The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

Author:Howard Norman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2011-01-16T16:00:00+00:00

My father did not wait a week. Three nights later he came to our house. My mother had sequestered herself. I had been out each day trying to draw birds, but as far as I knew she had not been back to the lighthouse. It was late, around eleven o’clock. I was lying fully clothed on my bed. It was raining hard. The roof, the chimney, the shingle-roofed shed each registered rain with a different sound, and there was spillage out of the eaves. My door was open enough to see the blurred figure of my father go past. I got up and went to my door. He had tracked in. He had not bothered to take off his raincoat or galoshes.

“You want a miracle?” my mother cried out as a greeting.

Their bedroom door slammed, but I could still hear them.

“Do you want some angel from on high to save you from humiliation?” she said. “Do you want to kill me? Do you want Reverend Sillet to put me in stocks so you and everyone else can spit on me? What is it, Orkney? Do you want me to drown myself in the sink? What would satisfy you? What would make it worth your while that you ever came back?”

She kept the questions flying, and I thought there would be no end to them.

“Should I cut out my heart? Should I write ‘I’m sorry’ a thousand times on the blackboard?”

At one point my father shouted, “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill myself!”

“That solution’s a little too generous toward Botho August, don’t you think,” my mother said hoarsely.

“I’ll kill him!”

As for me, these were hours of bewildering helplessness and fear. Such a violent argument can turn a house inside out, let alone a mind, and there seemed to be no way to intervene, and no way to slow my heart down. It could have fairly beat out of my chest. What was perhaps most unpredictable was that the air choked with accusation, the guilty questions, the silences all emboldened me. It all emboldened me, maybe in the most senseless way, yet it did. I went to the woodshed, took up the revolver, and from that moment forward the revolver was part of my fate. As I walked to the lighthouse, I heard the foghorn. Three extended blasts. In a manner of speaking, I had perfect knowledge of everything to come, because I had said out loud, “You’ve got a gun.” I named the thing I held, and even having done so did not cast it aside. I tucked it into my belt under my shirt. And then it was as though the rain drowned out the sound of my own thinking, all reason, any hope at all. I was accompanied by dumb silence and rain.

At the lighthouse I made my way along the picket fence. I watched as the beam swept and flattened out on the sea. I thought of how many times I had stood watching this from a cliff. How

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