Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  A bullet at that range wouldn’t have left much intact. Still, they might have mended it, she thinks. They might have sat here and bound the broken pieces with ivory nut leaves and creepers. Refashioned the eye sockets with rings of clamshell. There must have been something left.

  Cadillac’s been trying to cast some light on the news of Jim’s death, to see it as a release, a new beginning, a reunion with others who died before. In this way, the old island beliefs weren’t so different from Christianity. The main difference, it seems to her, is that the Solomon Islanders managed to keep their dead close at hand. So they might go and talk to them sometimes.

  “At home, the old people believe that the dead pass over to an island called Santo,” she says. “Some of them say they have seen the dead or heard them passing by in their canoes. They say a man’s spirit can come back in the shape of a shark or snake, a bonito fish, or a frigate bird.”

  Sunbirds, Fergus thinks. The dead returning for Jim. And what bird or fish would Jim come back as?

  It’s time to leave. But he sits a while longer, letting Cadillac’s thoughts of shrines and frigate birds wrap around him. Hell, they’re not going to start the service without him. Looking out across the cove and all its bright reflections, he sees clearly what she’s offering him. Another way of seeing, acceptance, a hope that stands apart and directly opposed to the gloom of his doubly crossed inheritance.

  When he stands, she raises a hand for him to help her up, then keeps his hand firmly in hers. They walk up the dock together toward Stillman, who’s waiting to drive them in his pickup truck.

  Island Funeral, Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, September 1973

  Jim’s funeral is timed to begin shortly after the arrival of the noon ferry. Michael disembarks with a small clutch of fellow birdmen and they walk up a slight hill to the small white clapboard church just back from the waterfront. Its bells call out in the brisk, clear sea air. They pass the small post office, shut for the day. The town library. A provisions store, where they linger a minute, drinking some bitter overbrewed coffee.

  Fergus had invited him, along with the rest of the bird department, and an impressive number have shown up, given that Fox Island is a full day’s journey from New York. That many had only just returned from summer holidays. And that Michael isn’t the only one Jim’s offended and alienated. They are here for his better days.

  Oliver Austin—or Iggy as he’s called, the expert on Japanese birds—is here. Farrell, back from studying parrots in Central America.

  Inside the church, Michael looks about him and studies Jim’s family from behind. A large jowly figure he recognizes as Jim’s brother, dressed rakishly in a cream-colored suit and panama hat. A tall, younger man who must be Jim’s son, though his full, shoulder-length hair is unusual for Wall Street. Next to him, a tall, striking black woman. Her bright flowered dress and hair mark her as foreign. Delacour sits with them.

  Toward the back, Laina slides in late just as the organ sounds. She wears a stylish hat but looks terribly pale beneath it.

  It’s an eclectic gathering. The delegation of crusty ornithologists dispersed amid a smattering of islanders in their Sunday best, looking as though they feel slightly displaced in their own church. There’s an old, hunched man wheeled into the aisle, a medal from the war pinned on the lapel of his suit. A large sturdy man with thick calloused hands who later stands to read Psalm 23 with a slow Maine accent and sonorous gravity that makes the whole journey worth taking. Stillman, he’s called.

  And that’s before a voluptuous soprano teeters up to the altar in high heels and sings Bach’s Bist Du bei mir. This followed by an aria from Tosca. Actually Michael distinctly hears her say “for Tosca,” but perhaps she misspoke. She’s German. He remembers that Jim’s brother helps run the Met.

  The soprano sings again as they file out, this time gesturing to the foreign woman, who joins her in an apparently impromptu descant to Shubert’s Ave Maria. Their voices spill out the open door, across the Penobscot.

  Someone’s been busy gathering flowers. Cutting them ruthlessly from every garden on the island it seems; there are so many. Dahlias, cosmos, daisies, and black-eyed Susans in every alcove. Up on the altar, giant sunflowers beam like big, colorful defiant suns.

  At the door, the island cop in full uniform stands so stiffly, it appears to Michael that he’s waiting to arrest Jim’s ghost.

  It’s a beautiful afternoon, a spah’kler, he hears someone call it. The guests gather on the wide porch of Jim’s house and spill out over the lawn, where they drink champagne and are served New York delicacies, such as Jim would never offer.

  The foreign woman and Jim’s son go hand in hand. Michael overhears Laina talking to them about a museum in the Solomon Islands, so he’s confused as to whether she had some relation to Jim or is Fergus’s exotic girlfriend from the city.

  “Michael!” Laina greets him, as he joins her at a small picnic table under an apple tree. She’s taken off her hat and has been sitting with her face to the sun.

  “I hear you’re taking a break from the museum and heading back to Argentina?” she asks with interest. He nods.

  “Will you be finishing your reference work on local bird names? Such a terrific idea.”

  He’s flattered by her enthusiasm, her exact recollection of his work. “Actually not,” he confides quietly. “I’m going back to find my wife, Nita.”

  He looks out to sea, unsure what she’ll make of this, wedded as she is to incessant research. Curious whether she’d ever had any inkling of his feelings for her. And is taken aback when she almost jumps with pleasure and clutches his hand.

  “But Michael, that’s wonderful,” she says. And Michael is relieved to find he’s immune to this physical contact. His infatuation has vanished. Not that he doesn’t appreciate her hair, her pretty hat.

  “To your luck,” she says, raising her glass. “To birds of paradise and their showy courtship displays.” Michael’s not sure what to make of this either, it seems so out of character.

  “I’m wondering if you might do me a favor,” he says, seizing the moment. Laina looks at him, wide-eyed. “I’m wondering if you might finish off the piece for me, the profile of Jim.”

  “I’d love that,” she says. She squeezes his hand.

  “You’d do him better justice.”

  And here is Mann lumbering down the lawn toward them with a bottle of champagne. It seems a long time ago, much longer than this one summer, that he assigned the profile of Jim. Strange that it had turned into an obituary after all. Although Michael had never got past the note-taking stage, it seems the work has changed him. That Jim’s secrecy, his isolation, his temper had stood as a warning. He’d been an ass to let Nita go.

  Standing to greet Mann, he looks out across the cove, its green-brown water, its clutch of lobster pots, a single lobster boat on its mooring, the weed-strewn rocks, the reflection of trees and sky. Both wild and workaday, which suits Jim somehow.

  No one at the funeral had mentioned how Jim died. Most likely, it’s another fact that’s not going to appear in the retrospective. He wonders what Laina will do with the Japanese material. The heads Mann had told them about.

  Suddenly, Michael feels eager to get away. To be back in the colorful, dusty streets, the forests and hills of Argentina. It will take explaining and apology. It will take changes. But he wants nothing more now than to join Nita. To be a proper husband to her, which will mean staying there in the wilds of Argentina. On a farm on the pampas maybe.

  Now that he’s decided, he feels he hardly has time to get there fast enough. He hopes it’s not too late.

  EPILOGUE

  Set out, you people of Enogai, you people of the Kula Gulf, you people of Roviana, you people of the Wanawana. Go up to Noro, launch four canoes; go to Mbanga, launch four canoes; go to Kokenggolo, launch four canoes. Paddl
e four embracing nights, cast out four anchors. Shout people of Enogai, shout people of the Wanawana. Let him come down sounding your conch, let him come down casting.

  “Stop that witch talk,” Cadillac’s mother scolds, overhearing the old aunties. But she’s too busy grilling fish and preparing pudding for a proper church burial to interfere. And other women draw in to listen, nodding and recalling their own memories of how it was a dead man used to be sent on, remembering stories they’d been told.

  They sit under a mango tree a way off from the thatched Methodist church, enjoying the shade and the rapt attention of this young girl, who is smart and quick. Already they see something special in her. They are chewing betel with lime. One or two are weaving a decorative altar of rattan and dyed pandanus leaves for the church.

  In the old days, the souls of the dead were picked up by the ancestors and paddled across the sea. As far as Cadillac can make out, this doesn’t happen right away, the moment a person dies, but sometime after. After all the proper rites and ceremonies have been performed. First, you have to leave the skull to bleach in the sun, one auntie says. Then, you bind the jaw with lave creepers and decorate the ear and eye sockets with rings of clamshell.

  She’s seen the skulls tucked between slabs of coral, haphazardly arranged, on what is still considered tambu or sacred ground, in the rubble of old canoe houses. The Australian scuba divers pay money to the chief to see them, though most of the skulls have lost their decorations and jawbones. The creeper has rotted and not been replaced.

  In the old days, an auntie says, a dead man’s body was tied with vines, slung on a pole, and carried down to a sacred rock by the shore. A remote rock where it was tied in a sitting position looking west out to sea and left to rot, and to be picked clean by the corpse-eating spirit. As well as by the birds and bugs and great hordes of flies, and crabs, another auntie adds. And you wouldn’t want to go near that place because of the smell.

  “Stop now, why are you are filling the girl’s head with all that nonsense?” Cadillac’s mother tuts from a distance. But they only laugh and spit betel juice and slap Cadillac on the shoulder or pat the back of her hand affectionately, conspiratorially, as if the girl can understand things her mother doesn’t. Even the most devout, who are weaving the altar, join in.

  In the old days, when a man died, fresh young coconuts and areca nuts were broken and left as offerings for the ghosts and the ancestors to eat. Also puddings of cassava and betel nut with lime. The dead man’s most precious belongings—his shield and spear, his shell arm rings—were broken and cast about. And in his garden, all his betel nut trees were cut down and his cassava plants uprooted, which was a way of displaying grief and fear and anger, as well as protecting against thievery and jealousy, Cadillac supposes. And his relatives would wear pepeu leaves around their necks to protect them from the corpse-eating spirit.

  This was the old way to mourn. The aunties nod their approval, quietly question whether Christianity had left a few things out.

  There were other traditions and rituals they are more abashed to speak of. Customs they’re well rid of, and others some of them won’t admit ever happened. Like the kidnapping of children from other villages to be tended until the day a skull might be needed for an important ceremony like the funeral of a chief, for instance, or the launching of a canoe. The way a chief’s widow was expected to commit suicide, and how the others might be called on to help her. The way the bodies of suicides and lepers and stillborns were not tended to, but taken and unceremoniously dumped at sea.

  The way menstruating girls had to seclude themselves in a bisi hut at the edge of the jungle and pregnant woman had to give birth there. Though that, in fact, had the advantage of allowing the women some rest, Cadillac thinks.

  If you ask them about any of that, they tut like Cadillac’s mother and shake their heads—as if it was another world where those things happened.

  Her old aunties’ murmurings have sunk so deep, Cadillac supposes she’ll carry them around with her forever. Even here in the United States, even when she returns to the Solomons as a proper doctor.

  Jim would have liked the stories too and the old way of burial. He would have liked being left down here a while looking out. Even if, as a suicide, he was rudely dumped at sea, his body floating down into the deep forest of kelp to rest on the mica-flecked sand, he would have liked to be picked clean by fish and crabs and lobsters.

  It’s the end of the day. The sun drops low across the cove, turning a brilliant orange. She’s sitting on the thick plank that runs across the threshold of the boathouse, the exact place Jim died. Tomorrow, she will be heading back to Yale, but now she lets her legs dangle toward the cold water.

  Go off to Baanga, slap the water four time to attract bonito fish. Go to Kohinggo, slap the water four times. Go off to Wanawana, she murmurs. A prayer used to summon the ancestors and usher a spirit on its way. When she whispers it aloud, then closes her eyes, she can hear their paddles slapping the water, the guttural utterings, the whistling of ancestors. Here they are. They have come for him, to this place Jim died.

  Jim’s spirit is as truculent as ever. She has to scold him and wave him on his way, just as Tosca shooed the hornbill. She can tell he’s pleased, though he’d never say. And who has come? His doctor father, his father’s friend, who first taught him about birds, a boatman who taught him to sail. Dead men from the war. The lovely woman in the photograph he hides.

  When a man becomes a spirit, he is a child all over again and has no knowledge of the ways of the ancestors, or even their language, her aunties told her. For Jim, it’s a relief. He doesn’t like talking. And now there’s no demand for explanation, in fact there’s no possibility of saying anything. The ancestors don’t rush him, they don’t hurry. They paddle slowly all the way around the cove, four times.

  Nor will they steer a direct route back to Santo but will take their time, paddling along the reefs and islands, putting into familiar coves and sacred places. Along the way, they will fish. They will cast. They will shout and blow conch shells. It’s as if the new spirit has given them a chance to come home, to visit their old haunts and pasts.

  And Jim is glad to be on a boat again, out on the sea. Fishing. Moving along the coast in the last reflections of the sun. Go now, and wait that they might take you to Santo.

  She keeps her eyes shut and listens to the sound of spirit paddles.

  NOTES

  On Names

  Bird names change over time as scientists reclassify species based on new information about molecular data (DNA), behavior, and geographic distribution. To the best of my ability, I have adopted the scientific names my characters would have used. For simplicity’s sake, more modern spellings are used for place names.

  On Sources

  The description of the Laysan Rail and quotes come from J. Greenway Jr.’s article “Remarks on the Preservation of Birds” delivered to the International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature in Lake Success, 1949. The theory and arguments for the whereabouts of the true Treasure Island are adapted from Greenway’s unpublished article “Isla de Providencia: Or Old Providence, Providence of Pirates.”

  The songs Cadillac sings are “Auki Love Song” and “Walkabout ’Long Chinatown,” written and recorded by Solomon Dakei and by Edwin Nanau Sitori, respectively. As well as leading the capital’s top bamboo band, Dakei was chief radiologist at Honiara’s Central Hospital. He served as a scout in the war. I have not been able to track the origin of the popular war tune.

  The incredible story of Jean Delacour can be read in his memoir The Living Air, published by Country Life Ltd. in 1966.

  Highly informative local accounts of Solomon Island traditions and lives include Maekera: The Life Story of Hereditary Chief Nathan Kera, as told to Russell Parker (1994); Tie Varane: People of Courage, a series of biographies compiled by the Methodist mini
ster Rev. George C. Carter (1981); and The Big Death: Solomon Islanders Remember World War II, 1988.

  One of the first books I read on the Solomons, Aloha Solomons, by Gwen Cross, who worked as a missionary teacher between 1929 and the late 1960s, made a vivid impression. I would recommend Arthur Grimble’s A Pattern of Islands to anyone interested in the South Seas.

  John Miller Jr.’s Cartwheel: The Reduction of Rabaul, published by the Office of the Chief of Military History in 1959, served as a constant reference and provided key details of the New Georgia Campaign. As did Eric A. Feldt’s The Coastwatchers (1946).

  The book Jim sends Tosca is modeled on Ernst Mayr’s Birds of the Southwest Pacific (1945), the first field guide to birds of the area. Modern birders are in luck with Guy Dutson’s 2011 Birds of Melanesia. Jared Diamond’s article on Northern Melanesian Birds (published in Pacific Science, 2002), Charles Sibley’s “Notes on the Birds of New Georgia” (1951), and Walter R. Donaghho’s “Observations of Some Birds of Guadalcanal and Tulagi” (1950), both published in The Condor, were particularly useful for me as local studies. Sibley and Donaghho collected and observed during the war.

  All Native American bird names mentioned come from Joseph Kastner’s history of birding, A World of Watchers, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1986.

  The Life magazine photo was published as “Picture of the Week” on May 22, 1944. James J. Weingartner’s “Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941–45,” published in The Pacific Historical Review, gives an account of the furor it caused.

  A. M. Hocart’s fascinating and hugely informative article “The Cult of the Dead in Eddystone of the Solomons” was published in two parts in The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, vol. 52 (1922). W. H. R. Rivers’s lecture, “The Dying-Out of Native Races,” was delivered to the Royal Institute of Public Health in 1918 and later published in The Lancet (1920). The anthropologists travelled to New Georgia to conduct field research between 1908 and 1909. During World War I, Hocart’s served in France with Army Intelligence, while Rivers, more famously, treated shell shock victims in Edinburgh.