The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  I feel obliged to say that schooner crews, lobstermen, and the like spoke highly of Botho, in terms of his operating the lighthouse. I worked with these men. I heard them talk. In Witless Bay, a lighthouse keeper held a sacred trust. Berserk gales, blanket fogs, fairy squalls, even zigzagging water spouts—weather that had for centuries drowned sailors, lovers, fishermen, and indeed battered Witless Bay countless numbers of days and nights during any given year—are what Botho had to contend with. So his profession lay at the heart of life and death to my neighbors; tuna and sea-bass fishermen out in the before-dawn or evening hours, coming home well into the night; leggie and capelin fishermen; codfish trappers, lobstermen—all of whom made up the grandfathers, fathers, and sons of most of Witless Bay’s families.

  “Botho August can pin a schooner in trouble to the sea with that beam,” Romeo Gillette once said. “He can shade the beam just right and beckon a dory in, just like it was Jesus on the water following some holy-lit path home. He’s damn good at that. We’re lucky on that account to have hired him. But he’d rather be up in his crow’s nest than down among common men. I’m not suggesting, mind you, that there’s a judgement on his part toward us in all of that privacy. I’m saying that for Botho August, there’s no card playing, no pissing off the dock after a drunk, no socializing for five minutes of obligation on the church steps, no church. He’s a person with the distance in him.”

  Anyway, back to the day that I drew the garganey. Leaving the lighthouse, I continued on past Gillette’s store. His sign read: PROVISIONS / GILLETTE’S / GROCERIES in large black letters. It had a wide porch with four chairs nailed down and a rocking chair a customer could move here or there.

  A quarter mile or so farther, on the way to the codfish drying flats, was the sawmill owned and operated by Boas LaCotte, and beyond the flats and down a rocky slope across a slat bridge were the wharf, dry dock, and four adjacent peninsulas. At the end of each peninsula was a single square-up house; in that part of the village, people often visited by rowing a dinghy house to house.

  Well past these peninsulas was old Helen Twombly’s cold-storage shack, roofed in dirt and sod. It held her milk bottles and rectangular pats of butter. Even with dawn just breaking, I figured that Helen might be there, and she was. In 1911 she was eighty, and though her house was next to Gillette’s store, since childhood I had thought of her as living more at her shack. In late spring she would plant flowers on its roof. Her garden was only a few steps away. She had had her husband, Emile, buried near the shack, forsaking the family plot in the cemetery west of the sawmill. I would often stop and watch Helen rearrange her milk bottles in her own finicky way, lifting, sorting. Bent as she was, you could almost balance a bottle on her back. No one person of course could have drunk as much milk as Helen hoarded. A lot went to waste. As children we believed that she drank only rancid milk; when we got older we learned that she drank it fresh as well as rancid, and that she considered milk as generally medicinal. “For which illnesses?” I once asked her. “For the ones I never get because I keep drinking the stuff” is what she said. When she came into the store, Romeo never hesitated or said, “Helen, come now, ten bottles!” He simply lifted the milk from its bin of ice blocks and set them on the counter, as Helen opened up her snap purse. She had enough money to get by. I think she poured milk into her parsnips and carrots—watered her garden with it, I mean. The garden had a milky air about it. The nozzle of her watering can was crusted white.

  That morning, Helen wore a housedress, a knit sweater, a shawl, long underwear, and black galoshes.

  “Hello, Helen,” I said, just loud enough so she would hear, yet not be startled. “Good morning.”

  “Loathe to anyone steals my milk,” she said. Her eyes were bright, with the shocking beauty of a goat’s in a decrepit goat’s face. “I can be a harpy if I choose to.”

  “I respect that, Helen. I’m just passing by. I’m going off to try and find a bird to draw for my fiancée.”

  “Where’s the wedding?”

  “Halifax. In October, most likely.”

  “Yes, yes. I heard that you and Margaret Handle have been practising all along. I always liked that Margaret. Ever since she was a little girl, she never came near my milk.”

  “I like her, too.”

  “Why are you two going down to Halifax for the ceremony?”

  “I’m not marrying Margaret.”

  She put a finger to the side of her head. “I get it. Margaret’s been practising for somebody else, too.”

  “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Margaret’s had a difficult past. I hope her future’s better. I hope no man ruins it. I hope she won’t let that happen. The bicycle accident, you ask me. You ask me, that was the start of Margaret’s troubles on this earth.”

  Exactly on her thirteenth birthday, July 2, 1900, Enoch had brought Margaret a bicycle from Halifax. There were few bicycles in Witless Bay then, not a lot of good places to ride them. But Margaret learned to ride hers quickly. She would risk various horse trails as well as the path that ran behind the lighthouse, high above the water. She would careen around the wharf. She would skid sideways to the last slat of a dock, front wheel spinning over the edge. She spilled in a few times and the bicycle had to be salvaged. It got rust-pocked.

  One morning in late August of that year I had just come into the store to buy groceries when I heard a loud slap. This was followed by a girl’s voice crying out, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” At first I did not recognize the voice. I walked to the counter. My father was away visiting Bassie in Buchans. My mother was just getting over the croup and had not been in the village for a week. I had been back and forth to Lambert’s trout camp. All this to say, we had not heard any news.

  Boas LaCotte was in the store. “Fabian Vas,” he said, “let me introduce you to the constable, Mitchell Kelb.”

  Mitchell Kelb stepped forward and we shook hands. “Son,” he said, nodding.

  “He’s come down from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s—well, the magistrate court up there, to carry out a formal investigation,” Boas said.

  “What’s that?”

  “Investigation’s when a British official looks into the hows and whys and wherefores of a crime,” Boas said.

  “Or an accident,” Kelb said.

  “That’s Margaret Handle in the back room,” Boas said. “Poor girl, she collided on that bicycle of hers with Dalton Gillette, on the path behind the lighthouse. I have to put this plainly, Fabian. Dalton fell to his death.”

  Dalton was Romeo’s father, who was slowly recovering from a heart attack.

  “That can’t be,” I said.

  “It could and is,” Kelb said.

  I looked into the storeroom, the one old Dalton Gillette had been recuperating in. Romeo stood over Margaret, who was sprawled on the bed. He had just slapped her and looked almost as shocked at what he had done as Margaret did. His face was contorted and he was trembling, staring at his hand.

  Mitchell Kelb now stood next to me. “Mr. Gillette,” Kelb said into the storeroom, “you just struck a witness. Don’t do that again.”

  He said this with such severe reprimand that Romeo retreated to a corner like a schoolboy dunce. Finally, head down, Romeo walked to the front door of the store, turned, and said, “My father died in a humiliating way, after all that hard labor to be able just to take a walk again.”

  Mitchell Kelb was a short man, no more than five foot six, I would guess. He was in good trim, had curly brown hair, a fair complexion, and wore spectacles. There was a bookish aspect to him. He spoke with authority, though, and said to Romeo, “That’s a personal matter between you and your God, and the girl there, and maybe her father. I’m just taking down the facts of this incident on paper”—he held up a leatherbound pad of paper—“to report back to the Board of Inquiry. I’ve been out to the exact spot it happened. It’s hardly a blind corner, that I’ll admit. This is tragic, Mr. Gillette. You’ve lost your father. I�
��m sorry for you, for the girl. But don’t hit her again.”

  Romeo left the store.

  Flung across Dalton Gillette’s bed now, Margaret looked as though she was stretching her arms and legs as far out as possible, clawing at the bedcover, trying to get purchase. She went into a weeping jag unlike any I had heard; her shoulders quaked, great sobs welled up. She wailed, almost a howling. I could not seem to turn away.

  “If you had any sense, boy, you’d bring her a glass of water,” Kelb said. “She’s crying for her own future, as she’s got to live with what a goddamned stupid thing she’s done.”

  Years later, I came to believe that every drink of spirits that Margaret took had, in a way, its wellspring in that incident. And that no amount of whiskey could take a complete enough vengeance on herself. But at that moment in the store, I simply carried in a glass of water and handed it to her.

  Mitchell Kelb had questioned Margaret for over an hour, and had made her go out to the cliff and show him exactly where she had crashed into Dalton. Boas had gone along, too, as Kelb had requested. Later, Boas said that Margaret had collapsed in tears, and that both he and Kelb had to keep her from flinging herself over the cliff. She had actually run toward it. “She was kicking and screaming,” Boas said. “Saying suicidal things nobody that young should’ve even had in their vocabulary.”

  By the time I had seen Margaret in the store that morning, Dalton Gillette had already been laid out in Henley’s Funeral Parlor overnight. He had fallen onto some jagged rocks, then rolled into an inlet and was easily found. Mrs. Henley had washed all of Dalton’s clothes, hung them out to dry, and, when they had dried, sewn together rips in the shirt and trousers. She had hung up his shoes by the laces to a clothesline. Romeo had provided his own suit for his father to be buried in. Now Romeo would need a new one.

  I was eight, and that is about all I remember, except that at the funeral the reverend at the time, Weebe, said, “Dalton Gillette has surely established our strong and loving memory of him, and God resides therein.”

  I did not see Margaret for three weeks after, some feat in Witless Bay. My mother at first said that Margaret had gone to live with her aunt in Bonavista, north up the coast, because that is what my mother had been told. But rumor was mistaken. It turned out that Margaret had been home all along and simply could not be consoled. She had lost a startling amount of weight and vomited up each meal, or most of it. Enoch finally told Boas, who of course told some others, and so on. “She was under sedation,” my father said one morning at breakfast, then explained what sedation meant. I would have thought that such news might draw sympathy from my mother, but I was wrong. “I don’t know. I just don’t know,” she said. “Sometimes I swear that Margaret’s got an untoward mind, just a little right or left of center. Mind you, my heart goes all the way out to Romeo and Annie Gillette, and to Enoch, of course. But I’m afraid only half as far to Margaret.” I was at best puzzled. I looked at my mother, waiting for her to say something more. She only shrugged, pouring herself a cup of tea.

  Helen leaned against her shack. “Well, whoever your bride is, when you bring her back here, keep her away from my milk,” she said.

  “If we come back, I’ll do that.”

  “You know, this shack’s my true address.” Helen sighed deeply. “I only sleep in my house. I generally stay away from people. Everyone’s jealous of me, because I’m old enough to have witnessed mermaids and mermen, and they aren’t. Nowadays, people have to travel to get important memories. Not me. Mark my word, Fabian Vas, jealousy leads to stupid behavior, even among Christians. Where they could delight in my memory of mermaids, they hold it against me as eccentric. They think I’m lying. Memory is a pox. A pox, to remember all that I still can. It won’t leave me alone. One night, I saw mermaids and mermen attain a shipwreck. Right out there on the rocks.”

  She looked out to sea. She heaved another sigh, and it made her lose her balance slightly. I reached out to help, but she pushed me away. She raised her fists in anguish to her face. “What difference, anyway—there’s nobody left to talk to. I could have educated the village children.”

  “I’m going now. Goodbye, Helen.”

  She turned back to her bottles.

  In Shoe Cove, between Witless Bay and Portugal Cove, I saw the garganey. It was a male, asleep in the early sun, head tucked to his breast. There were no other birds or people in sight. It was a small, high-cliffed cove, and I made my way down to some flat rocks near the water, where I sat watching the garganey for a few moments. Then, moving to a more comfortable rock hollowed out almost like a chair, I sat sketching the garganey for a good two hours. I drew him as he slept. I drew him as he lifted his head, preened, skitted across the surface. He mostly held to one place, though at a certain point he flew off, circled, then lit down on what I thought was the exact same spot, hard of course to determine on a sun-glinted sea. It was as though he had enacted his own dream of flying, then had returned to his body. He fed awhile, scooping, shoveling, shaking his head, dipping, drifting, slowly turning with the random eddies. The sea brightened, the wind picked up, and there were whitecaps. I drew. Those were the elements: water, rocks, sun; the garganey, a migrant here for a short stay, whose life I had only happened upon because of that morning’s particular luck. Luck like no other I had ever had, or have had since.

  Three days later I purchased a simple wooden frame from Gillette’s store, with money I had earned from Bird Lore. On the back I etched: This is for Cora Holly, my fiancée. Begun June 26, 1911, completed June 29, 1911.

  2

  Cora Holly

  My mother smuggled Cora Holly’s photograph into our house. On the evening of September 17, 1910, we had cod, bread, and potatoes for supper, apple cobbler for dessert. During the cobbler, my father said, “We’ve been hired to repair the Aunt Ivy Barnacle. A crack in the hull, warped cabin planks, and the like. We need the money, eh? It’s already hoisted up. Enoch, he’ll be there to watch, 5 a.m. on the nose.”

  “Ah, Enoch’s home,” my mother said. “Poor Margaret, nights alone in a cold bed.”

  “Alaric, that’s not the present subject,” my father said. “Anyway, it being the mail boat, Enoch will be there but won’t give advice. He just likes to see things get patched up, so he won’t worry at sea. It soothes his mind about it.”

  “I’ll get up at 4:30 to make your coffee,” my mother said. “But I won’t be in a civil mood.”

  “You’ll hardly know we’re here,” my father said. “We’ll be father and son ghosts at the table. Just set out coffee mugs, scones, you’ll see bites disappearing. The table’ll be cleared. The door’ll open. The door’ll close. You can go right back to sleep.”

  “It should all work out fine, then,” she said. “I’m in for my bath now.”

  My father pointed to my sketchbook, which I’d placed on the table. “Is that your day’s work?” he said.

  “I was out at Lambert’s camp. Ospreys.”

  “How’s Lambert?”

  “A man of one motto.”

  “Nothing to hope for from any promise, nothing to fear from any threat,” he said, laughing a little. “He hasn’t changed that tune since he was fifteen.”

  “You want to take a look?”

  “Yes.”

  I slid the sketchbook across the table. He took in each page. Finally, he sat back and folded his arms. “These ospreys are highly recognizable,” he said.

  “What about the harlequins?”

  He looked at the harlequin ducks, four or five of them. Pointing to one, he said, “This captures a harlequin’s nature. But what I most admire is that it doesn’t resemble every harlequin. It’s got its own character as well. But these others fall short.”

  “Short of what?”

  “Of your best harlequin. You told me yourself, Fabian—all these drawings you do every day, you’ve got a standard to uphold. But you don’t always know the standard until you look over your day’s accomplishment, drawing by drawing. For
my money, today’s best is this last harlequin. And the ospreys.”

  “I’ve got a commission. Maritime Monthly. Crows, and whatever ducks I prefer. They sent an advance. That’s a first. A one-dollar advance.”

  “It’s their confidence in you, that dollar.”

  “There’s a lot of people drawing birds in Canada.”

  “That’s some sort of attitude, I suppose. Better than none at all.”

  “Okay, I’m pleased.”

  “I said once to Lambert that if a bird, even a buzzard, spoke to me in a dream or nightmare, I couldn’t ever shoot another one.”

  “How’d Lambert reply?”

  “Lambert said that he didn’t dream, so didn’t worry about such things. Then he added that if I did have such a dream and it stifled my hunting, he’d get a new hunting partner. He boiled it down to that.”

  “A practical man.”

  We heard my mother come out of her bath.