Delacour, New York, July 1973
Jim skinned like an Annamite,” Delacour says. He uses the old colonial term for the people of central Vietnam, intending it as a compliment to both Jim and the Vietnamese, particularly his head boy Nhi, who showed the greatest mastery of all for the intricate work.
“Jim could squat too,” he adds. Michael has seen that. Jim, in his seventies, inspecting the mist nets on Great Gull Island, his sharp knees pointing up around his protruding ears.
They sit at a table near the window of The Dominican Place, a family-run restaurant around the corner from the museum. Where the slow ceiling fans with rattan blades make you feel you are back in the tropics.
It was Jim’s favorite and Delacour suggested it when Michael called. Looking across the red-and-white-checked oil cloth, Michael envisions Delacour’s camp in Indochina. A younger version of Jim squats by the edge of the fire, sharing hand-rolled cigarettes with the native skinners. While Delacour and his great friend Jabouille, the rotund, monocled resident superior of Hue, lean back on folding camp chairs outside the tents smoking their pipes or Gauloises cigarettes. There was something distinctly indigenous or primitive about Jim that set him apart.
“Huevos rancheros. Señor Delacour?” the proprietress asks. She’s pleased to see the Frenchman and remembers his usual order. “Will Señor Kennoway be joining?”
“Solamente en pensamiento,” Delacour replies. Multilingual, he slips easily into Spanish.
He and Jim like this place for its home cooking. Also for the brightly colored mural depicting a forest in the Dominican Republic, complete with an African gray parrot. The artist was from Zimbabwe, the owner had apologized, much to their delight.
“Jim was a good shot, un bon tireur.” Delacour nods as the proprietress refills their glasses from a half carafe of red. “He could shoot a leaf warbler from fifty yards. But when he wasn’t shooting—always so impatient.”
He’s thinking back thirty-five years to their 1939 expedition to Laos. Traveling up the Mekong in their pirogue, they were beset each morning by thick river mist. He and Lowe and Jabouille would sit back in the boat’s long cabin smoking, waiting for it to lift, reading old issues of Paris Match. He’d brought a stack of the magazines to wrap the skins in, and they must have read every one.
But the mists drove Jim crazy. He couldn’t sit still and was forever jumping on and off the boat, fiddling with the motor—which was new to the boatmen of the river. Sometimes, bursting with impatience, he’d rush off with his gun, returning with nothing but a bad temper, because you really couldn’t see anything in that mist, let alone shoot.
He remembers how Jim helped the boatmen pull the long pirogues across rapids and over shallow rocks, while Delacour and the others followed a walking path to meet the boats upstream.
“He was ten years younger than the rest of us. He never passed an opportunity to show off.”
Michael smiles. It’s somewhat of a relief to think of Jim prey to youthful vanity and prowess. It makes the man seem more human.
“And what about Jim’s wife?” he asks. They’ve finished their huevos and have ordered flan casero. He doesn’t want to miss the chance to fill in that piece of the puzzle.
“Ah yes, we mustn’t forget, Jim was in love.”
And with his wife too!” Delacour adds as an afterthought, raising his glass and taking an appreciative sip of the wine.
Michael waits for him to elaborate.
“The lovely Helen. She came to Indochina on our 1935 expedition. It was the year they married and a sort of honeymoon for them. Jim picked her up in Saigon and drove her up to our camp above the hill station of Dalat, one of the most enchanting places on earth.”
They’d had a small cabin on the edge of a forest of pines, with a bed, a table, three cooking pots hanging from the wall, and a nail to hang your hat. When Helen came, Delacour gave up the bed and moved into Lowe’s tent.
“We had a lemur, one Lowe brought from Madagascar,” Delacour says. “Helen was very fond of it. She could get it to sleep on her lap like a baby.
“I remember once it was hanging by its tail from a tree. And Jim went and hung upside down by his knees right next to it. I have a photo of that. It made us all laugh. You can see how he was showing off, especially for her.”
“And what happened to her?” Michael probes, trying to steer Delacour gently down this path, to establish the minimal facts. Instead the older man falls silent, shaking his head.
“Alors,” he responds, resorting to French. “Cela arrive à tout le monde, n’est-ce pas?”
He sighs. And Michael is too polite to persist, remembering how Delacour’s family home was destroyed in the First World War, then his own château in Normandy overrun by the Nazis. Not to mention his beloved Indochina, invaded by the Japanese and now savaged in this brutal American war. After that last trip up the Mekong with Jim, Delacour had never returned.
“Here’s a thing you might not know,” Delacour offers, wanting to help out, even if it’s not the exact information Michael is looking for. “Jim helped me leave France. Back in 1940, when the Germans took my house in Normandy I fled to Lisbon. It was Jim who arranged my papers and paid for my passage on an export liner to New York.
“Back then I was a refugee, sans le sou.” He laughs, comforting himself with the flan, then offering a toast to Indochina, to old friends, to Jim.
Perhaps it’s why they continue to be friends, why Delcaour puts up with Jim’s irascibility, his poor behavior, Michael thinks. He owes.
Walking back to the museum after lunch, Michael considers how different the two men are. Delacour—short and stocky with rounded shoulders and that big bald head. Ten years Jim’s senior, though you wouldn’t know it. So lively, so full of stories, that having lunch with him makes you feel you’ve lived through a piece of history, that you’ve been invited in.
While Jim’s angular, sharp, and craggy. He’d lived through a good part of history too but was closed up and secretive. If you went to lunch with him, he might choose not to talk at all. Once he’d had a drink or two, he might turn unpleasant or abusive. Or his statements might be so coded and elliptical, you’d need a seer to decipher what he meant.
An ass, Jim had called him.
Looking at the black-and-white snapshot Laina had taken of Jim, Michael can see the small field station of Great Gull Island in the background, some rocks. The sky overcast and hazy. It must have been that same day.
Jim, he remembers, had set himself to skin a bird. Nothing exotic, a small warbler or a sparrow, one that had got tangled in one of the mist nets and broken a wing maybe or died of shock. But his hands shook awfully, most likely a side effect of the alcohol he was consuming. His gnarled fingers would no longer do as he asked. This man who, as Delacour said, had turned out particularly fine specimens, who’d been known for his dexterity and speed.
The old man worked alone at a trestle table set against the wall, so that Michael could have ignored him. They all could have. But somehow the intensity of his frustration drew everyone’s attention. And even if you happened to glance over, you could see the mess Jim was making of it. The bird’s feathers all askew and stuck together, the skin stretched and elongated, the cotton stuffing loosely wound. Jim’s brow furrowed not just with frustration but with some deeper despair. They could hear him muttering obscenities under his breath.
Michael had only meant to be helpful, to puncture the tension that was building up in that small, hot hut. Just why he took this upon himself, he can’t imagine. Walking over to the table, he’d delivered a homily about all specimens being important to science no matter how executed, the need to value each bird’s life. Assurances, he sees now, that would have been better directed at a student, someone who was just learning and would only improve—not at the master, who was careening downhill fast. Still, it was no reaso
n for the old man to turn on him like that.
“You’re a monkey’s ass,” Jim had said. Cruelly. Distinctly. With a searing contempt that was even more humiliating than his words. Everyone fell silent and looked away. It pains him to think Laina had been there.
He remembers Jim stuffed the sorry specimen in the pocket of his jacket and didn’t say another word.
Iron Bottom Sound, Off Guadalcanal,
En Route to the Solomon Islands, October 1942
The problem was that he saw those islands differently. To the other men, the Solomons were savage and inhospitable. The Cannibal Isles. The land of headhunters. A fetid equatorial swamp. Wet, hot, febrile. A place where dysentery or malaria would get you if the Japs didn’t. Where you might slowly decay if you weren’t shot straight off, from foot rot, skin infections, pustules, and tropical ulcers that could bore right down to the bone. They all suffered in some form and treated themselves with sulfa powder. The islanders fared better going barefoot.
Subhuman, some called it. The uncivilized bowels of the earth. Belowdecks they sounded out the unfamiliar names: Guadalcanal, Tulagi, Savo. The names of rivers they would have to cross once they secured a beachhead: the Ilu, Tenaru, and Alligator Creek. Cursing their friends or brothers, anyone they knew who’d been sent to Italy, France, or even North Africa—anywhere but these godforsaken islands.
The jungle spooked American boys. They didn’t like the thick vines or serpentine woody lianas, the pulpy herbs, the flagrant orchids, the thick sweet smell of ginger. Everything close and cloying. They’d stick to the coast when they could and traverse high ridges of grassland to avoid this jungle, even if the grass was high and razor-edged.
Jim came with different eyes. He’d dreamed of these archipelagoes. He knew their names, their history, their birds. He delighted in the wild tangle and disorder of these forests. The great nutmegs soaring up to 150 feet or more. The banyans with their buttresses smooth and gray like the flanks of elephants. The aerial roots, hairy and twisted, dropping down to suck water right out of the air itself. To him, it was familiar and intriguing, like the landscape of his own mind.
It’s not that he wasn’t scared. Jesus, he was scared as the next guy. He’d heard the stories too from Nanking, Malaya, and Bataan. He’d seen the grisly photos that circulated the ship, of pilots mutilated at Wake. Later, he’d see for himself what could happen. A man’s genitals hacked off and stuffed in his mouth. His corpse lashed to a tree and left as a warning. It made you sick at first, then it made you thirsty for revenge.
You didn’t want to get caught. That was the main thing. There were no prisoner-of-war camps in the Solomons: American or Japanese.
Jim didn’t panic in the jungle. He didn’t fire at the slightest scuffle. He knew how to use noises to hide. It was other men’s fears and their friendly fire that worried him. He volunteered to work alone—to scout. What the others mistook for foolhardy bravado, bravery, or even for his own death wish, Jim knew to be selfish.
No dying for the men beside him. He didn’t want to get blown up because someone pulled the pin but forgot to throw the grenade. Nor did he relish the thought of anyone witnessing his own mistakes, or his own disintegration if it came to that. They all saw men fall apart. Turning tail, shitting in their pants, lowering their heads between their hands and sniveling like babies, or worse, becoming too cruel.
To him, the Solomons were the land of colored fruit doves; flightless rails; the Melanesian megapode, which leaves its eggs to incubate in the hot volcanic sand; Meek’s extinct crested ground pigeon, Microgoura meeki, with its headdress of blue feathers and purple tail, never to be found again. The many species of white-eyes, Zosteropidae, Mann sent back from New Georgia and which became crucial to his groundbreaking theories of dispersal and evolution. These were the islands where Meek and Beck and Mann had all collected, first for Lord Rothschild, later for the museum in New York.
As a child, Jim lay on the beach reading Meek’s autobiography, one of the many books Sanford brought him. And there was Cecil kneeling in the sand next to him, a hot hand resting on Jim’s back, peering over his shoulder at the black-and-white photographs—of these same coastlines fringed with palms, men in loincloths, thatched houses high on stilts, canoes with sails made of bark. There was one particular image that held their interest longer than the others, a photograph of bare-breasted girls smoking tobacco in long bamboo pipes.
At the back of the book was a map you could fold out, showing the South Pacific scattered with islands, coral atolls, reefs, as if someone had stood in Asia and tossed out a handful of pebbles and debris. From kangaroo-shaped New Guinea, down the long double chain that made up the Solomons, to the tiny Pitcairns in the east. Running above them all—the equator! Even then, Jim sympathized with Meek’s dismay at city life, at nearly getting run down by a cab in London. His conclusion that civilization has also its perils; how it seemed he’d feel safer, more at ease, more himself, as soon as he could return to collecting in the wild country.
It was how Jim felt too, preferring his own small archipelagoes in Maine and Connecticut to the hazards of the dining or drawing room. The habits of birds were predictable and orderly. A thing you could count on.
October 11, 1942. The night before Helen’s birthday. He stood out on the deck all night waiting for his first glimpse of Guadalcanal. The rain spat down, the sky was a murky black, which was what you wanted—cloud cover, dark.
Then the sun rose, lighting the huge clouds over Florida and Tulagi a bright red, so it looked as if the islands were under fire already. In that sudden light, the ship felt huge and exposed. A giant bull’s-eye gliding across the vast ocean. They were in reach now of the Japanese planes and subs based at Buin and Rabaul. Torpedo Junction, Iron Bottom Sound were the nicknames given to this stretch of water.
At 0700, the fleet of sixteen Wildcats all ready for takeoff. Their propellers deafened as he climbed up into the cockpit next to a grinning pilot. Then the plane sped off, down the long, top-heavy deck of the USS Copahee and up over the water. One by one, the other planes appeared on either side, all flying in formation to Henderson Field. Halfway between Tulagi and Guadalcanal, the pilot dipped a wing so that Jim could see a pod of porpoises streaming along just ahead of them, racing the shadows of the planes.
He wished Helen a happy birthday. Somewhat ashamed of his exhilaration and expectation because he’d longed for these islands. He’d chosen to go there, rather than stay with her.
V
Wantoks
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,
August 1973
After hunkering down at both ends of the Thoroughfare the day before, the fog had pushed its way in during the night. He’d been aware of it in his sleep, half-woken by the mournful horn at Goose Head. Now the garden and cove are wreathed in a whitish gray, the whole bay cloistered in a thick wet blanket. Erased.
Somewhere off the point, the gong’s heavy iron pendulum clangs discordantly as it swings back and forth on the wash. He wonders what the girl makes of it.
In this muffled hush, the phone rings like a shot going off and Jim stumps into the kitchen to pick it up.
“Hello Pappy.”
“Hold on.” Jim pulls up a chair.
It’s Fergus, calling to warn his father that he’ll be arriving for his summer visit a few days early. Jim glances at the calendar next to the phone. Mid-August already.
“Do you need any supplies? Any food from New York?” Fergus asks. “For your guest?”
He’s heard about the girl then, from Sarah, and will be put out that Jim hadn’t mentioned her. Though he’s far too polite to say.
“No need,” Jim says. “We’re fine.”
He can read his son’s thoughts on the other end of the line. A silence as the word we strikes the wrong way, a stifled impatience at Jim’s reticence. He doesn’t intend to be curt. It’s
just—they are fine.
“She’s not my long-lost sister?” Fergus asks. Jim doesn’t bother to reply. Although, to be fair, those things did happen.
“OK then, Pappy.”
Jim puts the phone down, strikes the leg of the kitchen table with his stick. That’s that then. Fergus will come whether Jim wants him to or not. He’ll cook his elaborate meals. The chef, Stillman calls him.
Perhaps Jim should have stayed in Greenwich. At least there, no one bothered to foist themselves on him. Interrupting his solitude. His apartment over the stable was too tight for company. If guests came, there was the big house at the end of the drive with its palatial rooms. To hell with that. He would have been even more of an invalid there, even more watched over. Besides, he needs this place now. The fish hawks, the swallows that nest up the road in Stillman’s barn and swoop over in the evening feeding on mosquitoes. The sea, even if the fog’s swallowed it all up at present.
He crumples some newspaper and stuffs it in the big cast-iron stove, then lowers himself onto the chair to gather a lapful of wood from Stillman’s stack. Once it gets going, the stove’ll burn off the wetness in the air, and make the place warm for Cadillac. Putting a match to the paper, he puzzles over why he ever stayed so long in Greenwich, calcifying and pickling himself with drink. Commuting into the city to work. Perhaps he’d fooled himself with an illusion of mobility, not realizing how stuck he was. Home to Greenwich was just where he went after the war. Helen was in the hospital nearby, their boy was there. The museum in New York offered work. It seems he’d been too crushed to ever get himself out.
Fire blazing, he closes the stove’s heavy door and makes his way out to the porch, stepping carefully so as not to let the crutch slip on the wet boards. He peers into the gray, watches it swirl through the garden and up the porch steps, wrapping itself around the balustrade. He catches glimpses of things: a corner of the boathouse, the end of the dock, a tree branch. Everything unmoored and insubstantial, like ghosts drifting past.
Bird Skinner (9780802193636) Page 13