Creation (3 page)

H
e scans the northern horizon until he sees it: the rock with its flat projecting shelves, the sea stack beside it, all white. The air is so cold he assumes that the rock is covered with snow.

“No,” says Godwin, the pilot. “That’s birds. Like I told you.”

He rubs his temples and looks again. The air over the rock seems to dim and the light to fade although it is midday. His eyes are failing. It is a fear, chief among many. He raises a fist and rubs one eye with it, like a boy.

He takes out his spyglass. The massive rock is crawling, heaving, white with birds. Thickly covered and veiled by multitudes, the rock is a living stone thrust up out of water to meet a cloud all its own.

He has seen multitudes before. Twenty years ago, he witnessed the flight of one billion passenger pigeons eclipse the sun for three full days. At New Orleans he watched while in a matter of hours two hundred market hunters shot fifty thousand migrating golden plovers. Multitudes, yet here are more.

He cries out. “Birds, birds. So many I cannot tell it. So many it is not to be believed!”

He has come with foreboding in his heart, parted from his wife with premonitions that he might never again clasp her to his chest. He hates the sea. In all his crossings, and there have been many, he has despised the tossing, the sickening depths, and the weight of deadly water, the transit over its uncertain surface. He would prefer flight, but men cannot fly.

“Wind’s picking up fierce,” says Godwin. It shakes the mast.

They are within a quarter-mile of the rocks. He sees them clearly now, through his spyglass. The two rocks are red sandstone, worn by waves to the smoothness of a fortress wall, rising straight up from the sea. The higher one is perhaps 150 feet, and the lower a little less; a line of breakers shows only a narrow passage in which to approach them.

He can see that the greyness of the air is caused by a torrent of birds, flying in a magnificent airborne mantle that stretches and thins, shrinks and darkens at will, as the birds which compose its every thread move through the air. It flutters as if blown alternately from above and below, so that here in this corner it shoots skyward and there it falls as if to drape the rock, and then divides in the centre, wafting low over the water. The birds are white with black pinions.

“Gannets!” He shouts again from sheer joy and skids across the deck for a better look. It is true, then. Birds in uncountable numbers are here. The perilous journey he is undertaking, where no one has ever come before to see the birds, will be worthwhile.

Lucy will see, if she ever doubted it, how right she was to support his dream. Lucy. He loves her so much when he is apart from her.

A
FEW HUNDRED YARDS OFF THE ROCKS,
gannets pinwheel overhead. The sky blackens further, the wind tosses the water up into spray, and the
Ripley
pitches sickeningly. He grips the mast, hangs on, rides as if he can tame the water. He and the young gentlemen stagger on the pitching deck as they step into their fishermen’s boots, the soles of which are studded with nails so they can stand on seaweed-covered rocks.

“I can’t land her,” shouts Godwin into the tearing wind. “Can’t even get close!”

“But you must! We’ve come all this way.”

“Can’t be done.”

The pilot is a simple man; he attempts a simple command. “Land her! It is
imbécile
to be here and not land.”

Godwin jerks his head at Captain Emery. “I can’t put her in.”

Emery, hired with his schooner, tugs first the right, then the left branch of his moustache. He is caught between two stubborn men. He does not wish to disappoint the painter. But he can’t risk the ship.

“That pilot is an ignorant oaf,” shouts the bird fancier, into the wind and so that his words are carried away from Godwin.

“I can go, Father,” says John Woodhouse. “Tom Lincoln and I will do it. Let us go out in the whaleboat.”

Johnny. The wild one. The one who he is meant to tame. Johnny and Tom are the strongest of the young gentlemen he has brought along to help him, his son and the sons of his friends Shattuck, Ingalls and Lincoln.

“We can.”

Let him
.

W
ITH THE WIND TEARING
at the canvas, the
Ripley
furls her sails and lays to. Four sailors put down the little whaleboat. With Johnny and Tom they row around the northern point of the first Bird Rock in the driving rain, their boat heaving up, then nosing down on the crests of seawater. They disappear. Now the artist stands in the centre of the squall, braced on deck with his rain-spattered spyglass. Between sheets of rain, he can see the gannet nursery: the tall nests run north and south in rows, as straight as if they had been planted. He can imagine the eggs, one in each hollow, carefully guarded. He is bitterly disappointed not to be in the landing party, but to have his son there is almost as good.

“Have they landed?”

“They’ll not land. Nobody lands here,” says Godwin. “Not in weather like this. Nobody excepting the Eggers. And they’re desperate men. Them you wouldn’t want to see.”

“Wouldn’t I?” he says, talking to pass the time.

Godwin, stocky and taciturn, horks and spits before turning his head to give his employer a sour grin.

The artist is beginning to suspect he will dislike this pilot; two weeks’ acquaintance has not given him warm feelings.

They stand, as the deck rises and drops beneath them, adjusting their weight and balance without remarking that they do so, watching for a sign of the little whaleboat at the foot of the Rocks. Watching for human figures on its steep red bird-spattered sides.

An hour passes. The man who came to see the birds stands on, now by himself, now with the pilot near him. The sky goes blacker and the sea becomes wilder. No young gentlemen appear on the rock. No whaleboat returns. His heart throbs in the base of his throat. His eyes burn. Feeling like an old man although an hour ago he felt in the bloom of youth — but that is what it is to be forty-eight — he stands sentinel with his glass until at last, as if he has willed it, the little boat appears around the point of the rock. The four sailors heave their weight back against the oars. They can barely move the barque through the water. John Woodhouse leans on a long oar at the front, with Tom Lincoln bailing and losing against
the surf that flies over the gunwales. They are visible and then, in an instant, erased.

His son might be lost. Might, right before his eyes, be swept into the furious cold water to his death, so far from home. Might leave him to desolation and no doubt the failure of his life’s work, along with the outrage of his wife. He and Lucy have lost two daughters already, a loss which has somehow been his fault, if only because he failed to make a good life for them.

The whaleboat makes progress, pulling ahead by what looks to him to be mere inches, while the wind and water thrust it back. After what must be an hour they are near enough. Godwin throws down a rope; the whaleboat is drawn in and up. Gasping for breath, faces whipped half white, half red, John and Tom clamber on board, with full baskets and a burlap bag that heaves and squawks.

B
ELOW DECKS,
wrapped in rugs, Tom and John drink tea. Young John cups his hands around his steaming mug. Sweat drips off his forehead while his teeth chatter with cold. The father, worn out with the fear of losing him, watches his son warily. A man of twenty-one, Johnny has inherited his olive skin, brown eyes and chestnut hair from his father, but his stalwart courage must come from Lucy, that slightly-mad composure of the British under duress. He has enjoyed the risk, this wild one, this whippet. Johnny, who runs through the bogs, climbs the cliffs, captures the specimens, skins them. He shoots with a perfect aim, like his father. He is becoming an excellent painter. He sees the thing itself, sees through the surface.

“Tell me, son. I can see it as you speak.”

Johnny gives his witness, while Tom is silent, nodding. “Father, they plummet from one hundred feet above your head. When they hit the water they’re like cannonballs. Dropping all around the boat as you approach.

“As you come closer you smell them. You want to do anything but breathe it in, even in the sea wind. And there is an immense, rhythmic squawking filling the sky. There are birds moving everywhere your eye lights; it’s like an army massing. The nests are orderly
in themselves. But the birds are raucous! We saw pairs together, one bird sitting on the nest, the other defending. They squawk and squabble and sometimes one takes to the air, only to return in half a minute. We would have fallen over laughing if we hadn’t been so busy trying to stay upright.

“There is only one way to climb up but Tom and I found it. The birds occupy the rock in a hierarchy — lowest down are the guillemots, then the razorbills, and higher still the kittiwakes. The gannets are on top, the kings, and they lord it over the others, making such a din. We made our way almost to them. They are comical as they begin to worry — they jab their bills at the others’ head; sometimes two will lock bills and each try to push the other off the edge. But they’re also loving. They seem constantly to know where their mate is. I saw, when the one bird is sitting on the nest, and the other of the pair in the air, the sitting bird pointing skyward with her bill to call him back down.”

“Aaaah,” says his father. “Yes.”

“The sailors were hollering for us to get back before the boat smashed on the rocks. I shot two pairs, both mature and young. On top of that we got half a dozen of the birds alive.”

“You’re a good boy,” says his father. “And a great help to me.”

“Look,” says Johnny, reaching under the blanket into his pocket. “I brought you an egg too.”

B
Y NIGHTFALL THE SQUALL
is behind them and
Ripley
is on its way to the north shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Labrador. The artist takes a turn on the deck, wrapping his buffalo robe around his shoulders to warm him as if it were love. He cups the gannet egg in his right hand. He turns the egg and taps the shell lightly with the tip of his forefinger, then places it against his cheek. He adores its oval smoothness, its weight, its hardness; above all, the way it takes warmth from his hand, and the sense he has that life is forming inside it.

The
Ripley
hides in the small bay of an island, beyond the reach of the surging water, inside a set of shoals. The sky is vast, reaching around the schooner in all directions, cradling it in its cold arm. The
wind is foul, the fog malicious, the rocks studded beneath the waves like waiting tombstones. Clouds obscure the moon. And yet the night is white, somehow, padded, even benign. The nests are out there, the eggs tucked inside, emitting their strange light, visible perhaps only to him. There are millions and millions of laying birds, countless eggs — oval and marbled, or pure white dotted with red, eggs hidden on sea stacks, cliffs, in crevices and reeds of this immense nesting ground — a veritable Milky Way of egg-light.

He holds his gift from Johnny tighter, encircling it with his fingers. He wishes on it. That they all should return safely. That he should complete his master work. He has been a failure at everything else.

He fears, always, the bailiff who pursues him, the critics who have set out to ruin him and even the crowds who hail him, for it is them, more than anyone else, he has fooled. He fears losing his wits. Perhaps because he has lived so hard by them he senses their revenge coming on. He fears the loss of his eyesight. The loss of the strength in his legs. He prays to the god he scarcely believes in that his wits, his vision and his legs last a little longer. He has nothing else to lose, nothing of value in this world, save Lucy and the boys. He must finish.

He wishes that the Work will bring him wealth enough to provide for his family, and the respect of all those who have scorned him. Wishes that he, John James Audubon, will be known as the greatest living bird artist.

I
T IS A SIMPLE THING, A NAME.
We are given one, we grow into it, we bear it. Simple for the rest of creation, but not for him. He gives a name to each new bird he finds, but he hasn’t one of his own, not a true name.

He has, instead, many names. Jean Rabin. Monsieur Newhouse. Jean Jacques. Fougère. John James.

To have many names is in fact to have none.

To seek a home is to be adrift.

To attempt great things is to be ridiculed.

To love one’s country is to invite contempt.

A raucous voice rises,
crack, crack
, from the corner of the deck. It is the young raven he picked up in the Magdalen Islands. He has clipped its wings and decided that he will teach it to talk; ravens are said to have powers of divination. He has called the bird Anonyme after a French cousin he dislikes, but in fact he has begun to enjoy its company.

“Anonyme,” he says. “Join me.”

The bird, barely fledged, does not move. Audubon finds a seat on a barrel and takes the bird on his wrist. It is surprisingly heavy. The claws are long and hard as glass and threaten to puncture his skin. He strokes the raven’s head. This tender act quiets the bird, as it quiets the man. He pictures the nesting gannet stretching her neck to call down her mate from the sky. They are loving to their mates, Johnny said. They caress each other’s napes. It is strange that a tale of nesting birds can make him lonely.

The sailors are teaching the young gentlemen a shanty, the words floating back to him from the forecastle. Johnny’s voice, braver and sweeter, rises above the others.

One night as we were sailing, we were off land a way

I never shall forget it until my dying day —

It was in our grand dog watches I felt a chilly dread

Come over me as though I heard one calling from the dead
.

Godwin issues forth from a shadow, smoking. The pilot is a Newfoundlander. This had seemed a good thing back in Maine; the
Ripley
would be piloted by a man who knew the waters. Now Audubon is not so certain.