Creation (38 page)

“Are you the famous artist, then?” she says.

“I’m forced to admit to it.”

She stares at him. “You are looking for more birds? I saw you go up the hill.”

“I am. You did.”

“You are painting our birds, then, for the people across the sea?”

“That is indeed what I am doing. Do I have your permission?” He asks, head cocked sideways to tease.

“You didn’t ask it, did you, before you began? I think it’s too late now,” she says seriously and goes on her way.

L
ACK OF WIND
keeps them in the harbour for a second day, which is, it so happens, the day of the Fisherman’s Ball. He finds and shoots a magnificent frigatebird, knowing it by the red patch under its bill, which it blows to a fine red balloon when it is displaying. The bird has no business in these parts and he concludes it is very lost. The girl is on his heels again as he returns to the path.

“What’s that bird, then? I never saw one near here,” she says. “Did you bring it with you?”

“No, my dear,” he says. “It is an exotic, an accidental bird driven by a hurricane into your cove.”

“We gets a lot like that,” she says.

He laughs. “I am one too.” He points his toe as if to show a fine leg, in his hairy fisherman’s trousers. A flirt. She wrinkles her nose to show that she is not impressed.

“We get the boats too, sometimes. The big storms to the south blows all manner of creatures our way.” She looks at him accusingly. “Tell me what else you can see when you go out to the Labrador in your schooner.”

“You can see the masts of a hundred ships and know that each hold is stuffed to the top with cod. You know that the ship will not leave these waters until it is near to sinking with fish drained from the sea.”

“I have seen that,” she said.

“I saw the Foolish Guillemots that you call ‘murres’ careen around the topsail so thickly that we heard them bounce off the canvas. I heard
the laughter and the singing of Italian fishermen in the long, pale night. Men who have chased down and dragged in the giant whales, slicing their bloody carcasses on the shore. White bears riding down from the north on ice floes.”

“You didn’t.”

He hangs his head and winks. “I didn’t. But I heard tell.” He lifts his head, brightening; his face glows with the thought of it. “I saw clouds of curlews arriving, it went on for days and days.”

“You did,” she allows.

“And a new sparrow that I named for my friend, Tom Lincoln. It is a near relation to the song sparrow but with finer markings on its breast and back. It was very shy, and had a song of great beauty and variety.”

“Did it not already have its name before you come along?”

“Maybe it did, now that I think on it,” he laughs. “I heard too the jingling tune of the Winter Wren. Like silver sleighbells,” he said. “And also the lovestruck warble of the Purple Finch. You must know it, all trills and deep flute-like notes.”

He saw the Horned Lark, its golden-speckled young on the wing, the adults sky-larking up in the sky. It pushed itself up in circles to six hundred feet until it was a tiny speck in the sky. It sang the whole while at first, but later only in bursts, stopping to flap its wings and get its breath.

“I saw the fogs reduce all to nothingness.”

“I sees that all the time,” she says.

“I saw the great Black-backed Gull feasting on the rotting flesh on the back of a whale’s carcass,” he says.

She shudders. “That’s disgusting.”

“Oh, and much more: the Caspian Tern, the Hudsonian Curlew, the Spotted Sandpiper that you call beachies. And I heard the guillemots streaming through the air, their voices in concert making a long-drawn wail, which might have been the baa-ing of newborn lambs.”

“Ah,” she says, “I have heard that too and not known how to describe it.”

“What puzzles me is how each one recognizes its own egg. What do you think? By smell? I don’t believe birds can smell a thing. I’ve
been having a big fight with other men about that,” he says, thinking of the Turkey Vulture and its prey. It sounds silly when he says it out loud.

“And here’s a story for you. I saw, on a calm day with the sea heavy from a storm the night before, a schooner nearly smash itself to pieces on the rocks. The men, thinking she was lost, jumped ashore. No sooner were they off her deck and out of reach than a gust of wind came along and their schooner sailed off smartly all on her own!”

“I don’t believe that story,” she says.

“I saw it with my own eyes. I thought it was an omen, that I might die there. But then the schooner was captured by a friendly vessel and brought back to her crew.”

“You’re pulling my leg for sure,” she said.

“On my honour I am not. It plays upon the senses, this land of yours, and over there too, the air and the water, the wild, the strange light.”

“Tell me more.”

“Do you know the Razor-billed Auk you call tinkers? They sit upright in solemn lines facing each other as if having a parliament, with their long tails and roman noses? When they’re courting they show red feet and a scarlet lining in their mouth. Oh, and here’s a thing. I wager you’ve never seen this — mysterious beaches hundreds of feet above the water, with beds of small round stones. What could they be?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “There must be some way to explain it.”

“I am not so certain,” says Audubon. “There may be no explanation. There are great jewels there and no one to say who owns them. The Ruby-crowned Kinglet. The Golden-eyed Ducks. The Lords and Ladies because of their fancy plumage. There is a place called La Tabatière, which means a snuff box in French but it really isn’t that, for the word comes from the Montagnais Indian and means sorcerer. In Bras d’Or lives a certain Mr. Jones with forty dogs.”

“Forty dogs?”

“Well, quite a few. Before you know it he’ll have a player piano too, for his wife. He is happy to have no society for hundreds of miles, free, as he said, from lawyers, and from taxes. His may be the greatest riches of all.”

“You’re a great talker, you are,” says the girl.

Then she steps aside and lets him pass.

A
LL DAY THE WOMEN
and children have been producing food — berry pies and high white buns and dishes made of cod and potato. The men stand on ladders, stringing ropes made of braided flowers from the rooflines. They hang the doorposts of the little houses and the posts of the fishing sheds with orange paper lanterns. The sun sets earlier now, by seven o’clock, in contrast to the long evenings of earlier in the summer. When darkness falls the lamps are lit and doorways stand open, girls in ruffled dresses lining the steps.

“There’s nothing but girls in St. George’s,” says Johnny. “The men are all dead or fishing.”

Sounds of fiddles being tuned come across the water to the
Ripley
; it is like the warmup to a play. The young gentlemen stand on deck with bowls of water warmed on the stove, shaving their beards. Johnny brings his father’s cleanest shirt.

“I must take myself to bed,” Audubon protests.

“No, you cannot, Father. You are the guest of honour. And you are wanted to play the tunes,” says Johnny.

“But I must write my notes before sleep. You play in my place.”

Johnny’s face is a mask. Play in my place. Paint in my place. Calm your mother, in my place. “Leave the notes for once,” he says, turning sharply on his heel. “We’ll be having a time.” He has picked up the Labrador term for a party.

Each fisherman’s salt-box house is made by himself and for himself. On the stoops the men sit tuning their fiddles while the boys tend fires to cook the fish. In the light of the whale-oil lamps, the women are ruddy and bold.

As Audubon walks on his stiff cold legs, carrying his flageolet in its cloth bag tucked in his waistcoat, his mind revisits the grand parties in England. The terrifying ladies in red turbans, the footmen with white wigs. The ancient gleaming tapestries and the towering silver candelabra. He remembers the Duc d’Orléans in France, himself arriving in his fur hat and smelling of bear grease to show he
was a frontiersman, only to encounter D’Orbigny’s son from Coueron to prove he was not. Past lives pursue him: he doesn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. The world is very large, but it has never been large enough.

It would hardly seem odd if tonight at this ball he found Charles Bonaparte, with his letters steeped in vinegar sent from plague-ridden Italy. Or Vincent Nolte himself, that imp of rebirth whose shadow has prefigured Audubon’s rising and falling for the past twenty years. He must not fall again. This is the real fear.

But there are only the girls, bursting from their dresses. They take drink as strong as that of the men. He looks for the ones with the beautiful calm faces and intelligent eyes. These girls can be found everywhere; it is one of the wonders of life.

As a consequence of the brew, the party grows boisterous. While Johnny and the others fiddle, the dancers form lines and circles and tap their feet with great cleverness while musicmakers sit and make an elaborate clatter with spoons. Tom Lincoln and Ingalls and Shattuck allow themselves to be led into steps they’ve never seen before, the closest thing being an Irish jig or an English reel.

And Audubon dreams with his flageolet against his lips. He has survived Labrador, it seems. Soon he will see Lucy again. And soon after that, Maria.

His girl from the hillside materializes.

“What are you wanting then, Mary,” someone jeers.

“This one. I want to dance with him.”

Audubon has not shaved for weeks. His woollen trousers are worn threadbare, patched, and worn again. His face is windburnt, his fingers stained and rough. Several of his last remaining teeth have disappeared this summer and he thinks, although he cannot be sure, that his eyes are clouded over with grey. They certainly feel it.

“On my behalf, my son would be delighted to dance with you,” he says, gesturing to Johnny.

“But it is you I am asking.”

“All right then,” he says. “I am charmed.” And he rises.

The young gentlemen cheer.

His shoulders go back, his chest up, and air fills the space under his ribcage. He towers over these little people. Up there near the rafters his head goes blank. He has no idea how to dance, suddenly. But the dancing master’s legs do not fail him and his feet find the patterns of their own accord. The muscles recall what the brain lets go. He sees Godwin prowling the edges of the party, evil spirit or guardian angel. The girl is graceful and never takes her eyes off him. “I could be your grandfather,” he says to her and she smiles widely, showing a gap between her front teeth.

So gentle was this pretty maid, she did her duty well
;

Then what followed next, me boys, the song itself will tell
:

The captain and this pretty maid did oftimes kiss and toy
,

For he soon found out the secret of the handsome cabin boy
.

A
FTER THE DANCING
Johnny persuades him to play again. He can fiddle with either hand — a party trick — draw either way too; he is perfectly ambidextrous. There on the stoop of the house overlooking the monstrous sea he plays his tunes, one, two, three of them, until he begs to go back to the ship.

“I’ll walk you back, Father.”

“No, stay, Johnny. The girls will be bereft.”

“I will walk with him,” says young Mary with her intelligent eyes, but her mother pulls her away from him, and then Godwin is waiting to take his arm.

Am I unsteady? thinks Audubon. Surely not.

They go silently together along the shore to the gangplank of the schooner and Godwin leads him up it. Audubon squeezes his forearm.

“I trust thee,” he says. He has used his oldest and most intimate form of address, the one he uses to address Lucy. “Though at first I thought ye the devil. I fancy our friend Nolte sent you to look after me.”

“Are ye certain then?” says Godwin. “I’ve many a lie left to tell you.” He says lie so that it rhymes with boy.

They laugh together as Audubon steps onto the gangplank. Then Godwin melts into the dark as is his habit and suddenly the girl is there.

“Can you show me your pictures, then,” she says.

“It is too dark to see them properly.”

“I can see in the dark.”

“Ah. I have no doubt you can.”

“It isn’t truly dark. Only half so.”

He lights the candles on his deal table. As he unrolls the paintings he feels an immense weariness. The terrible hours of the summer weigh on him, the darkness, the cold, the wet, his tired eyes. The weariness, and the pride. “My birds,” he says simply.

There they are. Twenty-three of them, life size. Some over two feet across and three feet high. Others small and delicate and detailed. Resplendent and supremely unaware of their audience, bird by bird, they go about their business.

She stands stolid, the dampness still at her temples from the hornpipe. “Say the names,” she commands.

He says the names. Red-throated Diver. Willow Ptarmigan. Black-backed gull. Eider Duck. Horned Shore Lark. Labrador Gyrfalcon.

Her eyes are huge. They seem in the candlelight to be full of tears but he is not certain. Like a blaze the paintings unfurl. Gannet. White-winged Crossbill. Arctic Tern. Puffin. Harlequin Duck.

At each name she exhales in recognition. Until there are no more. The drawings in their pile flutter in the drafts of the hold.

Her hands rise to her waist and she reaches for something, the bird, or him. “I have no clever words,” she says. “They’re grand, I know.”

He bows.

“So like to themselves they are,” she says. “Only more so.”

“Ah,” he says. “You need never worry. It is the right thing to say. I am so pleased that you find them so.” He has always needed this. The new shore. The bird to worship. And the young woman to worship him.

He feels the strange shame that comes upon him when he is admired. It was this way in Edinburgh, when the papers printed glowing accounts. He could not show his face.

“Go back, child,” he says. “It is late at night for you to be out.”

She takes a last long look at the Lords and Ladies, and leaves.