The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  “More likely,” I said, “they’d think it was Boas LaCotte shooting at raccoons.”

  Margaret sat on the bed. “Gunshots making people think that things are just going along per usual,” she said. “Sure enough, probably just raccoons.” She yawned as though it were some other woman, in another house in the village yawning.

  “They—I mean Orkney and Alaric. What should I say happened to the photograph?”

  “I’m here now, in this bed,” Margaret said. “I’ve just done something out of pure emotion, from being upset. And all you can worry about is what to say to Momma and Poppa! Okay, just say I got an urge for target practice and Cora Holly volunteered. Or, if you’d like, I’ll march over first thing tomorrow morning to report why this girl’s missing from your house. I’ll stand on your porch. Alaric will be in the doorway. I’ll say, ‘Fabian slept with me last night. He brought the photograph of a total stranger. I took out a revolver.’”

  I have to admit that we tore at each other that night. Margaret drank whiskey, moaned, frightened me a little, just in the way she would do something she had never done before, say, “There, that’s a fact of life,” and not let up. Her words labored up from deep in her throat; it was barely Margaret’s own voice. By dawn she was into her second bottle. I had begun to use a begging tone, almost, asking to come back that night.

  “No, Fabian. Thursday. Not until Thursday.”

  “Where’d you learn those things?”

  “I learn most everything from my own thinking them through. I was saving them for a future time, and then, halfway through last night I thought, What the hell.”

  “Margaret, listen.”

  But she interrupted, her voice slurred. “Now you know what it’s like to stay up all night,” she said.

  “I couldn’t help myself.”

  “Don’t fret about it too much, Fabian. I’m just working my way through you, right on out of Witless Bay eventually, same as you are, vice versa.”

  “There’s love between us, though, Margaret.”

  “That’s easy to say, when everything around you this minute is so familiar. The bed, the smells, all of it.”

  “I don’t want the picture frame back.”

  “Generous in the wrong ways, as usual.”

  Nightshirt on now, Margaret leaned back against the bedroom wall. “I’ve never had my photograph taken,” she said. “Not at that age. Not ever. Not at goddamned all.”

  Then I got dressed and went back to my house. I drank coffee and drew birds all day.

  Two weeks later, after a supper of cod, soup, and bread, I made coffee for my father and me. “Did you enjoy the potato-leek soup?” my mother said.

  “Well, you noticed I took a second helping, didn’t you?” I said.

  “The Hollys, in their most recent letter, mentioned that potato-leek is Cora’s very most favorite. I suppose that, in a way, I made potato-leek tonight in Cora’s honor.”

  “Here’s to Cora Holly, then!” my father said, knocking his coffee mug lightly against mine.

  “The idea is that I should marry her because we both like the same soup?” I said.

  “The idea,” my mother said, “is quite simple. It is that it’s intelligent for fiancés at such a distance to develop a bond in advance. And soup is as natural a thing to start with as any.”

  “Did the letter say that Cora was passionate about potato-leek soup?” I said.

  Without so much as a glance or utterance, my mother left the kitchen.

  My father stared after her. “Marrying a woman you’ve known all your life,” he said, “Margaret, for instance. Now, that could turn out badly. To marry your fourth cousin, come in sight unseen from Richibucto, granted, that’s the opposite end of the stick. But it’s still marriage. Still the same stick. It’s your God-given privilege, and the woman’s, to choose without fear of the future or the unknown.”

  Back in the doorway now, my mother cleared her throat loudly. “That’s it in a nutshell, then,” she said. “Orkney Vas sounding pious and philosophical as Reverend Sillet himself. What your father, here, Fabian, considers marriage: the unknown.”

  Granted, it was a rare loss of restraint, but my father slammed the table with his fist. The coffee mugs jumped.

  “It’s just words,” he mumbled, as though convincing himself. His face withdrew a moment, then he took a deep breath. “There, well,” he said. He mopped up the spilled coffee with a cloth napkin. “Nothing to die for, now, is it.”

  “I’m awaiting an apology,” my mother said in a clenched voice.

  “Till hell freezes over,” he said.

  “I’d like to see that very day,” she said. “It would provide an interesting change.”

  “We’re not conspiring against the boy here, Alaric,” my father said in painfully measured tones. “All I meant was, marriage is not to be feared. It’s meant to be everything else, maybe.”

  “I’ve got work to do,” I said, standing.

  “A cup of tea, please,” my mother said, her voice stripped of sentiment. “A cup of tea first, before you flee Cora Holly’s presence at our family table, back to your birds.”

  My father, shaken by what had transpired, rummaged in the mud room, emerging with a raincoat, gloves, and two hammers. “The Ryland Barney”—a schooner in for all-night repairs—was all he could manage to say. He shut the door quietly behind him.

  “The repair crew will use so many lanterns,” my mother said, “you could see the glow from as far away as the rookery cliffs, below the lighthouse. It’s like a false dawn. I’ve seen it. It’s like that.”

  In fact, I did not go back to my desk right away. Instead, I made tea for my mother and sat across from her at the table. For a few moments it was odd; she gripped the table edge, bracing herself as though expecting an earthquake. She held on tight. Then, relaxing her grip, she looked at me. “I didn’t ever intend for you to have memories of things gone on in this house like the ones you’ll now have,” she said.

  “I’ll have lots of different kinds.”

  “Bad memories shout the loudest, for the longest, my mother used to say. More lemon, please.”

  I cut a lemon in half, then squeezed a half’s juice into her cup. She clasped her hands around the cup.

  “I’ll now proceed to subtract what harsh messages just flew between you and Orkney and me,” she said. “I’ll subtract them from the rest of our conversation, here, right now.”

  “Fine by me.”

  She absently rubbed the other lemon half against the back of her hand.

  “Ouch!” she said, suddenly using a girlish voice, pulling her hand away. “There’s always invisible cuts.”

  “The smell of lemon juice at night. That’ll be a memory.”

  “It is rather exotic, isn’t it? You know, I told the Hollys that we were close, you and I. Do you think that’s true, darling? That we’re close.”

  “I think so. I like to think so.”

  “We try, don’t we, each in our own way.”

  “Yes. But, Mother, these letters going back and forth between you and the Hollys. They discuss my future, but I don’t get to read them. And I don’t sense, deep down, that you even think that’s peculiar. You bought a new letter opener especially for them.”

  “I purchased it with money from a shawl I’d knitted for Mrs. Harbison, who housekeeps, as you know, for Reverend Sillet.”

  “The letter opener’s not in question here. Your devotion to the letters is what.”

  “Well, I’m very up front in my letters to the Hollys. I told them about your birds, for instance. Why, I’m all but writing your biography to them. That’s a devotion, I suppose, yes. Of course, I didn’t maintain that you were a scientist of birds. Rather, a serious artist. I did add, for practicality’s sake, that you could repair any boat. I said that not just to please them but because it’s true, and it’s a truth that should please them.”

  “A lot has gone into these letters of yours, hasn’t it?”


  “I bend over the table just the way you do, I’ve noticed. Though I reprimand myself for my posture.”

  “Have you felt well, Mother? You’ve seemed—that your mind’s wandering.”

  “A mind can’t wander and come up with a shawl as detailed as the one I made for Mrs. Harbison.”

  “Detailed as letters can be.”

  “Those as well.”

  “I’m a grown man. I sleep with a woman right in the village, which everyone knows. I work. I bring in money. I’m saving to leave Witless Bay. No secrets in any of this. And then one day it turns out that my parents have made a decision for me. On my behalf, to put it generously. Yet I’m not really consulted. I’m more or less told. I’m led into it. It comes to me like news about somebody else’s life, except it’s not, it’s mine. Suddenly the house is filled with this name. Cora Holly. And the sad, aggravating truth is, as time goes by, I all but mean hour by hour, I’m numbed between the craziness of it and the enticement. And I don’t know why. It’s like being crippled with desire.”

  “Margaret told me she shot up the photograph. She came right over and said it. I told her it didn’t matter, since Cora’s presence was fixed in your mind. And that we could always get another photograph.”

  “Please, don’t bother.”

  “Look, Orkney and I see some basic facts. You’re old enough for marriage, one. Margaret—”

  “Leave Margaret out of this.”

  “That’d be my hope exactly. But it’s hardly possible.”

  “You have never once invited her for supper.”

  “Fabian,” my mother said. She sat back in her chair. “It’s between Margaret and me. Perhaps it’s not logical, as if logic ran the world one minute of any day. Or fair. Perhaps it’s something I see in her that I despise in myself. I’ve given that some thought. Whatever it is, it was powerful from early on and won’t abate. When I see you and Margaret together, I should feel that you look sweet. That you look sweet together. I should. A son would want his mother to set aside hostility and cantankerous opinion, if only for the sake of his own self-respect. I know that. And I apologize. And I should have done so long before now. But toward Margaret I can’t change. I simply cannot.”

  “Well, I haven’t proposed marriage yet.”

  “Has marriage come up?”

  “Enoch brought it up.”

  “He’s a good man.”

  “Knowing Margaret, she’d do the proposing anyway, not the other way around. She’d ask, and if she didn’t like the way I said yes or no, or the look on my face, she’d take the proposal right back.”

  “Basic fact number two. Orkney is willing to pay for the wedding, as far as he’s able to contribute. The bride’s father has certain obligations, but Orkney has stubborn pride in this event, and he wants to let the Hollys know he’s no pauper. He’s arranged a trip to Anticosti Island for feather birds. He says it could be lucrative. He’s got buyers already alerted. Lambert Charibon will be in on it. He always has hunted on Anticosti with Lambert. They’d go early next summer. We had in mind that all of us would go down to Halifax for the wedding. Perhaps next October. The Hollys know Halifax quite well. They love the idea of the wedding taking place there. In one letter, Klara called Halifax ‘romantic,’ and I got the distinct feeling she used the word from experience. Now, Enoch Handle would have to take us on the mail boat. That may prove awkward, what with him being Margaret’s father, I mean. But it would be a fact of life. He might well not speak to us along the way, but my bet is he’d take us nonetheless.”

  “Halifax is pretty much the same as the moon to me. I’ve never been either place.”

  She reached into the pocket of her robe.

  “Here,” she said, holding out a piece of blue stationery, folded once over. Opening it, she let loose a piece of string with an O shape at the end. I picked it up.

  “It’s Cora Holly’s ring size,” she said. “Romeo Gillette’s got a catalogue of rings. I’ve notified him of our interest.”

  “Romeo let in on our family business on purpose. Now, that’s a new one.”

  “Fabian,” she said, holding her hand over mine. “The first few times we seriously talked about this marriage were bound to be awkward. But you wait and see, we’ll get better at it.”

  “How would I support a wife?”

  “The Hollys have family money, enough to hold you until you get started.”

  “You’re describing our married life as if it’s already in motion.”

  “There, you see how natural it sounds?”

  4

  Botho and Alaric

  Early on July 2, 1911, my father left with Lambert Charibon for Anticosti Island. Shortly after supper on the same day, my mother took up with Botho August.

  All winter the Aunt Ivy Barnacle had been in dry dock. With Enoch home, Margaret and I used the spare room adjacent to the Spiveys’ kitchen. Bridget and Lemuel refused our offer of payment. Given that the restaurant was open until nine o’clock, we would stretch our meal and talk until the Spiveys went upstairs. Then we would go into our room, set our shoes at the end of the bed like tourists. Tourists in our own village. Sometimes we would have breakfast with Lemuel, who would be up working at 5 a.m. He would move kettles around and wake us.

  November, December, January, February, March, April, May. No letters from Isaac Sprague. No letters from the Hollys, either, but my mother spoke of Cora every day.

  The morning my father left, my mother prepared porridge, poached eggs, scones, and coffee. I went out to look at my father’s travel weather. To the north-northeast, sunrise had streaked the flat clouds with crabapple light; south along the coast, black rain clouds seemed to leaven in the updrafts. The wind carried the smell of codfish up from the flats. I could picture it down there: a dozen or so families standing at outdoor tables—the Jobbs, Austers, Benoits, Corbetts, Barrens, Parmelees, and others—dressing out fish for salting. They might be saying, “Codfish are a bit early this year but we’ll take them when we get them, eh?” Talking about last year’s harvest, the year’s before that, the one before. My father and I had worked codfish crew once, when I was thirteen. Every night, sitting in his chair at the table, he would stare at the blisters on his already calloused hand and swear off the job. But he would get me up at three the next morning, and the next, until that season ended.

  When codfish arrived they did so in abundance, but it averaged only about two or two and a half weeks with the trap. The sun broke through about four-thirty, traps would be set by that time, and trapping and jigging would be kept up until eleven or eleven-thirty at night, or even past midnight. When it got dark, cod-oil lamps were lit. You had a glimmer of light then, enough to clean the fish on deck if you chose. After the codfish slacked the trap, it had to be taken up, hauling eighty-pound grapnels out of twenty-five or so fathoms of water. This went on, over and over, from Monday through Saturday. Jiggers alone were used for another three weeks. After the middle of August, the last of the fish were dried. The whole catch might be five or six hundred quintals, there being 112 pounds to a quintal. Around the first week of October, the last of the export schooners would arrive to pick up the fish. After the fishing, the laying out of fish in neat rows, the salting, drying, stacking, hauling in carts and wheelbarrows to the wharf; the pay was at the rate of $100 Canadian for a quintal, some years $125.

  At the breakfast table, my mother looked out the window and said, “There’s Lambert now.” She opened the door. “Hello, Lambert.”

  “Hello, Alaric,” Lambert said. He nodded at my father and me separately.

  “I’m sure you already had breakfast,” my mother said. “Would you care for a second one?”

  “No, ma’am. I’ll wait out here.”

  “That’s all right. Ours is usually a house where visitors don’t come all the way inside.”

  My father had known Lambert all his life. They were both born and raised in Buchans, in the center of Newfoundland. “When Lambert was in his twenties,” m
y father told me, “he was all temper. He served jail time for brawling, assault, inflicting bodily harm, and other categories of violence. Then, when he got to thirty, he was beaten nearly to death up in St. John’s. And stabbed. It was a foreign sailor he’d insulted who did it. After he got out of hospital, you could say he was a reformed man, mostly.”

  Around my mother Lambert was painfully polite; I do not think that he could look any woman directly in the eye, though. He was burly, and he had the widest sideburns I had ever seen. Except for a horseshoe shape of curly brown hair, he was bald. He had a wide, doughy nose, bad teeth, and oddly a rather delicate smile. I would have to call it painful, too, his smile. He usually had on worn black trousers held up by a rope belt, high boots, a calico-lined undershirt, and one of the two checkered shirts he owned.

  He stood on the porch facing the wagon. Romeo Gillette had loaned the wagon and horse to Lambert, so that he and my father could haul their supplies to the wharf.

  My father finished his breakfast to the last. He and Lambert loaded up burlap sacks, my father’s shotgun, shells, spare boots, two coils of rope, each attached to a three-prong hook. Lambert got up into the wagon seat and kept the horse calm by murmuring, “There, okay, okay now,” over and over.

  I stood near the kitchen door. On the other side of the table, my father kissed my mother on her forehead. I sensed a deep, yet deeply strained tenderness between them. “You haven’t been to Anticosti in five years,” she said. “You’ll of course be careful on those cliffs.”

  “What will you do the rest of the day?” he said.

  “I’ll have tea,” my mother said. “That first. Then I’ll get properly dressed for gardening. Then—let’s think ahead now. Yes. Then it’ll be lunch, and the afternoon will require separate planning, won’t it?”

  “And for supper?” my father said.