The Afterlife of Birds
Page 23
In the first room he enters, casts of fossils in ornate gilt frames hang on the walls like paintings in a gallery, and tiny, bird-like creatures are brilliantly lit in square cases, their bones like jewels in a tasteful setting. Henry feels as if museum-goers in this dimly lit room should be wearing tuxes and cocktail dresses and sipping glasses of wine. As it is, the few people studying the fossils speak in whispers. Even a little boy holding a plastic T-Rex in his fist makes a muted yelp of pleasure when his father holds him up to the interactive display so he can place his tiny palm in a large three-toed dinosaur track the circumference of a manhole cover. The father sets the boy on the ground, and with a hand on his son’s head, guides him out of the room.
In the Dinosaur Hall, Henry shrinks beneath towering tyrannosaurus rex, their snaky necks and ridiculously small heads reaching up toward the cathedral-like ceiling. The stout triceratops, with their deadly looking horns and a bony frill of armoured collar at the back of their skulls, are like otherworldly war machines. Sprinting at the feet of the giants are more demure creatures, six-foot-long dinosaurs — they can’t fly yet, but something in their stride makes you believe they’re about to spring into the air.
Henry is dazzled. With its vast interiors, the museum is like a mind that is never conflicted or doubtful, always certain of its facts, willing to surrender them if they prove false, but sure of the bedrock: there were these gargantuan beasts, and tiny lizards, and every other size of cold-blooded creature in between, and they are no more. These fabulous beings died out, making room on earth for a radical new idea, another way of being, and here Henry stands, his warm blood rushing in his veins, his heart clapping, in thrall to its own ingenuity.
When the shrill sound of the phone woke Henry that night, he’d been having a dream about canoeing down the Torch, the blue and gold of the sky so perfectly reflected that he could hardly tell air from water. It took him a couple of minutes to comprehend what Marcie’s sister was asking of him. On his way up to the maternity ward in the overly bright elevator, Henry still didn’t feel awake. Through the half-open door of Marcie’s room, he heard her cry out. When he rounded the corner, she was on her feet, arms braced against the back of a chair as she swayed, mid-contraction, a nurse at her side. He didn’t really wake up until Marcie’s eyes met his, and her naked gratitude at the sight of him, her elemental need, blew right through him, his shock of fear confusingly like joy.
HENRY MEANDERS BACK AND FORTH in time at will. Mammoths, mastodons, sabre-toothed cats. Shark-like fishes the size of carp swimming with marine creatures that look like flowers. His head spins; he hasn’t eaten since breakfast and now it’s late afternoon. He sits on a bench next to a pond in the Cretaceous Garden, a real garden of green and dripping palms, descendents of what grew here millions of years ago, and a real toad — a fire-bellied toad — jumps off the side of a frond and into the water.
IT’S ALMOST CLOSING TIME. As he’s looking for the exit he passes through a hallway he hasn’t seen before and comes upon an articulated bird skeleton, spot-lit in a Perspex case. The label reads rock dove. He laughs. He too likes to use this more appealing name for his articulation of the same species — a pigeon. Somewhere in this building, in one of the many labs, is someone who does what Henry does, and gets paid for it. Henry thinks of his kitchen, his birds crowded together on top of the cupboards. Henry’s Museum. Maybe Maria Bogdanov is right when she calls it that bird bone art. Unlike Henry’s pigeon, whose head is lowered to butt whatever comes its way, this little dove is a charmer and seems to be curtseying, as if cooing and bowing to a mate, as daftly social in death as in life.
WHEN HE STEPS OUT OF THE MUSEUM, the sky in the west is tinged with mauve and violet and there are filaments of translucent cloud riding the horizon over the hills. The wind that touches his hair is so soft, it’s almost not there.
At the end of the museum’s driveway, Henry chooses to go west, away from town, driving leisurely through the weirdly shaped hoodoo hills, spying out of the corner of his eye a monumental scaly foot, an enormous ridged tail — which vanish when he turns his head.
He sees a sign for a canyon he didn’t know was there and in a few minutes pulls into a big empty parking lot. A small poplar at the edge of the canyon, half of its leaves a brilliant yellow, is quaking in a kind of seizure. The wind is wild right here, the great gaping hole in the ground that is the canyon forcing the cooling air to a fierce pitch in this last hour before sunset.
East or west, all roads lead to Marcie. That’s what he’s thinking, that he will keep on driving, and forget the cheap hotel. But first he’s going to take one last gander at this place of prehistoric riches, at this chasm in the earth: the sight and scent, the texture beneath his feet of the exposed rock. A lightning tour of the living museum.
Standing at the precipice, he’s rammed by a gust so strong it feels like he could dive into it and hover suspended for a long moment before falling. The far reaches of the canyon are bathed in an eerie, crepuscular light. Nearby, where the canyon wall curves toward him, he can read the rock, the stratified slice: the narrow black line of coal, and the thicker, lighter bands above it ranging from ochre to grey to coral to almost white, each colour marking a great change.
Here, there have been sea swells, hurricanes, drought, floods, glacial ice.
Henry sees that there’s a trail going down. He’s wearing good boots, and who knows when he’ll be here again. He eases himself over the edge and steps off into sky.
The bright delivery room must have seemed to the newborn as vast as this: whirling infinite space. The first glimpse he had of the baby was a disc of scalp with a ferny swatch of hair, and not long after, she was there, the whole astonishing length of her, wet and blood-smeared, between Marcie’s legs.
AS HE DESCENDS THE PATH, which seems to glint now with its own light, he walks hesitantly at first, then with more confidence, the misty purple of dusk coalescing over his head. The wind that was so raucous above is tame a hundred yards down, barely skittering through the dry buffalo grass clinging in tufts to the outcrops. Soon he’s spiralled as far down as he thinks it’s wise to venture. The canyon floor is still half a mile away, maybe farther, but distances are becoming impossible to judge as darkness pools in indigo bruises at the base of the hills.
After the baby had been cleaned up, after Marcie held her and murmured over her and fed her, the nurse lifted the baby toward Henry. He must have looked blank, dazed, not understanding what he was meant to do — and then she was in his arms, wrapped in a white blanket, both heavier and lighter than he imagined, her surprisingly round head feathered with damp blonde hair.
“Here’s your dad,” the nurse said, more to Henry than to the baby, and Marcie smiled, not correcting the woman or even implying that the real father was elsewhere.
The baby’s eyes were very large in her small face, a night-sky blue, not quite focusing yet as she searched his features, her legs flailing weakly beneath the blanket.
IT’S TIME TO TURN BACK. Henry pivots on his heel, something hooks the toe of his boot and he stumbles, plunging heavily to the ground. Palms stinging, he pushes himself to his feet, coughing out a winded laugh — Henry Jett, adventurer, tossed off the ridge of a sleeping dinosaur’s tail like so much dust, his bones buried — forever, or for a while — in the shifting scree.
The ground at his feet is hazy now, indistinct. After a sweaty quarter hour legging his way up — more carefully now — he’s confronted by a shoulder of rock as tall as he is and marked with faint veins. Henry knows you can never walk the same path twice; that landmarks appear to morph with the season and time of day, but still, for a second he believes he’s taken a wrong turn.
The rock is pocked and scored, storied as an old hide that he almost expects to stir as he works his way around it. Amphibian stone, mammalian rock, changeable human brother. Everything has happened here, and will keep on happening; Henry feels the thrum of possibility under his fingertips.
He lengthen
s his stride, almost running up the last slope toward the rim of the canyon, and the sky brightens before him, the far side of the world on fire, as if the sun is no longer setting but rising and he has just a few breaths left to propel himself back up onto the plateau, where time will begin again. He’ll fly for hours through the night, across the dark rise and fall of the plains, until he’s at Marcie’s door. She’ll be awake, she’ll let him in. And he’ll hear her, the child, crying for milk or warmth or consolation, the daughter who isn’t his, but will be.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Saskatchewan Arts Board, and the Writers’ Trust Woodcock Fund for financial support that contributed greatly to the completion of this book. Thank you to the Saskatchewan Writers’ Guild and St. Peter’s Abbey for retreat time.
An earlier version of Chapter One appeared in The Malahat Review in Spring 2010.
It takes a village to write a novel, and I’d like to thank mine: Mary Jo Anderson, Terry Billings, Sandra Birdsell, Karen Bolstad, Sandra Campbell, David Carpenter, Lorna Crozier, Patricia and John Dewar, Connie Gault, Joanne Gerber, Curtis Gillespie, Sarah Grimble, Tonja Gunvaldsen Klaassen, Pauline Holdstock, Greg Hollingshead, Clint Hunker, Martha Innes, Patrick Lane, Sylvia Legris, Jane Munro, Don Purich, J. Jill Robinson, Dawna Rose, Betsy Rosenwald, Lorna Russell, Sandra Sigurdson, Fred Stenson, Steven Ross Smith, Joan Thomas, Dianne Warren, and Marlis Wesseler. Thank you to George Thornton, wherever you are. Thanks to Zeke Johnson for his expertise on mushroom hunting in Russia. Thank you to George and Jean Lidster for the gift of the Torch Valley years. Particular thanks to Bill and Jane Philips, and to Jan Goddard, Sue Philips, Anneliese Larson, Chris O’Hagan, Mira O’Hagan, and Rowan O’Hagan. And to the Canine Therapy Unit: Zephyr, Lily, Sullivan, Maggie, Kaylee, and Joe.
And at the heart of the village, my first reader, Doris Wall Larson: thank you for uncountable blessings.
Many thanks to my editor, Barb Scott, for numerous feats of divination large and small. Ongoing gratitude to Kelsey Attard, Deborah Willis, and everyone else at Freehand Books.
The Bird Building Book (Volume 5) by Lee Post (copyright © 2005) is a witty and precise guide to the art and science of bird articulation. Any mistakes in these pages are mine alone.
Excerpt of two lines from “Field Flowers” from The Wild Iris by Louise Glück copyright © 1992 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.
Excerpts from “I Shall be Released” by Bob Dylan, copyright © Dwarf Music, 1967, 1970; renewed 1995 by Dwarf Music.
“The Cuckoo” is a traditional English folksong.
“Bring Me a Little Water, Sylvie” was first composed and sung by William Huddie Ledbetter (aka Leadbelly) circa 1935–1936.
“The Birch Tree” is a traditional Russian folksong.
ELIZABETH PHILIPS is the author of four books of poetry, most recently, A Blue with Blood in it (Coteau Books: 2000) and Torch River (Brick Books: 2007). Among other awards, she has won two Saskatchewan Book Awards, a National Magazine Award, and an Alberta Magazine Award, and Torch River was a finalist for the Lambda Book Award in the US. Her poems have been anthologized in The Best Canadian Poetry in English, 2009 and 70 Canadian Poets (Gary Geddes, editor, 2014). The Afterlife of Birds is her first novel. She lives in Saskatoon with her partner and their dogs.
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