Creation (28 page)

“It is not only the season, I fear. There are fewer birds and fish all up the coast. The natives say so, and the settlers. Our pilot tells me more tales of Eggers.”

Bayfield gives his slow nod.

“It is as if the birds are abandoning me. As if Nature herself were perishing. You may think this a strange thing to say but I have thought it in the last two weeks — it is as if I were being punished.”

“Punished? For what?” says Bayfield.

“My deeds,” says Audubon woefully. “What I have done and not done.”

“I am only an Englishman,” says Bayfield. “You must explain your troubles.” This time he is eager to listen. It lets him forget his own for the moment.

“I was in Paris, Captain. Looking for subscriptions for the
Birds
, of course.”

H
E CARRIED HIS PORTFOLIO
on his back through the city, the same one he carried through London, the wide leather case weighing one hundred pounds. The ladies in England scolded him for it; a gentleman would not bear such a burden in public; a gentleman would not arrive at his destination in a sweat; he ought to have a man to carry it for him. But Audubon would not put it down. His entire life was inside. He had lost his work more than once. One hundred sketches went when the rats ate into his wooden case. Another three dozen disappeared when a porter forgot to put his portfolio onboard a riverboat. What did he care if people objected? He took no chances.

In Paris, his height helped. Dodging messengers scurried under the case, but plump businessmen were clipped in the head, or had to swerve, and cursed him. Young women stared at him from behind their hands and giggled.

Perhaps he even
wanted
the burghers of Paris to stare: he was still wearing his fox-fur hat. When the guardians of the Louvre judged him unfit to enter, he strode away defiant with the tail prickling his neck. He kept his eyes high because he did not like what he saw down low. On the pavement were one-legged old soldiers, missing ears and fingers, veterans of Napoleon’s Moscow campaign. Had his father not had the bright idea to send him to America, he would have been amongst them. Or worse, dead, with snow for a winding sheet.

“Would they judge me, Captain, for not wanting to fight a war for a country I never thought my own? A country in which, because of my birth, I could neither vote nor inherit?”

He had not been home for fifteen years. Anne Moynet wrote all those letters begging him to come see her, letters that made their laborious way across the sea, following him wherever he went, letters like burrs, this complex family a curse, dragging him back to Coueron.

She was not his real mother, but his father’s wife. Did that make the difference? But she loved him, Anne Moynet. Why did he neglect her? He is guilty, guilty, and now the birds hide from him.

“I have written it, Captain. It is all in my journal. That some day people will know. But what do you suppose happened? I went to meet the Duc d’Orléans. The king in waiting, he was. A handsome man, who himself had lived in exile. He opened the wide black covers of my portfolio. He fell to his knees, Captain. I remember what he said exactly: he said, ‘Now I understand why Redouté praises you so highly.’”

A
UDUBON BOWED
. There were important men to be met. There were connections. And to each important person Audubon must be introduced. But how was he to be introduced? As whom was he to be introduced? This was France. Here, most certainly, he could not be the lost dauphin. Here he could not risk claiming to be the son of a French admiral. The highest rank Jean Audubon ever achieved was that of lieutenant. He could not say he studied with David. So who might he be, in France, his homeland which was never his homeland?

An American. Anyone could be an American. He could be born in Louisiana.

Introductions led to introductions and one day in October he stood in a salon with many elegant men and women. The host was a man named Gérard. This Gérard was a painter of portraits. He took Audubon’s hand and kissed it and called him a genius. And insisted on introducing him to a zoologist.

The zoologist was born in Rochefort. Too close to home. He ought to have run. But drawn by danger, or perhaps confused, or perhaps
simply wishing that it would be simple, Audubon said that he spent childhood summers not far away at Coueron.

Coueron!

There was a stir in the salon. The zoologist jumped up in pleasure and said, “I must bring you someone from your home village.” He disappeared for a minute, long enough for Audubon’s heart to pump and for him to reach, instinctively, for his gun, which he had left behind. Into the room the zoologist hurried with a young medical student. And here it happened, this encounter which Audubon had been dreading. He thinks now he even felt this moment approaching, with a dread and a delight, the doubled pain and joy of being unmasked, shamed, reduced for once and for all, and perhaps recognized, forgiven, heralded, made into one man.

“May I present Charles-Henri D’Orbigny. This is Monsieur Jean Jacques Audubon, who has travelled here from America.”

The face, the name, loomed up. Time was diving and looping over the artist’s head again. That narrow lip and the pointed chin, under the high, domed forehead, the penetrating eye of the scholar. D’Orbigny! Could it be his old neighbour and teacher?

“I believe we are already acquainted,” said Monsieur D’Orbigny.

“Indeed we are,” said Audubon.

“C
APTAIN BAYFIELD
,” says Audubon, “through our journeys and our decades, we travel great distances and meet people in the thousands. And yet, our lives are determined by a very small cast of characters, some half a dozen I think, who we meet by chance and then meet again, either by themselves or through another. Do you agree?”

“My life has a simpler trajectory.” Bayfield is thinking of his own meeting with Audubon. That it has force, that it will make a shape in his own life.

A
UDUBON DOUBTED
this could be the father. Too much time had passed, and this D’Orbigny was young. He must be the son. Could this one be his godson, another obligation left behind? No. It must be the other son, the younger one.

“Indeed we are,” he repeated, confused, trembling. “Your father was my dear friend when I was a youth.”

“He named you Fifi. I have heard speak of you. But you have been gone, I believe, since I was a small child.”

To meet the son of D’Orbigny, who knew him to be Jean Rabin, Creole of Santo Domingo, who aided the falsified baptisms so long ago now. And taught him taxidermy in the barn. To be introduced as an American!

He swayed in the embarrassment of his lies. In the zoologist’s parlour, he sank to his knees on the stone floor, but no faster than he, this D’Orbigny.

Andubon remembered the plaintive letters from his father, and from his half-sister, and from his cousin Anonyme, asking for help. Remembered then the widowed Anne, who mothered him, with her many bills to pay and no money to pay them with. The cousins wishing to enlist Audubon in their attempts to claim his father’s estate. The debts. The quarrels. It had been like a terrible odour following him, like a trap, a trick, an awful reminder that he was fraudulent.

The complications of his father’s estate had spread like a contagion. There was Sanitte, and the half-sisters of colour, quadroons and octoroons who were his relations. He had cast the letters away from him. He did not have enough money to feed his own children. He could not help.

“I knew my own lies had caught up with me, Captain Bayfield. But I had not accounted for the lies of others. There was money owing. For this man’s father, old Dr. D’Orbigny, had fallen out with my father. The doctor borrowed a sum which he never repaid. When my father died his widow needed the money. But D’Orbigny could not or would not pay.

“That was what held back this long-lost neighbour of mine, what gave him the mysterious downward glance. He could not unmask me — his shame was as great as mine.”

Charles-Henri said nothing tear away the disguise that made it possible for Jean Rabin, Creole, to stand before a king-in-waiting. He merely stepped forward and clasped him about the shoulders. Tears stood in both men’s eyes.

“And how is Anne Moynet?” Audubon said.

“You don’t know? Madame Audubon is dead. These past seven years. Can it be you have not been told?”

B
AYFIELD IS PALE
with indignation. “I must say that story reflects ill on you,” he manages. “It is a poor fellow who will abandon his parents in their age and their need. You must have a weight on your conscience.”

“She was not my real mother. And I was saved, as a matter of fact, by her death, by the way it had shamed D’Orbigny: he was as bad as I was.”

“There are no mitigating factors,” says Bayfield. “You have put your own selfish interests ahead of the very people to whom you owe everything. I am afraid it is unforgiveable.”

“You don’t understand,” Audubon shouts. His face has purpled. His hands are drawn up, his long fingers curled into a fist. “In this matter, as in others, you are a virgin!”

Bayfield is aware of himself as straitlaced. He knows he suffers a lack of imagination. He is humbled by the quality of intimacy that Audubon gives to him, which he cannot return. He is prepared to listen to almost anything. But this is too much. He is most definitely not a virgin.

“Be careful what you say.”

“You see, I am right,” taunts Audubon.

Bayfield has eaten better and drunk more than he has in weeks. Perhaps he is inebriated. Or coming down with Bowen’s cold. His men are threatening mutiny. The tilting rocks give him vertigo. He feels light-headed. His discipline fails him. He moves into the chest of the taller man, takes his arm and twists it behind his back. Pins him over his knees. Force-marches him to a four-foot boulder. He pushes the artist back against it, and then stands over him, one foot propped on his chest.

“Take that word back.”

Audubon’s chest heaves. He waves a hand in front of his face to dispel smoke, flies. “What word?”

“You know the word I mean.”

Bayfield puts a little pressure on the artist’s chest. He does not know why he does this. He does not know where his outrage comes from. He does not understand why in this moment it is crucial to him that the artist retract. He does know that, in the real world, so many hundreds of miles of fog and rock away, none of this matters. No one will hear of it.

“Take back that offensive word.”

“I do not see why it offends you.”

“Don’t ask questions. Do as I say.”

“You fear the word ‘virgin’?” Audubon says, carefully, laughingly. Bayfield lessens the pressure of his foot and then almost stomps on Audubon’s chest again.

Audubon rolls away, leaps to his feet and seizes the captain’s forearms. But Bayfield easily throws him off, turns, reaches around and has him in a headlock. The sailors stand back in the gloaming, as if they are not listening. Johnny starts forward as if to intervene but his father signals him away.

Audubon, no longer laughing, takes the navy sleeve with its three white stripes between his teeth. He spits it out, gagging.

“If you let me breathe I will find another word for what I mean.”

There is a slight release of pressure. Audubon draws breath.

“You are not — dirtied.”

“By what?”

“By what dirties the rest of us. And you don’t even see it. That is your difficulty. What was that about the tenth transmitter?”

“I have no idea what you are talking about,” says Bayfield. But he loosens his grip.

“You have your king. You are high born. The yoke is not on you.”

Bayfield drops his hold and walks away. He stands ten feet off, his arms behind his back. “What yoke?” he says.

“The yoke of man. The harness that makes a man an ox.”

Bayfield is charged with what? Being different than others, more free, above it, somehow, less human. He does not like it. It seems to him unfair. He moves farther, drawing Audubon after him, away from the other men. He lowers his voice.

He makes a confession he has never made before. It is easier than he would have imagined.

“I have a yoke. It weighs on me every day. My yoke is fear.”

“Fear?” Audubon is contemptuous.

“Not of pain, or death, not anything like that. My fear is … I fear that — I cannot find my way through this frenzy of rock and water. I cannot make a perfect chart. It would take me a dozen summers. And in those seasons more ships will go aground. More lives will be lost. My men will strike against me, as they nearly have done already.”

He loosens his hands and lifts them in a gesture almost of supplication, then drops them.

“And even if I do produce the absolutely correct chart, no sea captain can read it. In the fog, no one can tell one island from the next. I will not turn in a sham chart as my predecessors have done. But I must be reasonable although it wounds my pride. I will tell the Admiralty it is impossible. That is the heart of it, I fear the negation of all my efforts.”

“
Impossible
,” says Audubon in French. It is a word he discussed with Nolte, those many years ago, in the inn in the Allegheny range. “‘The word impossible is not in my vocabulary.’ Napoleon said that.”

“Nor has it been in mine,” says Bayfield. “But I fear it may be about to enter.” He looks to the east at the maze of islands.

“It is a word to dream but not to say.”

“Will it be my secret then, that I fear I cannot succeed?”

“If it is your secret, you have told me, and we are even.”

“I may be forced to give up.”

“I cannot believe it.”

“I may choose to give up.”

“Then I shall think you are a coward,” says Audubon pleasantly.

Bayfield is on him in a second. Easily, with the advantage of surprise, he forces the artist onto his back on the ground. He places his foot on his friend’s chest, heavily, again. Audubon goes completely still. Bayfield, too, freezes. Then he removes his foot and helps the artist to his feet.

“So behaves the Wild Turkey in mating season,” says Audubon, dusting himself off.

“Pardon me?”