Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  Now, years later, as I laid under my flowered stairs, a lot of things went through my mind. I remembered my short, happy visits next door, how eventually I had gone over there, a willing guest. The strange, airy relief I felt coming home afterwards, at being able to leave. For I was privileged, I was blessed. There go I but by the grace of God, Aunt would have said, oh yes. There is nothing like seeing people unluckier than yourself to make you grateful.

  Are your garments spotless, are they white as snow? Are you washed in the blood of the…?

  “You go ahead, you take her up on it, Olive’s offer of a bath,” I had told Ev. “Don’t let me stop you.” I would take meals there, though the thought of lying in the almshouse washroom in a big tub of water with God knows who peeking in through the keyhole was too much for me. But as I lay under the stairs waiting for dawn, and for Ev to come and the pain to go, I took myself back to the dinners he and I ate with the poor and the destitute in the big echoey dining room graced by Olive’s kindness. At least we didn’t have to eat with the lunatics, they ate on their own. The first time we went, then every time after, Ev brought humbug candies for Olive’s own little boys, one for each child.

  “Isn’t that nice. You’re some sweet, Ev. Say thanks now, young fella.” That was Olive nudging her youngest son closer to put out his hand. She was always smiling. Even at dinner when one of the lunatics in the rooms above us took to cursing and Olive’s husband, the warden, had to put him downstairs. I felt just plain cocky being there, like I was tempting fate. Tucking into a feed of boiled dinner alongside other gals who had got themselves in trouble but had their children and no place to go, no one to help them, nowhere else to hide or be hidden. I knew in my heart even that basement room would be kinder than the judgement of folks with no clue how life can be. Uppity folks who didn’t mind heaping shame on those unlucky enough to wind up here. “You remember Everett’s wife, Maud,” Olive would tell the ladies every time, even the ones who weren’t off their heads or indolent, the ones whose sufferings were healed by work.

  At Christmas, Olive brought us gifts of fruitcake and chocolates, and had us over for turkey with all the trimmings.

  I don’t know how she slept in that place, living cheek by jowl with some of those sad cases.

  Under the stairs, darkness tightened around me. Damned if I hadn’t wet myself, the puddle under me going from warm to cold. Are your garments spotless are they white as…are you washed in the…. My head throbbed. I imagined strong fingers kneading my scalp, washing my hair—soap suds sluicing into a sink, swirling away…swirling down a deep drain somewhere as my gumption ebbed before me, and as dawn’s pinkness slowly warmed the floor I thought of a lady’s voice. The lady who had done my hair in Yarmouth. Washed and set and made it pretty. Mae.

  I sucked on my fist to keep from yelping out as the tune from “The Darkest Hour is Just Before Dawn” played through my head, the Stanley Brothers ditty I’d always liked. A peeping accompanied it, a field mouse trapped somewhere handy? Realizing the peeping was coming from me, I whimpered, waiting, breath bated, for daylight. Yet, whimpering, I was still more scared of Ev waking up mad than of him sleeping in. Waking and yelling, “Where the hell are ya? Where’d you get to?” Finding me hiding. Hollering “goddamn this, goddamn that,” how dare I give him such a fright? Like I had stole something of his and snuck off with it, a thief in the night.

  Now, a Carmelita Twohig would say what goes around comes around. And that my lying there in the cold and the dark should have been a warning to Ev of what he had coming, the way he was to meet his maker later on. But just when I was ready to give up the ghost, a string of farts sounded overhead. The boards quaked. The stairs juddered under the weight of Ev’s knees. The wall the stairs were nailed to trembled fit to shake free the linoleum basket of tulips I’d painted and hung there as a newlywed.

  Reaching the bottom, he knelt there. He half looked like he was praying—now there’s a notion. Then he loomed over me in the rosy light. “What the devil? You foolish…hiding on me, what the hell. Like a goddamn mouse. What, the loft weren’t cozy enough? Get up out of there now, you silly—” But his face was pale. He grabbed the wooden spoon off the shelf, gave it to me to bite down on. The spit rattled between his gums as he breathed in. The fear in his eyes was wilder than the panic that rose up in me. His worst fear had come to pass: the housekeeper he had ordered and kept all these years was well and truly pulling a Hank Snow, leaving for good.

  I saw this and more in Ev’s eyes. I saw the boards waiting to be painted, orders drying up, customers abandoning us. In a crazy blur I remembered him burying the jar of money. I remembered the constable’s talk of money in the bank. Even worse, worse for me, I remembered the trailer and my worry that the Light & Power people would cut us off. The Light & Power were my salvation. Now, I had somehow curled deeper under the stairs, eyes shut tight, and I felt a nudge. Ev’s big toe poked at me through his sock. His boots stood before the range like a pair of those china dogs rich folks set before their fireplaces. The folks in Yarmouth who had kept Father in business, whom Mama aspired to know. Imitation being the highest form of praise, she said.

  Now Ev was muttering, like he had come unglued. “What were you thinking, falling? What should I do? Run acrost the road, get someone to phone a hambublance?”

  If not for the pain, his bungled word would have made me smile. I suppose I blacked out.

  13.

  Hello, Central! Give Me Heaven

  A few weeks after my arrival in Digby, Aunt caught me watching Everett Lewis through her parlour curtains. An Indian summer breeze twitched their lacy goods to and fro, but I was careful to keep myself hidden. I didn’t want to cause her any trouble, seeing how kindly she had stepped in to save my sorry skin. If I can save a flibbertigibbet from herself, I can bring a middle-aged orphan to Jesus, she might have thought. The words of that gloomy old hymn “Abide with Me” that we’d sung at Mama’s burial were words Ida took to heart. Why people like that hymn I have no idea, with its dark old valley and shadow of death. Darkness is old hat, everyone knows about it. But maybe Aunt Ida had seen it as a command from God to take me in. Of course, my abiding with her more or less meant being adopted at the ripe age of thirty-six, an age that didn’t just teeter on being over the hill.

  When Everett Lewis came to the door one breezy afternoon a while later selling mackerel, Aunt bought one, then practically shut the door in the man’s face. She caught me peeking out at his shiny old car, a Model T Ford. She didn’t say a word, just bustled to the kitchen sink, gutted the fish, dredged it in flour, and fried it up for our supper. She was saving her breath, I guess, for saying grace.

  “Very tasty,” she finally said when we were almost done eating. “Though to tell you the truth, I’m suspicious about where that fella gets his catch. Says he waits around the wharf to see what’s been landed. Then I suppose he dickers with the fish’men till they can’t take his arguing anymore and let their fish go cheap just to get rid of him.”

  As she spoke, that saying came to me, the nasty one, how company is like fish after two days, it starts to stink. I had been at Aunt Ida’s place more than two months by this time.

  Having got that suspicion about Mr. Lewis off her chest, Aunt kept talking. “He drives a fierce bargain, that one. Last time, his fish wasn’t fresh. So I thought twice today before buying. Didn’t want him lingering, though.” She took a deep breath, eyed my cigarettes laying on the sideboard, and heaved a sigh. “But, there it is, Maud. We’ve got to make allowances for others. If the Lord condemned us on the basis of a single transgression, there’d be no room in hell for another sinner—would there, dear?”

  “Suppose not. If you believe in that stuff.”

  Aunt Ida’s powdered cheeks turned pinker at any hint of doubt. “Well. He’s a queer duck, anyway.” I guessed she meant the fish man, not the Lord. “I suppose it’s not Lewis’s fault. Considering where he cam
e from. His people started out in Bear River, I think, before the poor farm took them in. Unreliable, you could call them. But, you know, ‘there go I but by the grace…. Far be it for us to question or judge His plan.”

  “Plan?”

  Aunt Ida looked at me funny, gave a little laugh, and picked a tiny fish bone from her tongue. “Each and every one of us has a purpose, like I’ve said. Given to us before we were even a glint in our parents’ eyes.” She flicked the fish bone onto her plate. “Who knows what He had in mind for the Everett Lewises of the world. Beat and battered before they leave the womb, then causing more trouble than the rest of us should have to put up with. But there, you see?” A smile spread over her face. “It’s His plan, that the poor and unwanted are here to teach us. That we’re our brothers’ keepers, so help me. Whether we like it or not. The more surly and ungrateful, the more they teach us patience. Like that conniving fish man.” She got up, cut two pieces of pie for our dessert, and poured tea.

  “Everett Lewis. A conniver, is he.” I laughed, risked dribbling tea down the front of the stiff green blouse Ida had embroidered. She had a gift for needlework, she truly did. Like Mama, she liked clothes. Unlike Anne Shirley’s Matthew, and more like Anne herself, or Matthew’s sister, Marilla, Aunt Ida wasn’t shy about speaking her mind. I got up and lit a cigarette. Aunt waved at the air, making no effort to hide her disgust. High in her cheeks were spots of white where their blush of pinkness ebbed.

  “Laugh all you want. But watch yourself.” Ida spoke into her napkin. “That Lewis has got quite the roving eye, I’ve heard all about him. Can’t keep his hands to himself.” She got up and cleared the table. Her silence said we had slipped onto shaky ground, raising things best left unsaid. About people keeping their hands to themselves, or not. People like me and Emery Allen. Sinning in ways that could never be undone.

  The sin of smoking was just the icing I kept slathering on the cake.

  Cigarettes were the devil’s way of keeping me under his thumb, Aunt said. Next I would be playing cards, though probably not dancing. When I smoked upstairs in my bedroom, even with the window opened wide, the late autumn air blowing in, somehow the scent found its way to her nostrils. One day, not long after our mackerel supper, she lost her temper.

  “I’m afraid, missy, if you want to stay on, it’s my house, my rules.”

  I figure you might call this the last straw. I did, though winter was just around the corner. As you know, I had no one else to turn to, didn’t know another soul in Digby. I couldn’t hide my desperation, preferring the devil’s thumb to Aunt Ida’s. Yet, Aunt was so good. One afternoon she gave me money to buy myself some soap at Shortliffe’s Riteway.

  Guess what I spent it on? I remembered too late that she’d asked me to buy milk, too.

  Suddenly, right there in the store, all the past years’ hiding, penny-pinching, and doing without, all the looks people kept giving me—someone’s whispers about “poor Ida what’s-er-name” getting the shitty end of the stick, saddled with “that one from Yarmouth”—it all spilled over faster than potatoes on a hard boil. I could not see living out the rest of my days at Aunt’s. I didn’t have the fare to catch a train back to Yarmouth or even halfway there. And even if I’d had the fare, who would have taken me in? Mae? Nice as she was, I didn’t think so. No, I had run plumb out of options. Maybe I’d never had options to begin with. It wasn’t ever as if I could run away, with these ankles and knees. I’d be lucky if I could walk five miles.

  I had seen the place out in Marshalltown from the train coming up from Yarmouth that day with Aunt. Marshalltown wasn’t even a whistle stop. It had nothing more than the big, shabby building I had glimpsed as we flew by, the place Aunt called the county home. She said every county had such a home. I decided this one couldn’t be worse than Yarmouth County’s place in Arcadia—that forlorn-looking place my family had passed in the buggy the day of our picnic, when I was barely an adolescent. Lingering there in the Riteway, I thought to myself, if they were to give me a bed, a bit of scrap paper and a pencil, and leave me alone, I might get by all right, I might even get used to it. In time. Used to it in a way I would never get used to Aunt’s well-meaning rules.

  The shop girl eyeballed me. “Is there something else you wanted?” Her eyebrows arched when she spoke. Not much taller than me, she had on a soft-looking moss-green sweater. She should’ve guessed I was penniless the way I’d tucked away my purchase, then picked up a can of milk and held onto it for some time before setting it down again. I was thinking how I could follow the train tracks, though it might be smarter to find the road that must run nearby. The pale look of the girl’s eyes helped me work up the gumption to speak.

  “That poorhouse in Marshalltown, can you tell me how to get there?”

  Her voice was as even as if I’d asked where to find the ferry or the fish plant, she sounded so ho-hum. “You aren’t the first person to ask. Guess you won’t be the last, long as they allow visitors. Just head out of town here and keep walking—you can follow the train tracks, then once you cross the bridge, get on the road and watch for Ev Lewis’s shack, and go from there. It’s the big white place next door to him. It’s back off the road a ways, but you can’t miss it.”

  She kept looking at my hands. I pulled my sleeves down over my fists. The cigarettes were safely tucked into my coat pocket. She stared so, I had a mind she would step out from behind the counter to take a gander at my ankles—they were swelled pretty bad, I figured I would be lucky if they got me to where I had to go.

  “How far is it?”

  “Fi’ miles or so? You know Lewis, the fish pedlar? That’s whose shack I meant—you can’t miss it. Matter of fact—” and she pointed to something tacked on the wall near the door. “Have a gander at that—you might get yourself a job, you never know.” Then she laughed and said, “Good luck, honey.”

  I set out walking the rail bed, stopping every so often to sit on a rock or a stump beside the tracks and have a smoke. It was a grey afternoon, early December, not a stick of snow, the trees stripped bare. Tried to pace myself, seeing as it might be the last pack of cigarettes I would ever buy. Did they provide smokes at the almshouse? Something told me they didn’t. But they fed you there and gave you a place to sleep, I’d heard it said. And maybe I would just lie down on whatever bed they gave me and not get up again. In Aunt’s absence, there would be no one to say I had sinned of despair.

  I walked and walked till I could barely lift and set one foot ahead of the other. I had Everett Lewis’s notice in my pocket, I had given it the once-over. He was advertising for a live-in housekeeper. When I came upon his little shanty I almost laughed out loud—what Ida would have thought! The house was the size of a shed. A housekeeper to keep a place that small? And a live-in housekeeper, no less, the same as a sea captain would hire to keep a mansion like the ones on Parade, Cliff, and Collins Streets back in Yarmouth. A big huge turreted pile with servants’ quarters and a carriage house out back.

  Then I thought, Everett Lewis must have a sense of humour, which I figured not every man did.

  As I passed by, I heard a dog bark. Smoke curled from the pokey little chimney. The place was little more than a shack. I wondered where in tarnation a live-in anything was supposed to sleep. It gave me a laugh, anyways, as I limped and hobbled onwards, anxious though none too keen to reach my destination. How much farther was it? How bad would it be? The answers to both questions came pretty quick as I rounded a tiny bend in the road, and there it was, the almshouse—a big wooden two-storey house with a steep pitched roof, four little peaked dormers set into it with one big pointy-roofed dormer in the middle of them, a two-storey wing at either end. The laneway led in a beeline to the front door. There was a rusty-looking ladder on the roof and a little cupola and a chimney that looked ready to fall down. And I stopped at the top of the lane and I looked and looked at it, and thought of the poorhouse in Arcadia and Charlie’s words
, “That’s where you’ll end up.”

  I wager things might have turned out different if Olive had been there back then and seen me and come outside. Or if I had knocked and someone like her had answered, taken my hand and brought me inside. Maybe even if I had gone close enough to peek in a window and get a handle on what it was like in there. If I had spied a smiling person like Olive tending the sick, the poor, the knocked-up, and the feeble-minded, it would have changed everything.

  But nobody saw me, nobody came out to ask what I was after. I was but a crippled ghost passing through the world. Except I had that note in my pocket, real as could be, tucked in with my cigarettes. How hard could housekeeping be in a tiny, ramshackle place like that? At least it would pay, wouldn’t it? Though probably not much, seeing as I had no experience besides baking the odd cookie, dusting, and helping Aunt do dishes.

  At the same time, I got it into my mind that if I went up and knocked on the almshouse door and they took me in, that would be it. The end of my life, really. I might never paint another picture or step out under the sky again, might never get to pick a flower or feel salt fog on my face or pet a cat or smoke a cigarette or suck a humbug or piece of toffee.

  What would be the good of living like that?

  So I turned and shoved off and started walking back the way I had come. It didn’t take any time to reach Ev Lewis’s shack, weary as I was. When I got there, I told myself what the heck, and knocked on his door.