The Bird Artist (2 page)
Authors: Howard Norman
She led me from the dock onto the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle,
the wooden, two-tiered wedding cake of a boat. We climbed down into the bunkroom. Margaret said, “Lie down there. It's all right.” I looked around as if there was some place other than the bed she might have meant. “The bed,” she said. I got under the one blanket, fully clothed. Watching, Margaret simply shook her head back and forth. Then she took her clothes off entirely and got in next to me.
Aunt Ivy Barnacle,
the wooden, two-tiered wedding cake of a boat. We climbed down into the bunkroom. Margaret said, “Lie down there. It's all right.” I looked around as if there was some place other than the bed she might have meant. “The bed,” she said. I got under the one blanket, fully clothed. Watching, Margaret simply shook her head back and forth. Then she took her clothes off entirely and got in next to me.
Now Margaret was at the center of my life. I did not fully recognize this fact at first, did not consider it possible while lying with her that night. Maybe I had come to believe that tenderness was the least practical part of my nature, so what could be the use of it? “It's all right,” she said in the middle of the night. She may have been asleep when she said it.
I think it was about five o'clock in the morning when we heard Enoch up on deck. When he started down the stairs, Margaret wrapped her legs tightly around me and said, “Shut your eyes.” We heard Enoch go back up the stairs.
“I've never been all night anywhere but my own house,” I said.
“Now you have.”
“I'm going to have to explain it.”
“Not to me.”
“My mother, I meant. My father.”
“If we walk right up to your house hand in hand, stand
right in the kitchen and ask for breakfast together, I bet they'll get the hint.”
right in the kitchen and ask for breakfast together, I bet they'll get the hint.”
“Margaret, my mother doesn't like you. You know that.”
“She can't bear me. But I can keep you separate from Alaric. I don't know if she can.”
“Your father's right up on deck.”
“Put on your clothes, Fabian, and walk up there. Say good morning to him, because it's morning. You don't have to add anything. I'm getting more sleep.”
I climbed up and said, “Good morning,” to Enoch. He was mopping out the steering cabin.
He did not look up. “You know, I've let Margaret steer this boat since she was ten. Why, she could take over my job any minute, if need be! She can take apart and put together this newfangled steam engine. She just learned it with native intelligence, eh? She's always had a talent for mechanical things. That's something she might not have told you, so I thought that I would.”
Roughly from 1908 to 1911, I was faithfully apprenticed to a bird artist named Isaac Sprague. I had followed up on his advertisement in the journal
Bird Lore
, which Mrs. Bath had ordered specially on my behalf. In her will, in fact, she left me all the back issues.
Bird Lore
, which Mrs. Bath had ordered specially on my behalf. In her will, in fact, she left me all the back issues.
Sprague lived in Halifax. Above my desk I had tacked a reproduction of his painting of a red-throated loon, which I had torn from an issue of
Bird Lore.
It was so graceful and transcendent that each time I sat down in front of it to work, it made me want to give up. But then after I had
stared at it, the loon became an inspiration. It was uncanny how that change overtook me. The pencil seemed to move of its own volition. The brush made a beak, feather, eye. It was as if to hesitate or think too much, to resist in any way, would impede the progress of my calling. I was convinced that birds were kinds of souls. Not the souls of people but of previous birds whose mystery and beauty were so necessary on earth that God would not allow them to be anything in their second life but birds again. This was an idea I had come up with when I was nine or ten, just after Reverend Sillet's sermon on the transformation of souls in heaven. I sometimes went to church with my mother. Witless Bay had the Anglican Church of England. I would sit antsy in the pew, or daydream. Having made my own connections between God and birds, I felt moral enough not to have to listen too closely to Sillet's sermons. Besides, I had already passed my own judgement on Sillet; I had made a few drawings of him taking potshots at a woodpecker on the church belfry.
Bird Lore.
It was so graceful and transcendent that each time I sat down in front of it to work, it made me want to give up. But then after I had
stared at it, the loon became an inspiration. It was uncanny how that change overtook me. The pencil seemed to move of its own volition. The brush made a beak, feather, eye. It was as if to hesitate or think too much, to resist in any way, would impede the progress of my calling. I was convinced that birds were kinds of souls. Not the souls of people but of previous birds whose mystery and beauty were so necessary on earth that God would not allow them to be anything in their second life but birds again. This was an idea I had come up with when I was nine or ten, just after Reverend Sillet's sermon on the transformation of souls in heaven. I sometimes went to church with my mother. Witless Bay had the Anglican Church of England. I would sit antsy in the pew, or daydream. Having made my own connections between God and birds, I felt moral enough not to have to listen too closely to Sillet's sermons. Besides, I had already passed my own judgement on Sillet; I had made a few drawings of him taking potshots at a woodpecker on the church belfry.
It went like this. I would send five carefully packed drawings or watercolors to Halifax, and Sprague would comment by return mail; this might take one summer month, if the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
was in good repair and if Enoch did not dawdle on his mail stops, and if fair weather prevailed. But when I sent drawings out just before winter, I would not get Sprague's reply until spring, because the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
would be in dry dock. Anyway, once I did get a letter from Sprague, I would send him two dollars, a lot of money for me. For anyone in Witless Bay, for that matter. To pay
my parents' room and board, which I had done since I was thirteen, I worked at the dry dock, repairing and painting schooners, trawlers, dories. I sometimes worked side by side with my father. Still and all, I was barely able to afford the inks, special paper, and brushes which I ordered through Gillette's store, especially after Mrs. Bath died.
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
was in good repair and if Enoch did not dawdle on his mail stops, and if fair weather prevailed. But when I sent drawings out just before winter, I would not get Sprague's reply until spring, because the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
would be in dry dock. Anyway, once I did get a letter from Sprague, I would send him two dollars, a lot of money for me. For anyone in Witless Bay, for that matter. To pay
my parents' room and board, which I had done since I was thirteen, I worked at the dry dock, repairing and painting schooners, trawlers, dories. I sometimes worked side by side with my father. Still and all, I was barely able to afford the inks, special paper, and brushes which I ordered through Gillette's store, especially after Mrs. Bath died.
Isaac Sprague's letters were detailed and impersonal. They kept to subjects such as the shaping of a beak, shadows, color accents. He wrote to me about consciously denying certain background landscapes the opportunityâas he put itâto dominate rather than feature a bird. In one letter he said that bird artists should
invoke
a bird, feather by feather, not merely copy what we observe in the wild. He had, for me, a difficult vocabulary and I wrote him a separate letter to say that. He sent me a dictionary for Christmas, 1909, along with a note saying, “Read each of my letters from now on with this book in hand. I'm not going backwards in my education on your behalf.” The dictionary had arrived in October, Christmas greetings inscribed in advance.
invoke
a bird, feather by feather, not merely copy what we observe in the wild. He had, for me, a difficult vocabulary and I wrote him a separate letter to say that. He sent me a dictionary for Christmas, 1909, along with a note saying, “Read each of my letters from now on with this book in hand. I'm not going backwards in my education on your behalf.” The dictionary had arrived in October, Christmas greetings inscribed in advance.
Sprague offered strong opinions in each letter, not just about my work but about bird art in general. Much later, after our correspondence had ended, I realized that all of his musings, asides, complaints, all of his fervor added up to a rare education, not just in craft but in his own passionate character as well. “Birds,” he wrote, “and the making of a bird on the page is the logic of my heart. And yours?” He examined life closely and described things in close-up language. “That belted kingfisher you sent me,” he wrote, “is
pretty good-fine. A solid effort, Mr. Vas. Yet the foot does not seem to encircle the branch but to be laid on a differently pitched surface.” I looked up “pitch” in the dictionary. I drew kingfisher feet on branches for hours, days in a row.
pretty good-fine. A solid effort, Mr. Vas. Yet the foot does not seem to encircle the branch but to be laid on a differently pitched surface.” I looked up “pitch” in the dictionary. I drew kingfisher feet on branches for hours, days in a row.
Whatever praise he divvied out I was intoxicated with for weeks, months! When I would hear that the
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
had tied up, I would drop everything and run to the wharf. I would follow the burlap mail sacks up to Gillette's store, even haul them myself, and watch as Romeo distributed envelopes into slots. My family did not have a slot. “Anything for me from Halifax?” I would ask Romeo, a question meant only to narrow down my possible disappointments to one, since Halifax was the only place from which, and Sprague the only person from whom, I had ever received a letter.
Aunt Ivy Barnacle
had tied up, I would drop everything and run to the wharf. I would follow the burlap mail sacks up to Gillette's store, even haul them myself, and watch as Romeo distributed envelopes into slots. My family did not have a slot. “Anything for me from Halifax?” I would ask Romeo, a question meant only to narrow down my possible disappointments to one, since Halifax was the only place from which, and Sprague the only person from whom, I had ever received a letter.
Each of Isaac Sprague's letters began: “Dear Mr. Vas, Student # 12.” I learned that at any given time throughout the years I worked with him, he kept three dozen or so students through the mail, and also taught a night course, “Nature Drawing,” in a small museum on Agricola Street, the stationery of which he used. The date of each letter was printed below his signature, and each letter ended in an identical way:
In hopes for improvement, Isaac Sprague
I have kept all his letters, my own inheritance from those years. “You've got a knack,” he wrote on September 7, 1909, “but you are no genius.”
Out of financial necessity I maintained my other employments, yet privately I considered bird art to be my profession. In secret, a journal such as
Bird Lore
truly defined my world, or a world I wanted more and more to belong to. I wanted someday to report birds back from Catesby's Florida, or from Africa, South America, Siberia, any place really; just looking at a globe would keep me awake half the night painting. I was squirreling money away to flee. And though I was stuck in Witless Bay, or thought of it that way, I was in fact able to improve, slowly, to the point where two reputable journals,
Maritime Monthly
and the more specialized
Bird Lore
, solicited my sketches and watercolors, both as fillers and to accompany feature articles. Each request, each acceptance, made me feel more hopeful, more alive to the possibility that bird art could be my life.
Maritime Monthly
, for instance, had paid $1.50 Canadian for the first work I had ever sold, ten pencil sketches of barn swallows which it did not publish yet kept on file. Sprague, of course, had recommended me. He wrote to tell me that he had. I thought of this as a generosity and it was, yet it was also an investment in his own future. The success of his students, within the small world of bird art, reflected well on him, and he asked that I mention him in any correspondence I might have with a journal's editor. I am certain that he asked the same of all his students.
Bird Lore
truly defined my world, or a world I wanted more and more to belong to. I wanted someday to report birds back from Catesby's Florida, or from Africa, South America, Siberia, any place really; just looking at a globe would keep me awake half the night painting. I was squirreling money away to flee. And though I was stuck in Witless Bay, or thought of it that way, I was in fact able to improve, slowly, to the point where two reputable journals,
Maritime Monthly
and the more specialized
Bird Lore
, solicited my sketches and watercolors, both as fillers and to accompany feature articles. Each request, each acceptance, made me feel more hopeful, more alive to the possibility that bird art could be my life.
Maritime Monthly
, for instance, had paid $1.50 Canadian for the first work I had ever sold, ten pencil sketches of barn swallows which it did not publish yet kept on file. Sprague, of course, had recommended me. He wrote to tell me that he had. I thought of this as a generosity and it was, yet it was also an investment in his own future. The success of his students, within the small world of bird art, reflected well on him, and he asked that I mention him in any correspondence I might have with a journal's editor. I am certain that he asked the same of all his students.
In fact, when I had sold the barn swallows, Sprague requested that I send him a 25
commission, that one time only. I sent it; I would happily have sent the entire amount I was paid. And I enclosed a lengthy, no doubt overwrought description of a magnolia warbler, along with a torn-out
page from my daily sketchbook, as intimate a document to me as any diary. However, the audacity of a student offering “a preliminary sketch,” as he called it, heartily offended him. He wrote back: “I herewith return your warbler without comment.” That was comment enough. Perhaps it was his custom to give his students a cold shake early on, to slowly step back once they had entered his professional domain. I cannot say for certain. When our 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.
commission, that one time only. I sent it; I would happily have sent the entire amount I was paid. And I enclosed a lengthy, no doubt overwrought description of a magnolia warbler, along with a torn-outpage from my daily sketchbook, as intimate a document to me as any diary. However, the audacity of a student offering “a preliminary sketch,” as he called it, heartily offended him. He wrote back: “I herewith return your warbler without comment.” That was comment enough. Perhaps it was his custom to give his students a cold shake early on, to slowly step back once they had entered his professional domain. I cannot say for certain. When our 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.
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.
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.
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 keptâthe 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. Butâand this struck me as unnaturalâwhile 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 the air on the ground floor.
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