Only the Empty Sky

By Russell Kelly

1918: Lord Howe Island, off Australias eastern coast. An American, Paul De Martinet, arrives to paint the sub tropical outposts vanishing birds. Home to an insular community, jealousy and suspicion lurk not far below the surface of what appears to be an otherwise carefree community. On expeditions into the islands mysterious and beautiful kentia palm forest he is accompanied by Margaret Sleap, a gifted local gardener. Re-animating vanished birds in paint, they find each specimen resonates with its own deeper story of loss and belonging. Together they map out the aching territory of love until one day, as tensions surface, they are the victims of a savage attack that sets in motion their own choices of survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Aug 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781452528236

Russell Kelly

Russell Kelly, a former editor of Island magazine, has written several short stories. Love Bird is his first novel. He is a native of Hobart, Tasmania.

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Only the

Empty Sky

RUSSELL KELLY

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Copyright © 2015 Russell Kelly.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

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Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com.au

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Print information available on the last page.

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2822-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4525-2823-6 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 06/11/2015

www.russellkelly.net

Contents

love.bird

Bird of Providence

Plate I The Bay Thrush

Plate II The Mauritius Red Henne

Plate III Guadalupe Caracara

Plate IV The Great Auk

Plate V Lord Howe Boobook Owl

Plate VI The Woodhen

Plate VII The Mysterious Starling

Plate VIII The White Gallinule

Plate IX The Carolina Parakeet

Plate X The Red-Fronted Parakeet

Plate XI Emerald Green Dove

Plate XII Lord Howe Gerygone

Plate XIII Rattus Rattus

Plate XIV The Spectacled Cormorant

Plate XV Cudgimeruk

Plate XVI Dodo

Plate XVII Bird of Providence

love.bird

Acknowledgements

About The Author

For Jack, Emerson and Leilani.

love.bird

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‘T here came from the north an incredible multitude of these pigeons to Pennsylvania and New Jersey. Their number, while in flight, extended 3 or 4 English miles in length, and more than 1 such mile in breadth, and they flew so closely together that the sky was obscured by them, the daylight becoming sensibly diminished by their shadow.’

A description of wild pigeons which visit the southern English colonies in North America during certain years in incredible multitudes.

Peter Kalm, 1749.

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S ometimes, human souls are held to the ground by the weight of a single piece of paper. When Paul De Martinet was eight years old he put the pictures of birds he’d painted in his mother’s upturned hands so that she would stay on the ground. They were images upon which her gaze alighted. In all the whitewashed house, his child’s pictures were the brightest things. He arranged his pots of paint about him like building blocks, all the colours distilled from his effort, containing gifts. He was getting heavier and she was becoming lighter. As he grew older he weighed himself down with learning from heavy encyclopaedias. He studied the histories of bird discoveries, maps of bird organs, so he could draw them more accurately, more realistically. He drew birds he saw in the estate grounds, fascinated by a bird’s effortless ability to simply throw itself into the air and remove itself from capture, to steal away. When he painted in the same room as his mother, he worked backwards, colouring the space left in meaning by a quivering bough.

As his mother moved about the mansion, she left ghosts of herself in each room. There were examples of simultaneous conversations, exchanges that disturbed the servants. Only in the appreciation of his bird paintings did her presence complete the brilliance of his paintings. For her, in a world turning white, they became increasingly important, all she could see. Everyone who stood in front of her became the shape and colour of clouds, tremulous. They did not know, could not have known, in 1888, that a part of her brain expanded with clear sky. The young Paul De Martinet, her son, sensed she was being buffeted by forces unseen. One day he sat on her lap and she suddenly clasped onto him, overtaken by vagueness, by drift, as if she were holding a parcel for someone about to return.

Eventually, she became confined to her room, attended by a procession of doctors who spoke in hushed tones in the weeping house.

His surgeon father, greedy for his wife’s attention, slowly began to panic. He clutched at the doctors and district healers and implored them to save her without delay.

‘Son, you must move out of the way.’

Young Paul moved his paints and pictures to the side.

‘Right out of the way. Not in here. All the time you are in here, can’t you see that your mother is ill?’

But for the advice of a visiting doctor, he would have been banished from his mother’s room altogether.

Meanwhile, he diligently continued to paint. He studied bones, beaks, the intricate webbing of feathers revealed by close inspection. He acquired books on natural history, the history of last sightings – nine of the last eleven Guadalupe Caracaras shot by one collector who thought they must be abundant. His picture of the soon-to-be extinct Carolina Parakeet focused on its flimsy hold on the earth. He spent so long studying it that to his mind, the ending of a tree, the bird and the sky were unable to exist apart. When he painted birds he captured them in small isolated worlds of great beauty, painted as if still alive. In his mother’s room, he held up the pictures for her to see.

‘I painted this for you Mama.’ A child’s voice floating.

His mother’s mind fell back to the present, through some interminable descent. Her eyes drifted to the painting, the vibrancy of her son’s birds breaking through her clouds of white.

‘What a lovely bird! How bright!’ She looked too, at a face, a child’s face, painted, before her.

‘What are its colours, my sweet?’ Seeing him for the briefest flickering of moments.

Kingfisher Blue, he might say. The colour of the mill stream under the willows. Cadmium Yellow, the colour of egg yolks, mother.

The paper sat on her hands. Those observing would notice how her eyes would alight on it, like a bird poised on a branch. Then her gaze simply flew away to another part of the room, then out the window.

His hand held out, touched his mother’s cheek, her hair. A second later, nothing. She had moved out of reach, about the room, a glorious wisp of white, filled with carelessness, precarious. To De Martinet, she was a slight change in the wind, an empty space recently vacated. For though the pictures he painted for her registered in her perception of the world much more than anything else, eventually they too lost their potency. Her feelings of vagueness became unbreachable and she wandered about the mansion distributing uncertainty. He was old enough to appreciate the concern of others. His response was to paint more exuberantly, his paintings of birds hinting at what was to become his adult skill: the ability to make his subjects vibrant with inner life. Still his mother became lighter, began to dissipate. Her behaviour became more erratic. She stood on tables, walked across the furniture, refusing to touch the floor, balanced on banisters. In the mornings she complained her bones had been hollowed in the night, mysteriously lightened. In any significant breeze she drew tighter the strings of her nightgown’s collar and cuffs, concerned otherwise the wind would shred her, blow away the pieces. But she vacillated between the need to be clothed and the need to be unburdened. He watched as she removed the hoop of her nightdress above her head, her raised arms, the release of her hair over her thin breasts, the blackness of her pubic hair against her white thighs. They spent many hours together, he drawing pictures of birds upon branches, she standing on chairs, the outline of the tiny transparent hairs on her skin glowing in the sunlight that came through the windows.

He was attending his mother in her chamber, she was sitting up in bed, the lace of her nightgown drawn up about her throat and her cuffs, her gaze far afield, beyond paintings and boy and walls. There was, however, a comfortable, unhurried feeling of safety. She said:

‘I give many thanks for your kind congratulations.’

‘My return of health will be the greater pleasure to me, if I can contribute in any measure to the happiness of my many good friends.’

‘And, particularly, to that of you and yours.’

She smiled politely and proceeded to swing her legs out of bed, cross the animal rugs to the sill and swing out, again, into the square of clouds. He watched her disappear beyond the reference of the window frame, as easy as a single step. Did he hear anything? Just the pendulum of the clock on the landing outside the chamber. Its heavy return.

He laid out his paintings of birds upon the floor, carefully, lined them up, smoothed out their crinkles and waited, listening to the clock.

When his father entered the room sometime later, he found the bed empty, and the room empty and saw that square of white sky outside the window with nothing in it, except the feeling something that belonged had departed, just moments ago. He ripped back the covers of the bed to see if his wife was hidden there, looked out the window. He fell to his knees and wept bitterly. Seizing on the nearest things to hand, his son’s pictures of birds, he ripped them up, every one he could find, throwing the pieces at young De Martinet, who cried too, covered in the pathetic confetti of his bird pictures. A wing on his lap, a handful of beaks, glinting eyes. Then came the sound of running feet throughout the house, and he was ordered to his room, in punishment so it seemed, and eventually he heard the sound of servants weeping in the kitchen.

From his room, he looked at the sky and noticed his mother had turned to a feather, a single white feather, held up by some mysterious current, turning and revolving, its whiteness sliding about in unseen currents, an altogether different technology.

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After his mother’s death, he roamed through his schooling years, raised in a house that defied geometry. It seemed to grow as the grass in the fields grew, gradually expanding in size, a patch of brambles. His father’s grief turned destructively inwards. He became fastidious. He could not stand clutter or disorder, especially loose paper, and his pre-occupation extended to his appearance. He became immaculate, spending hours each day attending to his ablutions. He washed his hands till they chafed, changed his clothes at the slightest mark. Into rooms De Martinet would come, to see his father surprised at the possibility of being interrupted. He watched his father wring his hands and wished there was something he could put in them to make him stop.

He was forbidden to paint in the common areas of the house, but eventually, it was the boy’s interest in painting birds that at last gave his father direction. In need of specimens to paint, his father resolved to teach him how to hunt and skin game. That way they spent many days walking across the estate fields and through its forests, hunting racoons and deer, birds of all descriptions.

The New Jersey estate had been rolled flat by the weight of flocks. The oaks and beech were grown from guano-deposited seed, but no one knew of course. The woods were wound back to expose the skeleton of the soil. Many hours he followed, mesmerised by the swinging bore of the gun pointed backwards over his father’s shoulder. When they explored forest paths, the gun waved hypnotically in front of him, and he could see right down the black hole of the barrel, a yard away. Did he feel nauseous, watching that swinging bore? He saw his father’s index finger stuck thickly through the trigger guard; his heart splintered at every stumble his father made. Though he had grown taciturn, his father spoke most often when they had taken game. A racoon gutted and skinned in ten minutes, its gawking eyeballs staring out of red and purple pulp, its pelt folded neatly nearby, removed the way a stocking is rolled down a lady’s leg, sucked over the toes.

He held the gun, and watched his father’s broad sun-blotched hands disappear into bird guts, a tangle of purple worms and green shit, his father flicking his bloodied knife into the grass. Of skinning, his father said: ‘It’s the true moment of possession. The moment you know you’ve won completely.’

‘How easy son, to slit the guts of a young bird. The skin just splits apart, right up the middle. As easy as this.’

The boy relished memories of his mother. She had been accustomed to reading a pillar of books, so many they seemed to fall from the folds of her clothing. She read as others played music, becoming beautiful as she did so. At night, she read to herself, and his father stole glances at her from the other side of the room. Her aching serenity, the peace she extended to all when she had a book in her hand. Within a year of their marriage she’d taken ill. Then, one night, she said, ‘soon there will be nothing left of me. Nothing even to look for.’ But she was both right and wrong. After she died, her presence was everywhere. That’s how De Martinet grew up: existing in a reverberating silence, embraced by air currents. A father’s accusations as rigid as index fingers.

It was from his father that his intimate knowledge of bird anatomy came, the liquid split of the skinning knife from anus to beak, the warm worms of innards grasped in the palm and tugged out. The precise nicks of his father’s skinning technique, a calligraphy of disassembly. His father’s hands steadied the shotgun butt against the ball of his shoulder as he took his first shot: the retort too close to his cheek, and cracking him across the face. Afterwards, in his room, he drew the birds anew from the skins he’d collected – wiring them into suitable poses, re-animating them on paper, the most minute reconnection of bones to the earth.

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It is through the obliteration of the sky we sense our mortality.

In 1888 there came to his father’s estate a great flock of passenger pigeons, now extinct, which descended in a ravenous mass upon the fields, and the forests of oak and beech. The hunters had rumour of their approach, but the reality did not match any telegraphed report, of the sight of many hundreds of thousands of birds, in bright day, crashing into the seemingly feeble vegetation and forests of his home.

The sound of the flock’s approach was as of a hard gale in a close-reefed ship. The whole of the estate woods had become a vessel into which poured this multitude of birds. Long rows of village-men discharged their weapons that made no sound against the onslaught. The sulphureous fumes of lighted pots made no impact, it