Ev leaned his bike against the house, then took my saucer and brought it inside. Stepping back outside, he kneeled to inspect the rear tire. He groused that it needed air, then glanced up at me on my chair. He eyed me with a kind of awe. At my stupidity, perhaps.
“Well what are you setting there for? You look froze. Christ, woman, are you that stunned? Lounging when you’ve got work to do. Lord love a duck, them orders aren’t gonna fill themselves. You think those pitchers of yours paint themselves? Huh?”
Try as I might, I couldn’t stop thinking about the mail I’d received before the morning’s kerfuffle. I guess I was full of beans—it was the beans that made me pipe up, any other time I wouldn’t have. Maybe the thought of those squalling youngsters just kept on getting my goat. Maybe because all the morning had brought in was forty cents, my tongue got loosened, against my better judgment.
“What else was in that envelope, Ev?”
He eyed me like I was talking crazy, was touched by the sun beaming straight overhead. It did nothing to warm things up, alas. I tugged my hat down lower.
“What’s that? What fool envelope you talking about, now? What the heck are you waiting for anyways, Christmas? Jesus. Set there long enough and you’ll catch cold. Git off that darn chair, have yourself a cup of tea and a fag, and get cozy. You want to be nice and warmed up before you start painting.” He said it the same way he said some mornings, “Git up and start eating. What do you think this is, a diner? I don’t got all day to wait on you.”
Before I could budge from the chair he steadied the bike, no longer too concerned about that tire, and flung his leg over the crossbar. Straddling it, he pushed off on one pedal and, without saying goodbye, wheeled out onto the pavement. Heading left, he moved slow and wobbly at first, then getting up to speed, he sat straight as a preacher and pedalled as fast as a man half his age in the direction of Digby. I watched until he was a dot that grew lean as an exclamation mark before he disappeared altogether. He might be gone now for hours or days. I never really knew how long his excursions would last until he came home—it might be that night or two nights hence. Once the almshouse shut and his work there ended, he didn’t have to keep regular hours. But as long as there was wood handy and the fire didn’t die I could sit in my corner uninterrupted, get a painting done and maybe start on another, whatever it would take to fill back orders.
Yet, as quick as Ev vanished from sight, a weariness overtook me. It was all I could do to haul myself over the threshold, let alone drag the chair inside with me. So I left it out there on the gravel, the sign hung over the back of it.
3.
Work, for the Night is Coming
How many years had Ev and me been at this business of ours? Too many to count, it seemed. Ever since a nice man from Yarmouth had come and snapped pictures of us, people kept writing to ask for paintings. They’d taken a liking to my pictures of cats, oxen, horses, boats, lighthouses, wharfs, and happy-looking couples tooling around the countryside in roadsters during apple blossom season. A smiling man at the wheel of an old black jalopy, the lady riding shotgun. The human version of Willard and Matilda. The Wedding Party, I called that particular scene, which I admit I was kind of partial to, though the farther Ev and me got from our newly wedded bliss the harder it was to copy the picture with the same delight. You might know how it is with lengthy marriages. It’s not that familiarity breeds contempt, or that fish gets old after a time. But sharing your life with the same person day in and day out for near thirty years does feature the odd yawn and less-than-starry-eyed moment.
And think of it: I had been painting and Ev had been begging, borrowing, peddling, caretaking, and scrounging a living for as long as we had known each other.
A lot longer, in fact.
Now, if it didn’t get too cold in the house and Ev kept himself busy elsewhere, I could lose myself in my work, even copying pictures I had copied a thousand times. When my hands pained too bad to paint, I could amuse myself reading over letters people sent, like the one that had come earlier. I could play a little game with myself imagining the folks who wrote them, picturing their houses and their faces, their children, their pets. I even tried to imagine their voices, how they might sound.
As I dug out today’s letter, started to read it again from the top, I imagined the lady speaking the words in her Yankee accent, the way she probably said “ah” for “ar.” As in—if she owned a cow, say—“Got a heffah, you can have ah, if you want ah.” I pictured her sitting in her sunporch, maybe it had a nice big fireplace made of beach stones, and my painting on the wall, and the spring sunshine streaming in through the windows, warming it so the smell of paint and turpentine was a genie escaping its magic bottle, a genie waking up after the ride in Secretary’s car, then a downhill jaunt in the mail truck, then onto the ferry to rock its way across the Bay of Fundy, then onto a train and into another truck and maybe the lady’s car before reaching its final destination, her place.
The picture would be a little piece of my life in Marshalltown, Nova Scotia, making itself at home in her big, beautiful house.
There’s a reason they call turpentine a spirit, I guess.
I wondered if the woman was lucky enough to have a crow like Matilda to watch, and to watch over her. Maybe not, as not everyone is so fortunate. Though I could have been wrong about this; maybe she had a whole flock of bird friends. Maybe I’d get Secretary to ask about this when I had her write the woman back.
By now, the fire Ev had banked to warm the beans had dwindled to near nothing. Halfway through reading the letter, I pocketed it again to go and lift a burner lid and poke in a few splits of kindling. The scorched bean can sat there licked clean; Ev had given it his best, it looked like. There was enough water in the kettle to save me traipsing out back to the well, dipping, hoisting, and lugging the bucket back to the house, hoping Fred didn’t come with it, all the while wondering if that kindling could fuel enough of a fire to make ice water boil. It was a further trek to the woodpile, a pile which grew shorter as the days lengthened.
The fire was amply strong to heat the kettle’s dregs, water enough for a cup of tea. It was a bit of a chore reaching the tea bag Ev had hung to dry from the line strung above the range. It dangled like a mermaid’s purse pegged between two of his socks. I almost needed to climb on his chair to get at it but managed to flick the bag down using the fly swatter. Flinging it into my tin mug, I hoisted the kettle, poured in the water. There was a speck of milk in the tin on Ev’s windowsill. When the tea looked as brown as could be, I tipped the milk in. Ev was particular about milk. I suppose it came from his upbringing, his notion that a person should only have so much, which made sense when you thought about the cows, poor beasts, giving all that milk and for what? I carried my tea to my table-tray and once I was settled behind it on my little cane-seated chair—all without spilling a drop, mind—I picked up reading where I had left off. P.S. the lady had put below her name, Please find enclosed five US dollars which should cover costs, plus a little extra.
I remembered Ev holding the envelope up to the sun, just before that pesky family drove in.
Maybe he had gone to town to see about getting that Yankee funny money turned into the real McCoy, Canadian bucks? It was a worry how those greenbacks of theirs all looked the same, aside from the numbers on them. I hoped that whoever helped Ev at the bank would be honest. It hurt to think of folks taking advantage of him on account of his poor schooling, which wasn’t his fault. This troubled me more than his habit of pocketing cash without letting me count it first.
It was hard to get mad at Ev, harder to stay mad at him. Before he left, he’d set everything up so nice. My sardine tins were topped up with paint, just so, the turpentine in its alphabet soup can. My clean brushes stood bristles-up in their peanut butter jar. “Waste not, want not,” I remembered my father saying a long time ago, and these words remained words to live by, through feast or famine,
as Ev would warrant at any time. The green paint barely needed a stir; Ev was way ahead of me in readying things, his way of helping speed the work along. He had guessed at my plan to colour in hills, grass, and spruce trees he’d helped me trace on a slew of boards, scrap wood, really.
Waste not, want not.
I had teased him once: “You’ve got so good at this soon you won’t hardly need me, will you.” Nudging his arm, I’d leaned in to feel the warmth of him through his sleeve against my cheek and to breathe in his woodsy, smoky smell. Ev’s smell was a complicated smell occasionally muddled by the smell of drink, part and parcel of his man-body’s smell of sweat. I imagined the lady in Massachusetts imagining me unfolding her five dollars. How easily Ev had taken to handling the money I brought in—doing like our vows had said all those years back, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, what’s mine is yours, etcetera. Yet something about those five dollars disappearing didn’t sit quite right; it stuck in my craw, and I scolded myself over it. It wasn’t like Ev and I were in competition for the money. It would have felt clearer, fairer, if the lady had addressed her letter to both of us.
After I’d teased him, Ev had given me a bashful shove. “Oh g’wan, it’s you they want. Not me. But if I can he’p you, I guess that’s what I’ll do.” Putting his face close to mine, he had smiled his smile, playful and bashful both, with that twinkle in his eyes. The twinkle that kept me wondering why, just why, are some folks born with horseshoes up their rears while others, like Ev, are not? I appreciated his eagerness to help fill the orders, but didn’t like how it made me feel, half useless, a malingerer. No longer up to snuff, I mean. The way my father might have felt when cars replaced horses and rendered his fancy harness work not just quaint but a frill.
Unnecessary.
We all need to feel needed, it’s a fact.
And I dare say this points to one huge drawback to being up here: the fact of being useless on top of being invisible. Especially when the king and queen bees of usefulness down your way make sure some folks already feel this way, useless and invisible, like nothing beyond those uppity ones’ noses matters any-old-how.
As for being useful, in life I could do things Ev could not do and other women, women with good hands, clothes, legs, and hairdos, couldn’t do either. I tucked the customer’s letter into the Pot of Gold box with all the other letters thanking me for work received, then guzzled down my lukewarm tea. The letters proved the point: what I did was make grown adults get over themselves and their troubles, even if just for a moment, and smile, just smile. Even when the down-below world taught them, See here, there’s just this one way of looking at things. Like the whole world was an old photograph.
But I had known since forever that it’s colours that keep the world turning, that keep a person going.
Thinking this happy thought, I rummaged for my cigarettes, found them buried under the latest Couriers Ev had got off the neighbours. He said you could tell a lot about people by what they put out for trash. I would have liked to visit these people, see for myself how they lived and what they were like. But it was true what Ev said: walking that highway would be taking my life in my hands. “What, you’re gonna play chicken with an eighteen-wheeler? Not over my dead body, you ain’t.”
The paper matches were right where they were supposed to be, beside the kerosene lamp. Ev kept the box of wooden ones on his window shelf by the range. I lit up and for a second, with no one but myself for company and only Matilda and her murder outside, the peace that wrapped itself round me was as good as a thick woollen shawl. Curled inside such coziness, I blew smoke rings and watched them mix and mingle with sunbeams. These poked through the windowpane, setting the tulips’ red and gold aglow. Angling in above the flowers, the sun glinted off the bells tied to the window blind’s pull. I fancied its shimmer and glow might be some person’s foretaste of glory. Ending in dimness, the smoky rays resembled the fingers that reach down from storm clouds on dull days. Fingers of light my aunt would ascribe to the hand of her Almighty God.
I took a couple more puffs then butted out, saving the nail of the cigarette for later. Using my left fist to brace my right one gripping the brush, I dipped the brush’s sable-haired tip into the forest green, knocked off little drips of paint against the tin’s razor-sharp edge, and fighting to keep steady, brought it to the board’s surface. I pushed the bristles as gentle as I could against the wood’s grain, filling in inside the pencil lines Ev had helped trace using the cardboard cut-outs he made. Helping to guide my fists holding the pencil, he said this was the best way to get the work done. It worked all right with square and straight-lined things like houses, barns, wharfs, even the decks of boats above their plimsoll lines, but wasn’t so good for fine curves and details, the hills, treetops, grass-edged roads and ponds that needed done.
But, who was I to complain?
Holy frig, he would have said. Do it yourself, then.
We both of us knew working by my lonesome I would never, ever fill all the orders. Feast or famine: that about described the life of an artist. Though it took surviving more than one long famine before I ever dared call myself that, an artist.
After I filled in all the green on the first board, I stopped and lit up the rest of my fag. The smoke tickled my throat, cooled my lungs. I imagined them like a hot air balloon lifting me up and out of myself, a whoosh of relief that warmed my ears and filled my belly. I leaned forward on my chair, rested both elbows on my table-tray, and near drifted off. Had I done so, I’d have landed face-first in my picture! But, enjoying the final drag off my cigarette then slowly crushing it out, I straightened up. Ash blotted out the gull soaring inside the spare ashtray I’d rustled up. I could’ve kicked myself for letting that other one go to that kid for less than asking price. No wonder Ev had left in what some might think was still a bit of a snit.
Regardless, I needed to finish off at least one painting before daylight wore out. It was hard to work once the shadows stretched longer. My window faced sou’-east while Ev’s faced sou’-west. When he was around, the setting sun shed light for him to cook by. Even in early summer, the sun working overtime to dispel the house’s dimness, the evening light wasn’t right for painting. Daylight was precious, I don’t need to tell you. Yet it was all I could do just then to keep my rear end planted in that chair and not stumble over to the daybed at the foot of the stairs. I wanted nothing more than to lay myself down for a nap. But Ev would’ve had a conniption coming home mid-afternoon to find me out cold.
Every now and then stray brush hairs stuck to the board, damned if I could pick them all off. They spoilt the smoothness I favoured when I could get it, depending on the paints Ev rustled up. Of course, thanks to that kind man from my hometown and the photographs he’d taken of us, by this time people who meant to encourage me were sending real artist’s oils. Imagine! Among these folks was a nice man up in Ontario by the name of John Kinnear, who had heard about me and taken a fancy to my work. I had no way to repay his kindness except by trading my paintings for the paints he sent. Secretary helped with all this. But every silver lining has a cloud, and being famous, as Ev was convinced I was, is not all sunshine and all-day suckers. Putting out the number of boards people expected meant using whatever paints Ev could lay his hands on, not much different than when him and I started out. Fame takes you full circle, maybe. I had to use what I could get. Beggars can’t ever be choosers, like Ev said.
If people from all over creation want pictures to pretty-up their winter houses and summer homes, la-de-da, they too will just have to take what they get, I figured.
Have another smoke, I told myself.
Lighting up, propping the ashtray between two paint tins, I thought once more of the family that had stopped by that morning. I imagined that boy rubbing his finger over the shell’s painting to feel its smoothness. I imagined them driving, maybe pulling into Yarmouth by now to catch the ferry to Bar Harbor or
Portland, Maine—or simply arriving home, entering a mansion with lofty ceilings, bay windows, and a widow’s walk atop a steep pitched roof, and a cute little lap dog, not a mix dog like Joe, jumping up to lick everyone’s faces. I imagined the mother hanging up everyone’s coat, the father giving her a kiss, the boy going off to read a book or play with a toy truck or whatever boys nowadays did, the girls running up a long, polished staircase to a vast pink bedroom to play dolls.
Imagining all this gave me a second wind. It only lasted for a minute, though.
Say that crowd’s life was nothing like this. Say that family had just kept driving, farther and farther from home, wherever home was. Say those kids didn’t even belong to that couple, the couple were babysitters fixing to drop those three little christers off somewhere and keep going. Maybe the real parents were dead, those kids had no mama or papa to coddle them. Of course, I was thinking of my Ev growing up next door, back when the almshouse was actually a poor farm, and his ne’er-do-well father and his mother were stuck there. Not only poor Ev, but all the other folks locked up there over the years through no fault of their own. At least my people had had means, unlike Ev’s people. Hard as things could be, I’d had a loving mama and father a lot longer than many folks do. Though seeing a mother live to old age like Ev’s had was no blessing either, not when a life is more or less lived like a sledge being hauled daily from a gravel pit.
Remembering Ev’s ma made me feel for my ring. I wished to high heaven it would have slipped over any one of my knuckles. I’d even tried, to no avail, pushing it onto my pinky with a slick of wet soap, and, when that didn’t work, a bit of pork grease. And I pictured the ring in the little box where I’d put it for safekeeping—the box my brooch had come in, a tiny palette with dots of red, blue, and yellow glass for paint, a present from a lady who wrote about me. Oh it was a sad day when I said goodbye to wearing my ring, but a happy one when that brooch arrived in the mail. I had tucked the ring into the nest of cotton batting inside the brooch’s tiny box and hid it in the narrow basket by my windowsill. The basket was a pretty thing made of split ash by an Indian lady over Bear River way, though I couldn’t begin to tell you how I came to have it. I can’t remember everything, you know.
Brighten the Corner Where You Are Page 6
