Creation (25 page)

“Don’t tell him!” commanded Lucy. “He does not have your best wishes at heart.”

“But he says, dear heart —”

“You are too easy! Don’t read his writing, just look at this,” she warned, holding the page between finger and thumb. It was a message all by itself, sour and sterile.

Poor Lucy hates his enemies with more passion than he does.

To think of Bonaparte is to think of the Philadelphia group, who laugh at Audubon’s exuberant creatures and call them “wretched.” To subdue the Americans he must conjure the Europeans, who love him: there is Swainson, whose ecstatic review in his magazine soothed the painter’s hurt feelings in London at a time when it mattered. And there are signs that the Americans are warming to his work. He sold
new subscriptions before he left for Maine. And there is the heartening
Baltimore Courier
that denounced his “own country’s neglect of the
Birds
…”

N
OW
A
UDUBON
is in the final stages of his distraction; his gaze has floated to some far dark corner of the hold, where he stares as if at a shadow play. He is not in Labrador in a forty-degree chill at all. It is a summer day.

T
HEY WERE IN THE GARDEN
of the house on Rutledge Avenue, walking through the piazza where the vines of Cloth of Gold roses hung, and the white star jessamine. The garden was formal there, and they had to follow the intricate stonework that made a path amongst the beds. There were flowering pomegranates, and a huge quince tree, espaliers with the
Mannetia
vine from Brazil, and the yucca with its towering cloud of snowy bells, which the children called Adam and Eve’s Needle and Thread because they used the spikes and the threads to sew. The orange wallflowers filled the air with their sweet scent.

They passed from the formal area to the arbour covered with the little yellow Lady Banksia roses. It was their spot. They sat on the bench. Surrounding them were the wild plants that Bachman brought from the woods — azaleas, woodbine, dogwood and Cherokee roses. The well was there. Beside it was the green water cart, into which Adonis, the gardener, pumped water for the plants and for the kitchen.

Audubon exhaled the harsh, salty and cold air of Labrador and inhaled the rose-drenched oxygen of Charleston. Maria stepped away to admire the small pink Zephyr lily, the white callas, the deep crimson amaryllis.

“Come, child,” he said, taking her by the hand and drawing her toward him.

“Child?” she said. “I am not your child.” Of course they were laughing. They were always laughing. “I am not your sweetheart, nor his either,” she said.

“Come,” whispered Audubon. He and his friend the pastor divided her kisses between them, as many as she could spare. Yet he saw her
this way: child. How was it he loved in a carnal way one who he also loved like a child? Here was a thought he could not follow, and he dropped it.

“No,” she said. “I cannot come to you. I have work to do.”

“What work? You have given the children their lessons. You have given instructions to the cook.”

“I must work on my painting.”

“What painting do you mean? I am your instructor. I give you the painting work. You have painted the little shrubby tree, which I will use in my Scarlet Tanager. And now I say to you to stop.”

“But I am drawing a bird.”

“Why are you drawing a bird, Maria? I have not asked you to.”

“I am copying your Snowy Egret. I do it because I want to learn. Here, let me go. I say no, Mr. Audubon. I must work. When I finish I want to do the Little Blue Heron. No.”

He did not understand this no. She was always there; she was warm; she was open; he could go to her when he needed her. He did not understand this refusal to be to him whatever it was he wanted to make her, call it a child, call it a lover, call it a friend or a helper or an angel. Maria was whatever he made of her. She must be.

“What do you mean no? How have you learned to say no to me?”

She pulled away from him, and she was gone.

F
OR THE FIRST TIME
since he met her, he contemplates the loss of Maria. That she should refuse him her kisses, her soft attentions, her aid, her affection. It would be dreadful, fatal. He sees her again, rising from the bench under the magnolia tree, nodding her smart, efficient little nod, dulling the spark in her eyes so that he can no longer see into her, and turning on her heel.

His eyes come back to the bird before him, and he sees not the great cormorant, immature, pinned down and eviscerated. He sees his finished watercolour of the Black-throated Mango Hummingbird. Maria has painted the trumpet-creeper on which the birds cluster. The flowers are wide open, the throats of the blossoms matching the fuchsia of the bird’s tail.

The birds approach dizzily from all directions: one is upside down in top left-hand corner; another has its entire head ecstatically buried in a flower; a third dives in from forty-five degrees, touching the outer curled lip of flower with its long narrow beak; another rides triumphant on top of a pink, fully opened blossom. Seeing his work in his mind, he finds it difficult to believe that birds and flowers have been done by a separate person — they are a whole. If two people have created this, it is two people who are entranced, enraptured, as entangled as the birds and the vines are entangled.

He is happy with what he has done. He sees that it is beautiful. If he can produce these works — and even now, knowing Maria’s part in it, he thinks of himself as the sole creator — if he can continue, it will not matter if subscribers are cancelling, reneging on their payments, complaining of the quality. It will not signify that Victor cannot pay Havell his fifty pounds, that Audubon is constantly in need of defending against the scientific establishment. He himself will not, finally, matter. He is only a vehicle. What matters is the bird and his rendering of the bird.

At last the people who haunt him desert, and the little corpse comes into focus before him. It seems a poor thing. Yet he knows that from these little agonies, the greatness is born. The bird in his hands is a form, a foreign being, a message only he can decipher.

He draws his instruments closer to himself.

He removes the intestine of this young cormorant, two weeks old, and stretches it out on the table. He measures the intestine: it is an incredible five feet, two inches long. He discovers in the stomach fragments of fish (with bones) and a small pebble. When he is finished he writes out a tag and ties it around the feet of the bird, and drops the specimen into a jar of spirits. It sinks into the alcohol in its dark container.

LABYRINTH

B
ayfield is in the launch at dawn. The wind has turned from north to west, to blow offshore. The locals call this the flat wind, because it makes the waves drop.

He spends the day surveying the protected passage between Ouapitagone on the north and the outer islands on the south and east. The tide is out. He has to work quickly. He measures, makes notations, measures again. He must record the shoals as high in the water as they ever get, four or five feet above where they lie in low water. In the existing charts this difference is not accounted for, creating great danger for a vessel.

By late afternoon he has all the vagaries of the channel and its entrance. But the offshore wind is stronger. He decides to wait until it drops before rowing back into the harbour.

He beaches his boat. The shore is a narrow curl of sand, which a temporary sun turns into a dressy gold braid. He climbs the height of the big island, through grey, black and white rocks that he is careful to call by name — feldspar, granite, gneiss. When he gains the top he sees a wide-open horizon to the south and east. There is a haze on it, which is not a good sign for tomorrow.

He turns to the west. The horizon is a circumference, his rock a small dome in the centre; he is a fleck, his eyes, as he rotates, a measuring clock hand. Last night a god, today a speck. This is what he loves about life at sea.

By now he has accepted islands as his fate. The sense comes over him each time he circles another, measures it, names it, the sense of
creating a world. He thinks how as a younger man he wanted an enemy to test himself against. Instead he got earth before it was ordered, land masses floating in water, islands upon islands. Is-land. The land of is. The land of “to be.” Sum. I am. In this lonely, potent way he has gone from youth to middle age, for he is thirty-eight and has been at his work for eighteen years. He has developed an affection for rocks and learned their names too. There were moments among those islands, moments of perfect stillness, heat, sunglint, with nothing around except the horizon like the dial of a compass, and he the pin that held the needle in place.

The horizon is flat, constant,
there
even when it cannot be seen, his immutable, but ever-retreating goal. It is, in its way, perfect, a kind of justice, a reduction to terms. A sea horizon is imaginary, he knows. An idea. Yet he has sailed over it more than once. He has believed perfection to be attainable.

He turns north. Here the horizon is interrupted by land, bulky and stubborn, rocks piled up and tumbling down. It is the wildest shore he has ever seen; it has the most bizarre topography, and the foggiest, windiest, rainiest weather he has encountered. Impossible weather.

Doubt has entered his mind.

His goal this summer is to survey to the Strait of Belle Isle. He knows now he cannot do it in the
Gulnare
. At 140 tons, she is too big. She draws too deep, and though she handles well she can’t manoeuvre in the narrow channels. She was built for him, for his work, but she cannot do this part of it.

He struggles with his doubt. Four years he has been at this survey, beginning at Rimouski. It is slow work. It will not be completed this year, or the next. But it is not impossible. He will not admit that. He must devise a new plan. It was one thing to send Bowen forward to Ouapitagone in the open boat and have him come back again: that was a relatively short and protected passage. It would be extremely hazardous to venture in an open boat as far as the next stop. He isn’t even sure what that next stop might be. And to be truthful, he is not entirely positive that Bowen, who this summer seems delicate and somehow difficult, could manage. Bayfield would not send a lieutenant on a mission too risky for himself. No, he must go.

He is the captain of the
Gulnare
. When Admiral William FitzWilliam Owen asked for him as assistant surveyor, young Bayfield was not pleased. But the wild shore won him; he has served and will serve until he dies. There has been hardship enough. Danger enough. Opportunity for heroism of the unsung variety. He knows his charts save lives. He makes the wild less wild; he brings it onto his graph, into his scope, and he lays it down on the scrolls of the Royal Navy. He will not be stopped by geography or weather.

The plan begins to form. He will leave the
Gulnare
where she is, safe, at anchor. He’ll take two open boats forward, the launch victualled for Collins and seven men, the
Owen
provisioned for three weeks with himself, Bowen and eight more men in it. They will scout the next leg and, if they make it safely, return for the surveying ship.

It is a risky plan. It is what Owen and he did in Georgian Bay, the inland sea, which was rough and wild enough, and they lived to tell the tale. Can this task be tougher? The men will be vulnerable in the small boats. The weather will be foul, the coast its indecipherable worst. Sometimes he imagines it to be on Mr. Audubon’s side, wilderness with an active desire to remain just that.

S
URE ENOUGH
the east wind picks up next morning, bringing its constant companion, fog. Nevertheless Bayfield, Bowen, Collins, and the sailors say their goodbyes to Dr. Kelly, who will remain with the
Gulnare
to guard the chronometers in their absence. Bayfield says goodbye also to the men of the
Ripley
, and shakes with surprising emotion the bloodstained hand of Mr. Audubon, whom he doubts he will see again.

On July 7, in the morning, Bayfield and seventeen men set off in two open boats to survey north and east to Mécatina. What follows threatens to be disastrous.

Once underway, they are among rocks and islets, shoals and inlets so confusing they soon lose sight of what is mainland and what is an island masking the mainland, a kind of screen, or foil. There are thunder squalls all afternoon; some they row on through, but during others they stop alongside a high point, if only to avoid being a magnet for
lightning. There is no hope of staying dry. There is no dry wood either, and that night the fire is barely hot enough to boil water.

The next day is the same. Learning from the previous day, they search for an overnight spot with wood from the very outset. They find one, pitch their tents and gather anything they can find that will burn. They smoke the clouds of moschettoes — and themselves, to the point of staggering blindness. Two of the men shoot a brace of ptarmigan for dinner, which, soaked, cold and swollen with bites, they eat.

For the next four days Bayfield takes no observations. At night the wind attempts to tear their tents off the ground; by day the fog closes in, uniting water, land and air in one impenetrable mass. Blasting wind is followed by soaking rains with no sun between to dry anything. In a fit of temper, Morgan, the
Owen
’s coxswain, swings an axe at a piece of driftwood and nearly severs the toes from his right foot. He howls with pain as Collins pours rum down his throat and wraps the toes tightly in bandages. Toes can reattach, grow back, says Bayfield. He’s seen such things happen. He chides himself for leaving the doctor behind. The men are sullen; one or two grumble out loud that this survey shall be the end of them.

On the fifth day, July 11, the sailors take to the boats at dawn only to find both injured and uninjured coxswains drunk in the hulls on stolen grog. Bayfield orders Collins to keep the grog keg in his tent. Collins sets off in the launch toward the islands, and Bayfield in the
Owen
to the mainland shore.