The Bird Artist Read Online Free PDF Page A

capelin fishermen; codfish trappers, lobstermen—all of whom made up the grandfathers, fathers, and sons of most of Witless Bay’s families.
    â€œBotho August can pin a schooner in trouble to the sea with that beam,” Romeo Gillette once said. “He can shade the beam just right and beckon a dory in, just like it was Jesus on the water following some holy-lit path home. He’s damn good at that. We’re lucky on that account to have hired him. But he’d rather be up in his crow’s nest than down among common men. I’m not suggesting, mind you, that there’s a judgement on his part toward us in all of that privacy. I’m saying that for Botho August, there’s no card playing, no pissing off the dock after a drunk, no socializing for five minutes of obligation on the church steps, no church. He’s a person with the distance in him.”
    Anyway, back to the day that I drew the garganey. Leaving the lighthouse, I continued on past Gillette’s store. His sign read: PROVISIONS / GILLETTE’S / GROCERIES in large black letters. It had a wide porch with four chairs nailed down and a rocking chair a customer could move here or there.
    A quarter mile or so farther, on the way to the codfish drying flats, was the sawmill owned and operated by Boas LaCotte, and beyond the flats and down a rocky slope across a slat bridge were the wharf, dry dock, and four adjacent peninsulas. At the end of each peninsula was a single square-up
house; in that part of the village, people often visited by rowing a dinghy house to house.
    Well past these peninsulas was old Helen Twombly’s cold-storage shack, roofed in dirt and sod. It held her milk bottles and rectangular pats of butter. Even with dawn just breaking, I figured that Helen might be there, and she was. In 1911 she was eighty, and though her house was next to Gillette’s store, since childhood I had thought of her as living more at her shack. In late spring she would plant flowers on its roof. Her garden was only a few steps away. She had had her husband, Emile, buried near the shack, forsaking the family plot in the cemetery west of the sawmill. I would often stop and watch Helen rearrange her milk bottles in her own finicky way, lifting, sorting. Bent as she was, you could almost balance a bottle on her back. No one person of course could have drunk as much milk as Helen hoarded. A lot went to waste. As children we believed that she drank only rancid milk; when we got older we learned that she drank it fresh as well as rancid, and that she considered milk as generally medicinal. “For which illnesses?” I once asked her. “For the ones I never get because I keep drinking the stuff” is what she said. When she came into the store, Romeo never hesitated or said, “Helen, come now, ten bottles!” He simply lifted the milk from its bin of ice blocks and set them on the counter, as Helen opened up her snap purse. She had enough money to get by. I think she poured milk into her parsnips and carrots—watered her garden with it, I mean. The garden had a milky air about it. The nozzle of her watering can was crusted white.

    That morning, Helen wore a housedress, a knit sweater, a shawl, long underwear, and black galoshes.
    â€œHello, Helen,” I said, just loud enough so she would hear, yet not be startled. “Good morning.”
    â€œLoathe to anyone steals my milk,” she said. Her eyes were bright, with the shocking beauty of a goat’s in a decrepit goat’s face. “I can be a harpy if I choose to.”
    â€œI respect that, Helen. I’m just passing by. I’m going off to try and find a bird to draw for my fiancée.”
    â€œWhere’s the wedding?”
    â€œHalifax. In October, most likely.”
    â€œYes, yes. I heard that you and Margaret Handle have been practising all along. I always liked that Margaret. Ever since she was a little girl, she never came