The Bird Skinner

Alice Greenway

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781782390275
• Print ISBN:
  9780857897275
• Subtopic: Literature General

From the award-winning author of White Ghost Girls comes an evocative tale of memory, loss—and the redemptive power of friendship. It is 1973. Jim Kennoway, a distinguished ornithologist and World War II veteran, has just left his work at the Natural History Museum in New York, turned his back on his family, and retreated to an island boathouse off the coast of Maine. His desires are simple: to be left alone with his cigarettes, gin, and battered copy of Treasure Island, and to forget. Jim's solitude is shattered when Cadillac Baketi, a tall, ebullient, and dazzlingly bright young woman from the Solomon Islands arrives on her way to study medicine at Yale University. Cadillac is the daughter of Tosca, an island scout Jim befriended during the war when they collected and skinned birds while spying on the Japanese. Jim curses the intrusion as he finds his thoughts catapulting back to his youth and a dark truth about his time in the Solomons. Yet it may be that Cadillac, from the Pacific islands Jim thought he'd left behind, can teach him to be human again.

CONTENTS

	Prologue
I	Summerhouse at the End of Winter
II	A Girl Named After a Car
III	Hunting Grounds
IV	Tosca’s Story
V	Wantoks
VI	Long John’s Earrings
VII	Japanese Bones
VIII	Hieroglyph
	Epilogue
	Notes
	Acknowledgments

PROLOGUE

They talked about it afterward, at the end of summer, after the summer folks had left and there was room to breathe again on the island. They talked slowly, hesitantly, in that drawn-out way you hear less and less down east, with long pauses between short utterances, as if, in the end, most things were best left unsaid.

Down at the boatyard where young Floyd was attending to some hitch in the electrics, resuscitating a bilge pump, adjusting a prop shaft that was shaking the engine something awful; down at the town dock where they tied up at the end of a long day, after hosing down their boats, shedding foul-weather jackets, high boots, oilskin overalls, rubber gloves, like lobsters shedding their skins; down at Elliot’s Paralyzo too—the only watering hole on the island—they sipped the froth off their beers and talked of Jim.

The old man like an ancient buck, or an old, injured dog, seeking out a familiar hollow in the woods. Like Curtis’s dog, who only the week before hauled himself the whole way down to the waterfront to slither in among a heap of traps, sniffing out the smells he loved best: salty rope, rotted herring, sun-soaked wood, the primeval scent of mud hauled up from the bottom of the sea. The way that dog lay, looked like he’d been hankering to be taken out one last time. Though Curtis, himself bent over, lame, rheumatic, hadn’t lobstered in years.

“The old man must’ah felt it coming,” Elliot observed, wiping down the long wooden bar.

1973. It was unusual then for summer folks to arrive much before the first of July or to stay beyond Labor Day. One or two kids, drawn to island life, might linger, then refuse to go home. But for the most part the summer folks followed a seasonal pattern. Like migratory birds, they flocked in, one generation following the other. Bostonians, New Yorkers, Philadelphians mostly. For two months, they’d stake out most every rock in the Penobscot and there you could see them: flitting and clambering round the islands; spreading towels and blankets, even in thick fog; unpacking handsome picnics of cheese, biscuits, thermoses of clam chowder, lobster salad, blueberry cake. They’d waft up and down the Thoroughfare, the tidal channel between Fox Island and Carver’s, in their gaff-rigged sailing dinghies, their wooden Herreshoffs. Zip round in their flat-bottomed whalers, fouling their propellers on the ropes of lobster pots.

On land, they could prove even more troublesome. Getting het up about houses that hadn’t been painted, fields that hadn’t been mowed, pipes that hadn’t been mended. Strutting up and down in their summer plumage, enacting age-old and highly evolved territorial displays—then flitting off again.

So it was unusual when Jim slipped ashore toward the end of winter. Stealthily, surreptitiously—so the islanders couldn’t rightly say just how he’d come. Like a bird blown off course, he just appeared, then stayed, when the sailing boats were still hauled up onshore. March brought a late storm with four to six feet of snow. Snow heaped up in the backs of pickup trucks, plowed over to both sides of the road like a parting of white hair.

“Couldn’tah been Sarah brought him ov’ah,” Floyd remarks. Elliot pours a last round for the men about to leave for the night. “No way she could’ah fit that chai-yah in her ca’h.”

Sarah’s the first to have a compact Mitsubishi hatchback, while the rest of them swear by Ford and Chevy pickups. “I suppose you put rice in the carburetor,” Floyd likes to tease her.

If it wasn’t Sarah, then it must have been her old man Stillman, lobsterman, dockmaster, and caretaker of Jim’s family summer place. Even more taciturn and inscrutable than the rest of them.

They did remember the girl’s arrival. Though she’d come later, mid-July with the rest of the summer folks, so that the only reason they’d taken note was the color of her skin. Which isn’t to say anything particular, only there weren’t many blacks living along, or even visiting, the Maine coast then. One fellow who lobstered out of Stonington. A few deckhands who worked the tall ships, sailing tourists up and down the New England coast out of Boston, Bar Harbor, or Damariscotta.

This girl was different though. Not just black but jet black, black as boat oil. Like she’d come right out of Africa. With that big halo of hair and a bright-colored dress with printed flowers, hibiscus flowers someone said, and an old-fashioned leather suitcase with buckles looking like one they might find stowed at the back of their mothers’ attics. Even more peculiar, she’d come to stay with Jim.

Stillman drove Jim down to the ferry dock. It was the first time many of them had seen for themselves the old man had lost a leg. Sure enough, it was amputated just above the knee. He managed alone with a crutch, leaning back against Stillman’s truck and smoking a stream of cigarettes.

“Guadalcanal,” Curtis interjects from the far end of the bar. Slouched over, bleary-eyed, looking more ancient than his late hound. Curtis was a decorated war veteran, though most of them had forgotten for what.

“What’s that you said?” Elliot asks, retrieving the glass Curtis shoves down the bar.

“She was from Guadalcanal,” he repeats, his words slurred but emphatic.

Guadalcanal then—not Africa.

I

Summerhouse at the End of Winter

Yet some of the men who had sailed with him before expressed their pity to see him so reduced.

—Treasure Island

Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1973

Jim wedges the chair into the kitchen doorway, forcing the screen door open, lights his third or fourth cigarette. The doctors told him not to. Cut down on the drink, right down, and cut out the smoking altogether. To hell with that. He lost the leg anyhow.

The nicotine leaves him edgy and overly alert. An irascibility that’s hard to burn off, stuck as he is in a wheelchair. He could use a drink is the truth of it but he’ll hold off for now. It’s the least he can do—not meet the girl half drunk.

Go easy. Go easy, he mutters aloud. Shutting his eyes, he wills himself to concentrate on birdcalls. A habit honed since he was a boy. A surefire way of keeping emotions at bay, or safely battened down, which is how he likes them. Gulls—the leitmotif of the island, laughing or crying, however you want to take it. The scolding of a blue jay. The sharp chirrup of a robin. Crows—down by Stillman’s place patrolling the fields, their voices grate, hoarse as smokers’, and crack like adolescent boys’. There’s no cacophony—it being midsummer and high noon—but he can hear the thin, come-hither whistle of a phoebe from the woods in front, the fish hawk mewling as it circles high above the point.

There are other sounds. The low diesel chugging of Adam MacDonald’s lobster boat setting out late. Moments later, the dock creaks in the wash from its wake, rubbing against the wood stakes.

Clenching the cigarette between his teeth, Jim wheels out the door, over the uneven grass, and past the corner of the house. From here, he can look down the sloping lawn to the shore, where weed-and barnacle-covered rocks are exposed at low tide, across the brown-green water of Indian Cove, down the end of the Thoroughfare to the open blue of the Penobscot Bay. In the deepest water of the cove, a clutch of Stillman’s orange and yellow lobster pots bob on slack lines.

“You can’t live up there,” his son Fergus protested when Jim announced his intention to move here to the old summer place in Maine. “You’ll be too cut off.”

“Damn right, I’m cut off,” Jim snapped. He looked down at his stump. Transfemoral is the word they use when the leg is severed above the knee. Which makes it more difficult to fit a peg leg, or a prosthesis as the doctors insisted on calling it, though Jim had refused one anyhow.

“What if you fall down? What if you get stuck?” Fergus grew uncharacteristically fraught. He felt guilty perhaps, being the one responsible for hauling Jim off to the doctor: the advocate for his father’s operation. He implored Jim to be sensible, to hire a nurse or housekeeper. Pleaded with him to stay put, at least until summer.

“What if I get stuck here?” Jim spat back, banging his crutch on the floor. It was the one satisfying thing about being a cripple, having the stick to bang about.

The truth is, he was already stuck. He’d been stuck since the war.

He’d gone back to work, the museum in New York kindly offering a position. There, he’d busied himself writing reports about other people’s finds—buried himself more like it—for the past thirty years. His latest undertaking had been to catalog the department type specimens, the skins first used to identify new species and subspecies. The standard against which all new discoveries are compared. The museum had 6,300 of them, representing somewhere near a third of the world’s known birds.

It was meticulous, painstaking work that involved delving into dusty archives, deciphering unintelligible labels, sometimes scrawled in French or German. It required encyclopedic command. Still, it was derivative, clerical. He’d not initiated any original inquiry of his own. He’d not traveled, unless you count the daily commute from Greenwich into the city and back. He’d become a mothballed, dried-up skin himself. A shriveled specimen preserved by alcohol—gin in his case. His one book, his one valuable contribution to science, Extinct and Vanishing Birds of Oceania, published in 1960, was itself a compendium of loss, a rejection of life and living things.

Suddenly an amputee, he could no longer navigate the city. He couldn’t get himself to the museum. He hadn’t gone back, not even to say good-bye or to collect his things. He couldn’t stand the idea of anyone opening doors for him, staring at the empty space where his leg had been.

“And no goddamned nurse!” he swore at Fergus. He’d had enough of that in the hospital. Enough poking and interfering, enough rules and regimens, enough mollycoddling. Not even allowing him a goddamned drink. He twirls the cigarette he has now defiantly between his fingers, associating it in his mind with a sort of freedom.

Early spring, Jim began to wonder if Fergus had been right about moving to Maine. He looked at himself in the mirror, eyes red-rimmed, thick stubble on his colorless cheeks, the deep creases in his forehead, the fishhook scar down one side of his face. His hair was thick, tousled, and uncut. His lips distinctly blue. He wondered if he was drinking himself to death. If so, there must be an easier way.

He flicks the spent cigarette, presses it into the grass with his single faded blue canvas sneaker. It’s the first time he’s worn a shoe in weeks.

Wintertime, Jesus Christ, he lived like a bear. Wrapping himself in a big fur coat he found in one of the closets. Piling goose-down covers and scratchy wool blankets on the bed, which was unmade and all scuffed up like a rat’s nest. Sleeping. Drinking. Keeping the fires lit. Bottles and corks under the bed. Empty corned-beef tins that sprouted mold once the weather changed. Books left open with the spines straining. Half-smoked cigarettes stubbed out on the kitchen table. It’s lucky he didn’t set the goddamn house on fire.

Everything was new to him as he’d only come in summer. The island lay muffled in the snow of a freak storm. The weighted branches of spruce and fir bowed low over the white-clad rocks. Slips of birch trees shivered like cold bones. In the cove, disgruntled gulls hunkered on broken slabs of ice. An early snow goose with its black wing tips appeared one day on its way to summering in the arctic. Chen caerulescens—he noted it in a book he’d started, a record of birds on Indian Cove.

At night a pair of great horned owls hunted the point, filling the house with their bassoon-like calls. Scoters and rafts of eiders floated on the gray sea. When the temperature dropped below freezing, a sea mist rose from the water and wrapped the island in a mirage-like veil. He looked at the thin drift of snow lining the balustrade outside his bedroom and remembered that Helen had always wanted to come here for Christmas. They never had.

The house was cold. No matter how many fires you lit, how long you kept them going, you couldn’t make it warm. Large, airy, built for summer, it had little insulation, no central heating. Instead it had a warren of rooms for guests, extended family, and servants. The original owner was one of a Boston elite, who called themselves the Rusticators. Businessmen, bankers, lawyers, architects, who flocked down along this coast at the turn of the century, seeking, like Emerson and Thoreau before them—like Jim now—a simpler life. Only for them, Nature was buffered by maids, cooks, and in-laws.

Cold leaked through places you wouldn’t expect, right through the shingles and slated boards, right through the glass panes of the windows facing out to sea, right under the floorboards as the large front porch, jutting over the lawn, let the wind in underneath.

When Jim arrived, Stillman carried some ancient wood up from the basement, and they struggled to light the big cast-iron stove in the kitchen. The flue was clogged with a ne...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents