The Bird Artist Read Free Page B

work together ceased with sudden abruptness, it was a mystery to me, and upsetting. Late in October 1910, I had sent him the required five drawings: a murre, a crow, a gull, a cormorant, a black duck, knowing the likelihood of not hearing from him until spring. Yet in April and May 1911, the Aunt Ivy Barnacle made a number of round trips, and there was no letter from Sprague.
    Anyway, I had been earning money from bird art and was proud of it.
    In 1911, I still had a steady hand and could set aside personal torment for the duration of a drawing or painting. I still could concentrate for hours in a row, day and night, and had not yet fallen completely into the habit of drinking twenty to thirty cups of coffee a day. That happened in earnest after I had murdered Botho August and holds true of me to this day. I had never enjoyed alcohol, though I would drink whiskey with Margaret Handle, because she hated to drink alone. And she drank alone much of the time. But coffee is a different thing. It is a peculiar addiction and few people understand it. In my case, however, it can be traced back to Alaric’s, Orkney’s, and my household; I had
drunk coffee since I was five years old. There were the long winters, you see, and coffee was what you came in to out of the cold.
    So much to tell. Though I am a bird artist, you would not have heard of me. None of my paintings resides in a museum. My sketchbooks gather dust in Enoch Handle’s attic. My first wife, Cora Holly, whom I married in an unfortunate arranged marriage, may still own an ink portrait of a garganey in eclipse plumage, I do not know. It was a wedding present, actually.
    The garganey is a surface-feeding duck, and even Enoch Handle, who knew every bird along the coves, inlets, the entire coastline (he delivered mail from Lamaline at the southern tip of Newfoundland, to Cook’s Harbour at the top; another boat, the Doubting Thomas , serviced the western seaboard), found it a rare visitor. Enoch was in his sixties and told me he had identified only two garganeys with total certainty. He admitted that at a glance a garganey might easily be mistaken for a cinnamon teal or a blue-winged teal. And it was true that you could live your entire life in Witless Bay, in Newfoundland for that matter, and never see a garganey, even if you were desperately searching for one.
    Yet I had drawn Cora Holly’s wedding present from life. It had been as though an otherwise meandering summer day, the day I had spotted the garganey, had lured me to Shoe Cove. Just before dawn I had packed my sketchbook, pens, binoculars, and had set out from our one-story blue cottage. I had already drunk five cups of coffee. I walked
the half mile to the lighthouse. It was a clear morning; the lighthouse was silent except for gulls bickering along the wooden rail that encircled the light housing.
    I looked up at the lighthouse and thought how rarely I had spoken with Botho August, only a few words in passing if he was standing near the road, even though he had been the lighthouse keeper since I was eleven. People may assume that in a village of less than two hundred everyone talks to everyone else, but in truth being reclusive is a kind of expertise. Of course I had seen Botho working around his yard. I had seen him pulleyed up on a hoist slat in order to paint the lighthouse or wash windows. I had also stood in front of other lighthouses, at Bay Bulls, Cape Race, Portugal Cove. I had walked or taken a horsedrawn cart to those. I knew them as being well kept—the one at Cape Race could be called pristine. Each of them was inviting in its own way, so that, stranger or no, you would care to go inside. You might be enticed by an open door or a table lantern glowing or some other sign of life. But—and this struck me as unnatural—while Botho August lived there, I never once saw Witless Bay’s lighthouse door ajar, certainly not wide open enough to let the breeze in, to fully change