Creation (7 page)

It is time to take his leave. Bayfield steps carefully over the slimy deck, toward the ladder over the side. “Thank you for showing me your drawings,” he says in his formal way. “I did not imagine your Birds would be the same size as when alive, and so beautifully painted. I am delighted to have seen them.”

The painter gives his queer bow again. Like a dancing master, Bayfield thinks.

“We’ll be here in Natashquan at least another day. Perhaps, if lack of wind detains you too, you would come to dinner on the
Gulnare
.”

“Another day? Why must we wait? The birds won’t wait for me,” says Audubon. But then he appears to resign himself. “I should like your escort up this perilous coast. If it is another day, we’ll wait.”

He glances at the sky again and, giving Bayfield a nod, turns to take the ladder down into the hold. “I must get back to my birds.”

P.M. observed for Time and diff’e Longitude, also for true bearing. Variation & angles for the Survey of this small anchorage. At night the wind hauled more towards the SE with fog and drizzling rain.

—
Surveying Journals
, Henry Wolsey Bayfield, Captain, Royal Navy

Obstinate
CREATURES

T
he sort of men we are
. What sort of man does Bayfield imagine Audubon to be? A sea-farer? A pedigreed hero? A warrior who spurns the passions and domestic life?

If so, the captain is quite mistaken.

He may be fantasist, a fabricator. He is even called a liar, with his grotesque, exaggerated wildfowl. He has told his English patrons that there are, in the New World, winged creatures as tall as grown men. His pictures must prove it. The flamingos and the wild turkeys, the cranes and the pelicans crowd the edges of his double elephant-size paper, bow and twist to fit the trim. But it is not his pictures that lie. He himself is too large for any frame. He was not built for the sea. His legs are made to leap over stiles; they slip and betray him on the rain-slick planks. He must not be contained in any way. His hair escapes its bindings and his enthusiasms exceed his ability to express them, so that even when he is deep in thought his hands and arms must be in motion. Speaking in English, he has a French accent and comical grammar, but the power of angels invests his tongue. He veers from glee to melancholy, each extreme mirrored in his dark brown eyes. He needs to take people by storm and he does.

Bayfield is entirely mistaken if he thinks Audubon is like him.

…
how you came to be here, and how you came to paint birds
.

I will tell you my story
, Audubon promised.

Which story would that be?

Truth is discovered backwards, fact buried in the flow of impression, in the rubble of stories told then and now to suit a purpose. His
friends and family guard his lies more jealously than he. Even the record, his own record, his tale of himself, is a story. But the impulse remains: find one story and make it true.

He was born Jean Rabin, in Santo Domingo. At three, he became Monsieur Newhouse, on the register of the ship that carried him to his father in France, in the care of strange men. Someone’s idea of a joke, surely, to call him that, but it was a sign that he was leaving one life behind and going to another, that nothing remained behind for him to return to. To be cut loose like that, from land, from the women who cared for him and all he ever knew.

Over and over, he was cut loose. In his new house in Nantes, his father called him Jean Jacques. Later, when it became a crime to be Catholic, he became Fougère, “fern.” When he was eighteen, his father sent Jean Jacques Fougère to manage his property of Mill Grove, in Pennsylvania. He hoped that the sale of the French colony of Louisiana to the United States might be the occasion for a questionable young Frenchman to get American citizenship.

In America, he became John James Audubon. And he fell in love, with Lucy Bakewell, daughter of his English neighbours on the property next to Mill Grove.

In summer he took her to watch the peewees nest. He placed a ring around the leg of the male peewee. He wanted to see if the same bird would come back the next spring. In April they went again, and sure enough, there was the bird with the ringed leg. When he held the peewee’s little head to his chest, Lucy said, “You’ve wed the bird, instead of me.”

And once he’d wed her, too, the bird was her rival. And every bird had a mate, and a home, while all she had was his protestations. It seemed he could only be faithful to himself by failing her. He was neither a domestic man, nor a wild one, but a man split by double yearnings: to be in the lap of his family, and to be off tramping. But, he told her often, wherever he was, he longed for her.

Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky; mine operator, farm owner, storekeeper, mill owner. All his endeavours failed. He invested his father’s money and his in-laws’ money and he lost it. There, on the
frontier of the still-wild continent, he did what he knew best: he followed the birds.

In fact, during these thirty years since he came to America, he has been apart from Lucy more than he has been with her. He has followed the birds and tried to know their world, his chosen continent. He has ridden its trails on horseback, tramped its frontiers, threaded its veins by riverboat and lake steamer, sleeping in its open air under his buffalo robe, alone and far from home. His daughters died. Lucy despaired of him and took a job as a governess. Her employer refused to have Audubon on the property. His enemies derided him as a ne’ er-do-well who had abandoned his wife and children for a dream of twitterers in the bushes.

But he was not such a man. Even his father, for all his sins, did not abandon his children.

He found a job teaching painting at a girls’ school in Pennsylvania. But he was not born to nurture the talents of others. As soon as he had money saved he headed up to Lake Ontario for the fall migration. He bought a little skiff and there, rowing alone, watching the flocks of birds muster and rumble up to wing southward, he understood at last the purpose of his existence: it was to create this giant book, a folio of every single bird of North America. The paintings would be engraved, and printed, and coloured. He would sell it by subscription. Fired with his idea, he sold his skiff for passage down the Ohio, sleeping on deck in his buckskins. At Cincinnati creditors chased him out of town. He begged fifteen dollars for a fare and wrote to Lucy. She sent him a message: if this is your life’s work, be on your way. Mine must be to keep the rest of us alive. You have my faith, she said, but that is all you’ll get from me, because my little savings are all I have left.

The artist’s wife. Unsung and true as a sword.

He knew by the passion of her anger that the door was still open. He found his way to her and told her how the great book of his life and of the times they lived in and of the lives of birds needed only a dozen of his years, and her complete faith. When they parted he had the rest of her savings. He presented himself to Nolte and, armed with introductions, sailed for Europe.

From America to England, for the business of publishing, and back to America for the birds he has gone, stringing countries like beads on his life thread. Six crossings in as many years. But a seafaring man? Never. These crossings are his martyrdoms: on the sea there are wars and pirates, doldrums and tempests beyond his control.

What is his world then, if not ships and water?

It is a world of shores and arrivals. Of visions carried over water. Of a dream in a metal tube sent halfway across the globe. The sea is a gap to be spanned. It is the mother of his invention and the birthplace of his tales. In Europe he hobnobs with princes, while in America he is known as a bankrupt and a charlatan. He plays the two worlds against each other, acting the frontiersman in Europe, and the aristocrat on the fringes of civilization. He turns up in his fox-tailed fur hat at the Louvre, but in the wilds of America, he hints that he is the lost dauphin.

But he wearies of stories now, especially his own.

A
ND ONE MORE THING
the captain said.
Dream in reverse
.

Here he is not mistaken.

Yes. Dreams of heat and sun, dreams of tenderness. Of the scent of roses. And a small woman’s heart-shaped face. What would the captain say if Audubon were to tell him: I love a woman not my wife.

The sort of men we are
.

T
HE YOUNG GENTLEMEN RETURN.
They clatter down the ladder with their baskets.

“Look! Six little horned shore larks, two living, four shot.”

“We watched them fly,” cries Johnny. “They spiral up in the air hundreds of feet, and tumble back down. Then up they go again, for the joy of it, as if in their own glass chimney, singing as they rise. Over and over, they did it.”

“I wish I’d seen it!” says Audubon. “How did you get them?”

“We found two young in a burrow under a bush; the male was nearby and Tom got him.”

“Were they sitting right in the bush, nesting there?”

“They were all on the ground, hiding.”

The male is horned and masked with a black bib. The female is dun brown all over, and shows less white. The young are plump and downy.

The deal table becomes a surgery. Shattuck and Ingalls take the little larks apart, searching for clues to the mystery of their flight. They pull out the minuscule livers and intestines and hearts, even their tongues, with tweezers and drop them into bottles of alcohol, writing their notes in spidery black ink. They examine the muscles, the way they are attached across the bird’s tiny chest, the hollow bones of the wings. When they cannot identify what makes them fly, they leave the bones and go to bed.

S
TILL LATER,
Audubon sits alone with his gannets. The last few moments before the light dies are the best to check light and shade. They stand reproachless, slowly disappearing as darkness comes on. The young bird is good, the speckled grey of its plumage nearly exactly as he saw it. He narrows his eyes critically on the adult bird. Its white feathers no longer give back light. The white is not right. He has not made it
resplendent
. He would like some chalk from the rocks, or perhaps the white inside of a mussel shell, but there is nothing at all of the pure whiteness that he needs. Nothing in nature is that white except the feathers of the bird itself.

He looks again at his rendering. The two are a pair of opposites — one dark, one light, one contemplating the air, the other the self. Their shapes gash open the great horizontal emptiness in which they live. In the background the Bird Rocks sit in blue-grey water. He is rather pleased with the composition. But the birds are still. They are dead. He sees in his mind’s eye their flight. The wide, peaked pinions. The thrust of those strong wings, and the easy glide forward that follows it.

He has not captured the life of them. When he is tired like this, he wonders if he ever will. He wipes his brushes wearily and goes on deck to say goodnight to Anonyme. He calls the raven and when it comes he absently strokes its head with his thumb and forefinger.

“…
a chaos of upstart ragged black rocks
.”

The sky is dark, lined with cloud, the stars occluded, the moon a suggestion of silver, the only visible landfall a chaos of upstart ragged black rocks. There is snow to the west, on the hills, and something resembling rain in his face. The air presses at Audubon’s cheeks; it is as if he stands in a moist element stretching from fathoms below his feet to yards above it, the air merely a less dense, floating version of the sea. He feels, beneath him, the secret flurry of cloud after cloud of fish, and around him the reek and teem of winged life.

He thinks of Bayfield, on the deck of his own, nearby ship, measuring the stars. Of the
Gulnare
herself, all curves in this jagged land, silently riding out the night.

“Lucy,” he says, “Captain Bayfield came onboard today. He is an eminent man, the best surveyor in the entire Royal Navy, says Captain Emery. And he liked my pictures.” He tries to think of more to tell his wife, but he cannot. He pictures the wooden figurehead of the
Gulnare
, her conical breasts and slender neck. Once Lucy looked like that, but no more. No, it is the shape of Maria.