Creation (35 page)

“What did you want?”

“I do not know.”

“That is your difficulty then,” says Havell, in a matter-of-fact way. “As you did not have a passion, you were consumed by his.”

Victor cannot argue. It is as if his father has taken the positive position and Victor has been forced all his life into the negative. He has had to say no. And yet he could not. Victor’s words spurt from him and he paces in the workshop. “The Yoke of Man, he calls it, that he must make his way in this world and provide for us all! But it is our yoke now, for he does what he is called to do while my brother and my mother and I must do for him what need be done! And we are never good enough!”

Havell lifts up his head from his drying and polishing, wipes his hands on his smock, and stands erect to stretch his back.

“He is equally demanding of himself,” he observes.

It is time to apply the resin for the aquatint ground. For this, Havell must place the huge copper plate on its edge, slanting upward in a tip pan. The foreground side of the plate with the pelican’s “columnar legs,” as Audubon calls them, is at his face; the sky is down.

The spirit ground is made of red wine and resin. He puts the resin in the wine when he brings the jug to the shop, so he can be sure the workers will not drink it. Now he pours on enough to cover the plate. With the smell of wine in their noses, the two men stand together watching the ground run down. When it has covered every inch of the surface, together they turn it around so that the ground runs back up the plate. It must settle finest on the sky and most thickly on the bird itself. Havell takes his dabber and touches it up, leaving Victor to hold the plate.

When he has done this they lie the plate nearly flat on the table, and wipe off the extra ground, which has gathered at the bottom. When the alcohol has evaporated so that the plate is dry, Havell strengthens the ground by heating the huge plate once more over the fire.

“I am glad to have another pair of hands to lift the plate,” he says. “Now you see why we complain of the double elephant format.”

“But it is the best to display my father’s genius,” says Victor. His anger has dissipated. The room is now warm from the charcoal brazier and the windows clouded with smoke. Havell puts him to work grinding Frankfort black on the stone to make the ink. To the ground black and the linseed oil and the treacle, Havell adds a bit of Persian blue.

He takes the ink from Victor and applies it to the warm copper plate. With the other watching, he carefully rubs the ink into each tiny crevice and burr and then cleans the surface so that only the fine lines are inked. He dampens the paper and carries it to the rolling press, where he lays it on the plate. Once it is in place Havell puts his shoulder to the wheel that moves the upper roller. He bends like an ox to his burden, using all his weight to move the roller along the length of the paper.

The two men are completely silent as they wait for the great cheeks of the press to open.

When they remove the paper they stand back to look.

And there it is, the White Pelican. In black on white.

COUNTING

In six weeks I have seen the eggs laid, the birds hatched, their first moult half over, their association in flocks and preparations begun for their leaving the country.

—
Journals
, J. J. Audubon

N
orth is the negative of south. North is the nesting ground, the first feathers; south is full plumage. Labrador is black and white while Charleston is colour. Here, down north, the white rims along the shore are crushed shells; sea urchins dissolve underfoot. There is the occasional gleam of sun, and a white wooden cross here and there down by the water, as if a sailor had died at sea and his fellows marked the nearest place. There are hummocky dunes flocked with blue and green grasses. By the woods there is fireweed and the white plumes of Queen Anne’s lace.

Labrador is the proof, the first print pulled from the press. North is the unpainted version. It is created by taking away.

T
HE CURLEWS ARE GONE
but Audubon still walks the smooth crescent beach of Bras d’Or. As he walks, birds of all description depart in clouds above his head.

It is only the beginning of August but the razorbills, the guillemots and the kittiwakes are going south. The young Arctic terns dart restlessly with their parents, ready to go too. Remaining are the immense and quarrelsome gannets, shouldering each other off their breeding rocks. The young are a speckled grey, long-winged and gawky. They flap their wings incessantly, letting small soft feathers — the last of their down — drift into the air. Once they are strong enough, they too will be off, abandoning this place to a depth of winter he cannot imagine.

Summer is so short that it might never have happened. Six weeks only. Summer flowers are emerging even as summer birds are leaving.

In going south, the birds go to Maria. To her colours, her fragrance, her summer. It is a kind of exile he suffers here.

So too his youth will be gone. It has lingered; he has kept it, far past his just desserts, far past what is natural, kept it even when he knew in his bones in his numb fingers in his lungs that it was leaving. Propelled as he was by the desire to cover the territory his birds covered, he could not rest.

T
HE SUMMER’S
harvest of fish lies drying on flakes that have been built a little way up from the water’s edge, thousands upon thousands of curling bodies. At the far end of the beach is an impromptu rendering station where the giant corpse of a whale is slung across the sand; men climb on it, slicing away the blubber with great sickle blades. There are firepits and copper cauldrons; blubber is boiling. There are stacks of baleen with flesh still caught between the fibres.

Some of the whalers are black men from the Antilles; he is warmed by their speech, their red bandanas, their tattered leggings. Brandings on their necks mark these as the slaves among whom he once lived. But now they are free men. He can read it in the looseness of their step and the swing of the great knives, in their shouts of greeting. His life, he supposes, could be read as a flight from blackness. But
now the dark of their skin looks familial. He wonders how he would greet, if he could greet, his mulatto half-sisters, one dead, one long ignored in France.

The whalers sing as they work. The voices are the same ones that rise over the harbour at night. But the day songs are different from the night songs. The night songs are rueful or lusty. The day songs are work songs, every second line shouted with a great surge of power to send the knife more quickly through the slab of whale flesh.

Renzo took a notion, Renzo, boys, Renzo
,

That he would plough the ocean
,

Renzo, boys, Renzo!

Walking on, Audubon stops by a dory roped to the side of a shallop. A raggedy, garrulous group of Eggers is drinking there. The man nearest him is gaunt and weathered and toothless; he looks forty but has the voice of a young boy. He raises his cup and boasts to the stranger that they have eight hundred dozen eggs in the hold.

“Show me, then,” says Audubon, hopeful disbelief in his voice.

The hold is a pit, shot through with arrows of light from the broken deckboards above. The eggs are stacked ten foot deep in baskets, old barrels, and slings of burlap. The shells are pasted with slime, gore and feathers. They are faint, faint in the dank hold. They mourn like stolen children and Audubon makes an involuntary sound of grief.

Mistaking this for awe, the Egger modestly asserts they’ve done well. “The birds keeps laying if you steals from them,” he says. “Stupid things.”

“I wish that the stupid man who says this were half as wise as the birds he despises,” says Audubon.

He lurches into daylight. There is a numbness in his fingertips. He thought it was the cold but today, walking, he is quite warm and still he can feel nothing. He walks farther along the beach through the carnival atmosphere but he is not merry. They wait here to see if a guide can take them overland toward Hudson’s Bay. It was his plan, but daily it seems more difficult. The tireless jabber goes on in his mind: how
have Lucy’s nerves survived his absence? Has Victor collected the Trash? Has Havell increased his pace and has the colouring improved?

I
N THE TRADING POST
, Audubon skulks amongst the goods while the faithful Captain Emery attempts to get information. “Where can we find a guide to take us overland to Hudson’s Bay?” he asks the storekeeper.

“It’s late in the year for that. Maybe Pamack could take you but he is gone to Torngat. Maybe Billie Parr. But I haven’t seen him since spring.”

“It is for my friend. He is the greatest bird artist of our time.”

“That one?” says the storekeeper.

And Audubon is shocked into awareness of himself, how he must look: his beard, frizzy and untrimmed. His moccasins, stiff and muddied; his rough trousers, patched and sewn with a sailor’s thick fingers and now barely hanging on his thin frame. His sore and red-rimmed eyes, which have strained themselves to see in the dark and to sleep in the long light.

The agent of the Fish and Fur Company is evasive, like a pirate not wanting anyone to know where his treasure is buried, fearful for his profits, no doubt. Amongst piles of seal skins and caribou skins Audubon comes upon the hide of a white bear. He admires it. But it is too expensive.

“The white bear is fearsome. They ride down from the top of the world on ice floes,” says the agent. “We had the white whale, too, the beluga, but they’re gone now.”

“Gone?”

“The walrus and the bowhead, too, we don’t see ’em any more. They used to come down with their calves from up north, this was their getaway. Seal, that’s another matter. No shortage of seals.”

Unwelcome notions knock against Audubon’s heart. It is the intrusion of man here, it is the harvesting, the relentless harvesting from this land and these waters. He fears that Labrador will become, when these men are done, a worn-out, broken-down field. He fears that her native peoples will have their livelihood wrested from them, and they will fade out like the wild creatures.

He longs to speak to his friend Bayfield. He longs for his steadiness, his reassurances, his orderly way of thought.

What if, he wants to ask him, you come to the wild and discover that it is not wild at all? What if half the world is here before you? Men taking from the coast what they can, who have been doing so for as long as living memory and longer than that? And what if this taking exceeds the ability of the coast to give?

What if you begin to understand that your presence, no matter what your mission, is only the presence of a man, and nothing better? It is like that of the greedy Eggers, and can do nothing but lead to the end of this fertile wilderness? What if you can see a day when Labrador will be emptied, shorn, strained, drained of every living thing, even the original peoples?

What then? He has asked it before. Where will I go to visit the wilderness?

He hears the absent Bayfield: Am I to understand that wilderness must find its best expression as a refuge for you?

No, not just for me. In being itself. Unmolested.

Why might not this wilderness become a settled place, with commerce and trade for its inhabitants?

Because then we will lose the creatures. Lose the wild itself.

I thought you hated Labrador.

You said it would change me.

A
T NIGHT
, Audubon sits over his work. He hears the singing from the foredeck. The Newfoundland sailors are teaching the others “The Ghost Crew.” One brave tenor rises above the flutes and fiddles.

Right o’er our rail came climbing, all silent, one by one
,

A dozen hardy sailors. Just wait ’til I am done
.

Their faces pale and sea-worn, all ghostly through the night
,

Each fellow took his station as if he had a right
.

It is Johnny, of course. So light and carefree, amongst his friends. Yet the face he turns to his father is weighed down and severe. The
wildness hides in him, wanting to break out.