Graveyard of the Puffins

With her arm inserted through a wicker basket’s handle, Kate carefully stepped over the shoreline’s rocks as water sloshed inches from her feet. Tied by a blue hair ribbon, her sandals hung around her neck. A cool, salty breeze that blew in from the Atlantic Ocean made her calf-length tie-dyed skirt billow above her knees like an adrift parachute. Free from being bound, her silver hair that reached to the middle of her back floated in the air around her. Sunlight glinted from the dancing web-like strands. Her scrubbed cheeks were ruddy from the assault of wind, weather and exertion. She bent down and lifted a dead puffin from where it had become lodged between two rocks and placed its limp, battered body in the basket with another puffin. She stood and looked out at the water, holding her hand above her eyes, shielding them from the sun and water’s blinding glare. She then spotted a puffin diving from the sky, and sighed audibly when it hit the water and then immediately rose back into the air, carrying in its bright orange beak a small fish.

She turned and climbed the few feet up to the carpet of  grass, sat down and set the basket down beside her. She untied her sandals, and brushed wet dirt and sand from the soles of her feet before putting them on. As the wind whipped her hair hair about, she gathered it in her hands, shaped it into a bundle on the top of her head, and thread the ribbon through and around it. Within moments she had tamed it, having returned her hair to the way she always wore it, except for when gathering dead puffins from the shoreline’s rocks. This act of releasing her hair and then rebinding it, and finding the puffins and saving their corpses from ignoble death were mysteriously linked. It had been that way since the first time she found the first dead puffin when she was just a child. At that time it was her mother who loosed the ribbon and helped her walk on the slippery rocks.

The walk from the shore to her small bungalow wasn’t long. With her own hands, she had reshaped a path of freshly lain pebbles through the grass that led directly to the back door. Every summer, blue-bead lilies, coltsfoot, purple lilacs, and dandelions, grew in the tangle of weeds and thick grass that lined both sides of the path. At the start of summer, the first thing she did upon returning to the bungalow from her home in Halifax was to pull any sprouting weeds or wildflowers from the path and spread new pebbles where the winter storms or wild animals had created bald spots. Entering the kitchen of the bungalow she sat the basket on the kitchen sink and thoroughly washed the puffins, careful to avoid removing any more of their black feathers than had already been lost, under the circumstances. A dead puffin was a delicate thing that naturally shed its feathers quickly, but did so even faster when handled.

“Death quickly reclaims those things given a living thing,” her mother had told her upon finding that first puffin. She had never forgotten it. Her mother said it with sincerity she rarely said about anything. That was when both she and her mother were still young.

She toweled off the first one and turned it over in her hands several times prodding and poking every part of its body, then spreading its feathers and closely examining its skin. Smiling, she laid it back in the basket and then turned her attention to the second bird. She repeated what she had done with the first bird, but almost imperceptibly, sadly, shook her head and laid it in the sink. More than half of the puffins she found on the shoreline ended up in the sink. It was long after her mother had passed away from Alzheimer’s that she had begun separating the birds in such a manner, but her mother’s words stuck with her.

“The unfairness of life lingers on beyond death,” her mother once said.

She would later return the bird in the sink to the waves that washed it ashore to join most of its kind whose lives ended in the cold ocean water.

She walked away from the sink, carrying with her the basket with the other bird lying inside that she placed on a small antique table by the back door. She had bought the table many years before from a seller near the docks in Halifax whose store was cluttered with items obtained from ships. The table had been onboard a ship renowned for having circled the globe. She thought it perfect in looks, and by its history, for transporting the puffins from this world to the next.

When she was sixteen her father drowned at sea during a storm while sailing a lobster boat. Miraculously, among the six lobstermen aboard the boat, his body was the only one recovered. It was returned to the bungalow in a coffin the same color as the table. The sight of her dead father profoundly changed her life forever; it shook her already tenuous grasp on the nature of life and death. Through the years as a child of observing the dead puffins along the shore during her walks with her mother, death seemed a natural end to life. The sight of her dead father’s corpse didn’t strike her as being at all natural.

Her father was buried near the shoreline with a simple concrete marker that read: To the Sea, Evermore.

As her mother’s Alzheimer’s began to worsen, her husband, Kate’s father, was the first prominent thing in her life she had no memory of.

Suddenly feeling weak – advancing age catching up with her – Kate covered the bird in the basket with a square of linen cut from a larger piece she kept hanging on a hook by the door, and went into the living room and sat in one of the two overstuffed chairs, the one with a pattern of sailboats on its upholstery. She laid her head back, closed her eyes, and tried to take a brief nap. Instead, images of puffins falling from the skies filled her consciousness.

#

The day she heard that her father’s boat was lost at sea, Kate left her mother sitting in the same chair, but with different upholstery, whales instead of sailboats, to walk to the shoreline. Her mother hadn’t moved in the four hours since learning of her husband’s disappearance. Going out the back door of the bungalow, the young Kate meandered along the dirt pathway, picking wildflowers as she made her way to the rocks. There she removed her shoes, tossed them in the grass, and climbed over the rocks to the water. Her parents didn’t believe in God, and she had never been inside a church, but she closed her eyes and whispered a prayer:

Dear maker of puffins

Send my father back to Earth

as soon as possible

We already miss him terribly.

She opened her eyes and tossed the bouquet of flowers she had collected into the water. In that instant, a puffin landed at her feet, flopped about for several seconds before dying. She looked heavenward. “Thank you,” she whispered. She bent down, picked it up, and carried it to the small one-room guest house her mother had always intended to turn into some kind of studio. She opened the door and carried the dead bird into the ambient dim light of twilight that shone through the one window.

#

It was the foghorn sounding from the recently installed warning system built on the rocks a bit north of the bungalow that roused her from her brief rest. She pushed herself up from the chair, brushed a few strands of hair back from her face, tucked them into her mass of hair, and walked back into the kitchen. The waning light of day shone through the window above the sink. The kitchen was filled with shadows. She flipped on the light, flooding the room with unnatural daylight. This had been her mother’s favorite time of the day when she would sit at the table and have a cup of tea while reading the latest edition of the Mariner’s News. Up until she forgot her husband had ever existed, she had diligently read the Mariner’s News page to page each week that it arrived in the mail just as her husband had done.

Kate went to the window and saw waves of fog rolling in from the sea, swallowing up the land around the bungalow beneath its blanket of gray clouds and mist. She left the window and took the flashlight from the drawer in the antique table, and flipped it on and off several times to make sure it worked. She had recently changed its batteries, but it was an old flashlight that, just like her own body, lost the will to work at inconvenient times. She then picked up the basket and went out the back door.

She knew the chill that fog rolling in from the North Atlantic brought with it, even in summer, and cursed under her breath for not wrapping around her shoulders the shawl her mother had knitted for her many years ago that hung on a hook by the door. The shawl had holes where she had caught it on nails that she always forgot to hammer all the way in, although they had stuck out in the same manner since the day they had been pounded in. Although still easily able to see through the thickening gray, she switched on the flashlight that required tapping several times against her leg before it came on.

“When anything can go wrong, expect it to every time,” her mother often said about almost any accident or misfortune. Her husband’s death was one of the rare times she didn’t say it. About his death she said very little. Her years of mourning said it all.

Shining the flashlight on the path, Kate thought about the many times she had walked it from the bungalow to the guest house – hundreds of times, thousands, a million –  that she had turned into a studio as her mother always talked of doing. The walk was shorter than that from the house to the shoreline, but traveled with the same excited, albeit respectful solemnity, when going to retrieve the bodies of dead puffins.

At the door to the studio, she paused briefly before turning the doorknob. Although she knew what was inside, there were so few things she anticipated anymore that the moment before opening the door gave her a brief moment’s pause. As she pushed the door open she was greeted with the scents of arsenic, borax, cedar dust, and glue. In the pale light that shone in through the window, the contents in the studio took on eerie or unearthly shapes, resembling anything from fierce dragons to angels. She reached over and flipped the light switch installed on the inside door frame.

Light flowed down from fluorescent lights hung from the middle of the ceiling casting a bright glow on the large oak table set up in the middle of the room where tools and bottles and boxes of chemicals were placed in an orderly fashion at one end.

On wires hanging from the ceiling were hundreds of taxidermied puffins, their wings spread as if gliding through the air, or their heads pointing to the floor, in a diving posture. They lay tacked atop dowels standing on driftwood bases in the positions their bodies had been found in. They stood on paper mache rocks looking upward, four to five deep along the walls, and were stacked like cords of wood on the floor. Many were packed in lobster traps awaiting a final resting place, each with the words “To the Sea, Evermore” painted on placards attached to the netting, awaiting a final resting place.