Where? Where? I wish I’d been on more archaeological digs, knew the places to look. Refuse piles, midden heaps, kitchen scrap piles, compost boxes. Why hadn’t I been born on a farm so I’d know instinctively where to search.
I prodded around the grounds. I moved back and forth like a setter casting for the scent of quail. I wanted more, more. I still wasn’t satisfied.
* * *
Dusk. Dark, in fact. I trudged into the Kraits’ front yard. The toe sack I carried was full to bulging. I was hot, tired, streaked with fifty years of chicken shit. The Kraits were on their porch. Jim Bob lumbered down like a friendly mountain.
I asked him a few questions, gave them a Xerox of one of the dodo pictures, left them addresses and phone numbers where they could reach me.
Then into the rent-a-car. Off to Water Valley, acting on information Jennifer Krait gave me. I went to the postmaster’s house at Water Valley. She was getting ready for bed. I asked questions. She got on the phone. I bothered people until one in the morning. Then back into the trusty rent-a-car.
On to Memphis as the moon came up on my right. Interstate 55 was a glass ribbon before me. WLS from Chicago was on the radio.
I hummed along with it, I sang at the top of my voice.
The sack full of dodo bones, beaks, feet and eggshell fragments kept me company on the front seat.
Did you know a museum once traded an entire blue whale skeleton for one of a dodo?
Driving, driving.
the dance of the dodos
I used to have a vision sometimes – I had it long before this madness came up. I can close my eyes and see it by thinking hard. But it comes to me most often, most vividly when I am reading and listening to classical music, especially Pachelbel’s “Canon in D.”
It is near dusk in The Hague, and the light is that of Frans Hals, of Rembrandt. The Dutch royal family and their guests eat and talk quietly in the great dining hall. Guards with halberds and pikes stand in the corners of the room. The family is arranged around the table; the King, Queen, some princesses, a prince, a couple of their children, an invited noble or two. Servants come out with plates and cups but they do not intrude.
On a raised platform at one end of the room an orchestra plays dinner music – a harpsichordist, viola, cello, three violins and woodwinds. One of the royal dwarfs sits on the edge of the platform, his foot slowly rubbing the back of one of the dogs sleeping near him.
As the music of Pachelbel’s “Canon in D” swells and rolls through the hall, one of the dodos walks in clumsily, stops, tilts its head, its eyes bright as a pool of tar. It sways a little, lifts its foot tentatively, one then another, rocks back and forth in time to the cello.
The violins swirl. The dodo begins to dance, its great ungainly body now graceful. It is joined by the other two dodos who come into the hall, all three turning in sort of a circle.
The harpsichord begins its counterpoint. The fourth dodo, the white one from Réunion, comes from its place under the table and joins the circle with the others.
It is most graceful of all, making complete turns where the others only sway and dip on the edge of the circle they have formed.
The music rises in volume; the first violinist sees the dodos and nods to the King. But he and the others at the table have already seen. They are silent, transfixed – even the servants stand still, bowls, pots and kettles in their hands forgotten.
Around the dodos dance with bobs and weaves of their ugly heads. The white dodo dips, takes a half step, pirouettes on one foot, circles again.
Without a word the King of Holland takes the hand of the Queen, and they come around the table, children before the spectacle. They join in the dance, waltzing (anachronism) among the dodos while the family, the guests, the soldiers watch and nod in time with the music.
Then the vision fades, and the afterimage of a flickering fireplace and a dodo remains.
* * *
The dodo and its kindred came by ships to the ports of civilized men. The first we have record of is that of Captain van Neck who brought back two in 1599 – one for the King of Holland, and one which found its way through Cologne to the menagerie of Emperor Rudolf II.
This royal aviary was at Schloss Neugebau, near Vienna. It was here the first paintings of the dumb old birds were done by Georg and his son Jacob Hoefnagel, between 1602 and 1610. They painted it among more than ninety species of birds which kept the Emperor amused.
Another Dutch artist named Roelandt Savery, as someone said, “made a career out of the dodo.” He drew and painted them many times, and was no doubt personally fascinated by them. Obsessed, even. Early on, the paintings are consistent; the later ones have inaccuracies. This implies he worked from life first, then from memory as his model went to that place soon to be reserved for all its species. One of his drawings has two of the Raphidae scrambling for some goodie on the ground. His works are not without charm.
Another Dutch artist (they seemed to sprout up like mushrooms after a spring rain) named Peter Withoos also stuck dodos in his paintings, sometimes in odd and exciting places – wandering around during their owner’s music lessons, or stuck with Adam and Eve in some Edenic idyll.
The most accurate representation, we are assured, comes from half a world away from the religious and political turmoil of the seafaring Europeans. There is an Indian miniature painting of the dodo which now rests in a museum in Russia. The dodo could have been brought by the Dutch or Portuguese in their travels to Goa and the coasts of the Indian subcontinent. Or they could have been brought centuries before by the Arabs who plied the Indian Ocean in their triangular-sailed craft, and who may have discovered the Mascarenes before the Europeans cranked themselves up for the First Crusade.
* * *
At one time early in my bird-fascination days (after I stopped killing them with BB guns but before I began to work for a scholarship), I once sat down and figured out where all the dodos had been.
Two with van Neck in 1599, one to Holland, one to Austria. Another was in Count Solms’s park in 1600. An account speaks of “one in Italy, one in Germany, several to England, eight or nine to Holland.” William Boentekoe van Hoorn knew of “one shipped to Europe in 1640, another in 1685” which he said was “also painted by Dutch artists.” Two were mentioned as “being kept in Surrat House in India as pets,” perhaps one of which is the one in the painting. Being charitable, and considering “several” to mean at least three, that means twenty dodos in all.
There had to be more, when boatloads had been gathered at the time.
What do we know of the Didine birds? A few ships’ logs, some accounts left by travellers and colonists. The English were fascinated by them. Sir Hamon L’Estrange, a contemporary of Pepys, saw exhibited “a Dodar from the Island of Mauritius … it is not able to flie, being so bigge.” One was stuffed when it died, and was put in the Museum Tradescantum in South Lambeth. It eventually found its way into the Ashmolean Museum. It grew ratty and was burned, all but a leg and the head, in 1750. By then there were no more dodos, but nobody had realized that yet.
Francis Willughby got to describe it before its incineration. Earlier, old Carolus Clusius in Holland studied the one in Count Solms’s park. He collected everything known about the Raphidae, describing a dodo leg Pieter Pauw kept in his natural history cabinet, in Exoticarium libri decem in 1605, eight years after their discovery.
François Leguat, a Huguenot who lived on Réunion for some years, published an account of his travels in which he mentioned the dodos. It was published in 1690 (after the Mauritius dodo was extinct) and included the information that “some of the males weigh forty-five pound. One egg, much bigger than that of a goos is laid by the female, and takes seven weeks hatching time.”
The Abbé Pingre visited the Mascarenes in 1761. He saw the last of the Rodriguez solitaires, and collected what information he could about the dead Mauritius and Réunion members of the genus.
After that, only memories of the colonist
s, and some scientific debate as to where the Raphidae belonged in the great taxonomic scheme of things – some said pigeons, some said rails – were left. Even this nitpicking ended. The dodo was forgotten.
When Lewis Carroll wrote Alice in Wonderland in 1865, most people thought he invented the dodo.
* * *
The service station I called from in Memphis was busier than a one-legged man in an ass-kicking contest. Between bings and dings of the bell, I finally realized the call had gone through.
The guy who answered was named Selvedge. I got nowhere with him. He mistook me for a real estate agent, then a lawyer. Now he was beginning to think I was some sort of a con man. I wasn’t doing too well, either. I hadn’t slept in two days. I must have sounded like a speed freak. My only progress was that I found that Ms Annie Mae Gudger (childhood play-mate of Jolyn Jimson) was now, and had been, the respected Ms Annie Mae Radwin. This guy Selvedge must have been a secretary or toady or something.
We were having a conversation comparable to that between a shrieking macaw and a pile of mammoth bones. Then there was another click on the line.
“Young man?” said the other voice, an old woman’s voice, Southern, very refined but with a hint of the hills in it.
“Yes? Hello! Hello!”
“Young man, you say you talked to a Jolyn somebody? Do you mean Jolyn Smith?”
“Hello! Yes! Ms Radwin, Ms Annie Mae Radwin who used to be Gudger? She lives in Austin now. Texas. She used to live near Water Valley, Mississippi. Austin’s where I’m from. I –”
“Young man,” asked the voice again, “are you sure you haven’t been put up to this by my hateful sister Alma?”
“Who? No, ma’am. I met a woman named Jolyn –”
“I’d like to talk to you, young man,” said the voice. Then offhandedly, “Give him directions to get here, Selvedge.”
Click.
* * *
I cleaned out my mouth as best I could in the service station restroom, tried to shave with an old clogged Gillette disposable in my knapsack and succeeded in gapping up my jawline. I changed into a clean pair of jeans, the only other shirt I had with me and combed my hair. I stood in front of the mirror.
I still looked like the dog’s lunch.
* * *
The house reminded me of Presley’s mansion, which was somewhere in the neighborhood. From a shack on the side of a Mississippi hill to this, in forty years. There are all sorts of ways of making it. I wondered what Anne Mae Gudger’s had been. Luck? Predation? Divine intervention? Hard work? Trover and replevin?
Selvedge led me toward the sun room. I felt like Philip Marlowe going to meet a rich client. The house was filled with that furniture built sometime between the turn of the century and the 1950s – the ageless kind. It never looks great, it never looks ratty, and every chair is comfortable.
I think I was expecting some formidable woman with sleeve blotters and a green eyeshade hunched over a roll-top desk with piles of paper whose acceptance or rejection meant life or death for thousands.
Who I met was a charming lady in a green pantsuit. She was in her sixties, her hair still a straw wheat color. It didn’t look dyed. Her eyes were blue as my first-grade teacher’s had been. She was wiry and looked as if the word fat was not in her vocabulary.
“Good morning, Mr Lindberl.” She shook my hand. “Would you like some coffee? You look as if you could use it.”
“Yes, thank you.”
“Please sit down.” She indicated a white wicker chair at a glass table. A serving tray with coffeepot, cups, tea bags, croissants, napkins and plates lay on the tabletop.
After I swallowed half a cup of coffee at a gulp, she said, “What you wanted to see me about must be important?”
“Sorry about my manners,” I said. “I know I don’t look it, but I’m a biology assistant at the University of Texas. An ornithologist. Working on my master’s. I met Ms Jolyn Jimson two days ago –”
“How is Jolyn? I haven’t seen her in, oh, Lord, it must be on to fifty years. The time gets away.”
“She seemed to be fine. I only talked to her half an hour or so. That was –”
“And you’ve come to see me about…?”
“Uh. The … about some of the poultry your family used to raise, when they lived near Water Valley.”
She looked at me a moment. Then she began to smile.
“Oh, you mean the ugly chickens?” she said.
I smiled. I almost laughed. I knew what Oedipus must have gone through.
* * *
It is now four-thirty in the afternoon. I am sitting at the downtown Motel 6 in Memphis. I have to make a phone call and get some sleep and catch a plane.
Annie Mae Gudger Radwin talked for four hours, answering my questions, setting me straight on family history, having Selvedge hold all her calls.
The main problem was that Annie Mae ran off in 1928, the year before her father got his big break. She went to Yazoo City, and by degrees and stages worked her way northward to Memphis and her destiny as the widow of a rich mercantile broker.
But I get ahead of myself.
Grandfather Gudger used to be the overseer for Colonel Crisby on the main plantation near McComb, Mississippi. There was a long story behind that. Bear with me.
Colonel Crisby himself was the scion of a seafaring family with interests in both the cedars of Lebanon (almost all cut down for masts for His Majesty’s and others’ navies) and Egyptian cotton. Also teas, spices and any other saleable commodity which came their way.
When Colonel Crisby’s grandfather reached his majority in 1802, he waved good-bye to the Atlantic Ocean at Charleston, SC and stepped westward into the forest. When he stopped, he was in the middle of the Chickasaw Nation, where he opened a trading post and introduced slaves to the Indians.
And he prospered, and begat Colonel Crisby’s father, who sent back to South Carolina for everything his father owned. Everything – slaves, wagons, horses, cattle, guinea fowl, peacocks, and dodos, which everybody thought of as atrociously ugly poultry of some kind, one of the seafaring uncles having bought them off a French merchant in 1721. (I surmised these were white dodos from Réunion, unless they had been from even earlier stock. The dodo of Mauritius was already extinct by then.)
All this stuff was herded out west to the trading post in the midst of the Chickasaw Nation. (The tribes around there were of the confederation of the Dancing Rabbits.)
And Colonel Crisby’s father prospered, and so did the guinea fowl and the dodos. Then Andrew Jackson came along and marched the Dancing Rabbits off up the Trail of Tears to the heaven of Oklahoma. And Colonel Crisby’s father begat Colonel Crisby, and put the trading post in the hands of others, and moved his plantation westward still to McComb.
Everything prospered but Colonel Crisby’s father, who died. And the dodos, with occasional losses to the avengin’ weasel and the egg-sucking dog, reproduced themselves also.
Then along came Granddaddy Gudger, a Simon Legree role model, who took care of the plantation while Colonel Crisby raised ten companies of men and marched off to fight the War of the Southern Independence.
Colonel Crisby came back to the McComb plantation earlier than most, he having stopped much of the same volley of Minié balls that caught his commander, General Beauregard Hanlon, on a promontory bluff during the Siege of Vicksburg.
He wasn’t dead, but death hung round the place like a gentlemanly bill collector for a month. The colonel languished, went slap-dab crazy and freed all his slaves the week before he died (the war lasted another two years after that). Not having any slaves, he didn’t need an overseer.
Then comes the Faulkner part of the tale, straight out of As I Lay Dying, with the Gudger family returning to the area of Water Valley (before there was a Water Valley), moving through the demoralized and tattered displaced persons of the South, driving their dodos before them. For Colonel Crisby had given them to his former overseer for his faithful service. Also followed th
e story of the bloody murder of Granddaddy Gudger at the hands of the Freedman’s militia during the rising of the first Klan, and of the trials and tribulations of Daddy Gudger in the years between 1880 and 1910, when he was between the ages of four and thirty-four.
* * *
Alma and Annie Mae were the second and fifth of Daddy Gudger’s brood, born three years apart. They seemed to have hated each other from the very first time Alma looked into little Annie Mae’s crib. They were kids by Daddy Gudger’s second wife (his desperation had killed the first) and their father was already on his sixth career. He had been a lumber-man, a stump preacher, a plowman-for-hire (until his mules broke out in farcy buds and died of the glanders), a freight hauler (until his horses died of overwork and the hardware store repossessed the wagon), a politician’s roadie (until the politician lost the election). When Alma and Annie Mae were born, he was failing as a sharecropper. Somehow Gudger had made it through the Depression of 1898 as a boy, and was too poor after that to notice more about economics than the price of Beech-Nut tobacco at the store.
Alma and Annie Mae fought, and it helped none at all that Alma, being the oldest daughter, was both her mother and father’s darling. Annie Mae’s life was the usual unwanted poor-white-trash-child’s hell. She vowed early to run away, and recognized her ambition at thirteen.
All this I learned this morning. Jolyn (Smith) Jimson was Annie Mae’s only friend in those days – from a family even poorer than the Gudgers. But somehow there was food, and an occasional odd job. And the dodos.
“My father hated those old birds,” said the cultured Annie Mae Radwin, nee Gudger, in the solarium. “He always swore he was going to get rid of them someday, but just never seemed to get around to it. I think there was more to it than that. But they were so much trouble. We always had to keep them penned up at night, and go check for their eggs. They wandered off to lay them, and forgot where they were. Sometimes no new ones were born at all in a year.
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