Audubon's Watch: A Novel - Softcover

Brown, John Gregory

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0618257314 ISBN 13: 9780618257317

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2002

Synopsis

On his deathbed, renowned ornithologist John James Audubon remains haunted by a thirty-year-old mystery about the sudden and enigmatic death of a beautiful woman, Myra Gautreaux, on the Louisiana plantation where Audubon is employed as a tutor, in an atmospheric novel based on a single entry from Audubon's diary. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

John Gregory Brown lives in Virginia and teaches creative writing at Sweet Briar College. He is the author of The Wrecked, Blessed Body of Shelton LaFleur and Decorations in a Ruined Cemetery, which received a Steinbeck Award and the Lillian Smith Award. Audubon’s Watch was selected as the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities Book of the Year.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Prologue

Beauty carries death in its arms,” Emile Gautreaux, physician of New Orleans, once declared to a young apprentice while ceremoniously brandishing the scalpel with which he was about to commence the apprentice’s first lesson in anatomy. This notion must have occurred at least once to the ornithologist and artist John James Audubon as he raised his rifle toward the sky and paused before taking aim on a bird whose exquisite splendor he would recreate on the page. It was indeed beauty and death that brought these two men together. On July 31, 1821, at the estate of James and Lucretia Pirrie in St. Francisville, Louisiana, where Audubon was employed as a tutor to the Pirries’ charming, coquettish daughter and to which Gautreaux had traveled in order to meet the man whose drawings he so admired, the two men spent the night not engaged in pleasant conversation, as Gautreaux had hoped, but keeping watch over the body of Gautreaux’s wife.

Myra Richardson’s striking beauty and curiously frank manner had enchanted and tormented a variety of men before her marriage to Emile Gautreaux. And throughout his life Audubon made gifts of his drawings to women who excited his interest, with coy and affectionate tributes hastily scrawled in charcoal pencil on the back. But the manner of Myra Gautreaux’s death -- its mystery and vulgarity, its suggestion of exaltation, its intimation of despair -- and the troubling beauty of even her lifeless body seemed to assure that both men would never free themselves from their memory of this evening. Thirty years later, confined to his bed and amid his mind’s ceaseless wanderings, Audubon turned again to his meeting with Emile Gautreaux. He spoke not to his sons, John Woodhouse and Victor, nor to his wife, Lucy, nor to his dear friend, John Bachman, but to his two daughters, grown in his mind’s eye to their full grace and beauty. Just as Audubon finally spoke, so did Emile Gautreaux. His carriage made its way from New Orleans to New York, an arduous journey lasting nearly a month. But what was a month? It was nothing. For thirty years passion and grief had burrowed so deep that they had invaded every chalky bone to the marrow. They had feasted with insatiable appetite on the soul. They had become both sustainer and destroyer, mother and infant, victor and victim, carrion and cathedral, the earth’s lime and loam. Here was the very embrace of the heavens.

Copyright © 2001 by John Gregory Brown. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0618257314
• ISBN 13: 9780618257317
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224