Creation Read Online Free Page A

we grow into it, we bear it. Simple for the rest of creation, but not for him. He gives a name to each new bird he finds, but he hasn’t one of his own, not a true name.
    He has, instead, many names. Jean Rabin. Monsieur Newhouse. Jean Jacques. Fougère. John James.
    To have many names is in fact to have none.
    To seek a home is to be adrift.
    To attempt great things is to be ridiculed.
    To love one’s country is to invite contempt.

    A raucous voice rises, crack, crack , from the corner of the deck. It is the young raven he picked up in the Magdalen Islands. He has clipped its wings and decided that he will teach it to talk; ravens are said to have powers of divination. He has called the bird Anonyme after a French cousin he dislikes, but in fact he has begun to enjoy its company.
    “Anonyme,” he says. “Join me.”
    The bird, barely fledged, does not move. Audubon finds a seat on a barrel and takes the bird on his wrist. It is surprisingly heavy. The claws are long and hard as glass and threaten to puncture his skin. He strokes the raven’s head. This tender act quiets the bird, as it quiets the man. He pictures the nesting gannet stretching her neck to call down her mate from the sky. They are loving to their mates, Johnny said. They caress each other’s napes. It is strange that a tale of nesting birds can make him lonely.
    The sailors are teaching the young gentlemen a shanty, the words floating back to him from the forecastle. Johnny’s voice, braver and sweeter, rises above the others.
    One night as we were sailing, we were off land a way
    I never shall forget it until my dying day —
    It was in our grand dog watches I felt a chilly dread
    Come over me as though I heard one calling from the dead .
    Godwin issues forth from a shadow, smoking. The pilot is a Newfoundlander. This had seemed a good thing back in Maine; the Ripley would be piloted by a man who knew the waters. Now Audubon is not so certain.
    There is a silence as both men look out to sea. Anonyme pecks restlessly at the fold of skin between Audubon’s thumb and forefinger.
    “If you look long enough into the water,” says Godwin suddenly, “you can see there’s light down there.”
    “Not here. There’s rocks. Maybe over a sand bottom you’d see light.”
    “Aye, here too.”
    “I doubt it. Where would the light come from?”

    “Comes from below.”
    “And what gives off this light, pray tell?”
    Godwin scowls, wary of being patronized. “Why, the living things that’s there, I suppose.”
    The idea strikes a chord. Audubon has a private theory that the down on herons’ bodies actually glows, allowing the birds to catch their prey in the dark. He has visions of night marshes illumined by the phosphorescent tails of herons. It is one of many scientific notions he has not had time to explore. Why shouldn’t life at the bottom of the sea be like the life in the air itself, producing light?
    He does not confide this to Godwin. “Do you know the eastern seaboard?” he asks.
    “Clear down to New Orleans. I worked there once.”
    “I might have met you, then, when I embarked on the Delos for England?”
    “Not in the port. I was a bodyguard then, for a man named Nolte.”
    “Vincent Nolte? The cotton merchant?”
    “Is there any other? Cotton, to start. Then it was sugar, and then it was arms,” says Godwin. “Used muskets. Bought them from the Prussians where they’d left them lying in the fields when they retreated in 1813. Sold them back to the French in ’29, to fight off their own people. Most of ’em were useless. Some rough visitors he had.”
    Audubon steps away from Godwin, in the dark. It is bizarre that this pilot should bring up the name of Vincent Nolte. It strains even his credulity, he whose life has been shaped by chance encounters.
    Of course it happens. This is the way life works in his adopted, his adored, country. People know people. Vincent Nolte more than most. He made a great fortune and lost it, and