A silent competition grows up between Jim and Helen over who can shoot first, who can get the cleanest shot. Until Jim lets her win. Because he’s more interested in the birds. Warblers, tanagers, and buntings. A tiny Carolina wren he finds in a tree bore. He wanders off to locate the source of a particular chattering, sits quietly in a clearing to see what will come. Until the others call for him, or one of the hunting dogs bounds up.
He starts going off on his own.
He writes home asking for his skinning set to be sent. Uncle Fergo’s tools will do for game but not songbirds. I think the boy’s improving, Fergo scribbles in a greeting at the bottom of Jim’s letter.
Now Aunt Susu gives Jim a room for his birds. It’s a study lined with books at the far end of the house, with two sets of French doors opening to the long wraparound porch. There’s a big desk with a leather top Aunt Susu clears off and covers with oilcloth. There’s a pool table, covered by a dust sheet, where he can lay out his specimens.
She’s not persnickety. If she were, she couldn’t be married to Uncle Fergo. But she can’t abide dead animals in a bedroom. She doesn’t reckon that arsenic and mothballs are healthful for sleep.
Helen walks into the room without knocking or asking. She carries a large sketch pad and a clutch of pencils.
“I need to practice drawing,” she declares. “I don’t know why you want to skin all these tiny birds. We can’t eat them.” But since he has, she’ll draw them. It’s harder of course to draw them live.
Jim doesn’t respond. He believes he’s collecting for the good of science but worries he’ll sound pompous if he lectures her. His goal: to collect a representation of all birdlife on the island, two of each species, male and female. Later, he’ll see it differently, wondering if he just liked to shoot birds and steal their eggs.
Having interrupted Jim once, she now comes and goes as she pleases; she leans her drawing pad back on the fat leather sofa as if staking out territory. Sometimes when Jim comes in with his birds, she’s already there, working alone.
She sits on the back of the sofa, astride as if riding a horse, or cross-legged on the floor with her drawing pad before her. She rearranges Jim’s skins on the dust sheet to please herself. Taking a bird not yet skinned, she’ll spread its wing and copy the exact detail of the feather patterning. She draws the same bird over from different perspectives: wing spread out, wing folded, on its back with its feet curled up, or propped up to look alive. Studying each until she knows it so well she can draw it from memory. She claims this will help her sketch birds in the wild, where she may be able to catch only a quick glimpse.
One day, Jim feels her gaze turn away from the bird she’s drawing, toward him. He tries not to look up, to concentrate on the pine warbler he’s skinning.
He parts the downy feathers along the breast and cuts a straight line down from the collar to the vent, careful not to pierce the membrane of the belly, and gently starts to pull away the skin. If he pushes down with the flat side of the scalpel, it comes away easily. There’s little fat. Taking a pair of sharp scissors, he snips the bird’s tiny legs at each knee and pushes the shinbones out from the skin to scrape them clean. He severs the tail, careful not to cut through the end of the quills.
In seconds, he pulls the skin up to the wings, and after snipping the shoulder bones, right up to the neck. The skin peels away as easily as an orange rind, folding over itself like a glove as Elliot Coues wrote in the book Sanford gave him. Supporting the skin in his hand, careful not to stretch the neck, he eases it off up to the ears. Then laying the bird down on the table, he dabs a small piece of cotton along the inside of the skin to absorb any blood or body fluid. Sprinkles some fine sawdust to keep it dry.
Now comes the trickier part. He detaches the delicate membrane of the ear with his thumbnail, uses the smallest scalpel to cut around the eye sockets, then tweezers to extract the eyeballs without damaging the bird’s thin eyelids. He worries Helen might find this disgusting. For all the time she’s spent in the room with him, she’s never watched so carefully. He hears her pencil scratch the textured paper and tries to shut her out, to think only of the songbird and not make a mess of it. He cuts through the jaw muscle, and up past the eye socket to pull out the muscle and brain. He leaves the skullcap in place to retain the shape of the head.
The bird’s now skinned. Its pink, featherless body lies on the newspaper before him. He dips a brush into the jar of arsenic and applies a generous coating, careful to get the powder into all the cavities, then dusts it off. The arsenic will prevent any fly or beetle infestation. He coaxes the skin right side round, draws out the wings and tail feathers, gently stroking them back into place. He feels her eyes on him, all over him; it’s excruciating.
Finally, when he’s finished stuffing eyes, neck, and body and is writing up the label to tie on the warbler’s crossed leg—Dendroica pinus, male—he hears her rip the page from her pad. She brings it to him.
A drawing of Jim. He is young, lean, intent, his eyes fierce and focused. His dark thick hair, cropped short, juts up in almost military fashion. He leans over the tiny bird, wielding a scalpel. The pair of scissors, the brush, and the arsenic jar lie on the table near him.
She’s drawn in other birds. A northern bobwhite, mounted in a glass cabinet behind him. The stuffed short-eared owl in the bookshelf under its bell-shaped dome of glass. Jim’s own birds laid out across the pool table on the dust sheet. Transforming the study in her drawing into a laboratory, or museum.
He likes her drawing. It makes him look like a scientist. The kind of man he would want to be. He smiles at her. Grateful to be looked at. Grateful to be seen this way—the way he is.
The Eggs of Incubator Birds,
American Museum of Natural History,
New York, August 1973
Laina’s come in early to read through the final correspondence from the South Sea Expedition collectors, checking for any mention of the type specimens she’s been cataloging for Jim. She lays her papers across the wide table in the library. Enjoying the musty quiet before the others arrive.
She looks over a list: the banded rail and white-faced heron, the last birds sent back to the museum from New Caledonia. A bill of sale for the museum boat the France, dated 1932, from Rabaul. Then picks up a letter from the Expedition’s last collector Lindsay Macmillan, her Australian compatriot, dated 1939—just as war broke out in Europe. In the letter, Macmillan expresses his shock to find that the formerly peaceable, louche colony of New Caledonia had turned Vichy overnight.
With typical Australian swagger, he mocks the French officials, the resident superiors, clicking their heels and saluting the Führer. And goes on to describe how a former drinking companion, a Bêche-de-Mer fisherman, had come to him in the night to warn him he might be arrested as an enemy spy.
If it comes to that, I’ll be bloody well forced to tell them everything, about the roosting of swamp hens, where to find the eggs of incubator birds. I suppose that might save a man’s life.
The island’s pro-Vichy governor had been thrown out by the Free French colonials and sent packing to Indochina, Laina recalls. Its capital, Nouméa, had served as U.S. military headquarters during the war. Macmillan had gone home to be drafted into war.
This letter marks the end of the line of her research for Jim, work that has taken a good part of two years. She should feel elated to finish, or at least relieved. It’s perfect timing, before her trip to New Caledonia. When the others come in, she should invite them to lunch, celebrate with a few bottles of wine. Instead, looking up through the row of windows to the leafy treetops of Central Park, listening to the steady swish of traffic from the street below, the occasional horn, she feels let down. It’s Jim she’d like to go to lunch with. It’s Jim’s praise she’d want.
Crossing to the secretary’s office to make a copy, she glances down toward the end of the hall.
Imagines the gray elevator shuddering to life and Jim emerging from the creaky, folding door, fierce and disheveled, badly hungover. And if he did happen to appear just now, she’d ask him about the war. And the France too: the seventy-five-ton, cockroach-infested, former copra-trading sailing schooner. Home to a generation of museum collectors, it had crisscrossed the archipelagoes of the South Pacific for ten years. It might take his mind off whatever it is that ravages him.
Waiting while the copy machine warms up, she raises her arms over her head and brings them down in a slow stretch. And wonders whether the France went on to play any role in the war. Evacuating colonial settlers, rescuing far-flung traders or missionaries, repatriating copra workers to their native islands. Or dropping off Coastwatchers. Whether she might have been commandeered by revved-up GIs, risking their lives to salvage caches of scotch left behind by fleeing traders. Michener had written of that in his Tales of the South Seas. After reading through the field notes and journals of each collector, Laina feels close to the France and somehow responsible. She’d seen those schooners pottering around the coast of New Guinea, when she was a child.
She shakes her hair free of its tortoiseshell clip. Envisioning a whole new line of research she and Jim might pursue together. But no, she should stop. Besides, Jim’s not here.
It’s when she’s refiling the letter, slipping it back in a filing cabinet of museum correspondence, that Laina sees another folder marked Jim Kennoway—Urgent, and inside it two letters with their envelopes paper-clipped to the front. One letter is stamped with the official seal of U.S. Naval Headquarters; the other is a carbon copy of a response from the museum. She lifts them out.
1943. By this time, the war was in high gear. In the Solomons, the marines had pushed the Japanese from Guadalcanal and were slowly working their way up the island chain. While a joint U.S.-Australian force, under General MacArthur, was fighting the brutal front in New Guinea.
Pending Court-Martial, she sees emblazoned across the top as she slips off the paper clip and runs her hand over the yellowed paper. It’s one thing to read letters relevant to your research, another to read potentially incriminating information about a colleague, which probably should not be here.
She feels unprofessional, suspect. As if she’s snooping in a child’s diary. As if she’s stumbled upon Jim’s doctor’s report or is reading his love letters.
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,
August 1973
Jim doesn’t attempt to finish the Treasure Island piece when drunk. Instead he trails through his scribbled notes, trying to list the flora and fauna, which he might later type up as an addendum—The Natural History of Treasure Island.
Sitting at the table in the boathouse, his whisky flask lodged in the side pocket of the wheelchair, he reads through what he’s written so far.
1.Ben Gunn’s goats. Most likely there were goats there. The Spaniards left goats to breed on far-flung islands to feed shipwrecked sailors.
2.A rattlesnake? Put that down to poetic license. Young Hawkins stumbles on one after giving the pirates the slip but there are no rattlers on the island. The beast no doubt lifted from Stevenson’s California days.
3.Shore and marsh birds. Wild ducks. If ducks, the West Indies tree duck and the Bahaman pintail are likely. Stevenson describes a great cloud, a whole troop of marsh birds, darkening heaven. Unaccustomed to man, the birds on Treasure Island startle easily. Wheeling and crying at the plunge of the Hispaniola’s anchor, then again when Alan, the first honest seaman, is shot.
He draws a line across the paper, scribbles in a new heading, and underlines it: Seaward’s Animals.
1.A herd of peccaries, the small South and Central American pig. If true, the pigs would also have been introduced. Or perhaps Seaward mistook feral goats for peccaries, though this was unlikely—even for the unobservant gunner.
2.Iguanas. Certainly. The lizards provided a staple diet for Seaward and his wife, no doubt for his dog too, faithful Fidele.
3.Northern lobster. The crustacean Seaward describes at great length, with its spinous projections, two large horns, and two great claws—a creature that terrifies Fidele—belongs to the family Nephropidae, the lobster fished right here off the coast of Maine. Seaward couldn’t possibly have found one on Old Providence. The West Indies spiny lobster hails from a different family altogether, Palinuridae, with no claws to speak of.
Seaward must have added the northern lobster later for effect, or perhaps it was stuck in by his editor, Miss Jane Porter, who might have read of Nephropidae elsewhere. Mariners were known for spinning tales, and for their wild exaggerations. They had time on their hands. In Seaward’s day, sailors would stitch together skins—a primate’s body to a fish’s tail, for instance—to sell to gullible collectors as mermaids.
Jim takes another swig of the Scotch, jots down a new heading—Seaward’s Birds.
1.Parroquets. The small or miniature parrots, ubiquitous throughout Central America.
2.A brown pigeon. Zenaida, most likely. A common bird still found there. Jim had seen plenty.
3.A bird “with a sweet voice like a nightingale.” A mockingbird perhaps? Jim had come across one on the island of Saint Andrews, about thirty miles south. He’d checked his own field notes.
He looks up and out the door, where he can hear Fergus and Cadillac hammering wood, and thinks of another beast he’d forgotten—a sea turtle coming to lay its eggs. Seaward and his wife were too kindhearted to shoot it, moved by its human eye. Later though, after establishing their small colony, they corral hundreds to sell in Kingston. Hawksbills, green turtles, loggerheads, and leatherbacks. The birth of a trade that’s made the sea turtle a rare and endangered beast. In his description of Old Providence a hundred years later, the naval surveyor Collett recorded 170 pounds of turtle shell shipped from the island each year.
There’s another animal not mentioned in any of the accounts, though no doubt present—the dreaded rat, which follows man to any island he visits. Rats would have been on Treasure Island when the first pirate hauled his ship for cleaning. More of them would have no doubt jumped ashore when Seaward’s boat banked on the sands, bringing with it a store of flour, eggs, and sugar for his wife to make puddings. A threat to birdlife as well as to turtle eggs.
Draining the last drops from his flask, Jim scribbles Sea turtle. Rat.
Love Letters, New York, August 1973
Michael’s delight to find he’s Laina’s only guest at lunch and that she’s ordered a bottle of ice-cold chablis is dashed when she produces a letter with Jim’s name on it. He looks down with resignation. In her eagerness, she doesn’t seem to register the dampening of his spirits
August 25, 1943. Sent from U.S. Naval Headquarters in Annapolis. Pertaining to the recommended court-martial of Lieutenant James Kennoway.
It has been brought to the attention of U.S. Navy Headquarters that during the New Georgia campaign, in July 1943, Lieutenant Kennoway defiled remains of Japanese servicemen. He peers at her through his reading glasses; her face is slightly blurry.
It has also been established that Lieutenant Kennoway attempted to send said remains to Dr. Gerhard Mann at the American Museum of Natural History. Such conduct stands in direct defiance of rules pertaining to the respectful treatment of war dead, particularly in regards to Articles 15 and 17 of the First Geneva Convention, as well as being contrary to the moral code and standards expected of all U.S. servicemen. In addition, it stands in violation of U.S. military postal regulations
She leans eagerly across the table. “What do you think?”
Frankly, Michael’s not at all surprised to learn Jim committed a war crime. He wouldn’t be at all shocked to learn that the man committed some atrocity in the department elevator. Before he has a chance to say anything though, she produces a second letter. A carbon copy of a response, written by Mann and cosigned
by the department chair, Robert Cushman Murphy.
I can assure you that the Ornithology Department of the American Museum has never solicited, nor received, human remains of any kind, from either the Pacific or the European war fronts. Nor would our department have any interest in such remains, our work being solely dedicated to the study of birds.
Instead, may we point out to you that it is the U.S. government’s own Smithsonian Institution, not our museum, that has shown a particular interest in the physiology and phrenology of the Japanese skull.
“Seems like Mann and Murphy went to bat for Jim,” Laina says. He looks confused. She’s far ahead of him here. “I’ve looked it up. At the start of the war, the Smithsonian conducted a study of Japanese skulls, looking at whether the bone structure reflected inherent racial aggression. Scientists there recommended that this trait be watered down through interbreeding with other Asiatics, presumably with more peaceably shaped skulls.”
“Eugenics.” Michael nods. “It was more acceptable at the time.”
“Mann’s letter reads to me like a veiled threat. If you go after our man Jim, we’ll make a fuss, a big public fuss about government-sponsored research at the Smithsonian.”
Yes, he supposes she’s right. Secretly, he thinks it’s too bad Mann interfered. It might have been good if the navy had been able to take on Jim. It might have taken him down a notch, helped civilize him. He feels slightly in awe of Laina. Her terrier-like ability to unearth facts, whether they have to do with type specimens or Jim. Her astonishing memory. He wonders what she might have become as a lawyer or politician.
“What do you think Jim did?” she asks. He shrugs, shakes his head. She wears him out. The wine at lunch doesn’t help.
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