The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  “I’d gladly ponder advice from Helen. But coming from you, Margaret, in your condition just now, I think I’ll row in any direction I choose, thank you.”

  “Helen wasn’t drunk when she gave me that advice, so what’s it matter to the truth if I am?”

  “This conversation is over,” my mother said. “Besides, who can see birds in the dark, bonfire or no?”

  I watched as she put on a sweater, then a coat. She took a rain slicker from its peg, tucked it under her arm, then put on a stocking cap.

  “And how will you two spend this Guy Fawkes evening, once I’m out of sight?” she said. “Having some sort of close reunion?”

  “For us to know and you to find out,” Margaret said.

  “Mother, you never asked me if I spoke to Bassie. You must’ve seen him during the hearing,” I said.

  “Bassie is a convict, whether in jail or out. And we never got along. Not really. Though I admired, at least, the fact that robbing a bank was a clear, stalwart decision on his part. He could make a true decision in his life. Though again and again a wrong one. Bassie. Yes, well, whenever he sat at our table, he never said, ‘Now, should I pick up the fork or knife first?” He’d just pick one up and let the other follow.”

  “This is your decision, then? To row out in the harbor.”

  “Yes. It’s something I want to do. Just consider it an evening stroll, except on the water.”

  And she left the house.

  Margaret was quite drunk by now. She had eaten only a few bites of supper and had worked through half a bottle of whiskey. She slid back in her chair. “I lied,” she said. “I lied, there, in that goddamned hearing, just by not telling what I really know, about who shot whom. I lied, but I can’t bear that I did. In my life I’ve done about everything that’s not good for the soul, except for lying. Now I can notch that one up, too.

  “If Orkney—if your very own father, whom I admired from a distance and so wanted to like me—if your father had been in the store, I swear I could not have lied. I could not have blamed him. And I wouldn’t have, anyway, Fabian, if I didn’t think that you loved me. That there was some future for us, difficult as it might be. I tried to lie my way out of no future with you.”

  “My Uncle Sebastian told me that my father said to blame him.”

  “And you took the first convenient advice that came along, didn’t you? You took that advice as easy as you’d nich a piece of candy from Gillette’s store.”

  I had nothing to say.

  “You know what’s always been some people’s problem?” Margaret said, taking a swig. “They look at something and right away they start thinking how to improve it. Not me. I look at you, for instance, and I think: Fabian’s painting of birds maybe can be improved, but Fabian himself can’t, not much at least. Yet I still love him. And now he’s murdered a lighthouse keeper. And every day of his life is anchored to that fact. Mine, too. I look in the mirror and say, ‘Now we’re the same.’”

  I took up the bottle and poured a glass of whiskey, drank it right down. Margaret poured me another. “I propose a toast,” she said. “To Botho August, who brought us closer together!”

  “I won’t drink to that.”

  “I’m pleased with myself for thinking it up.”

  I fell asleep on the sofa. When I woke, groggy and with a sharp pain in my head, I sat up and cleared the dizziness, then saw flickers of light on the windowpane. The Guy Fawkes bonfire was blazing at its peak, I thought. I half stumbled out to the porch. “Margaret! Come look at this!” I called back into the house. “Mother, come look!” There were no answers.

  Then the lighthouse beam came on. Mr. Sloo must’ve been hired, I thought. Such a clear, simple thought. The stars were out, no fog, though—the beam slanting out—then I was overtaken by panic, as if the source of it was the beam itself. I ran toward the lighthouse.

  At the cliffs, the first person I made out clearly was Oliver Parmelee, who stood holding his accordion. Panting, I tapped him on the shoulder and he turned with a start. “Fabian, what’s got into your mother, rowing out there? Jesus!”

  “Why’s everyone at this cliff?” I said. And then a rough sleeve had me in a choke. At my ear I heard, “I’m Mitchell Kelb. What in hell are you doing out of your house?” But I could not answer. I could not manage a single word.

  I looked around me. All along the cliffs people were holding lanterns, standing with their families, dozens of silhouettes facing the sea. “There she is!” Oliver said. He pointed. The lighthouse beam had caught the Aunt Ivy Barnacle, swathing it in white-yellow light, as it slowly moved across the harbor.

  I do not remember how long we stood there. Perhaps it was only minutes. It was a perfectly clear night out, smoke drifting off to the west behind us. There was not a moon, but the sea always gave off some light.

  The foghorn sounded once, twice—a third blast.

  Then I heard a cry: “Margaret!” I turned to my left; down the row of my neighbors, Enoch was clawing at his face.

  We saw the Aunt Ivy Barnacle collide with the dinghy a few seconds before the sound carried to the cliff. There was a hollow thud, like a tree hitting the ground, splintered wood echoing across the harbor. The lighthouse beam slid away, and for the first time I noticed that Margaret was not running with lanterns. None was lit on rail or bow. Mr. Sloo caught the mail boat again as it drifted and bobbed on a gentle swell, engine shut off, an oar bobbing in the wake.

  Already men were scrambling down to the wharf.

  11

  Birds of Witless Bay

  I was legally acquitted. Yet a village has an intuition of its own, plus which everyone knows that the truth is larger than the law. Whatever it did not prove, the hearing taught my neighbors that I had murdered Botho August. They had studied my face when I lied. They came to their own conclusions. In fact, a few weeks after the hearing Boas LaCotte cornered me and said, “Orkney didn’t pull the trigger. You should be ashamed.” I was ashamed. I am now. I am sorry. Sorry that I followed my father’s advice and betrayed him.

  Once in a while I hear Slieveen—a deceitful person—whispered as I pass by, as though it was my epitaph even before I have a gravestone. I heard Mekeel Dollard say it once. Martha Wheelock said it. I was hurt, though I do not deserve to be. If you lie, you become the lie. Everyone knows that, too.

  The murder of Botho August continues to haunt my village, simply because, young children aside, it persists in everyone’s memory.

  At the hearing, Margaret had at least admitted that she pulled the trigger. She told more of the truth than I had. What is more, she had spirits-in-a-bottle, as Helen called whiskey, as a punishment. I had only, as Reverend Sillet put it, the fatal consequences of my weakness to offer up to people for forgiveness. Sunday after Sunday, my family was a topic for his sermons. I came to sit in the front pew. I would even linger on the steps or lawn after church. It was as though I had become two people: Fabian Vas, and Fabian Vas the murderer.

  “Fabian Vas has acquired for our village a second name,” Sillet said from the pulpit. “A stranger might ask, ‘Where are you from?’ You might answer, ‘Witless Bay, Newfoundland,’ and immediately a small voice of conscience adds, A place of a murder.”

  On yet another Sunday, he said, “God forgive me, but sometimes in contemplating human nature, I think that the Ten Commandments are in the wrong order. That Thou Shalt Not Kill should follow Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery , the one so often born of the other.”

  I said, “Amen,” as loud as anyone. Margaret heard that I had. She was disgusted. She told me that.

  Mitchell Kelb admitted that he felt partly responsible for my mother’s death. To his way of thinking, he had been tempted by the Guy Fawkes festivities, seduced from his obligations. “I shirked my duties,” he said. “I shouldn’t have ever left the house. It’s that simple.”

  I never did learn, in any exact detail, how Kelb’s report to Her Majesty’s Court in St. John’s read, though, as I have mentioned, I
was found guilty of no crime. Before he made his report, however, Kelb said to me, “I’m going to fight to get your mother’s name erased from the printed indictment. A document concerning murder shouldn’t be the last place her name appears in this world.” He surprised me further by purchasing a stone and having Alaric Banville engraved on it. He helped me situate the stone atop the cliff where most of the village had watched her die. Kelb had his own turmoils with the incident. He had his guilts. It seemed that the death of Botho August and the death of my mother drew out a particularly strong sympathy for Margaret. “I’m going to officially interpret Margaret’s testimony about October 8 as drunken hearsay, though it wasn’t that, not entirely at least. And as for you, Fabian, a son’s testimony against his father, who by all accounts loved him, well, I won’t soil my hands with that. I’m taking it all personally. I consider it inadmissible because it is so disgusting. Besides, at this point, it’s useless—we won’t find Orkney Vas, because we’ll stop looking for him, unless he gets influenced by that crazy brother of his and robs a bank in Newfoundland. Albert Poomuk figures that Orkney is off in the deeps of Canada by now, maybe even a city. There it is, then.”

  It was Mitchell Kelb, too, who set another example of forgiveness in Witless Bay. He took it upon himself to take Margaret to a sanatorium in Garnish. In the collision she had received broken ribs, a concussion, and a gash on her forehead that needed fifty-one stitches. She had been quite battered up. Altogether, she was a resident of the Garnish sanatorium for six months. I did not visit her there. However, Mitchell Kelb, who may have been a little in love with her (Margaret thought so), found it in his heart to make a separate visit to me, in order to explain the whys and wherefores of her condition. On the freezing night of January 19, 1912, he knocked on my door.

  He took off his coat, set his boots by the fireplace, and came back into the kitchen. “Home sweet home,” he said. “I know where the tea is.” He made a cup of tea for himself. I had coffee, five or six cups, as we spoke.

  “Fabian,” he said somberly, “Margaret is in a sanatorium hospital down in Garnish. I took her there with Enoch’s permission. I’d suggested it to the court in St. John’s, who agreed to it. In fact, insisted. They said since I’d already gone ahead and done it, well, fine. Enoch Handle is with his daughter now. He moved down to Garnish. Found a room there for the winter.

  “I’m sorry as hell we all had to see Alaric meet her maker. That you had to see that. Terrible, terrible luck to have been drawn to the cliff at such a moment. Yet I admit the tragedy got me thinking about the past. Back to when I first met Margaret Handle. Circumstances I’m sure you remember, since you were in the store that day, just after she’d run her bicycle into old Dalton Gillette. Collisions seem part of her fate on earth, eh?

  “Anyway, Margaret is in Garnish. It’s not a lock-up place. It’s not a prison. It’s got nurses. More, it’s for people—who—on whom life bears down hard, is the best I can say it. Bears down hard and won’t let up. You know how Margaret’s brain is fairly buoyed up by alcohol some days? Well, the doctors have fancy names for her troubles. Sprinkle their explanations with Latin. Now, the broken ribs, that was easy. The gashes and bruises and the like, healing nicely. Dizziness from the concussion they say will wear off in due time. She has some mysterious internal malady—the doctors say it won’t kill her but they can’t figure it out, except to say it doubles her over now and then. She’s not sleeping. Maybe an hour a night she sleeps. They’ll try a pharmaceutical for that. Still, given the collision, it’s a miracle she’s alive. Alive, yet in a generally harassed mental condition.

  “What the doctors do say plain and simple is that she probably is too stubborn to stop her drinking. It’s what might eventually kill her, rot her from the inside out, to put it bluntly. She’s not allowed to drink in hospital, naturally. But doctors aren’t truant officers. They suspect that once out, she’ll want to line up every last whiskey bottle in Newfoundland and invite just herself to the party.

  “I’ve talked for hours with Enoch Handle. I’ve even slept on his floor in Garnish. He says that you and Margaret have both bad and good influences on each other. One of those, I guess, has got to win out, maybe the good.

  “Look—to hell with my advice. It’s not even real advice. I’m not your father, and I’m not Reverend Sillet.

  “As for what happened on Guy Fawkes being an accident, well, that’s the official version. Leave well enough alone is my motto here. On paper up in St. John’s it says accident. But for the life of me, I couldn’t tell from the cliff that night if Alaric rowed toward the mail boat or if Margaret zigzagged and aimed, or just what happened.”

  We sat and talked late into the night. Finally, he stood and said, “I’m at Spivey’s tonight.” He offered his hand and I shook it. He put on his coat, hat, and scarf, opened the door, and set out.

  I have not seen or heard from Mitchell Kelb since.

  I had lost all contact with the journals. When the Aunt Ivy Barnacle was again repaired (I was hired to help in this) and went out on its first spring run, I posted a letter to Isaac Sprague. Even as I wrote the letter I had no real expectation that he would reply. He did not. Twice again in April I sent him sketches. No reply. Then, at the lowest point in my finances and spirits, something occurred which proved to me it was indeed a mercilessly low point. Reverend Sillet came to see me.

  I was sitting on my porch. It was May 2, and I remember the moment so clearly that I recall what I was wearing. It was one of Lambert’s checked shirts that my father had obviously borrowed on Anticosti and by some oversight had left at Spivey’s. It was sizes too large. I had the sleeves rolled up to my elbows. I also had on dark brown trousers and boots. One heel was badly nicked. It was near dusk. I recall seeing a sharp-shinned hawk glide out of Giles LaCotte’s orchard behind Sillet as he walked up the road. The hawk had a mouse dangling from its beak. On the porch, I had propped up an easel and was working on a sketch of a shearwater from memory, as it was too early to see one. Shearwaters did not nest in Witless Bay, but sometimes, I don’t know why, a dense fog brought one or more in during the summer.

  “Good evening, Fabian,” Sillet said, placing one foot on the bottom step.

  “Reverend.”

  “Fabian—” I had the feeling that if I had gone inside my house, he would have followed me, so I stayed on the porch. “Fabian, I understand, perhaps better than you, your, shall we say dislike of me. A grisly, vigilant dislike, perhaps influenced by Margaret, perhaps original. But you should realize that my Sunday sermons are on everyone’s behalf, not against you in particular. Or against your family. I merely organize God’s words to judgement, Fabian. It’s simply that in my professional domain, I let those words serve me from the pulpit.

  “Be that as it may, all God’s children are equal in His sight, even though you won’t accept forgiveness from Him through me. I’ll be direct: though you attend church, you scowl. You have no use for me. Yet I might have a use for you.

  “You’re a painter—an artist, though with very few people, I imagine, who see your art. A few magazine subscribers and the like. People whom you may never meet. In addition, you’re a person who of late hasn’t had much employment at the dry dock. Those are facts. Now, let me wed facts together. Let me make an offer.

  “I want to put you in the service of my church. I’ve approached the church elders with an idea for your redemption, as it were. I suggested a mural. And the elders listened. They are patient, good men. I broached the idea of a mural on the north wall of the church. A mural that might serve to lighten the congregation’s spirits, especially through our long winters.

  “For the most part the idea was graciously received.

  “And while the name Fabian Vas soured the elders a bit, I argued that we really could not afford to hire an outside artist. And who else in Witless Bay, truth be told, has the required talent?

  “Now, what is the bribe behind my generosity?

  “If you paint a mural, I
won’t mention Alaric Vas, Orkney Vas, or Fabian Vas ever again from my pulpit. Or Margaret Handle.”

  “Well,” I said, “you’ve already mentioned us enough for a lifetime.”

  “Not for ten lifetimes, as far as I’m concerned. That’s my own private opinion, however. But some good people in Witless Bay have taken me aside and suggested leniency.”

  We just looked at each other a hard moment.

  “You know,” I finally said, “you’re just like me.”

  “In what respect?”

  “You found your true subject. Mine is birds. I paint birds now, no matter if anyone sees them or not. It’s my heart’s logic. As for your true subject, I believe it’s my family. Me, my father, my mother—we’re your subject, all right. So, Reverend, why not continue being loyal to your calling and keep your sermons aimed at us?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself, Fabian. If you think I’m beholden to you in any regard for murdering Botho August, which I know you did, you have gone mad.”

  “To use your kind of language, Reverend, God gave me a small gift to help me clarify my world.” (In fact, Isaac Sprague had written this to me.) “Maybe in turn He gave you me and my parents, plus Botho. We’ve gone and made your reputation, is how I see it.”

  “Your misguided opinions don’t interest me, Fabian. A mural does.”

  “No, no. No, go ahead, talk about us every Sunday till hell freezes over. I’m your best customer now. In the front pew as soon as you open your doors. I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  “Fabian, do you feel anything in your heart toward the man you murdered? Toward Botho August, these months later.”

  “I feel I did myself a favor.”

  Sillet ran his hand through his hair, sat heavily on the porch step, and stared at the ground.