Creation (19 page)

“Thank you,” says Bayfield, the glimmer of a smile on his taut lips. “But she is mine and remains always in her place.”

“A pity.”

“Perhaps you require an effigy of your own.”

M
ARIA
. And in his mind, he sees Maria. The delicacy of her tipped chin as she looks up from her sewing to his face. It is a tiny face, wide about the eyes narrowing to a pointed chin. Her jaw is beautiful, almost prominent, a lovely curve leading from its widest place at the hinge to the narrow tip of her chin; he can see the bone, shaped like a wishbone, beneath her translucent skin.

He longs more than anything to put his hand there, on the soft
whiteness of her upper throat, which is hidden, for she does not throw her head back to show that unprotected place. It would be unseemly for her to do so. But when she sings, which she does,
Fait do-do
, a little French lullaby, seated at the pianoforte with the children around her, this part of her throat moves with the notes in it.

He imagines she is here with him on the
Ripley
, drawing. He watches the light purchase of her hand on the pencil, the calm that suffuses her face as the fingers trace out a blossom, as if by some intervention. As the curve of the petal is set down on paper it is no longer dark, cold and late in the day. It is morning and sunlight lies in squares on the floor.

He observes her behaviour now in his mind’s eye the way he observed the eider duck. In the carefulness of Maria’s movements can be read her situation. There is no man here. She has no protector. She is barren, circling her sister’s nest.

He wants to take her into his arms. He wants to trace her skin with his fingers. It is so strong a desire that now, as more rain runs over the tipped glass skylight of the ship’s hold off the coast of Labrador, he can feel her.

B
AYFIELD,
on deck alone, watches the moon slide free of the shadow which has hidden it, earth’s shadow, his own shadow. The moment awes him, evidence of the habits of celestial bodies that are to him almost gods. Suddenly the freed, reflected light falls on the
Gulnare
and lights the slave girl herself. She
is
his. He is duty-bound to ensure that on the ship she leads nothing less than honour will prevail. He walks to stand under her, placing his hand on the curved wood. He strokes her side. Mammoth solid woman that she is, it steadies him to feel her there, her lines so different, her curves extended, not predictable, not coming back to themselves, but lengthening, extending outward.

There is much expressed in her lines that he could not put into words.

America
MY COUNTRY

T
o discourage the moschettoes from attending the evening’s revelry, the tars set fire to the grass growing in the crevices on shore. The flame races back and forth along the narrow cracks, consuming the lines of pale yellow plumes. When there is no more grass to be seen, smoke continues to issue from the cracks between the rocks, as if the fire has sunk deep into the earth itself. When that smoke screen dies, the sailors burn the little spruce meadow next to the beach. The flames shoot up fifty feet in the air.

Godwin has been climbing the hill with his shark-spine walking stick. He watches the flames from apart. “Is this how you celebrate your country’s birthday?” he asks. “You burn the place down?”

Audubon too has been apart, drawing in the hold. He has finished the Eider Duck, the White-winged Crossbill,
Fringilla lincolnii
and, to show Maria, three plants of the country, all new to him and probably never before drawn. He is loath to befriend the pilot, but they share age, if nothing else; the others are so young.

“The idea was to defeat the moschettoes coming from inland but I see we have only drawn more from the other side of the harbour. Not only that, the sailors have consumed a good deal of our fuel.”

The young gentlemen go foraging for more wood. By evening the pyre stands on the bare rocks at the head of the harbour. The British arrive in their launch, fresh from their measuring and calculating. They are in uniform, the three white stripes on Bayfield’s sleeve gleaming. There is navy grog, in a barrel taken from the
Gulnare
’s hold.

Emery welcomes Bayfield. “Every Saturday night, like other seafarers, we salute our wives and sweethearts. But tonight, we celebrate our motherland.”

Bayfield has been apart from womankind since he was nine. On Saturday nights he takes a daguerreotype of his mother from his trunk, sets it up on his bunk, and walks back and forth in her presence for an hour.

His motherland is a fact, like his name and his status. It is dear to him but he is not given to demonstration. Besides, his real country, the place where he lives, is his ship.

“It serves, this day, as a kind of midsummer,” he offers. “And your ‘America’ is a midsummer of countries, is it not? Bursting with life, but with a long season of ripening ahead?”

As they sing the anthem, Audubon has tears in his eyes. The British stand respectfully at attention.

“How have you come to be a citizen of America?” asks Bayfield in a rare display of curiosity. His host’s French accent is so strong.

“My father sent me away from France, to avoid conscription for Napoleon’s war.”

Jean Jacques Audubon, an evader of the draft? Albeit the draft of France, his enemy. Even so, it seems a dishonourable act.

“You are right,” says Audubon, catching the distaste. “I ran away.”

Bayfield suddenly sees the humour in their situations. “You came to escape a war. I came to find a war but was disappointed. Buried alive I thought I would be, without one. Now, I am content to conquer coastlines.”

Audubon raises his glass. “Buried is what I’d have been, without my country. Drink to the Labrador wilderness! And to our loved ones at home!”

The men toss a torch into the pyre. It burns merrily as the sailors and the young gentlemen cheer and sing. There is the sound of drumming from the trading post across the harbour.

“What is that?” Audubon asks.

“The Esquimaux people are doing their circle dance. Have you seen them? It is a fine sight.”

“It is an occasion for them?”

“Not, I think, America’s birthday,” laughs Bayfield. “They have their own gods.” Even as he says this, he is conscious of an absence, of what he has never known, or thought to ask, of the natives’ gods.

Fires in the night and drumbeats. Audubon slips again from this landscape and become little Jean Rabin, on sad dry paths through canefields.

All around him others are running in the dark. A large fleshy hand has grasped his and, as invisible legs pump, lifts him off his feet. The canefields are burning. The slaves are coming out of the night, with machetes. They will kill everyone in their way. A woman has him by the hand. Her fingers are black, her palms pink.

Bayfield drinks slowly, methodically, tasting the liquid on his tongue. Audubon takes another swig. “You said you dream in reverse. What do you mean?”

“That here I dream of land, but when I am away, I dream of this.”

“My dreams,” says Audubon, “take me to a tropical place. To heat and sand, not rock and water.” He sees it all: the light sharp as teeth, the palm fronds that cut your hands. The deep rustle of leaves, the sea water lapping his feet, warm as mother’s milk.

Bayfield inclines his head.

“I believe they take me to my birthplace in the Antilles.”

Truth, not lies. Why does he tell the truth this time? Because he is afraid he’ll die on this journey and leave it unsaid? Because to tell Lucy (dearest best beloved Friend), or even write it in the diary which has become a letter to her, has become impossible? Because as he goes on he has a need for newer, stranger hiding places for his secret? Or a need not to hide it at all, but to plant it where it will grow, come forth into the light, on this journey which feels like no journey he has ever taken, a journey with no return, no shape to it, unless it is a loop where he continues to encounter himself, just as he did when Godwin said he knew Nolte?

It does not matter why he tells the truth. He has told it before. He has lied, to be sure, but he has never lied enough, never consistently enough. It is in telling the truth that his troubles begin.

“There is a secret burning inside me which I would like to tell you.”

“I don’t like secrets,” says Bayfield.

“I must tell you. And when I do, you will look at me in astonishment.”

“I shall?” says Bayfield, looking at him in astonishment. No Englishman and not even a proper Frenchman would engage in so unwanted an intimacy. “I cannot imagine what you could tell me that I should know. I am sure there is no need.”

“But there is a need. For thirty years in America I have kept secrets. Now the secrecy and the lying is heavy on me. It divides me from my name, my past, and my children.”

Bayfield shifts his feet. He would very much like to be off this rock but escape is not so easy. Reluctantly he tips his face to the taller man’s, adopting a listening position.

“I have told you I am European but it is not so. I was born in Santo Domingo. My mother was a maid my father met on ship as he journeyed to his plantation there. He did not marry her, for he was married already. Therefore I am, I have been, all my life, without a true name or a true country.”

“Ah,” says Bayfield.

“An illegitimate son, while he cannot be a citizen or inherit, is not exempt from being cannon fodder. This is why I felt no duty to fight Napoleon’s war.”

“I see,” says Bayfield, who is beginning to.

“Hence my flight to America. My good father and his wife reasoned that in Louisiana, the French part of the continent which America purchased, a questionable Frenchman might, with a forged document or two, become an American citizen.”

“I see,” says Bayfield again. He tries to imagine the man’s predicament. He casts his mind back to the society he left at eleven. “‘Stampt in nature’s mint of exstasy,’” he says. It comes from some recess of memory.

“What did you say?”

“The Bastard. That was he:
Stampt in nature’s mint of exstacy
. A line of poetry. From a poem I read in school, by a man called Savage.
It was not assigned to me of course, but I came across it and remembered it. ‘No tenth transmitter of a foolish face,’” he continues. “That line would come back to me when I looked in a mirror; that was me, a
tenth transmitter of a foolish face
. I think I rather admired the Bastard.”

Audubon laughs, an odd, barking cough of a laugh. He has disrobed, and been foiled in his disrobing at the same time, because he has not succeeded in shocking Bayfield. “That may be, Captain. But there is more to me which you must not admire. I am mated, as the birds are. But my wife occupies only a part of my heart.”

Bayfield rebels. “Why do you tell me this?”

“Every day I face the chance that I might not see my home again. And I may not see you again. Soon you will turn back where you came from, while we go northward.”

Bayfield subsides.

“I love a woman not my wife.”

“I know nothing of these matters. Though I believe you have mentioned the woman.”

“Maria. I long for her, for soft, clever, tender Maria. Long to hold her, but I cannot. Do you see my trouble?”

“I am beginning to see it,” Bayfield says testily. “Although I see no reason why I should.” The wild coast that has been his comfort and his haunt for seven years begins to feel like a Quebec levee on New Year’s Day: one is expected to be festive when one longs only to be closeted with charts. One is forced to remain in the hail of unsavoury confession when silence would suit. “You must be happy here. Nature does not judge.”

The shriven Audubon looks for a blessing in this and finds none.

“Nature is uninterested in man’s pleasure. Would you agree?”

Audubon agrees. “Marriage belongs to society.”

“It has its purpose.”

“Like the birds’. To reproduce.”

They hear a loon’s cry. It goes on and on, rippling into its own echo.

“Storm tomorrow,” says Bayfield. “It is a portent.”

“That is a sailors’ myth,” says Audubon. “The loon is merely calling his mate.”

“You see? A married man is fortunate,” says Bayfield.

“So is a bachelor,” says Audubon, and laughs.

T
HE SAILORS
are teaching Johnny a hornpipe. Before long, the irrepressible artist pulls out his flute and joins the music making.

“Dance!” he commands.

He has them off their haunches now, Shattuck and Ingalls and Emery. Bayfield and Bowen stand stifled in serge but that won’t do. He gives his flute to Johnny, who takes up the air without missing a beat.

Her cheeks were like the rosebuds and her sidelocks all in curl
.

The sailors often smiled and said he looks just like a girl
.

Audubon places himself amongst the rest and begins to dance, his locks bobbing on his shoulders, his entire body a song. Bayfield now knows why the artist’s bow had reminded him of a dancing master’s: Audubon could have been one. It is clear that what he does is what dancing
is
: all the other men only imitate it. Except for Johnny, who in the grace he shares with his father is suddenly not like him at all, but his own elegant creature.

“A fine reel, save that we are men without women,” says Audubon when the air ends.

“It is the seafarers’ lot.”

“Not always,” Audubon laughs. “My father had a wife at each end of his journey. And one on shipboard if he could. Had three women, in fact.” He is roaring, now, with the grog in his belly. There was Anne in Nantes, the sensible, hardworking widow his father married, who died asking for her adopted son every day, the boy she’d entangled in a snare of false names and lost forever. Sanitte, the mulatto mistress he kept in Santo Domingo. She bore Audubon’s older brother, his father’s first born, that taller, shadowy half-memory pressed behind her as she sent Monsieur Newhouse off on the ship. The boy died in the slave uprisings, his father told him. She bore too the half-sister called Rose who followed him to France.