The Bird Artist by Howard Norman

against the table, like a man about to play the piano, and press down hard until the tips were white. He held his hands that way, staring at my mother.

    â€œThis boy doesn’t like me, Alaric,” Botho said.
    â€œHe’s not a boy,” my mother said.
    â€œHe holds a fierce grudge from Thanksgiving at Romeo Gillette’s table, when I said a thing to him. I can’t remember what I said. I’ve been told I’m not polite.”
    â€œI told you that,” my mother said.
    â€œI’ll eat at Spivey’s tonight,” I said.
    â€œGood. All the more fish, potatoes—let’s see, what else?” Botho said. He leaned over and opened the oven door. “Cake. All the more for us. Enough for three’s enough for two.”
    â€œI worked to catch that fish,” I said.
    â€œThis time of year you can whistle a fish from the harbor,” Botho said. “Besides, I saw you buy it. I was at the wharf. You didn’t see me, maybe. But I saw you. I saw you buy the fish.”
    â€œNo, you didn’t see him, either,” my mother said to Botho. “I told you that Fabian bought the fish.”
    â€œI’ll eat in the restaurant,” I said.
    â€œThis is your house, too,” my mother said. “You don’t get exiled to Spivey’s. Darling, please sit down. We have a guest you don’t care for is all. That happens in a life.”
    â€œOnce too often,” I said.
    â€œFabian, please. Wash up for supper.”
    â€œI’ve seen you in that dress in church, Mother.” She had on a light blue cotton dress with a white lace shawl. “But just now, I don’t recognize you in it.”
    Storming from my house, I bypassed Spivey’s and went directly to Boas LaCotte’s sawmill barn. It had been a favorite
refuge since childhood, a hideout. Whenever Lambert was away from the village, yet not at his trout camp, he left his crippled owl, Matilda, in LaCotte’s care. I did not know an owl’s life span, but this one seemed very old to me. In the barn, Boas kept it tethered by one scaly leg (the other leg had been mangled in a muskrat trap) to a sawhorse. It was on the sawhorse now. The barn had high rafters. The floor was littered with wood scraps, chips, sawdust, random planks. I loved this barn most early in the mornings, when sawdust in the air suspended sunlight in swirling eddies and traced the sun’s slantings from the roof to the ground.
    When I stepped into the barn, the owl shuffled excitedly along the sawhorse, its wings ruffling loudly, lifting it up a few inches. It rolled its head in its socket, then tore at a mouse Boas had nailed by the tail to the sawhorse. The owl spread a clipped wing like a magician’s cape over the mouse, revealed it, covered it again. The owl usually got worked up when a person came close.
    I sat there until dark, then took a lantern from its shelf, lit it, found a piece of scrap paper, took a pencil from my pocket, and began to sketch the owl. It was a frenzied effort, though. I was just killing time. Botho’s presence in my house, let alone on the very day my father had left, had skewed my thinking, violated every notion of propriety. Yet I had not been fully able to grasp the forebodings. How could I? It was enough, just then, to be shocked at the sheer audacity of the circumstances. I had had to flee my own house, where suddenly I could not breathe the same air as Botho August. I did not know how to think about all this.
I did not know how to think about anything, except what I discovered minute by minute. I stopped drawing. I sat there. The owl picked apart the mouse. It got totally dark in the barn.
    Finally, I returned home. The house was dark, my mother gone. No note. No message scribbled down. I made a cup of tea for her out of habit, out of misguided hope that she had only gone for a walk with Botho. Her new evening stroll. But of course the tea was long past cooling by