Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  “Emery Gordon Allen.” He reached out his hand and shook mine. I tried not to flinch when he squeezed it. “You must be—?” He spoke like he knew who I was but wanted to play around a bit, draw out this pleasant little interlude.

  “Miss Maud Kathleen Dowley. That’s M-a-u-d, no ‘e.’”

  “Okay, I get it. What’s the deal going to the movies by your lonesome? Or was that old lady you were sitting with your ma?”

  “Might be.”

  “Looks like she forgot about you. Guess I should walk you home—don’t live far, do you?”

  Just then Charlie came outside for a smoke with Joe Bent, the electrician who moonlighted as the projectionist, before they closed up for the night. Father had gone home when the show started, to get ready for work next morning and put on the tea Mama liked having before bed. My brother stood there talking to Joe; if he saw us, he didn’t let on. By then Charlie had his own apartment across Main Street, where he lived with his first wife. A good thing, because I wouldn’t want to sit at breakfast next morning with him asking who “the fella” was.

  He had to have seen Emery talking to me, the two of us heading down Forest Street.

  A fella fixing to save me from my life as a shrinking violet, a crippled one at that, I imagined Charlie teasing. Truth be told, I was neither a shrinking violet nor a cripple, not quite. Just because my chin was tucked and I kept to myself, maybe folks took me to be scared of my own shadow? Maybe you know how people can be, thinking they know better than you what makes the person inside the body they’re gawking at, tick.

  Emery didn’t walk me all the way home, but came close. At the corner of Hawthorne he said “Adios!” Then he darted across Forest, hurrying in the direction of the Belvue Hotel next to Sweeney’s store. I stood there and waved. He turned around once and waved back.

  When I let myself in, Mama was at the piano picking out the tune for “His Eye Is On the Sparrow.” “Where’d you get to, my girl? Out there in the damp, you’ll get a chill.” She gave me a mysterious smile as she went upstairs to bed.

  If I’d known then what I know now, I would have said, “Mama, there’s a lot worse you can get than chilled.” It wasn’t till I lived in Marshalltown that I knew what chilled meant. How could I have known my meeting Emery Allen would be part of what happened to send me, signed, sealed, and delivered, into that chill and into Everett Lewis’s stringy arms?

  That night a full week later, after we washed up, Mama set out the paints. We only had a couple of hours to spare but two hours was better than none, she said. “Seems your father figures painting ought to be more than a hobby. We’ll see, I guess, though Christmas is a long ways off. But it wouldn’t hurt to get a batch of cards made before folks buy elsewhere. Those Currier and Ives sell like hotcakes at Stirrett’s. We could do some scenes like theirs. Though some people do favour store-bought.” If we got busy now, we’d have plenty to peddle by December. Her voice was half wistful.

  Those two hours dragged as we dipped our brushes until it was time to head out.

  There was no sign of Emery Allen before or after the show. The night would’ve been more fruitful if I had stayed home and painted sleighs and silver bells, though I did love seeing Mary play Molly.

  In warmer weather I painted on the little balcony at the back of the house, just above the cellar door. Perched over the backyard’s drop onto Water Street, it had a good view of boats and trains, people and horses, and teams of oxen coming and going. But now that the weather had turned colder with autumn, I painted in the little room above it. Filled with grey-blue light, the room looked out onto the wharfs and low treeless islands in the harbour, almost clear to the horizon. Best of all, it had a bird’s eye view of the Belvue Hotel just past the Thibeaus’ yard next door and across Forest Street. When it wasn’t too foggy, I watched the comings and goings of men, all kinds of men—sailors from the seven seas, cargo being loaded and unloaded off of sailing ships, boilermen shovelling coal into the holds of steamships, and fishermen from fleets of schooners visiting Sweeney’s store, just up from the piers, to buy supplies.

  I kept my eyes peeled for Emery. I couldn’t help thinking about Molly in the movie, how in the end all she had to do was care for ten kids she didn’t have to birth, living it up in the fancy home of the rich man who’d saved them. All a gal needed was one good fella.

  There was one good-sized piece of wood in the woodbox, and I banked the fire with it. I slid that board ruined with green in behind some rags where Ev wouldn’t see it, rags crammed there to block the corner draft. No sooner had I hidden it than I heard him outside, the wobble of his bike bumping and being leaned against the shingles, his uneven gait on the doorstep. When he came inside, surprise surprise, I could tell he was in his cups. Stumbling over to me he didn’t speak, just bent and, all wobbly, got me into his arms and hefted me up the stairs. It seemed to take forever. A thread of heat followed us as he fed me through the hatch into the attic and then, without a word, thumped back downstairs on his knees and went out again.

  Alone, I peeled off, down to the nightgown that worked like an extra skin under my clothes, then tugged my sweater on over top of it. The bed swayed as I crawled underneath the blankets. A stretch of canvas slung between two poles, it hugged me goodnight. All I could think of was that lullaby, Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will rock. I imagined Matilda sitting on a nice big clutch of eight or nine eggs, blue-green at the small pointy end, two-toned with grey-brown at the larger, rounded end. I imagined them all hatching, the hatchlings getting dizzy the first time they looked down at the ground. When the bough breaks the cradle will fall and down will come baby, cradle and all.

  In nature all is fair game, I thought, though the baby mightn’t approve. I imagined all of Matilda’s hatchlings learning to fly, how thrilled they would be by the view.

  Little did I know then how vast that view would be. Blues, browns, velvet greens, rust reds, snowy white, and the greys of wharfs, roofs, shingles, stilts, and pilings that shops and houses rested upon on riverbanks where the tide ebbs and flows like no one’s business. The tide pays no mind to people’s doings, only to funnelling Fundy Bay’s waters in and out, day after day. As far as the eye can see, the bay is the same silver-blue shimmer as a run of smelts where the sun hits it, pretty as the aluminum paint Ev used to spruce up the range and the ceiling. Both range and ceiling started out shiny as the foil from a pack of Cameos when I wasn’t pressed to roll my own Players or Black Cats, before daily living covered range and ceiling and everything else with the finest coating of soot.

  But can I just say even all the colours of land and sea can’t match the wondrous hue of that little bird in our yard in Yarmouth. When the weather cooled, Father had bought a pretty cage to keep him in and for half a season he’d lived in our parlour. Like in my dream, that bird became my friend and confidante. I imagined his deep blue-green carrying within it all the colours of the rainbow. I imagined him talking: “Maud! Maud!” I imagined he would trill. In my mind’s ear, he had a gift of gab for all the world to marvel at. And so, in a way, he did, and his gift was a marvel to me.

  Until I met Ev, that is.

  That night in bed I let the March wind’s whistling between the shims and joists sing me to sleep, a sweet, gentle chorus. The house sang lullabies all its own without Ev there. Who knew where he had gone, leaving me again? The fact is, I missed him on nights he wasn’t there. Off on a bender somewhere—no doubt this is what a do-gooder like Carmelita Twohig would be only too happy to broadcast. Stories about my poor man passed out in somebody’s barn or field or under the railway overpass up towards town.

  As if I would be crazy to worry about him.

  Of course I worried about him, he was my husband. As with deciding your cup is half-full rather than half-empty, you work around a marriage’s ebbs and flows.

  But that night I was well and truly beat, wha
t with work and visits from troublesome customers—well, in the case of that couple and their annoying kids, the closest thing to tire-kickers we’d seen in a while. So I never heard Ev come back or get into bed, only felt the quake and jostle of him rising in the wee hours, like I told you about early on. The next thing I knew, I was hiding in the moonlight, watching him dig a grave for Secretary’s pickle jar. I suppose he’d scarfed down the contents for a midnight snack.

  Where I am now, I venture to say birds don’t much mess with people, nor do cats mess with birds. They’re both a presence here, one you can feel but not see, happy to live and let live. If Matilda’s here I expect she is the same, with no call to be vengeful. In life, no one but an owl or the odd kid with a pellet gun ever posed a threat to that bird. But she knew how to be my lookout. I miss that. Because to every rule about living and letting live is an exception, and if it applies here, maybe I ought to watch my back?

  I miss watching that crow, I can tell you. Every so often I spy one of her youngsters below, up to no good. But even having wings of my own, wings of a sort, I’m in no rush to swoop or touch down, not for a second, not even on a lazy riverbank or daisy field. Up in the air is where I belong, where most folks belong, truth be told, where they can do no harm—so I like to think. In the pure salt air I’m right at home—high above the smoke curling from stovepipes and chimneys, the smell of fish plants, diesel buses, and trucks bound for the Saint John ferry, and, rare nowadays, the whiff of turpentine and kerosene, spirits that brought light to my nights below.

  Now all is light, no shadows are cast by the swoosh of weightless wings.

  Nope, I would not trade this weightless state for all the tea in New Brunswick. It’s why I was made in the first place, to float above beauty, take it all in. Marshlands, beaches, islands, and the sea are a rolling rug of greens and blues, every hue you can imagine is hooked into it, it’s the prettiest hooking made by the happiest hooker. If there’s a God in charge of all this, that’s what she is, a hooker of borderless rugs. I hanker to see her. Just as, once upon a time, a long time ago, I hankered without knowing it to paint such a view. If a board big enough had existed, if paints could have been had in endless colours.

  But it’s best not to linger on regrets, just as it’s best not to hover over sights you would rather not see. Clear-cut hills, dead stubble on the ridge, thorny fields full of wild asters that tell of oncoming frost, of winter’s cold.

  Every September, those asters were the first hint of these.

  “‘For now I see as through a glass, darkly, but then face to face,”’ my aunt used to read from her old Bible, eons ago. Whoever’s face they meant I hardly gave a hoot, back then. Except, the word darkly gave me pause, because people who laughed at my pictures said I’d forgot to put the shadows in. Like the moon’s dark side, the shadows were there all right, folks just didn’t look close enough to see them. My paintings had all the shadows a person needed: blue on white snow, brown on blue water. The rest of the shadows were ones any fool could guess up on their own. Why spell out something anyone with a brain knows in their heart is there?

  Pretty as the view from up here is, it fetches me back to where I set off from on this otherworldly flight. Looking down, I see the cemetery up in North Range, with its border of old apple trees setting it apart from the spruce woods. There’s the plot with its polished black headstone. That stone is the nicest thing, I have to say, that Ev ever spent our money on. My money, I mean, though he acted like it was his. Wife is carved at the bottom alongside my name, Maud Dowley, not The Wife as some fellas call their women, like they are a broom or a pot. Why, if that Nosy Parker Twohig woman had her way she would tell the world Ev was too mean to credit me as His Wife. That’s my maiden name carved underneath his name and his parents’. Ev’s pa I never laid eyes on, he was long gone to this other side by the time Ev and me wed. I’ll wager Ev’s father was a rougher, tougher nut to crack than Father, who lies in a bigger, finer graveyard full of worldlier folk than most of us buried on the ridge. Your world’s notions of rich and poor, of worthy and unworthy, have a power all their own that would clip anyone’s wings and sink them faster than a bellyful of lead shot would.

  Now I admit at times Ev’s notions got under my skin. “The man is the boss of his wife,” he told those television folks who came to interview us a good five years before I was laid to rest. Ev was happy having some ears to bend besides mine. He was outside my window when he said it—or maybe it was a little bird out there shooting the breeze? “Oh, go on, git,” I’d have said and given him a good hard nudge if he’d made his remark in the house with me sitting there. Then I’d have laughed to show those TV fellas it was best to go along with what Ev said, give him the benefit of the doubt, seeing how he liked talking through his hat.

  They might want to be kind to Ev’s memory knowing what befell him, something nobody on either side of any veil deserves. That was a dark time, Ev’s passing, even darker than that business of him burying things that weren’t his to bury. I can barely entertain such darkness, let alone recount it. It’s an awful helplessness that takes over when your hands are tied—or you’ve got no hands a-tall to intervene with, not even swolled-up, half-useless ones.

  Like the shadows you know are in a picture though they’re hidden, life has its moments you wish never happened. And the urge to keep the peace lasts past the grave, I know, with Ev’s bones laying cheek by jowl with mine up on the ridge. Now, if I were vengeful, I might say as quick as he would, Move over, you, quit hogging the dirt. It was me who paid for this plot of ground, not you. The sound of worms and sowbugs burrowing deep would be the sound of his voice. There you go, hogging the attention, like always. Always were a layabout, not like yours truly keeping you and the house, seeing as you weren’t fit to mind a wood bug let alone a kid let alone yourself. Such teasing might get to a person if she let it. That’s how it always was, Maud. You’re the one you took care of, ain’t it true.

  A more vengeful type would step on those bugs and squish them.

  If a more vengeful person had feet.

  Now here’s a confession. When my parents died, those Bible words after glass and darkly, “but then face to face,” made me tremble with hope that I would see them again. But after being married to Ev the same words would fill me with dread, like I would have to do more time with him just as things were. Even yet, gazing down at the road that winds from Digby to Yarmouth—the road that traces my travel from the grave to the womb—what I see isn’t all bliss. I can’t help glimpsing the scrubby woods where the almshouse stood, and the cage-like monument where our house used to be, handy the crossroads where the road to the ridge meets the highway. Though nothing looks the same as it did in our day.

  I guess no one missed the almshouse after it got shut down and when, sixteen or seventeen years after Ev left Marshalltown, a bunch of hooligans set it afire. Good riddance, folks would say, though Ev might’ve had mixed feelings had he lived to see the place burn to the ground, seeing how he was raised there, and his father and maybe a sister or a brother or two had died there.

  It’s odd to look down upon the land of the living and think of any of us belonging to it. With its spruce-wood hills and overgrown fields, this rolling, ragged-edged county stretches down to meet the county I came from. It’s a quilt with all the world’s colours, and not the kind of quilt that gets raffled at fairs, but stitched of oddments as random as the pickings Ev found on his rounds. No tidy patches, but scraps with selvages as frayed as life gets, though each patch means something to somebody somewhere, living or dead. But this quilt has no neat rickrack borders. Its borders are the ones folks put up in their minds. There are patches for “the coloureds,” as Ev called the people in Jordantown, patches for the Frenchies in Saulnierville, as he called the Acadians, patches for the Indians in Bear River, as he called the Mi’kmaq, and patches for the plain white folks in Digby with its churches, courthouse, hospital, banks, and school an
d nice houses.

  Some think God’s in her heaven looking down at this quilt, like there’s a rightness to it. I would say, Think dirt for embroidery, worn out goods for shacks and privies. Just so you know, on Rag Days at Frenchys I’m a hawk hitched to a downdraft, sighting ladies buying rags by the pound to insulate trailers while their men tinker with cars and cut firewood, like Ev used to, and like Ev on brown-envelope day might blow an entire cheque at the liquor commission, and kids glued to video games scarf down whatever their mamas might rustle up from a can, the way Ev did for me. Sure, now they have Digby Scallop Days and Frenchys springing up all over; the world has changed since I left it. But being country poor hasn’t, not so much. Ev and I weren’t so special. If things had gone a bit different for me, I might have hoed the same row these mothers hoe, or worse. Though part of me—a small part, mind—might have envied these women, once.

  But, like I told those TV folks, so long as I had a paintbrush in my hand I was content. So long as I could paint, I got through what the world dished out.

  How well I got through it, you be the judge of that.

  I don’t aim to candy-coat my time below. What I am saying is, it wasn’t ever so bad I couldn’t stand it. The way I look at it, I was lucky. Which leads me to wonder, though, if a reckoning lies ahead. All your life you’re told you will pay for your fun, I learned it the hard way. I don’t suppose the same goes beyond the grave, in the sweet by-and-by.

  Now, where was I?

  5.

  I Will Lift Up My Eyes

  After Ev caught me out back that cold March night, after he’d put away the shovel and disappeared into the house, I made another quick stop at the privy. Then I paused outside the house to catch my breath and take another whiff of spruce gum. It was tonic for my lungs, as good as a belt of Buckley’s cough syrup. I could have asked Ev to pick some up in town at the Riteway but didn’t like to. It was just as easy to pick some gum off a spruce’s bark and chew on it. It was best not to be fussy, best not to give Ev cause to fret.