The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

“I think perhaps fish. If Fabian goes to the market, or out in a dinghy. I’ll ask him to. Fabian?” She turned to me. “Darling, can you buy a fish for supper, or catch one?”

  “Yes,” I said, without looking at either of them.

  “There it is, then,” my mother said.

  “And if Fabian doesn’t get to it, despite promises?”

  “Some idea for supper will come along,” she said.

  “I’ve always been overly interested in day-to-day routines, haven’t I?”

  “Not overly.”

  Then my father stepped up to me. We shook hands. “It can’t please you, the particular fact I’m off to kill birds,” he said. “A lot of birds. Mainly puffins and auks. Anticosti’s the best place to get hundreds of birds in a reasonable amount of time, especially given I don’t want to shotgun high numbers of puffins offshore of Witless Bay, now, do I? That wouldn’t be local etiquette, eh? With any good luck, I’ll have money when I get home. And that’s what my going to Anticosti comes down to, doesn’t it? Enoch’s given us a fair price for passage there. It’s pocket money for him. He won’t have to report it. That’s a privilege he’s due, from seniority.

  “Anyway, about birds, Fabian. I’m going to shoot any number. So is Lambert. I’m saying this because I want you to hear that I know exactly what I’m doing and why. It’s my choice, this way, to earn money. Your wedding is the beneficiary, but you don’t have to like that. I’ve tallied up costs in advance, the travel of us all down to Halifax, hotel room, food. I think that I can realize such costs from killing birds. Finally, it all depends on your going through with marrying Cora Holly, but I’ll hear about that news one way or another when I get back. And when I get back, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know: total numbers killed, prices obtained, the weather on Anticosti. You just ask. I’ll tell it all, or part of it, or nothing. The birds’ll be gone by then. I’ll just have the burlap sacks left. And the money.”

  “Map me out your travels,” I said.

  “We’ll go past Trepassey, then across Grand Bank. Stop at Cape Ray overnight. Back out in the morning across Cabot Strait, weather allowing. And then across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Anticosti.

  “We’ll be working the rookery cliffs all over the east, southeast, and north of the island. But we’ll have to go into Port-Menier right off first thing to register our intentions, get a license, pay the fees. There’s a hotel in Port-Menier, the Gaspé North. The original, the Gaspé Royale, is in Quebec, Canada.”

  I nodded. “See you when?”

  “I’d guess late September, thereabouts,” he said. “Depending on everything that affects a trip like this.”

  “Well, goodbye, then.”

  “Take care of your mother.”

  He walked out to the wagon. He climbed up and sat down. He looked small next to Lambert. Lambert clicked his tongue, flicked the reins lightly across the horse’s rump, turned the wagon from the weeds the horse had been nibbling, down the road into town. My father waved over his head without looking back.

  “What’ll you do today?” my mother said.

  “I’ll go past the burntland about two miles, to a barrens. North of Mint Cove.”

  “Oh, everyone’s talking about such faraway places this morning. I’m wistful. Maybe I should go somewhere different, too. Visit my long-lost sister in Vancouver, for instance. Anyway, darling, why the barrens?”

  “Because a journal wants water pipits, and the barrens is popular with that bird.”

  Yet I did not make it to the barrens. When I reached the burntland, a stretch of scrub pines and stumps, I saw a three-toed woodpecker right out in the open and got all caught up with it. It was a male, with a large yellow crown patch and black wings. The black barrings on its side reminded me of the rough shadings and texture made when I would rotate a pencil against paper to sharpen it. I sketched its comings and goings all morning. He was foraging two stumps about twenty yards apart. Hammering, echoing, sometimes in quick bursts like Morse code, other times in a single thrust, perhaps impaling a bark beetle with a perfectly aimed blow. Every now and then he let loose a cackling call that befit some general notion of insanity, while flying in erratic dips and glides, scrawling the air. I knew that I could never capture that motion on paper. After working up a dozen or so sketches, I walked to Romeo Gillette’s store.

  There were no customers. Romeo was at the metal scale weighing nails, dividing them into quarter-, half-, and one-pound bags, which he lined up on the counter. I bought some bread and a piece of cheese, then sat down on a barrel to eat lunch.

  “Did my mother mention a catalogue?” I said.

  “She mentioned wedding rings some time ago. I showed her a selection.”

  He pointed to a stack of catalogues at the end of the counter. “Third one down, I believe,” he said. “Turn the stool facing away from me if you want privacy. I can’t leave these nails.”

  Sitting on a stool at the counter, I took out the piece of string with Cora’s ring size on it. But I saw Romeo glance over, so quickly put the string back in my pocket. I studied the rings in the catalogue. There were close-up illustrations. Some of the rings were on ring fingers. There were floating faces of women admiring rings on their own or other women’s hands. On a few pages there were grooms. Romeo saw me staring. “The grooms all look pleased, don’t they?” he said.

  “Page after page of rings.”

  “Mind-boggling, isn’t it? How many choices.”

  “I’ve marked a page here. I want the last ring in the last row, the simple one to the right. I’ll leave the ring size with you. It’s on this string.”

  I put the string on the counter.

  “What about your ring, Fabian? Did you forget, you get married, you both get rings?”

  “I’ll need a piece of string.”

  “Just take one off the spool there, end of the scissors and knife shelf.”

  I cut a piece of string, tied it around my finger, knotted it off, set it next to Cora’s string.

  “That ring decision didn’t take too long,” Romeo said. “Well, poor Margaret’s heart is going to break like a wave on the rocks.”

  “That’s one guess,” I said.

  He slid more nails onto the scale, which needed oiling.

  “You know the laws of human nature and Newfoundland are not for mortals to figure out. My father used to say that. Course, that was after his heart seized up, when every minute was a confusing puzzle to him.”

  “Margaret’s sure a puzzle.” I wanted both to end the conversation and to get deeper into it. “She’s so full of human nature, I doubt ten men could figure her out.”

  “You might feel alone in the over-all predicament, which is why you just invited nine other men in.”

  “It was just a number at random. It didn’t mean anything.”

  “If you say so.”

  “I say so.”

  “Well, Margaret quite possibly can fend for herself, once you’re married down in Halifax. That’s a choice she’ll have to make. And fate will play a card.”

  “Which choice do you mean?”

  “Choice of a man to be with; there are eligible men about. A choice, if a young woman has imagination. There’s a good man. A bad man. There’s a number of in between men. There’s giving up entirely, then the very next day getting surprised. There’s—”

  “That’s a long enough list.”

  “I see you don’t like the thought of Margaret with somebody else, eh?”

  “Did Botho August pay for Margaret’s Canada-made stockings?”

  “Yes, he did. If she told you that, she told you the truth. What’s more, I mentioned that to Enoch and he paid Botho back the cost of the stockings.”

  “Margaret never told me that part.”

  “Margaret, Margaret. You know, a year before my wife, Annie, passed on, rest her soul, she came home one night from cards. You recall how Annie got together with Dorris Letto, Dara Olden, Edna Forbisher, Mary Kieley, and sometimes younger o
nes such as Alice Heltasch and Margaret Handle? Hearts and Draw Fives were the most popular games. Or Old Maid, the card game that migrated up from Halifax or down from St. John’s. Well, on this particular night, it was Old Maid. The ladies brought bread, tea, and Margaret had her customary flask of spirits in tow. The game was held in the Lettos’ kitchen.

  “Annie told me what happened.

  “The cards were being handed along, you know, how the rules dictate. And suddenly Margaret lets out a whoop and pounds her fist on the table. Then she crumbles up the Old Maid card and pops it directly into her mouth! Chews it. I mean, swallows it right down.

  “Margaret then says, ‘Oh, girls, well, I’m sorry. I’ll have Romeo order another deck from Halifax at my expense. No, I’ll have him order two. One for us, one for me to keep in reserve.’ Then she dabbed the corner of her mouth like she’d nibbled a cookie with tea.”

  “I’m sure it was a once-in-a-lifetime moment for all of them,” I said.

  I watched Romeo weigh nails. I thought of what my parents had told me about his life. He had never intended to run a store. He had inherited it in the aftermath of his father’s heart attack. Actually, Romeo was all set to become a doctor. As a young man he had attended two years of medical college in London. Recognizing a chance to have a permanent doctor in Witless Bay, and because Romeo was so well liked, Reverend Weebe (he had succeeded Clemons, and later on Sillet took his place) put out a local call for funds. Finally, enough money was raised for Romeo’s steamer fare and tuition. He was about halfway through his studies when Dalton Gillette was stricken. Once notified, Romeo booked passage to Halifax on the first steamer he could afford, then took the mail boat home, all of which took four months. The only thing he had bought in London was a new suitcase.

  At first, Dalton could move only his eyes and feet. He could swallow, too. Romeo said that heart attacks allowed for unpredictable combinations of mobility in the human body, and that things might change day by day. “The mystery of it’s way bigger than the science of it,” he said. After a few weeks with his son, however, Dalton rallied to where he could stand up and sit down, piss on his own, chew down forkfuls of meat, and say a few logical sentences, which more or less lurched out of him. Romeo spent hours reading books to his father. At meals he would cut up Dalton’s food into small bites, search for fishbones, hoist the spoon or fork to his father’s mouth, then wipe it clean with a napkin.

  Romeo made over a storeroom into convalescent quarters. He hired Annie Stuyvesant to work the counter, and a year later Annie, a lovely, clear-thinking woman with a mischievous sense of humor, married Romeo. It was her second marriage; a brief scourge of smallpox had widowed her at age eighteen. By and by, Annie got the store’s financial records in order and took over as manager, while Romeo attended to his father, saw to inventories, and was the general stock boy.

  Using two years of medical training and a lot of intuition, Romeo thought up ways to try to funnel Dalton’s frustrations, his unwieldy temper, into a healing force, part of which worked and part of which did not. He would walk his father back and forth across the room, hundreds of times in a row. He made Dalton read out loud, even if at times he could not get past the first sentence. He made Dalton lift a fork, even if there was no food on it. “We’ll get you back to your old self,” Romeo would say. “Or almost.”

  Right up until age sixty-one, when he was stricken, Dalton was a rambunctious figure in Witless Bay. He referred to himself as a brigand. I remember later looking that word up in the dictionary that Isaac Sprague had sent me and laughing out loud. Dalton’s own wife, Romeo’s mother, was named Ethel Kitchener. She had been Helen Twombly’s closest friend. Ethel died one night in her sleep, no one knew from what. “Ethel was a private person,” Dalton said. “She died in a private way. I prefer being the widower of Ethel than a husband to anyone else, even in my imagination.” And Dalton never did remarry.

  He had once been on a ship to South America. When he ran the store, he would often greet a customer with “Buenos morning!” or “Buenos afternoon!” But he said it in a way that avoided his showing off too much, because he had thought to match one word of Spanish with one of English. On the wall behind his counter was a mottled anaconda skin stretched out in a glass case. “As I was touring the river Amazon,” he was fond of reporting, “it slithered aboard my dugout canoe. But it did not debark!” He would make a chopping motion as if wielding a machete, and laugh boisterously. In fact, Dalton’s laugh had its own reputation. It was like an odd musical composition; it began with a tentative humming, then burst forth in donkey brays, sometimes ending up with a coughing fit.

  Dalton was of middle height, with fine ink-black hair and bright blue eyes that caught you off guard if you had been too convinced of his character by his long, sad face. He was a world away from dour. And never was there a more direct inheritance, bone structure to steady gait, hearty laugh to love of imported shoes, than between Dalton and Romeo. So strong was their physical resemblance that it was easy to imagine a line of nearly identical faces going centuries back to the heart of England, the country of their ancestors, the place Romeo hated so much.

  After months of grueling and loving work, Romeo got his father to where he could take a walk every day, and his favorite place to do that was on the cliff path behind the lighthouse. “My father’s a stubborn man,” Romeo had said. “He dares his own sense of balance, just him and his walking cane.” And then of course Margaret ran into Dalton on her bicycle. Word had it that Margaret walked the bicycle all the way to the wharf, down the dock, propped it against the Aunt Ivy Barnacle’s cabin, told Enoch what had happened. Enoch walked with her up to Gillette’s store. Enoch left right away for St. John’s and brought back Mitchell Kelb.

  Back to the day that my father left for Anticosti. I mentioned it was July 2, Margaret’s birthday.

  Having left Gillette’s store, I bought a sea bass from Peter Traynor, who had just come in from dory fishing in the Bay. I brought the fish home wrapped in straw. Then I went back to the wharf. I sat with my sketchbook, trying to capture how cormorants perched on buoys, fanned out their wings like a closet rack full of black neckties, drying them in the sun. How they held their beaks gaped open.

  In his letters Sprague had insisted that I work with birds I did not particularly enjoy looking at, and cormorants were that. “I have one student who at first could not bear the sight of any long-necked waders,” he wrote. “Herons, egrets, and so forth. After two years, she draws them beautifully and the question of likes or dislikes is no longer there.” Yet for some reason I portrayed cormorants as spectres, grim, foreboding out on the buoys. Warning what, I did not know, but I had turned cormorants into superstitions of my own making. In my drawings of this bird Sprague found “an irksome prejudice. Granted, cormorants can look eerily like a fossil bird come alive in your harbor, there. Nonetheless, they are worthy of everything but your poor drawings of them. Yours are indeed poor. I request five pages of cormorants, seen from every possible angle, in order to get your thinking right about this bird. Bird art must derive its power from emotion, naturally, but emotions have to be tempered and forged by sheer discipline, all for the sake of posterity.”

  I was fairly succeeding with ducks, shorebirds, crows, ospreys. I failed miserably with cormorants. No journal accepted a single one. Can a person truly hate a bird? I do not know, but I hated my failure with them. Once I even dreamed of Margaret shooting cormorants from her bedroom window, picking them off one by one from buoys and stanchions. In real life, though, I am sure she never did that; she shot only what she needed.

  Anyway, by dusk on July 2, the sky was clear except for stretches of washboard clouds. I walked home. I opened the door. And there was Botho August sitting at our kitchen table. My mother had set three places for supper, though Botho’s plate was not at my father’s customary spot. Botho had apparently brought a music box, a miniature merry-go-round bedecked with painted ribbons. The salt shaker rode on it. The music box w
as working a plunky tune, but when I walked in my mother frantically reached to stop it. Botho reached to prevent her hand. Their hands touched and my mother drew hers back as if from a hot skillet.

  Botho had a boot off. He looked at me, then at the other boot, which he then pried off with his toes. “Ah, there, much better,” he said. “I had a stone in there.”

  My mother gave a short sigh, then watched the music box wind down to a standstill.

  “I’m going to be employed by Mr. August,” she said.

  “On a part-time basis, and out of his own pocket,” Botho added, though he spoke only to my mother. Annoyed, he had flattened his voice as if they had rehearsed the moment and my mother could not remember the first simple thing they had agreed to tell me.

  “In the lighthouse?” I said.

  “That’s where Mr. August works, yes,” my mother said. “It’ll do me good. I’ll feel useful, in a new way. I often go on my morning walk past the lighthouse, when I do go on a morning walk. Now I’ll simply change that to an evening stroll, stop in, sit at the wireless. Mr. August has agreed to teach me how to talk to the schooners, by beam and wireless.”

  “We’ll take it slow at first, then get to the more complicated work,” Botho said, still looking only at my mother. “It’s good for the village. What if I drop dead on a foggy night. Who’s going to help boats out to sea? I need an apprentice, eh?”

  “I’ll learn to work the light, the foghorn, all the apparatuses,” my mother said. “It interests me. It would be rare and useful knowledge for a woman, this day and age, even if Mr. August doesn’t drop dead.”

  Botho wore suspenders over a faded denim shirt tucked into his trousers, better suited, I thought, to colder weather. His hair was neatly combed. His way of dealing with tension was to splay his fingers open, taut against the table, like a man about to play the piano, and press down hard until the tips were white. He held his hands that way, staring at my mother.

  “This boy doesn’t like me, Alaric,” Botho said.

  “He’s not a boy,” my mother said.