The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  “Fabian—listen carefully. From Botho August’s bed, you can see so far out across the water. It’s—”

  She kicked the bottle across the room, clutched herself, rolled back and forth on the bed as though poisoned. As though the memory had poisoned her. “It’s all hopeless,” she said. “You’re hopeless, Fabian. Get out. Get out of the room now. Go away.”

  “I’ll sit here with you. I’ll make us coffee.”

  “You’re such a child. You just don’t know how to think about what I’ve just told you, about me and Botho August. Well, it’ll all sink in. You’ll finally understand that Alaric knows what happened between me and Botho, and that she’s jealous of me. Of my past with him.”

  “One night is not a past.”

  “It is to Alaric, now that she’s in love with Botho.”

  “Not love—I doubt it. Not that.”

  “Well, I can’t expect you to grow up all in one night.”

  “I’m no child. Confused as one—”

  “By the way, Alaric has some interesting reading. And not on the shelf. Behind it. In a shoebox, like a mouse would nest in. Letters are all neatly stacked in there, Fabian, tied in string.”

  Margaret took some deep breaths, calming herself. “Those are my mother’s letters.”

  Now Margaret took on a sneering, mocking tone, quoting a letter: “Richibucto is such a lovely place. Alaric dear, you simply must visit us here sometime. Of course, our home is yours.”

  “Those letters are private.”

  “God, I could vomit.”

  “Did you put them back?”

  “Such a child,” Margaret said, her voice trailing off. She closed her eyes, slowly got under the covers again, and in a moment was asleep.

  I made coffee. I stayed up all night, not drawing.

  The following morning Margaret was sick with a hangover, fever, vomiting. She woke mid-morning, had a few sips of tea, and got back into bed. “Don’t speak to me,” she said.

  My mother, of course, did not come home for breakfast or lunch. I drew at the kitchen table, looked in on Margaret, to find her either in a fitful, sweating sleep or glaring at me. “Get out!” she would say. “Don’t look at me!” My mother stayed away for supper. After dark, I persuaded Margaret to try a cup of rice broth. She sat at the table in her nightshirt. She looked wretched and pale, and seemed to have only enough strength to lower. her face to the broth. “Don’t watch me eat,” she said. I had to wait in the living room.

  “I’m through,” she called.

  I went back into the kitchen. “All right to look at you now?” I said.

  “I don’t give a good goddamn.”

  We heard footsteps on the porch; the door opened and in came my mother, waving an envelope. “Oh,” she said, taking in Margaret’s presence. Glancing at me, she tucked the letter into a bag containing a loaf of bread and a bottle of milk.

  Margaret rubbed her temples with her thumbs. “Your son here, Alaric, and I were sharing soup like an old married couple,” she said. “Care to join us?”

  My mother sat down, still holding the bread and milk. “Margaret,” she said, “I’ve got something to tell Fabian of direct consequence to his future, if you please.”

  “Got a new letter from Richibucto in hand?” Margaret said. “I read all the others. I’m interested in keeping up, you know.”

  “A private moment with my son,” my mother said.

  Margaret looked at me. “Fabian,” she said weakly, “I’ll need some help to our bed.”

  Margaret leaned against me as we walked into my room. She sat on the bed. “I considered swooning, but didn’t want to give Alaric any entertainment. God, I drank enough last night to kill an ox. I had two of the worst nightmares in history, then your soup. I’m deathly ill in the house where the mother hates me. But you know what? Just look at you. You seem worse off.”

  Then we heard my mother break into a sea dirge, alternately singing the lyrics and humming.

  “Alaric likes to kill sailors, she sings those dirges so often,” Margaret said. “I heard her singing one near the church the other day. She didn’t know I was close behind. She likes a song that leaves widows and orphans.”

  We heard: “ … the tenth of November, a storm come hard, oh, oh, into Bleak Joke Cove.”

  “Bless her heart,” Margaret said. “Just a few moments back in her own house, she breaks into song.”

  My mother did not have a good singing voice, not important for dirges; she seemed to force a lower octave, and she forgot words or cut songs off on purpose.

  Yet something else interrupted her this time. There was a voice calling with great urgency at the kitchen window. “Fabian! Margaret! Fabian Vas!”

  I stepped into the kitchen. My mother looked at me with blank panic.

  “Even if he knew the truth, Father wouldn’t call out my last name,” I said. “And how would he know to call for Margaret here?”

  My mother opened the door. Romeo Gillette stood there in his rain slicker, hat, and galoshes, all streaked with water. The wind was up. “This rain blew in suddenly,” he said. “It’s not a squall yet and might not be.”

  “What’s wrong?” my mother said.

  Romeo took us all in: Margaret in her wrinkled nightshirt, leaning against me, my mother raking her fingers through her hair. “Peter Kieley,” Romeo said, “was working late at the wharf. He saw Helen Twombly row out. She got into a dinghy. She had bottles of milk with her. The harbor’s now almost entirely fogged in.”

  “She wants to end it,” Margaret said. “The poor thing just does.”

  “Who’s to say?” Romeo half-shouted, then calmed himself. “Not you. Not Reverend Sillet. Who’s to say that? Who’s to allow such a thing to happen?”

  “I’ll get a lantern,” I said.

  “Hurry, then,” Romeo said. “She was my mother’s best friend.”

  Romeo turned from the door and was quickly out of sight in the rain and darkness.

  “I’m going, too,” Margaret said. “I’m going with you, Fabian.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” my mother said. “You’re in no condition to be out there. You stink of vomit, Margaret, and you can hardly stand up.”

  “Go back to your lighthouse, Alaric,” Margaret said.

  Margaret went into my room and got dressed. I heard her coughing. She came out wearing one of my sweaters over her own clothes. “Is there a spare slicker?”

  “Rain gear’s in the pantry.”

  “Botho August could be of some help in this,” Margaret said. “Tell him to get his light going.”

  “I’m sure that somebody’s got to him already,” my mother said. “There’s fog out, he’ll be alert to it.”

  “Tell him, anyway.”

  My mother drew her eyes to slits, held the bag of groceries like they were all she owned, then fled the house.

  Margaret and I set out a few moments later. We walked half-blind in the fog toward the lighthouse. The rain had let up some. When we passed the lighthouse, its beam was off. No lantern in any window, fog swirling around the housing.

  At the steepest incline above the wharf, we stopped stock-still, listening to voices from down below, though we could not make out the words.

  “I hate to think of Helen out there now,” I said.

  “She’s made a choice,” Margaret said. She coughed hard. “Poor woman wants to end it. There’s no one left to talk with is what she told me, just last week. I went to visit Helen more often than you might have guessed.”

  “She liked you.”

  Each of us held a lantern. We made our way down.

  At the wharf, familiar sounds—voices, rainy drizzle on tarpaulin, masts creaking, dories knocking against each other—all seemed to struggle through some thick garment of fog. Life on the wharf felt ghostly.

  Margaret bent over coughing. I had linked my arm in hers, so bent down with her.

  “They should just leave Helen alone now,” she said. “Okay, I’m fine, let me s
tand up.”

  “They won’t leave her alone.”

  We heard a dory shove off. “Get the lantern turned up—” And suddenly the dory materialized out of the fog and glided right past us, close to the dock. We saw the faces of Boas LaCotte and Giles LaCotte, almost familiar in the opaque light.

  Soon the harbor was a scatter of lanterns floating above the water, face level, shoulder level. Helen had surely extinguished her own light by now, if she had brought one to begin with.

  Margaret and I located a dory and climbed in. It did not matter to whom it belonged. The oars were under the thwarts. We set our lanterns between us on the middle thwart. Guided by other lights, I rowed. The long night of drifting began. The vigil began.

  Throughout the cold, dark hours the fog held, and like survivors of a shipwreck in lifeboats, people called out their names, names that wended through the darkness with the force of grim affirmation, of astonishment at this common experience. “Peter Kieley—” a voice said. It was repeated, then answered: “Peter Kieley, this is Harry Delacroix.” It started up then, this consensus of rowers, like a children’s round of overlapping verses, except devoid of music and playfulness. “Harry Delacroix, this is Elmer Wyatt.” Then: “Elmer Wyatt, this is your brother, Sam Wyatt.”

  And then: “Where’s the goddamn lighthouse beam?” I do not know who called that out.

  Margaret and I heard a dory close by. We heard oars dripping. An oar’s length away, Reverend Sillet now held his lantern up near his face. I had always thought of his face as a place where mannerisms resided: overly anxious grins, clownish frowns—a face that overdid emotions. It was a wide face, whose tics were distracting. I think Sillet knew this, because he had moved his pulpit a considerable distance back from the front pew. He was, however, a man of great seriousness, too, because he would cloister himself in his library, the midnight oil burning. He was rather portly, physically very strong, agile. He was about fifty-five, with pronounced jowls, thinning grey hair, dark brown eyes with thick eyebrows. His voice was gravelly. Neither of us had ever made much of an effort to know each other.

  In the dory, Sillet moved his lantern closer to us. “Ah, Fabian, Margaret, it’s you,” he said. “You know, being out here has given me an uneasy thought.”

  “What’s that, pray tell?” Margaret said.

  “That Helen is the only one of us still alive. That she’s really back on shore, tending to her bottles. And that, lured and harried forth by the terrible illusion of her suicide, we are all now drifting in purgatory. That Witless Bay Harbour was purgatory all along, only we didn’t recognize it as such.”

  “I don’t like your imagination,” Margaret said, racked then with coughing. She spat. Barely croaking out her words, she said, “If I had your imagination, I’d slip overboard. Fabian—row away from him, right now, please. He gives me the jitters.”

  “I’m taking you back in,” I said. “Helen’s probably caught her death out here. No reason for you to catch yours.”

  We rowed back to the dock and Margaret climbed out. Standing on the dock, she said, “I’m going to my own house.”

  I rowed out again, looking back once to see Margaret’s lantern fade.

  “Richmond Fauvette, this is Oliver Parmelee.” Oliver’s voice and slapping oars were nearby. “Oliver Parmelee, this is Fabian Vas.”

  I do not know at what hour people began to return. They had searched the harbor high and low and still were not giving up, only stopping their search for the remainder of the night. Yet I did not go back. For some reason I stayed in the dory. There is a kind of peacefulness that exists only after other boats have left. I felt that now. In an hour or so, the wharf was to my north. The rain had stopped. I could see the first tinges of light on the horizon, sun filling the clouds from the bottom up. There was a cormorant on a buoy. It had its wings outspread, hoarding, I thought, the early warmth. There was a gull on each post of the old dock, the one with rotted slats and posts and underpinnings; it had been rotted for years and was Margaret’s favorite place as a child to ride her bicycle.

  I had been gazing off into the distance when I heard a hollow clunk against the hull. Leaning over the side, I saw a milk bottle. I placed it in the boat. I got my bearings. I was at the mouth of Caroline Cove, halfway between Witless Bay and Bay Bulls. I had drawn bitterns and teals here. I was a hundred or so yards offshore. I took up the oars and rowed toward a line of boulders and flat rocks to portage.

  Almost immediately I saw Helen’s dinghy. It was wedged into a sandbar. Farther on were rocks jutting from the water. Small waves slapped against Helen Twombly, who was curled on a ledge of rock. One high-topped shoe drifted, though still fastened by its lace to her ankle. She used to tie the laces above her shoe tops, crossing them twice, then making a bow. Some sort of twisting or tossing must have removed her shoes, I thought; Helen must have gone through something awful to have had that happen. My second thought was, What Providence is this? Yet the phrasing was not mine, not mine at all. It came from the Bible or maybe one of Sillet’s sermons. I felt ashamed and stupid. Here I was, out all night, then I’d found the body of someone who was already old when I was a boy, hardly common experiences. You would think an original utterance would get into my head. But all I could finally think of to do next was fit Helen’s shoe back on.

  The shrieks of the carrion gulls quickened my blood then, and I rowed to Helen. Closer now, I could recognize her flower-print dress, though it was sequined with dry salt. Vines of kelp, slick leaves shining, festooned her legs, strangling her waist and arms. Sand flies buzzed loudly in droves on her face and hands. I anchored, tying up with a tow rope. I went ahead and forced the shoe over Helen’s bloated foot. The deep gash on her cheek was stitched with flies, her skin bruised but otherwise drained of color. Still, she had a human expression, and if I could describe it one way, I would say that she looked puzzled. I said, “You got even smaller,” but that was all.

  I took out a jackknife and cut away the kelp, then hoisted Helen into the dory. I could cover her completely with my raincoat. I rowed home. The current ran across the bow, so it took a long time.

  On the dock in the distance, Giles LaCotte, Romeo Gillette, and Oliver Parmelee were preparing to set out again. I shouted to them. They waved. I was too exhausted to do anything but row steadily. I knew that they could see I had something in the dory, a cargo. When I got near the dock, Romeo saw the shape and said, “Where was she?”

  “South. At Caroline Cove.”

  I tossed the rope and Oliver caught it. He pulled us in, then tied up. Lifting Helen, the men did their best to keep her inside the raincoat. They laid her gently on the dock.

  “I’ll go tell Sillet,” Romeo said.

  “No. I brought in this news. I’ll tell it to him.”

  I walked directly up to Sillet’s house, a two-room white house with a black roof located directly behind the church. He was in his yard, washing shirts with a scrub brush and washboard, leaning over a tub.

  He saw me and said, “Mrs. Harbison’s day off. I don’t usually get this familiar with my shirts, other than wearing them. By the way, tell Margaret that under the circumstances last night, I forgive her her harsh words.”

  “Forgiveness won’t register with Margaret. Not from you. She just won’t care.”

  “So be it. What’s on your mind?”

  Looking down, he scrubbed a shirt.

  “I’ve brought Helen Twombly back. She drowned.”

  “Lord have mercy. Where is she now?”

  “Laid out on the dock. There’s people with her.”

  “Terrible, terrible accident.”

  “Accident” seemed the one perfectly wrong word.

  I went home. The house was empty. I changed my sheets, heated water for a bath, and bathed a long time. I made coffee and sat in the living room, thinking about Helen.

  In an hour or so Sillet came by to return my raincoat.

  “Helen has no heirs or relatives whose address we know,” he
said. “I’ll manage things from here on out.”

  I do not know all the reasons, but just then I had an unusually narrow tolerance for Sillet. “That’s one of the things the village pays you for,” I said.

  “That temperament comes from finding a person dashed on the rocks, poor boy.”

  “Maybe so.”

  The funeral was held on August 3, 1911, late in the morning. My mother came to our house and put on a black dress with a black shawl. The shawl was lacy and reminded me of one worn by a Spanish lady who, in a magazine, sat ringside at a bullfight.

  “I understand that you found Helen,” she said. “An experience like that must have unraveled you.”

  “It was unusual, I’ll say that.” I had on my church suit and was polishing my shoes. “There’s been a lot of those lately.”

  “Someday you’ll sort them all out.”

  “I might not sit with you at the funeral.”

  “I imagined not. But do please acknowledge my presence, Fabian. I don’t much care about keeping up appearances. At this point that obviously would be folly. But do acknowledge me, please. Quite simply, it would show good upbringing. It would show politeness—at least that—in the face of adversity.”

  “I’ll bring you a plate of food at the testimonial.”

  “That would do nicely.”

  My mother went on ahead. I waited for about ten minutes, then followed her to church. Though the temperature was fairly cool for summer, the sun was strong, the sky all but cloudless. When I got to the church at about eleven o’clock, the pews were almost all filled. I managed to get mourners to slide down, allowing me an aisle seat in a middle pew. People stood inside along the walls as well, others leaned in through the windows or sat on the porch or stood outside near the open door. They all could hear Sillet.

  Helen’s coffin, covered with flowers, had been placed across two sawhorses directly in front of the elevated pulpit. Francis Beckett, a top-notch net maker, was playing the organ. At the last moment, three horse-drawn wagons pulled up and about two dozen Moravians from Renews climbed down and stood together off to one side of the church. I do not know who reported Helen’s death to them, but I was impressed that so many had come. The women held black umbrellas against the sun. Among the Moravian men was Jarvis Bellecamp. He had been Emile Twombly’s friend and partner in a number of enterprises, including bee farming. He was in his eighties and was the only person I knew of whom Helen had visited on a regular basis. The Moravians’ minister, Sander Muggah, had stayed in Renews.