Creation (37 page)

Someone is praying.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life
… He hates prayer.

H
E HAS THE BIRD
in hand. The warmth of life still in her, though he has shot her, neatly, behind the head.

How to tell what a bird is:

A bird is constructed this way.

It comes apart this way.

It comes in two sexes differing in the following ways.

It produces young which are.

Its entrails are.

The inner cavity is.

It lays eggs of this colour, shape, size and number.

Its habitat is.

Its habits are.

What else is a bird? Something more. That animated mystery, that flying spark lives somewhere in the bird. He pins back the wings. He tears off a feather. He draws it along his cheek to feel the texture. He pulls out the guts. He tries to blow through its cavity. There is nothing there.

The time when he was one with the bird is all that ever was. And when the bird is gone it will be as if that time never happened.

T
HE YOUNG GENTLEMEN
stand before him. They have found a whaling schooner called the
Wizard
from Boston, which is carrying letters for them all.

There are no post offices in the wilderness before us
—

There are two envelopes. One, he sees, is from Lucy.

Audubon is bone weary. He has been, some days, seventeen hours at his drawing table, where the rain drips off the glass onto his watercolours. He is beyond missing Lucy. He has rehearsed his life from beginning to now, and released himself from it. Only if he, like the birds, lives in the continuous present can the hauntings of the past be put to rest. Then he can go to Maria. But if he is not like the birds, if he is an ox or a man, then he is caught in the yoke and must stay with Lucy.

He opens Lucy’s letter.

The date is July 1. Such a long time ago. Five weeks. Lucy writes that she has suffered greatly from toothache and has had two more of her teeth removed. Ord has attacked him again in the Philadelphia papers; she has collected dues from six American subscribers but three others have cancelled. There are still no more than twenty subscribers in his own country. She is lonely without him and her sons, and she hopes he has suffered no further consequences of the spell he took after suffocating the golden eagle —

He is skimming, reading too fast to absorb what she says. He holds the other letter in his hand. He opens it finally, his hands not working properly.

Bachman writes:

“I have discovered a new bird — a little sparrow —”

He, down in Charleston? It seems unfair and already Audubon is angry. But there is more.

“Our sweetheart wishes me to tell you that she had made several drawings of plants for you and that the portfolio and quire of middle-sized paper you had shipped from London have arrived, much to her
delight. She sends her kisses — as many as she can spare from me — not very many, I guess!

“But on a more serious note, I enclose her final letter to you. My wife took the liberty of showing me your correspondence with Maria. It is one thing for me to jest about her affectionate nature. It is improper for you to address yourself to her in the intimate manner of your last letter, sent from Boston. From now on her assistance to you, and your correspondence, shall be carried on through me.”

Audubon is standing on the deck of the
Ripley
at Bras d’Or, Labrador. He had made himself a creature of the unhaunted present, in a place with a past but no history, sailing always proud and naked before the mast. Now his friend is chiding him about kisses. How easily he is called back, cut down from his heights. He is furious.

There is a paper folded inside Bachman’s letter. It is from Maria.

“Non,” she has written. “Impossible, no matter what you say. If you are a man who could lay aside his duties as did my father, then how could I love you? And if I loved you, which I surely do, then you cannot be such a man and I cannot allow you to betray your better instincts.”

He stares at the message from Maria, there on the rocky lip of Labrador. “As did my father,” he repeats. That was it. Her dreadful father, Mr. Martin with the watch chain stretched across his belly. She may not love who would do as he did, abandon his legitimate wife and children for a new lover, run away and seize a little of the world’s too elusive sweetness.

Yet the man who feels the pull to do so is perhaps the only man she can love.

And
his
father? What of Jean Audubon? He too went beyond the bounds. Yet he embraced the contradictions that were his life, he did not deny himself what he wanted.

He crumples the letter. She has rejected him.

He feels her giving way under his hands, but that is not the way it is. He is in
her
hands being crushed, having the breath pushed out of his lungs. After all that he has done to the bird while asking the bird to trust him, he is now in the hands of the bird. He is helpless. He
has given her the power to blow his life to bits. She has taken up her musket and it is loaded.

He has asked her for something; what, he does not exactly know. Perhaps simply to give her life to him, and to his aims. She has said no. Yet he remembers that she asked him if she could come with him, to the wild.
Impossible
. But Maria is his because of the fire he harbours for her small self. The only impossibility is that she should refuse him. He has created her with his desire, and therefore how can she escape?

Yet she attempts to. She writes these terrible words, these cool words, these words of dismissal or at least of bargaining — that she would only be his if he were free and he is not free.

But one cannot bargain with destiny and she is his destiny. As he is hers, he admonishes.

“You have a wife!” she said once.

“Of course I do. Men do have wives in this world. It is not in the nature of man to be free,” he’d replied.

He regrets this remark now. Look how he tried to be.

“I am as you found me, as you discovered me, a man with a cause, a man driven forward by the need to accomplish his enormous task. Encumbered and made possible by wife and family, aided and yet struck dumb by the very existence of these others who took their name from me. It was not only reputation and ambition that drove me forward, but debt and need. Lest it be forgotten.”

“I shall be an artist too,” she said that day. With you or without you. Did she say that too?

“But you are an artist,” he replied. “You help me. What more can you want?”

She had laughed. “My name does not appear on the prints with your name. I want what you want,” she said. (
But for myself
.)

Did she want acknowledgement, was that it? It so often came down to that. With those who helped him. Bachman, his assistants, even Johnny seemed to want to put their name to the work they did for him. It would not be. The Work was his.

“To struggle,” she said, “in the world, not under this arbour. Not under your name.”

There it was again.

He tried to explain. To struggle is not interesting. It is not to be sought. All living things struggle. He has struggled. She is protected from that.

It is Maria’s duty to be unattached, suspended in the amber of his longing. Maria is his right and his reward. It is incomprehensible that she should reject this construction and yet she does.

Audubon is as angry with Maria, brown sparrow woman in her modest dress, sewn into it so that is tight over her tiny bosom, as he is with his friend John Bachman.

He imagines in Maria a calculation, a craftiness. What ambition is hidden there, masked with duty, under the need to please? She must please, for her survival. Please her keepers, her sister, her sister’s husband, even the children. She must be the one who cares for others. Or does she only pretend to be pliant? The little person he adored, whom he believed he knew better than anyone in the world, that adoring listening admiring self, turns its upright little back.

He glimpses in her a totally private being with a separate destiny, despite the helpless openness at which he marvels. Despite the fact that he has practically made her. But she is not completed. He is not finished with her and he is not ready to let her go. He will teach her, one day perhaps, to follow her passion. To forsake that which is false, that which one does not truly love. He is not ready to hear her say no to him. Will she take his teachings and apply them against him?

No. She is Maria. Winsome, tender and submissive.

He crumples the letter in his hand. Calls to the young gentlemen: “I wish to give a return letter to the
Wizard
.”

“There is no point,” says Johnny, reading his mood. “We’ll be home before she is.”

“I wish to send a reply.”

“Yes, Father.”

He sits at his deal table under the hatch. It is miserably cold. There is no tea at this hour of the night. He has again sworn off tobacco and grog. His clothing is damp and his hammock contains no attractions for him. What else to do but write? And as he writes, it is as if he is
speaking to himself, in the habit he has developed over time. He addresses his words to John Bachman. (There are no words for Maria just now.)

“I cannot imagine,” he writes, in his black spidery hand, with small ink splotches decorating the page that he can barely see, “what you have to do with my letters to Miss Martin. I think you will discover that I shall send her kisses and affection and will feel as much love for her as she will permit me to do regardless of your thoughts on the subject!”

He writes, or he does not write. He will quarrel, later, with Bachman about many things, about Maria, about his drinking, which will become an offence to the preacher, about their collaboration. He hands the letter to Johnny.

“Are you certain, Father, that this letter must go?”

Johnny tries to ward off trouble. And in doing so brings it down on himself.

“I am quite certain, young man. Who are you to question me? Do as you are told! You’ve given me enough trouble already, losing birds and falling off cliffs. If you are not careful I’ll leave you at home on our next expedition!” On he rails as Johnny backs away, letter in hand.

Audubon watches his son row into the gloom with grim satisfaction. Now he has given Bachman an earful. Now his dearest friend the preacher has something to think about. Perhaps it will create a rift. It does not matter. All that matters is that he is on shipboard, while John Bachman is at home, pampered, surrounded by blossom and leaf, by scent and stem, attended to by the soft fingers of his women, and Audubon — equally deserving, somehow, of the attentions of the women of that family, although it is not his own family, equally deserving of all of his friend’s comforts, is cold and alone and frustrated in the wilderness.

ACCIDENTAL

S
ailing southward, southward at last! Never so happy to leave a coastline behind, Audubon watches from the stern. The inland plateaus vanish under their burden of cloud. To his left the iceberg weeps green water down its prismatic flanks. Its journey is southward to warmer water, which will diminish it until it heaves and disappears under the surface.

They are heading to the Dominion of Newfoundland. Godwin’s land.

“And are they all like you, there?” Audubon says to the pilot, whose face is pulled sideways by a plug of tobacco.

“Aye, every last one of ’em. Cut from the same cloth.”

Audubon knows the man is joking though there is no hint on his face or in his voice. It is in the way the words fall. At long last he understands the accent.

“What cloth would that be then Mr. Godwin?”

“Well, you tell me.”

Called upon for a description, Audubon is at a loss. What cloth is Godwin cut from? He has seen savagery but is not a savage. Knows death and would like to avoid it as long as possible, but does not exactly fear it. He is not a slave, although born to circumstances that would enslave others. The words “acquainted with grief” form in his mind. It is a bond. But he cannot say it.

“You would be one of a kind — that’s as near as I can get,” says Audubon.

“You could paint me, I suppose,” Godwin says. “You might get nearer.”

Ah, a hint of vanity. “You are human then.”

He brings his watercolours on deck and makes a likeness of the man with his walking stick made of a shark’s vertebrae. He paints him weathered, squinting, with eyes that could bore holes in buffalo hide, short stubby fingers with surprising dexterity, the barrel chest, the lively bitten lips which spit out their incomprehensible vowels and turn either up or down in an instant. He finds intelligence there and good humour, the patience of one who is constantly mistaken for an idiot, and something else, peace. The man is at peace with all he has seen.

“I thank you for it, sir,” says Godwin, showing scant pleasure. “You shall see me present it to my wife, so she can see my likeness when I am at sea.”

“Are we going to see your wife? Is that the one port you will put in?”

“The best harbour this side of the island.”

They fly before a good wind across the Strait to the west coast of Newfoundland, and Labrador disappears behind them in its vapours.

O
N AUGUST 13
they sail around a rocky point and into the tickle of St. George’s Bay to find a snug outport lined with houses, maybe thirty of them, and fishing dories, and grass and flowers, a settlement such as they have not seen for weeks. Well before the
Ripley
lands, the locals start down to the water in welcome. When the boat is secure, Godwin steps down to cheers and embraces from half the populace, a warmth which is soon extended to all on the
Ripley
.

Audubon is soon off for a walk over the hills. He must search to see if there are any more birds; he has only five new species, a paltry number considering the risk they’ve undergone. Looking out over the choppy waters from a mad network of trails through violent green moss, Audubon sees a shy shearwater and some oystercatchers with their needle-like red beaks, puffins flying with laden bill, but nothing new. Inland, there is more of the quagmire, to which he gives a wide berth, and plenty of the pitcher plant. Returning on the path, he meets a girl. She hikes with two loaves of bread under one arm and a bucket in the other hand. He steps aside to let her pass. But she stands face to him, boldly examining him head to toe.