The Bird Artist by Howard Norman Page A

on her forehead, the backs of her hands. And she would leave the door open when she did. I once mixed hues of white and pale grey paint in order to match the color of one of her skin creams, a color which reminded me of a sky I had seen one day at Portugal Cove, when I had painted a dozen or so murres heading fast toward a cliff. For three nights of painting in a row I referred to the open jar of cream on my desk, returning it to the pantry before I went to bed.

    At about eleven o’clock, late for me to be awake, after that long day’s work on the Aunt Ivy Barnacle , I replenished the iodine on my thumb. I had gone to visit Margaret, but she had told me that Romeo had run out of the special ointment. We stood in the apple orchard kissing for a long time, then parted.

    In my room I set my lantern on the night table. Lantern light made it seem as if a bonfire glowed to the left of Cora Holly. My curtains shifting in the breeze, the moonlight, all flickered shadows across the framed glass. In the photograph, Cora Holly stood in front of a shed. There was cordwood stacked nearby. She wore a dark sweater over a darker dress, and fur-lined white snowboots. Her knees showed. Her lips were pursed into a smile. She had made fists and held them outward close to her waist. Her hair was tucked under her fur hat. She had, I thought, a mature bearing for someone her age, which I guessed was fifteen. In that I was wrong. In the photograph she was sixteen. All in all, it struck me that Cora Holly was barely tolerating the moment. This made me laugh. I was convinced that it was true. I had a random thought then: She’s had her photograph taken , and I haven’t.
    I took my magnifying glass from its drawer. The glass had been a present from Margaret Handle. I saw that the shed door had metal hinges inlaid with some kind of intricate leafy vine, and I imagined that the photographer had used their detail to gauge his focus. The focus was good; still, the shed’s roof had a ghost line. I was almost certain it was a meat-drying shed, though—so if its woodstove was cranked up, then the ghost line was most likely steam rising from the roof’s snow. I put the photograph on the table. I lay awake a long time, wondering how Cora Holly was being convinced to marry me.

3
    M orse C ode

    O n October 1, 1910, the Aunt Ivy Barnacle brought in a copy of Bird Lore, which had my drawing of a common raven on its cover. I stood staring at it. “There’s another envelope for you,” Romeo said. It contained a check for the cover rate, two dollars Canadian.
    â€œAny letters for my mother?” I said.
    â€œHere’s one again from Richibucto,” Romeo said. “Handwriting is a woman’s, I’ve noticed all along. That puts to rest the notion of Alaric having a distant paramour.”
    â€œCan you cash this?”
    â€œSure thing.”
    Romeo took care of the checks from Halifax, where Maritime Monthly and Bird Lore had their offices. Looking at my cover, he said, “Congratulations. When one of your paintings adorns an official postage stamp of Canada, I’ll
brag to everyone that I handled your banking. Maybe a stamp saying, ‘Welcome, Newfoundland, the Newest Province!’ Then one of your birds, a Newfoundland bird, hovering over the coast.”
    â€œThat really would be something.”
    Having the raven so prominently featured inspired my working dawn-to-dusk, seven days a week. It was unseasonably warm. Migratory birds were lingering. In October, I completed watercolors and ink portraits of diver ducks at Bay Bulls. Half a day’s walk to Cape Broyle, I sketched harlequins. I had a weeklong stint with yellow-bellied sapsuckers behind LaCotte’s sawmill. I went north to the spruce crags outside Petty Harb, filling two sketchbooks with grey jays. I had hoped to earn ten dollars in October. That was my goal. It was an amount I had simply snatched from thin air; one minute I