The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  “Before I go in, I’ll let her stare out the window,” my father said. “At the lighthouse. Or more likely the stars. It’s a clear night out.”

  Then, as I had heard it said when two people fall silent at the table, an angel passed.

  “I know this is a curious aside,” he said, “but your mother’s the only woman I’ve known or heard of who dresses for bed in more layers than she wears during the day. She makes a man work at it, all right. Our wedding night was like that, and it was unseasonably warm. Just about this time in September.”

  He said all of this with some humor in his voice, tinged with resignation, and when my mother appeared in the doorway, he cut himself short, then winked at me.

  “I overheard clearly,” she said. She did not seem angry at all, only about to state a fact. “It’s not so much against feeling cold, the layers, as it makes me feel girlish and secure. And it helps me to sleep.”

  My father stood up. “Look at that, will you?” he said. “Fabian and me sharing coffee and father-and-son talk, and you fresh from your bath, and suddenly a new revelation about what you wear to bed. A simple life still leaves room for being surprised, doesn’t it, Alaric?”

  “I’ll bet Margaret Handle’s a lightly clad sleeper,” my mother said, looking past us out the window.

  She was wearing thick woolen socks folded over once into reverse cuffs of equal width. She had on red long johns under a cotton nightgown. Over the nightgown, she wore a faded white robe. With her right hand she held the ruffled lapels of the robe together at the neck. Her left hand was deep in the one pocket.

  “I’m going to bed now,” my father said. As he left the kitchen, he kissed my mother on her forehead.

  I prepared tea for my mother, then said good night.

  In my bedroom I put on my nightshirt. Then I noticed the photograph. It was in an ornate frame of darkly whorled wood, on the table next to my bed. I kept little else there: a sketchbook, matches, lantern. I got into bed and turned the lantern down to a faint. I took up the photograph and looked at it closely. I had absolutely no idea whom this face belonged to, or in which country in the world she lived.

  The next thing I was conscious of were the words “Knock, knock,” which is what my mother usually said after she had knocked on my door. I had fallen asleep with the photograph facedown on my chest. My mother looked pleased. I quickly set it upright on the table.

  “The picture is of your fourth cousin,” she said. “Her name—dear thing—is Cora Holly, of Czechoslovakian descent, like your father. She’s a cousin on Orkney’s side, by way of England. She lives in Richibucto, New Brunswick, a coastal village like ours.”

  “What’s her picture doing here?”

  “I just knew you’d ask that. Well, your father and I are interested in her. In your marrying her, more precisely.”

  “What?”

  “That Margaret Handle, whom you’ve been sleeping with. You know what people say, that she’s better to visit than marry.”

  “What people? You’re like someone gossiping with herself.”

  “Calm down, Fabian. Think Cora Holly over, will you, darling? All I ask is that you turn your thoughts to her, for my sake, for your father’s. And of course eventually for yours. Because it’s our understanding that even the lovely face in that photograph hardly does Cora justice.”

  “When’s the last time you saw this Cora Holly?”

  “I’ve never seen her.”

  “And the mother and father?”

  “Pavel and Klara? Well, let’s see. It would be twenty years.”

  “And given that, how’d this photograph get here?”

  “Well, Klara and I have been exchanging letters.”

  “You’ve kept it a close secret.”

  “When the mail comes in, you look for letters from Mr. Sprague. You don’t ask for anything else.”

  “True enough.”

  “Cora is keen on marrying you as well.”

  She closed my door.

  It took two full days to repair the Aunt Ivy Barnacle. The crew was made up of myself, Boas LaCotte’s nephew Giles, and my father. I spent hours next to my father, hammering, prying, planing, caulking, sanding, painting, yet he never once mentioned the photograph, and neither did I. He did, however, reminisce about a group of Beothuk Indians he used to see as a boy. At the outset of the conversation, I told my father that in my history primer all we had were watercolor facsimiles of Beothuks paddling, fishing, tattooing their bodies, smoke-drying fish in domed huts, staring out to sea.

  “Well, nobody ever got a photograph of a Beothuk,” he said. “A book might say they all died out in the early 1800s, but I swear I saw a few stragglers after that. Those Indian faces were not, I guarantee you, commonplace. And you could tell Beothuks from Micmacs and Eskimaux. A few —Beothuks, I mean—seemed lost stumbling drunk in the century itself, a sad sight. The ones who ventured into the general store, then run by Romeo’s father, came to buy fishhooks, not to converse. There was one old woman I remember in particular. She bought the hooks. She’d say, ‘I’m baptized. I want fishhooks.’ I don’t know if it was true.”

  “Which thing?” I said.

  “About her being baptized. Anyway, she looked shabby and was polite. The others just stood staring at the floor.”

  “I wish I could’ve seen them.”

  “Enoch here has Beothuk blood, and that’s believable,” my father said. “Try and find cheekbones like his elsewhere in Newfoundland. Other than in Margaret’s face, naturally. Enoch can say words in Beothuk. Mammatek—that means ‘house.’”

  “You pronounced it wrong,” Enoch said, annoyed. He had been eavesdropping from his chair, which he had placed near the rail of the Aunt Ivy Barnacle. He had been on deck, writing in his leatherbound log, sharpening pencils with a strop razor.

  “Enoch,” my father said, “what’s Beothuk for ‘bird shit’? You told me once, but I forgot.”

  “Sugamith,” Enoch said, emphasizing the first syllable about twice as loud.

  “Enoch can resurrect some truly ancient words,” my father said. He admired this.

  “Tell Fabian about the parrot,” Giles said.

  Enoch jumped down. He was a stocky man, with a visegrip handshake, wisp of beard, black hair slicked with grease; he had to clean the inside rim of his pilot’s cap with rubbing alcohol.

  “See,” Enoch said, warming up for a long tale. “This Beothuk twosome lived off by themselves, north of Witless Bay. ‘North’ is as accurate as anyone knew. This was back when Orkney and I were kids. Back before we even had a local doctor.”

  “We’d try and stop bleeding by putting cobwebs on it,” my father said. “Or turpentine of fir.”

  “My mother knew a secret prayer to stop a nosebleed,” Enoch said. “Anyway, when I say the Beothuk twosome lived off by themselves, I mean a location meant to shun a bear. You didn’t see them for a long time. Then, one day they’d just show up in the store. To buy flour, fishhooks, whatever.

  “They owned a parrot. A lice-ridden bird, green with some yellow. The old man, hell, he could’ve been part of my direct ancestry, he had a beat-up coat. French-made. The parrot rode there, clamped right on with its claws to his shoulder. The parrot spoke a lot of Beothuk words. I think whole sentences. I don’t have the foggiest where they got the parrot. But they’d clipped its wings and cut its tongue and it liked to say Beothuk words to any audience. And of course it spoke parrot garble, naturally.

  “The twosome had a fishing camp out where Lambert Charibon’s trout camp is today, along the Salmonier River. When they died—rumor had it on the same day—they were found at their camp. Some trouters notified the church.

  “Now, the reverend at that time was named Clemons. Broderick Clemons. He performed the funeral. Rainy day, a few curious onlookers, but who knew how to grieve correctly for them? To grieve on their behalf?

  “Clemons took money from the church till, and there were later complaints about this. He had two grey slab
s put over their graves, with the first verse of the Lord’s Prayer chiseled in.

  “Afterwards, Clemons adopted the parrot. He’d stay up late by lantern light, writing down Beothuk words in a ledger. He kept the bird in a room behind the pulpit. To many, it seemed rancorous to worshippers in an uncalledfor way—but you’d hear the bird squawking and carrying on during sermons. ‘Hey, hey, hey, hello, hello, Nonsut, Demsut!’ That’s as close as I can recall the pronunciations.

  “It echoed all throughout the church, belfry to pews. Clemons never muzzled the bird, either. Who knows why? Nonsut, Demsut—everyone figured those were the twosome’s names. They may not have been, though. Who knows that either? It might’ve just been the mad ravings of a parrot in Newfoundland lonely as hell.”

  At dusk on the second day of work, I was sanding a new cabin plank when I jammed a long splinter clean through my glove, lodging it deep in the base of my thumb. It was a stupid accident, out of tiredness, and when I reported it to Enoch, he gave me a swig from his flask of whiskey and said, “Quitting time.” At home I soaked my hand in hot water. It took my mother fifteen or so minutes to work the splinter out. She dabbed on iodine, then set the splinter on the table to show my father.

  We had a late supper of sea bass, lettuce and tomatoes from my mother’s garden, which produced almost through September.

  “How’s the hand?” my father asked.

  “I can feel my pulse in it.”

  “Nothing to die for, now, is it.”

  “Did we get paid?”

  “Two separate stacks of money, Canadian. Yours is in an envelope, in the potato cupboard.”

  “I’ll use a little to buy inks.”

  “And groceries. You’re still part of this family.”

  “All right.”

  “Don’t let that hand get infected or you won’t be doing much bird drawing, I’ll tell you that.”

  “I saw Margaret along the road. She knows of an ointment in Romeo’s pharmaceuticals that’ll ease the pain better than iodine. She kindly said she’d pick it up for me. I’ll visit her later.”

  “Margaret ease the pain,” my mother said. But it sounded like an abbreviated request of her own and embarrassed her. She turned to the stove.

  I was in bed by eight-thirty, thinking about an early morning of sketching ducks at the tidal flats, when my mother appeared in the doorway.

  “I washed the fingerprint smudges off the glass,” she said, referring to the photograph.

  “I didn’t notice.”

  “Well, notice.” She sat on the end of my bed. “That Cora Holly’s got a mesmerizing face, don’t you think?”

  “I wouldn’t use those words, no.”

  “What’s your opinion, then?”

  “I’d say it’s a face the photographer caught just right to favor it.”

  “Do you suspect that the Hollys chose an uncharacteristic likeness to represent their daughter?”

  “How could I know that? I’ve never met them. I’ve never met this Cora Holly. You and Father never once mentioned their family. And then this photograph shows up.”

  “It arrived, Fabian. It’s part of a correspondence between hopeful parents. Don’t fool yourself. There’s no one normal way in this world to meet a bride. It can happen in all sorts of surprising ways, really. I could tell you stories. What’s important for you to know is that Pavel and Klara are honest people. I can vouch for that. And I noticed that you didn’t stuff the photograph in the rubbish.”

  “The frame is nice handiwork.”

  “My next question is, can you believe that curiosity might be the first part of passion?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Did your own mother just now saying the word ‘passion’ embarrass you?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “It means a lot in life, Fabian, passion does. Especially if it’s absent.”

  “Maybe that’s a thing you’d say to Father.”

  “Let me educate you here.” She was annoyed. She shifted uneasily on the bed, squaring herself directly in front of me. “Once in a while I say something to you that I purposely choose not to say to Orkney. And what I do say to him, in private, is none of your business in turn. Kindly move that photograph back from the table edge, will you?”

  My mother closed her eyes; she sometimes gathered her thoughts so intensely that she all but sank into sleep. This was a sort of interlude I was accustomed to.

  Breathing lightly, propped up by one arm, her hand pressed into the blanket, she suddenly trembled—and I mean that the bed shook—as if she had compressed a nightlong fever chill into a single moment. I all but got the quilt out of its cedar chest at the end of my bed to cover her up, it was that convincing. I recalled, then, a sermon that Reverend Sillet had given. He had quoted someone, a martyr, blind sage, someone, to the effect that in the lifelong vigil for redemption, each show of faith in the face of torment and doubt was a reprieve from madness. At the moment of hearing that, I had especially clung to the word “vigil.” I thought that the word fit my mother. That her life was a vigil. Though waiting for redemption for which sin, which trespass, exactly, I could not say at the time, nor could I say now. Passion for what, or whom, I did not know. Later, of course, I thought it all applied to her adultery with Botho August. Yet as time passed, I realized that Botho August —that one man—was finally too narrow and convenient a way to consider my mother’s emptiness, her longings.

  Opening her eyes then, my mother absently turned her wedding ring, rubbed her hands over her face, and said, “I’m tired, darling. Good night.”

  “Good night.”

  All through my life at home with my parents, I knew that my mother’s sadness (that is the word I always fall back on) had a grip on her. I did not know all of the ways it worked, or all of the things it made her do, but I felt its existence early on. Some days in our house you could breathe it like air. I had felt it as a child, and by adolescence regarded it as permanent. I think back on the dozens of conversations we had had at the kitchen table after supper, my father asleep or working half the night at the dry dock, the dishes cleared, me drinking coffee, my mother sipping tea. I had often wondered if I had missed what she had intended as most intimate in her observations, opinions, advice, even in her very occasional teasing. I have come to the conclusion, with bracing regret, that I had. Furthermore, I believe that on certain topics she would detect a blank or at best a puzzled look of incomprehension on my face and be disappointed in me. I suppose this is true for any son, but when I look back, certain declarations become my mother—“I neither champion nor repudiate my life thus far,” she said one evening. “I mostly feel stuck somewhere in between.”

  “I just like to wake up early, wash my face, and get out and draw birds,” I said in reply. “Maybe I should be more brainy and philosophical.”

  “No, no—lucky life for lack of that,” she said.

  My mother had a clear, resonant voice. She articulated like a schoolteacher. She was graceful, it was nice to watch her walk. She said what was on her mind, though her boldest assertions were often followed by “Now, where on earth did I get that thought? Obviously that’s just the kind of girl I am!” She would blush, as if she had had a revelation not only about her own character but about what she was truly capable of saying to her son.

  From as far back as age five or six, perhaps earlier, I remember that she demonstrated great empathy toward me, though she’d never allow me to play out my catastrophes or confusions for too long, or whine, or wallow in self-pity. Her pet phrase was “Get on with it, then.” Once in a while this became an extended meditation: “I’m quite impatient with people who tell me they’re going to do something and don’t at least try. You get all caught up with their enthusiasms, and then things change and what have you got?”

  “Do you have anyone in mind?” I once said. I think I was fifteen.

  “Fabian, be polite to your mother. When I’m thinking out loud, just hush up and lis
ten.”

  I dutifully listened then, but she would not say another word. We fell silent. And I heard gulls. Once again, it seemed that in our house when you turned away from talk, day or night, with the windows open, the keening of gulls marked every passing minute.

  As for her brief, dry laughter, it seemed more of an accompaniment to her silence than an actual change of heart. It scored up her forehead with deep wrinkles, and caused her to cup her hands over her mouth, as if trying to hold it back.

  “My grandmother always said heavy hoop dresses strengthened your back and stayed your posture upright, but when I wore them, my back always ached. It was like taking off a barrel every night. I just had enough,” my mother once said. By and large, most women in Witless Bay dressed alike, skirts and blouses made of serge or woolen cloth. The skirt bottoms were flat at the front waist, but tucked up high and full in back, all sewn with tiny stitches. To make such a dress was detailed labor, and most every girl could sew one by age ten. Mostly the sleeves were puffed at the shoulders and tight-fitting at the wrists. We had muddy and dusty roads, and women had to lift their skirts while walking. As a boy I recall washing and polishing my mother’s shoes nearly every day from the spring mud and summer dust. In summer, women generally wore “winseys,” lighter, more ruffled dresses, except when doing outdoor work—salting, potato scraping, gardening, and the like—when they wore housedresses covered with rough burlap aprons, or aprons made of burny cloth.

  Some of the time my mother wore such local clothing, as she called it. But deep down she had another way of thinking. “You may not realize it,” she said to me, “but when I stroll into Gillette’s store, or to church, or anywhere, I feel that I have the soul of a world traveler. I’ve just stepped off a schooner, and lo and behold, look at this odd little village we blew off course to! You may laugh, but I cannot begin to count how many days this lie to myself has got me through, Fabian.” She sighed and shook her head at her own invention. But I knew, too, that there were more nights than I could count when my mother had stayed up until morning light, working on one new dress or waistcoat or other.