The endless crusades of the birds of Macaw have carved the
island into long, bitter strips, where each avian tribe defends
itself with terrible songs and more terrible talons, painted in
fabulous designs like barbarian tattoos.
Mr. Mouth, for his part, reclined in comfort on the prow
of his ship, scratching his feathers with the tip of an ivory
pipe. He was comfortable, having beaten off the particularly
irritating hummingbird corps by means of cannons stuffed with
shattered coconut shells and pearls from some unfortunate
woman’s décolletage. He did not blow smoke rings, having held
the opinion throughout his professional career that this was a
gauche and pretentious habit. He thought of himself as both
above and below the common man, and strove to keep the ballast
of his quotidian debasements full. Thus he sat on the decks of
his own ship, finer than a barrel of daisies, yet worked at his
evening drunkenness in the way that some men work at whittling
wood.
And thus we find him: clapping his pipe in his thick yellow beak
and savoring the rich, sour taste of his favorite tobacco,
almost like the flavor of a cherry pit soaked in bitumen. With
one broad, lined hand, he smoothed his plumage back—for Mr.
Mouth was a member of that most select caste of Macaw, folk
descended from the sailors of the H.M.S. Beagle, which sank
anchor off of the golden-green strand of the isle en route to
Tierra del Fuego, and being men, as sailors often are, ran
ashore, their lust as sea-ragged as their clothes, seeking the
local distaff, fat and brown as they had been led to believe by
the syphilitic bo’sun’s mate.
What they found, instead, were parrots.
Ah, the parrots of Macaw! No man may speak of their
wingspan without falling into a swoon, no woman may dream of
their colors without blinding her heart to all other shades! How
green and how scarlet they must have lain upon the sands, vast
as condors, their beaks that shamed the gold of El Dorado! How
blue their tails must have shone, how pink their underfeathers!
Even Mr. Mouth cannot imagine how the hearts of those sailors
must have seized and lurched upon seeing the restful parrots
prone on the palm-scattered shore. Need it be said that they
lost all thought of what deep and sun-shaded haunches might be
found further inland? Need it be described how they fell upon
the parrots of Macaw, who had only of late ceased their
hostilities with the green-backed herons, how they must have
squawked and fluttered beneath the rutting, chilblained crew? It
is said by the black-billed finches in their banyan-parlors that
M. Darwin was occupied that afternoon with a tumbler of black
rum and a vicious game of Gluckhaus, else he might have written
very different books, once he had rolled off of a parrotess of
his own.
Among these poor ravished birds was Quatrefoil herself,
bless her name, bless her leg, shattered under the weight of a
lieutenant’s desire and replaced by loving cousins.
Mr. Mouth let out an anguished cry as the sun sank heavy and
blistered onto the back of the sea, trying to recall how his
grandmother’s groans must have sounded above the surf. For in
the expected time the great parrots of Macaw gave birth to the
strangest of all social circles: those birds who walked with
men’s muscled legs, though their heads were properly green and
rose, though their beaks were as curved as rum-tumblers. Los
Loros, bright they be, and black their eyes!
Mr. Mouth puffed his pipe, and listened to his lines creak and
sway under a spray of stars like sailors’ seed.
It was a Thursday evening, blue as feathers, when Mr. Mouth’s
yellow-decked ship, the Charlie’s Thesis, pulled
alongside the poor schooner-scow King’s English. It was a
wretched boat, with sails like cheesecloth and a hunched old
wreck at the wheel, his captain’s hat flattened by winds. The
crew was more drunk than ill and more ill than awake. Sores
broke open along their lips and they had clawed at their sagging
throats in the throes of thirst. They lay about the decks like
the dead. Mr. Mouth knew well this was no challenge, those poor
souls had had a rough passage, their cabins littered with
women’s shoes and orange rinds, but it was not a challenge he
sought—his gambles were of a more refined, aristocratic breed.
In piracy, he preferred ease. Despite his long legs and taste
for oysters, he had not quite escaped the parrot’s
predisposition to scavenging, and when he stepped aboard the
ramshackle King’s English, he bobbed his head and
chortled in his emerald throat like a magpie.
"Oh, ho! My captain, my captain!” bellowed the superlative Mr.
Mouth, his palm-bark coat clapping in the sea wind. “Captain of
flapping sails and poor rigging! Captain of the creaking boom!
Captain of milk-cut half-rations! Where is your cargo, my
dashing dear? Where do you aim, my debonair master of
barnacles?”
The old captain raised his salt-encrusted eyebrows, new wrinkles
forming in his forehead as the ocean-rime which caked his
haggard face buckled and cracked. Behind the squared and downy
shoulders of Mr. Mouth, several spectacularly violet and
turquoise headed Loros ground their beaks and cawed happily at
the cannonless ship.
“I’ve heard of you, you know. The Crown ought to send a
hunting party down here and serve you up to a table of
princesses en brochette,” the senescent captain hissed
through lips chapped to bloody.
Mr. Mouth opened his generous arms wide, the first pale
blue stars shining like St. Elmo’s Fire along the thin stripes
of green feathers which snaked down to his wrists. He enclosed
the captain in his hummingbird-slaying embrace, nuzzling the
skipper’s brine-shrimp infested ears, tipped in barnacles like
earrings, as a pet would nuzzle its owner.
“I am not to the taste of princesses,” he hummed, and
clipped those ropy naval arteries with his burnished beak. The
blood was dull, tide-salted. As he let the mariner’s body drop
onto the deck like a net of silver fish, he squawked roughly and
the blue Loro gathered round, their meaty arms ringed with
conch-bracelets. “Haul up the cargo, my chicks, for my scalpels
are restless in their case!”
The cerulean Loro gave leaps and kicks that any country
girl would be proud to count in her dancing repertoire. Along
their bare backs slight traces of lavender feathers arced in
graceful lines, never quite amounting to wings, but suggesting
the memory of flight. Poor little ducks! How they long to fly,
to dance and turn mid-air like their uncles and their cousins,
who cross the width of Macaw in little more than a minute!
Instead they are forced to this, to shambling, shuffling reels
that display like crossed pistols both their joy and their
shame.
From the depths of the King’s English the parrots
dragged a clutch of women and young men bound together at the
ankles by predictable iron fetters, their hair matted and
ragged, but fatter than the crew and almost entirely without
running sores at lip or eye. Their clothes were colorless and
rough, but their cheeks had blood in them, and Mr. Mouth bent to
examining their throats, one by one, tipping back their heads
like the lids of treasure-chests. He moved his fingers around
the face of one woman with bright blonde hair, bright as the
dreams of locksmiths, and nibbled at her chin ever so lightly.
The stately Mr. Mouth kicked at the ribs of a sail-mender until
he groped with wastrel-strength at the toe of the offending
heron-skin boot.
“For what purpose, young stitch-minder, have you dredged
a furrow in the sea and hauled these poor bedraggled swans
through it?”
The boy coughed, a dry, smacking sound, with no moisture
at all in it. His eyes rolled in his head.
“There was a storm, and no fresh water—“
“Yes, yes. I don’t care. The swans, my boy.”
The sail-mender shaded his rheumy eyes from the moon,
which burned him even as the sun. “Brides,” he rasped finally.
“Bound for Trinidad, for the cane farmers, for the plantations.
We kept them healthy—see their color? Everyone needs a wife. The
cocoa-breeders pay in gold and sugar for these whores—and their
daddies back in England sold them for copper.”
“What about the boys?” The discerning Mr. Mouth
inquired.
The sail-mender shrugged and smiled weakly. “Not
everyone can afford a woman. Some send away for the lads,
special. Their daddies sell them for silver, but they’re
all gold in the end.”
“Not these,” chuckled the bobbing, grotesquely gorgeous
parrot-head with its blaze of orange over the nostrils. But it
was not the beak which slashed down to the neck of the toothless
wretch. Mr. Mouth crushed that nautical larynx with a slow press
of his green-heeled boot, and the Loros around him fluttered
into action, stomping through the remaining prostrate crew and
rifling the cabins for their wages. A cobalt female with ropes
of coral around her neck crowed as she held up a
brass-and-mahogany sextant. A pink-crested male juggled three
compasses.
The woman with such bright hair, bright as plumage, did
not look at the debonair Mr. Mouth. She had learned her lessons
at the hands of the barnacled captain, and looked no one in the
eye. She closed them and thought of sugar and cocoa growing
green in the sun.
“What a pretty songbird,” Mr. Mouth warbled.
The north sliver of Macaw is entirely occupied by cages.
They hang from the boughs of banana trees and swing among the
coffee-leaves. They are twisted together from vines and
ship-lines, palm-bark and driftwood, myrtle and mangrove.
Occasionally, the Loros have raided ships which were the pale
ghosts of the Beagle, setting upon hapless naturalists with
ravenous and vengeful pleasure and beaks painted ritual-red with
the blood of hummingbirds—and from these brigs, crawling with
specimen-scorpions and turtles in mating pairs, they have taken
any number of iron and copper and oak cages, which once held
such diverse fauna. One discerning shipboard scholar even kept a
tall golden cage for his favorite flamingo, a stunning bird whom
he had loved from the moment he saw her, crook-legged in a
steaming swamp. Unwilling to be parted from her rosy
ministrations, he kept her ever by, until a Loro with an eye for
scrying perversion bit the tendons of his ankles in two and
tipped him over into the brine. The flamingo keened in her
mourning, and all her feathers turned to black. She drowned
herself for her white-wigged love off the hull of the
Jupiter’s Shuttlecock, and the cage went into the collection
of the sagacious Mr. Mouth.
It was in that very cage that the bright-haired Trinidad
bride sat, her sunburned shoulders shaded in almond leaves. Her
yellow hair was braided once, and is still knotted and bunched,
falling to the backs of her knees. Mr. Mouth came to her on a
balmy evening not long after the King’s English had been
sunk to the blue world that abides beneath the clear water. He
brought a little doctor’s case with him, black and shining,
rescued from the kit of a wartime surgeon with a taste for
frog’s livers soaked in milk. Mr. Mouth had let his Loros divide
the man’s soft, amphibian belly between them. Thus equipped, the
nimble Mr. Mouth ascended the crimson-berried nance tree to rest
beside her in the teak-bottomed cage. She looked at her hands.
“Now, my dear and dulcet bride of sugar! What is your
name?”
“Clare,” she said softly, her voice swallowed up by the
trees of Macaw, “Clare Lamp.”
“Ah, Miss Lamp, Light of Reason, Hope of my Heart! I am
most happy to make your acquaintance. I have reason to believe
you will be a great success of mine, perhaps the crown of my
career—do you know why?”
“No, Sir.”
“Because I have asked the other ladies, and not a few of
the strapping young boys, and they tell me your mother was a
penny opera soprano, and your father was a bass—he played the
King of Spades in Il Inferno della Gioc-Scheda, did he
not?”
Miss Lamp looked up with pride in her light eyes, a
peculiar shade of green not unlike a messageless bottle bobbing
on the sea. “Yes, Sir, that he did. And I was the Knave of
Diamonds. My mother was the prettiest ingénue they ever saw,
even when she had her three babies and not a line on her face
hadn’t been caked with greasepaint more times than rouge. She
was the Queen of Clubs in Gioc-Scheda, and she carried a
black staff as big as a man!”
“I’ll bet she did!” crowed Mr. Mouth, and his green
feathers puffed up with pleasure. “And you, my treble clef, my
eighth-note, you can sing, can you not? In your Knave’s costume,
with your red pantaloons and your spangled cap, you sang most
sweetly, didn’t you? As sweetly as a bird?”
“Oh, I did, Sir. Better than my sisters, better than
half the dancing corps. They clapped for a quarter-hour after
the Knave’s aria. My Papa would never have sold me, except that
costumes are so dear, and painters so hard to come by. It hurt
him, he had tears in his mustache, but what can a theatre man
do? There are always more girls to be found. He told me I’d be a
fine lady, Queen of Sugar-Spades, with a lace fan and mint
liquor in a little glass every day at three.”
“I am sure you would have been, Miss Lamp. I can just
see you now, with peacock feathers in your hair. But alas, your
ship was poor, your captain poorer, and by mere chance, you know
how to sing.” He grinned as a parrot may grin, a pink-grey
tongue flashing out and back. “But there is yet cane for you.”
Mr. Mouth opened his gleaming black case and removed
several objects from its depths. He laid before the young woman
seven scalpels of varying lengths and sharpness, a dark, heavy
awl, and five pieces of thick, fibrous sugar cane, oily and
solid. Mr. Mouth was at that time the preeminent surgeon of the
isle of Macaw, ministering to the Loros wherever they came to
harm. And it was in this capacity that he pioneered—let no one
say that Macaw was a backwater, let no one malign her crystal
shores where such songs echo!—an extraordinary surgical
technique. Culling the likeliest subjects from his maritime
adventures, Mr. Mouth perfected his methods in much the way any
doctor will, and by the time he hovered over the quavering Miss
Lamp was quite a sure hand.
“It will hurt, I shall not lie to you on that score,” he
admitted. “Once, when I boarded a clipper by the name of
Plebiscite, I was not nearly so quick on my feet as the day
required, and my Loros and I spent a full summer in the service
of a captain so thin you could see the moon’s edge through his
ribs. He took a man’s kind of pity on me and plucked my feathers
with his fingers like grass blades, one by one, from my scalp,
determined that underneath all my verdancy he would find the
head of an upstanding fellow, with a clear enough brow. He
strapped me down every day, swore it would not hurt me, no more
than a mosquito’s sting, and administered his depilatory
treatment among a dozen hanging cages filled with songbirds
trilling out the hours. But, my little Knave of Diamonds, when
he had pulled the last gall-green feather from my brow, he found
only a parrot’s skull beneath, naked, bald, shriveled, prickled
with bird-blood. By autumn we lured enough of the crew to our
side to safely snap the thin captain’s spine like the stalk of a
lily. I opened all his songbird cages to the breeze, and I spent
the better part of an afternoon plucking each hair from his
head.”
“But, please, Sir, I am not sick,” said Miss Lamp, her
gaze fixed on the scalpels.
“Did I suggest you were?”
After a protracted skirmish some several summers back in
which the green herons were driven from their roosts, the Loros
claimed the strand between the almond groves and the coconut
clutches. Under their callused hands and through their menagerie
of seafaring goods, it became a long boulevard of raised
deckboards, lamp-posts fashioned from masts with flaming
lanterns swinging from their crows’ nests, and parrot-women in
palm-frond hoop skirts dancing with parrot-boys in cacao-buckled
breeches.
Along this boulevard the lordly Mr. Mouth led his
charge. Her throat was bandaged with a navigator’s chart, and
her eyes bruised with weeping. He led her with her hand tucked
into the crook of his arm, lecturing like a Cambridge man as
they strolled, patting her fingers every now and then.
“You see, my dear, the importance of parrots to the
world. Off Macaw, we are pets, we are playthings. We are the
songbirds of grotesquely thin men. We sing and make obscene
gestures towards speech. Even on Greater Blue Macaw, where the
parrots were always small and they worship a saint none of them
has ever seen, we are showpieces. And it is the creature which
shows his pieces which is the greatest, not the one whose pieces
are shown. I think this is elementary, don’t you agree? No tribe
can rise to the level of nation when they are given fresh seed
and water promptly at four only so long as they whistle ‘God
Save the King’ when the master snaps his reedy fingers. Who can
be great while sitting on the shoulders of eyepatched men and
cawing idiocy at the sky? But here, on Macaw, we are beset on
all sides by birds who do no recognize our superior nature,
seeing in us only the playthings of men. I have devoted myself
to proving them wrong, to raising the Loros up, to sit beside
men on the veranda of God, to sit beside sailors and naturalists
and archangels.”
As they entered the main thoroughfare, Miss Lamp could
not fail to see that the finest cages were here, hung along the
sidewalks, side by side. In each one was a man or a woman or a
child, hunched over and hiding their eyes. They wore sailors’
clothes and whores’ clothes, the clothes of a baron’s son or the
clothes of a captain, gamblers’ rags and catamites’ silks. As
Mr. Mouth passed, dozens of hands fluttered to their throats.
Miss Lamp trembled, and their shadows fell on a silver cage
which contained a single wooden leg of ruddy mahogany. It was
small, a bird’s crutch, resting on a pillow of parrot-down. Mr.
Mouth crossed himself with fervor.
“She alone does not sing,” he intoned, and with a firm
press of his hand guided the bright-haired woman towards the
crest of the boulevard, where herons deep in the brush glared
and fumed, and where the cage of the lovelorn flamingo had been
deposited by burly Loros with ear coverts of lurid yellow. In it
had also been placed a captain’s chair with a low canvas seat.
The surgeon directed Miss Lamp to sit upon it, and helped her to
keep her back properly straight, assuming rightly that her
mother had not taught her such niceties.
He removed the map-bandage from her throat, and a
silence fell over the bustling street as each Loro in their
strange-ventricled heart strained to hear. For the brilliant Mr.
Mouth had cut away the crystalline larynx of the child of the
penny opera, and replaced it most expertly with five strips of
sugar cane, with neat holes awled in their thready thicknesses.
He smoothed her hair and kissed both her cheeks with his rough
and painted beak.
“My dear, my pet, my showpiece! My ballad, my threnody,
my opera!” He said breathlessly.
With a blazing faith and pride in his black eyes, Mr.
Mouth leaned in close to Miss Lamp, who would one day quite soon
be called the Light of the Lane by every Loro with tongue to
speak it, and blew very gently across her sugar-throat. A sound
filled the air of Macaw like the weeping of seraphim, a high,
pure flute, sweeter than clear water. Tears streamed down the
poor girl’s face. She turned her eyes to the deep violet sky,
where flocks of finches flittered across the impassive face of
the moon. The sinister Mr. Mouth closed his own eyes and, hands
trembling in triumph, played a simple minuet, sad as the ache of
a ship too long at sea, on the throat of his best and newest
songbird.
Along the boulevard, the caged folk cried out, anguished
in their seedless prisons—but their breath through their
cane-paneled throats only sent up further notes beneath Miss
Lamp’s perfect voice, low and broken, flawed and sharp, bent and
flat. All Macaw was filled with cacophonous music, and the
herons shivered in their nests.
As one, the many-colored Loros stepped up to the rows of
cages and, squeezing shut their beady eyes in rapt ecstasy, put
golden beaks to so many throats.
