Creation (20 page)

And Jeanne Rabin. The girl conjured by his father nearly ten years
later. Audubon remembers the inn, the day and the confession, as unwanted as his own. A French girl, from a town near to Nantes. Illiterate, bound to become a maid in Santo Domingo. Not a Negro, his father repeated. It would have been easier had she been.

The inn was near the port in Nantes. His father sat Fougère at the notched table in the dim early-winter afternoon. And unburdened himself of his story as if it were a romance, a fairy tale, as the English say.

She was beautiful, his father said again and again, as if it were a reason, as if he could explain it that way. But all he could see was the moment she was dragged away from him on the landing in Les Cayes, Santo Domingo, that port of human misery, in front of the slaves in their chains and under the whine of the lash. The French officer not looking back, the young woman tugged by the hand to the other plantation where she had been promised.

She must have been like me, thought young Audubon. (No, I am like her.) No wonder I hate partings! Like me, she felt love that strongly, the burning in all her limbs.

She went where she was told, but not for long. Six months later she ran away and came to her lover’s plantation, begging to be taken in. And his father took her in, although he already had Sanitte there. What could he do? She was a white girl, a French girl. She must have been pregnant already. It meant that he had been conceived on a ship, one explanation for his constant
mal de mer
. She gave birth to her son, and six months later she died. Perhaps she was ill already, his father said. Perhaps she died in the violence. I’ve never known.

There is a moment when a boy’s eyes are rinsed clean of childhood’s sleep. When they understand adult error, and adult grief. His father that day gave him the acid bath. He has sworn never to give such moments to his own sons. He spent the next few years trying to remember his mother, but he never could conjure a face. He told himself that she was not sick and that she was not murdered, but that she ran away. It was better that way. Jeanne is to him
she who escaped
, not
she who died
.

Johnny is innocent of it all. Audubon has made certain of that. He remembers that first sea voyage. Some cabin boy, assigned to make sure he did not fall overboard, who enjoyed teasing Monsieur
Newhouse when he cried. The hideous and endless rocking, his sickness. He will not have his son burdened by the duplicities of the past, as he has been. He came to America to forget the sins of his father. He has not gone home.

The dancing master is on his feet again, swirling through the polonaise with Tom Lincoln, the mazurka with his son. Audubon is certain it is Jeanne’s ghost that animates Johnny’s feet, just as she animates his own. He wonders if Johnny, like poor Jeanne Rabin, will throw himself away for something he calls love.

The dancing master dances, chest high, chin up, neck long, back perfectly straight, arms out at the elbow, the breath which flows into him seeming to lift the weight off his feet. His clever feet remember the waltz, the cotillion, the gallop. The English society ladies in their red turbans, the eyes that followed him flat, slightly red-rimmed, the eyes of animals intent on their needs.

There’s a long tongue of flat rock just right for a gallop so he gets them all to stand in lines. The place hasn’t heard such song before and maybe won’t for a hundred or two hundred years more. The man who steps up to put more of their hard-found wood on the fire is doing a clog dance himself.

“Some of us will have to be ladies,” Audubon announces, putting half the men down one side and half down the other. The young gentlemen grumble but goodnaturedly change their bows into curtseys. There is another dance and another. Bayfield taps toes and sways a little but does not join until Audubon hooks his elbow and swings him, letting him loose squarely in the midst of the men and he is helpless, caught by this one on his left and that on his right in the allemande. He is embarrassed, a little, and he feels himself thoroughly Bayfield of Bayfield Hall —
tenth transmitter of a foolish face
— but at least he is dancing.

Finally they have burnt every bit of trunk and root of tuckamore that touches the shore. Audubon kicks the embers together but there is little left to burn. The dark has still not fallen but Bayfield’s stars are in the ascendant. The naval officer makes for his skiff. He will not let a clear night go to waste.

FAME

T
he schooners stand in the great harbour of Ouapitagone, their shrouds limp against the masts. Candlelight glows from inside the
Gulnare
and the
Ripley
. Wanting perfect blackness, Bayfield rows out under the bare breasts of the figurehead. He lingers there a moment, taking pleasure in his schooner, the dark curves of her hull, the slenderness of her masts. Then he makes his way beyond the harbour wall and through the cleft in the rock into the open where this lost arm of the Atlantic Ocean claps against the red granite cliffs, the locked iron gates of Castle North America.

Pitch black greets him as he rounds the point. He hears water for miles, sea smoothing and circling the shoals. It had been wild, earlier, but now it rests. He rides the swells as peacefully as he did his nursery horse long ago. On those solitary night rides he dreamed of adventuring, and now here he is. Why was he out of bed in the middle of the night at six years old? Why not asleep? Preparing for a lifetime when he would not sleep a night through?

The answer comes as a muffled, intimate blow, delivered by himself to himself, and hence the more shocking. He, the boy warrior, had been afraid. His thoughts are reduced to nothing by this insight and he sits idle in the launch for he does not know how long.

But of what was he afraid?

Of Bayfield Hall, so many rooms, so cold, as busy as a ship with all the servants?

The dark, which is now his domain?

The quiet, which he loves more than any living soul?

Being alone, which he has chosen?

He does not know.

A
T LENGTH THE MOON
emerges and silvers the crests of certain swells around the rocks. Luminous ruffles unfurl against a shoal. The rest is black water and lethally frigid. But tonight, in the calm, and this little boat, he is in no danger. He rows and lets the boat drift, rows and drifts until he is precisely over a shoal and then, with an ominous scrape, precisely on it. Caught.

Standing, he is careful to brace his feet on either side of the floorboard. He takes the sextant in his hand and directs it toward the horizon, now just visible as the darkness divides itself into depths for him. He looks through the eyepiece at Altair, in the eastern sky. Keeping his eye on the star, he moves the index arm of the sextant back and forth. Altair seems to swing back and forth along a short arc. He catches it at the lowest point and tightens the screw. He can feel with his fingers the tiny engraved lines giving the angle at this precise instant. He presses the stop button on his chronometer.

The air rising from the water has chilled him to the bone. He knows the water temperature; out here, it will be about thirty-nine degrees. He measures it nearly every day. He knows that were he to fall into it, he would have less than a minute to live.

But he would love to walk on the shoal.

It is a foolish idea. What if he lost his footing? If he tipped the boat with his instruments in it, even worse.

But he likes the idea of standing on the rock, which is just inches above the surface.

No.

Yes.

He places his hands on the thwarts and steadies the boat. He inches the hull forward so that the boat is more secure. He gets one foot on the shoal, and balances with the other in the boat. He slowly shifts his weight. The boat rises under him and slides a little on the shoal. He holds his breath. Then, quickly, he pulls out the other foot and stands. The water swills around the mound of granite, only a few feet across.

He has done it. He feels as if he is walking on water. He wishes he could stay all night. He could fool the fishermen as they went past in the morning. They would think he was the Almighty. He laughs out loud, picturing it. He is becoming profane.

T
HE NEXT DAY
Bayfield seeks out Audubon in his dark and damp hold and invites him for a walk. He has a question for the artist, but he scarcely knows how to formulate it.

Bayfield peers at the rocks with ferocity, picking up this one and that, looking for ammonites. Looking down is rare for him; he looks up constantly when he is at sea. Audubon is staring into the distance when suddenly he whistles quietly and motions to Bayfield to be still.

His sharp eye has seen a flash of colour. A woman enters the clearing, unaware that they are there. She is clad in white man’s clothing; her skin is a deep mahogany red. Her cap, which has little points that droop above her ears, is of cloth woven in black and red stripes as if she got it from a Frenchman on the side of liberty. She wears a multi-coloured skirt and a neckerchief of bright red, blue and white. There are embroidered bands about her bodice and her hat.

She comes closer. She has two huge silver crucifixes on her breast. And her legs, which move in and out of the blue-green leaves, the pale laurel bushes, the sun-shrivelled leaves of tiny blueberry plants, are in stockings knit with the colours of the rainbow. On her feet are low moccasins.

Bayfield rises. Audubon puts out a hand to stop him.

“She’ll fly!”

“You’ll frighten her,” Bayfield says. He presents himself to the woman. “Good evening, miss,” he says.

She stands still while first the one then the other man materializes from the berry bushes. She reaches up and removes her hat in respect. She looks on either side for an escape route but in the end bravely stands her ground. Her hair is knotted above her ears, in glistening, braided ovoids.

Audubon is enchanted. He would have lain hidden for hours; he would have stalked her.

Bayfield steps closer. She shakes her head
Not understand English
. She giggles. In only a few minutes Bayfield, who listens to Kelly the botanist, has her giving the names of the tiny flowers he pulls from the tangles of moss.

“
Vie toujours
,” she says.

“We call it lungwort,” says Bayfield.

Audubon, competing, points to the rocks below where the birds come and go. “Foolish guillemot,” he says.

“
Murres
,” she replies.

“Cormorant,” he points to the black ones with the neck like snakes.

“
Ouapitagone
.”

“Ah, that is the name. And the sailors think the name denotes the shape of the rock, which resembles a cannon.”

Audubon speaks to her in French, attempting to explain this, pointing to the gun which is always at his side. Her eyes widen. He asks her about more birds. She does not speak back but she gestures them to follow. They walk inland over the clumsy piles of rock and across the open spaces, where the terrain is dry. They come to a rim of trees and, inside of it, a pond. They make out the shape, in the gloaming, the beaked periscope of the red-throated loon. They hear the cry.

“
Whabby
,” she says.

“An ancient bird,” says Bayfield, “and lonely as the rocks.”

“Not at all, not at all,” Audubon says. “That cry in which you hear loneliness is in fact the sound of devotion. They have a devoted family life.”

“Oh, they too,” says Bayfield, dryly.

“They do! They fly here in pairs, the male taking the lead. Sometimes they are so high that you cannot pick out their shape, only, if it is calm, hear their wings beating the air. Whenever the bird alights it dives, as if to taste the water. When it surfaces it shakes its wings and makes that cry to reassure its mate.”

The Montagnais girl comes to the edge of the pond. The loon pops to the surface of the water in front of her, its young behind. On seeing the people, she begins to run on top of the water, racing along the surface with her tail digging a little furrow behind her. Her young dive.

They all laugh.

They stand, marvelling as the birds gather at the shore. Bayfield finds the moment for his question. “Mr. Audubon,” he says. “I have a strange question. Do the birds play?”

Audubon does not answer directly.

“Do you want to see how we toll a loon? I tried this with Johnny and Tom Lincoln.”

“What is tolling a loon?”

Audubon undoes the kerchief at his neck. And, imitating its cries, runs at the birds. They become confused and fly at him rather than away. It is a contest to see who veers first.

“No other species of waterfowl is deceived so completely by this game,” says Audubon. “They become very easy to kill.”

“Ah,” says Bayfield. “Perhaps it is only you who are playing.”

The Montagnais girl has flown. Her red stripes can be seen ascending the hill.

“Ravens, on the other hand, play. Anonyme, my pet, whom you met when you came to see my paintings, will roll a stone along the deck of the ship. He will drop it from a height to watch it bounce.”

Bayfield laughs at the image. “Is he talking to you yet?”

“Sometimes,” says Audubon. “At least, he will say what I tell him. He has not predicted the future.”

“Perhaps you have not given him the words.”

The two men climb the rocky hillside. The terrain is very rough. They walk a long way and come to a petrified forest less than three feet tall. Audubon dodges through the spiked, silvery, barkless branches, which are hard as glass. The forest appears to have died long ago, and to have been under a spell ever since. He sits on a rocky ledge.

“Time is your business,” he says to Bayfield. “Am I correct?”

“You might say.”

“For me, time, which you measure so carefully, has begun to move at a most awkward gait. It is neither slow nor quick. It is willful. It speeds, and then it stops. It toys with me, quite suddenly driving me backward to a place I have long deserted. But what is worse is that now
I fear it will drive me forward. When time drives me forward then surely I shall rebel. I am aging too fast.”