As for her manner of dress, I had the impression that she as much organized clothes on her person as merely wore them. She was an expert seamstress. She made most of her own dresses, shawls, and vests. She preferred somewhat odd combinations of color. This, to me, was less an eye for fashion—there was only the fashion of Witless Bay, and the occasional magazine—than a composition of thought that wore her inside. She would spend a ritual half hour or so standing in front of her closet, riffling through dresses, greatly amused. “How do I look?” she would ask, whirling, modeling a familiar dress combined with an equally familiar vest or shawl. “If you say ‘interesting,’ I’ll know I’ve failed.”
She spent a good deal of time alone. I thought of her as someone who knew how to do that. I did most of the grocery shopping, errands. Even in summer she had an indoor pallor. Coming home from the dry dock, I would see her crouched in her garden and think, My mother’s outside—though this tends toward exaggeration, because in fact she did go on long walks, some days more than one. And she would row a dinghy out into the harbor. She would pack a lunch and row out, staying all afternoon. She did that two or three times a summer.
I cannot say she had one close friend in Witless Bay, no one she called that, at least. People were, as I have mentioned, friendly to her. Romeo Gillette was flirtatious, which my mother took in good humor. Otherwise, she would be matter-of-fact in her visits to his store, unfailingly polite, measured in her inquiry as to his health, and so on. She was pretty much that way with everyone. By the summer route—a horse path through the meadow, then through Giles LaCotte’s apple orchard—it was less than a mile to the store. Yet my mother’s appearances on the store porch or in its cluttered aisles were few and far between.
She was in 1911 still a very pretty woman, I thought, though perhaps the accumulation of estrangements from my father and from family life, combined with her storm-in-a-bottle emotions toward Botho August, or a hundred other factors had begun to tighten her features. Crow’s-feet webbed out at the corners of her eyes. She had bouts of arthritis that no liniment seemed to relieve at all; then, quite suddenly, the pain would disappear.
She used skin creams from France. She kept them in a separate cabinet in the pantry. Her skin was a forthright vanity, though she would take only a few moments each evening to massage cream in around her eyes, on her forehead, the backs of her hands. And she would leave the door open when she did. I once mixed hues of white and pale grey paint in order to match the color of one of her skin creams, a color which reminded me of a sky I had seen one day at Portugal Cove, when I had painted a dozen or so murres heading fast toward a cliff. For three nights of painting in a row I referred to the open jar of cream on my desk, returning it to the pantry before I went to bed.
At about eleven o’clock, late for me to be awake, after that long day’s work on the Aunt Ivy Barnacle, I replenished the iodine on my thumb. I had gone to visit Margaret, but she had told me that Romeo had run out of the special ointment. We stood in the apple orchard kissing for a long time, then parted.
In my room I set my lantern on the night table. Lantern light made it seem as if a bonfire glowed to the left of Cora Holly. My curtains shifting in the breeze, the moonlight, all flickered shadows across the framed glass. In the photograph, Cora Holly stood in front of a shed. There was cordwood stacked nearby. She wore a dark sweater over a darker dress, and fur-lined white snowboots. Her knees showed. Her lips were pursed into a smile. She had made fists and held them outward close to her waist. Her hair was tucked under her fur hat. She had, I thought, a mature bearing for someone her age, which I guessed was fifteen. In that I was wrong. In the photograph she was sixteen. All in all, it struck me that Cora Holly was barely tolerating the moment. This made me laugh. I was convinced that it was true. I had a random thought then: She’s had her photograph taken, and I haven’t.
I took my magnifying glass from its drawer. The glass had been a present from Margaret Handle. I saw that the shed door had metal hinges inlaid with some kind of intricate leafy vine, and I imagined that the photographer had used their detail to gauge his focus. The focus was good; still, the shed’s roof had a ghost line. I was almost certain it was a meat-drying shed, though—so if its woodstove was cranked up, then the ghost line was most likely steam rising from the roof’s snow. I put the photograph on the table. I lay awake a long time, wondering how Cora Holly was being convinced to marry me.
3
Morse Code
On October 1, 1910, the Aunt Ivy Barnacle brought in a copy of Bird Lore, which had my drawing of a common raven on its cover. I stood staring at it. “There’s another envelope for you,” Romeo said. It contained a check for the cover rate, two dollars Canadian.
“Any letters for my mother?” I said.
“Here’s one again from Richibucto,” Romeo said. “Handwriting is a woman’s, I’ve noticed all along. That puts to rest the notion of Alaric having a distant paramour.”
“Can you cash this?”
“Sure thing.”
Romeo took care of the checks from Halifax, where Maritime Monthly and Bird Lore had their offices. Looking at my cover, he said, “Congratulations. When one of your paintings adorns an official postage stamp of Canada, I’ll brag to everyone that I handled your banking. Maybe a stamp saying, ‘Welcome, Newfoundland, the Newest Province!’ Then one of your birds, a Newfoundland bird, hovering over the coast.”
“That really would be something.”
Having the raven so prominently featured inspired my working dawn-to-dusk, seven days a week. It was unseasonably warm. Migratory birds were lingering. In October, I completed watercolors and ink portraits of diver ducks at Bay Bulls. Half a day’s walk to Cape Broyle, I sketched harlequins. I had a weeklong stint with yellow-bellied sapsuckers behind LaCotte’s sawmill. I went north to the spruce crags outside Petty Harb, filling two sketchbooks with grey jays. I had hoped to earn ten dollars in October. That was my goal. It was an amount I had simply snatched from thin air; one minute I thought, Ten dollars is a lot of money, then immediately decided to work toward it. I had all this ambition. I’d fall asleep five nights a week at my desk.
“I think you’re trying to earn back as much as you pay out to Isaac Sprague,” Margaret said. “To make a clean break from him eventually.”
On Tuesday and Thursday nights, Margaret and I slept together. I suppose this arrangement was to our mutual satisfaction, since almost from the start it did not vary. I would not ask Margaret if she ever spent nights with someone else. I would never ask her that. After all, Witless Bay was a small village, so I presumed I would hear, if there was anything to hear, and most likely would get such news from Margaret herself. In turn, she must have known I was faithful to her. Though on the night of October 19, 1910, when I finally told her of Alaric and Orkney’s efforts to arrange my marriage, she said, “To even consider it is a betrayal.” This revealed deeper feelings than I had heard before, though I’d known they were there.
Five nights a week, then, we would keep our distance. But during periods when Enoch was up the coast, overnight in St. Anthony or Twillingate, where he would sleep in his bunk on the Aunt Ivy Barnacle, or Bonavista, where he would stay with his sister, Sevilla Pierce, Margaret and I would spend from early Tuesday and Thursday evening until breakfast the next morning together. And she would seldom sleep.
There was a chowder restaurant, Spivey’s, in Witless Bay. It took up the ground floor of a two-story house, set back from the water about a hundred yards. The owners, Bridget and Lemuel Spivey, had moved to Witless Bay from Trepassey in December 1899. They lived upstairs. “We spent the exact turn-of-the-century drunk as skunks,” Lemuel told me. “Putting up wallpaper.” Spivey’s was especially popular on “Family Night,” as it came to be known, which was Sunday. I had taken my mother there for her thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth birthdays, my father joining us after work at the dry dock. Enoch, Margaret, and I had supper there now and then as well. That always went smoothly. We counted
on Enoch to spice up the conversation with news from his mail route. He was an even-voiced, tireless raconteur, who began any number of accounts with “I just happened to hear” or “I happened upon,” as though interesting events and people more or less fell into his lap. Anyway, during supper with Enoch we would hear about places we had not been to. We all got along. Outsiders might have thought they saw a family.
One night at Spivey’s Enoch said, “When are you two getting the rings? I’m authorized to marry people shipboard, if you’d prefer to stay out of church.”
Margaret cut in. “We haven’t got a fix on that yet, Pop,” she said. She placed a hand on Enoch’s shoulder and squeezed, looking at him sternly. He never broached the subject again, at least not in front of me.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, then, Margaret and I would eat at Spivey’s. We would be out in public. The restaurant had one large room crammed with tables of assorted shapes and sizes, mostly square tops that seated four. A window on either side of the door took in a view of the dry dock, part of the flats, and on out to sea. Gulls swooped close or attended the gateposts, as though begging scraps through the window. The gulls would stare in. On any but the warmest nights, however, the glass finally drew cold from outside and warmth from the kitchen or woodstove, and the windows would completely fog over.
Bridget Spivey presided as hostess and the only waitress. She would shout a welcome to you at the door, then point to an empty table, if there was one. She was a short, lithe woman in her fifties, and would move quickly from table to table, scribbling orders, fastening each slip to a string with a clothespin. Lemuel, the cook, would pulley the slip close enough to read it through the small order window. He would be back there, expertly maneuvering the cramped space between stove and shelves and kettles, despite taking swigs of cooking sherry. He was about six foot two, with a pudgy face, deeply clear blue eyes, and a head of unruly brown hair, all mops and brooms, as they say. He was slovenly. Yet Lemuel had sophistication in his bold humor. He would burst through the kitchen’s swinging door, tap the metal tray with a spoon, call out, “Presentation!” and then hold the tray above his head. He would walk to someone’s table, lower the tray so that the guest could savor the aroma. He would inhale dramatically, then set down the tray, revealing a lobster under the cloth napkin. Sometimes this drew applause, usually Bridget’s.
Now, Boas LaCotte, like all the regulars at Spivey’s, had seen Lemuel perform any number of times. One Thursday night, I recall, the place was packed. There had been a three-day blow, sleet, freezing rain, and people just wanted out of their houses. Margaret and I took a corner table. At a center table, Boas sat with his wife, Mercy, and their nephew Giles. Mercy and Giles ordered sea bass. Boas ordered lobster. That morning there had been a small fire at the sawmill, little damage to speak of, but it all had put Boas in a foul temper. When Lemuel lowered Boas’s lobster, Boas said, “Goddamnit, Lemuel, I didn’t pay for bloody Shakespeare!”
LaCotte’s indiscretion, which flew in the face of Lemuel’s grandiose way of showing gratitude to a paying customer, hushed Spivey’s to the last person. Lemuel answered right away. “You haven’t paid yet at all,” he said. He stared stone-faced at Boas. “And what’s more, this lobster’s on the house.”
Lemuel picked up Boas’s mug of beer, held it high, and said, “Here’s to Boas. For the skill of being a one-man fire crew this morning, and saving his own ass from debtor’s prison!”
A few mugs were clinked, but given the certain tension it was a halfhearted response. Boas, a tall, somewhat gawky man with a lean, weather-beaten face, was so stymied that he could only put on his short-brimmed cap and center himself in his chair. Everyone knew that Boas was tightfisted about money, far past any practicality, yet he was scrupulously honest as well. These two forces in his character seemed to collide at that moment. His face collapsed; the only thing worse for Boas than being overcharged was not being allowed to pay what was rightfully due.
Lemuel slapped his knee, sending up a cloud of flour. “It’s the biggest goddamned lobster of the night, too!” he said. He set Boas’s mug down hard.
As Lemuel stalked toward the kitchen, Boas hung his cap with great deliberation on his chair, sat up stiffly, and said, “I won’t enjoy one bite and I’ll leave a tip double the bill!”
“Suit yourself!” Lemuel said. The kitchen door swung back and forth. Inside, Lemuel called, “Order up!” and set two plates of steaming halibut on the counter. Bridget said, “Thank you, dear,” and held one plate above her shoulder, the other near her waist, as she moved to a far table. Boas cracked open a claw. Lemuel had not gained, Boas had not lost, nobody was changed. Everyone turned back to their meals and conversation. They were in the only restaurant in Witless Bay.
October 19 proved to be a memorable night. It was just after dark, about eight o’clock, when Margaret and I got back to her house from Spivey’s. Margaret and Enoch lived between the sawmill and Helen Twombly’s cold-storage shack. Theirs was a stilt house situated amidst boulders at the end of a tidal inlet. It was painted rust-red, its roof shingles black. The rooms were small; there was a kitchen, dining room, two bedrooms, a sitting room. The attic’s high ceiling had three thick, knotholed beams. Enoch kept sea maps scrolled against a wall. Margaret worked at a spruce table in the attic. She kept records for the Aunt Ivy Barnacle, kept the books for Spivey’s, LaCotte’s sawmill, Gillette’s store. She had all the financial records filed in packing crates. In school she had been good at math, top honors, and, as I’ve mentioned, had been tutored in bookkeeping by Mrs. Bath.
The sitting room was just off the kitchen. It had a loose-spring sofa and a rocking chair, and a bulky ship-to-shore wireless on the table.
“My father taught me Morse code as a kid,” Margaret once told me. “We used to talk in it at the supper table. Pass the peas, pass the butter, all in Morse code, though you can’t get certain homey details. But you could tap out the weather, say, or a little gossip. I’d tap the table with my spoon. Tap, tap, tap, tap. Then he’d tap, tap, tap. Very stormy seas, he’d say. My boat’s in trouble. I’m going to capsize. So long, fare thee well. Then I’d rush over to him and hug him and save him from going under. We had a lot of fun.”
One night, when we thought that Enoch was not coming home, Margaret woke me up and said, “Listen.” We heard the wireless clicking in the dark. “That’s my pop. He’s just offshore.”
“God, I’ll get dressed and out of here.”
“No, he says he’s sleeping on the boat. He’s too polite to intrude. He must have seen his own house lights. Maybe he looked up here through binoculars and saw you walking by a window. Who knows?”
The wireless clicked again.
“What’s he saying now?” I said.
“Asked if I’d row out some hot cocoa first thing in the morning. I think I might do just that.”
Soon after we got to her house on the night of October 19, Margaret went in for her bath. When she came into the bedroom, she was drying her hair with a towel. She had another towel wrapped around her. She poured a shot glass of whiskey. “Salut!” she said. She would say that even before she drank a glass of water. She slugged back the whiskey. “Want some?”
“One glass. Then I’ve got something to mention.”
“Can it wait?” She opened the towel, quickly closing it again.
“After you hear it, you might have wanted me to wait.”
She took off the towel and set it on the chair by the window. Lingering naked right in front of me a moment, she then put on a freshly laundered nightshirt. I finished my drink, then sat back against the headboard. Margaret sat cross-legged at the opposite end. She poured a second glass for herself.
“You’ll take this how you want,” I said. “Alaric and Orkney have got the idea to marry me off.”
Margaret took this in without expression. “I’d spit out this whiskey,” she finally said, “but what a waste. Who’s the lucky girl?”
“My cousin. Her name is Cora Holl
y. She’s from Richibucto, New Brunswick.”
“A first or second cousin, she’d give birth to something untoward.”
“Fourth.”
“That’s far enough away in blood. I didn’t know you even had New Brunswick relations, Fabian. Whose side?”
“My father’s.”
Guttering the candle with a wet finger, Margaret lay close to me. It was dark out now. Pulling my shirt away from my belt, she unbuttoned it to the waist. She situated my hands on her hips, under her nightshirt, then turned fully toward me. She whispered, “To even consider it is a betrayal.”
Right then, I should have moved my hands up or down, let the subject fade and the whiskey work into us both in the most useful way. Yet I said, “You noticed I brought my day satchel along?”
“Bird sketches to show me, I figured.”
“Her photograph’s in there.”
Margaret rolled from the bed. My hands felt suddenly cold. She fumbled in the dark. When she found the satchel, she carried it into the dining room, then sat in a ladderback chair and lit a candle. She was as beautiful as ever in that light, I will not forget it. She took out the photograph, moved the candle close, and stared. She turned the frame over, removed the backing, slid out the photograph. Then she picked up the salt and pepper shakers, walked to the window, propped the photograph between the shakers, lifted the window, and stepped back out of my line of sight. I heard a drawer open. And then the house exploded in gunfire—she fired three shots, bursting the pepper shaker, pulverizing the photograph. The house and my ears rang with the shots.
“Jesus, Margaret! Somebody might have heard that!”
“So what if they did?”
I smelled the gunpowder in the room. She placed the revolver on the dining-room table.
“They’d say, Well, Fabian’s shot her, or more likely, she’s shot him, to save him from a stupid life,” Margaret said. “Once they decide which—all cozy in their beds—everything else can wait until daylight.”
The Bird Artist Page 5