“I don’t know,” Henry says. “For safekeeping, maybe?” Sad mementos of past glories, that’s all the box seems to hold.
“I guess so,” she says. “I should get moving,” but she just stands there, fingering the tiny gold man on the trophy.
“You know, after your father died,” she says, rearranging the contents of the box and closing it, “I didn’t take very good care of you two. Of Dan, particularly, because he was a little older. I think I left him on his own too much, or — anyway — he’s always had trouble really connecting with people.”
“He has loads of friends,” Henry counters.
“Apart from you, Henry, they’re mostly teammates and acquaintances.”
Their eyes meet, and neither of them says anything for a moment. His mother takes out the pins holding her hair up, shakes the tresses down onto her back, then pulls them together, winds them into a bun and re-pins them — all in one smooth, practiced motion.
He wants to say that he doesn’t think Dan’s fixations, his nutty behaviour, could possibly be her fault. “I’m going to go for a drive,” he says instead. “Do you want to come?” Maybe she can talk to the taxidermist’s brother while Henry’s searching the premises for a penis bone. Then he’s afraid she’s going to say yes, and will want to see what he finds, but all she says is, “You go ahead. I’ve got some reading I want to do.”
HENRY’S DRIVING DOWN A GRAVEL ROAD, his wheels kicking up spumes of dust. The email he got from Dan a couple of days ago was three words: where’s my boner? and Henry shot back, if you can’t find it I can’t help you, and then he phoned Marcie, and she listened while he released a stream of invective against his brother: “Dan has abandoned Rae when she needs him the most, a woman he’s been with for years who would do anything for him; and Mom has lost countless nights of sleep worrying about him — and the only reason my running fool of a brother can think of to get in touch with me is to ask me to find him a wolverine penis bone, which he wants, again, and now — a bone that’s as hard to find as Dan bloody well is himself.”
And Marcie said, “Desperate Dan, that’s what I used to call him — just to myself, you know — because even when he wins a big championship or whatever, he doesn’t stop to enjoy it, he’s already chasing the next big thing. He can’t sit still long enough to even know what it is he’s feeling.” And when Henry didn’t say anything because he thought he’d already said too much, she said, “You’re different though, Henry. You’re the one.”
He’s the one. He doesn’t know what she meant, but probably it has something to do with the fact that he’s driving down this dusty road on a sunny Saturday afternoon in June, about to pull up in front of the old taxidermist’s shop, rather than doing what he wanted, which was to go for a walk down to the river. And for sure he would end up having coffee with the taxidermist’s brother, because you can’t just call up an old bachelor farmer, arrange to drop in on him half an hour later, and not accept his offer of country hospitality. And that would be Henry’s whole Saturday afternoon shot.
The pale yellow farmhouse is small, square, very plain, probably about ninety years old, with marigolds in pots on either side of the door. An old collie comes limping out to greet Henry, its large bushy tail wagging slowly. He crouches to talk to the dog, which lowers itself stiffly to the ground and rolls on his back so Henry can rub his belly.
The door opens, and a tall thin man with freckled, windburnt cheeks, in a pair of blue overalls, acknowledges Henry with a nod.
“Mac,” he says, extending his hand.
“Henry,” Henry nods back and they shake.
“Nice day,” Mac casts an eye up at the cloudless blue sky, then at the building that is his dead brother Percy’s workshop, a muddy brown building, long and low, with a flat roof.
“Sorry to bother you like this,” Henry says, “but I’m looking for a particular bone.” He can’t imagine speaking the phrase “penis bone” into Mac’s innocent-seeming face. Mac waves a hand toward the workshop and Henry follows him.
“Door’s a bit sticky,” Mac says, pushing his shoulder into it.
Inside, Henry can make out a large shape just ahead of him, opposite the door.
“The light is here somewheres.” Mac gropes with two hands along the wall and a row of fluorescent ceiling lights crackle to life.
The shape is the moose head that Henry remembers from his school trip. Mounted over a long wooden counter, the moose, with its enormous rack and elegant, almost equine head, presides over the room like a deity. The counter has a tool of some kind lying on it, and a coffee mug, as if Percy has just stepped out for a moment. Henry touches the tool with his fingertips, a toothy loop of metal, and it spins, revealing a blank in the dust in the instrument’s exact shape. But this must not be where he worked. There’s no work surface, no other tools.
“Bones, if there is bones,” Mac says, “would be in that back room. Haven’t been in here for a while but that’s my guess. Look around all you want.” The old man’s face is closed, like he doesn’t want Henry to be here, and he feels in the wrong, an intruder, and then Mac’s straight back is disappearing out the door.
The narrow front room is like a showroom, where customers came in to pick up their finished trophies — and the place is beyond quiet. There are so many heads on the walls on either side of the door that Henry averts his eyes even while telling himself not to be stupid. Is what Percy did so different from what Henry himself does? Taxidermy, the articulation of bird skeletons, they’re both acts of preservation, aren’t they? And after all, Percy was just providing a service, wasn’t he. Should Henry feel superior because the birds he works with haven’t been killed deliberately? Because he’s a scavenger, not a predator — a crow, not a hawk?
For an instant, it’s as if the animals before him are moving the wall in his direction, bearing it on their shoulders — the rest of their bodies hidden on the other side. A large buck, another, smaller moose, a black bear, a coyote, a red fox, an elk, two delicate-looking antelope with straight, unelaborated horns. And a wolverine, its plasticky lips permanently curled in a snarl.
In the back room there are skins hanging from hooks along the wall. And antlers in a pile in one corner, like a thicket of calcified thorns. A table with a blackened surface. A big white sink. A wall of shelves filled with bottles and bags and pots — all the chemicals and potions needed to preserve and clean and tan hides.
And against the back wall, two large freezers with rust stains spilling down the front. If there are bones in them, the bones will be red and raw. May even still be inside the bodies of the animals. Henry has a vision of a jumble of severed deer heads — he puts a hand on the first freezer, takes a breath, and yanks up the lid. It’s full of packages of meat in pink butcher paper. Moose meat. And venison. A couple of plucked ducks in clear plastic bags speckled with frost. Henry laughs, and lets the lid drop with a bang. What made him think that there would be bones here? The bones would have been hauled away, buried somewhere, on the Macintosh brothers’ land. This search is pointless.
There’s only one other place to check, a pedestal desk with a large drawer in the centre. He opens it and finds just what you’d expect, pens and pencils, a new set of scalpels in a clear plastic case, paper clips, a well-thumbed deck of playing cards. The side drawers hold wads of old bills or receipts, receipt books, ledgers, file cards with customers’ names on them. The last drawer is sticky and doesn’t want to open. He pulls hard but it resists.
When’s the last time anyone saw a wolverine around here, never mind skinning and mounting it? The one out front probably dates from the twenties or thirties.
Henry tries the drawer again and this time it opens a crack. He peers into it. Marbles, he thinks — and then, eyes. The hair prickles on the back of his neck. He hauls on the drawer and it squeaks open. Glass eyes of all one size, probably deer eyes. Henry squeezes a hand in and grabs several, rolls the half-spheres — like swollen brown buttons — around in his palm.
Imagines Percy sewing one of them into an eye socket.
He slips the eyes back into the drawer and whacks his kneecap against the stubborn wood to force it closed. “Ow,” he cries, grabbing his knee, and something catches his eye under the desk — a watch about where Percy’s feet may have kicked it, not noticing that it was there. A very handsome gold watch with a broken strap, and it’s working — the little hand swooping over a creamy dial painted with what looks like blue-winged teal in flight over cattails.
Henry smiles and shoves the watch into his pocket.
THEY ARE SITTING IN MAC’S KITCHEN, drinking instant coffee.
“Didn’t get what you wanted, then?” Mac’s watery blue eyes are curious, his tone mild.
“No. Not a single bone in there — except maybe in the steaks.”
“Steaks?”
“One of the freezers is full of cuts of meat customers must have given your brother.”
“Ah, right. I guess I should empty that freezer. I don’t want none of it. You could help yourself. Perfectly good meat,” Mac says.
“No, thank you,” Henry says from behind his coffee cup.
“We used to put half a beef in the freezer each fall.” Mac rubs his hands brusquely across his whole face. “These days, I don’t need much.” Henry looks out the kitchen window at the dark, low building. At dusk, it must disappear.
“You do some taxidermy then?” Mac asks.
“No, not me. I articulate birds.”
Mac nods thoughtfully. “Draw them, you mean?”
Henry explains about assembling the skeletons.
“Like what’s in a museum then. Like that place at the University.”
“Yeah, that’s right.”
Mac’s mouth lifts at one corner into a closed-mouth smile. “I used to work with him, in the beginning, forty, fifty year ago.”
“So you’re a taxidermist too.”
“Nah, I was a fumbler.” The old man, with his small, trim head, his cheeks reddened from decades of outdoor work, studies the surface of the Arborite table, its fake green marble. “Ever seen a skinned fawn?” he asks. Henry shakes his head.
“It’s the sorriest wee thing. And a bear cub, we did once, back then.” Mac brushes at the surface of the table with his sleeve. There are age spots on the backs of the old man’s hands, like faded, overgrown freckles. “No, I left Percy to it,” he says. “I was more at home in the fields.”
Mac walks him to his car, shakes Henry’s hand again. “I was going to say take whatever you want out in the shop, but I suppose nothin’ out there’s of any use to you.”
“Thanks anyway,” Henry says. And then he draws Percy’s watch out of his pocket. “I almost forgot. I found this.” And he hands it to Mac, who glances at the watch and then away, to the field of new barley growing beyond his picket fence, nothing but spears of urgent green, rippling west, to the horizon.
HENRY PARKS IN HIS MOTHER’S DRIVE and immediately goes to the shed out back, the place where he’s prepared so many birds over the years, where his bird bones are stored. He wants to see them, to handle them, the clean, dry bones in the drawers of the assorted cabinets he appropriated from his father’s workshop.
So many bird bones, so many drawers. Each one like a secret channel drawing him into the days and weeks of his boyhood summers, and soon he’s lost amongst the tiny bird skulls, the beak sheaths, the vertebrae as minute as seeds.
An hour later when he hears a raven’s querulous cough outside, above the shed, he glances reflexively toward the ceiling and sees a cardboard box not quite hidden in the rafters. Curious, he snags it with a finger, and it tips, rattling noisily into his arms.
He opens the box: fox bones.
Of course. For years after that summer, he collected fox bones whenever he found them — as if somehow he’d be able to divine, by studying them, what really happened to the male fox and the kits. Hundreds of fox bones; he could probably assemble three or four foxes out of them. A few of the vertebrae are tiny and may have actually belonged to the kits. He is lifting a skull out — so small, smaller than you’d think an adult fox skull would be — when his other hand closes on a very narrow, very straight bone.
He carefully puts the skull down and then examines what he’s holding, and yes, it is — it really is — a baculum. Digging around in the box, he comes up with another one.
Not just one but two perfect penis bones — the second a little fatter, and longer, than the other. Baculum, bacula. He can hardly believe it, but he should have known: home is where the boner is.
Henry is laughing now, the bones lying across his open palm like the Roman numeral two.
Twenty
HENRY PULLS UP IN FRONT OF Maria Bogdanov’s Friday afternoon and finds Michael’s gleaming blue Lincoln parked in Henry’s usual spot. This morning, Mrs. Bogdanov had the cloud excised from her eye. Does the old woman really need him? Michael is here, and he’s far more solicitous than Henry could ever be. He remains in his car, gazing up at the house, the earthy yellow brick glowing in the sunshine. A moving van is idling in front of the neighbour’s house — looks like it might have been sold after sitting empty for years.
He feels a deep reluctance to move, even though it’s a hot day and it’s stuffy in the car. He rolls his window down; the air outside is as heavy as the air inside, the heat like a skin that can’t be peeled away.
A jogger passes by, a jogger who is not Dan but is just as whacko as he is to be running in this heat; Henry hopes Rae is sheltering in the shade of her Russian Olive, her stamina slowly returning. Dan is showering maybe, done with his run for hours now. Or he and Lazenby are sprawled together on the couch in some borrowed apartment, watching John Wayne twirl his six-gun. Wherever he is, Henry hopes he’s read his email, and knows that Henry has his boner for him — for real, this time — although Henry was purposefully vague about which species of boner exactly.
Marcie, he knows exactly where she is — she’s basking in the air-conditioned comfort of a so-called “day spa,” getting relief from the heat that is making it so much harder for her to haul her heavily pregnant self around these days. She’s had her last shift at the greenhouse, and is pampering herself; the baby’s due date is only ten days away now. She’s cancelled their usual riverside walk and invited herself over to his place for dinner this evening instead.
Henry is sleepy in the heat, suspended between the river in the east and Mrs. Bogdanov in the west, the grand old storyteller with her wounded eye. The sound of the passing traffic is hypnotic, like the current of words, the conversation he imagines going on in the Bogdanov house right now, those two old people speaking Russian to one another. Michael and his dear friend Maria. Henry’s leg jumps, and his eyes open for a moment and then close again.
It’s not just one eye that has been miraculously healed — both of Maria’s eyes are bandaged, but she talks on, oblivious, her sight all in her words, in what she’s saying about the bear. Henry doesn’t want her to tell this story when he isn’t there to hear it, and in Russian, but she keeps talking and talking. The bear is a great shambling thing, and it isn’t in a cage, but in chains, a clanking black chain around each of its powerful back legs. And it wears an iron collar, and that collar is also attached to a chain, and that chain is bolted to a tree. Whenever the bear moves, there is the painful sound of the heavy links grating against one another. The tree has a huge girth and is plated in a slatey armour of bark. It has no leaves but its branches are so thick and entangled that it provides shade nonetheless for the old bear that has been anchored to this tree for years, for decades, for the entire time that Maria Bogdanov has been away in a far country.
Now she is back, and stands under the tree, next to the animal, and is about to put her hands in his coarse fur, to place her palms under his collar. The story she is telling she is telling to the bear, and it is about the young man, the bird-builder with his house made of bones.
Henry awakes with a start at a thump on the hood of his car. A
t first he thinks a branch has fallen, a limb from the giant tree, but then he sees Michael standing next to the car.
“Hello,” Michael says, his big face, cross-hatched with fine lines, tipped politely toward Henry.
The sun’s in Henry’s eyes and Henry looks past Michael, momentarily blinded.
“Maria asked me, ‘Where is Henry,’ she asked,” the old man says. “I said I would call him. So now,” Michael smiles, drumming his fingers on the car roof, “I am here and I am calling you.”
“I was just going to come in.” Henry gets out and Michael steps away, standing with his hands folded together behind his back. He’s wearing an expensive-looking dark blue suit that makes his stocky frame appear almost trim.
Henry feels sweat along the runnel of his spine, his T-shirt clinging to him. “How is she?” he asks.
“Resting. I think it really is quite straightforward, you know, this operation.” Michael’s brow is furrowed as he gazes toward the house.
“That’s right,” Henry agrees.
“But still. The eyes, they can’t be replaced. It must be nervous-making, to have a doctor in there.”
Henry smiles, seeing a small doctor inside the vast spaces of Maria Bogdanov’s wandering left eye.
“I told her I would come again tomorrow. And you also?” This is not a request but a command.
“If she wants. Yeah, sure.”
Michael is looking up at Henry, but Henry is the one who feels like the lesser man. Sleeping, sleeping while Mrs. Bogdanov awaited him, needing his — what? Would she want him to read to her now, from all those Russian novels he fetches for her from the library? He remembers his dream, the air in her house turbulent with long Russian sentences. He doesn’t even know if she still speaks the language; all the novels he fetches for her are English translations.
He turns toward the house. “I’d better —” He points at the front door, which Michael has left open.
The Afterlife of Birds Page 16
