The Bird Artist Read Online Free PDF

near my milk.”
    â€œI like her, too.”
    â€œWhy are you two going down to Halifax for the ceremony?”
    â€œI’m not marrying Margaret.”
    She put a finger to the side of her head. “I get it. Margaret’s been practising for somebody else, too.”
    â€œI suppose that’s true.”
    â€œMargaret’s had a difficult past. I hope her future’s better. I hope no man ruins it. I hope she won’t let that happen. The bicycle accident, you ask me. You ask me, that was the start of Margaret’s troubles on this earth.”

    Exactly on her thirteenth birthday, July 2, 1900, Enoch had brought Margaret a bicycle from Halifax. There were few bicycles in Witless Bay then, not a lot of good places
to ride them. But Margaret learned to ride hers quickly. She would risk various horse trails as well as the path that ran behind the lighthouse, high above the water. She would careen around the wharf. She would skid sideways to the last slat of a dock, front wheel spinning over the edge. She spilled in a few times and the bicycle had to be salvaged. It got rust-pocked.
    One morning in late August of that year I had just come into the store to buy groceries when I heard a loud slap. This was followed by a girl’s voice crying out, “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” At first I did not recognize the voice. I walked to the counter. My father was away visiting Bassie in Buchans. My mother was just getting over the croup and had not been in the village for a week. I had been back and forth to Lambert’s trout camp. All this to say, we had not heard any news.
    Boas LaCotte was in the store. “Fabian Vas,” he said, “let me introduce you to the constable, Mitchell Kelb.”
    Mitchell Kelb stepped forward and we shook hands. “Son,” he said, nodding.
    â€œHe’s come down from Her Majesty’s Penitentiary in St. John’s—well, the magistrate court up there, to carry out a formal investigation,” Boas said.
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œInvestigation’s when a British official looks into the hows and whys and wherefores of a crime,” Boas said.
    â€œOr an accident,” Kelb said.
    â€œThat’s Margaret Handle in the back room,” Boas said. “Poor girl, she collided on that bicycle of hers with Dalton
Gillette, on the path behind the lighthouse. I have to put this plainly, Fabian. Dalton fell to his death.”
    Dalton was Romeo’s father, who was slowly recovering from a heart attack.
    â€œThat can’t be,” I said.
    â€œIt could and is,” Kelb said.
    I looked into the storeroom, the one old Dalton Gillette had been recuperating in. Romeo stood over Margaret, who was sprawled on the bed. He had just slapped her and looked almost as shocked at what he had done as Margaret did. His face was contorted and he was trembling, staring at his hand.
    Mitchell Kelb now stood next to me. “Mr. Gillette,” Kelb said into the storeroom, “you just struck a witness. Don’t do that again.”
    He said this with such severe reprimand that Romeo retreated to a corner like a schoolboy dunce. Finally, head down, Romeo walked to the front door of the store, turned, and said, “My father died in a humiliating way, after all that hard labor to be able just to take a walk again.”
    Mitchell Kelb was a short man, no more than five foot six, I would guess. He was in good trim, had curly brown hair, a fair complexion, and wore spectacles. There was a bookish aspect to him. He spoke with authority, though, and said to Romeo, “That’s a personal matter between you and your God, and the girl there, and maybe her father. I’m just taking down the facts of this incident on paper”—he held up a leatherbound pad of paper—“to report back to the Board of Inquiry. I’ve been out to the exact spot it
happened. It’s hardly a blind corner, that I’ll