Creation (29 page)

“The cock will attack and kill his rival. Yet the moment the vanquished is dead the conqueror treads it underfoot with all the movements usually employed to caress a female.”

Bayfield has no more words.

HOPE

I
t is much later. A front of drier air has blown through. Two men — Godwin and Collins — stand around the fire in the long pale night holding their clothes to the flame in hopes of reducing the damp. A full moon like a cool blue sun hovers above the horizon.

Johnny is stretched out on the rocks, where a suspicion of warmth lingers. His eyes are closed. Audubon and the captain talk on. They have covered many subjects, the Church of England, and the hatching of eggs by steam. Their voices rise again.

“We kill too much, Captain Bayfield. We kill for sport. Do you never fear, Captain, that we are destroying nature?”

“There is so much of it you cannot make a dint.”

Audubon seems not to hear. “We do make a ‘dint.’ We are trapped into doing so by the circumstances of our lives. Do you see? I, above all. I set myself to make this Work; I set my wife and children and my friends to aid me. The wheels are in motion. I must find the birds. The book must be printed to satisfy the subscribers. The printer must be paid, the dues — the ‘Trash,’ I call it — collected. It is not only my art, but my means of survival. The birds — the wilderness — are at my mercy.”

“You see yourself as very powerful in this enormous wild,” soothes Bayfield.

“I have seen the Eggers. I cannot forget the spectacle. They have no right to be here,” says Audubon. He points his long finger at Bayfield. “Do you see what you do with your maps? Bring all manner of ruffians and murderers to these shores.”

Bayfield smiles. “Piracy was never started, nor will it be ended, by Navy charts.”

“You and your government are wrong!”

The insult brings Johnny to a sitting position. “Father. The captain is not wrong. Just not of your view. You know how a man hates to be called wrong.”

“If my government is wrong, then I am wrong, my friend, if I may call you that,” says Bayfield.

“You are my friend. Yet, though your mission lives as strongly in you as my own in me, if you failed I would rejoice!” Audubon is so agitated that he steps away, swinging his arms.

Johnny stands. “Captain Bayfield, forgive my father. He is frustrated.”

But Bayfield appears unruffled. “Imagine that from my charts will come more ships. Not the thieves you describe, but trading vessels, shiploads of immigrants seeking a better life.”

“You would see this shore settled?” Audubon speaks out of the darkness, incredulous.

Godwin interjects. “These settlers must come from a bad place indeed to prefer this.”

“Aye,” says Collins in his gentle way. “There are such places, made ill by man, not by God.”

“You would see this shore settled?” repeats Audubon. “Where will I go then, and visit nature undisturbed?”

“Is that what you expect then, that Labrador’s curtains of fog should close at your back, and no man follow you here?”

“Why would any man want to?” That was Bowen.

Collins speaks in the weak firelight. “I could make a little cabin here and bring my bride. Put potatoes in the sand. They’ll grow. A happier life I cannot hope for.”

Bayfield tries another tack. “Man has ventured out since time began. He will not stay home for lack of instructions. Are you happy to hit a rock or lose your way at sea? The number of shipwrecks is increasing and with it a terrible toll in human life. You speak of your dark vision. I wonder if you have seen the darkest of it.”

It is a question that does not want an answer. There is silence, and Bayfield continues. “I know you love the birds, Mr. Audubon. It is most passionately your cause and I commend you for that. But, with all due respect, I must tell you I have seen worse than Eggers.”

He throws this challenge across the glowering coals. Audubon is silent, staring into the fire.

“May I counter your testimony with a story of my own? A harrowing story which may explain what moves me onward on what you call a worthless task.

“It was four years ago on the island of Anticosti. Lieutenant Bowen was with me.”

Bowen’s low cough punctuates the telling.

“We arrived at Fox Bay and heard from the local people of the ill fate of the
Granicus
. She sailed from Quebec on the 29 October, the previous winter, bound for Cork. Have you heard of the ship? It had disappeared and until that moment had gone unaccounted for.”

“Aye,” says Collins. “Taking the poor Irish settlers who’d failed in America back to starve at home.”

“It is a tragic and not uncommon story: in November of that year, the
Granicus
struck on the reef off the south point of Fox Bay. The crew got her off the reef but she ran ashore on East Point. The crew pulled down the sails and built tents, taking shelter within the canvas walls and keeping themselves alive upon what supplies they saved from the wreck. In those supplies was not only the food they needed, but also rum. The rum, I believe, made them reckless and brutal. Early in March, when there were no more provisions to be had from the
Granicus
, they went in a boat to Fox Bay. They had lasted nearly five months, but they could last no longer.

“It was, of course, still winter. There were six weeks to run until the season might begin and a vessel appear. The post was not supplied, and there were no inhabitants. The survivors — seventeen men, two women and three children — found shelter, in the house of a Monsieur Godin that stood next to the harbour.

“Came a day in April when some fishermen sailed in. They saw that the building had a strange and forbidding air. There were signs of
human habitation yet it was utterly silent, and, as they drew near the wooden walls, the most horrible odour rose to their nostrils, such that they were afraid to enter.

“They stood, undecided, a hundred feet away, turning their faces to the wind and muttering amongst themselves. They were decent men, accustomed to shipwreck and its horrors, who knew what must be inside. The stench of rotting human flesh is not soon forgotten, and there had been other disasters. But there was one man, braver or more decent or perhaps simply possessing less imagination than the rest, who said, We must go in.

“And so, holding his cap to his face, he opened the door of the house, and stepped across the threshold into a scene of unmatched horror. There were piles of putrid bodies on the floors and the wooden couches, dead but not entirely dissolved. It was still cold, you see. They were intact enough so that one could see not simply the ravages of death but the depredations made on the bodies by the living. It appeared that when a body passed on, the living feasted on the starveling flesh.

“This much was clear to our honourable fisherman. He was frightened almost out of his wits by the ungodly scene. He turned and ran.”

Audubon is still standing away from the fire, his back a streak in the moonlight. Collins cannot be still. He makes to leave the circle and then returns. Johnny paces along a crack in a rock and back, like a cat on a chain. Only Godwin appears unmoved by the tale. No doubt he has heard — or seen — its like.

“You may have guessed, it was on this very April day that we sailed into the harbour, about to begin our surveying for the year. The fishermen, quite overwhelmed, called us to investigate.”

Bayfield speaks softly but no one misses a word.

“Of all God’s cruelty I had not seen anything the like of this. I entered knowing what was within but nothing could have prepared me. I kept on walking through the building only because I knew I must. Clearly, murderous violence had accompanied starvation. The walls and windows had been battered and broken and were splashed with
blood. The sleeping platforms and blankets were soaked and dried with gore, and the ragged, filthy clothing was ripped, stabbed, soiled and bloodied from every possible assault. There was a pinafore that must have belonged to a girl of perhaps ten. It was on sight of this that my heart failed me; I bent over, and felt my knees begin to go.”

The cough sounds again, close at hand. Bowen has risen during the tale. He walks around the fire to stand at the captain’s side. He challenges Audubon with a stony gaze.

“Mr. Bowen here —” Bayfield puts a hand on his assistant’s shoulder, then lifts it “— came behind to lift me and we walked together through this ghastly graveyard. I am not ashamed to say we both sobbed aloud. We saw a pot in the fireplace with a human forearm in it.”

Bowen’s gaze has lifted over the hills; it is as if he sees into the past and is walking still through that room.

“I did not know how to understand it. How to make my mind accept what I saw. Can you imagine? In the end I saw it this way. Life had broken the human of his civilization and the animal was all that remained. I tried to think we saw only animal corpses, that these men’s spirits had fled their bodies long before breath itself had fled.”

“You slander the creatures. Animals do not behave this way,” protests Audubon.

Bayfield accepts with a nod. “I know you venerate the beasts. You may tell me about that another day on this coast. You may tell me we are the true savages. I say this: when I saw it, I was ashamed to be human.”

“Then we can be agreed.”

“But I am not finished my tale. Pointless murder of creatures is wrong. But more wrong is the murder of humans.”

“What is wrong cannot be ‘more wrong,’” counters Audubon.

“I think it can. Our suffering is greater than that of the beasts.”

“How do you know?”

“For a simple reason which I shall give you. We are more than beasts. We hope. There was in that scene of carnage a sight even more difficult to bear. Shall I tell you?”

Bayfield fills his chest with a steadying breath and turns his blue serge back a moment, then faces the men again.

“One of these ravaged and ravaging corpses, when it had been human, had made a pattern on the wall in chalk. He or she had written the numbers one to thirty-one, in a square, seven numbers to a row, four and a half rows of numbers. It is a pattern we recognize. A calendar. This degraded, starving, cannibalized or cannibalizing half-corpse had struck out each number in sequence. Do you understand?”

Godwin pulls out a plug of tobacco. No one else moves.

“He was counting. Counting! Counting the days! Do you know what that means? It means hope.

“I saw the calendar on the wall. Its delicacy, its order, the care with which it had been maintained in the chaos all around. Numbers in straight rows. Diagonal lines through them, one after another. A drawing. A chart if you like. A man, a woman or perhaps the owner of that pinafore, a child, created it. Did she see daybreak and sunset? In her stupor of hunger and terror perhaps she only waked to strike the number; perhaps the act itself was all that kept her alive. And then even hope could not keep her alive any longer.”

Bowen stands with his hands joined at the small of his back, as if he is in irons. Godwin, jaw set, glares at the horizon.

“It was by my count only ten days between the last strikeout and our arrival.”

He stops. There is a respectful pause.

“It is a terrible story,” says Audubon. The men can hear his unspoken “but.”

“Shall I tell you more? We walked through the back door and saw another, smaller building perhaps ten feet away. And we were drawn to it. I
knew
. I am responsible for those in my command. I knew that he would be there, the monster whose creation this was. He who had commanded this disaster.

“And he was.

“He was a huge man, still muscled, with more flesh on him than any of the others: he had consumed more than his share of provisions no doubt. He had been neither wounded nor mutilated and so we
assumed he was the last to die. God knows what we would have done to him had we found him alive: I expect I’d have had him shot through the head.

“He lay quite still, as if he had died in his bed at home. Around the small enclosure where they found him were hanging from the ceiling, like the four posters of a bed, the bodies of four of his fellows. He had to have killed them, or else watched them die and lived on simply because he was larger than they and no doubt more evil, and had then hung their bodies up for safe-keeping.”

Bayfield’s voice is lower now. Audubon strains to hear, and then realizes that the tale has ended.

The five men stand a few minutes longer. Emery steps forward, from where he has been listening, unseen, in the darkness. Bayfield heaves an enormous sigh and grips his tin mug more tightly. He drains it. He lifts it in his fist to the sky and gently lets his hand drop to his thigh, the mug upside down.

“Gentlemen?” he asks. “Is it time to retire?”

“I am puzzled as to why the calendar was the worst to you,” says Audubon.

“They were marking off the days until rescue came. And it did not. We failed them.”

“Ah,” says Audubon bitterly. “This was your failure, is it? God had put you in charge, had he, since you are English? Could it be that, simply, life for them was set to end this way? That the monster no more commanded this disaster than did the little girl whose pinafore you saw? That man is not in charge of his own nature, or of the elements?”

But there is nothing to be said in favour of death by shipwreck, starvation and cannibalism. Bayfield has won the argument. Bowen says goodnight stiffly. Audubon watches him disappear into the tent. Godwin fades off to where he sleeps in the whaleboat.

But neither Bayfield nor Audubon moves. They stare off, Audubon, to the fire, Bayfield to the sky, where the aurora now is brilliant and huge.

“Tomorrow we part company,” says Bayfield, and if he were not a captain of the Royal Navy, there would have been sadness in his voice.
“We shall turn back to the
Gulnare
, and you will go onward, north to the Straits.”

“We have been fortunate to have your help and company on this journey,” Audubon says.

“It is we who have been fortunate,” says Bayfield, offering his hand. “Though our missions are opposed, we have had much to gain in each other’s company.”