The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  Sillet slapped the Bible. Kelb glared at him and Sillet stayed quiet.

  “Yes,” said Romeo. “For the past eight years, I’ve jotted things down and Margaret Handle tallies them up. She keeps the ledgers. She keeps them in her attic.”

  “Previous to today, did I ask you to look up the particular revolver in question?”

  “Yes, you did. You said to look it up and see if Orkney Vas, Alaric Vas, Fabian Vas, or Margaret Handle ever bought it from me.”

  “What did the ledgers say?”

  “Margaret Handle bought it from me on September 5, 1908. She put it in the ledger herself. In her own writing.”

  Kelb looked at Mekeel Dollard and spoke slowly: “Now, I’ve had three men, pretty much bullet and gun experts in Witless Bay, match up the murder bullets to this revolver. Two were in Botho August. The one in the neck and the gut shot. At first the one that went through the high ribs was missing. But later we found it on the ground.”

  Sillet was overwhelmed and stood up. He pointed at Margaret. “I hope you’re not carrying Botho August’s child!” he said. “Because if you are, you only need to turn to chapter and verse, you’ll see there are things a person can do that’ll put a curse on a family, legitimate or not, for a hundred generations.”

  “Reverend Sillet!” Kelb said, slamming his fist on the table. “We’re establishing the nature of the actual shooting itself, slow as the truth comes. We’re conducting a hearing, not a Sunday-school class. If need be, we’ll hear about relations between Mr. August and Miss Handle later on. I won’t tolerate your interruptions.”

  “God held the first trial. He has to be present at every one.”

  “All right, He’s here. Are you satisfied, Reverend? You seem to want a drama of your own making.”

  “Why not go upstairs to the lighthouse,” Margaret said to Sillet, “put on one of Botho’s gramophone records, sing at the top of your voice, ‘Almighty Vast and Blessed Is Thine Heart That Confer Baptism Upon the Very Creatures of Thy Wondrous Sea,’ window open, citizens of this fine village paying a price for a ticket?”

  “A murder shouldn’t draw out her sense of humor, should it, now, Mr. Kelb?”

  “I adjourn,” Kelb said. “I’m a magistrate highly annoyed just now.”

  “It’s been just over an hour, though,” Mekeel Dollard said.

  “Well, note that down, then.”

  Sitting at my father’s place at our table, Kelb unpacked his lunch. He set out a cold baked potato, then poured a glass of water from the pitcher. He took out a jackknife, then a small whetstone. He sharpened the knife. He cut the potato into four equal parts. He stuck the knife into a piece and put it into his mouth. He wiped the knife across his trouser knee, then set it on the table. My mother sat down with a cup of tea across from Kelb. Margaret and I sat in the other two chairs.

  “Mr. Kelb,” my mother said, “would you care for some potato-leek soup, like the rest of us?”

  “I prefer my potatoes out of soup.”

  “Mr. Kelb, do you think that our hearing will last until Guy Fawkes?”

  One of the traditional festivals was Guy Fawkes Night, held on November 5. Huge bonfires were lit in memory of the attempt to blow up the Parliament buildings in the time of King James I. People stacked up green boughs, and tar barrels were used to make a thick smoke, and people danced in and out of the smoke, colliding, laughing, shouting. This went on in most Newfoundland villages. It was Romeo Gillette’s favorite holiday, more than Canadian Thanksgiving or Christmas.

  “It might well,” Kelb said. “It’s hard to predict how long a hearing will last.”

  “Because if it does,” my mother said, “you should really see it here in Witless Bay. The festivities, I mean. People do have great fun.”

  “It’d be awkward, me being a representative of the crown.”

  “Do you mean to say that you’ve never attended one single Guy Fawkes?”

  “If I went this year I’d be a novice.”

  He took up another piece of potato with his knife, ate it, and again cleaned the blade on his knee. He took a sip of water.

  “A novice gets smeared with ashes, isn’t that right?” Kelb said.

  “But once that’s over, you can have a wonderful time,” my mother said.

  “I just might go. If the hearing lasts till then, naturally. I’m sure there’s somebody who’d take my guard duties for an hour or two, which is all I’d attend for.”

  “There’s a feast, too. Better than this prison food you eat,” my mother said.

  “I’ll finish my meal now,” Kelb said. “Then I’ll escort you all back to the store.”

  Margaret and I each finished our soup. I had two cups of coffee. My mother sat and watched Kelb eat.

  “Is there any pepper?” Kelb asked.

  “Sorry, no,” my mother said.

  Kelb sprinkled salt on the two remaining pieces, ate one with quick dispatch, washing it down with water. The other piece he wrapped in a cloth handkerchief and put in his suitcoat pocket. He stood up.

  “Let’s go, then,” he said.

  “May I ride my bicycle to the hearing?” Margaret said.

  “Miss Handle, you can walk there on your hands, for all I care.”

  Kelb tapped a gavel on the table. The room hushed down.

  “Getting back to the revolver,” he said. “Mr. Gillette, would you say that Margaret Handle—let’s start with her —that she could shoot a gun?”

  “Everybody knows Margaret could,” Romeo said. “She took one out in the harbor now and again. To shoot ducks, mostly.”

  “From some distance, I imagine.”

  “Depends on the duck. Some are quite stupid. You might say too trusting. Some don’t use their natural skittishness to their best advantage around people.”

  “But ducks don’t come right up to a boat.”

  “No, sir. To shoot one at twenty yards, say, takes a steady hand and a good eye. Especially in the rain.”

  “I didn’t ask you about rain.”

  Kelb turned to Margaret. “I’ve kept too long on ducks here,” Kelb said. “We aren’t really concerned with them. We’re talking about killing a lighthouse keeper. From close up. Because at least one bullet went straight on through. Miss Handle, was the revolver you purchased in your possession on the night of October eight, nineteen and eleven? The night that Botho August was shot dead. You don’t have to stand up to answer.”

  “If what you mean by possession—”

  “Did you carry it to the lighthouse yourself?”

  “We haven’t established that she was in the lighthouse,” Romeo said.

  “Well, I was. You know it, Romeo. Everyone does. I was. But I didn’t have the revolver with me,” Margaret said.

  “Do you know, Miss Handle, whose possession it was in?” Kelb said.

  “The only person I saw with my own eyes, who had the gun—the revolver in hand—was Orkney Vas.”

  “His wife committing adultery almost every night while he was on Anticosti Island!” Sillet shouted.

  Most people turned to the back of the store where Sillet stood.

  “To my mind, that very thing could argue against Orkney Vas, true,” Kelb said. “But it’s not your place to prosecute here, Reverend. Please shut up. Orkney Vas’s knowledge about his wife must have been a hard fact to swallow. But Mrs. Vas is not on trial here for adultery. Come to think of it just now, I want you to leave the room.”

  Looking cowed but tightening his fists, Sillet turned to the door. He put on his wool cap. Still facing away from Kelb, he called out, “I’d be a hypocrite not to provide a voice of reason.” He left the store.

  “Mr. Fabian Vas,” Kelb said, looking at me. He checked a piece of paper with his own writing on it. “Margaret Handle told me that on the night of September 28, the dance in Boas LaCotte’s barn, she gave you the revolver. Is that correct?”

  “Did you tell him that?” I asked Margaret.

  “Yes,” she said.
/>   “It’s true,” I said to Kelb.

  “And that you hid it in the woodshed behind your house.”

  “Under a plank,” I said.

  “Margaret, did you see Fabian Vas outside the lighthouse on the night of October 8?”

  “No.”

  “At any time that night did you see Fabian Vas in actual possession of the revolver? I know you told me you didn’t, but here’s a second chance to remember.”

  “No, I didn’t.”

  “Well, just what did you see that night? Tell us.”

  “A bullet shatter the window in the room where Botho August and I—”

  “Did he say anything at that time?”

  “‘That has to be Orkney Vas,’ he said.”

  “Then what?”

  “He stomped downstairs. Botho did. Mad as a hatter.”

  “What did you do then?”

  “I pulled the sheets up to my chin.”

  “Were you—imbibing? Did you have your customary whiskey with you?”

  “I had a bottle there and had drunk a good bit of it.”

  “Did you hear more gunfire?”

  “Yes.”

  “How many shots?”

  “Two more shots.”

  “Did you go to the window then?”

  “No, between the shots I stumbled to the gramophone. I fell against it.”

  “But you hadn’t yet looked outside.”

  “No. But except for the rain it was godawful quiet.”

  “At any time after the shots did you look out the window?”

  “Yes. Finally, I did.”

  “What did you see?”

  “I saw Orkney Vas.”

  “Doing what? Orkney Vas doing what?”

  “He had a revolver in his hand. He had a lantern in the other hand. He ran off.”

  “How much time—just guess. How much time had passed between when you heard the last shot and when you saw Orkney Vas?”

  “I don’t know. When you’re drinking like that, a long time can pass quickly, and a minute can stretch.”

  “Did you eventually go down the stairs?”

  “Yes, I did. I did go down the stairs. Because I heard shots, didn’t I? And because Botho August hadn’t come back up.”

  “What did you find in the yard?”

  “Botho August lying there.”

  “Was he dead?”

  “No—no. Well, at first I thought he was. He was bleeding all over. Rain was hitting his face. Blood, and he was coughing. More, then, it was a wheeze. I thought, He is not dead. He was trying to say something.”

  “Did he succeed?”

  “He said, ‘Cirala.’”

  “I didn’t hear that clearly. Would you repeat it?”

  “Cirala. I’ll spell it out. C-i-r-a-l-a.”

  You could have heard a pin drop.

  “It’s my name spelled backwards,” my mother said.

  “Mrs. Vas,” Kelb said, “can you say that again, for the record?”

  My mother shifted in her chair, rubbed her face with her hands, then laid her hands flat on the table.

  “Alaric,” she said. “If you spell my name backwards, it comes out just as Margaret pronounced it.”

  “Cirala,” Kelb said. Then he all but whispered the word. “Whatever in God’s green acres could that word have meant, spoken as his life was fading?”

  “I can tell you,” Margaret said.

  “Go on, then.”

  “Me and Botho August—I hadn’t carried on intimately with him for many years. Yet now and then I’d visit him in his lighthouse. We—Botho and me. We did entertain ourselves. What I’d bring to his lighthouse was a deck of Old Maid cards. He called it ‘Old Hag.’ Old Hag. As we say around here, ‘Old Hag’ means to have a nightmare. You see, Mr. Kelb, in our village you call a nightmare ‘Old Hag.’ And if you want to cure a nightmare, you try and figure out who’s really causing the nightmare. If you can figure it out, then you say that person’s name backwards. That’s the cure.”

  There was about thirty or so seconds of utter silence. Then Mitchell Kelb reached into his pocket and took out the last piece of potato, chewed and swallowed it, all fidgety as a squirrel. He rubbed his hands against his trouser leg a moment. He cleared his throat. “Am I being made a visiting fool of?” he said. He perused the faces in the row of barrels. “This hearing is not going in pristine order. And now we have superstitions involved. I need to organize my thoughts. Mrs. Dollard, please write: Mitchell Kelb adjourned to organize his thoughts, one after the other. We’ll take a full day’s recess. Everybody leaves the store now. Just get out.”

  10

  The Guy Fawkes, Tragedy

  “News of Orkney Vas might interest you,” Mitchell Kelb said. Revolver holstered on his right hip, he ate pancakes doused in butter, shredded cabbage, and brewis, which was a boiled biscuit with pork fat. It was the evening of November 3. Margaret, my mother, and I sat with Kelb. Kelb ate his last bite, stood, stretched in an exaggerated way. “My sources keep me informed. Mr. Llewellyn Boxer travels back and forth, here to St. John’s. Well, Orkney was seen in Lamaline, of course, where neither you, Alaric, nor you, Fabian, nor Enoch Handle, for that matter, saw fit to stop him from going ashore. Not that you could have stopped him. After Lamaline, there were sightings in Garnish, Terrenceville, and Bay du Nord. We have a professional tracker out after him. A part-Micmac named Poomuk, first name of Albert. He’s done good work for us in the past. He found an escapee in a cave once.”

  “Mr. Kelb, did you ever escort a man who was criminally insane,” I said, “down the coast to a sanatorium?”

  “As a matter of fact, I did. Ten or so years back. Enoch Handle took us down.”

  “I’d heard that rumor,” I said. “I was just asking.”

  “Getting back to Orkney Vas. We figure that he has headed into Canada, possibly overland, because the skipper of the Doubting Thomas, Mr. Arvin Flint, has been notified. I notified him through Llewellyn Boxer, who sent his brother Perry to Flint. Now, Mr. Flint is a former constable himself. He retired because of how his character is made up—he wasn’t cut out for the job, really. The job got him too close to lowlife sorts who weren’t well met with his more cheerful notions of humanity. Whereas, for me, it’s all a perfect fit. Anyway, Arvin Flint still carries a sidearm and knows how to use it. Orkney Vas, I believe, knows all of this and will keep to dry ground.”

  “Well, thank you for telling us,” my mother said. “I think personally I’ll skip dessert. I’m quite tired. But we have duff; we make that pudding with flour, fat, and molasses, Mr. Kelb. And you can see there’s syrup. Good night, then.”

  “Good night, Cirala,” Kelb said, then snickered.

  “Old Maid?” Margaret said to Kelb, holding up the deck.

  My mother left the kitchen.

  “No thanks,” Kelb said. “I’m turning in. I’ve got your room again tonight, eh, Fabian?”

  “Help yourself.”

  Mitchell Kelb washed his face in the kitchen sink, then went into my bedroom.

  “Cuts up a potato and then doesn’t use a fork,” Margaret said. She looked out the window. “It’s duckish.”

  Helen Twombly liked that word; it meant the time between sunset and dark.

  “Want some coffee?” I said.

  “There’s bottles and bottles left, and I’m taking one with me to the sofa. I’m bottomed out, Fabian, just empty. I have no one to talk with.”

  She went to the pantry, took up a bottle, went into the living room, and lay down. “Fabian,” she said. I stood in the hallway. “Seeing that Botho’s left no will and testament, does that mean his gramophone’s up for grabs?” I doubted that she expected an answer. She turned her face to the back of the sofa. “Goddamned Mitchell Kelb will probably get it.”

  I went out and sat on the porch. House arrest included the porch, I thought. There was a saw-whet owl on a lightning-struck tree nearby, a harbinger of nothing. Seeing a Boreal owl was supposed to mean “Don
’t go to sea.” Sighting a snowy owl meant that “bones would ache,” but without further consequence; they would simply ache for a while, then stop. Gulls seen more than a mile or so inland were supposed to be wandering ghosts, or meant that ghosts would soon force themselves into your dreams, possibly your daytime imagination as well. The saw-whet owl called a few times, then with a slight gust of its wings flew past the porch, off toward Giles LaCotte’s orchard.

  “Fabian—”

  Hearing my own name startled me. I stood up and saw a figure step from the side of the house.

  “Fabian, it’s me, Sebastian.”

  “Jesus—Uncle Bassie.”

  I had not seen my uncle since I was seven years old. He had last visited for Christmas dinner, 1898. I remember that he had been out of prison then for less than a week. Actually, it was because of Christmas that the warden had cut a week from his sentence. After supper my father and Bassie had gone into the living room and talked much of the night. Bassie had brought me a clipping from a newspaper in St. John’s, where his most recent bank robbery had been reported. It included an artist’s rendition of my uncle, not a good one. I kept it in a drawer for years. When he had given it to me, he had said, “From that drawing, who could recognize me? I should thank the man who did it for some extra weeks of freedom, no doubt.”

  Now Bassie looked so much older, his features somehow more angular. He had a small, pointed beard. He was an inch or so taller than my father, yet all the other family resemblances were strong. He had on a black greatcoat, under which was a sweater. The sweater was frayed. But it still had all the evidence of my mother’s handiwork. In fact, I suddenly recalled her having knit it that same Christmastime, day after day. Bassie had stayed for two weeks. I remember him sitting at the fireplace, watching her knit it. I remember him putting it on and looking at himself in the mirror. I remember him saying, “Thank you for the sweater, Alaric,” but not saying goodbye.