Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  “Which am I?” Jim asks, tipping back the last of the oak-aged whisky.

  Harding laughs. Jim’s not mad. He’s an ornithologist, a museum man. He’s happy to be reminded of that.

  “As far as I’m concerned, you can go back to fight tomorrow,” Harding says, pouring Jim another shot. “From what you’ve told me, it seems you’ve had plenty of rest, too much perhaps. Unless of course you want to stay here for a bit. I can arrange that too.”

  Normalized abnormality is how Harding diagnoses Jim. He writes it up in a report to be sent to Naval Headquarters and shows it to Jim for his own approval. It’s about how ideas and perceptions of normality and acceptable behavior break down when men are faced with the brutality of the battlefield. Actions that seem abhorrent and even criminal to those still living a civilized life become the norm in war. If Harding wonders whether a certain callousness or savagery is actually a ­prerogative—what a man needs to survive here—he does not put this down in writing.

  Jim thought of the broken men when he came home and went to Helen in the hospital. How it seemed to him then that the war hadn’t ended at all but had spread its long, vengeful fingers all the way across the world, reaching deep into the heart of his home. Infecting her with its disease, its terrors.

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,

  August 1973

  Fergus watches his father. Jim’s expression is so hard, ferocious almost, as if the world’s set against him. What harm would it do to respond to Cadillac’s mention of those runways when he’s been there and seen those islands?

  Oppressed by his father’s truculent silence, Fergus swings his legs over the small bench, seizes the excuse of clearing breakfast to retreat to the house.

  “I taught boys from Brooklyn not to chew gum in the jungle,” is about all Jim’s ever told his son about the war. If he questions further, his father grows so forbidding and threatening that he backs off.

  He sets the tray of dishes next to the sink. They can wait. Only one week here and he, age thirty-five, with a hugely successful career, already feels as frustrated as a small child. Grabbing a pack of cigarettes Jim’s left on the table, he crumples it angrily, stuffs it into his pocket, walks out the kitchen door and down the road.

  Before the war and after the war is how Fergus sees his childhood. Split into two irreconcilable halves.

  Before the war, only a few impressions stand out. His mother’s hair falling across his face and tickling as she leans down to kiss him good night. His father’s sharp bones as he lifts Fergus high in the air to lower him onto his shoulders.

  He was four. They lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where Jim worked at the Museum of Comparative Zoology. He was riding Jim’s shoulders to his first day of school. When they reached the schoolhouse, he’d refused to get down, clutching wildly at Jim’s hair, stiffening his small legs round Jim’s neck. He can’t remember the room or the teacher, just his gratitude when Jim sat down, not saying a word, not even tugging his leg or trying to extract Fergus’s hands from his hair.

  Striding down the road through the piney wood, Fergus imagines his young father perching on a child-sized chair. He’s wearing his navy uniform and maybe that’s why the teacher doesn’t say anything. Just lets him stay there, sitting at the miniature desk, listening to her read a story. Until Fergus, tempted by paper and crayons, decides for himself it’s safe to come down.

  Two crows call raucously from the trees beside him. He stops at a stone wall where the wood ends abruptly and a plowed field opens up with a sweeping view of the Thoroughfare. To his left, the drive to Stillman’s place forks sharply back through the trees.

  Of Jim’s work at the Harvard museum, Fergus remembers fanciful rooms with steaming radiators, musty-smelling cabinets full of strange stuffed birds, drawers lined with eggs. He remembers being shown the great beak of a hornbill intricately carved with a mountainous landscape dotted with pagodas and Chinamen working in the fields below. There was a dusty, wooden attic he could climb to, up a ladder that pulled down from the ceiling. There the ribs of a blue whale pressed up against sloped rafters among boxes of old papers. And pigeons cooed and rutted outside arched brick windows.

  Then the war. And while Jim was away, his wife, Fergus’s mother, had been taken to a hospital. Fergus was only five. He doesn’t remember it well. He remembers his mother kneeling down to him. The thick, white-stockinged legs of two nurses standing on either side. He remembers taking his mother’s hands and not wanting to look in her face.

  He climbs over the wall and down through the field. Better to leave the road in case he runs into someone he knows. V-J Day and the war was over! It was August and Fergus clung to the back of the Fox Island fire engine with the other boys as it roared through town, honking, its bells pealing. Everyone was rushing out of their houses, waving, cheering, and some weeping.

  When Jim came home that spring, Fergus was living with his grandparents and uncle in the big house in Greenwich. He’d been brokenhearted to find that Jim wouldn’t be staying with him there but would move into the coach house, with its groomsman’s apartment above the stables, which Jim had decided to fix up.

  After school and on weekends, Fergus would walk down the long drive. The coach house was in bad repair, having been neglected during the war. Everything needing fixing. And Jim was rebuilding the stairs, cutting and fitting new windowsills, laying new slates on the roof. His pa didn’t say much but he was happy enough to let eight-year-old ­Fergus help. From the roof, you could see the sharp tip of the Empire State Building. The city seemed surprisingly close, though the house was surrounded by woods and pasture and the sea. Some days Jim would put down his tools and take Fergus fishing.

  Those afternoons were good. Fergus was proud, like other boys were, to have a war veteran father. Even though he could never be sure when Jim might turn mean, when his pa might suddenly throw down a hammer and tell Fergus to get the hell out.

  His father’s sudden transformations frightened him. He treaded carefully, thoughtfully. Fergus had already seen how fast a person could fall apart. His mother shining too bright, then burning up like a shooting star. He didn’t want his whole universe imploding. Sometimes, while sawing or hammering, or laying tiles in the kitchen, or painting, or holding the leveling line for Jim, or sitting on the roof, he allowed himself to believe that his mother would come back to live with them. Just as soon as they’d fixed the whole place up. That’s why they were fixing it. He let himself imagine that sometimes, even after she died.

  From the Thoroughfare, he hears some kids shouting as they glide past in two sailing dinghies. Turning into the wind as if to confer about some point, a girl stands and throws a wet sponge across into the other boat, then pulls in her sails and races off. He walks down to the water, rolls up his trouser legs, and steps into the cold.

  After the war, he remembers Jim reading to him. First Treasure Island and Kidnapped, then Stevenson’s other stories, such as The Bottle Imp, until Fergus began to identify Jim with those characters. His father—a washed-up pirate, a South Seas adventurer, which was as good a way as any to explain his roughness. When they’d exhausted Stevenson—Hemingway. Hemingway’s stories were too old for Fergus. He didn’t understand them. Though he recognized Jim in these books too, in the noble bullfighters, the sinewy jockeys, the war veterans who were hard and drunk, better at fishing and camping and shooting than at being with people.

  He remembers Jim swearing at the critics of Across the River and into the Trees, saying they didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground.

  He searches the shore for a flat stone and sends it skipping across the water. He needs to get away, just for a day. He should take the ferry across to the mainland, just for an afternoon.

  Back at the house, Fergus thrusts his hands in his pockets and finds his father’s crumpled pack of cigarettes. Not quite ready to go in, he leans against
his car, draws out a broken fag, and is startled when Cadillac appears from nowhere and takes it from him matter-of-factly.

  “At the Fiji School of Medicine, they showed us a smoker’s lung,” she says, pausing to give him time to imagine what it looked like. “You don’t want one of those.” Before he’s had a chance to take a first tentative drag.

  “OK then.” He hands over the whole pack like an obedient schoolboy. Grinning at her bossiness.

  “If it rains tomorrow, do you think you’d like to go over to Rockland?” he asks.

  “Yes.” She smiles.

  And Fergus remembers his mother dancing with him for no reason, telling him she loved him so much.

  VI

  Long John’s Earrings

  Still more strange was it to see him in the heaviest of weather cross the deck. He had a line or two rigged up to help him across the widest spaces—Long John’s earrings, they were called.

  —Treasure Island

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,

  August 1973

  There’s a rumble of thunder and wind tousles the trees. Jim looks up from his work. A large bumblebee floats through the open door. Now he sees that several other insects have come in as well. A monarch sips a drop of coffee on the edge of his tin mug. Three bluebottles buzz angrily against the small kitchen window pestering to get out. The humidity’s almost tropical, so that his paper feels sodden and the type smudges easily.

  Out across the cove, a curtain of rain splits the sea in two: the water in the Thoroughfare lies flat and gray while the bay, a mile or so out, is churned into frothy crests. White horses, his father called them.

  Fergus and Cadillac have gone to Rockland for the day on the ferry, taken advantage of the bad weather to get supplies. So Jim has the place to himself—the whole afternoon, until six.

  Chewing the butt end of a cigarette, he tries to concentrate on the chart he’s drawing, and sees how the shakes in his hands make his outlines quiver like waves upon a rocky shore. Never mind, he’s managed to put the islands down, to moor them on a single piece of paper. He feeds the page into the Corona, types the words Caribbean Sea toward the bottom, then the name of each island and its corresponding islet—Treasure Island and Skeleton, Seaward and Edward, Old Providence and Catalina.

  Taking a sharpened pencil, he draws the key landmarks described in all three accounts—Stevenson’s, Seaward’s, and the Royal Navy survey. Triangular squiggles to mark each island’s sugarloaf and distinct twin-peaked hill. Anchors in the three anchorages, described by all as pond-shaped or like a lake. A sort of prow or quarter-note rest to mark the limestone headlands, also a prominent feature in all three descriptions. This headland is the outcrop of white rock beneath which Ben Gunn kept his boat. In reality, it’s called Morgan’s Head after another infamous buccaneer. He marks the cave where Ben Gunn hid his treasure. Seaward too wrote of finding treasure in a cave.

  With the islands set together like this, you can’t help but see the similarities. Except for one glaring anomaly of course—that Treasure Island is upside down. Stevenson’s harbor and little Skeleton islet, sketched by the author himself, lie to the southeast, whereas the actual anchorage and islet off Old Providence lie to the northwest. But this is the crux of Jim’s argument—his epiphany. That Stevenson used Old Providence as a template but flipped the chart to make the place his own.

  Jim feels a certain joy in this, as if Stevenson left a puzzle just for him. A narrative sleight of hand. A bluff to confound future readers or treasure hunters, which only he has managed to see through. Now all he needs to do is to use a straightedge to draw in compass points, and an arrow to show the prevailing northeast trade winds.

  A great clap of thunder this time. A flock of ducks fly past, low and silent in their eagerness to avoid the storm. A streak of lightning cuts through the darkened sky. It’s good to see such wildness, God’s fiery wrath. The others in Rockland must be in the thick of it. He wheels around the side of the table to get a better view of the tall clouds piling up over the bay and feels the wind drop. There’s a brief moment of still, like a drawing of breath, then, before you would think it possible, the rain plummets down in a torrent and he has to throw a book on top of his papers before his whole argument blows away across the cove.

  Behind him, the small door bangs open. Jim crutches over, the shooting pain in his leg reminding him of the exercises and stretches he’s forgone. He means to shut the door but instead finds himself looking out at the heaviness of the rain, the force with which the drops pummel grass and sea, sending up fresh smells of dirt, grass, seaweed, and hot shingle. Splashing up onto his trouser leg and across the wood floor. Rain so full, you can hardly tell if it’s falling up or down. So that an umbrella wouldn’t do you any good. And if you were swimming, you’d see pockmarks shooting up all around—as if you were in the pattern of a Japanese wood-block print. And the sea would taste soft and less salty.

  He remembers dancing naked in summer storms with Cecil when they were boys. Taunting the lightning that streaked above them. He thinks of Helen twirling across the wide, white beach, the way she is in the photograph he tries not to look at.

  The wind catches the door again, slams it into his shoulder. He shoves a chair up against it. Then, his trouser leg already wet, he steps out, hunched over. Out from under the eave of the boathouse, the rain pounds down the back of his head and neck, soaking his hair and shirt, weighing down the cotton and khaki. He lifts his face to the dark sky, letting the big swollen raindrops smack heavy against his lips and eyelids.

  It was the way her hair felt, falling down into his face, across his eyes and into his mouth. Like absolution, like forgiveness.

  Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1917

  A train to Savannah, a change at Yulee to San Fernandina, then a boat to her island. Pa took him as far as Washington, D.C., where he was to help run the Medical Corps, then sent Jim on alone.

  Jim doesn’t remember much about his journey south. Looking out the window, he only saw his own reflection. Everyone was talking about American troops being sent to France, the German advance through Belgium. Jim was secretly glad. It took attention away from him.

  He remembers his dread of the motor launch. It was the first time he’d been on a boat since Pieter died and he felt marked. Almost as if he should declare himself. Here I am—Little Lord Jim, an unlucky talisman, a bad piece of work. He felt embarrassed that Pa’s friend, waiting for him on the island, would know what had happened, and why he was being sent away from home. Banished at fifteen. A pariah.

  Great ungainly brown pelicans floated right next to the pier. He stared down at their huge beaks and grotesque pouches that sagged like the chins of old men, their round sharp eyes. Pelicans—even he couldn’t be uglier than that. But as the boat pulled away, he watched in wonder as they flapped their huge wings, struggling out of the sea. Once airborne, they tucked their heads back and flew with surprising grace—gliding long distances, low over the waves.

  He remembers the tall white ibis as the boat approached the island, roosting up at the very top of the trees, stepping along the highest branches on their long, spindly red legs.

  Jim stepped off the boat, walked up the dry slats of the pier and up onto the soft sand, stepping over large pieces of driftwood with his own spindly legs—as if he too were performing some sort of precarious balancing act.

  Pa’s best friend Uncle Fergo waits, his open-top Ford pulled up in the sharp dune grass and palmetto palms. He wears a broad-brimmed bark-cloth hat that he picked up on a hunting safari in Uganda. When he sees Jim, he flicks his cigarette into the grass and strides forward. Behind him, a girl swings down from the branch of a tree, where she’d been sitting to watch the boat.

  No one had warned Jim about Helen. Perhaps they forgot. Perhaps they thought she’d be away, at summer camp. Perhaps someone had mentioned a girl and he’d simply ass
umed she was little, like his sister Ann. But there she is, almost exactly his own height, with long dirty-blond hair that falls like a mane over her shoulders. She wears a blue cotton dress with a simple braided belt of rope he thinks she might have made herself. Her bare feet and ankles are sandy and caked with bits of shell.

  He feels confused and resentful, unsure he’s ready to contend with a girl—this girl. He shakes her hand formally and looks down. Painfully aware of his pallid complexion, his awkward city shoes and suitcase.

  “Jump in,” Uncle Fergo says. He tosses Jim’s suitcase over onto the backseat and gives him a collegial thump on the shoulder as if nothing’s wrong in all the world, as if Jim might believe that too. “Young Jim, my favorite and only daughter, Helen.” This by way of introduction.

  Best thing to do is ignore her, pretend she doesn’t exist, which isn’t going to be easy as she steps up onto the fender, slides along the hood of the car, and leans back against the windshield. Looking ahead as they drive off with an intent expectancy of pleasure Jim at first mistakes for arrogance. She ties her hair down with a red bandana but the ends lash out in the wind. Red and yellow, like hand-painted photographs Jim’s seen of Tibetan prayer flags left at the tops of high mountains. One hand pins down her cotton dress, the other spreads along the hood of the car for balance. She has elegant long fingers.

  He wishes his uncle had come alone. He wishes she at least didn’t have to sit right in front where he can’t help but see her. But then he turns and feels the island’s steamy air, blowing round the windshield, tousling his hair, tugging his shirtsleeves, caressing him. The warm, salty air, redolent with the smells of sea and swamp, the hot road, the sun, the mossy bark of live oaks that line the edge of the beach, stunted and windblown.