The Authentic Animal: Inside the Odd and Obsessive World of Taxidermy - Hardcover

ONE
 
Our taxidermy story begins on a cold night in Clarendon, New York, in the winter of 1876. Everyone in town was asleep. The farmers and shopkeeps. The judges with their offices in Town Hall and Frank Turner, the new town clerk. Chauncey Foster, who owned the Clarendon Hotel. The man who ran the gristmill, a miller whose name just happened to be Miller. The schoolteacher, William Stillwell, who pounded insubordinate students with a notched ruler, and the schoolboys trying not to sleep on their bruises. Even the known night owl Dr. Brackett turned in early that evening, the cold being too fierce to get any work done. Irene Glidden, the youngest of ten children—twenty years old and living, still, at home, a brief lifetime of spinsterhood set out unwittingly before her—had fallen asleep before she could remember to throw another log or two in the stove. In the morning she rose early and shivering to find that her pet canary had frozen to death. She fed fresh, dry logs to the dying embers. She tried to get a fire roaring. If she tried hard enough maybe she could wake her canary up. Maybe it could live again. Maybe miracles happened every day.
Another canary? Another canary was just a day’s trip away in Rochester, and yet as any pet owner knows what creates the love between the human and the pet is the notion of custody. This animal’s life is my responsibility. Every loss of every pet is met with some anxious mix of deprivation and personal shame. Sometimes sobbing alone in one’s living room is the only reasonable reaction. Miss Irene Glidden’s tears, then, are understandable tears. She had that cold morning in 1876 some complicated feelings of guilt to manage, and she had before her an image no one likes to consider: a bird unmoving, its wings no longer cutting through the air above us.
*   *   *
Enter Carl Akeley. A small boy, thin. His sandy hair slicked flat on his scalp. In certain brands of daylight it looked painted on. A farmer’s son, quiet and watchful. Fence-picket shoulders and skin as fair as a lady’s handkerchief. She watched Carl enter the house with an empty basket held in his mittened hands. Outside, the wind blew up snowdrifts in slanted curtains of white. Carl said good morning. He left his coat and mittens in place on his tiny body. He was so much like a bird in the frail way he stood beneath Irene that it was too much for her not to keep sobbing right there in her chair.
“Mother sent me for some eggs,” Carl said, not moving closer.
She couldn’t say it. She only pointed to the birdcage in the corner.
Carl set the basket on the floor and walked over. The cage was a shiny brass thing. Baroque, and glowing in the firelight like a lantern. It hung from a hook in the ceiling, and Carl stretched up on the tips of his toes to see inside. There lay the canary. “Oh Carl,” Irene said, standing up from her chair and keeping a distance from the birdcage. “I’m an animal. A monster. What kind of person…?” She drifted off to open the stove and throw another short log in, but by now the fire was blazing. Carl began to sweat. He took off his mittens and stuffed them in his coat pockets, and he pried open the wire door of the cage and reached one hand in.
“I’ll fix it,” he said. The canary was warm to the touch and felt like breath between his fingers.
He had handled a dead animal before. After the cows on his father’s farm had been milked, after Carl had cleaned out the horse stalls in the barn, he liked to walk wordlessly through the woods with another old farmer in town, a man named Os Mitchell, who could train a dog to hunt better than anyone. Mitchell taught the boy how to shoot, and Carl on his best days would clip a bird right out of the air and watch as one of Os’s dogs ran off to fetch the animal and present it to the boy. These dead animals led to nothing. They became dead animals and remained dead animals. Before that morning in the Gliddens’ home, death was the end of something, and then, suddenly, death was not the end, Carl saw. Death was just an accident, an error in the world he thought he could fix. That morning a canary had died, but before anyone knew it a taxidermist was born.
*   *   *
Julia Akeley was a fire-eyed woman with an acute severity in the brow and a temper none in her household could anticipate. A wronged woman. Her family was wealthy and her husband was poor, having been handed fifty-eight rocky, barren acres on the far eastern outskirts of the property owned by Julia’s father, Thomas Glidden.1 The Gliddens were a large and proud clan, one of Clarendon’s founding families, who, according to Carl’s older brother Lewis, “ruled the public opinion of the neighborhood.” To be a Glidden was to walk through town expecting the faces of its people to reflect envy and admiration. And then there was Julia. Her husband, Webb Akeley, was a man who did not put on airs and had no truck with the airs put on by others. He didn’t go to church; he raised livestock. A couple cows, and few pigs, some chickens. He grew oats and corn and wheat, but the ground was all clay and rock, and Webb never could have been called a successful man. And Julia saw success all around her. Her sisters all married well and lived in tall brick houses in town with four, five bedrooms. As she walked through town, she heard, she thought, them and the other citizens of Clarendon talking about her family—that run-down farm, that boy and his dead animals. It should have been enough to make her leave. Webb wrote to relative Gliddens out in De Kalb, Illinois (where one of them, Joseph Farwell Glidden, became the inventor of barbed-wire fencing), and received word that out there was wealth and bounty. The Heartland. It had so much promise, but Julia wouldn’t leave. Her refusal to break away from the Clarendon Gliddens and their power led, Lewis once wrote, to the Akeleys’ doom: “Our father never had a chance for economic independence in the utterly hopeless agricultural situation to which his wife’s reluctance condemned him for life.”
Julia turned cold and cruel. She snapped at her children and nagged her husband. By age twelve, Carl had learned to remain out of her sights, to stay busy with farmwork, to spend his afternoons far out in the woods of Clarendon. When he got home that cold morning he tried to slip noiselessly upstairs and get right to work, but his mother heard his footfalls from the kitchen. “How many eggs?” she called out, and only then did Carl realize he’d forgotten. He was to have left with at least four eggs, his mother had explained, and eight if the Gliddens could spare them. “And they can,” she’d said. Carl had even forgotten the basket. He walked into the kitchen. His mother was sitting at the empty kitchen table, her hands flat on the surface. The canary was safe in his coat pocket, wrapped in a red handkerchief. “I forgot them, I guess,” he said. “Shall I go back for them?”
“You forgot the one thing I sent you over there for?” She didn’t look his way when she spoke.
“Yes’m,” he said. “It was Irene. Her canary—”
“I don’t care about canaries. I only care about feeding this family.” Her eyes were closed and her face held upward as though in prayer. “But it’s clear you don’t care as much as I do. Running around without a head on your shoulders. Your father’s son, that’s what you are.”
“I can go back, Ma.”
“No,” she said. She was looking at him now. “No, you can go up to your room. And stay there. Without...