Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  Glancing over at the open cupboard, she sees something she hadn’t noticed earlier. On one of the lower shelves, next to a damp unopened box of Triscuits and a can of Brasso: a canvas bag. She walks across, lifts it out, and unrolls it on the table, next to the gun oil. A skinning set, like the one her father has. The long sharp scissors, the scalpel with its sharp tip stuck into cork, the knife, the pair of tweezers, each in its individual pocket. The brush and block of arsenic for treating the skins. A pair of dividers for measuring, needles. A spool of Size 1 thread.

  “That’s for skinning birds,” Jim explains without looking at her. Deep in his own thoughts, he doesn’t notice the surprised, then amused expression that crosses her face.

  III

  Hunting Grounds

  “Ah,” says he, “this here is a sweet spot, this island—a sweet spot for a lad to get ashore on. You’ll bathe, and you’ll climb trees, and you’ll hunt goats, you will; and you’ll get aloft on them hills like a goat yourself.”

  —Treasure Island

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1913

  As he wedges the cleaned guns back onto the rack, Jim looks up into the thick beams that run under the fish-tail roof and remembers how Pieter, his grandpa’s Dutch boatman, would tie a rope there each summer with a fat knot called a monkey’s paw at the end. How they’d climb onto the worktable, or scramble up a ladder, angle their feet onto the knot, then jump.

  He remembers the feeling of it, grasping the rope and flying right out the big open doors over the sea, up and up until the rope swung taut, then dropping and flying back inside. Whirling over the worktable, the big storm anchor and its heavy chain, over the open cans of boat paint, brushing past sails hung up to dry like flags, the skiff turned up on its gunwales.

  Pieter would go first, whooping and hollering to show how it was done.

  He remembers walking down here early mornings, before the others woke, to help Pieter scrape weed and barnacles off the hull of the skiff, and later off the hull of Jim’s own sailing dinghy. The dizzying smell of paint remover and fresh paint.

  These islands were his early collecting grounds. First the Dumplings, which he could row out to: mere outcrops with a few stunted trees looking from the boathouse, in this clear light, like a scene from a Japanese wood-block print. Further out the Sugar Loaves. And past Goose Head, islands he can’t see: Hurricane, Leadbetter, and the White Islands. Or eastward, out the other end of the Thoroughfare: Stimpsons, Calderwood, and Babbidge. All places he could sail to in the dinghy Pa gave him for his tenth birthday. A boat Pieter taught Jim to sail.

  “Tell me when to haul up the centerboard,” Pieter would say as Jim beached the boat. And Pieter showed him how to hitch the anchor around a tree or rock and drop a stern anchor in case the tide turned. And if he didn’t secure the boat properly, Pieter would whistle and let Jim sort it out for himself.

  Once ashore, Jim leapt from rock to rock. It was his habit to circumnavigate any small island. If he came across some obstacle, a cliff or thicket of prickly raspberry or Rosa rugosa, he’d strike inland. Ducking under prickly firs, he’d enter a hushed world of dappled light. Each step on the spongy bed of needles releasing clean, sappy smells of balsam, spruce, and pine. The high lisp of a cedar waxwing rang sharp in the muffled air. The forest floor was a garden of moss, ferns, and hooded mushrooms. In open meadows, dewy spiderwebs were cast like fishing nets in the wild grass.

  Pieter, waiting on the beach, kept an eye on the tide and cast his fishing rod. Teaching Jim everything there was to know about his small boat until he learned to go alone.

  Summertime, there were picnics with roast chicken and thermoses of clam chowder. Big jars of cold lemonade and iced tea brewed with peppermint that grew so thick in the garden you could grab handfuls of it.

  The front porch was strewn with fishing rods and tackle and life jackets and folding deck chairs. There was a large sun umbrella from India, which opened up with tassels and brightly colored elephants marching across the top; and a wicker basket with padded pockets to hold a tin kettle and tin cups one nestled inside the other, for hot tea when the children got cold from swimming.

  And Ma in her laced-up boots and petticoats and her large sun hat presided over the whole thing like a field marshal on a campaign.

  Everything had to be transported out to Grandpa Murray’s boat, an eighty-foot twin-masted schooner he sailed up from New York. Jim would slip away as soon as he could to help the boatman on the water.

  “Well done!” Pieter exclaimed as Jim brought the tender neatly up to the big boat, thrusting the gears into reverse as the boatman had taught him. Then Pieter would jump aboard and Jim would throw the painter and stern line.

  The boat smelled of warm teak and tar, oil, Brasso, and rope and, when Ma climbed aboard, of musk perfume.

  Pieter was from a fishing village on the Waddenzee. He had served in the Koninklijke Marine, the Royal Netherlands Navy, and worked on four-masted cargo ships. He was quick and neat and wore a blue fisherman’s cap pulled over his tight curly hair. He was always in motion: scurrying along the deck to drop anchor, leaning over the bulwarks to check the set of a sail, shinnying up the mast to un-jam the rigging. Lively as the water rat in The Wind in the Willows, Jim thought, with his smart cap, his bristly mustache, his infectious enthusiasm.

  Jim offered himself as swabbie, ever-willing to coil, polish, sew, grease, mop. In return, Pieter unfurled charts and introduced Jim to the art of navigation: how to plot a course; how to use the dividers, parallel ruler, and compass rose. Instructing him on how to make entries in the logbook: to set down weather conditions, direction of wind and tide, point of sail, and compass bearings. Things Jim would later teach pilots in the war.

  If they set off for the day in Grandpa’s schooner, they could go almost anywhere. Across the Penobscot to Brimstone with its black rocks and wild cliffs or to blue Isle au Haut. Out through the Merchant Row to Jericho Bay, or south to far-flung Matinicus and Matinicus Rock—where the lighthouse keeper doubled as a warden for the National Audubon Societies. There Jim would clamber ashore to watch the nesting birds and ask whether the Atlantic puffin had returned. The colony decimated by fishermen who ate them and took their feathers.

  “The lad should be made to eat with the rest of us,” Grandpa Murray objected.

  But as soon as he turned away, Frau Leiber, the housekeeper, wrapped Jim’s lunch in a linen napkin and slipped it into his hands, or into the small cotton satchel he carried over one shoulder. She’d never paid attention to anyone except Jim’s ma and would later become more headstrong, hardened by anti-German prejudice stirred up by the First World War.

  Then Jim would vanish for the rest of the long summer afternoon. So that years later, the Welds and Chandlers, the Bowditches and Gastons, all of whom summered on the island and had children Jim’s age, would have trouble placing him. They’d remember Ann. They all knew Cecil—even then he was someone to take note of—but they’d have trouble putting a face to the older brother.

  Never mind. Jim collected smoothed stones and rocks with flecks of mica and serpentine. He picked up sand dollars and dried sea urchins and the dry hollow pouches Ann and her friends called mermaids’ purses, then tossed away when he pointed out they were egg cases of skates or whelks. He couldn’t understand that—wanting to pretend something was other than it was.

  Some of his finds couldn’t be brought home. Iridescent jellyfish stranded on the beach, porpoises gamboling near shore, a young otter playing with a crab.

  “Are you lost again, lad?” Grandpa Murray bellows. He strides with heavy splayed steps across the sand, grabbing Jim by the collar as if he’s caught a vagrant urchin or stowaway. Even now Jim winces, reliving the old anger, his injured pride. Feels his heart race with stifled indignation.

  He was never lost. He’d leave signs, a scratch on a tree, a pile of rocks, a twig pointin
g backward. It was a game for him, committing landmarks to memory: a boulder shaped like a dog, a tree scarred by lightning, an outlook where one island disappeared behind another. Like other boys, he imagined himself an Indian scout—one of the great Algonquin warriors or the Red Paint Indians who used to inhabit these islands in prehistoric times. He imagined himself one of Sanford’s collectors.

  “No sir,” he answers.

  Grandpa pulls him so close Jim can smell the soured sherry on his breath, and other lingering remnants of the picnic—crab, jellies, cigar smoke.

  “Something the matter with your ears then?” Grandpa growls low. “That you dinn’ ae hear the horn?” He sets Jim back down on his feet and smacks both his ears at once. And Jim’s face grows hot, not so much from the pain as from the humiliation. He remembers the feeling. It was as if he’d run aground or smashed up against a very large rock.

  “I’m in a right mind to leave you here and pick you up the next time we happen along,” Grandpa threatens.

  Good, Jim thinks. He’ll be Robinson Crusoe. Or poor David Balfour in Kidnapped, who ate raw limpets until he got sick, not realizing he wasn’t marooned at all but merely stranded on a tidal island from which he could walk to the mainland at low tide. A sea bred boy would not have stayed a day on Earraid. Jim considers himself sea bred. He’d like to prove he could survive.

  He says nothing. Grandpa’s a big man, not tall but broad-­shouldered and powerful, and Jim doesn’t want to be smacked again. He dares himself to look direct into his grandpa’s eyes, which makes the old man grow redder.

  In truth, he suspects Grandpa Murray’s a coward. These incidents don’t occur when Pa’s around, and Pa’s not big. He’s tall and thin and bearded, but strong in a moral sense, like Abraham Lincoln. And if Pa’s there, Grandpa doesn’t treat Jim like a petty thief. Demanding that he turn out his pockets and satchel, Grandpa tosses Jim’s hard-won treasures into the sea, crushes a small shell or a bird’s egg under his shoe.

  “Good God, lad, there’s enough flotsam and jetsam without you having to carry the whole island home!” he guffaws, making the others laugh. All except Pieter, whose brow is furrowed. Jim’s heart opens to him—this man who only laughs at joyful things.

  After that, when he sees Grandpa’s drunk too much, Pieter will help smuggle Jim’s finds aboard.

  “Let me see what you have, young Jamie,” he’ll say, leaping across the rocks to intercept. His fishing rod flailing in the air above.

  “Why don’t you let me take that for you?” Wrapping a bright yellow tree fungus or egg in his silk neck scarf, he’ll stick it in his jacket pocket or nestle it in his fishing tackle box. It becomes a secret pact between them.

  And later Pieter would bound up to the house to deliver the contraband goods, and admire Jim’s room, with all his finds labeled and arranged along shelves and in glass cabinets, like a museum.

  Summertime, there were uncles and aunts and cousins. Soon after their own arrival on the island, Mother’s sister would come up from New York with her girls Harriet and Jane and baby Dod. Once or twice, Pa’s brothers traveled from Tennessee with their boys who spoke funny and asked, “Where you’all going?” and got horribly seasick.

  “That’s ’cause there ain’t no sea in Tennes-see,” Jim’s brother Cecil whispered to him, mimicking their cousins’ twangy accent. There were other guests too, from New York and Long Island and Boston, many of whom had their own summerhouses on Fox Island or across the Thoroughfare on Carver’s. And Grandpa Murray’s friends from Pennsylvania: steel men and fellow Scots.

  Mostly Jim kept to himself, avoiding the company and his grandpa’s temper. Helping Pieter. Exploring the cove and reed beds with Stillman.

  If he was lucky though, Pa would come sailing and bring Sanford, who was visiting from Connecticut. Both men worked as doctors at Yale. Sanford was chief surgeon to the football team but his greater love was birds, particularly seabirds, and his work as a trustee at the Museum of Natural History in New York. It was Sanford who first recognized Jim as a fellow enthusiast and presented him with books: Frank Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern North America and Elliot Coues’s two-­volume Key to North American Birds, which was a bible for birders in those days. And later, he gave Jim his first skinning set.

  When Pa brought Sanford, Jim would hover nearby. He remembers Sanford leaning back in one of the deck chairs on the foredeck, in front of the raised cabin, feet up, entertaining them all with the Indian names for birds. O-du-na-mis-sug-ud-da-we-shi or making-big-noise-for-its-size, the Chippewa’s improbably long name for the tiny house wren. Nan a-mik-tcus or rocks-its-rump, the Malecite name for the spotted sandpiper. And uwes’ la’ oski—­lovesick—the name the eastern Cherokee warriors gave the red-tailed hawk.

  As the great sails filled, all cleats and ropes straining—and Pieter shouted out their increasing speed in knots—Sanford would point out to Jim the rafts of eider ducks that floated in Jericho Bay, the males temporarily flightless after their postnuptial molt. The shear­waters, and scoters, which the Maine islanders called coots. Rarer Wilson’s storm petrels, short and stubby with a distinctive white ring around their rump like the band of a cigar. Named for St. Peter for the way they patter the calm surface of the water with their tiny feet. And Arctic terns, almost driven from the Maine coast, Sanford explained, because of a craze for ladies’ feathered hats.

  He’d bring news of the museum’s collectors. James Chapin in the Belgian Congo. Rollo Beck in Peru, later to sail to the south seas.

  “And President Roosevelt?” Jim asked. Having lost the election, the Bull Moose candidate had set off to explore the River of Doubt, Rio da Duvida, in Brazil.

  Sanford pulled up a chair next to him and Jim sat, intrigued by these stories of men and birds. He was beginning to imagine a life for himself, while the other children chased each other up and down the long, wide teak deck, or played French and English flags. Or, if it was the end of the day, wrapped themselves in towels and blankets. Then Jim’s brother, Cecil, would lean his head up against Ma’s knees.

  Cecil was Ma’s favorite. She called him her cherub, her Adonis, her Endymion, wishing she could keep him young forever. When he leant back against her knees, she’d stroke his golden hair, which she kept long and curly like a girl’s.

  Cecil, like their sister Ann, was all golden brown and voluptuous. He was charming and could make the adults laugh. While Jim was quiet, lean, and rangy. He turned a dark brown in summer. His hair, darker too like his pa’s, was kept cropped, almost militarily short. When he looked at himself in the mirror, he could see the sharpness of his features, his ears protruding. A certain defiance in his eyes.

  “Most of the lepers on Penikese are black and some are Chinese,” Cecil informs them. “It’s because they’re immigrants.” He pronounces the last word with a slight derogatory inflection he’s likely picked up from Grandpa.

  One late afternoon, they’re down at the beach in front of the big house in Greenwich, savoring that last hour of freedom before Frau Leiber rings the big ship’s bell outside the kitchen and they have to run up and get clean for dinner. Ann’s arranging her porcelain dolls on beds and chairs sculptured from wet sand carried up from the surf. While Jim lies facedown, splayed like a sea turtle, nestling his brown arms and legs into the white sand’s lingering warmth.

  It’s a topic that fascinates them—the fifteen or so infected patients banished to the wildest, most remote island in Buzzards Bay.

  “What’s im’grants?” Ann asks and Jim digs his elbows into the sand, hoping she won’t see that he’s not sure. He does know where Cape Verde is, home of the Cape Verde sparrow and Alexander’s swift. He traces the west coast of Africa in the sand.

  “An immigrant is someone from another country who wants to live in America, because it’s better here,” Cecil explains. Sitting just a bit further up the beach, he wraps himself in the co
lorful sarong Ma gave him from Indonesia. Exuding in its bright colors the air of their tribal chief.

  “That makes Grandpa an im’grant too,” Ann points out. As youngest, she’s stubbornly determined to set her brothers right.

  “Yes but he doesn’t have leprosy,” Cecil retorts, as if this is the obvious distinction that separates good immigrants from bad. Jim has a vague notion that there may be more to it, like the color of people’s skin even if they don’t have leprosy. The fact that some people come from Africa or China, while others come from Scotland. But he doesn’t care to interrupt. He feels too content, too drowsy, happy to listen to the chief.

  Cecil’s a year younger, ten to Jim’s eleven. But more precocious and already more knowledgeable about the grown-up world. Jim doesn’t mind. He sees the advantage of having a brother willing and able to decipher adult needs, leaving him free to concentrate on sand bugs and periwinkles. He doesn’t covet the hours Cecil spends sitting through cocktails or lingering at the dinner table, well after they’ve been excused, when Jim’s been itching to go.

  Besides, Cecil tells Jim other things. That Grandpa’s a cousin of Carnegie, the richest man in America. That he made his fortune working in the steel business but grew up as a grocer’s boy in Dunfermline, Scotland. That he and Pieter once broke the world record for fastest crossing of the Atlantic, but that their boat didn’t win the Kaiser’s Cup a few years later. Although it turned out the cup was only gold-plated, not solid gold as the kaiser said, which just went to show about the Germans.

  “But not Frau Leiber,” Ann pipes up in defense of their housekeeper.

  It’s Cecil who confides in Jim that Pa’s family fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War but that it didn’t matter because Pa went to all the best schools on the East Coast and graduated summa cum laude from Yale.