—
June survived, but Elizabeth died and Father’s being there didn’t stop it. He began a punishing regime of penance, putting stones in his shoes and walking long distances on them. Hagar cooked meal after meal that no one ate, scraping the food from the plates and into the run where the dogs were. Father canceled all his upcoming engagements. He wrote to his closest friend, Tom Flynn, saying he couldn’t leave his wife or she would kill herself.
Somewhere, in the midst of this tumult and agony, Edwin was conceived. He was born in November that same year with the stars and the caul, all as Rosalie had said.
When Father returned to his tour, he found that he could now summon the passion he needed only with drink. He played Louisville, where he witnessed firsthand the exuberant slaughter of the passenger pigeons, the same thing that twenty years earlier had so shocked Audubon.
Young as she was, Rosalie had also been through a pigeon year. She knew that you heard them before you saw them, a far-off sound of wings, like a ceaseless thunder, and, inside that, a song like sleigh bells. They passed in one continuous mass overhead, an ocean of birds, blotting out the sun for hours. There was no sky when they flew over, only pigeons above, in ripples of color, blue, gray, purple. Droppings fell like snow.
The farmers had run outside to protect their fields and fill their larders. They simply shot their rifles into the air. There was no need to aim. There was no way to miss. The bird mass coiled into the air and rose like a giant snake when the shots began. The dead plummeted and the living fell on the oat fields, stripping them in minutes. In trade for their crops, the farmers gathered the bodies into bushel baskets, not even bothering to collect them all. A handful of shots resulted in more dead birds than anyone could eat.
But Father hadn’t been home, so he was seeing this for the first time. He was greatly affected by the terror of the dying birds, which drowned out even the noise of the guns. They died in inconceivable numbers.
The next day he went to the market and bought whole wagonloads of dead birds. He purchased a coffin and a cemetery plot, and he held a public funeral.
A crowd gathered. “What madness prompts you to such carnage?” Father shouted in anguished tones. “To the sin of killing these admirable creatures, with their fair colors and soft, tunable voices? Oh, you men are made of stone! Where is your mercy?”
The crowd was amused at first. The mood sobered when he compared the innocent birds to Christ on the cross. Then he said that Christ had been crucified for the sin of eating meat—no crucifixion without the loaves and fishes was his reasoning. Then he said that the Hindoos had the only true religion. He was arrested on the spot.
“Currently imprisoned for telling the truth to scoundrels,” he’d written his father, who’d read the letter aloud to Mother while Rosalie listened unnoticed. “When, when, when,” Grandfather asked, “will he tire of these mad freaks?”
* * *
—
In 1835 Asia was born.
* * *
—
In 1836, the year Rosalie turned thirteen, they lost Henry Byron. They were in England at the time, the whole family plus Hagar but minus Grandfather. Much as he now hated America, still he hated England more. Besides, he said, he had work to do. He was translating The Aeneid into English. He was trying to retain its rhythms while reworking it as a play for Father to star in.
Grandfather had spent the weeks before their departure creating months of lesson plans for Henry—science and literature and philosophy. Henry could do simple sums in his head when he was only four. By five he could read Father’s reviews in the newspaper and the news of the day as well. He would sit in a kitchen chair, reading aloud to the women as they cooked and cleaned, charming them all by lisping his way through words like spectacle and glorious. Sometimes Father’s reviews described him as inebriated, a word Henry mispronounced without correction. Ann Hall told them that inebriated meant full of spirit, and for a long time, the children all believed inebriated was the very highest praise until Grandfather, in an unkind moment, told them otherwise.
The trip was Father’s idea, a way to remove Mother from the scene of so much loss but also another chance for him to dazzle the British audiences. It was his third such try, and still they refused to love him, comparing him unfavorably to Edmund Kean, no matter how he bellowed and declaimed. Edmund Kean! Who at the very start of Father’s career had tricked him into a contract to keep him in bit parts. Whose followers came to Father’s shows only to riot in the pit, fight and shout, throw orange peels onto the stage, and create such cacophony that no one could hear the play. Edmund Kean, dead and gone and still his relentless nemesis.
Once again, Father was found wanting in both physical strength and understanding of character. Kean, the reviews said, had understood Richard III as a man of consummate address, energy, and wit. Father had played him with nothing but bluster.
Father wrote home that “. . . entre nous, theatricals in England are gone to sleep—with all their puffing of full houses.” He complained of the London Tricksters.
Those months in London provided the only schooling that Rosalie would ever have. She made no particular friends, too quiet and awkward for that, but her teachers were fond of her. She surprised her family by doing rather well. Father went so far as to write Grandfather and say so.
Before the trip all the children had been inoculated against smallpox. Still Edwin and Asia suffered light cases. Hagar had to be hospitalized, but she also survived. But Henry’s inoculation didn’t take. He died and his death was more terrible than either Mary Ann’s or Elizabeth’s.
Henry Byron had been the best loved of all the children. He was a quick, thoughtful, charming child. Their shining boy. For Rosalie, he was her rock, her constant companion, their tight bond forged during the terrible time of the cholera.