so, the captain is quite mistaken.
He may be fantasist, a fabricator. He is even called a liar, with his grotesque, exaggerated wildfowl. He has told his English patrons that there are, in the New World, winged creatures as tall as grown men. His pictures must prove it. The flamingos and the wild turkeys, the cranes and the pelicans crowd the edges of his double elephant-size paper, bow and twist to fit the trim. But it is not his pictures that lie. He himself is too large for any frame. He was not built for the sea. His legs are made to leap over stiles; they slip and betray him on the rain-slick planks. He must not be contained in any way. His hair escapes its bindings and his enthusiasms exceed his ability to express them, so that even when he is deep in thought his hands and arms must be in motion. Speaking in English, he has a French accent and comical grammar, but the power of angels invests his tongue. He veers from glee to melancholy, each extreme mirrored in his dark brown eyes. He needs to take people by storm and he does.
Bayfield is entirely mistaken if he thinks Audubon is like him.
… how you came to be here, and how you came to paint birds .
I will tell you my story , Audubon promised.
Which story would that be?
Truth is discovered backwards, fact buried in the flow of impression, in the rubble of stories told then and now to suit a purpose. Hisfriends and family guard his lies more jealously than he. Even the record, his own record, his tale of himself, is a story. But the impulse remains: find one story and make it true.
He was born Jean Rabin, in Santo Domingo. At three, he became Monsieur Newhouse, on the register of the ship that carried him to his father in France, in the care of strange men. Someone’s idea of a joke, surely, to call him that, but it was a sign that he was leaving one life behind and going to another, that nothing remained behind for him to return to. To be cut loose like that, from land, from the women who cared for him and all he ever knew.
Over and over, he was cut loose. In his new house in Nantes, his father called him Jean Jacques. Later, when it became a crime to be Catholic, he became Fougère, “fern.” When he was eighteen, his father sent Jean Jacques Fougère to manage his property of Mill Grove, in Pennsylvania. He hoped that the sale of the French colony of Louisiana to the United States might be the occasion for a questionable young Frenchman to get American citizenship.
In America, he became John James Audubon. And he fell in love, with Lucy Bakewell, daughter of his English neighbours on the property next to Mill Grove.
In summer he took her to watch the peewees nest. He placed a ring around the leg of the male peewee. He wanted to see if the same bird would come back the next spring. In April they went again, and sure enough, there was the bird with the ringed leg. When he held the peewee’s little head to his chest, Lucy said, “You’ve wed the bird, instead of me.”
And once he’d wed her, too, the bird was her rival. And every bird had a mate, and a home, while all she had was his protestations. It seemed he could only be faithful to himself by failing her. He was neither a domestic man, nor a wild one, but a man split by double yearnings: to be in the lap of his family, and to be off tramping. But, he told her often, wherever he was, he longed for her.
Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky; mine operator, farm owner, storekeeper, mill owner. All his endeavours failed. He invested his father’s money and his in-laws’ money and he lost it. There, on thefrontier of the still-wild continent, he did what he knew best: he followed the birds.
In fact, during these thirty years since he came to America, he has been apart from Lucy more than he has been with her. He has followed the birds and tried to know their world, his chosen continent. He has ridden its trails on horseback, tramped its frontiers, threaded its veins by riverboat and lake steamer, sleeping
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