The Bird Artist by Howard Norman Page B

thought, Ten dollars is a lot of money, then immediately decided to work toward it. I had all this ambition. I’d fall asleep five nights a week at my desk.
    â€œI think you’re trying to earn back as much as you pay out to Isaac Sprague,” Margaret said. “To make a clean break from him eventually.”
    On Tuesday and Thursday nights, Margaret and I slept together. I suppose this arrangement was to our mutual satisfaction, since almost from the start it did not vary. I would not ask Margaret if she ever spent nights with someone else. I would never ask her that. After all, Witless Bay was a small village, so I presumed I would hear, if there was anything to hear, and most likely would get such news
from Margaret herself. In turn, she must have known I was faithful to her. Though on the night of October 19, 1910, when I finally told her of Alaric and Orkney’s efforts to arrange my marriage, she said, “To even consider it is a betrayal.” This revealed deeper feelings than I had heard before, though I’d known they were there.
    Five nights a week, then, we would keep our distance. But during periods when Enoch was up the coast, overnight in St. Anthony or Twillingate, where he would sleep in his bunk on the Aunt Ivy Barnacle , or Bonavista, where he would stay with his sister, Sevilla Pierce, Margaret and I would spend from early Tuesday and Thursday evening until breakfast the next morning together. And she would seldom sleep.
    There was a chowder restaurant, Spivey’s, in Witless Bay. It took up the ground floor of a two-story house, set back from the water about a hundred yards. The owners, Bridget and Lemuel Spivey, had moved to Witless Bay from Trepassey in December 1899. They lived upstairs. “We spent the exact turn-of-the-century drunk as skunks,” Lemuel told me. “Putting up wallpaper.” Spivey’s was especially popular on “Family Night,” as it came to be known, which was Sunday. I had taken my mother there for her thirty-eighth and thirty-ninth birthdays, my father joining us after work at the dry dock. Enoch, Margaret, and I had supper there now and then as well. That always went smoothly. We counted on Enoch to spice up the conversation with news from his mail route. He was an even-voiced, tireless raconteur, who began any number of accounts with “I just happened
to hear” or “I happened upon,” as though interesting events and people more or less fell into his lap. Anyway, during supper with Enoch we would hear about places we had not been to. We all got along. Outsiders might have thought they saw a family.
    One night at Spivey’s Enoch said, “When are you two getting the rings? I’m authorized to marry people shipboard, if you’d prefer to stay out of church.”
    Margaret cut in. “We haven’t got a fix on that yet, Pop,” she said. She placed a hand on Enoch’s shoulder and squeezed, looking at him sternly. He never broached the subject again, at least not in front of me.
    Tuesdays and Thursdays, then, Margaret and I would eat at Spivey’s. We would be out in public. The restaurant had one large room crammed with tables of assorted shapes and sizes, mostly square tops that seated four. A window on either side of the door took in a view of the dry dock, part of the flats, and on out to sea. Gulls swooped close or attended the gateposts, as though begging scraps through the window. The gulls would stare in. On any but the warmest nights, however, the glass finally drew cold from outside and warmth from the kitchen or woodstove, and the windows would completely fog over.
    Bridget Spivey presided as hostess and the only waitress. She would shout a welcome to you at the door, then point to an empty table, if there was one. She was a short, lithe woman in her fifties, and would move quickly from table to table, scribbling orders, fastening each slip to a string with a clothespin. Lemuel,