Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  Now he has news that a baby had been born at the leper colony on Penikese and shipped the day after to New Bedford.

  Lucky baby, Jim muses, watching a sand bug tossing up grains of sand as it burrows, and is surprised when Ann objects.

  “The baby would rather be with its mother,” she says bossily, pouring a blanket of the hot, golden sand over her dolls.

  “Don’t be stupid,” Cecil says. “The mother wouldn’t even be able to hold her baby if she doesn’t have hands. And if she sneezes her nose might fall off.”

  Ann snatches up a doll and clutches it to her as if Cecil might threaten to send it away. And Jim quietly wonders if she might be right. Whether being youngest, she is best placed to judge.

  There’s a boy on Penikese—Jim’s age—with a knack for physics and electrics. The New Bedford Women’s Association sends a kit radio, which he assembles and uses to communicate with fishermen and signal­men on passing ships. Pa shows Jim an article about it in the paper. And sometimes, Jim finds himself imagining how he might make friends with the boy, if Grandpa actually does set him ashore there, as he sometimes threatens to do.

  On the island, he would keep track of the seabirds and migrants and the boy could report their sightings on his radio. When Pa tells him the boy died, of pneumonia and weakness due to the leprosy, Jim remembers going off to cry as if the boy really had been a friend.

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, 1916

  Play nicely, Ma says. But the others don’t want to search for sand wasps or the traps wolf spiders set for them. They aren’t interested in dissecting owl pellets and trying to reassemble the tiny bones of a field mouse. The boys Jim’s age are thirteen now and more interested in impressing girls.

  There’s one game Jim excels at: hide-and-seek. But he’s too good. Even if there are six or seven other children looking for him, no one can find him.

  He wriggles right into the hollowed middle of a juniper bush. Or climbs so high in a tree that they don’t look far enough upward. He covers himself with seaweed, which they find too disgusting to imagine, though you can swim the smell off afterward. Bored, he changes the game to one of evasion rather than concealment. Running through thickets, crawling under the latticed wood along the front porch, swimming under the floating dock where he can see their feet stepping across the slats above him.

  Frustrated, the others forfeit and wander off to other games, and Ann, cross at being beaten, runs to Mother in tears.

  “Why can’t you play nicely like other children?” she scolds. “They’re all littler than you.” Though some of them weren’t.

  He remembered those games years later, when Helen read him a book about some British children growing up near a river in Bengal. In the book, a boy named Bogey plays Going-round-the-garden-without-being-seen, which was just the right name for Jim’s game. He remembered how invisible and powerful and magical he felt, but also frightened—as if he really might disappear if he tried hard enough.

  “Bogey’s just like you,” Helen had said. Jim knew. At least Bogey was how he might have been, if allowed to run feral, to remain illiterate and practically mute. Helen loved him for that. She was more untamed than he, having grown up wild on her own island.

  Once when Helen was angry—Jim was going to Indochina on another collecting trip and this time there was no chance she could join him because she was pregnant with Fergus—she’d stamped her foot and shouted, “I hope you get bitten by a cobra.” Which was what happened to the boy in the book.

  “In that case, would you mean the Asian spitting cobra or the Indian king cobra?” Jim replied. She’d attacked him with her bristle hairbrush and they fell on the bed laughing.

  Summertime, Jim kept lists of seabirds: gulls, cormorants, and fish hawks that whistle and mewl and build their ungainly nests on the tops of dead trees.

  Once he set off along a sand spit to collect a tern’s egg. The birds swooped and dived like stunt pilots, so close he could hear the air whistling through their feathers; their shrill cries deafened him. And he could see why they raised such havoc because here’s a thing that utterly surprised him: the way their eggs lay unprotected, unsheltered, exposed to all the elements, sun, wind, sea spray. Easy picking for predators. Some of the birds had lined their shallow scrapings in the sand with bits of seaweed or grass, but it wasn’t any proper nest or bedding. Just some halfhearted attempt at decoration. Nestled in each hollow were two or three brown mottled eggs, smooth as river pebbles.

  He remembers climbing to the edge of a cliff, lying in the wild grass and watching the adult gulls nudge their young off the rocky ledges, sending them reeling perilously down on untested wings, toward the rocks and sea foam. Herring gulls, laughing gulls, and great black-backed gulls. It was a seagull flying school. The air echoed with screeching and crying that reverberated off the cliff, and the sea crashing below. It’s why he hadn’t heard the ship’s horn. The birds’ cries were so loud, the sight of their first fledgling flights so mesmerizing.

  It’s how Jim feels sometimes—giddy, exhilarated, then falling dangerously fast.

  “Row harder, boy. Row harder,” Grandpa Murray shouts. But the wind is set dead against him and the oars are too heavy.

  “When I was a lad, I could row across the Firth in better time than this,” Grandpa boasts. On and on he makes Jim row until the skin of his hands splits and he can feel the blisters on his palms chafe wet against the wood.

  Jim looks to his mother pleadingly. She’s sitting next to Grandpa in the stern of the boat but she gazes right past Jim, out to sea.

  Rat Catchers

  As he grew older, Jim realized that the naturalists he met and worked with shared this childhood passion or preoccupation. Take Brewster, curator at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and cofounder of the American Ornithologists’ Union. Brewster’s boyhood scramblings won him a cache of eggs and nests that to this day form the heart of the Harvard museum’s oology collection.

  He thinks back a few years, to a lunch at The Dominican Place, around the corner from the museum in New York. All of them there: Delacour, Farrell, Laina, Griscom, whose book he’d given to Cadillac. After a few carafes of wine, the conversation turned to childhood. And Griscom bemoaned his teenage agony when his parents insisted he perform birdcalls as an after-dinner party trick. An acned city boy, Griscom had taught himself to recognize and mimic the chirrups and trills of every bird in Central Park.

  Jim tries to imagine it: eminent New Yorkers and the bespectacled, knock-kneed boy. Ah yes, a blue jay! A cardinal! The guests clapped in wonder. Incredible. Astounding! Doesn’t that sound just like it? A Cape May warbler—Griscom throwing that one in to thwart them.

  He had an ear and his parents plied him with music lessons, and French, German, and Italian tutors. They hoped their son would become a concert pianist, or, failing that, a diplomat, and were dismayed when his oddball hobby led him to the study of birds.

  And Delacour, Jim’s great mentor after Sanford and closest friend. There he was reminiscing about his first pet: a small white downy Faverolle chick named Moumou, kept in a box by his bed to amuse and distract him as he suffered through a bout of scarlet fever. He was five and it was already clear what interested him. Christ, he’d raised chicks from his crib.

  Aged ten, Delacour took charge of some disused aviaries at the farm attached to the family château near Villers, which he filled with local songbirds, then rarer birds he sought out in the Paris markets, like whydahs and Peking robins. Les oiseaux méchants as he liked to call the parrots and grosbeaks. It’s why his knowledge was so extensive and so intimate. He grew up with these birds. He knew their habits, their petty eccentricities, the way another child might know a dog.

  By the time he was a man, Delacour had built an extravagant park, its domed aviaries set along pathways of espaliered fruit trees. There were ponds and waterfalls for rare geese and d
ucks; fenced paddocks for rheas and ostriches, crowned cranes and pink flamingos; and indoor galleries populated by the rarest, most colorful exotics: hummingbirds, tanagers, sunbirds, birds of paradise. Birds you were lucky to see stuffed in a museum. Aviaries designed to make you feel you were walking through a library of rare books.

  At its center, his own favorites, Lady Amherst’s pheasant and Chinese painted quail with their tiny bumblebee broods.

  He fashioned an ornithological Xanadu so fantastical that the French general Foch declared he’d like to be reincarnated as a bird there. Foch requisitioned the château and planned his advances along the Somme while sitting in Delacour’s pheasantry. And Delacour, stationed nearby, would ride a bicycle over in the evening, entering by the back gate, and find the general there.

  That was before the trenches ripped right through. Villers being the town where French soldiers fought off the German advance toward Amiens in 1918.

  “The truth is we never grew up,” Delacour declared. They all raised their glasses. Though Jim suspected Delacour must have grown up the day he walked around his park for the last time, listening to his birds. He was thirty-eight, the town was already evacuated, the first shells beginning to fall.

  Delacour served at Champagne and Verdun. He lost a brother at Verdun. He told Jim once that another brother had committed suicide before the war began. War had ruthlessly upended his life, as it later would Jim’s.

  “We were supposed to get interested in girls and coming-out parties, then eventually our wives,” Griscom said. “Or husbands,” he adds, winking at Laina. “Only we never did. At least I didn’t!”

  “We were distracted,” Farrell added.

  “Stunted,” someone else throws in. “Like some sort of tree gall.”

  Jim remembers Laina looking at him with concern, or was it affection? Christ, she’s a schoolgirl; there are reasons he keeps quiet.

  He was some paces behind, musing over Griscom’s mention of piano lessons, considering how an interest in music or natural history might be fostered and nurtured, passed down from one generation to the next. Or how it might emerge on its own in the most unlikely family, unappreciated.

  Even Darwin’s father groused at his son, You care for nothing but shooting, dogs, and rat-catching, and you will be a disgrace to yourself and all your family. Darwin wrote it down in his autobiography and Jim laughed when he read it. He’d marked the passage in his book, scribbling in the margin—a child’s wanderings, the lodestar. Birding, he realizes, offered him both a way to engage with the world and a means to escape it.

  Worried that Laina might reach out and put her hand on his knee, he’d got up and left.

  Greenwich, Long Island Sound,

  Connecticut, 1917

  It’s hot in his room at the top of the house. Jim lies on top of the sheets; his bare feet scratch against a thick wool blanket folded at the end of the bed. He feels hot. Other times, he pulls the blanket around him and shivers in a sweat. He has a fever from shock, Pa says.

  From the tall bed, he can look out the dormer windows, through the tops of copper beech trees, out across the Sound, and watch the steam ferries crossing back and forth from Greenwich to Long Island. The lines of black smoke hang in the air behind and are blown into shapes by the wind. Though the sea and its boats are the last thing Jim wants to look at now. What he wants is to sink his face into the dark of his mattress and never show his face.

  In the evening, the stairs creek. His hears his ma reading a bedtime story to Ann. The sound of her voice goes up and down. He’d like to hear the words; they might distract. But at age fifteen, he’s too old for bedtime stories. Across the Sound, sparkly lights blink on, tracing the shore of Oyster Bay, where Roosevelt, back from the Amazon, agitates to raise a volunteer regiment for the war in Europe.

  From downstairs, Jim hears rumblings of their own war. “You will not talk about the boy that way,” he hears his pa say down in the front hall. His voice polite but frighteningly cold. Grandpa swears. A door slams. Jim hears his ma crying. And here is Ann, who’s supposed to be asleep, leaning in over the side of Jim’s bed, clambering up on the mattress, whispering to him that Pa’s going to Washington to help run the Medical Corps. That Pa says he won’t leave Jim to be bullied by Grandpa.

  Frau Leiber brings a porcelain bowl and puts it beside Jim’s bed in case he’s sick again. She takes away the soup Jim hasn’t drunk. Soon, she says, U.S. soldiers will be fighting her nephews in Germany.

  When the fever rises, Jim feels the walls of the room swelling and pressing in on him until he feels in danger of being crushed. Or else his own body thickening, his arms and legs becoming grotesquely large. It’s a hallucination he’ll suffer again with malaria. He wraps himself in the blanket, shivering. Waiting for his pa to dose him with a spoonful of brandy and to sponge him with a cloth.

  It’s not Jim’s fault, Pa says. Pieter knew better. Hadn’t Pieter himself often told Jim to keep low? Jim had done exactly the right thing, helping take in the sails, helping to bring the boat in. Few other boys would have kept their head. Pieter, Pa tells him, would have been proud.

  It’s good to hear Pa’s voice. It’s good to feel him near, sitting on the edge of the bed. His doctor’s hands wring out a washcloth over a bowl of water. He runs the cool cloth behind Jim’s neck. Lifting Jim’s head gently off the pillows, he runs the cloth across the boy’s thin shoulders.

  At night, the waves of the Sound lap the shore, the wind tousles the beech trees. The big grandfather clock on the landing strikes a deep, sonorous one, then two, echoed by the higher chime of the French mantel clock in the hall. Just before dawn, the raucous gulls start up, crying his name, Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. Until he finally falls asleep. Then wakes in a sweat.

  Pieter had asked Jim to take the tiller while he rushed to the bow. He aimed to take in the jib or to reef the main, or both. They were out in Grandpa’s day sailer, a twenty-foot Herreshoff, running in before a storm. The sky boiled up angry behind them and the boat was being badly hit by gusts.

  “Hold the course,” Pieter said gently. The trickier things got, the calmer he became. Jim nodded. Grandpa Murray had chosen that moment to push tobacco into his pipe; otherwise Pieter would have passed the tiller to him, and then how different everything would have been. Pa was there too, but he was no sailor.

  Just as Pieter stepped away, the storm caught up to them, and a fierce wind, like a fist, grabbed the sail and lifted the boom up and over so that before Jim had time either to shout or to haul in the mainsheet, it swung across, smashing Pieter in the head and sweeping him into the sea. Jim heard the crack of wood against the boatman’s skull. He saw the astonished look on Pieter’s face.

  The next thing he knew Grandpa Murray lunged for him and threw him across the cockpit, taking the boat round in a wide circle.

  “Let out the sheet. Lower the goddamn sail,” Grandpa shouted. The sails flapped all over the deck like funeral shrouds as they hauled Pieter back over the gunwales. Pa tore off the boatman’s sweater and shirt and laid him facedown, trying to force water from his lungs. Flipping him over, he knelt astride Pieter’s waist, drawing the boatman’s arms up above his head, then back down to pump his chest, over and over. It was no use. All the pumping did was make seawater run out of the boatman’s mouth. There was no air in him. The seawater ran between the boards into the bilge. The boatman’s body lay limp and heavy like a great fish.

  “Jim.” Grandpa snarled up at him, from where he crouched in the cockpit, his hand thrust in Pieter’s mouth to keep his tongue clear of his throat. “Lord Jim. You were ever a bad piece of work.”

  Then Pa, unfolding himself from Pieter’s body, brought the boatman’s arms down to his side and laid a gentle hand over his eyes. And the rain, battering down, splashed onto Pieter’s face. So that Pa took off his jacket and laid it over him. Then the rain soaked Pa. It ran off the waxed
jacket in rivulets. And Jim was sobbing and it seemed the whole world had drowned.

  IV

  Tosca’s Story

  “Wherever a man is, says I, a man can do for himself.”

  —Treasure Island

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1973

  The day after they open the boathouse, Jim finds a small bird cradled on two large maple leaves in front of his typewriter. A green-brown bird with a black head and a deep yellow collar and chest.

  She must have found the bird dead and brought it in. Or did she take one of his guns and shoot it? It doesn’t look like any native. Too big to be a flycatcher or warbler. Its tail too stubby for an oriole. Now, he sees the cotton buds carefully pulled through the eye sockets, the wings pinched back, the small legs folded under the tail. He leans forward, his armpit pressing into the crutch, to pick it up. The specimen is light and dry in his hands. He turns over the small, handmade label attached to its leg.

  Layla Island, Wanawana, New Georgia.

  Pachycephala pectoralis centralis.

  June 2, 1973. T. Baketi.

  A golden whistler. Christ, it’s Tosca’s!

  The skinning is beautifully executed. Jim couldn’t have done it better, even in his best days. The feathers are clean and dry. No evidence of blood or fat stains, no broken or missing feathers, no sign of shot.

  He turns the small bird belly up, pulls back the skin with his thumb to examine the neat spindle of cotton wool inside. An amateur will commonly overstuff and thereby stretch the specimen, but this is perfectly done. No need to sew the belly of anything smaller than a pigeon, Delacour instructed. The belly isn’t sewn. Moreover, Jim sees the whistler’s left leg crossed over its right, its head cocked left, which was exactly the way he fashioned his own bird skins.