Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  Robert Louis (or Lewis as he was christened) Stevenson most likely read the Seaward Diary when he was a sickly lad growing up in Edinburgh, Jim types. He no doubt read Mr. Collett’s account; he was an avid reader and drawn to sea tales. Both his father and his grandfather built lighthouses.

  Indeed, Stevenson tipped his hat to Collett when he named the captain of the Hispaniola Smollett. Or was that mere coincidence?

  Jim looks out the open window at his own smattering of islands, his own lighthouse across the Thoroughfare at Goose Head. It’s a still, bright morning with hardly a breath of wind. Soon the small sailing school dinghies will be floundering about, caught in irons at the entrance to the cove. These morning lessons must put children off, the prevailing sou’wester often not picking up till noon. The day is set to be a scorcher as a heat wave wends its way east. Good news for the girl, accustomed as she is to the equator.

  The similarity between Treasure Island and Old Providence had greatly excited Jim, when he visited the island some forty years ago. He’d set down all the main points in his field notes, planning to take it further when he returned home. But somehow he’d let it go, with crates of birds to identify, new species to describe. With Helen to propose to.

  It was his son Fergus who unwittingly rekindled the idea, when Jim was still in the hospital, when he felt his lowest. He was bedridden and in pain, what was left of his leg strapped down to a lathe of some sort to keep the muscles from retracting, when Fergus had thoughtfully brought in some of Jim’s books to cheer him up: Conrad, Hemingway, Stevenson. That morning, after rereading the tale and drinking copious amounts of coffee—it was the one palatable thing they offered in that place though it was cold and served in a Styrofoam cup—the likeness and the particularities of each island resurfaced. And he became so bitten by the notion that his doctor proclaimed he’d turned a corner. Well, perhaps he had.

  He grasped the idea like a lifeline.

  She looks up across the cove and takes note of the birds, so she can describe them for Tosca. Cormorants perching on some rocks, wings outstretched. A tern skimming the flat surface of the water. Doves—she can hear their mellow cooing from someplace inland.

  But here’s something new—gulls. She hasn’t seen gulls in the Solomons and Tosca would be impressed by their loud squalling and wheedling, their gleaming white feathers, their bright yellow eyes and legs. They’re cocky too. One careens in to land on a rock nearby, fixes her with its eye, and she has to chase it away before it makes off with her comb or toothpaste.

  Gathering her belongings, she squats at the edge of the water to brush her teeth. She spits. The white foam washes in and out on the flat sea.

  In the Thoroughfare, a lobster boat heads out to haul traps. The diesel chug and the gentle wash of the sea make her daydream of the rickety old Chinese trading boats that putter about the South Pacific and she finds herself wondering if she might travel back to Honiara on one of those boats but shakes her head. Of course it would be impossible. A boat like that would never make it. It’s a wonder they stay afloat between the islands.

  When she spits, a good-size fish lurking just below the surface darts up to suck down a bubble of the toothpaste, mistaking it for the larva of a small bug, or spawn of some sort.

  She stands, searching the edge of the beach for a sharp stick suitable for spearing.

  Jim runs his hands over the smooth grain of the table, rests them on the chunky keys of the typewriter.

  “Just like Hemingway’s,” Fergus had said, presenting him with the machine, a portable Corona 3. And Jim, who’s not good at accepting presents, has to admit it’s a godsend. His handwriting shot to hell.

  To prove his theory about Treasure Island, he’s squandered a good deal of time trawling through the three-volume Seaward diaries and the more succinct naval survey, jotting down nautical and geographic clues. Flipping through these now, he sees his notes and page references are as shaky and illegible as Billy Bones’s book of sums and crosses—the illiterate pirate’s attempt to keep track of the ships he’d plundered, the share that was his due.

  Fergus, no doubt, intended the typewriter for more practical uses. Bills and correspondence for instance, rather than more ranting on obscure topics of natural history and minute physical distinctions, which might be how the boy would see this too. A taxonomy of islands, not unlike comparing different bird skins, which is maybe what Jim likes about it, why he might be good at it.

  He reaches out to retrieve the twisted butt of a half-smoked cigarette. No use letting it go to waste when Sarah has to bring them over from the mainland. The keys of the typewriter make a purposeful telegraphic sound in the empty house, like a wartime code transmitter.

  He hears her before he sees hers. She’s singing a catchy tune in pidgin. Time you go ’long way ’long sea, supposim you no lovim’ me—the words as far as he can make them out through the open window.

  He remembers how the Pacific Islanders could sing. How they sang all the hymns and church music the missionaries taught them. Though their talent was a far older one. A gift passed down by mothers singing to their babies. Headhunters ululating as they paddled their grisly trophies home.

  Me writim letter ’long you. Supposim you no lovim me turu.

  Her voice is rich and high. If she were back home, no doubt, the others would join in, taking up different points of harmony. He remembers coming into a small Catholic mission at Marau Sound after they’d pushed the Japanese from Guadalcanal. The villagers had returned to repair an abandoned church and were weaving an altar from sago palm fronds and bamboo. He’d stopped, pleased to accept a man’s offering of a coconut and sliced papaya, when some women started singing. It was Schubert’s Ave Maria and their voices spread out, washing across the water like sunlight as they escorted a carved statue of the Virgin Mary off into the sound in a small fleet of canoes.

  It was the most beautiful singing he’d ever heard.

  He looks up from his table and sees Cadillac walking up from the shore, her skin so black she looks purple against the green of the grass. Barefoot, with that unexpected blond streak in her mass of hair, a natural lightness the islanders sometimes accentuate with lime.

  Time you go, you must think back ’long me

  She’s carrying something in her hand.

  When she comes in the door, he sees she’s caught a fair-size flounder, and that she’s stuck her comb and toothbrush through her hair.

  “Summer flounder,” Jim says, thinking she might want to know.

  Standing up and crutching into the kitchen, he opens the drawer for a knife, hesitates, then hands it to her.

  “Also called a fluke.” Paralichthys dentatus.

  He leans against the counter and watches as she lightly scales the fish fresh from the sea: first one side, then the other. Running the blade of the knife from the tail up to the head, she scrapes under the gills, then rinses the fish under the tap. No longer singing but gently humming to herself.

  She wears a sarong, a colorful cloth the islanders call a laplap. He watches her run the knife in a red streak up the middle to extract the fish guts, severing them neatly. She’ll make a good surgeon, no doubt—tall, authoritative, confident, steady. He imagines her in his own doctor father’s white coat with his stethoscope around her neck.

  He admires the sureness of her hand.

  I used to do this. I could scale and gut as neatly as you. I could skin a bird in minutes. As fast as any of Delacour’s native Annamite skinners, whom the others could never match.

  Fish scales stick to the sink and counter. The bright sun catches them as it streams in the window, scattering specks of broken light onto her face and arms. Into his eyes. Dazzling him.

  He looks away. Shuffling sideways to the stove, he takes down the skillet, spoons in a bit of the bacon fat. Here he is fixing a second breakfast, just what he swore he
wouldn’t do. But then, he didn’t expect a fish. He takes the gutted flounder from her hands. Laying it sizzling in the fat, he sees the ragged tear, a bloodied hole just behind the gill. Jesus Christ, she speared it!

  Tosca standing barefoot, poised on an outcrop of coral, spear in hand. Swarms of reef fish swim about his feet, red, pink, blue. He is fifteen years old. The boy’s delight when Jim obtains a navy diving mask and they can watch the fish underwater. Bright green and blue parrot fish tearing off whole chunks of coral with their beaks.

  Tosca sauntering up the beach with an impressive barracuda, all silvery blue. He lays it on a wild banana leaf and Jim insists on measuring it. He uses the dividers from his skinning set, swivelling them back and forth. A small instrument designed to measure the wings of songbirds.

  “Mr. Jim, did you lose your leg in the war?” Cadillac asks, moving to his side to watch him cook. So that he’s glad the empty space where his leg should be faces away from her.

  Well, that’s a change, as his family, Stillman, even Sarah, politely ignore the stump, trying their best to act as if he’s not stumping around on a crutch or sitting in a goddamn wheelchair. Strangers too, he’s noticed, generally turn away abashed, or stare. Or worse, speak too loudly, as if he were deaf or imbecilic rather than a cripple. The war—another taboo. Jesus, people just don’t ask him. She tramples right in.

  “No, nothing so glamorous,” he mutters, flipping the fish.

  Jesus, did he really use that word? No wonder he prefers not to talk about the war, if his words are so wrong. There was nothing glamorous about what he saw.

  She’s too young, too foreign, to read the signs he so painstakingly erects around himself. Invisible markers signaling reefs. Like the warnings that ward you off when you sail into Stonington or some of the other more insular harbors of Maine: No Docking. No Trespassing. Private Mooring. Go Away. It’s one of the reasons he likes the place.

  He looks down at their bare feet and remembers another foot, a strange prefiguring of his own missing leg. A man running toward him, an explosion, the man jerked into the air like a marionette.

  A piece of the man’s body lands next to him. A foot. He picks it up and carries it over to the medic, who is already leaning over the hit Seabee, extracting a vial of morphine from his kit.

  “It’s not yours, not yours,” the medic mouths, waving Jim away as if he’s an interfering schoolboy, a goddamn nuisance. The Seabee stares up in horror as Jim holds the foot out. Christ, he doesn’t need to take another look to see the man won’t be needing it. The medic sucks the drug into the syringe, plunges it into the man’s side.

  And now, a belated wail of an air-raid siren and the whole world erupts. Bulldozers, trucks, jeeps, trees, tents flip and blow apart. Great holes are torn from the earth as a swarm of planes darken the sky. Some thirty or forty Jap Betty Bombers, red suns painted on the undersides of their wings.

  The foot is naked, smooth; sock and boot have blasted off. Jim feels the rounded heel, the curved arch. Ligaments, bone, veins severed right through. He’s in shock, deafened from the noise of the explosions, splattered with mud and God knows what else. October 1942, two days after his arrival on Guadalcanal.

  The medic yells at him—For Fuck’s Sake Get Down! Jim can’t hear a thing but it’s impossible not to read the medic’s lips, his hand gestures. Get Down In The Fucking Foxhole! There’s a dead man there. Later, he’ll get used to that, callously using bodies to shield himself. He’ll grow more used to the bombing raids on Henderson Field.

  The medic waves angrily. It’s his job to stay out in the open if needed, not Jim’s. He doesn’t relish the prospect of another casualty, especially a stupid bastard greenhorn. For Fuck’s Sake, Put The Fucking Foot Down! Jim puts it down.

  He steps away, glaring at Cadillac for making him think of that. It’s what can happen if he isn’t careful. But the girl just smiles, straightforward, good-looking, waiting for his answer. As if she doesn’t consider his leg or even the goddamn war to be so all-important.

  Sitting down with her at the kitchen table, he reels off the angry litany to himself, all the reasons the doctors gave for taking his leg. Restricted circulation in the artery (clogged up like old plumbing). Likelihood of a blood clot. Ulcerated infection of the shin. The onset of gangrene. He stares at Cadillac as if it’s her fault. As if, an aspiring doctor, she’s already part of the medical cabal ganging up to play this ugly trick on him. His own particular situation aggravated by drink and smoking, his careless neglect of a skin infection.

  “Old age,” he says quietly.

  The fish is cooked to perfection, its skin charred, its flesh fresh and delicate. A back fillet for each. Cadillac mixes hers with the congealed corn beef and bacon he left earlier; this makes him feel bad. She drinks down the cold coffee, wasting nothing.

  Jesus Christ, he can’t blame her. Bikfala Faet, the bigman’s fight, was the islanders’ slang for the war. How else would you describe the inexplicable violence that descended on them from nowhere, like a plague? A war fought among their own islands by two peoples they hardly knew. The Japanese, who’d sometimes fished their waters. The Americans, whom the British told them were friends.

  He picks a bone from his teeth, and stands. Jamming the crutch under his arm, he turns his back to her to scrape the plates and clean the fish guts from the sink.

  Not sure what to do with her, Jim’s relieved to find the girl takes herself off. He sees her walking down by the shore. When he wheels out to the porch in the afternoon, she’s draped like a cat over the low branch of a beech tree.

  The next days, she takes longer walks, each time bringing back some find or other. To his surprise, he can tell where she’s been. The floppy leaf of skunk cabbage and branch of sumac from the brackish, swampy end of the cove. A bulrush from the reed beds near Stillman’s place. A clump of moss and toadstools from the wood behind the house. A rounded beach stone, which means she’s been to the north side of the island—a good two-hour walk, where the stronger surf rubs the stones smooth.

  Feathers too. He stuffs them in a jar near the kitchen sink. The glorious red of a cardinal, the black and blue banded feathers of a blue jay, the tawny feathers of a barred owl. She shows a particular interest in birds. Later, he’ll identify them for her, which feathers come from which bird.

  Sometimes she comes in so quietly he doesn’t hear her—like Tosca all over again, who would appear from nowhere. He’ll look up from his work to see she’s left a piece of sea glass on his table. A rare red, which most likely came from the pane of a lighthouse. A piece of flint that might be an arrowhead. A clamshell covered with barnacles. A black stone. Objects that fill him with an unidentifiable longing.

  Other times he hears her singing. Auki Love Song and Walkabout ’Long Chinatown—she tells him the names of her songs. Another tune with a surprising refrain, Ha ha, Japani, ha ha! She sings it slowly, so he can make out the words.

  Me lukuluku longo landi ’long sea. I look over the land and sea. Ha ha, Japani, ha ha! Mifela comu downi longo mi parasuti. I come down with my parachute. Ha ha, Japani, ha ha!

  A Coastwatchers’ song. A kastom song, she calls it, often played on Honiara radio.

  “Juniperus virginiana.” Jim’s sitting at his worktable in front of the open window. He takes the sprig of juniper she holds out. Picking off one of the unlikely blue fruits, he flicks open the jackknife he keeps in his pocket, peels back the tight scales to show her the tiny seeds inside.

  “Cones, often mistaken for berries,” he explains. “From the cypress family Cupressaceae.”

  He crushes the needles between his fingers, releasing the thick, sticky sap and a sharp scent of pine. A smell that conjures the image of his mother and Frau Leiber, their German housekeeper, packing away summer sweaters and blankets, laying them in big wooden cedar chests in the linen closet upstairs. A smell of summer’s end.
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  “The juniper wood’s used to repel bugs,” he tells the girl. “Its cones are used to flavor gin.” He smiles mischievously.

  Swiveling the chair around to the bookshelves, he selects some books for her: Frank Chapman’s What Bird Is That? from his youth; a newer, glossy Field Guide to New England Plants. She leans over his shoulder to look at a picture of sumac and witch hazel. So close that he can smell her skin, soap, and some coconut oil she must use. Too close. He snaps the book shut and thrusts it at her, wheeling back.

  Then is alarmed by the look on her face, her reluctance to take it. Christ, he shouldn’t be so rough.

  Jim’s books. Books stacked on his table; sprawled along the cushioned window seat; left, spines straining, on the kitchen table, on the floor. The shelves in the big room that run right up to the ceiling, like no library she’s ever seen.

  When he thrusts the book at her, she jumps back, half-expecting the sharp hand of her primary school teacher to come slapping down on top of hers.

  “Don’t touch. Don’t touch,” her teacher admonishes shrilly. It’s at the small Methodist school in Munda. Cadillac and her schoolmates clamber round, pulling their low wood stools forward or kneeling on the thatch floor to see the book she holds out, forcing their grubby hands down into their laps.

  Knights and Their Armour. She remembers the title. It arrives in a charity package from England. They listen attentively and admire the pictures. But afterwards, out on the school grounds, there’s a hot debate about whether the English were seriously deluded. A boy Cadillac likes staggers about in front of the schoolhouse with an empty petrol can over his head. “Hey, look, I’m a knight! I’m a knight!” His voice echoes inside the can as he walks with stiffened arms and legs.