The Bird Artist Read online

  Isaac Sprague’s letters were detailed and impersonal. They kept to subjects such as the shaping of a beak, shadows, color accents. He wrote to me about consciously denying certain background landscapes the opportunity—as he put it—to dominate rather than feature a bird. In one letter he said that bird artists should invoke a bird, feather by feather, not merely copy what we observe in the wild. He had, for me, a difficult vocabulary and I wrote him a separate letter to say that. He sent me a dictionary for Christmas, 1909, along with a note saying, “Read each of my letters from now on with this book in hand. I’m not going backwards in my education on your behalf.” The dictionary had arrived in October, Christmas greetings inscribed in advance.

  Sprague offered strong opinions in each letter, not just about my work but about bird art in general. Much later, after our correspondence had ended, I realized that all of his musings, asides, complaints, all of his fervor added up to a rare education, not just in craft but in his own passionate character as well. “Birds,” he wrote, “and the making of a bird on the page is the logic of my heart. And yours?” He examined life closely and described things in close-up language. “That belted kingfisher you sent me,” he wrote, “is pretty good-fine. A solid effort, Mr. Vas. Yet the foot does not seem to encircle the branch but to be laid on a differently pitched surface.” I looked up “pitch” in the dictionary. I drew kingfisher feet on branches for hours, days in a row.

  Whatever praise he divvied out I was intoxicated with for weeks, months! When I would hear that the Aunt Ivy Barnacle had tied up, I would drop everything and run to the wharf. I would follow the burlap mail sacks up to Gillette’s store, even haul them myself, and watch as Romeo distributed envelopes into slots. My family did not have a slot. “Anything for me from Halifax?” I would ask Romeo, a question meant only to narrow down my possible disappointments to one, since Halifax was the only place from which, and Sprague the only person from whom, I had ever received a letter.

  Each of Isaac Sprague’s letters began: “Dear Mr. Vas, Student # 12.” I learned that at any given time throughout the years I worked with him, he kept three dozen or so students through the mail, and also taught a night course, “Nature Drawing,” in a small museum on Agricola Street, the stationery of which he used. The date of each letter was printed below his signature, and each letter ended in an identical way:

  In hopes for improvement, Isaac Sprague

  I have kept all his letters, my own inheritance from those years. “You’ve got a knack,” he wrote on September 7, 1909, “but you are no genius.”

  Out of financial necessity I maintained my other employments, yet privately I considered bird art to be my profession. In secret, a journal such as Bird Lore truly defined my world, or a world I wanted more and more to belong to. I wanted someday to report birds back from Catesby’s Florida, or from Africa, South America, Siberia, any place really; just looking at a globe would keep me awake half the night painting. I was squirreling money away to flee. And though I was stuck in Witless Bay, or thought of it that way, I was in fact able to improve, slowly, to the point where two reputable journals, Maritime Monthly and the more specialized Bird Lore, solicited my sketches and watercolors, both as fillers and to accompany feature articles. Each request, each acceptance, made me feel more hopeful, more alive to the possibility that bird art could be my life. Maritime Monthly, for instance, had paid $1.50 Canadian for the first work I had ever sold, ten pencil sketches of barn swallows which it did not publish yet kept on file. Sprague, of course, had recommended me. He wrote to tell me that he had. I thought of this as a generosity and it was, yet it was also an investment in his own future. The success of his students, within the small world of bird art, reflected well on him, and he asked that I mention him in any correspondence I might have with a journal’s editor. I am certain that he asked the same of all his students.

  In fact, when I had sold the barn swallows, Sprague requested that I send him a 25 commission, that one time only. I sent it; I would happily have sent the entire amount I was paid. And I enclosed a lengthy, no doubt overwrought description of a magnolia warbler, along with a torn-out page from my daily sketchbook, as intimate a document to me as any diary. However, the audacity of a student offering “a preliminary sketch,” as he called it, heartily offended him. He wrote back: “I herewith return your warbler without comment.” That was comment enough. Perhaps it was his custom to give his students a cold shake early on, to slowly step back once they had entered his professional domain. I cannot say for certain. When our work together ceased with sudden abruptness, it was a mystery to me, and upsetting. Late in October 1910, I had sent him the required five drawings: a murre, a crow, a gull, a cormorant, a black duck, knowing the likelihood of not hearing from him until spring. Yet in April and May 1911, the Aunt Ivy Barnacle made a number of round trips, and there was no letter from Sprague.

  Anyway, I had been earning money from bird art and was proud of it.

  In 1911, I still had a steady hand and could set aside personal torment for the duration of a drawing or painting. I still could concentrate for hours in a row, day and night, and had not yet fallen completely into the habit of drinking twenty to thirty cups of coffee a day. That happened in earnest after I had murdered Botho August and holds true of me to this day. I had never enjoyed alcohol, though I would drink whiskey with Margaret Handle, because she hated to drink alone. And she drank alone much of the time. But coffee is a different thing. It is a peculiar addiction and few people understand it. In my case, however, it can be traced back to Alaric’s, Orkney’s, and my household; I had drunk coffee since I was five years old. There were the long winters, you see, and coffee was what you came in to out of the cold.

  So much to tell. Though I am a bird artist, you would not have heard of me. None of my paintings resides in a museum. My sketchbooks gather dust in Enoch Handle’s attic. My first wife, Cora Holly, whom I married in an unfortunate arranged marriage, may still own an ink portrait of a garganey in eclipse plumage, I do not know. It was a wedding present, actually.

  The garganey is a surface-feeding duck, and even Enoch Handle, who knew every bird along the coves, inlets, the entire coastline (he delivered mail from Lamaline at the southern tip of Newfoundland, to Cook’s Harbour at the top; another boat, the Doubting Thomas, serviced the western seaboard), found it a rare visitor. Enoch was in his sixties and told me he had identified only two garganeys with total certainty. He admitted that at a glance a garganey might easily be mistaken for a cinnamon teal or a blue-winged teal. And it was true that you could live your entire life in Witless Bay, in Newfoundland for that matter, and never see a garganey, even if you were desperately searching for one.

  Yet I had drawn Cora Holly’s wedding present from life. It had been as though an otherwise meandering summer day, the day I had spotted the garganey, had lured me to Shoe Cove. Just before dawn I had packed my sketchbook, pens, binoculars, and had set out from our one-story blue cottage. I had already drunk five cups of coffee. I walked the half mile to the lighthouse. It was a clear morning; the lighthouse was silent except for gulls bickering along the wooden rail that encircled the light housing.

  I looked up at the lighthouse and thought how rarely I had spoken with Botho August, only a few words in passing if he was standing near the road, even though he had been the lighthouse keeper since I was eleven. People may assume that in a village of less than two hundred everyone talks to everyone else, but in truth being reclusive is a kind of expertise. Of course I had seen Botho working around his yard. I had seen him pulleyed up on a hoist slat in order to paint the lighthouse or wash windows. I had also stood in front of other lighthouses, at Bay Bulls, Cape Race, Portugal Cove. I had walked or taken a horsedrawn cart to those. I knew them as being well kept—the one at Cape Race could be called pristine. Each of them was inviting in its own way, so that, stranger or no, you would care to go inside. You might be enticed by an open door or a table lantern glowing or some other sign of life. But—
and this struck me as unnatural—while Botho August lived there, I never once saw Witless Bay’s lighthouse door ajar, certainly not wide open enough to let the breeze in, to fully change the air on the ground floor.

  I felt there was something coldly sequestered about Botho’s lighthouse, and associated Botho with that feeling. The manicured summer lawn, white picket fence, goat bell nailed to the gate. Not a cobble was out of place in the low wall marking the path, past the supply shed down to Witless Bay Harbour. The lighthouse made me feel that even to appraise it from a distance was a kind of trespassing. All the same, it had a stately presence, beautiful, secluded, yet visible on a clear day for miles. And of course with its rescuing light it had dramatic purpose. Like most lighthouses along the coast, ours had a lens system invented by Augustin Fresnel, a Frenchman whom we all read about in our history primer. I remember the new lights being delivered by schooner in 1907. The enormous crates each had DIAMOND HEATING AND LIGHTING COMPANY OF MONTREAL stenciled on its side. It took three men from the company nearly a month to construct the beehive-shape assembly of prisms and lenses. There was a small crowd, mostly children, from the village watching every day. Finally, the crew’s foreman called a meeting and explained the new lights. He showed how Botho August could now use vaporized kerosene for a light source. The burners were 60 millimeters in size and used silk mantles to burn kerosene, much the way a hand-held lantern worked. The largest lights were rotated on a bath of mercury by a clockwork mechanism. There was a “bull’s-eye” lens at the focal point; the light burning behind it was refracted and magnified into a powerful beam. The foreman stayed on an extra night to instruct Botho in more detail, and to show off the beam, which he did for hours on a fogless night. It turned into a kind of celebration and a few people concocted fireworks for the occasion. After the crew left for Montreal, Botho used both the vaporized kerosene and, for shadowing and pinpointing the beam in the old way, a household lamp filled with seal oil. Romeo once said that Botho could “draw a picture on the sea” with his seal-oil lamp.

  The shutters were painted black. There was a forged weathervane shaped like a whale, spout and all. The lighthouse loomed at the end of its brief peninsula with a splendid jurisdiction over the wooden structures of day-to-day village life; the older cottages, the newer two-story houses, the stilt houses on shelves of rock along the water, the ice-fishing shanties lined up off-season at the end of the sawmill road, cold storage shacks dug into hillsides, the seine gallows, trestles made of rough rails we called “starrigans,” used for drying newly barked nets.

  I had had my closest look at Botho August long before the close look at his murdered body, however, when my family and assorted neighbors all had Canadian Thanksgiving at the widower Romeo Gillette’s house, adjacent to his general store. In part, Romeo saw his annual Thanksgiving as a protest. “This is Canadian Thanksgiving, mind you,” he would never fail to say, beginning the prayer. “God, we ask that Newfoundland will get out from under the yoke of Great Britain. And soon. Amen.” The holiday dinner I am referring to here was in 1909, and I sat directly across from Botho August. Neither of us had chosen such an arrangement; when Romeo swung the school bell to call dinner, those were the chairs we were each standing next to.

  It was a rare night of socializing for my family. My mother, Alaric, who was thirty-nine that year, had a slight build, dark brown eyes, and had as usual braided her black hair up in an inventive style. She wore a flower-print dress, exotic for Witless Bay, that her sister, Madeleine, had sent from Vancouver, and over it a cotton vest of her own design. The dress had taken the better part of ten months to arrive and was accompanied by a chatty letter full of old news pinned to the lace end of a sleeve. “Even though I’m hearing it for the first time, it seems like stale news,” my mother had remarked, setting down the letter. “Still, her handwriting is lovely. And I know that overland mail takes an eternity. Besides, what are my sister’s choices? To write about our childhood. To write about her present life. That’s it. Or else, to try and predict the future, I suppose. Oh, that’d be definitely too risky for her. Definitely.”

  My father, Orkney, was forty-three. He wore a Scottish herringbone suit he had bought from a tailor in Bonavista and a freshly laundered white shirt, starched and ironed, buttoned to the collar. Most men in Witless Bay wore knitted underwear all year round. It was lined with “fleece calico,” which kept it from being itchy next to the skin. My father’s sentiment was, what will keep out the cold will keep out the heat. He was an accomplished carpenter, boat builder, and harvester of wild birds. He was as meticulous a person as I have yet to meet, in how he washed his face, wrung out the washcloth, squared it, hung it to dry; in how he scrubbed out his coffee mug; in how he tested the strength of each shoelace before tying it. “All things are connected in this world,” he would say, showing me how to drive a nail. He would sing a philosophical song: “The nail shall not forget the forge, the plank not the darkly woods,” the kind of verse hospitable to just about anything you might think of, object, animal, human being. My father despised any sign of privilege, and he had the confidence of someone self-taught in a number of hands-on occupations from a young age. In all of this I admired him. Though he was occasionally edgy, capable of saying harsh things, he generally spoke well of people, perhaps more efficient in his assessments than generous. He seemed to harbor a very private system of prejudices. He kept his thoughts mostly to himself, though. I thought of him as a quiet man. His favorite response in the face of savage gossip, claim of insult, or just plain bad news was “Well, it’s no matter to die for, now, is it.”

  My father was of average height, I would say, solidly built, though he got on the thin side when he spent months harvesting birds, an enterprise he took part in every few years. He had thick black hair combed straight back from his forehead, salt-and-pepper sideburns. He had a handsome face, compromised by his older brother, Sebastian. My father called him Bassie. I thought of him as Uncle Bassie. My seldom-seen uncle. Bassie was a career bank robber, or that was the only steady occupation of his I knew about. He would send a letter every Christmas, often from a work camp or prison or local jail, asking for cigarettes, asking not to be forgotten.

  When my father was ten, my father’s story went, Bassie broke his jaw while teaching him to box, a rock in each fist. The break had gone unattended for too long; then it was improperly set, reset by a second doctor, and, when it finally mended, left my father’s jaw misaligned, his lips having the effect of the wrong two jigsaw pieces forced together, never fitting tightly. This affected his breathing at night. He may have breathed oddly during the day as well, but I did not notice. Lying in my bed all the way across the house, I would picture my father settling into his own bed, propped up by pillows, which allowed him to sleep. No doubt in part to cover the considerable scar, he had grown a beard as soon as he could. By Thanksgiving, 1909, his beard was white-grey.

  At social gatherings my parents were attentive listeners, but each preferred the other to do the talking. They knew that their natural reticence would be more sharply featured if they sat next to each other, so they never did. That Thanksgiving, I remember, went by with my mother saying the hellos, my father telling Romeo, “Rare as I’ve ever seen, for a man to cook like you can,” both of them managing a few sentences during the meal, and my father saying goodbye for all three of us. They were good listeners, though, and I always got the impression that people liked them, my father in particular, and maybe even liked puzzling over their natures.

  The meal was potluck. We had brought cod and sweet bread. Romeo had provided five wild turkeys. Botho August had contributed a dozen roasted puffins, those clownfaced birds the locals called sea parrots. There was a small population of them on the cliffs beneath the lighthouse, and thousands out on Witless Bay Island.

  By that time I had earned a reputation in the village for painting and drawing birds. I had had work in journals and magazines. Romeo Gillette even had framed two of my drawings of kittiwakes an
d hung them on the wall behind his counter.

  Margaret arrived late and wedged her chair between mine and my mother’s.

  Right after Romeo’s prayer, Botho August turned a puffin over on its platter with his fork and said, “Ever drawn one of these, Fabian?”

  “Not a dead one. I only draw from life. From the wild.”

  Botho stared at me, a hostile squint, as though I had talked down to him.

  “Well,” he said, producing what I thought was an involuntary hiss, “this one here’s got an awfully wild look about the eyes, wouldn’t you agree, eh? Would you care to make a quick sketch before we hungry folks tear away at it?”

  There was tense laughter all around. “No thanks,” I said. I then made certain to cut the first slice of puffin; in fact, I ate the entire bird. And from that moment until the last time I saw Botho August alive, he and I said barely a handful of words to each other.

  Botho August was a tall man, over six feet, slim but wideshouldered, in top health, I imagine. What seemed to contradict his physical stature, though, was his frail skin, which freckled up and needed protection from the sun. He often wore his sleeves cuffed to the end, even on the hottest days. He wore a British sea captain’s hat, which rankled Romeo, who took anything of British make personally. “Excepting ancestry,” he said. “That one can’t help.” Botho had hair perhaps a shade lighter red than Margaret’s, and wore it longer than most men in Witless Bay wore theirs. He was, I would guess, a few years younger than my mother. He had a red-brown, short-cropped beard and blue-grey eyes. He had a way of coming alert, of both squinting and holding his eyebrows aloft. It was a look of impatient curiosity and resignation all at once, as though he had a predetermined notion of serious regard, and you either fit into it with your first few words or you did not. And if you did not, it was as though you had failed him in some personal and unforgivable way, and he would tilt his head at a surprising angle, squint, appeared as bored as a child in church on his birthday. It was a rudeness that provided both him and you with an immediate reason to turn and pace away as in a duel. He was a man who disagreed with the world, is how I thought of him. A man able to make judgements as easily as another man might flick a moth from a table, without afterthought or regret. I had seen him be cordial, yes, but in a way that seemed painful to him, not at all natural.