The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  She yawned. Wiping the revolver with the hem of her nightshirt, she waved it in front of my face. “As for this, let me know your decision, if you can make one.”

  She rubbed her arms. “I feel something aching up in me now,” she said. “I want to be at home. Get a fire going and dry off my clothes from this fog. Maybe clean the ducks. A hot bath next, and some sleep. And I don’t—don’t—want you to come with me.”

  As she rowed even harder than usual, I said, “Margaret, I love you.”

  She let loose a wild laugh. “You love me, but how’s that work? You’re getting wed in a hotel in Halifax. You told me that to my face, remember? Now, be sure and write me a postcard, delivered by my father, telling me the exact room number you and your bride honeymoon in. So that in the future I can bed down some lummox in the same room. Long, long after I’ve forgotten you, Fabian, but not the room number. I’m good at numbers, you know, being a bookkeeper. Plus which, I’ve always wanted to visit Halifax.”

  Margaret was getting dressed. She liked to dress in front of me. It was the evening of September 28, 1911. We were going to the annual dance, held in LaCotte’s barn. As she slipped on her red dress with a black lace collar and lace at the hem and cuffs, she looked at me and said, “Cat got your tongue?”

  “No. I’m just thinking of something Helen Twombly told me.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “That you liked her superstitions, and even heeded one or two.”

  “They might well have been superstitions. But Helen all but ran her life by them.”

  “I know this. She told you that if you want to cause somebody ill fortune, you take dust from your shoe, then throw it over your shoulder in the direction of that person. Helen said you listened closely to that. Then you bent right down, fingered up dust from your shoe, and tossed it, and a fleck of something flew right back at you. You got a mote in your eye. And you were shaken by it.”

  “Old coot could talk a blue streak, couldn’t she.”

  “Who’d you intend the curse for?”

  “That’s my woman’s secret.”

  “For how long?”

  “Till I die.” She twirled around. “Do you like my dress?”

  “Your hair’s done up nicely, too.”

  “Fabian, do you know who made this dress? Sewed it by hand?”

  “No.”

  “Alaric Vas.”

  “That’s not true.”

  “It took her three full weeks to make this dress, right up there in the lighthouse. My father paid her handsomely for it. It was his gift to me, for no reason at all. Not a birthday. Nothing.”

  “I like the dress. Let’s leave it at that. I was talking about Helen, anyway.”

  “To dream of a wedding is a sign of a funeral. That’s another one she told me.”

  “When you heard it, did you dream of a wedding the same night?”

  Margaret moved to the far wall and leaned against it.

  “I worried that I would,” she said. “So I stayed up all night. That’s how you get around certain dreams. You don’t sleep.”

  “You’re one of a kind. I won’t meet someone like you again.”

  “Better or worse, that’s true.”

  She locked her arm in mine and we walked to LaCotte’s barn.

  There were no decorations other than lanterns. Moths fluttered around them; moths seemed to live a second life after summer for a while in barns. An elevated plank bandstand had been constructed, as it was each year. Francis Beckett sat at the piano. The pulley ropes and dolly used to haul the piano to the barn were set off to one side. Elmer Wyatt stood rosining his fiddle, plucking the strings, bringing it close to his ear in a kind of private communion, tuning, fitting it to his chin. Oliver Parmelee stood next to the piano, an accordion strapped around his neck. When Maurice March, the second accordionist, who had come in from Renews, arrived, the musicians huddled around the piano, going over the evening’s selections. Beckett had written them out on a piece of paper.

  When Margaret and I got there, it was about 7:30. “This herringbone jacket of my father’s itches around the neck,” I said. There was a half-moon, and a sharp breeze off the sea. Inside the barn you still needed a sweater or jacket. Couples were milling about the dirt dance floor.

  “I read a romance in Mrs. Bath’s library once,” Margaret said. “The heroine was going to a dance alone. I read quite a few romances when I was a girl. I noticed that heroines liked to be alone, or at least knew how, but that life didn’t leave them alone. Anyway, in this one romance, she was going to the dance alone. She wasn’t downhearted about it at all. Because she had a silk dress on. She liked how it felt against her skin. She thought that wearing a silk dress, you didn’t need a dance partner. It was already like dancing with someone, silk pressed against you, the two of you moving through the air.”

  “How’d that book turn out?”

  “I forgot the rest.”

  Near eight o’clock, Botho August and my mother sauntered right past us and stood in the center. To my knowledge, it was the first time they had stepped out together in public.

  “My, my, look at them,” Margaret said. “Love birds and everything.”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Well, maybe dancing will put you in a better mood.”

  “I won’t dance.”

  “Suit yourself, Fabian. Fine. But I’m here with Alaric’s son, who’s promised to his cousin. Alaric’s here with Botho August. Truth is truth, and all eyes are open. Besides, this is a local dance, not Judgement Day.”

  The band struck up “Amazing Grace,” though done in waltz time. Twenty or so couples got to dancing. Next came a jig, “Mother Carey’s Chickens.” During it a lot of children hopped about, but as soon as the jig ended, they heard a slow number, “Jesus Shall Preside,” featuring Wyatt’s melancholy solo, and they retreated to the hay bales and under the bandstand. This piece droned along and the band seemed to fall in and out of tune. It was halfhearted. Maurice March’s accordion playing stalled, slurred, cranked up again as he tried to catch the rhythm. He looked embarrassed.

  Margaret got annoyed. She walked up to Francis Beckett and said loudly, “My request is, leave religion out of the rest of this night.”

  She pulled me onto the dance floor. “Don’t look so blinking sour,” she said.

  “I owe it to my father not to dance on the same floor as them.”

  When a lively reel started, couples moved around us, yet I remained fixed in place, staring at my mother and Botho. They took it as a slow dance. Arms entwined, eyes closed, they were barely moving.

  “This barn’s clearly no place for a mother’s son,” Margaret said, giving my chest a slight push. I went over and stood by the door.

  Margaret then cut in on Dara Olden, who was dancing with Reverend Sillet. Dara looked insulted, huffed, then walked briskly over to join Catherine Jobb and Mekeel Dollard by the water glasses and pitcher.

  Margaret pressed herself to Sillet’s chest. She took the lead, and Sillet more or less stumbled about, trying to keep back an arm’s length, finding it impossible to do so. Margaret wrapped her arms tightly around him. Sillet was sweating. Lifting the hem of her dress to his face, she gently tamped his forehead, then rubbed the bottom of her dress roughly over his entire face.

  The band stopped playing all at once, except for March, whose accordion trailed off in a long, mournful wheeze.

  “Adultery spices up an evening, doesn’t it?” Margaret said to Sillet.

  Sillet finally broke loose, stepped back from Margaret, his head shaking in a sudden spasm, his teeth clenched. In his barely restrained pulpit voice he said, “And what name shall I call you by? Making a spectacle of yourself.”

  Margaret put her fists to her forehead, closed her eyes tightly as if in deep thought. Opening her eyes, she said, “You can call me harlot, if I can call you the word that’s in my mind.”

  “I’d rather you didn’t,” Sillet said. He turned and walked over to
get a glass of water. Mekeel Dollard poured it for him.

  Margaret now looked at Botho and my mother. She walked over to them. Clutching my mother’s face, she kissed her on both cheeks. Looking at Sillet, she said, “Love thy neighbor.”

  Then, loudly, she said, “Fabian—shall we go home to bed now?”

  I was fast out the door. “You wait for me,” Margaret said. As we walked toward my house, the band struck up a different reel.

  On my porch, Margaret said, “God help me, but I do believe Sillet’s in love with me.” We stepped into the kitchen. “I’ll have to live with that long after you’ve gone to Halifax.”

  Hours after we had been to bed, Margaret apparently had gone home and come back, because she woke me and said, “Here’s the revolver.” She placed it on top of my dresser. “I’ve cleaned and oiled it. I do that now and then. Everything neat and clean and in its place.”

  I threw on a nightshirt and took the revolver to the shed. I wrapped it in rags and wedged it under a floor plank.

  When I came home from sketching ducks at a tidal flat on October 5, I found my mother preparing supper. This alone would have surprised me enough for a lifetime. Yet when I set down my satchel on the table, she said, “Orkney’s home. Not in the house yet. But definitely back from Anticosti. The mail boat tied up early this morning. Did you know already?”

  “I was north of here all day.”

  “Well, he’s home. I’m making a family supper.”

  She took a letter from her apron pocket. Her hands were trembling. “I want to read this to you,” she said. “It’s the letter I had with me the night that Helen drowned.”

  I sat and she took the pages from the envelope.

  “I’ll skip some,” she said. “The Hollys have made the necessary arrangements. They’ll meet us in Halifax on October 23, the day before the wedding. There’s to be a rehearsal.”

  She hesitated, then looked up from the letter.

  “That’s not much time to get acquainted,” she said. “I suppose in the best of worlds, though, getting acquainted is what a life together is for.”

  I slumped in my chair, nodded as if I understood, then shrugged, gestures by which I repudiated myself.

  “Just look at your face,” she said. “You’d think somebody was shackling you to the mail boat, Fabian. You’re a volunteer, finally.”

  “Please just go on reading.”

  “She suggests—let me see here”—my mother set the first page aside, glancing over the second—“we use a justice of the peace, to avoid offending anyone’s religious sensibilities. They’re Baptists, apparently, however that happened. And I told her that we were practising Anglicans. They’ve reserved a room for themselves, another for Orkney and me, a third for you and Cora. On a separate floor, naturally. Klara says the Hagerforse Guest House is lovely. There’s a park directly across and oak trees lining the street. What a pleasant place it sounds like, Fabian. What a pleasant, serene place to sleep your first married night, in the city there. Klara goes on to say that they’ll leave Halifax the morning after, first to sightsee at Peggy’s Cove, then up to Prince Edward Island for the beaches. Weather allowing. ‘We are drawn to autumn beaches without sunbathers,’ she says. And then they’ll go home to Richibucto.”

  At the same instant we looked up to see my father standing in the doorway. He may have heard part of the letter, I do not know. We did not hear the door open. No doubt I had left it unlatched.

  “Oh!” my mother said. It was like an utterance from a ventriloquist’s dummy, hollow, and she even moved her hand woodenly to her heart.

  Without meeting our eyes, he dropped the tightly bound bundle of burlap sacks to the floor and immediately picked them up again. He carried the bags to the pantry. He stood there, facing away from the kitchen, silent. I heard him catch his breath. I do not know exactly what I had expected, though it was not that he would be as clean-shaven, his hair so neatly combed. He did have on the same clothes as when he had left months earlier, allowing for the wishful delusion that no time had passed. Though even so, his clothes appeared to be freshly washed and ironed. Then I fixed on his shoes. He had on new shoes. I thought that I even recognized the pair, from Gillette’s store. They had been on the third shelf to the left of the counter, above the galoshes. I had even once thought of buying them for my father. I had almost asked Romeo to set them aside. They were black, with slightly raised eyelets. Since his return to Witless Bay, my father had bought new shoes, yet they were not laced up. This oversight was a detail that gave him away. He was not quite himself.

  My mother tapped the salt and pepper shakers together.

  My father turned and walked into the kitchen. Leaning against the door, he said, “Here’s the places I’m offered to stay while I think things over. Until this thing gets settled in my mind. There’s the bunk on Enoch’s boat. No, I turn that down. And Romeo Gillette’s offered me his sofa. And there’s the spare room at Spivey’s. You know the room, Fabian. I’ve just washed up there, and it would do nicely. I guess it’s my turn there, eh? I’m partial to it, anyway, because I haven’t slept in a real bed in months. You see, I didn’t have a choice, one bed or the other, on Anticosti. So that’s it, then. I’ve made up my mind. I’ll stay at Spivey’s. For a week, say. And, Alaric, I’ll expect you not to be in this house after that, not that you have much of late, anyway.”

  The pepper shaker cracked, scattering grains on the table. My mother’s hand was bleeding.

  “And what kind of man are you?” he said to me. “To allow this humiliation to go on.”

  “Leave Fabian out of this,” my mother said.

  “How’s that possible? He’s sitting right here, not deaf and dumb.”

  He went out the door, down the road to Spivey’s.

  “I’ll take the music box with me,” my mother said. She stood up, washed her hand in the sink, held a cloth napkin to it. “He won’t get that.”

  “Father doesn’t even know about any goddamn music box, Mother. But he did get told about you and Botho. Maybe from Enoch. Maybe Romeo.”

  “I’ve hurt him deeply, Fabian. I have not kept a clean marriage. There’s no turning back.”

  Except for cracking the pepper shaker, she had kept a tense composure; now, however, she went into her bedroom and I heard a lot of commotion. She cursed, then smashed an object against the wall. I looked around the kitchen. On the counter, lemon rinds were drying. My mother stayed in her room. I imagined her curled up on the bed, a jolted stillness at the heart of the house.

  I looked in on my mother an hour or so later. She was asleep. The music box lay in pieces on the floor. It was just after dark. I walked to Spivey’s. I sat on the porch until the last customers, Mekeel and Paul Dollard, came out. “White horses on the bay tonight,” Paul said, referring to the whitecaps breaking into foam on the rocks. They both offered tight-lipped smiles.

  “Good night, then,” Mekeel Dollard said.

  “Good night.”

  I stepped inside. Bridget was clearing dishes. Lemuel was sponging a table.

  “He’s in his room,” Lemuel said. “You eat supper? Because if you haven’t, neither has Orkney, and it’s easy enough to send you back with a tray.”

  “Not hungry, thanks.”

  I knocked on the door and opened it. My father had set his shoes on the floor next to his old pair of boots. He had polished the boots as well. He lay on the bed, a pillow over his face.

  “It’s me. Fabian.”

  “This pillow is Bridget’s advice,” he said. He lifted the pillow away. “She claims a cool pillow against your face can change your disposition. Good if you need sleep.”

  “Things with Mother changed without warning.”

  He set the pillow on his chest. “—that all these years should come down to infidelity. Christ, how pitiful.”

  He placed the pillow behind his head.

  “—in the register of births,” he said.

  “How’s that?”

  �
�Your mother’s maiden name.”

  “What about it?”

  “Her name before marriage was Alaric Banville.”

  “I knew that.”

  “That’s how I’ll refer to her from now on. Alaric Banville.”

  “All right. That might help.”

  “Don’t be goddamned stupid, son. Nothing helps. Life’s taken a downward spin. I’m brain-sick. It’s all got me so riled and full of murderous hate. Toward both your mother and Botho August.”

  “That’s put directly.”

  “Enoch Handle told me he once delivered a man who was criminally insane. He’d done some awful deed up in St. John’s, and Enoch was delivering him to a hospital sanatorium away from civilization. There was a British constable along. The man in question was locked into a straitjacket. I mean padlocked—like this—”

  Wrapping his arms tightly around his chest, my father demonstrated, adding a look of anguish. It did not strike me as an imitation. It was more as though he had become the man himself.

  “You feel like that now.”

  He stood up. “That’s the goddamned point, Fabian! If I stepped from this room for a minute—now—I could do something. I’m capable. And what’s more, I might not regret it.”

  “Well, I’d regret it.”

  “Don’t protect them. Some citizens can’t be protected.”

  He looked at the wall, then back to me.

  “On Anticosti—” He reached into his trouser pocket, taking out a slip of paper. “I wrote it all down, not to forget. Three hundred six puffins. Two hundred twenty-eight auks. All the deliveries and haggling done. The wedding money’s in the till, a secret place away from Alaric Banville.”

  “I don’t see how we can travel as a family down to Halifax.”

  He stepped over to me, put his hand on my shoulder, and squeezed, then sat down again on the bed.

  “It’s a former plan,” he said. He stood up, walked a few steps to the chair. “A plan from a time months back, when we were a family. Or so I thought. Back then, we’d worked something out on your behalf. So now we can proceed as though we’re honoring a promise. Do you want to go ahead with marrying Cora Holly? That’s my question, here and now.”