The Bird Artist (21 page)

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Authors: Howard Norman

BOOK: The Bird Artist
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“Let's go, then,” he said.
“May I ride my bicycle to the hearing?” Margaret said.
“Miss Handle, you can walk there on your hands, for all I care.”
Kelb tapped a gavel on the table. The room hushed down.
“Getting back to the revolver,” he said. “Mr. Gillette,
would you say that Margaret Handle—let's start with her —that she could shoot a gun?”
“Everybody knows Margaret could,” Romeo said. “She took one out in the harbor now and again. To shoot ducks, mostly.”
“From some distance, I imagine.”
“Depends on the duck. Some are quite stupid. You might say too trusting. Some don't use their natural skittishness to their best advantage around people.”
“But ducks don't come right up to a boat.”
“No, sir. To shoot one at twenty yards, say, takes a steady hand and a good eye. Especially in the rain.”
“I didn't ask you about rain.”
Kelb turned to Margaret. “I've kept too long on ducks here,” Kelb said. “We aren't really concerned with them. We're talking about killing a lighthouse keeper. From close up. Because at least one bullet went straight on through. Miss Handle, was the revolver you purchased in your possession on the night of October eight, nineteen and eleven? The night that Botho August was shot dead. You don't have to stand up to answer.”
“If what you mean by possession—”
“Did you carry it to the lighthouse yourself?”
“We haven't established that she was in the lighthouse,” Romeo said.
“Well, I
was
. You know it, Romeo. Everyone does. I was. But I didn't have the revolver with me,” Margaret said.
“Do you know, Miss Handle, whose possession it was in?” Kelb said.
“The only person I saw with my own eyes, who had the gun—the revolver
in hand—
was Orkney Vas.”
“His wife committing adultery almost every night while he was on Anticosti Island!” Sillet shouted.
Most people turned to the back of the store where Sillet stood.
“To my mind, that very thing could argue
against
Orkney Vas, true,” Kelb said. “But it's not your place to prosecute here, Reverend. Please shut up. Orkney Vas's knowledge about his wife must have been a hard fact to swallow. But Mrs. Vas is not on trial here for adultery. Come to think of it just now, I want you to leave the room.”
Looking cowed but tightening his fists, Sillet turned to the door. He put on his wool cap. Still facing away from Kelb, he called out, “I'd be a hypocrite not to provide a voice of reason.” He left the store.
“Mr. Fabian Vas,” Kelb said, looking at me. He checked a piece of paper with his own writing on it. “Margaret Handle told me that on the night of September 28, the dance in Boas LaCotte's barn, she gave you the revolver. Is that correct?”
“Did you tell him that?” I asked Margaret.
“Yes,” she said.
“It's true,” I said to Kelb.
“And that you hid it in the woodshed behind your house.”
“Under a plank,” I said.
“Margaret, did you see Fabian Vas outside the lighthouse on the night of October 8?”
“No.”
“At any time that night did you see Fabian Vas in actual possession of the revolver? I know you told me you didn't, but here's a second chance to remember.”
“No, I didn't.”
“Well, just what did you see that night? Tell us.”
“A bullet shatter the window in the room where Botho August and I—”
“Did he say anything at that time?”
“‘That has to be Orkney Vas,' he said.”
“Then what?”
“He stomped downstairs. Botho did. Mad as a hatter.”
“What did you do then?”
“I pulled the sheets up to my chin.”
“Were you—imbibing? Did you have your customary whiskey with you?”
“I had a bottle there and had drunk a good bit of it.”
“Did you hear more gunfire?”
“Yes.”
“How many shots?”
“Two more shots.”
“Did you go to the window then?”
“No, between the shots I stumbled to the gramophone. I fell against it.”
“But you hadn't yet looked outside.”
“No. But except for the rain it was godawful quiet.”
“At any time after the shots did you look out the window?”
“Yes. Finally, I did.”
“What did you see?”
“I saw Orkney Vas.”
“Doing what? Orkney Vas doing what?”
“He had a revolver in his hand. He had a lantern in the other hand. He ran off.”
“How much time—just guess. How much time had passed between when you heard the last shot and when you saw Orkney Vas?”
“I don't know. When you're drinking like that, a long time can pass quickly, and a minute can stretch.”
“Did you eventually go down the stairs?”
“Yes, I did. I did go down the stairs. Because I heard shots, didn't I? And because Botho August hadn't come back up.”
“What did you find in the yard?”
“Botho August lying there.”
“Was he dead?”
“No—no. Well, at first I thought he was. He was bleeding all over. Rain was hitting his face. Blood, and he was coughing. More, then, it was a wheeze. I thought, He is not dead. He was trying to say something.”
“Did he succeed?”
“He said, ‘Cirala.'”
“I didn't hear that clearly. Would you repeat it?”
“Cirala
. I'll spell it out. C-i-r-a-l-a.”
You could have heard a pin drop.
“It's my name spelled backwards,” my mother said.
“Mrs. Vas,” Kelb said, “can you say that again, for the record?”
My mother shifted in her chair, rubbed her face with her hands, then laid her hands flat on the table.
“Alaric
,” she said. “If you spell my name backwards, it comes out just as Margaret pronounced it.”
“Cirala,”
Kelb said. Then he all but whispered the word. “Whatever in God's green acres could that word have meant, spoken as his life was fading?”
“I can tell you,” Margaret said.
“Go on, then.”
“Me and Botho August—I hadn't carried on intimately with him for many years. Yet now and then I'd visit him in his lighthouse. We—Botho and me. We did entertain ourselves. What I'd bring to his lighthouse was a deck of Old Maid cards. He called it ‘Old Hag.' Old Hag. As we say around here, ‘Old Hag' means to have a nightmare. You see, Mr. Kelb, in our village you call a nightmare ‘Old Hag.' And if you want to
cure
a nightmare, you try and figure out who's really causing the nightmare. If you can figure it out, then you say that person's name backwards. That's the cure.”
There was about thirty or so seconds of utter silence. Then Mitchell Kelb reached into his pocket and took out the last piece of potato, chewed and swallowed it, all fidgety as a squirrel. He rubbed his hands against his trouser leg a moment. He cleared his throat. “Am I being made a visiting fool of?” he said. He perused the faces in the row of barrels. “This hearing is not going in pristine order. And now we have superstitions involved. I need to organize my thoughts. Mrs. Dollard, please write: Mitchell Kelb adjourned to organize his thoughts, one after the other. We'll take a full day's recess. Everybody leaves the store now. Just get out.”
T
he
G
uy
F
awkes,
T
ragedy
“
N
ews of Orkney Vas might interest you,” Mitchell Kelb said. Revolver holstered on his right hip, he ate pancakes doused in butter, shredded cabbage, and brewis, which was a boiled biscuit with pork fat. It was the evening of November 3. Margaret, my mother, and I sat with Kelb. Kelb ate his last bite, stood, stretched in an exaggerated way. “My sources keep me informed. Mr. Llewellyn Boxer travels back and forth, here to St. John's. Well, Orkney was seen in Lamaline, of course, where neither you, Alaric, nor you, Fabian, nor Enoch Handle, for that matter, saw fit to stop him from going ashore. Not that you could have stopped him. After Lamaline, there were sightings in Garnish, Terrenceville, and Bay du Nord. We have a professional tracker out after him. A part-Micmac named Poomuk, first name of Albert. He's done good work for us in the past. He found an escapee in a cave once.”
“Mr. Kelb, did you ever escort a man who was criminally insane,” I said, “down the coast to a sanatorium?”
“As a matter of fact, I did. Ten or so years back. Enoch Handle took us down.”
“I'd heard that rumor,” I said. “I was just asking.”
“Getting back to Orkney Vas. We figure that he has headed into Canada, possibly overland, because the skipper of the
Doubting Thomas
, Mr. Arvin Flint, has been notified. I notified him through Llewellyn Boxer, who sent his brother Perry to Flint. Now, Mr. Flint is a former constable himself. He retired because of how his character is made up—he wasn't cut out for the job, really. The job got him too close to lowlife sorts who weren't well met with his more cheerful notions of humanity. Whereas, for me, it's all a perfect fit. Anyway, Arvin Flint still carries a sidearm and knows how to use it. Orkney Vas, I believe, knows all of this and will keep to dry ground.”
“Well, thank you for telling us,” my mother said. “I think personally I'll skip dessert. I'm quite tired. But we have duff; we make that pudding with flour, fat, and molasses, Mr. Kelb. And you can see there's syrup. Good night, then.”
“Good night,
Cirala,
” Kelb said, then snickered.
“Old Maid?” Margaret said to Kelb, holding up the deck.
My mother left the kitchen.
“No thanks,” Kelb said. “I'm turning in. I've got your room again tonight, eh, Fabian?”
“Help yourself.”
Mitchell Kelb washed his face in the kitchen sink, then went into my bedroom.
“Cuts up a potato and then doesn't use a fork,” Margaret said. She looked out the window. “It's duckish.”
Helen Twombly liked that word; it meant the time between sunset and dark.
“Want some coffee?” I said.
“There's bottles and bottles left, and I'm taking one with me to the sofa. I'm bottomed out, Fabian, just empty. I have no one to talk with.”
She went to the pantry, took up a bottle, went into the living room, and lay down. “Fabian,” she said. I stood in the hallway. “Seeing that Botho's left no will and testament, does that mean his gramophone's up for grabs?” I doubted that she expected an answer. She turned her face to the back of the sofa. “Goddamned Mitchell Kelb will probably get it.”
I went out and sat on the porch. House arrest included the porch, I thought. There was a saw-whet owl on a lightning-struck tree nearby, a harbinger of nothing. Seeing a Boreal owl was supposed to mean “Don't go to sea.” Sighting a snowy owl meant that “bones would ache,” but without further consequence; they would simply ache for a while, then stop. Gulls seen more than a mile or so inland were supposed to be wandering ghosts, or meant that ghosts would soon force themselves into your dreams, possibly your daytime imagination as well. The saw-whet owl called a few times, then with a slight gust of its wings flew past the porch, off toward Giles LaCotte's orchard.
“Fabian—”
Hearing my own name startled me. I stood up and saw a figure step from the side of the house.
“Fabian, it's me, Sebastian.”
“Jesus—Uncle Bassie.”
I had not seen my uncle since I was seven years old. He had last visited for Christmas dinner, 1898. I remember that he had been out of prison then for less than a week. Actually, it was because of Christmas that the warden had cut a week from his sentence. After supper my father and Bassie had gone into the living room and talked much of the night. Bassie had brought me a clipping from a newspaper in St. John's, where his most recent bank robbery had been reported. It included an artist's rendition of my uncle, not a good one. I kept it in a drawer for years. When he had given it to me, he had said, “From that drawing, who could recognize me? I should thank the man who did it for some extra weeks of freedom, no doubt.”
Now Bassie looked so much older, his features somehow more angular. He had a small, pointed beard. He was an inch or so taller than my father, yet all the other family resemblances were strong. He had on a black greatcoat, under which was a sweater. The sweater was frayed. But it still had all the evidence of my mother's handiwork. In fact, I suddenly recalled her having knit it that same Christmastime, day after day. Bassie had stayed for two weeks. I remember him sitting at the fireplace, watching her knit it. I remember him putting it on and looking at himself in the mirror. I remember him saying, “Thank you for the sweater, Alaric,” but not saying goodbye.
He got me in a bear hug, then let go and stepped back. “Orkney said I wouldn't believe how you'd grown.”
“It's been a few years, Uncle Bassie.”
“It has indeed.”
“You talked to my father, of course. You said, ‘Orkney said—' which meant you were coming to see me. He must know the law is after him.”
“It's almost laughable, isn't it? Here, for the first time in a long time I'm not on the lam, and Orkney is.”
“How did you find him? Or he find you?”
“Let's step away from the house, all right? I don't want to wake up Mr. Mitchell Kelb. He's got a reputation. I know that he's in the house. I was over to see Romeo Gillette, who remembered me. I don't want to wake up Alaric, either. She wouldn't be all that pleased to see me, I'm afraid.”
We walked past the charred tree and sat down.
“I'll fill you in,” Bassie said.
I could not see him all that clearly; in the starlit dark, his voice so closely resembled my father's that it was difficult to tell the difference. Perhaps Bassie's was a bit raspier, but that was all.
“Orkney stayed in Lamaline for one night,” he said. “I know that's where you watched him come ashore. He said he slept in the cemetery, having taken a blanket from somebody's wash out on the line. Said he neatly folded the blanket and returned it before daylight. Now, that does sound like Orkney, doesn't it?”
“Neatly folding it. Yes, it does.”
“He traveled mostly by dark, though. He made his way to Burgeo. He found a mail boat there.”
“The
Doubting Thomas.
”
“By chance and by luck. He persuaded the skipper, man named Arvin Flint, to carry him to Halifax. And what do you suppose he did then? He wrote me, his brother, a letter. Care of Buchans, because he knew I'd been a free man awhile this time around, and always after prison I go home. Which in fact I'd done.
“The letter said he was staying under an alias in the Hagerforse Guest House. He asked that I come see you, and that if I got to see you, to mention the Hagerforse Guest House in particular and wait for a confused smile to cross your face.”
He leaned close, peering into my face, contorting his mouth the way he had when I was a boy and he was trying to make me laugh. I smelled sweat, snuff tobacco, and hair grease on him. “I'm not a kid,” I said. “I'm not going to laugh at that.” And then I did laugh.
“Orkney's gone from Halifax now,” he said. “He's somewhere else. I know where, but I can't tell you. Because then you'd have that knowledge. If you don't have it, you can't be responsible.”
“I bet he's hightailed it into Canada. Somewhere into Canada.”
“Let me put it this way. Basically, there's Canada and there's the United States of America, and Orkney, since he was a boy, never had one spark of interest in going to the latter.”
“Will you go see him? Will you join him, or will he be alone?”
“I'm a free man now, Fabian, for the eighth or ninth time, I forget. So if I want to go and visit my brother, I can, and most likely I will. Hell, if he and I reminisced about everything that's happened even since we last saw one another, we'd walk out of the room old men!”
“Uncle Bassie—”
“Now, who's this Margaret?”
“My father mentioned her?”
“Yes, he did. He said he was out of his mind trying to persuade you to marry the girl from Richibucto, New Brunswick, whose name I've misplaced. He said he was trying to force a life outside of Witless Bay on you. But he realized—too late—you were striving for an outside life on your own. He thought this Margaret Handle might have kept you here, locked into sameness. Orkney used to like sameness—until he didn't. I guess he found out the hard way how Alaric dealt with sameness, didn't he. Between men and women, it's complicated and simple at the same time, eh? Anyway, I don't know all the man-and-wife details. So far I have only the one letter from Orkney, though it was a long letter. He says he was wrong. He is ashamed. He wants to be forgiven for his mistake.”
“Maybe he just now wants to disagree with my mother about Margaret. About everything.”
“Could be. I don't know. But to my mind, it's just a straight-out request for forgiveness.”
“Why did you come here, Uncle Bassie? I know, to tell
me that my father was all right. But he would have been all right whether you came all this way or not.”
“I broke his jaw. I owe him.”
“I'm happy to see you, don't get me wrong. I could use you here, too. Believe me, I could. Just to know you're here, during the hearing. Just to have you sitting in the store, so that later, if they don't hang me, I can say, ‘Did this really happen?' and you can say, ‘Yes, it did.'”
“I know you can use me here. I'm a free man. I'll stay through Guy Fawkes, at least.”
“Thank you.”
“I have to stay away from the house, though. Mr. Kelb is not my friend.”
“I understand.”
“Now listen carefully, Fabian. There's one last thing that Orkney insisted I tell you. Listen carefully to it. He said, ‘Tell Fabian it's fine to blame me for the murder. They won't catch me. I'm far out of jurisdiction, or at least the means of the magistrate. If it can guarantee your freedom' —he didn't mention anyone else's—‘then go ahead. Go ahead, twist the story around to blame me.' Blame him for the lighthouse keeper's murder. Even to the point of being an eyewitness to Orkney having shot the bastard.”
“I could just as easily say it was my mother who did it.”
“You'd have to look her in the eye, though. And a son sending his own mother to Mr. Ellis—”
“Either way is sickening.”
“More if someone hangs. Now, did you hear clearly what Orkney wanted me to tell you?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I'm going to leave now and get some sleep somewhere.”
We embraced for a long time. When Bassie was out of sight, I realized that I was shaking. I do not believe I have ever wanted someone to stay near me as much as Bassie over the next few days. I realized, too, that I had given Bassie no return message for my father. Now it was too late to shout one out or catch up with my uncle.
I fell asleep on the kitchen floor. What startled me awake the next morning was the sound of Margaret crashing into furniture on her bicycle. I got up and saw her sprawled on the floor, spokes spinning. She was bleeding at one knee. She looked up at me. “I'm riding my bicycle under house arrest,” she said.
Kelb appeared in the doorway. “How can you drink that poison so early in the morning,” he said, picking up a bottle from the floor. He looked in a foul mood. “Goddamn it, Miss Handle. You woke me up. And I've got to keep a clear head today.”
We had a breakfast of eggs and fried potatoes, prepared by my mother. Then Margaret wheeled her bicycle outside and rode it to Gillette's store.
In the store, Kelb shut the windows against the cold. He announced, “It's November four, nineteen and eleven.” Mekeel Dollard wrote that down.
The store was as crowded as ever, less Reverend Sillet.

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