Creation (11 page)

He flicks the beam to the back of Johnny’s hand. Johnny poses, keeping his hand exactly where it was. He knows to do this.

The same delta.
My son
. But the skin is plump, without the tiny diagonal puckers or the thin staves of sinews. He flicks the circle back to his own hand. In the intense reflected light, every line and hair of his own skin is suddenly sharp, separately defined. Lifted out of reality. “Do you see?” Audubon says, sharply. “This is how I paint a bird’s feather. With that light, that beam.”

He lets the beam escape across the deck, skipping, where it catches the raven’s eye. The raven hops to its master’s feet. He props the mirror behind the basin, from where, as the ship turns and tilts slightly on the lambent sea, the beam plays recklessly with sunlight. His razor is sharp, unused these three weeks. It cuts through the suds and stubble and, when it is pulled away, reveals the contour of his cheek. The flesh is a little sunken; he is thin beneath the cheekbone and his teeth are mostly memories.

“I grow old at the pace of light.”

“No, Father, you do not.”

And there he goes again trying to read the future. “What is in store for me? Will that god I pretend to worship allow me to see the Work through?”

Johnny, daredevil though he is, has the fear of God. “You mustn’t pretend.”

“I do. My only religion, as I have told you, son, is the Golden Rule.”

“Of course, Father. Do unto others …”

“As you would have them do unto you.”

Audubon is not through. “But if your god, Johnny, your mother’s god, does not permit me to live, you and Victor will ensure the
Birds
is finished?”

“There will be no need for that. You are vital. Look at your eyes.”

His eyes are peat brown, almond shaped, knowing and childlike.

Johnny’s eyes are opaque, those of a caged wild thing.

W
HEN AUDUBON ARRIVES
on the
Gulnare
, Bayfield is busy with his theodolite. The device commands the centre of the foredeck, an altar around which he, the priest, in his blue uniform, moves with stately grace. Its brass wheels and dials with their intricate markings, their reflecting surfaces, are another kind of mirror into which the captain stares with no trace of vanity.

“Don’t hurry; I shall wait,” says Audubon. A silent Johnny beside him, the artist turns and looks out to sea. Again, as when he first saw her, he is pleased by the female shape of the figurehead. Gulnare herself.

Beneath her narrow throat, her bare breasts ride high over the calm and silvered surface of the harbour. She gives her presence to the waves and to what remains, to him, a shapeless landmass. Her proud shoulders are wide but her back flutes inward at the waist to the sweet triangle above her tailbone. “Good evening,” he says to the figurehead.

A long, slow swell comes from nowhere and the woman bows back.

“Do you see what beauty does,” he says to his son. “It presides.”

Audubon is its captive. Powerless in its face, whether bird or woman.

“G
OOD EVENING MR. AUDUBON.
And young Mr. Audubon?” It is Augustus Bowen. His smile is not kind. With him he has a rotund little man with an eager, genial face. “This is Dr. Kelly, a naturalist who travels with us. You will enjoy one another’s company.”

Bowen withdraws, and Kelly begins to talk of today’s discovery: the burrows of the
Mormon arcticus
, which they call sea parrots, or puffins. “They are dug in loam,” he says, “in all directions under the surface, in some cases connected. When you find the end of the burrow there is the pure white egg. I would love to go collecting with you. But it is my job to run to the hold to keep the chronometers from being damaged when the sea is rough. Since the sea is always rough, I am scarcely seen above decks!”

When Bayfield completes his measurements he comes to stand at Audubon’s side. “Now that I have seen your paintings, it is only fair that you should see my charts.”

Audubon is unresponsive, staring at the water. His son can do the talking.

“I would like that very much,” says Johnny firmly and loudly, taking his father’s elbow.

The charts themselves are rolled and tucked into crevices in the captain’s cabin. Some are flat and held together as the pages of a book, while others are loose and bound with black tape. Bayfield unrolls a large one, backed with pale blue linen.

“These are my letters to the pilots and the captains who come after us. Like your portraits they represent three dimensions settled into two. They tell us where we are on the globe. We delineate the coasts, locate and describe aids to navigation such as lighthouses, buoys, identifiable land structures — if there are any. Here, of course, there are almost none. We describe the characteristics of the bottom and add tidal data.”

Audubon recognizes a line drawing of the shape of the water’s edge at Little Natashquan, with indentations of shoreline and shoals. The depth of the water is marked; the hazardous hidden rocks are drawn in as if they were visible. Audubon traces with his eye the delicate, frenzied line that outlines the coast, that chaotic mess of rock and water rendered onto graph paper.

Johnny leans with curiosity over the chart.

“That shoal nearly stopped us,” he says, pointing to the low reef that protected the harbour from winds from the southwest. “It will be of great help to those who follow to know exactly where it lies and at what depth. Although of course the depth changes with the tide.”

Bowen materializes behind them; his courtesy belies the faint sneer that lingers on his face. His mock-solemn blue eyes hang on the painter as the captain lifts the sheet of paper and reveals a second beneath it.

“This is the passage we have travelled thus far. You see here I have used a much larger scale. But I am having difficulty with the Admiralty secretary. I need the largest scale where the sailing is most difficult, and the smallest when it is easier. Their Lordships want me to limit my use
of scales to five only. But I maintain that I must be limited only by my own judgment. Their Lordships are concerned merely with the practicalities of printing.”

Audubon smiles. “With this I can sympathize! I have sworn to reduce nothing. The birds will not shrink. But they overflow my pages!”

“Indeed. A bird may be rendered life-size. But this landscape must be reduced to be contemplated.”

Audubon traces the line of the coast with his finger. Then he steps back. “How easy it appears to sail there! On your charts there is no fog, no cold, no tearing winds. You proceed by simple logic.”

“The fog, the wind — these are moods, if you like. The map is free of these emotions.”

Audubon looks more closely into Bayfield’s calm visage.

“And the mapper? Is he also free?”

The question takes Bayfield aback.

“The only emotion we have during our computations,” he says, “is the desire to save lives.”

W
HEN THEY STEP BACK ON DECK
the sky is filled with scudding white clouds; new weather has arrived. The
Gulnare
faces a streaming wind and foam on the sea.

“This is a force four wind on the Beaufort scale,” says Bayfield, almost automatically. “Do you see the foam? We shall be off at daybreak.”

“Force four, climbing to five,” Bowen says, happily.

But Audubon misses the good news. “You measure everything against a system,” he persists.

Bayfield nods politely. “I do. My ‘system,’ or rather Admiral Beaufort’s system, is science. Like your Linnaeus.”

“No, no, no,” says Audubon testily. “I am ahead of science. Science lives in books and dark laboratories. Mine is a new kind of truth, drawn from nature. People who see my book will never see the birds in the wilderness. They must be made to believe. I sit for hours within feet of the bird. I get my hands on the bird and in its blood. I must be accurate, or I am called a liar.”

At this word, Bowen finds his opportunity. “I must ask you this. Your bird portraits may be beautiful to look at; I have not seen them, but the captain says so. But — ‘accurate,’ ‘truthful’? You cannot paint a fact. I have seen the birds, and I doubt I would see them as you see them.”

The painter is glad to have an opponent, a man on whom to train his anger. Johnny shifts as if to back him up.

“There are men, like you, Mr. Bowen, who say that my birds are deformed, or even creatures of fantasy. There are those who call me a fraud and a man of no talent. Who do not recognize nature when it is laid out on paper before them. They are not my concern. They have not sat three feet from the nest and beheld the duck who nourishes her young from food she first digests and then regurgitates. Nor have they watched the females form teams to protect fledglings, or sink themselves in water to allow their young to rest on their backs, and watch over them with what appears to be devotion,” says Audubon. “I feel the birds in my heart.”

Bowen smiles. “I have no doubt you do. But do you not wonder if your feelings mislead?” he presses.

“No. Feeling is my compass and my sextant,” says Audubon. “It is all I have to judge by.”

“You say ‘simple’ measurement,” Bayfield says, “and you say we ‘measure against a system’ any distance from point A to point B. But that is not so. The distance is too large for us to measure. We
calculate
it. I measure a length, put this on a triangle, read an angle, multiply by a number. Only then do I have the distance, and it is arrived at by faith.”

“By
faith
?”

“Yes. Faith in my mathematics. But faith requires imagination, don’t you agree? Triangulation is an act of the imagination. There are three points — the base which is my eye, the distant station and the immutable star.”

“Another sea captain once taught me something of this,” says Audubon, warming just perceptibly. “On the
Delos
.”

“Three points. Where you stand, where you strive to be and the unreachable star by which you measure.”

“I like that very much. He did not teach me that. You have laid down the coordinates of my life.”

“Of mine as well. Where I stand, where I strive to be and the fixed point which defines both. Between these three is a relation. Once you know it, it can be used to discover any distance you have not yet travelled.”

“I would like to know that prophetic relation,” says Audubon gently.

The two men join in a smile that excludes Augustus Bowen. Johnny, relieved to have gotten this far without an explosion, places his hand on the small of his father’s back.

T
HEY SIT AT THE ROUND TABLE
in the captain’s cabin, Bayfield and Audubon, Lieutenant Bowen, John Woodhouse and Dr. Kelly. There is an oil lamp and the smell of smoke. The soup slants in its bowls as the
Gulnare
strains against her anchor in the wind.

“Have you, in your rounds of potential subscribers in London, encountered my godfather, the Duke of Sussex?” Bowen enquires. “If not, I could arrange an introduction. I should think he might be useful in persuading the library of Parliament to subscribe.”

It is a mischievous remark, as he is certain his godfather would send Audubon packing.

“I am not above knocking on strange doors, Mr. Bowen. God knows I have done it. But the doors of English lords, I have generally found, are not worth the trouble. In fact, English lords in my experience are worse than English rogues.”

Bowen flushes red, while Kelly hides a smile: he has suffered far too many references to the duke on this journey.

“Take the Marchioness of Hereford,” says Audubon. “An ignorant woman. I am told she papered her walls with the prints from my first volume. And the British Museum, which subscribed from the beginning, is so far behind on its payments that we are going to suspend delivery. I have no time to deal with these matters. My son Victor does it.”

“And Mr. John Audubon Junior?” says Bowen, emphasizing the American way of naming. He has not yet relinquished his attack. He
can only be a few years older than Johnny, who is intimidated into silence.

“Johnny is my right hand. A very fine shot and a fine painter too,” says his father.

Bayfield takes charge. “A toast. To Labrador. To the birds that brought you here, Mr. Audubon. Shall we say grace? There is much to thank God for.”

“May I?” says Audubon.

Johnny hides a smile.

On the table is a basket of eggs. Audubon lifts one and holds it to the lamplight. The egg is an oval perhaps three inches by two inches, its shell a cloudy blue green with pale green crusting and reddish blotches which are closer together toward the narrow end.

“Let us give thanks for this. Do you know what this is?” Audubon asks.

“The egg of a large waterfowl, I warrant. A Foolish Guillemot?” says Bowen.

“Yes, it is. A miraculous sort of egg. This guillemot, which is not foolish at all, mind you, nests high on the cliffs, on narrow ledges. Its egg, as you see, would be in danger of rolling and falling off into the sea, were it nudged, or blown by the wind. But the clever bird has adapted the shape. One end is more narrow than the other. See how it moves when pushed?” He pushes the egg. It rolls around its narrow end in a circle.

“Look,” says Bayfield, delighted. “It is a compass.”

Kelly murmurs in appreciation.

“You speak of grace and God. To the bird, indeed to me, the egg is god.”

“You are bold, sir,” chokes Bowen.

“Bold? Of course I am. And yet what I say is absolutely true. The egg before it is laid — that is, the instinct for the egg — brings the bird here. It forces these delicate sojourners made of cartilage and feather to fly thousands and thousands of miles, guided by we know not what, to this lonely place, in order that their lives should be renewed. Do you not think it is miraculous?”

“Yes,” says Bayfield, “I do.”

“This is our grace.” Audubon puts the egg up against his eye. “This is the moon and the stars and the wind. It is the compass, the sextant if you like, and the calendar.”

“Amen.”

Bowen nudges Kelly. His godfather had said the painter was a showman.

A
SAILOR WAITS ON THE TABLE
, starting them out with glasses of grog. After the soup they eat cod, pan-fried, and then the flesh of four eider ducks, which have been skinned and torn apart and put on a fire. When they finish they are all heavy with food. The fat of the duck has congealed on the heavy white china plates and the juice has stained their chins. The men wipe their beards on napkins that are washed only when there is sun to dry them.