The Bird Artist (8 page)

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Authors: Howard Norman

BOOK: The Bird Artist
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“How would I support a wife?”
“The Hollys have family money, enough to hold you until you get started.”
“You're describing our married life as if it's already in motion.”
“There, you see how natural it sounds?”
B
otho and
A
laric
E
arly on July 2, 1911, my father left with Lambert Charibon for Anticosti Island. Shortly after supper on the same day, my mother took up with Botho August.
All winter the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
had been in dry dock. With Enoch home, Margaret and I used the spare room adjacent to the Spiveys' kitchen. Bridget and Lemuel refused our offer of payment. Given that the restaurant was open until nine o'clock, we would stretch our meal and talk until the Spiveys went upstairs. Then we would go into our room, set our shoes at the end of the bed like tourists. Tourists in our own village. Sometimes we would have breakfast with Lemuel, who would be up working at 5 a.m. He would move kettles around and wake us.
November, December, January, February, March, April, May. No letters from Isaac Sprague. No letters from the Hollys, either, but my mother spoke of Cora every day.
The morning my father left, my mother prepared porridge, poached eggs, scones, and coffee. I went out to look at my father's travel weather. To the north-northeast, sunrise had streaked the flat clouds with crabapple light; south along the coast, black rain clouds seemed to leaven in the updrafts. The wind carried the smell of codfish up from the flats. I could picture it down there: a dozen or so families standing at outdoor tables—the Jobbs, Austers, Benoits, Corbetts, Barrens, Parmelees, and others—dressing out fish for salting. They might be saying, “Codfish are a bit early this year but we'll take them when we get them, eh?” Talking about last year's harvest, the year's before that, the one before. My father and I had worked codfish crew once, when I was thirteen. Every night, sitting in his chair at the table, he would stare at the blisters on his already calloused hand and swear off the job. But he would get me up at three the next morning, and the next, until that season ended.
When codfish arrived they did so in abundance, but it averaged only about two or two and a half weeks with the trap. The sun broke through about four-thirty, traps would be set by that time, and trapping and jigging would be kept up until eleven or eleven-thirty at night, or even past midnight. When it got dark, cod-oil lamps were lit. You had a glimmer of light then, enough to clean the fish on deck if you chose. After the codfish slacked the trap, it had to be taken up, hauling eighty-pound grapnels out of twenty-five or so fathoms of water. This went on, over and over, from Monday through Saturday. Jiggers alone were used for another three weeks. After the middle of August, the last
of the fish were dried. The whole catch might be five or six hundred quintals, there being 112 pounds to a quintal. Around the first week of October, the last of the export schooners would arrive to pick up the fish. After the fishing, the laying out of fish in neat rows, the salting, drying, stacking, hauling in carts and wheelbarrows to the wharf; the pay was at the rate of $100 Canadian for a quintal, some years $125.
At the breakfast table, my mother looked out the window and said, “There's Lambert now.” She opened the door. “Hello, Lambert.”
“Hello, Alaric,” Lambert said. He nodded at my father and me separately.
“I'm sure you already had breakfast,” my mother said. “Would you care for a second one?”
“No, ma'am. I'll wait out here.”
“That's all right. Ours is usually a house where visitors don't come all the way inside.”
My father had known Lambert all his life. They were both born and raised in Buchans, in the center of Newfoundland. “When Lambert was in his twenties,” my father told me, “he was all temper. He served jail time for brawling, assault, inflicting bodily harm, and other categories of violence. Then, when he got to thirty, he was beaten nearly to death up in St. John's. And stabbed. It was a foreign sailor he'd insulted who did it. After he got out of hospital, you could say he was a reformed man, mostly.”
Around my mother Lambert was painfully polite; I do not think that he could look any woman directly in the eye,
though. He was burly, and he had the widest sideburns I had ever seen. Except for a horseshoe shape of curly brown hair, he was bald. He had a wide, doughy nose, bad teeth, and oddly a rather delicate smile. I would have to call it painful, too, his smile. He usually had on worn black trousers held up by a rope belt, high boots, a calico-lined undershirt, and one of the two checkered shirts he owned.
He stood on the porch facing the wagon. Romeo Gillette had loaned the wagon and horse to Lambert, so that he and my father could haul their supplies to the wharf.
My father finished his breakfast to the last. He and Lambert loaded up burlap sacks, my father's shotgun, shells, spare boots, two coils of rope, each attached to a three-prong hook. Lambert got up into the wagon seat and kept the horse calm by murmuring, “There, okay, okay now,” over and over.
I stood near the kitchen door. On the other side of the table, my father kissed my mother on her forehead. I sensed a deep, yet deeply strained tenderness between them. “You haven't been to Anticosti in five years,” she said. “You'll of course be careful on those cliffs.”
“What will you do the rest of the day?” he said.
“I'll have tea,” my mother said. “That first. Then I'll get properly dressed for gardening. Then—let's think ahead now. Yes. Then it'll be lunch, and the afternoon will require separate planning, won't it?”
“And for supper?” my father said.
“I think perhaps fish. If Fabian goes to the market, or out in a dinghy. I'll ask him to. Fabian?” She turned to me. “Darling, can you buy a fish for supper, or catch one?”
“Yes,” I said, without looking at either of them.
“There it is, then,” my mother said.
“And if Fabian doesn't get to it, despite promises?”
“Some idea for supper will come along,” she said.
“I've always been overly interested in day-to-day routines, haven't I?”
“Not overly.”
Then my father stepped up to me. We shook hands. “It can't please you, the particular fact I'm off to kill birds,” he said. “A lot of birds. Mainly puffins and auks. Anticosti's the best place to get hundreds of birds in a reasonable amount of time, especially given I don't want to shotgun high numbers of puffins offshore of Witless Bay, now, do I? That wouldn't be local etiquette, eh? With any good luck, I'll have money when I get home. And that's what my going to Anticosti comes down to, doesn't it? Enoch's given us a fair price for passage there. It's pocket money for him. He won't have to report it. That's a privilege he's due, from seniority.
“Anyway, about birds, Fabian. I'm going to shoot any number. So is Lambert. I'm saying this because I want you to hear that I know exactly what I'm doing and why. It's my choice, this way, to earn money. Your wedding is the beneficiary, but you don't have to like that. I've tallied up costs in advance, the travel of us all down to Halifax, hotel room, food. I think that I can realize such costs from killing birds. Finally, it all depends on your going through with marrying Cora Holly, but I'll hear about that news one way or another when I get back. And when I get back, I'll tell you whatever you want to know: total numbers killed, prices
obtained, the weather on Anticosti. You just ask. I'll tell it all, or part of it, or nothing. The birds'll be gone by then. I'll just have the burlap sacks left. And the money.”
“Map me out your travels,” I said.
“We'll go past Trepassey, then across Grand Bank. Stop at Cape Ray overnight. Back out in the morning across Cabot Strait, weather allowing. And then across the Gulf of St. Lawrence to Anticosti.
“We'll be working the rookery cliffs all over the east, southeast, and north of the island. But we'll have to go into Port-Menier right off first thing to register our intentions, get a license, pay the fees. There's a hotel in Port-Menier, the Gaspé North. The original, the Gaspé Royale, is in Quebec, Canada.”
I nodded. “See you when?”
“I'd guess late September, thereabouts,” he said. “Depending on everything that affects a trip like this.”
“Well, goodbye, then.”
“Take care of your mother.”
He walked out to the wagon. He climbed up and sat down. He looked small next to Lambert. Lambert clicked his tongue, flicked the reins lightly across the horse's rump, turned the wagon from the weeds the horse had been nibbling, down the road into town. My father waved over his head without looking back.
“What'll you do today?” my mother said.
“I'll go past the burntland about two miles, to a barrens. North of Mint Cove.”
“Oh, everyone's talking about such faraway places this morning. I'm wistful. Maybe I should go somewhere different,
too. Visit my long-lost sister in Vancouver, for instance. Anyway, darling, why the barrens?”
“Because a journal wants water pipits, and the barrens is popular with that bird.”
Yet I did not make it to the barrens. When I reached the burntland, a stretch of scrub pines and stumps, I saw a three-toed woodpecker right out in the open and got all caught up with it. It was a male, with a large yellow crown patch and black wings. The black barrings on its side reminded me of the rough shadings and texture made when I would rotate a pencil against paper to sharpen it. I sketched its comings and goings all morning. He was foraging two stumps about twenty yards apart. Hammering, echoing, sometimes in quick bursts like Morse code, other times in a single thrust, perhaps impaling a bark beetle with a perfectly aimed blow. Every now and then he let loose a cackling call that befit some general notion of insanity, while flying in erratic dips and glides, scrawling the air. I knew that I could never capture that motion on paper. After working up a dozen or so sketches, I walked to Romeo Gillette's store.
There were no customers. Romeo was at the metal scale weighing nails, dividing them into quarter-, half-, and one-pound bags, which he lined up on the counter. I bought some bread and a piece of cheese, then sat down on a barrel to eat lunch.
“Did my mother mention a catalogue?” I said.
“She mentioned wedding rings some time ago. I showed her a selection.”
He pointed to a stack of catalogues at the end of the
counter. “Third one down, I believe,” he said. “Turn the stool facing away from me if you want privacy. I can't leave these nails.”
Sitting on a stool at the counter, I took out the piece of string with Cora's ring size on it. But I saw Romeo glance over, so quickly put the string back in my pocket. I studied the rings in the catalogue. There were close-up illustrations. Some of the rings were on ring fingers. There were floating faces of women admiring rings on their own or other women's hands. On a few pages there were grooms. Romeo saw me staring. “The grooms all look pleased, don't they?” he said.
“Page after page of rings.”
“Mind-boggling, isn't it? How many choices.”
“I've marked a page here. I want the last ring in the last row, the simple one to the right. I'll leave the ring size with you. It's on this string.”
I put the string on the counter.
“What about your ring, Fabian? Did you forget, you get married, you both get rings?”
“I'll need a piece of string.”
“Just take one off the spool there, end of the scissors and knife shelf.”
I cut a piece of string, tied it around my finger, knotted it off, set it next to Cora's string.
“That ring decision didn't take too long,” Romeo said. “Well, poor Margaret's heart is going to break like a wave on the rocks.”
“That's one guess,” I said.
He slid more nails onto the scale, which needed oiling.
“You know the laws of human nature and Newfoundland are not for mortals to figure out. My father used to say that. Course, that was after his heart seized up, when every minute was a confusing puzzle to him.”
“Margaret's sure a puzzle.” I wanted both to end the conversation and to get deeper into it. “She's so full of human nature, I doubt ten men could figure her out.”
“You might feel alone in the over-all predicament, which is why you just invited nine other men in.”
“It was just a number at random. It didn't mean anything.”
“If you say so.”
“I say so.”
“Well, Margaret quite possibly can fend for herself, once you're married down in Halifax. That's a choice she'll have to make. And fate will play a card.”
“Which choice do you mean?”
“Choice of a man to be with; there are eligible men about. A choice, if a young woman has imagination. There's a good man. A bad man. There's a number of in between men. There's giving up entirely, then the very next day getting surprised. There's—”

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