Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  “You still here? Your husband kick you out or what? Don’t you have kids coming home from school? When I was in school—”

  My visitor had shot him a nervy grin. “You got as far as what, grade three, Mr. Lewis?” Her sass struck me dumb. Ev’s face had looked blanched, a pale spot high in each cheek.

  “Long enough to learn my ABCs. And my Ps and Qs.” The pride in his voice helped me find mine.

  “That’s right, Ev did, too.”

  Maybe my tone was high on its horse. For my guest had looked a little upset, gathering up her purse and saying goodbye. And I realized too late, this is a person who needs to be helpful, the best kind of helper. I’d figured that was the end of it, though, our friendship squelched before it barely got started.

  Imagine my surprise when, a few days later, Ev went to fling the water from washing the porridge pot out the door and there was something on the doorstep. No note, no nothing. It was a small rectangular box the colour of a crow’s egg, but without the brown and grey blotches, and it had dials on it. Imagine my surprise again when Kay turned up at the door that afternoon, dolled up in a pretty shirtdress. “Got something for you,” she’d said, stepping past Ev. She had a tin of King Cole tea straight from Saint John and a can of cookies with butterflies on it. She set them both on the table. Her eyes lit right up at the sight of the radio. “You like it?”

  It was nothing like the radios I had seen in the Eaton’s catalogue, with wooden cabinets like the old Edisons had. To show her how it worked, I turned a knob and a crackling noise jumped out. Kay took the radio from me and turned the dial till a voice sprang out loud and clear. The voice had a twang like you imagined the villain Mr. Grimes having in Mary Pickford’s silent movie, the one with her playing the piano that Mama and I had loved so.

  “There, you can tune in to pretty much anywhere has a signal strong enough.”

  I was well and truly tongue-tied, but when at last I could speak I asked what I owed her for it. Even if she’d said twenty-five cents I knew I couldn’t pay. I looked at Ev and he shook his head. Kay looked at him as she spoke. “It wasn’t from me. Even if it was, I wouldn’t charge you a cent.” Ev’s grimace lifted, his eyes brightened. “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. Oh, and Lloyd, that’s my husband, had nothing to do with it either. Though he did provide batteries.”

  Then she’d said to think of her doing her spring cleaning while I painted bluebirds. I barely saw her leave, clutching the radio to myself. Listening to Wilf Carter yodel for all he was worth, feeling the throb of his voice against my breastbone, I thought my heart would burst with joy.

  But for two or three years now, not a peep could be summoned from the small bluish box. Same as with Carnation milk, Ev said batteries hardly grew on trees. They reminded me of Life Savers, neat little rolls of candy wrapped up tight. I wished we could have kept their juice from drying out. But as with Life Savers, there was no way of keeping them fresh. For over time, Kay’s husband tired of sending batteries, or maybe he simply forgot. But I sure did miss the music’s company. How I’d loved tuning in to pass the hours, once it got too dark to work. Especially when they played the Hanks, Snow and Williams, the Carter Family, and Patsy Cline and all of them from the Grand Ole Opry. It had near ripped a hole in my heart when I heard through the grapevine—from the keeper’s wife over at the almshouse, Olive—that Hank Snow had come all the way from Liverpool to Digby to play his guitar one night.

  I’d have given the world to see him! I suppose he’s up here somewheres, if I had the eyes to see, the ears to pick out his tunes from others. If I’d had one inkling when I was growing up about where I would land on the road that runs past Marshalltown, who knows, I might have taken the ferry to New Brunswick, then the train to West Virginia or Nashville, Tennessee!

  But it is probably best not to know too much of what lies ahead of you. Just say it’s like roadkill at the next bend ahead, what then? If, like a skunk, the future pledges to be black and white, and not exactly as you would choose.

  Enough hankering for things that weren’t. Cozying up to the lamp, I treated myself to a whole cigarette. But then that Twohig woman’s words came back, about me lacking a ring, like Ev didn’t care enough to give me one. I wished I’d had the gumption earlier to dig my ring out of the basket and flash it for her. Butting out, I grabbed the basket, shook out the box inside. There on its little bed of cotton batting my wedding band gleamed, pure gold, only a little worn and tarnished in spots. One winter when the snow had got too deep for Ev to trap much more than squirrels and, against my will at first, we’d taken Olive up on her invitations to dinner at the almshouse, he had held the ring up to the lamplight, said his mama had talked to him in a dream: You fool son, you cannot eat a ring. For land’s sake, pawn it.

  “Well,” I had said, real quiet, “a mother would roll in her grave, seeing her boy starve.”

  The very next dawn the snow had melted enough that Ev could set some snares. Before you could say “uncle,” he had us a rabbit for our supper. So, he decided. “I reckon that ring ain’t mine to pawn off, not really. Though you should consider it like assurance.” Insurance, he meant. “Now put it back safe and sound, hear? Since you can’t wear it. Though your finger’s as good as a safety apposite box. A thief would have to chop it off to get at it.”

  So you see, Carmelita Twohig was full of raccoon scat; Ev did so care. He cared about me smoking as many cigarettes as I did. Ev didn’t like my habit; he’d told the television people when they came. They’d visited one day in late summer the year before, 1965, which is the year things started going to hell in a handbasket, with me falling behind filling orders.

  I dare say, like the Yanks walking on the moon, there’s hardly a place where men with cameras won’t go.

  “She ain’t very strong. She smokes quite a lot. Them cigarettes is full of poison,” Ev had told our guests, the TV folks. “I don’t say nothing to her, though.”

  If I had been smarter I might have chewed my tobacco like Ev did, like he said I ought to. Or given it up completely, like the hospital folks said, quite a while before I croaked and wound up here. The smokes are hard on your lungs, they said. No harder than chimney vapours, I wagered, enjoying every pull off every last fag I smoked. Even when I smoked rollies, a minor complaint, for before I switched to Players, I liked the tins Black Cat tobacco came in, with their pictures of felines with yellow eyes like Fluffy.

  The only downside to cats is their delight in hunting birds. I still remember Fluffy skulking through the garden in Yarmouth, arse wiggling as he fixed to pounce on an unsuspecting robin. And how I had to chase him away when that rare and beautiful blue bird came to perch one day on Mama’s rose bush. That bird’s feathers were the colour of the south seas, someone said. Unlike Matilda, where he came from was a mystery. Father guessed he had been blown north in a gale. I believed he flew off a schooner unloading molasses from the Caribbean, took himself for an adventure winging up from Baker’s Wharf just down the hill. The bird liked it so well in Mama’s garden he decided to stick around for a spell, kind of foolish since where he came from would be warmer in wintertime, we imagined. Or maybe he didn’t want to sail on to Saint John, the schooner’s next port of call.

  There was truth to what I’d told my secretary, how I hankered to paint crows. Not just any old crows, mind, certainly not flat black ones to be traced with Ev’s help, but crows as they were and are. The way I saw Matilda—I sure would have liked to paint her, have her picture as a keepsake.

  By now it was pitch dark outside. Nothing stirred beyond the house. The crows had gone to bed. In my mind’s eye, I guessed Matilda up: all the blues, greens, oranges, reds, and purples in her feathers’ sheen, if you looked close enough when the sun caught the rainbow there—its glistening matched by her glossy beak, her wise brown eyes.

  Eyes that had such a glimmer you figured she knew things people didn’t.

  I t
ucked the ring in its box back inside the basket, the safest place I could think of for it. I chuckled to myself, thinking how Willard would’ve liked to get his beak on that ring, and imagined him giving it to Matilda.

  It’s thirsty work securing a treasure, making a treasure safe. I took a sip of water using the dipper by the range. There wasn’t much water left in the bucket, only an inch or two. After Secretary skedaddled with the orders I’d thought of venturing out to the well, figuring it might be some time before Ev returned from his trip to the bank. But then I reasoned that it paid to be careful when it came to drinking; the last thing you wanted was needing to get up in the night. Once Ev carried me up the stairs, it took a lot for me to get down them again.

  Ageing. There’s not much to recommend it, as Ev used to say.

  My thirst quenched, I dug out a clean board, laid it on my table-tray. Stared at it in the gloom. Thought if I could paint Matilda as she was, my life would be complete, I could stow my brushes in the firebox and die happy. But as I picked up a brush, gripped it between my fists, and smeared on a swath of green, I knew my hands weren’t up to the task, nor was my sardine-can palette.

  There were folks who would say neither me nor my palette ever were up to the task of making art, real art, that what I did was grown-up child’s play. No matter how Mama used to tell people who looked down their noses at me, “Think what you want of her, my Maud can turn out a beau-tee-ful set of cards,” I wondered if those snooty folks were right. It did no good to dwell on it, of course. There always will be those who think the Earth is flat and that crows are just plain black. But as I stared at that green I didn’t see how I could do Matilda justice. Part of me reckoned I had thought too late of painting her. The other part wished it could be enough just to guess up her picture and carry it with me in my head.

  Now I am not just up here in the otherworld talking crow, badmouthing naysayers. But unlike humans, birds, all birds, come into your world knowing full well the Earth is curved. I always figured birds had it made in the shade, crows, jays, chickadees, robins, and indigo buntings alike, ranging over this county and the next, the land a ginormous patchwork quilt. A crazy quilt, seeing as how you seldom get two lines running straight out in the country, not like in the widow’s walk– and steeple-studded town I was raised in. The fancy, fogbound town I once called home, with its Grand Hotel, parades, movie house, and ships coming and going. My old home. Though it pained me a little, stirring up a long-lost homesickness, I went there now, in my memory.

  That fall, the fall of 1927, the weather stayed foggy through to Hallowe’en, winter more than willing to take its good old time arriving. At five o’clock each evening I helped Mama put supper on while Father washed up after work. It was finicky work he did, measuring and fitting out horses and oxen, cutting leather, stitching and hammering straps together, decorating the finished pieces with polished brass studs. My father’s harnesses were things of beauty, people said, but in a kind of wilted, pussy-footing way as business ebbed. Surely things would pick up once the snow came and people started sleighing instead of driving cars? And as long as Bill Phillips’s Moving Company just down the way from us kept using horses, we’d be all right.

  Father took his place at the head of the table. “So, what trouble did you two get into today?” He liked teasing me and Mama, how we whiled away the hours tickling the ivories and painting pictures. This wasn’t all we did; in summer we grew flowers. In the centre of the table was the green vase that in spring would spill over with tulips. The pink carnival glass vase on the mantelpiece held a big bouquet of dried Japanese lanterns, but in summer Mama would fill it with peonies the dark red I imagined Mary Pickford’s lips would be. The one thing missing in the movies was colour, though half the fun was guessing up the colours things would be in real life if I could have seen them. The yellow of Mary Pickford’s hair, the blue of her eyes. A swamp’s green, quicksand’s brown. The movies’ black and white made me crave colour. It made me hungry to paint everything as bright as it looked in my mind’s eye.

  This evening Father wasn’t in the best of moods polishing off his supper. He hardly spoke, but when he did he sounded tired. “It would help, you know, if you two brought in some extra with your painting—maybe get a move on this year with your cards?” Rising from the table, he put on his suit jacket. He had to be at the Majestic before the doorman, Ernest Hatfield, got there for the early show. Mama and I would mosey up later on for the late show. I’d decided I wouldn’t mind seeing Sparrows again before it left town.

  I hoped Emery Allen might have the same idea.

  I thought then of the first time I ever laid eyes on the man. It had been a week earlier at the Majestic Theatre—my brother was managing it then. Every other night Mama and I went to the movies; we could because we had passes. Father helped Charlie take tickets, making a little extra dough when the harness-making business no longer kept Mama in quite the style she liked.

  Even pushing sixty, Mama would dress to the nines in the very best from Peter Nichol’s Clothing Store. That evening, a thick fog off the harbour frizzed the curls that escaped from under her fancy hat—it was one of those late autumn but mild-ish nights when the sea salts the air and people can barely see two feet in front of them, which suited me all right. I was as dolled up as could be, wearing a beaded headband with a flower on it—all the rage, Mama said, which was good and bad. Pretty as I felt wearing the headband, it wasn’t like I hoped to draw attention, holding onto her arm.

  Sitting in our special seats before the house lights dimmed, I felt like Mama’s sidekick, hardly soothed by the bag of penny candy in my lap and certainly not by the gossip being whispered in the seats below and behind us. About who was sick, who was dead, who had run off or got run out of town for bad behaviour. Folks were used to seeing Mama and me together selling our cards door to door. I was relieved when the pianist came out and sat at the piano, and the curtains parted and white script filled the blackened screen. We had waited a good while for Sparrows to come to town, though in Yarmouth new features came and went three times each week. The music was Mama’s favourite part. I liked music too but not as much as I loved Mary Pickford.

  I’ll never forget that movie. Mary’s beautiful little face soon filled the screen. She was playing a girl named Molly tending a flock of kidnapped kids, fighting off the evildoer Ambrose Grimes. He was some bully, even for the movies, leaving poor Molly scared and sad, cradling a sick baby after saving herself from being chucked in a swamp. A tear slid down Mama’s face when the baby died and Molly dreamt Jesus took the baby to heaven, and later on I would understand why. But all I could think of, watching Molly pray, eyes raised up so sorrowful, was Aunt teaching me that prayer “Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep, If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” I wanted no such thing.

  Mama and I let out a belly laugh when Molly head-butted Grimes into the quicksand. When she turned around and saved him, Mama gasped: “No! Wha’ did she do that for?” I didn’t answer, I knew it was too soon for the bully to die and that things would have to get worse before they got better and Molly and the kids could live happily ever after. The whole audience cheered when they got rescued. The man just ahead of us laughed out loud when the rescuer asked Molly about a husband and she said, “Ain’t never got married, it’s just me and the kids,” like that herd of youngsters had simply hatched. At the end, when Molly played the piano and sang “Shall We Gather at the River” with the kids joining in, Mama hummed along. She was still humming as everyone poured out onto the sidewalk, where she got swept ahead of me.

  Trying to catch up, I stepped on someone’s heel. “If you’d pick your chin up off the ground and watch where you’re going, maybe you wouldn’t walk like you got two left feet!” I had to crick my neck up to see who spoke, a girl who’d been ahead of me in school. I’d lost track of her when I quit. All at once a nice-looking gent came
up to us, the one who had been sitting in front of me and Mama. “What seems to be the problem, gals?” He wasn’t an awful lot taller than me, and even with fog swirling through the street lamp’s yellow light, as he bent closer I saw he had a face that would stop a clock. He had friendly eyes, and as I gazed up at him he smiled. I held out my candy bag, its paper already damp from the fog, nothing but a Chicken Bone, a humbug, and a licorice baby left to pick from. “Help yourself,” I said.

  The mean gal gave me a disgusted look and slithered off. All I could see of Mama was the paleness of her hat drifting towards Forest Street. Our house on Hawthorne was but a hop, skip, and a jump down the hill—that’s how close we lived to the Majestic, that’s how lucky we Dowleys were. One street below us was Water Street and Baker’s Wharf where ships from all over docked and departed from. Never a dull moment, living there. But until that moment, nothing in my life had been half as exciting as looking up into this fella’s eyes as he opened the bag, picked out my last three candies, and popped them all into his pocket. “For the road, eh.” The fingers that had dipped into my candy bag smoothed his hair’s sleekness. As he smiled I caught a whiff of pomade sharpened by the salty air. It had got colder. Any minute now rain would slice through the fog. How big and white his hand looked, his face, too, once we moved out of the yellow light.

  “Yarmouth gal, are you?”

  I don’t suppose he noticed that Mama had vanished. She often raced me home; there was nothing for either of us to be scared of walking alone that short distance after dark, and I could manage it just fine.

  “Who’s asking?” Without too much trouble, I raised my eyes to meet his, batted my eyelids like Mary-Molly. “The Prisoner’s Song” came into my head, the hit song about someone wishing they had someone to love them, someone to call them their own.