Creation (24 page)

The heron, indifferent, lifted one foot out of the water.

Here came the wood drake, gliding around a clump of lilies. It waddled to a stand on the slanting mud bank, proudly flamboyant. Nothing was spared in the coloration of this bird. The red bill had white outlines, and there were white markings like a curlicue under each eye. Its luminous green crest-feathers were slicked back over its head and fanned out at the nape. There was a white diagonal stripe on its flank and under its tail, and white curling lines under its crest, over its beak. It was this white that made the colour profound. The wing feathers were green and teal. It had a brown cowl around its neck, below which was a white necklace.

The bird wandered into shadow. And Maria said, “See how the red of the bill is a solid colour and does not vanish?” Yet the green on top and the teal were snuffed. So it was only the plumage that took its colour from the sun.

They stood, and walked, passing the soft brown female wood duck upended so that her tail feathers looked like the splintered ends of stumps. There were lily pads curling and blowing up. There were queues of turtles craning their necks, oval backs on an inclining log. There were scattered yellow daffodils. The blue-black male grackle flew low over the surface of the swamp. A host of graceful wood ibises with their long hooked bills alighted in the upper branches of a tree, and the branches heaved.

FUGITIVES

A
t the approach of night outside the harbour at Ouapitagone, the great cormorants return from the fishing grounds. The barren birds spend the night apart from the rest, standing erect on low rocks in the water, in lines, hundreds of them. Their necks make a graceful curve and their backs are straight. Sometimes they shake their wings open and stretch them out, in the shape of a Celtic cross.

The nesting birds fly to the highest shelves of the huge south-facing cliffs, over the water. It is to these cliffs Audubon goes at dawn, with Captain Emery, who has become a good specimen hunter. Audubon lies flat on the edge of the precipice, hundreds of feet above the turbulent water, directly above a nest. Emery is behind him, holding the end of the rope which is tied around the painter’s waist. The waves crash so violently that the birds do not know Audubon is there.

He looks down to see two parents asleep, erect, on their nests. He could have angled down a pole with a loop on the end, placed the loop right over one head, tightened it, and pulled up either bird. But he has no pole. He shifts his elbow and a rock scrapes. The male takes to the air, cawing. The mother bird looks upward and her light blue-green eye meets his in a way that is quite human. She too croaks in alarm, unfolds her giant wings, and rises into the air, the brood which was hidden under her feathers abandoned.

He scales down the rocks and takes the young.

N
OW HE WATCHES
them crawl sluggishly on the deck. They are dark purple with huge feet. As he approaches them, they open their
bills and stretch their necks so that the skin is taut as a rattle; they somehow pass their breath through it to make a snake-like hiss. They will take a bit of cake or a potato peel, a piece of the rind of a ham, and swallow it whole. They eat more than their weight, which is three pounds, in a day.

He scoops up the unfledged birds and tosses them overboard, to see what they will do. They swim off underwater quickly, beating their wings in the sea, just as their parents would, but they soon tire. He sends Tom Lincoln down in the boat to rescue them.

The young gentlemen go back to the cormorant roost the next morning to get a nest and some adults. This time Johnny has a pole. It is a difficult bird to strangle, with its long, sinewy neck, but he manages to do it, holding it out from his body to prevent its breaking its wings on him. The nests are pasted to the rocks with excrement, Johnny reports; each one weighs fifteen pounds. They reek. There seems to be nothing attractive about this bird: even the locals never eat its flesh or eggs.

Audubon measures the adult male, which more than covers his table; from bill tip to the end of its tail, it is the size of his double elephant page. The wings, open, are sixty inches — five feet across. The bill is about the length of the head, rather slender, somewhat compressed, straight, with a curved tip. The head is oblong. The feet are short, and placed far behind.

But it is the colour that fascinates him. All the silky plumage is black, glossed with deep greenish blue. The upper mandible is greyish black and yellowish white along the edges, but dusky toward the end. The iris is a sea green that seems to reflect the warm shallows. The space around the eye is dull olive above, and bright red below. The gular sac is yellow. At the base of the gular sac is a broad gorgelet of white, and the feathers over the head and upper neck are white; there is also a large clump of long white feathers on the side of the thigh. For a bird that appears black to a casual glance, it is a feast of hues.

The female is almost the same, only missing the white crest and thigh feathers. The piece under the eye is bright red in the male but bright yellow in the female.

The head and upper neck of the young unfledged bird are bare, but over the body there are small downy tufts of purple. The ears are tiny and the eyes very small as well, with a grey iris.

S
HE SAT OVER HER PAINTBOX
. She used colour sparingly. She had a perfect memory for it.

“Was it like this, the Roseate Spoonbill? That is the depth of the pink in the myrtle.”

“No, perhaps a little deeper. A little less orange, more white. No, that is very good, such a soft, soft pink. It is uneven, deeper where the feathers are closer to the body; it lightens as it goes outward in swirls.”

She made the centre of her spot of colour more intense and softened the colour toward the edges. He watched her dab lightly with the brush. Watched as she dipped it once more into a little water. A bead of moisture from its end dropped onto the cake of colour. She put the brush tip in it and swirled it. He felt himself growing dizzy.

“Like the pink of lips? No, not that, lips are not really pink — it is more livid than that; the lip is a purple, really.”

“This pink, where else does it exist, other than in the flower?”

“Perhaps inside my mouth,” she murmured.

He was quite short of breath. “You are a tease, Maria!”

“I beg your pardon! Who is it who calls me his sweetheart? You and my brother-in-law both. Between you two old men I don’t know how I shall ever get my work done.”

“Us both?” he cried, pained. “You would not make a difference between us? But surely Maria, you are
my
sweetheart, not his.”

“Let me make the yellow of the crest of the night heron, too. So soft you said it seems to be a new leaf, yet yellowish, too, creamy almost, like skin.”

“Maria.”

“Let me make that scarlet of the tanager,” she said. Just a flash, on the wing, like a throb in the clearing, like a heart suddenly exposed.

H
E TAKES UP
his instruments to investigate further the immature cormorant. The aperture of the posterior is smooth and half an inch
long. He introduces a probe into it, which passes right through the body, and out by the nostril. He observes that the tongue is extremely small, four-twelfths of an inch long, and elliptical. He is able to dilate the esophagus by blowing into it.

The heart he finds within the tiny chest seems large indeed, triangular, and two and a half inches long.

He thinks of Maria. He cannot help it. He cannot look at the heart of the bird without looking at his own heart. He cannot look into his own heart without coming face to face with Maria. He is sick of her, sick to death of longing, but the anatomy of birds has become the study of his longing.

He imagines that, rather than the fragile cormorant, he holds the cradle of Maria’s bones within his hands. He tests the soundness of it, pressing here and there on the curved ribs, sensing, exploring the strange, magical construction of this creature.

He frightens himself.

He cannot think any more of what he is doing.

T
HE SPELL IS BROKEN
.

Before he was famous, his painting was a private act of homage. He drew the bird for the bird’s sake, and for himself, because to make it right filled some need in him. But he is no longer alone with the birds. He is not Anonyme but John James Audubon with an audience of detractors and admirers. A veritable crowd sits at this deal table. His family. His friends. Bachman. Maria. Havell. Agents, suppliers of bird skins, critics. They help him. Yet it feels today as if they hinder him. They depend on him. They need to be guided; they need to be provided for. They offer advice. They want acknowledgement, or simply pay.

Havell, for instance. Several subscribers have found fault with the last two prints, saying they look too much like lithography for the line is too strong. If it were not that they were behind in paying his wages by fifty pounds, Audubon would dress Havell down. But he does not want to lose him. If he is to become discouraged, and quit? If he is to die? Perhaps — there has been no word for months — he is already dead? Then what?

Now, in the event that Havell is dead and word has not yet reached him, Audubon thinks, his hand still vainly attempting to draw the heart of the immature cormorant, perhaps Blake can continue.

No, Havell must not die. The man’s understanding of the Work grows with each plate he makes. So that now, with nearly two hundred birds rendered in copper, printed onto elephant folio paper and hand-coloured, Havell Junior, or simply Havell, as he has called himself since the death of his father, inhabits Audubon’s brain.

There he must be, even now, labouring under the dreary London skylights that, like the hatch above the artist, let in only a thin gruel of insipid daylight. And even now, Victor will be on the job. The last letter he sent, before leaving for Labrador, gave his son instructions to chide Havell about the lines on the last etching, and some blotting on the colour. Also, he is grossly behind in the water birds.

To soften the blow, Victor will take Havell for a pint at the end of the day. The two men, both sons of famous men, will complain, Audubon realizes with a smile as his fingers continue to examine the cormorant. Havell will say that the family has been engravers for two generations and that his father, Robert Senior, had been determined his son should not make the third.

This has been his song ever since Audubon met the family. Eight years ago the artist arrived at the door of Havell Senior’s shop by the Natural History Museum. It was frequented by naturalists, full of stuffed dead animals and arcane maps. There was the smell of the chemicals that snuffed the animals, the resonant deadness of taxidermy, of relics, of old men. Here in this temple to embalming appeared the Wild Man, as they have since called him in the family, and he would not be sent away. Since then Audubon has been admitted to the drawing rooms of rulers and rich men, and Havell Senior, could he speak from the grave, would say he never doubted it for a minute.

But then, Audubon had a terrible job to persuade him. Havell Senior was taken with the work, but he was fifty and doubted he could see it through: a double-elephant-folio-sized book of etchings of every bird in North America! But Audubon would not take no. Havell
Senior agreed to supervise the job of producing the pages, if they could find a younger artist to do the work.

They went down the street to the next shop, a publisher of engravings; the owner showed them an etching, unsigned, and said: this man is the best of the young engravers working today. Audubon did not need to be told: he could see it was the best. He said, Let us find him then. But the shop owner demurred, with a curious look at Havell Senior. “Don’t you know where he is? He is your son.”

At this time the son was estranged from his father, as the elder man had adamantly insisted his son take up a profession, and not be an artist. Robert Junior had taken himself off for a sketching tour in Monmouthshire. Now the son will say, “Our progenitor was yeoman of the Tower of London. Think on it. I do. He would maintain order through torture and chaining, and be deaf to the terrible cries of those condemned to death, and see them dragged to their execution. Yet my father called being an artist the worst possible life!”

And over the pints, Victor will concur in his sad way, saying that Havell’s engraving tools are like instruments of torture — the torch, the acid, the resin, the burnisher, the anvil, the hammer. He will remark that what a father does and does not do makes a son, and perhaps there is no other way.

And the two men will walk out into the yellow-orange glimmer of the London summer twilight.

Audubon pictures his son with a helpless, angry love. Victor has begun to walk with a stoop, as if burdened. Is it because I did not send him to that school he wanted? It had been Audubon’s ambition to give the boys the education he never had. But there was never enough to spare from the
Birds
.

Or is it because Victor wanted to paint, and was not allowed?

Audubon understood Havell Senior. He had imagined himself as the last of the Havell engravers. He wished an easier life for his son. Or he did not wish to be outshone. Either. Audubon does not know which is true in his own case; it depends on the day, on how well or how badly the drawing is going at that moment.

Lucy told him once, “A man does not own the lives of his offspring, or that of his wife.”

In his urgency Audubon has acted as if he does. And, they have colluded; they have given their lives to him. The family needs each member; the giant book calls them all into service. Even friends must be press-ganged. There is so much to be done. It does not do to conjure enemies. His critics jabber in his mind, repeating malicious judgments. Then Bachman arises, insisting he ignore them. It is not worth taking up your noble mind with their pronouncements, he chides.

But the noble mind is by now thoroughly distracted by friend and foe.

There are men who have been to Audubon both friend and foe, a combination he is too simple to understand. Charles Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon himself, at first a great supporter, but now mysteriously taken with his rival Alexander Wilson’s work. His letters arrive steeped in vinegar as a way to destroy the germs from plague-ridden Italy, where he stays. Audubon remembers drawing the pungent page out of the envelope. The stink went up his nose, bringing tears to his eyes. The writing was elongated, the text unclear. I have soaked the page in vinegar to destroy the germs, Bonaparte explained. We cannot pass on the infection. Then he asked for information on a bird.