corner of the driveway for a couple years. Katharine Ramchand— Persephone’s niece, Birch’s stepmother, and the executor of Persephone ’s will—was about to have the Bronco hauled off to Donald Jordan’s junkyard, but Birch, by then a teenager with a brand-new­ driver’s license, got an idea. He took some of his inheritance money and at great expense had the Bronco completely rebuilt. For Birch the vehicle was more than transportation, it was a link to his ancestry and responsibilities as steward of the forest conservancy. 47 Some of the lands of the Trust had been set aside to be “untouched by human hands in perpetuity,” in the words of Raphael Salmon. Other parts, through “wise logging practices,” were expected to produce revenue to pay taxes, maintain the Salmon residence, and support the Trust steward and his staff. Most of the land was open to the public for hunting, day hiking, and even snowmobiling. Birch knew that technically he, as lifetime steward, was an agent of the Trust’s board of directors , but since he had stacked the board with his friends, relatives, and admirers, Birch Latour, at age twenty-four, ruled over the Trust. Most of the board members lived in and around the Salmon estate in Upper Darby. The Manse had been built by Raphael Salmon’s progenitors back when there was big money in the family. The Salmons, along with the Butterworths and Prells, had bought up the properties in the highlands of the town and established Upper Darby. Birch had remodeled the Manse by wiring it to accommodate computers and by hanging landscape paintings of the Trust lands. The night Howard showed up at the Manse, Birch was giving a talk to his friends and some visiting investors in Geek Chorus Software. Howard took a seat in the back of the ballroom, turned up his hearing aid, and listened to his grandson. The young steward talked easily, and while his voice carried well, it had a soft quality to it that lulled and comforted his audience. “In the historical gardens of this estate I see the beauty, complexity , confusion, and isolation of my Salmon forbears. What they seemed to have had in common was an inability to agree among themselves. My great-grandmother established formal Italian gardens. My grandmother Persephone grew flowers in the profligate style of the English garden. Gertrude Jekyll had been her inspiration. My own mother’s last act before her death giving birth to me had been to plant lilac bushes from cuttings from the Governor Wentworth estate in New Castle, New Hampshire. The gardens were the first frames we built into our video game, because—with the exception of the lilacs—the gardens no longer exist in reality. Human neglect and the change-­machine that is nature has reclaimed the land, but from research in journals and photographs we have reconstructed the gardens in all their glory and 48 then some for our video game.” Birch paused for a moment, then made eye contact with his investors...