The Bird Artist Page 12

  “Would it please you?”

  “Nothing could, wholly. But that would, more than anything else I can think of.”

  “All right, then. Yes.”

  “Yes, but with very little conviction in your voice.”

  “It’s just that it sounds like a brutal journey to me. Hatred between you and Mother, going down to my wedding that way.”

  “It could well happen that we stare from the rail in different directions the whole journey. It could. It could go exactly how you might imagine it. But my small advice is, save imagination for marriage itself. I’m still in favor of it —marriage. God strike me dead, but I am. Even allowing the fact that Alaric Banville has sent ours to hell. Now leave me be. Get out. I’m tired.”

  I shut the door behind me. Bridget and Lemuel were upstairs. There was a clean tablecloth on each table. The soiled ones were piled in a corner. Out on the porch, I heard the rusted weathervane. I walked to Margaret’s house, but when I got there I saw that she and her father were having a late supper. They were laughing. I stood back from the house, watching them through a window. I went back to Spivey’s. I sat on the porch. I walked past the lighthouse, home.

  My father did not wait a week. Three nights later he came to our house. My mother had sequestered herself. I had been out each day trying to draw birds, but as far as I knew she had not been back to the lighthouse. It was late, around eleven o’clock. I was lying fully clothed on my bed. It was raining hard. The roof, the chimney, the shingle-roofed shed each registered rain with a different sound, and there was spillage out of the eaves. My door was open enough to see the blurred figure of my father go past. I got up and went to my door. He had tracked in. He had not bothered to take off his raincoat or galoshes.

  “You want a miracle?” my mother cried out as a greeting.

  Their bedroom door slammed, but I could still hear them.

  “Do you want some angel from on high to save you from humiliation?” she said. “Do you want to kill me? Do you want Reverend Sillet to put me in stocks so you and everyone else can spit on me? What is it, Orkney? Do you want me to drown myself in the sink? What would satisfy you? What would make it worth your while that you ever came back?”

  She kept the questions flying, and I thought there would be no end to them.

  “Should I cut out my heart? Should I write ‘I’m sorry’ a thousand times on the blackboard?”

  At one point my father shouted, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill myself!”

  “That solution’s a little too generous toward Botho August, don’t you think,” my mother said hoarsely.

  “I’ll kill him!”

  As for me, these were hours of bewildering helplessness and fear. Such a violent argument can turn a house inside out, let alone a mind, and there seemed to be no way to intervene, and no way to slow my heart down. It could have fairly beat out of my chest. What was perhaps most unpredictable was that the air choked with accusation, the guilty questions, the silences all emboldened me. It all emboldened me, maybe in the most senseless way, yet it did. I went to the woodshed, took up the revolver, and from that moment forward the revolver was part of my fate. As I walked to the lighthouse, I heard the foghorn. Three extended blasts. In a manner of speaking, I had perfect knowledge of everything to come, because I had said out loud, “You’ve got a gun.” I named the thing I held, and even having done so did not cast it aside. I tucked it into my belt under my shirt. And then it was as though the rain drowned out the sound of my own thinking, all reason, any hope at all. I was accompanied by dumb silence and rain.

  At the lighthouse I made my way along the picket fence. I watched as the beam swept and flattened out on the sea. I thought of how many times I had stood watching this from a cliff. How the beam caught a trawler, miniaturizing it like a toy boat on the full yellow moon, the firmament surrounding. Black. How the kittiwakes and gulls flicked darkly through the beam. At such times, you had to figure that Botho August would see these night birds, and that the trawler crew saw them as well—the night birds is what they had in common between them. I remembered Romeo Gillette saying, “A ship in trouble is exactly the same distance from the lighthouse as the lighthouse is from it—a simpleminded fact, except if you’re shipboard and about to capsize, that particular fact holds out no hope whatsoever. You simply hate the lighthouse keeper for being safe and warm, and mostly for you having to rely on him. And yet you pray he’s in top form.”

  Looking up to the yellow-lit third-floor window, the living quarters, I moved closer. Despite the rain I could make out that Botho August was expertly puppeteering the silhouette of a donkey against the opposite wall. He must have been sitting beneath the window, and had arranged the lantern in the best position to allow for hand shadows. He had come down from the housing for some entertainment, and he was not alone. One of the donkey’s ears drooped, and the silhouette of a hand considerably smaller than Botho’s lifted it up again. The hand disappeared and the ear flopped over. This routine was repeated eight times. I counted them.

  At that instant all of the elements of the entire unnerving night thus far gathered and sent some kind of poison up to my brain. I took Botho’s frivolity as a personal insult. He could not know this, of course. He could not know that out on his lawn I was so addled, had such disdain for him, that I was suddenly short of breath. Holding the revolver tightly in my right hand at arm’s length, steadying it with my left, I slammed a shot through the window. I walked to the door, stepped back about ten yards, and waited for Botho to show.

  The door opened and Botho peered out until he saw my figure in the yard.

  “Who’s that? Who’s there?”

  He had on his galoshes and nightshirt.

  “Fabian Vas,” I said.

  As he stepped from the doorway, I heard gramophone music coming from upstairs.

  “Is that a revolver in your hand?”

  “I shot the window out just now.”

  “There’s glass all over the floor. It’s rained-in, too. It’s a goddamned mess.”

  “Fine by me.”

  He looked at me a moment. “I didn’t force your mother to visit me so often,” he said, “just like I didn’t force Margaret to be here now. She did it on her own volition. She wasn’t bewitched. She walked up the stairs on two feet like anyone.”

  “You’ve done damage.”

  He sighed deeply, puffed out his cheeks, and made a loud blowing sound. “Congratulations on your forthcoming marriage,” he said. “Why, just earlier in the evening, Margaret told me. We’ll make a little toast later on, clink glasses and the like.”

  Botho lurched toward me. I shot him in the neck. The bullet spun him sideways, and by the time he turned back to me he had clutched his neck and appeared to be strangling himself. He took his hands away and inspected them. He rubbed them together like a child washing his hands with rain. Then, with awkward deliberation, he searched for the entry hole as if he might simply stop it up and be saved.

  Loudly the gramophone music scratched to a halt. I shot him in the stomach.

  He slumped to his knees. “I’m shot,” he said.

  “This was supposed to happen. It’s what I came here to do.”

  “I’m shot in the body, Fabian. I’m just the lighthouse keeper.”

  “You’re more than that.”

  “How old are you? How old is my murderer?”

  “Twenty.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d say goodbye to Alaric for me, whom I loved, if I could anyone.” He wheezed.

  “No, not in good conscience,” I said.

  He could barely talk now. “Imagine that,” he whispered, “—a murderer’s good conscience. You’re going to visit Mr. Ellis.”

  Since childhood I had heard any hangman, Canadian or otherwise, referred to as “Mr. Ellis.”

  Botho was curled in the mud. It was pelting down rain.

  “Mr. Ellis will be the man breathing good air right next to you on the scaffold.” He was now half facedown in th
e mud.

  I think that it was near one o’clock in the morning. Retching blood, Botho jerked his head back and forth, then lurched forward as though loosing his earthly form. This was followed by a sharp intake of breath, as though he was trying to suck it back in again. The bullet had lodged near his shoulder; it had not damaged his throat, and he could still utter, “I’ll pay the devil my soul twice over to watch you hang.” That sentence seemed to take an eternity to work its way through. I all but felt his grimace clamp down on my heart; blood bubbled along his lips. As he spoke those last words, his eyes had wandered crazily, which somehow made his prediction of my fate less plausible. Still, looking away just then, I was suddenly bent over with a true or imagined bodily pain and overpowering dread. If saying a thing more forcefully than it is felt makes it an outright lie, still, I dropped to my knees, knelt over Botho, drew his face close to mine, and confessed: “I’m glad I did this. And that’s what I’ll have to live with, however long I do live.” His eyes rolled back, his Adam’s apple seemed to lock like a gear fitting. I thought surely he was dead. He was leaking into the mud and grass. I saw the bullet hole and powder burn through his soaked shirt. An image came forth, of myself as a small boy on my knees by my bed. I said the Lord’s Prayer.

  I stood, dropped the revolver, and fled without thought to LaCotte’s barn, like an animal crazed by cold rain. The harpy voices of my mother and father quarreled in my ears. When I got to the barn I crouched in a corner. I breathed sawdust. The bile of fear and confusion rose in my throat. All in a few moments’ time, I was the most local of convicts. Pinned to the dark by the wretched gaze of Charibon’s owl.

  7

  Coffee

  Mr. Ellis, Mr. Ellis, Mr. Ellis, I kept hearing, but there was nobody else in the barn. As the remainder of the night passed, it turned out that I was pursued only by my father. The rain had stopped. I heard his voice: “Fabian?” He stood in the doorway holding a lantern.

  “Over here.”

  The owl fluttered, made a small screech, caped open its wing.

  “Fabian, don’t panic now, son. I’m keeping my distance here. Now listen carefully. Your mother has packed our bags. We’re leaving for Halifax. It’s best we go right now. Down to the mail boat. We’ll take things as they come.” He forced a strict calm into his voice. “Right now.”

  I hurried alongside my father to the wharf. Enoch had lit so many lanterns on board that from the top of the wharf their diffused light made it look as if the Aunt Ivy Barnacle was on fire. When we reached the dock, I saw that my mother was already there. She had on her raincoat, and the hem of her nightgown could be seen. She looked tired, pale, as distraught as I had ever seen her.

  “We woke Mr. Handle up,” my mother said. “We marched right into his house, imagine that. Imagine a neighbor doing that. Still, in this emergency, we remained discreet. We didn’t wake Margaret.”

  Enoch drew in the tie rope. My father and I stood at the rail. My mother stayed mid-deck.

  “Fleeing the village you were born in,” my father said.

  Enoch of course had for years full knowledge of my mother’s dislike for Margaret. Still, for the sake of civility, if nothing else, in advance of a long journey he said, “Alaric, you repair to the bunk. There’s blankets. You can go down there now.”

  My mother did that. Enoch climbed into the steering cabin. He idled up the Aunt Ivy Barnacle. Then he maneuvered us out into the harbor. Now fog was breaking into drifting wreaths and patches, and in the very first wash of daylight we gained open water. A half mile or so west of the harbor, Enoch steered south.

  “Coffee’s up here,” Enoch said.

  He had the engine full throttle, humming evenly. He kept things always finely tuned, oiled. Water churned and fanned out behind us. A few gulls rode the bow.

  My father screamed something incoherently into the wind.

  “Orkney there said there’d been a killing,” Enoch said. “He didn’t mention who’s dead or who did it. He put money in my hand, and now I’m taking you to Halifax.”

  Hands gripping the wheel, Enoch looked at me. “What is your life now?” he said. “Christ, what a sad day.”

  He fiddled with the wireless. “Botho August, this is Enoch Handle,” he said loudly, so I could hear. Then he tapped it out in Morse code.

  He sang:

  On the tenth of November

  as you all may well know,

  in the year nineteen-ought-two

  on her last trip she did go

  where she leaved Dog Tooth Harbour

  about 3 p.m.,

  with a strong breeze from the south’ard

  for Lamb’s Head she did steam.

  When he finished this verse from “The Wreck of the Steamship Bella May,” he said, “Fabian, I know who’s dead.”

  Now, concentrating on the sea ahead, he broke into another song, then abruptly stopped. “It’s a Beothuk song,” he said. “You can’t possibly know what it means. It’s talking to the dead. You can’t talk to the dead through a wireless. You have to do it another way.”

  As he took up the song again, thick with consonants, it shaped his mouth oddly. Hod-thoo, corah soob, puth-a-auth. I recall the sounds. He would translate in bits and pieces, as though English had just somehow broken through: “Sorrow, sorrow, sorrow,” catch himself, and return to Beothuk. The song was eerie, yet agreeable to the ear. He sang loudly, riding it into his private world, then it was over. “Pour me a cup of that, will you?” he said.

  “Enoch, in the eyes of the law you’re an accomplice of sorts.”

  “Maybe so. For now, though, I consider myself a paid employee. That and nothing else.”

  I studied Enoch’s face. His expression did not betray guilt, worry, or even doubt, as far as I could tell. In volunteering to help us get out of Witless Bay, he had cast aside personal pride, future shame, and fear of legal consequences. Eventually, too, Margaret might say, “Pop, you delivered a murderer to his bride.” Or perhaps my mother was right in the first place: that Enoch viewed this journey, now graceless and desperate, as a fact of life, nothing more, nothing less. I did not ask.

  “I just hired on,” Enoch said.

  By 7 a.m., three hours out of Witless Bay, the sky was cloudless. My mother had kept to the bunk. I saw that she was buried under the blankets. The Hollys’ letters were neatly stacked and tied with a string on the nightstand nailed to the floor.

  “We’ll tie up at Cape Broyle shortly,” Enoch called out. He pointed to a few stilt houses.

  And then I understood. He was going to take us through his regular routine of mail pickups. He knew that the wedding was set for October 24. It was now October 9. Given reasonable postponements for gales, mechanical troubles, or other unforeseen circumstances, there would be time. I stood next to my father. “Do you think he’s slowing down so the law can catch us?” I said.

  “I think he doesn’t want to waste a trip.”

  We anchored at Cape Broyle. Enoch cranked down the dinghy, then rowed it in. He stayed about an hour. He returned with a stack of mail and a few packages. In addition, he brought food aboard. In the small pantry belowdeck, he unwrapped hot scones from a cloth. He returned to the wheel. “Get off, you shit birds!” he shouted. Two cormorants flapped from the bow, then flew low to the water. He took us out to sea.

  As we entered the current the water darkened. At the rail, my father said, “How’d I even start to look for you in the first place, you might well ask.”

  “I figured you went to confront Botho August. I heard you and Mother fighting.”

  “Botho was still breathing when I got there. He was still alive when I found him, son. I thought it was a miracle, considering he’d been shot three times.”

  “Twice.”

  “No, you’re wrong.”

  “I shot him in the neck and then in the belly. I might not have been clear-headed, but I could count to two.”

  “One in the neck, that’s true. One in the belly, also true. The final
truth is that to the left of his heart, if you’d rolled him over and looked down on him like I had, was a third hole. Seen clear as could be, because the rain had washed him like a baby’s bath in Eden.”

  “I killed a man and now I feel nothing toward him.”

  “I called up into the lighthouse. I heard a scratching sound, maybe that goddamned gramophone. I took Botho’s pulse. It was now gone. I hurried back to our house. Alaric was facedown on the bed. ‘Botho August is dead,’ I told her. ‘I think it was Margaret who did it, maybe Fabian.’ She started packing suitcases without a word. A frantic person. Where did she think we were going? In a short bit, though, she walked into the kitchen and said, ‘It’s up to Enoch Handle now.’ And then I knew what she meant. I got out the money from where I’d hid it, in the woodshed. We woke Enoch. Then I found you in the barn. And one other thing to tell you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “At the lighthouse, when I looked up, I saw Margaret in the window.”

  “Botho told me she was with him. I don’t have to hear it again.”

  From October 11 to October 13, we rode out a storm just north of Lamaline. Late on October 14, we tied up at Lamaline, at the southernmost tip of Newfoundland. “I’ll go into town now,” Enoch said. “I’ll be back in the morning. What about cribbage? There’s a set in the pantry. Or else one of Margaret’s Old Maid decks, it’s around here somewhere. We used to play it. You don’t even have to talk to one another, playing that.”

  “Just go on ahead,” my father said. “We’ll do fine without cards.”

  Enoch rowed into Lamaline. My mother retired right away to the bunk. On a sudden impulse my father started to mop the deck and steering cabin. He worked the mop furiously. He reached into every crevice and corner. I climbed on top of the cabin and began to sketch red knot and dunlin. In the waning light I could still see them darting and foraging alongshore, their plaintive voices drifting out, if the breeze had caught them just right. My father finished his mopping. He stood beneath the roof. “Sore shoulder for some reason,” he said. “I’ll rub in some liniment and call it an early night.”