Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  “That’s right. You can have this brat of yours and I can foot the bill for it and for you and life will be grand, just grand.”

  “I love you, Emery. I do. I always will.”

  “Hope so. Hope you’ve told your other fellas the same. Do they know about your little problem? I’d suggest you tell ’em, each and every one. See who steps up to home plate, eh?” He slapped a dollar on the counter and stood up. I reached for his hand again.

  “No one needs to know we did it, put the cart before the horse. We can tie the knot quick as can be. It’ll all come out in the wash, you’ll see. A fella and a gal in love! There’s not a minister or judge wouldn’t marry us.”

  Emery bent down and kissed me on the cheek. “In love, that’s us.” Then he said he was leaving for the Grand Banks but would be back before Valentine’s Day, we’d have the wedding I wanted. “The wedding of your dreams,” he promised me.

  “Don’t suffer in silence. And don’t be a stranger,” Aunt said when I married Ev—though she was the one who became a stranger, at least to me, keeping her distance though she only lived up the road in town. “We all have our crosses to bear, Maud,” she would say from the time I was small. Mama said it too, though not in those words. She was always, “Be grateful for what you have, not ugly about what you lack—we’re all better off looking at things in that light.” Though Mama’s words did not always match her behaviour, she was right, without fully knowing it, perhaps. The older I got, the more I learned just how right Mama was. When did bellyaching ever make things better? Unless you have something good to say, zip your lip, my brother used to say. He was a good one for spouting clever sayings while elbowing me in front of Mama.

  I wished he was around to give Carmelita Twohig what-for.

  For his part, Ev had even sounder wisdom: “Whatever you hear bandered about, consider first who said it. The source, I mean, who it come from.” The character of the gossiper was a yardstick for measuring the truth. “That one’s got an axe to grind bigger and different from the next one, and the next. Mark my words. Everyone around here’s got some bee or other up their arse.”

  Aside from his choice of words, it was hard to find fault with what Ev said, considering the Miss Twohigs and Constable Colpitts of the world and how they liked to pry.

  “In their bonnet, you mean, don’t you, Ev?”

  “That too. Nah, up their arse. Don’t argue.”

  So I didn’t. I had learned a long time ago not to argue with Ev or anybody. In this spirit I knew it was best to keep the constable’s visits under my hat, and not give another thought to the complaints he had mentioned. Because of course Ev was in the right, just as I am sure Bradley Colpitts was in the right about other things, things not having to do with us. Of course, in their own mind everyone thinks they’re right. Look at Carmelita Twohig.

  Up here looking down, there’s not a whole lot in the world to make me see different.

  I know what it’s like to tell a fib now and then, when you’re not sure what the next person wants or expects to hear. I mulled all of this over after the constable left.

  I don’t doubt that those gals who complained about Ev felt some need to tell their fibs, maybe even had reason to. People lie all the time, often without even knowing it. Sure, they had mistaken Ev for another fella. I am not saying men who do bad things to women don’t exist, they do. But every one of us bends the truth from time to time, through no fault of our own. That’s just being human. What good was it to fret over other people’s lies I could do nothing about?

  Their lying would blow over. Just like a spell of dirty weather, wait five minutes and it would pass. As long as I lost myself in my painting I would get along all right, Ev and me would get along all right.

  Telling myself this, I got out my crow painting, such as it was, and surveyed its smudges of green and the black and blue lines I’d added the last time Ev had made himself scarce. It was all I could do to dab on one round brown eye, an eye that seemed to watch me. Then I must’ve dozed off because next I was dreaming of June. The backyard was a cathedral of blossoms. Lilac, apple, mountain ash. The ground was decorated with lady’s slippers, starflowers, and tiny, bristly white flowers that looked like dolls’ hairbrushes. Such beauty. When I came to, Matilda’s painting sat unchanged—how I wished my dream could’ve painted itself upon the board and filled her in, too. But I harkened back in my memory to my first summer morning in Marshalltown, the longest day of the year 1938.

  I had followed Ev out back while he turned the ground to plant seed potatoes. I’d ducked under the trees’ fresh-green umbrella, longed to get down on all fours to smell the carpet of starflowers under the spruce, figured if I did I mightn’t get up again, not without help. I didn’t like asking Ev for help; even back then he did enough for me already. It was up to me to hold my own, bad enough he’d married a woman about as useful as tits on a bull.

  Ev had finished his planting, then he’d come over and helped me get onto my knees. Kneeling beside me in the grass, he’d picked a tiny white starflower, twirled it between his fingers before he flicked it away.

  Batting my eyelids, I’d made my Mary Pickford eyes at him. “Don’t suppose you’d pick your wife a bouquet.”

  His forehead was smudged with dirt. He’d wiped it with the back of his hand, tugged his cap down, swatted the black flies brewing around us.

  “Pick it yourself. What, you can’t even do that?”

  And I realized then that I had no call to expect Ev to be anything other than himself. Himself, and not like Mama picking a big bunch of peonies to make me smile, or like Father bringing Mama a bouquet of mums for her birthday. I figured the only bouquet Ev’s mother had ever received, and that Ev had ever picked, was a handful of coltsfoot from the poor farm’s yard.

  Sometimes I fancy myself a wildwood flower poking up from the dirt somewhere.

  You can’t fault a person for being wanting—for failing—at something about which they haven’t two clues to rub together.

  “‘The Lord is my shepherd,’” Aunt had prayed along with the preacher at Mama’s funeral. “‘I shall not want….Thy rod and thy staff comfort me.’” Make my rod a brush and my staff a can of paint, and work was my lord, shepherd, and personal saviour, I had decided to myself. Aunt would have withered in her sturdy, low-heeled shoes at such blasphemy.

  If she’s anywhere handy I expect she still would, wither, that is.

  Meanwhile, I have to laugh, thinking of the constable asking after my staircase.

  Funny, in my early days up here I would hear a song down your way about a “Stairway to Heaven” blaring everywhere. Snatches of it drifted up from radios, cars barrelling up and down the highway, and from kids sitting on beds picking out its tune on guitar. The melody had a nice lilt until the singer’s keening ruined it. That singer was no Hank Snow, I can tell you. But for a while it was like that song aimed to outdo the wind, in these parts anyway.

  Now—depending on where I park myself, like a seed on the ground or hovering at the mercy of the wind—silence rules. A whole darn orchestra of quiet. The air, the earth underground, rocks, tree roots, the tiniest grubs—treats for Matilda’s great-great-grandchildren—each and every one of them sings out to me loud and strong. You are dead a long time, goes their song.

  But, speaking of longevity, they say a crow can live fourteen, fifteen, twenty years. The murder I’ve seen flitting from the trees up on the ridge and down around where the house stood must be three and a half generations removed from Matilda. I wager they’re Matilda’s stock, how they’ve gone forth and multiplied! Steadfast and quiet—by quiet I mean keeping to themselves, the way I did. The quiet of birds, flowers, grass, and trees consoled me after Mama passed, these things became my best friends. So how could the quiet of the grave not be my reward? From what I’ve seen, humans are awfully noisy beings; for all their sweetness, children might
be the worst. Take that crowd that called in that cold March day, those parents and their three troublesome kids. Squalling to shatter the peace. Don’t try and tell me they didn’t take delight in gawking at Ev and me. Those wee gals might have been dressed like chickadees but they had hawks’ eyes. Truth be told, I was happy that morning when Ev stepped in and got them out of my hair, taking them out back—their mother, too, with her uppity look.

  If only I’d told Constable Colpitts about this when he brought it up. But it’s hard to think straight when you’re put on the spot. When someone casts a cloud over you.

  Certainly, the day of my funeral in North Range cemetery was not the first time clouds gathered over Ev and me. Storm clouds fit to darken the sunniest days the same way noise dims silence. Though, granted, down where you’re at, calling silence quiet sometimes sugar-coats it.

  A person has got to be plenty careful what she pays attention to, more careful what she heeds, and even more careful what she says. Like the saying goes, See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.

  “The man is the boss,” Ev had told those CBC folks. They had a good laugh over Ev’s talk. Oh, Ev liked joking around, liked it even better when people listened to him. He liked having their full attention. I figure those men were just as happy hearing him put into words what a lot of men thought back then but didn’t say.

  Now Ev’s silence is deeper than the worms’ tunnelling. It’s the sound of bones turning to dust, of birds and raccoons scratching at the grass above for insects. Sharing the ground as man and wife, our bodies are more as one than when we lived day by day, cheek by jowl. Jawbone to jawbone, rib to rib. If Ev has a voice, it might be the very dirt he sprang from, thin dirt that’s on the stony side. Meager as his means always were—who can fault a man for what he is born to?

  I do hope he saved himself some cash choosing that little coffin for me. Any sensible person knows it’s a waste of good wood burying it in the ground. Though, looking to find fault, Carmelita Twohig and even Constable Colpitts might have something snarky to say about Ev putting me in a small box: Figures, doesn’t it, after the way he kept you in that tiny house? Why, I would tell them if I could, Ev just wanted me to feel cozy. And by the way, I am on the lookout for the constable; he might be up here too for all I know, as they say cops don’t live the longest lives. Anyways, I wager it cost Ev more to bury me and have Maud Dowley cut into the headstone—my name before he made an honest woman of me—than he spent on my thirty years’ worth of cigarettes. And that is saying a lot!

  My name before he saved me from myself, Ev liked to say.

  10.

  Brighten the Corner Where You Are

  “‘Nothing is new under the sun,’” Aunt used to read out, in love with her old Bible. “‘The rivers keep running into the sea, the sea never gets full.’” That about describes this otherworld, where time means nothing and the wind never blows itself out. Time doesn’t stand still nor does it crawl like it used to sometimes in my corner where flies buzzed and swarmed, and the summer heat and smell of turpentine and old piss made my head ache. The only cure then was a slow, sweet drag on a menthol cigarette, the smoke filling my lungs as cooling as a dip in the sea or holding a wrist under cold water. In your world, I had given myself over to time’s crawl, what choice was there? If there had been a choice I wouldn’t mind hearing about it.

  Before I wound up planted in North Range’s rocky soil, there was the hospital. I guess I should tell you about that. I laid for what seemed a dog’s age, running out of breath in a bed with sheets like fresh snow. Lying idle afforded time to mull over the long and short of my life, including the looming prospect of winding up in a box for all eternity. Weaving in and out of sleep, I dreamt of being wrapped up like a painting and carted off to the post office.

  I dreamt of walking with my secretary in the woods on a snowy evening, like in a poem I heard recited on the radio. In the dream, snowflakes were stars sifting down from a purple sky. We walked arm in arm, singing. Secretary knew all the words to “Stairway to the Stars.”

  I woke to the stink of cleanliness, a vexation after the smells I was used to, the smells of home. It was like waking up in a snowdrift. There were women in the room, some lying in beds and two on their feet dressed all in white. Ghosts, I thought at first. Angels, Aunt would’ve said. Nurses.

  “Where’d you say I am, again?”

  Their hands smelled of white ointment. They rolled me from my one side onto the other. Pain clamped down. Their voices racketed above me like blue jays’.

  “Jesus Murphy, she’s no bigger than a minute, the poor thing. Nothing to her, is there, besides skin and bones. Look at the bruises.”

  “From falling into things? Eats like a bird—don’t you, Missus?”

  “I’d say she’s near starved. Do you suppose keeping her light made her easier to lift?”

  They shifted me like a little piece of driftwood. One gal was named Darlene, the other was named Carla. Darlene’s laugh was like the tinkle of icicles falling from the eaves in a March thaw. Except this was in summer, four years after that March I was telling you about, with the dirty rumours and the chickadee girls. The ceiling was white with dots more plentiful than stars on the clearest night—more dots than the sky had stars viewed from beyond Hardscratch Road, the way I fancied the stars would appear if you lay in a meadow with the man of your dreams, and looked up, way up.

  Or the way the stars would shine through a car’s windshield on a cold, clear autumn night, driving past Frost Park with that same man, your beau.

  All of that was more than a horse’s age ago.

  You want to see stars, you have to get away from Yarmouth town with all its bright lights, this man told me. Get away from the coast where fog makes everything grey. Riding the crest of a thrill, I would have gone star-gazing any place that fella would’ve taken me, anywhere he asked me to go. Yet, if not for him, I most certainly would not have ended up living in Marshalltown or buried in North Range cemetery. I mightn’t have kept on painting, and I most certainly would never have taken up with Ev Lewis.

  Valentine’s Day came and went without any word from Emery Allen. By then I was three, nearly four months gone. Even the curse had abandoned me. Mornings, I took to laying in bed till the queasiness eased—it was an empty feeling like I needed to eat more, or was coming down with the flu. Please, not the flu, I kept telling myself. I didn’t want to think of all the people who had died from it after the war, like Emery had mentioned that night under the stars, that night that seemed like ages ago but was only a season past: “If the war didn’t kill you the flu would.” I had thanked those very stars that night that he had dodged death by both means.

  I marvelled at how easily my body had tricked me. Then again, it had let me down before. The same way the aches in my joints did, the flutter in my belly followed me everywhere. It was a ghost, and to think such a fluttery, invisible thing was to blame for Emery’s disappearing, which it must be—though I still could not convince myself that he had disappeared on purpose, that he had chosen to. He’d been lost on the Grand Banks, had fallen overboard. He had drowned and was buried at the bottom of the deep dark sea. Or, a schooner’s boom had swung about and struck his head, knocked all sense from it. He was wandering lost around some strange port town, not knowing who or where he was. Or, he had somehow found his way home to Upper Woods Harbour where an illness worse than flu claimed him, or some invisible injury from the war.

  It’s possible he had injuries I didn’t know about. I’d never really gotten a good look at his body, not all of it.

  Desperate, I wrote a note—To Emery Allen. Meet me at Frost Park, the bench under the biggest chestnut tree, this Friday, 2pm—and slipped it through the slot in the Belvue’s door.

  The next day a blizzard hit. The light through the kitchen window whitewashed Mama’s face as she eyed me. I’d just devoured two slabs of porridge bread sla
thered with butter, was slicing a third when she cleared her throat. Her look passed from amusement to horror, the same as when she saw someone fall into quicksand in the movies. Her mouth opened but nothing came out. Then she said, “I would say your eyes are bigger than your belly. But that’s not the trouble, is it.” Her voice was hard; it had the same bitterness as when she had caught Charlie hiding liquor in the cellar, lugging bottles back and forth right under my sunroom perch. “There’s something ailing you. It best not be what I think it is.”

  The anger in her voice sucked the air out of me.

  “Why, Mama...what are you getting at?”

  “I know that look, when someone’s expecting.” Looking away, she dropped the teapot lid, it broke in pieces, she started to cry.

  Sleet pinged the windowpanes.

  Until that moment, the jam I was in hadn’t fully sunk in.

  “When, Maud?”

  “When what?”

  “Your last—your monthly, when was it?” Not looking at me, she dried her tears, she didn’t care to hear my answer. Suddenly she was all business, the way she acted with people who balked at paying full price for cards. Five for a quarter. You don’t know quality when you see it? “Don’t even try lying to me, missy. What in Job’s name were you thinking, getting yourself up the stump!?”

  That’s a funny way of putting it, I wanted to say. Like a she-bear had gone and climbed a tree that was about to be chopped down. The bitterness in Mama’s voice stopped me.

  “Wait till your father hears. You have ruined your life, my girl. No man will want you now. No man buys the cow if he can get his milk for free! No man wants second-hand goods, let alone damaged ones. Now you really won’t be able to show your face outside this house.”

  Ru-inned, she said, not “roont” the way she usually said it. She turned her back, scrubbed tea stains from the lidless pot so furiously I thought its spout would snap off.