The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  The sketch paper seemed to hold the last light. I heard the dunlins but now could barely see them. The villagers of Lamaline lit window lanterns. It was a peaceful moment.

  I heard a dull thud down the rail, about halfway along the boat, where the lifeboat was secured. I climbed down and moved, mostly by touch, along the rail, trying to focus my sight. When I managed to do so, I recognized my father rowing away. As he approached shore, he entered the reflected light from the nearest stilt houses. He carefully tied up the lifeboat. He did not have any sort of bundle with him. He struck a match, which moved like a firefly to the wick, and then his lantern was lit; it made its own small pool of light on the water. He held the lantern up near his face. He stood like that for a moment or two. He turned toward Lamaline. It was the last time I saw my father.

  In the pantry I brewed coffee. My mother was awake, I think, though she kept her eyes closed. I took the coffee up on deck and drank the entire pot. I grabbed the mop and for hours repeated the cleaning of the Aunt Ivy Barnacle. I stayed up all night. I brewed a second pot. I watched my mother sleep. I ate cold scones. Toward dawn I got violently ill, and crammed coffee grounds down my throat to make it worse, which it did; I vomited over the rail. I lay flat out on deck. At first light, I woke my mother. She groaned from sleep, sat up, and said, “What?”

  “Father’s gone into Lamaline.”

  She climbed down from the bunk and stepped to the small woodstove. She stirred the ashes, added kindling, lit it, took up the bellows, and drew up a blaze. She put in two small logs and placed the teakettle on top of the stove. “You look like death warmed over,” she said. When the kettle whistled, she brewed tea. She carried her cup to the porthole and looked out. She took a sip.

  “I think that if we look—knowing Orkney as I do—we’ll find that he’s left us money to get by on in Halifax.”

  She set down the cup, walked to her suitcase, snapped it open. An envelope lay on top of her sweater. She slid out a stack of money.

  “I’d feel better if we paid the Hollys back for the rings, wouldn’t you?” she said. “It’s only right.”

  I went up on deck. I hoisted a bucket of seawater, splashed a few handfuls on my face. My mother came up the stairs.

  “I do hope that Enoch brings scones again. I’m starving,” she said.

  “Where do you think Father is?”

  “Orkney? Oh, into Canada somewhere, I imagine. I doubt he’ll venture a foreign country. Into Canada, I’d bet.”

  My mother went back down and changed her clothes. When she emerged again, with a different sweater on, I said, “Look!” We saw Enoch rowing out, and he had a passenger on board. As they approached, we saw that it was an elderly man. He looked to be at least eighty. He was wearing a black sweater, black trousers, galoshes, and a cap. Leaning over the rail, I held out my hand and assisted him up. His hands were knotty and strong. His face was stubbled with beard and there were tributaries of veins on his sallow cheeks. He had flat blue eyes. Open-mouthed, lips tucked back over his yellow teeth, he was panting. He forced a few words between ratcheting breaths.

  “So this is the one you mentioned, Enoch,” he said. Enoch stood next to the man. The man poked me in the ribs with his whittled cane.

  “I’ll make introductions,” Enoch said. “Fabian and Alaric Vas, this is Avery Mint. The cove’s named after his family. I suppose you didn’t know that. Anyway, I told Avery here that if he could muster the strength to come out this morning, I’d reward him with something he’s never seen firsthand close up.” Enoch turned to Avery. “Well, Avery, there he is, a bona fide murderer. Imagine it, Avery”—Enoch was all but shouting into Avery’s ear—“my daughter not being good enough to marry a murderer. In his and his mother’s and father’s minds, at least.”

  “Hell, I’d marry her in a minute,” Avery said. “I’d rather have that pretty girl kill me in bed with a heart attack and get my entire savings than have her spend one hour with the likes of this one here, Enoch.”

  “Thank you for saying as much.”

  “Some murderers,” Avery said, “if they’re truly remorseful, you can see it in their eyes or hear it in their voices. I don’t see remorse in this boy’s eyes. Remember the Cobb murder?”

  “In Renews, 1890,” Enoch said. “Yes, in fact I had a close look at the man who killed Sandy Cobb, named—”

  “Laslow Sprunt,” Avery Mint said. “A miserable worm.

  “Still and all, Sprunt tried to do himself in with a bedspring in jail—at least he was tormented enough to do that,” Avery said. “I’ll give him credit.”

  “I agree,” Enoch said.

  “Well, I appreciate you showing me the boy here,” Avery said. He poked me twice in the stomach. “Are you remorseful, boy?”

  “It’s the least I can do, considering all the nights you’ve put me up in your home,” Enoch said.

  “One more thing,” Avery said. “Can you fetch that barnacle scraper and get my back with it?”

  Enoch took the barnacle scraper from its nail and scratched Avery’s back, up and down.

  “That’s got it,” Avery said.

  Enoch helped him back into the dinghy. He rowed Avery home. Avery slowly walked up the slope into the village. Enoch noticed the lifeboat. He looked up into the village, then turned back to the lifeboat. He maneuvered it into the shallows. He tied the dinghy to it and, with the dinghy in tow, rowed back to the Aunt Ivy Barnacle.

  On deck, Enoch said, “Him being husband and father alike, I imagine you weren’t apt to stop Orkney from leaving. Did he kill Botho August? God knows he was all anger and blame, much of it righteous.”

  “You’re not the law, Enoch,” my mother said.

  “I didn’t really care to know, anyway,” Enoch said. He held up a basket. “Scones, jam, more coffee. The people of Lamaline have always been generous to me.”

  As it concerns the rest of the passage, memory comes in fits and starts. Maybe we remember, anyway, by selectively forgetting, and vice versa, though that sounds preachy. Then again, some of the things you try most to forget come back and ambush you, often in your calmest moments. I do not know. I do recall thinking on board the Aunt Ivy Barnacle , however, that Enoch was smuggling my mother and me into a deeper incomprehension of our lives. We seemed more confused by the hour. Enoch was our keeper. Standing on deck with Avery Mint, he had acted on his true harsh opinion of us. He had pronounced the word “murderer” with real disdain, almost as if he was about to spit. And yet, during the rest of our journey, he remained polite, if distant. Now and then he would sing in Beothuk in his cabin.

  Perhaps our days on the Aunt Ivy Barnacle, coldly dreamlike, exhausting, perplexing to the heart, menacing to the soul, should have been a chance for even a provisionary forgiveness. Instead, we avoided one another like the plague. We ate whatever Enoch brought on board. Using a cod jig I fished off the rail when we anchored or docked in harbor. At night, standing at different places, we would stare at village lights, as if each passing hour deepened our homesickness as well as the fear of no longer having a home. What was the future, Halifax being just another bitter unknown?

  After Lamaline, we stopped at St.-Pierre on the strait to the Miquelon Islands. We traveled in rain across to Glace Bay, Nova Scotia, then along the coast toward Halifax. The Aunt Ivy Barnacle was filling with mail for the outside world.

  The evening before we reached Halifax, I drank coffee for two hours in a row and had an attack of memory so powerful it nearly flung me overboard. I would close my eyes and see the same thing over and over. Not a vision of Margaret with Botho in the lighthouse. Not Margaret and me at some childhood escapade, or anything whatsoever to do with innocence. What kept returning to my mind with increasing clarity and detail was a time when Margaret and I went ice fishing. I think it was about three years earlier —in March.

  We had met by happenstance in Gillette’s store. “Fabian,” she said, “I’ve got a shanty all set up. Why not come out with me? You can’t possibly ha
ve anything better to do.”

  From behind his counter Romeo jokingly said, “If you don’t, Fabian, I will.”

  “That’s enough reason right there,” I said.

  We walked in bitter cold to Margaret’s house. I saw the shanty just about where the inlet in front of the house met the sea. We walked over the ice and went in and sat on opposite slats. Margaret added a split log to the small wood-stove set up off the ice and it quickly got warm inside the shanty. She took out a flask and drank from it. The jigging pole was fixed to its stand—no luck yet.

  “I was remembering a song today,” Margaret said. “All day so far I can’t get it out of my head. I think it’s from my mother. I think she sang it. ‘There’s no love/true as the love/that dies untold.’ That’s the refrain. I think that’s true. Do you?”

  “I’m not sure I understand it.”

  “I know what it means. It means, once a third person—outside the couple in love—knows about the love, it’s diminished somehow.”

  “Are you talking about us?”

  “I could talk about us if you want me to. But I wasn’t. Not really. I was talking about the song. It’s hot in here.” She took off her coat, then slipped off her sweater and unbuttoned her shirt partway down. “Aren’t you even a bit uncomfortable, Fabian? It’s warm in here.”

  “I’m fine, thanks.”

  “You’re fine, but you’re thickheaded as a stump.” She kissed me and laughed.

  “Margaret, an ice-fishing shanty is not a romantic place.”

  “You do something romantic, the place you do it in becomes that.”

  “You’ve been thinking too many thoughts today is my impression. People shouldn’t take apart a song like you do, Margaret. People should just sing a song and feel it. You took apart your mother’s love ballad—which got you sad. It’s sad enough without adding sad thinking to it.”

  “Well, that’s me, isn’t it? Everything reminds me of everything else.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  She buttoned up her shirt. “Consider today a missed opportunity, Fabian. Because that’s what it is. It’s not Tuesday or Thursday, even. I was willing to break a rule. A shanty’s as good a place to be adventurous in as any, five below out. It’d be memorable.” She put her sweater and coat back on.

  “I might have tried it out here with you, Margaret. Given a little time—I’d have warmed up to the idea. Possibly.”

  “That’s easy for you to say once I’m all battened up again, in all these layers.”

  “Besides—look. There’s no place to lie down in here. This is a fishing shanty, Margaret.”

  “I heard about a couple did it, her sitting on his lap.”

  “Who was that?”

  “Oh, some couple I heard about firsthand, from the wife of the couple herself.”

  “Which wife? Who? Where does she live?”

  “I’m sworn to secrecy, Fabian. But the couple lives in a place small and tidy as Witless Bay, only farther south. What’s more, they didn’t get any special knowledge from a city or anything. They figured out about each other’s laps on their own.”

  “If I think about it, I’ll figure out who it was.”

  “You should be thinking about it—not who.”

  “Just now I’m cold. I want to go back. I’m going back.”

  “Goodbye, then. I’m staying. I feel lucky. I’m going to catch a fish.”

  Then I went back home.

  I do not know why that day, of all days, kept plaguing me, kept repeating itself in my thoughts. Maybe because it was such a clear example of how I shrank from any given moment of enticement. There had only been a yes or no, right there. Whereas I could have offered a third choice. We could have found a bed somewhere. No, it was more than that. I should have proposed marriage. I was only seventeen. But I should have proposed. I would have learned why that particular song tore Margaret up so much. I would have learned who that couple south of Witless Bay was. I would not be making this journey.

  I drank more coffee and my thinking got even more jumbled, until remorse and longing made me crazy. I had to do something—anything. I went down into the bunkroom. My mother was asleep. She had been sleeping at odd hours. I took up the Hollys’ letters. I was going to tear them up one by one and throw them off the rail. But I hesitated. Then I slid a single letter from the stack and took it up on deck. I could not know what the letter contained. I had not read any. I tore it up without reading it and threw it to the winds. It was such a desperately small gesture, considering that suddenly this whole voyage to be married in Halifax felt like a betrayal of Margaret—of the years we had known each other. I closed my eyes, the day at the ice-fishing shanty came back even more clearly. I kept my eyes closed and went through it again.

  Just after dark ocean light glimmered and the sky was showing stars through hazy clouds. I watched murres arrive out of nowhere. We were a good mile from the coast. The murres whirled above the boat, moved along with us as though they comprised a spectacular mechanical kite, towed by an invisible string. I had my lantern and sketchbook out. I had just drawn a rough sketch of the murres when the engine coughed to a halt. I heard Enoch say, “There’s no problem—sometimes I just like to drift a moment or two.”

  I moved closer to the cabin and saw that he was talking with my mother.

  “That’s a nice freedom,” she said. “To be out at sea. Besides, what can a minute—even an hour—mean on such a long journey?”

  “Not much, unless you’re in a gale.”

  “I heard you talking and singing in Indian.” She had her raincoat draped over her shoulders.

  “If you think in a language nobody else knows,” Enoch said, “well, that’s my definition of true privacy. Nobody else to argue with. Just you and your God.”

  “I’d hate to be alone with Him. I’d rather be on a boat full of people who despise me than alone trying to talk with God.”

  “Look at you, Alaric. You’re all dressed up with nowhere to go.”

  She held open the sleeves of the raincoat. “It’s my wedding dress. We had so little time to pack. What to take, what to leave behind, because I didn’t think ahead, really. I didn’t know the relation of this journey to my outerwear, you see. Would it be warm or cool in Halifax? What shawls to bring. Now that I’ve had a chance to open the suitcase and see what wardrobe I’d salvaged, I discover that I must have gone into my closet and snapped up my wedding dress. For the life of me, though, I don’t remember actually doing that. As you can see, it’s not the traditional white bridal gown but one of my own designs. Much simpler. And notice, after all these years the moths have spared it.”

  “Margaret will wear her mother’s wedding dress someday.”

  “Enoch—I’m sorry.”

  “No apologies needed, none accepted.”

  My mother put the raincoat on, buttoning it to the top. “Enoch, I’m going to end it here and now. I’m going to slip overboard, and I don’t want you to counsel me to the contrary. My past has thrown a dark shroud over my future, and I don’t wish to live anymore. All’s lost, Enoch, you understand. I’m a shameful presence. It’s intolerable.”

  “You’re tired. Worn out, is all.”

  “You’ve started to counsel me, Enoch. Please don’t.”

  “Why even tell me your plan, then?”

  “Because I need to tell you a last will and testament.”

  “That should be in writing. There’s a pen and paper in the pantry.”

  “There’s no time. I’ll tell it to you. What I leave for Fabian, what for my sister. It’s not much to remember. I’ll make a short list, and that’ll have to suffice.”

  “Hold on a minute. Let me get something.”

  He set the wheel and rummaged around the cabin. “Here,” he said, “try some of this.”

  “That’s the filthiest-looking pipe. Not at all a gentleman’s pipe. What’s in it?”

  “Beothuk Indian brain medicine. Old as cavemen, I imagine.”

  �
�I’m not sick, Enoch. I’ve thought this through.”

  “You only want to slip overboard.”

  “That’s my clear choice.”

  “Well then, this potion might make it easier.”

  “It looks like some sort of tobacco.”

  “Think of it that way. Or any way you choose. It’s not hocus-pocus, Alaric. I may be the only one still knows the natural recipe. It’s a secret handed down and down. You pulverize it, tamp it, like this, see. Then you light it.” Enoch struck a match. “And breathe it in through this pipe. People have had similar woes to yours for centuries, you know.”

  “Can you die from smoking this?”

  “Alaric, I’m not going to kill you so that you can’t do yourself in, now, am I?”

  “I suppose not.”

  My mother put the pipe to her lips, drew in deeply, coughed, gave it a second try. “This is foul,” she said. She tried it again.

  “That it is.”

  “Can you tell me anything worthwhile?” she said. “A story from the past, from before all of this—behavior. From a time when there was some hope.”

  “I don’t know any stories like that, Alaric. Every Indian story I ever heard as a kid, Beothuk, Micmac, had human failing. It had fear and evil figures and ghosts that caused great trouble. Hungry ghosts. Unhappy—miserable ghosts. Cantankerous for eternity. Spiteful, too. And you could hardly take a walk without death leaping out at you. In those stories, people clung to the day-to-day. A dog barking, a trick played by a coyote, or staying warm, cooking food, things like that. Because just outside the village was the world, and that was a place of unknowns. You ventured too far out to sea, for instance—”

  “Go ahead, say it. You go right ahead. You venture too far from what’s day-to-day, you’d perhaps drown. Or drown yourself. Well, that’s right. And I’m going to slip overboard.”