The Bird Artist

by Howard Norman

  “Well, think over my proposition, if you would.”

  “And what would the subject of this mural be?”

  Sillet stood up. “Along the lines of a Peaceable Kingdom, I’d think. Newfoundland—Witless Bay in particular. Your own artistic interpretation, naturally. Though I’d be concerned in a close-up way.”

  “What would my wages be?”

  “We’ll call a meeting about it.”

  He walked down the path through the orchard.

  I had thought almost constantly about Margaret.

  Though we had not seen each other since the hearing, Enoch Handle, up from Garnish, stopped by the same night, May 2, to say that he was going to bring Margaret home.

  “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I thought you’d want to know.”

  Three days later, Giles LaCotte called from his orchard as I walked by, “Mail boat’s in!” I hurried to the wharf. The Aunt Ivy Barnacle had just tied up. Enoch set the plank, went down to the bunkroom to get Margaret. When she saw me on deck, she disappeared back below. Enoch spoke with her for a few moments, then came up and walked over to me. “She’ll see you later, Fabian,” he said. “Let’s meet at Spivey’s on Sunday night. How’s that?”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Good.”

  I walked up from the dock and sat on Spivey’s porch. I took my binoculars out of my satchel and watched as Enoch escorted Margaret down the plank, then along the path toward their house. Enoch carried her bag; it was brown with a Victorian tapestry-of-roses pattern, a hummingbird suspended above the roses. I had once tried to paint a hummingbird, using the one on Margaret’s bag as a model, but hummingbirds, I suppose, were not part of my native intelligence, and the painting failed. The way that Enoch held her arm, it appeared that Margaret needed to walk terribly slowly. But then she hugged Enoch, placed his hands on her ribs, and laughed, then took up her travel bag and carried it the rest of the way.

  On Sunday evening I dressed in my church suit and got to Spivey’s at six o’clock. A short time later Margaret came in with Enoch. They sat four tables away near the window. All evening the restaurant was crowded, and I could not always see Margaret across the room. She looked lovely, however. Her hair had a long braid down the back. She wore the same dress she had worn to the barn dance, though with a black sweater over it. It was her first night out in public since Guy Fawkes. She and Enoch were celebrating. No one came over to their table, but plenty of people looked and said hello. It would be my guess that Bridget and Lemuel did not ask them to pay for the meal.

  They stayed after all the other customers left, except for me. They had talked and talked, tea to dessert, and half an hour after their dishes were cleared. I was not so much as glanced at or nodded to, or acknowledged at all. In a way I was grateful, because for once my expectations were perfectly well met by what in fact took place. When Margaret and Enoch rose from their table and walked to the door, Margaret looked at me and said, “Meeting me at the dock was necessary for you, but not for me.”

  “Good evening, Fabian,” Enoch said.

  On May 9, Sillet came to report the results of the elders’ meeting.

  “It’s been decided to go ahead with the mural,” he said, “and pay you what you’d otherwise earn at the dry dock. Fifty cents Canadian a day, if you work all day, that is.”

  “Once I make preliminary sketches, I call that working on the mural already.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Then I accept.”

  Beginning the very next morning, I worked from dawn until dusk, seven days a week, though on Sundays I had to wait until the last of the congregation left. I worked through ten sketchbooks in three weeks. I outlined the wharf, lighthouse, cliffs, jetty, various birds. Some days I sat in the pews, imagining it all on the wall. I actually took up charcoal on June 1. My plan was to outline the entire mural in charcoal, then work on each section, then step back and see what I had accomplished.

  Throughout June and July, the wharf, jetty, and old docks to the south came fully into view. I charcoaled in the lighthouse, sawmill, the peninsula houses, stilt houses, fishing shacks, Helen’s cold-storage shack. I drew Giles’s orchard. I drew the saw-whet owl careening between its trees.

  Each evening after I was done working, I covered the wall with bedsheets. I had worked entirely without an audience, until quite early on the morning of August 8 Reverend Sillet walked into the church and sat at the end of a pew near the mural. At first he said nothing. I was putting the final touches on a glossy ibis. I had seen three ibis foraging in the shallows south of Witless Bay at Tinker Point one summer, but in the mural I placed a single ibis in a tidal inlet at the southernmost point of Witless Bay Harbour.

  It was warm in the church and Sillet fanned himself with a Bible he had taken from a wooden pocket on the back of a pew. The ribbon bookmark flapped up and down. He had rolled up his cuffs to near his knees, snapped open his suspenders, and was rubbing ointment on a patch of heat rash on his neck.

  “Progress is being made,” he said. “Now, that bird, the one you’ve just finished. What is it?”

  “An ibis.”

  “It looks Egyptian.”

  “I wouldn’t know. I haven’t seen birds in Egypt.”

  “Take my word for it.”

  “Is that my wages in the envelope you brought in? Because I need to buy some supplies at Gillette’s store.”

  “It is your wages.”

  “You can leave it there on the pew. I’ll work straight through lunchtime today.”

  “You’re no slacker when it comes to this mural, Fabian. I’ve let the elders know that. I said, ‘He’s no slacker.’”

  “Supplies are costing me a little more than I’d expected. I could use a two-dollar advance.”

  “You can’t be spending everything you’re earning, now, can you?”

  “I’m saving half, because after this mural, what work might there be?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There sure isn’t going to be need for another mural.”

  “I suggest that you give yourself the advance out of your own savings.”

  “You’re not all that welcome to watch me paint.”

  “In my own church I’ll make myself welcome, thank you. Anyway, I have a suggestion.”

  “I’m sure you do.”

  “Seeing as how the ability to paint is a gift from God and therefore a very, very personal thing. Seeing as how inspiration is a mystery, I won’t interfere by trying to comment on a beak or feather or the way you see the natural world. I won’t do that. I wonder, however, about just what this mural might contain as a higher calling. What the mural might call to in yourself, Fabian. How it can become a redemption. Redemption for you by fixing the truth to the church wall in a way you didn’t with your testimony at the murder hearing.”

  “You used my mother in a sermon last week. You said you wouldn’t.”

  “You aren’t finished with the mural yet.”

  “Getting in your last licks, eh?”

  “Fabian—I’ve been thinking that your mural might want to have more human nature in it. Not just birds. Not just portraits of birds.”

  “You mean what? You want me to show the murder?”

  “I don’t want the mural as a confession. No. That’s for Catholics. I simply want there to be some higher purpose involved.”

  “God’s wild creatures are perfect. You’ve said so yourself, even in their savage grace. You used those very words. What’s a higher purpose than that? Birds are enough. The birds of Witless Bay are enough.”

  “I’m afraid I’m put in charge of your wages, Fabian. Birds are not enough. I’m your patron. And as your patron, I have a liability. I have an obligation to strongly suggest the best ways for you to put your patronage money to use. Consider it a kind of inspiration.”

  “I don’t consider it that, though. I think I’ll quit here and now. I’ll whitewash the wall. All you’d have is a freshly painted wall
, no mural. Now, that wouldn’t be much of a redemption, would it? So what would be in it for you if I quit?”

  “Before you put your brushes down and make a rash decision, try and understand the opportunity I’m offering. Let me spice up the bargain. You paint in the murder, I’ll personally add ten dollars Canadian. Five in advance.”

  “The Bible is full of murders. And you’ve made direct mention of Botho’s in your sermons. You’ve brought murder into the church left and right. So I’d just be falling into tradition, eh? Is that how you’d care to see it?”

  “Think of me thinking of it any way you want.”

  “I will.”

  “I won’t take public credit for the idea, Fabian. It’ll be part of our secret collaboration.”

  “That is kind of you.”

  “Perhaps you’d include other citizens of Witless Bay as well, who did not murder Botho August. You were a friend of Helen Twombly’s, for instance. Why not put Helen in? Helen was an odd soul, now, wasn’t she?”

  “She hated you, oddly enough.”

  “Yes, I’m certain she did. Someone can’t go through such a long, long life without hatred toward somebody. It wouldn’t be natural.”

  I stepped back from the ibis. It was finished.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll put Helen Twombly in here somewhere.”

  “You know, Helen took up with Reverend Weebe less than two years after her dear husband, Emile, passed. You didn’t know that, did you? And why should you? You weren’t born yet. It’s the truth. And it was why Reverend Weebe finally left this village. It was one sad incident. Weebe’s invalid wife—name was Elizabeth—lived up in St. John’s, looked after by a nurse. She never once visited Witless Bay. And Weebe seldom got up to see her. When she finally got news of Weebe’s infidelity, she put a gun to her head. But she fell asleep, a kind of reverie, they say. Isn’t that the grandest scrinshank? Oh yes, maybe that’s a word from before your time as well. It means a hesitation so as to avoid an issue, scrinshank does. Elizabeth Weebe hesitated and dozed off, right in her chair! The nurse found her. Said the pistol was on her lap. The nurse figured old Elizabeth had put the gun to her head because she’d seen her do it before. One big opera, that house. And do you know what the nurse said? It’s famous gossip from that time and place. She said,’Tis not every day that Morris kills a cow.”

  “I don’t know that saying either.”

  “It means, a favorable opportunity comes but seldom.”

  “It sounded like she only had to stay awake long enough to do herself in.”

  “The favorable opportunity, in this case, was to leave Reverend Weebe an inheritance of guilt. To cause him torment for the rest of his days.”

  “What happened? I mean, after that.”

  “Well, Elizabeth Weebe and the nurse had a good laugh over it all later on. And Reverend Weebe did in fact outlive his wife by ten years. He thought he’d inherit her considerable wealth. But he was wrong. Because Elizabeth left every last penny to—”

  “Helen.”

  “That’s correct, to Helen Twombly.”

  “Talk about the last laugh.”

  “Indeed. Helen accepted her money, too. Later still, Reverend Weebe came to Helen to beg for some of it, and she refused him. Tail between his legs, he left the village.”

  “Well, live and learn. But I don’t love or miss Helen any the less for knowing.”

  “So be it.”

  “I’ll paint in Helen. You come back in a few days, Helen will be here.”

  “That’s a good beginning. I’ll leave your wages on the pew, the way you asked.”

  Sillet dusted along the pew with his open palm, then left the church.

  After lunch the next day, I took a walk to the wharf, and when I got back to the church, I saw a group of boys playing jackstones out front, and off to the side some girls played the ring game Little Sally Saucer. Millie Sloo crouched in the center, while the others held hands and danced around her, singing:

  Little Sally Saucer, sitting in the water,

  Weeping and crying for her young man.

  Rise up, Sally, wipe away your tears,

  Point to the east, point to the west,

  and choose the one that you love best.

  Inside the church I found a dozen or so children gathered in front of the mural. Three were clustered near the ibis: Andrew Kieley, Lucas Wyatt, and Sophie Auster. Carson Synge, Emma Shore, Petrus Dollard, Sally Barrens, Marni Corbett, Arden Corbett, Philomene Slater, Chester Parmelee, and some others I cannot remember just now, were looking at other parts of the mural. When I walked up the aisle, they all scattered, a few making wild crow caws, flapping their wings, racing down the pews. Seeing them I suddenly heard, as if it were yesterday, Helen saying, “I could have educated the village children.” And then and there I decided to paint Helen as a mermaid. I set to work. Since in one sense the mural was a map of the coastline, I placed Helen where I had discovered her body, in Caroline Cove. I detailed the gather of rocks, then drew a mermaid. I painted in eyes, nose, mouth, fish scales in rows on a wedged tail. It was a child’s version, mostly based on mermaids I had seen in several of Mrs. Bath’s collections of fairy tales. Stepping back in an hour to appraise it, I thought, This might have actually pleased Helen. I touched up the mermaid. There, in the mural, she would remain a basking presence two harbors away from the murder, which I began to sketch out late on the same afternoon.

  I worked well into that night. I worked late for four nights in a row. Just before supper on the fifth, Margaret showed up in the church. She walked to the mural and immediately said, “That mermaid looks a bit like Helen Twombly. Only you’ve made Caroline Cove heaven for her. She looks happy. According to what you told me, Fabian, she was all mangled up, head to foot, when you found her. So, as I see it, in a painting you get to change bad luck to good, eh?”

  “It’s nice to see you, Margaret.”

  “Thank you.”

  “About Helen—yes, it’s her. I thought that the children would like it.”

  “Makes a death at sea hold out some hope for the future, is that it?”

  “No, Margaret, I didn’t think it through. Helen liked to talk about mermaids, is all.”

  “I knew her better than you did, and I don’t think she’d approve.”

  “You made a pretty quick judgement.”

  “No, I’ve been here a few times already. In the middle of the night, with my lantern. I hardly sleep. Anyway, ha! Helen’s finally allowed in Sillet’s church! That’s a lark on him.”

  “I guess it is.”

  She lay down on a pew, propping her head on her folded hands.

  “I’m back to keeping books for Spivey’s, Gillette’s, and my father,” she said. “I was thinking how odd it is, you learn a little arithmetic and it makes you a living. I could take my work with me almost anywhere, I suppose. If I moved to Halifax or Montreal, I could bring my arithmetic and all my bookkeeping experience with me and find a job in one of those cities. It’d be like opening the same suitcase over and over, just in a new place.”

  “I was in Halifax, as you know. I can’t highly recommend it.”

  “You weren’t a tourist, though. Not a relaxed, sightseeing sort, at least. It might be nice just to be a tourist somewhere someday.”

  She closed her eyes and appeared to sleep a moment. “Fabian, when I was in hospital, I tried to put a name on everything that’s happened to us. Everything that’s happened in Witless Bay. All the funerals over so short a time. I don’t know. I just don’t know. But can I tell you something?”

  “Yes.”

  “You can go for a stroll with me this evening after supper. I don’t want to sit down to supper with you. Not yet. Just a stroll after.”

  “That’s being out in public together, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Yes, even if nobody sees us, we’ll know we risked that.”

  “All right. Where should we meet?”

  “Along the path, between your h
ouse and the orchard.”

  “Fine, then.”

  She left the church. I painted gulls near the lighthouse wind sock. I put away my charcoal and paints, washed out my brushes and placed them in a jar of water. At home, I fried up a potato and ate it with bread and coffee and codfish cheeks. I had two more cups of coffee, then set out along the path. I pissed against an apple tree. Stepping away from the tree, I saw Margaret in the distance. She hallooed and waved. I waved back and saw that she had a blanket tucked under her other arm. She was wearing a blue cotton dress and was barefoot.

  “Balmy out,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek. “There’s a place I want to walk to.”

  “What’s in the blanket?”

  “Oh, rudiments of life.”

  “I thought the doctors warned you.”

  “Oh, they did, Fabian, they did, for whatever business it is of yours. I heed their warning some of the time. For instance, I haven’t had so much as a drop yet this evening.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “You might first politely say, Lucky, lucky me, out loud. Lucky that this beautiful woman has even seen fit to stroll with me, so soon after my divorce.”

  “Margaret, it wasn’t a real marriage. It wasn’t a divorce.”

  “It was both of those things, only not done on the straight and narrow.”

  “Margaret, I am happy that you came to see me in the church. Happier yet you wanted this stroll. And you do look beautiful.”

  “Thank you for repeating my opinion so nicely.”

  “All right, then.”

  She took my hand in hers and led me toward the lighthouse. We said very little. It was near dusk and a few lingering boats could be seen out in the harbor. As we walked past the lighthouse yard, we saw how cheerful things looked. There were some wooden children’s toys near the door. The door was open. There were lace curtains.

  We walked from the lighthouse south along the path that ran along the cliff. “Over there,” Margaret said, pointing to a grassy place just back from the edge, next to a scrag spruce. She reached into the folds of the blanket and took out a bottle. She put the bottle on the ground, then spread out the blanket. She opened the bottle and took a drink, but then secured the cork. Gazing out at the horizon, her eyes teared up. “Stars know just the proper distance to keep from one another,” she said. “That’s what my mother used to tell me. She’s the only one in the world I’d want to come back, if a seance could work.”