Creation (32 page)

The second day the remaining birds are much more shy, as if they know they have endangered themselves. In the fog they fly swiftly, staying closely massed together and passing low over the rocks. Whenever the fog lifts they rise high and spin in the air as if for the simple joy of it, giving that single note like a soft whistle.

For three days the flocks continue to arrive. They cross the open water in a tight mass or sometimes in a broad line, and often simply scattered together. Although no hawks or predators follow them, they fly as if to avoid capture, darting ahead, turning back, twirling around and sometimes halting completely, suspended as they face the wind.

Pacing the shore in this whirl of wings, Audubon pictures the curlews as he will paint them. Their yellow, which recalls the sun they
long for. The male standing, legs apart, on a rock no taller than itself, tipped downward so that the whole of its brown and beige back, and the white stripe over its elliptical eye, are exposed. He will draw carefully each of the twelve even tail feathers and the four sharp toe-claws. It seems more important than ever before that he record, precisely, this bird.

But it is the soft white underside and throat of the female that tempts him. She is lying on the bare ground, her bed only a few sparse sprigs of yellowish moss. Her vulnerable white throat and soft rounded belly are in the centre of the picture. Her feet are folded, collapsed; her wing lies open on the rock like an empty palm. She is dead, or playing dead.

He has painted birds under attack or in throes of death from a predator. But never dead. Or playing dead. Not a bird lying on its side quite still. He never does it again. It was just that day, that bird, in Bras d’Or.

There is no visible enemy in the painting. The curlew offers herself to the painter, the viewer, her plump stomach glowing white and golden, her brown eye catching the light. The subtle marking of the feathers on the inside of the wings are so private, they speak of a terrible vulnerability.

This painted bird is docile, edible; she is a bird painted by another artist, not himself. Or by an Audubon who knows her fate, but does not want to know. Has learned but does not want to learn. Sees a future that he does not want to see.

This is not the way he paints birds. The curlew has come out of the wildness and into a man’s world and has become a thing.

A
BIRD IS
a vessel.

A vessel for what he knows. What he has learned from a lifetime of birds. A bird is an insight. A sight into the heart of man, the core where the heart ought to be. A bird is a site. A sighting.

J
OHNNY COMES
down to offer him dinner on a tin plate, so that he can eat at his table, since he will not leave it. “The curlew is delicious, Father. Everything they promised.”

Audubon is not hungry.

He does not want a fork and knife, but a scalpel and tweezers.

Audubon is not eating although the
Ripley
’s cook has distinguished himself with dozens and dozens of the birds. He is more interested in the purple carcass of the curlew he slaughtered, which he examines in his sombre quarters below deck. Everything of the bird is slender, the bill, the lovely neck, the body, the feet, the wings. The wing feathers are long and narrow as well, each next to the other a little shorter, making an even gradation. Only the tail, made of the twelve rounded feathers, is short. But the feathers are gone now.

There is only meat, and when the meat is pulled away, bone. The carcass is a contraption, bones without marrow, a cavity.

He is struck by the hopelessness of his measurements. He sees the pathos of his efforts to capture the bird. He begins slowly with his scalpel and tweezers to take apart the body of the bird, limb from limb, flesh from bone, organ from cavity.

This a bird: it comes apart this way.

Now he does not want a scalpel and tweezers but a pen and paper. He writes a letter to Maria, a letter he will leave with one of the ships in the harbour here, at Bras d’Or.

Dear Maria,

I have seen much on my journey and made some portraits which, God willing, you may enjoy.

This is a journey I did not wish to make. I did not wish to leave you.

I confess, I am weary. Weary of cold and wet, weary too of seeing. Seeing, for me, has always led to pleasure, but here, now, pleasure does not come, only an immense dread.

I wish I could see you. No, not see you. My eyes are protesting. Hold you. Like a blind man, against my person.

A bird is not really a bird. A bird is an elaborate costume, a disguise for a spirit. Each bird is the object of my passion, in a new disguise.

You are all my birds.

He did not write these words.

Or at least we do not know that he did. He may have done, but we do not know. If he did, the letter is gone. Saved, perhaps for years, by Maria. Collected on her death or before by Audubon’s zealous, censorious granddaughter. Lost in the Civil War, or burned, or soaked in a flood of tears, or vinegar. This is what happens to letters, especially those with secrets in them.

Time is a vessel. The past is the stories we fill it with.

He did write to Maria: “Please paint a loblolly bay, and a sprig of leaf and flower of the franklinia. I have almost never seen it in the wild but I know it is in your garden on Rutledge Avenue. Please paint the sweetgum. And send your paintings to Victor in London who will know what to do with them.”

He did write, and this letter did survive, somehow, the natural disasters and the protectors of reputation and of feelings.

“Dear sweetheart. You are as dear to me as my wife …”

H
E IMAGINES
he is painting Maria. He enumerates areas of desire: fingers, the tips and the inside pleat between them; collarbone, raised like a yoke from her tiny frame; shoulder, the way a sleeve or a strap can be pushed sideways off it, nudged along, giving an air of willingness, a promise; haunch with the hollow around the hip bone, top of thigh with indent of muscle (never seen but imagined). Further imagined, the ribs rising out of flesh, and the hollow beneath; the exquisite soft cloud of breasts floating over the rib cage.

T
HE CURLEW
is difficult to paint. Its colours are within the scope of his palette, but the birds’ disposition eludes him. They fly as if before a storm. They have an anxiety about them. Turn in the air, alternate between timidity and indifference, mass in numbers like an army looking for a leader. The urge to return to the south is strong in them and they have a long way to go. But human predators wait at the other end, too, in the Argentine pampas.

It is the fog that keeps the birds here. He understands this, as he walks along the shore path through the moss, worn thin where people
have walked before. It surprises him to see the footprints making an impression on this seemingly impervious land. On this wilderness. Yet it does not surprise him, either, because the day seems as old as time and the watch for the coming flocks as old as man.

On the fourth day at last the fog is gone; it is clear, and sunny. The birds are off. He is glad for them.

CAPTIVE

I
n the garden of the house on Rutledge Avenue, Maria watched a white peacock butterfly. It rested on the branch of the trumpet-creeper.

The thorax of the white peacock butterfly was black and shaped like the long nib of a pen. Its wings were pure white, webbed with delicate red lines, and nearly transparent. There were three black dots on each side of its segmented wings; the outside edge of the wings was trimmed like a child’s bonnet with a ribbon of gold.

Sometimes it raised both wings straight up. When it did this Maria drew on the figure on the right of her paper. Every few moments it flattened its wings to the horizontal, raised and flattened them several times. When its wings were flattened she worked on the figure on the left of her paper. When the butterfly flew off she waited for it to return.

“Do you see how I work?” she said to Audubon. “The butterfly is not pinned, not tacked to a corkboard. I do not kill.”

“You have no need.”

“What do you know about my needs?” she said. “You take everything you want.”

He watched her. She was restrained, still, alert. Her fingers were quick without ever showing a need. “Bachman writes that you are unhappy with your butterflies. I am astonished, Maria. You have been so eager to help. And so clever.”

“But I do not like captivity.” She raised her head and spread her hands in her lap, leaving her brush beside the paper. “Can’t you see?”

He looked. The garden was in full bloom. Beyond the palings of the fence was the poultry yard. The chickens pecked in the dirt; the roosters strutted amongst them. The bees buzzed around their tall papery hives. There was a bear, as well, that Bachman had got somewhere in the wild and was raising in a cage. Its rank smell did not disturb the painter; he had often used bear grease to control his hair, although the English ladies chided him for it.

Here was the terrible alligator, also penned. And here the clearing on the ground where Audubon tested his theory about the turkey buzzards, that they came to their feed by sight and not by smell. He had made a large oil painting of a sheep lying on its side, cut open with its entrails spilling out. Beside it they put a little wheelbarrow filled with offal. They laid the painting on the ground. The buzzards came quickly. They spotted the painting from the air and flew down, alighted, and pecked at it, to be disappointed. Ten or fifteen feet away sat the wheelbarrow with what they really wanted, stinking dreadfully, but the buzzards did not see it. He had proved his point.

“What do you see?”

“A garden in the nature of a laboratory. Domesticated creatures. The bears, the alligators, the bees. And myself in it.”

“I cannot for the life of me think what you mean.”

Yet he could see. He himself has come to hate tamed birds. On the
Ripley
they pursue him; the tamed birds of his past haunt him.

The garden creatures all belonged to the Reverend Mr. Bachman with his white starched tongues for a collar, which hung down his chest. His friend, the man with the satisfied generous smile of a life lived beyond reproach and eyes that were a fair day’s blue, a blameless blue. The hives were in the vegetable garden, which was beyond the poultry yard, along the western fence. No one went near, for fear of being stung. But Bachman could roll up his sleeves, his blameless sleeves, and put his arms right inside to draw out the honey. The bees recognized something in him: authority? entitlement? godliness?

“But these creatures are not useless,” said Audubon. “They are here for our assistance.”

“Exactly. They are not natural. The bear and the alligator are designed to kill, not to assist. Not to be studied. The bees to sting, not to make their honey for you. Why must I be here?”

“You are a woman.” In truth, he did not like to see Maria here, not any more. Yet he could not take her away.

C
APTAIN BAYFIELD
spoke in Audubon’s mind. Behind him was his convenient God.
Subdue
.
Have dominion over
. Audubon would hotly refute this presumption made on nature by gods and man. But a woman is a woman. He was hurt, as by any suggestion that Maria might find fault with him. The butterfly rose from its perch and floated nearly weightless on a current of air.

“I thought you wished to help me.”

“I am angry at you, Jean Jacques.” She spoke in French. The language of his childhood disturbed him then.

“But how have I offended? By teaching you? I put up the Bittern for you to paint, that dawn when I left.”

“I copied the Snowy Egret as well, and you were cross.”

“I did not ask you to do that.”

“You want to keep me in a cage.”

“Maria. What I want of you goes unspoken, always.”

“It is not what I want for myself,” she said.

“Then I am mistaken. And I am sorry.” He walked away, to calm himself. She spoke to him then; she had taken up her brush.

“You don’t understand. I am an artist.”

He turned on her. All his wildness is now decorum.

T
IME SLIPPED AGAIN
.

“Do I disturb you?” says Captain Bayfield, descending into the hold.

“No,” lies Audubon, in the way of all artists who are disturbed.

A
UDUBON BECOMES
all wiliness and craft. Careful, balanced, a fencer. He would not be out of place in parliament.

“An artist, are you?” he mocked. “Can this be a state of which I lack understanding? No, Maria. You are talented. But there is talent and
then there is genius. There is obsession. They don’t occur in your sex. Look at the birds. The female is more docile. She tends the nest.”

“And the barren female?” Maria said it harshly.

“The barren females group together. They might be found with the immature males. Sometimes if a mate is lost, one of the males will —” he stopped because she was crying.

She set down her brush. Her drawing fluttered off her lap; the butterfly rose in alarm and was gone.

“Can you imagine that I am content making little insects which you will fit into the white spaces in your paintings? Can you delude yourself into thinking it is enough for me? I too wish to be out in the world. I would tramp the woodland paths and ride ponies to the frontier. I would take the revenue cutter up the rivers to the swamps.”

“Maria, I repeat, with the greatest respect, you are a woman.”

“Yet not fully a woman.”

She came forward to him. She stretched to her full negligible height and put her arms in a soft coil around his neck. He twisted his face aside, and the warmth of her breath floated into the hollow of his neck. “Not now, Maria,” he said. The back of the house loomed over them. There was a verandah on each of three floors; servants, children walked along them. Three tiers of audience. They stepped across the path, under the large leaves of the philodendron. She turned her tiny pointed face this way and that until she was nose to nose with him. He bent over her sweet breath, her downy cheek.