Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  Mrs. Lewis kind of smiled at me and nodded. I could feel her looking at my chin, waiting in vain for me to look up at her. There was a pot-bellied stove in the parlour, which threw a good heat. I parked myself as close by it as I could. Then, lickety-split, the preacher joined Ev and me in holy matrimony—though when it came time to slip a ring on my finger, there wasn’t one. “Come with me,” the old woman said, “I got something for you.”

  She took me into the kitchen where a big cookstove threw off an even lovelier heat. The sun coming through the windows made the wainscot’s light blue look buttery soft enough to sink into. But I pulled my mind back into the room where I stood with Everett’s mother. “I figure I ought to be grateful to you,” she said, but didn’t explain why. I only reckoned it was because mothers of sons liked to see their boys fixed up with a steady companion, even if their boys were old goats. “Better late than never, eh?”

  I figured by this she meant Ev’s giving up his bachelorhood. “Oh yes.” The same goes for me, I almost said, but remembered Father’s advice about keeping your trap shut: better keep it shut than put your foot in it. I wasn’t about to confess to being “damaged goods” or “bringing in the sheaves” of shame and grief. Not on my wedding day.

  “You need a ring, though.” As she spoke, she set about slicing the cake. It was on a plate painted with blue roses, and it had yellowy-pink icing with tiny lumps of butter in it. She took something from her apron pocket. She passed me a sliver of cake on a saucer, and slipped the ring into my other hand. Just then Ev came into the room, the preacher behind him, and she cut slices of cake for them too. “Go on, put it on,” she told me. Ev butted in. “What?” But his mother pretended not to hear, busy straightening the cloth on the table, handing out cake to the two or three neighbours she had invited as our guests. “Your wife needs a wedding band; I’m giving her mine—reckon I don’t need it, do I?”

  And I wished I’d held off on giving the preacher all of Aunt’s money and divvied it up instead, given him just a bit and Mrs. Lewis the rest to cover the flour, sugar, and milk for the cake, not to mention her ring. As Ev grabbed the ring and with no small amount of difficulty pushed it over my knuckle, I hoped her wedded life had been one of bliss, and that her ring would bless mine. Though from what little Ev had told me about his childhood, I imagined his folks hadn’t enjoyed much snuggling and spooning. His dad sleeping in one dorm, his mama in another.

  Before the wedding, I had made myself as comfy as a body could be sleeping on that daybed. Bit by bit I had got better at heating up beans and steeping tea for Ev’s suppers. “I am giving you a week,” he’d said at first. “You got to pay your way or you’re out.” At the end of that week he’d said, “I ought to pack you off next door and maybe they’d learn you how to cook!” Then I made him a stew with fish he brought home, had it bubbling away when he came in from chopping wood. He liked it well enough he ate the entire pot.

  No matter how much Ev ate, he never lost his look, like a hawk hungry for whatever moved. He was always ready with a complaint: “Now I got two mouths instead of one to feed!” The same way he hadn’t figured on any housekeeper worth her salt taking one look at the place he lived in and saying, “Forget it, buster,” he hadn’t figured on me getting out my paints or setting myself up in that sunny corner, as far from his chair as I could get. The house was so small, the only thing that separated his chair by the range from mine in the corner was that hooked mat. When he sneezed, I’d feel the spray. When he picked his nose and flicked whatever he dug out, it would land on me. I was wrong when I’d figured the size of the place would make up for my poor housekeeping skills. “What kind of crackpot you take me for? Hire you to cook and clean and you sit on your arse all day painting? I ought to turf you out.”

  But he didn’t.

  For there was and is more to marriage than keeping house; there’s the part I would rather not think about, and would prefer to forget. After the wedding ceremony, with his mother’s ring on my finger, I sat up beside him in the passenger seat of his old black Ford, and on the drive home, relieved as I was at being spared the almshouse, I thought, Well, you have made your bed, now you have got to lie in it. There’s one duty you cannot get out of.

  Everett Lewis did so have a pot to piss in, it was in the corner by the range, and in the beginning it had a lid, as did the pot he found later to replace the one he buried. But before I followed him up that ladder to bed, despite the cold, taking my sweet time, I crept out to the outhouse. I still had my airs about me, wanting to keep some privacy, didn’t want my new husband to hear or get too close a whiff of my business. In the January dark the air snapped so I thought the pee would freeze as it trickled down the hole. Out in the woods a coyote howled, and in the stillness surrounding its cry I heard the faintest sound of wailing from next door—some poor creature lamenting land only knew what. But I wasn’t scared. You are a married woman, you’re safe now, I told myself. No one can blame you for what you have or haven’t done; it’s all behind you, in the past. You’ve got a man to stick up for you now, a tall, ornery man who doesn’t give a hoot what people think, isn’t one bit ashamed of himself, so why would he be ashamed of you? A hardworking man who thinks enough of you to have made you his wife.

  This gave me the courage to scurry as fast as I was able through the snow and back into the house. It was pitch black inside, except for a skinny crescent of orange light where a lid on the range top was ajar. I went and stood at the bottom of the ladder. For all I knew, Ev might have Joe the hound under the covers for extra warmth.

  But no, Ev was by his lonesome when I climbed up there. He was awake, waiting. Moonlight leaked in through the frost-covered gable window. The air in the loft was as still and cold as the air outdoors, but at least there weren’t wild animals ready to come and tear me apart. Tear us apart. I heard the beat of wings nearby—an owl, maybe, warming itself under the eaves outside. Ev threw back the covers, scooched over to let me into the canvas sling he had rigged for a bed. Foolish, but one of Aunt’s crazy old Bible verses came to me: “Everything is naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account.” Not that these words were any comfort or consolation.

  What passed for bedding was a far cry from the perfumed sheets I had lain in at Aunt Ida’s.

  My new husband was more than ready for me. The cold took my mind off his hands moving over me, his fingers with their crusty nails. I pushed away the thought of cleanliness, of Aunt’s clawfoot bathtub with its turquoise-stained drain. Her songs about garments washed white by blood. Leave it, it’s all behind you now, there is no going back, I said to myself.

  While he did what he did I shut my eyes and lay as still as if I was dead. Maybe it wasn’t all that different from being with Emery, from what I could remember. After a while I opened my eyes and stared at the rafters above Ev’s head, and pretty soon the roof wasn’t there and though my body laid there, I wasn’t really inside it. I was out of my body. I was a puff of cold air longing to touch the nearest star, then reaching out to meet it.

  Till death do us part.

  Afterwards, he rolled over and yanked the blanket up over himself; he took most of it with him. As he started to snore, a stripe of moonlight crossed his face. Watching it through the fog of my breath helped me see him for what he was: a boy inside of an old coot and curmudgeon. A sad boy, a coot with more than one axe to grind.

  I fixed my eye on the real rising star just visible through the ice-ferns on that single frozen pane of glass. Was it the same North Star Mama and I had looked for from the porch on Hawthorne Street, coming home from the movies? I guessed up a ladder unfolding down from the star that I could climb to reach up and grab onto it.

  When the wind blowing in through the cracks finally lulled me to sleep, I dreamt of an orange. It was fresh from the hold of a sailing ship from the south seas, round and bright as the sun. As I sucked its juice its seeds stuck in my teeth. And in the d
ream Ev yelled at me for not saving him some. For he expected me to share it: what’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.

  That orange was the colour I would’ve painted the entire house if I could have.

  Now, Ida used to say when the Lord closed a door, He opened a window. This is what I thought the day I met Secretary, when she rescued me from the roadside where I had fallen. I let her think I’d stumbled while jumping out of the way of a speeder. I didn’t tell her why I stumbled, that being unsteady on my pins was due to a weakness on top of my usual ailments. If I was poorly it was because of what had happened the very night before, a loss that happened only the once in all my married life. Now there’s a cause for gratitude. Granted, I’d had no business being out by the road, like Ev said, and as he would point out once I started getting famous, “Take your life in your hands being out on that road. Only safe spot for you is on your chair.”

  Even up here in eternity, thinking of it brings it back like it only just happened, what happened one night after we’d only been married a couple of years.

  “Ev? Ev?” I had hollered out, squatting over the piss-pot. What started as a cramp brought a flow worse than the curse. Pain was a fist low in my belly, grabbing onto my inner parts and twisting. I’d gone without the curse for three or four months, but who was counting? With no bathtub to soak in, going without was a blessing. My belly wasn’t so sure of this, though. It knew how long the curse was overdue, was keeping count.

  Oh, my belly had known just what to do. Once I was able to, I crawled aside, got on my knees, and raised myself up. I glimpsed it floating there in the pot.

  Ev came running in. He’d been chopping wood, had bits of tree bark on his sleeve and in his hair. He took one look at me and turned almost white. “Goddamn. When were you planning to tell me? Or were you not gonna say nothing and pull a fast one?” He whistled through the teeth he had. “You know I seen this all the time. Gals losing babies. Well, come on, calm yourself. Here, lay down, I’ll git you a cup of tea and take care of it.” He shook his head, half prideful. “Jesus. What were you thinking, bringin’ a kid into this world? I don’t know. It’s better off. We is better off.” Then he laughed, sheepish. Frozen there, like he did not know what to say or do next.

  Yack, yack, yackitty-yack, never quiet, a tongue that never stopped wagging so long as he’d been drinking: this was the Ev Lewis I had gotten to know, had by now grown used to. Yet, in silence he unfolded an old Courier and spread the “Wanted” section over the daybed. For the first time in the two years we’d been wed, he was lost for words. But only for a bit.

  “Now you lay down and stay put. Maybe we oughta git a doctor to take a look at you. Though Christ knows what they charge for that, making a house call.” For he had up and sold his car one day, had done so not long after our honeymoon jaunt to the dump. What was he going to do, carry me to town on his bike, me bundled up and riding crossbar? At least it wasn’t freezing out. But he’d been into the sauce.

  “Nah—I’m all right.” I hauled myself up, leaned against the range, then doubled over with a cramp. I fought it enough to insist, “I’m all right, I said. I’ll be okay.”

  The last thing I wanted was a doctor inspecting me, asking questions. The kind of questions that would lead to the kind of judgements people make whether they aim to make them or not. I imagined what Aunt might say, “The Lord gives and the Lord takes, and makes His punishments equal to our sins. He does no more and no less than use the folly of our mistakes to turn us towards Him.” I had no idea what this meant. But I knew the worst punishment on earth would be Ev finding out about the mistake I had made with Emery Allen.

  Shaking his head, Ev picked up the pot real gingerly, set it outside on the doorstep. It was already dusky out there. He came back in and lit the lamp for me.

  “What are you gonna do with it?” I hated the thought of the contents being spilled down the outhouse hole or onto the ground, the tiny mess of it attracting animals.

  “What do you think?” He clicked his tongue at me, like there was any question.

  “Could you give it a decent—”

  His grimace was the grimace of a horrified boy and a baffled, disgusted man.

  By now the pain had begun to slacken off some. “Wait. Give me a minute, gimme time to straighten up and come with you.”

  “Reckon I can do that.” He sighed long and loud but took a seat. He popped a plug of tobacco into his mouth and tongued it inside his cheek. In the lamp’s jumpy light, from across the room I watched his jaw working. The rest of him sat as still as a deer. His eyes were hard, bright coals in the gloom. “Where would we have put a kid, anyways? Hung it from a rafter?” His voice was half tender, not all the way gruff. “And what if it took after you, got handed all your troubles? More trouble than its life woulda been worth.”

  I bit my tongue so hard I tasted blood. I almost told him then, I almost did, about that other baby, the boy I’d had in Yarmouth that died.

  “Ev?” It was on the tip of my tongue. I did not want his sympathy any more than I wanted the punishment of his anger. I only wanted to tell him so things would be fair and square between us, with no secret separating us. Though land only knows what secrets he harboured and kept from me. I shuddered to think.

  “Well, do you want I should bury it, or chuck it out with the rest?” With the rest of what was in the pot, he meant.

  “Leave it be.” I half expected him to gripe about how we would miss the pot and need a replacement.

  “I reckon down by the brook might be a good resting place,” was all he said. “There’s more pots at the dump.”

  The moment had passed where I could say it, could tell him about my mistake, without him flying off the handle.

  “That’d be real good, Ev, by the brook.” The best of a bad situation, I almost said, recalling Mama’s words twelve years earlier.

  Ev helped me into my coat. His fingers were rough as they accidentally brushed my cheek. Picking my way, I followed him out back. He grabbed the shovel, carried it and the pot through the brambles guarding the path. Giving quiet, gentle yips, Joe followed along for a little while. He helped us make a kind of procession until he saw there was no treat and turned back. The ground was just thawed, it oozed mud. Branches snapped and grazed my face. I kept up the best I could. When Ev had a purpose he could be quick as a fox. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog, I thought crazily, remembering penmanship lessons at school.

  Beneath a slim crescent moon, ignoring the ooze of blood between my legs, I sat on a rock and watched Ev dig a shallow grave and set the lidded pot down into it. Right quick, he scraped and kicked loose dirt and grass over top of it. The thought dug at me, for pity’s sake: if only I had known a prayer to say, any sort of prayer. Not so much for this beginning-of-a-baby as for the one I had felt move in my belly twelve years before. For, most hurtful of all, remembering it made me think of Mama and Father. A cramp seized me, but it was nothing like the ache those words of hers had caused: You had a boy, he was born dead.

  Something stirred from the woods. A big horned owl alighted and peered down from a branch. Its head spun around as it watched us. I was glad Ev was not like that bird, all-seeing and wise. Goodness knows what-all birds would have to say about people’s doings if they could talk. The same went for the moon, curved as an eyelid hanging sideways. My secret was its secret.

  We picked our way back to the house, Ev just ahead, swinging the shovel. Never mind the sadness, I said how the field by Seeley’s Brook was a nice, quiet place to end up.

  It was that, he agreed. “And a good spot for poorhouse-spawn that no one in the world wants.”

  All at once, I knew that I could not keep my secret inside me anymore. I knew what I needed to say, what I was going to say. I didn’t want to say it. But it was like a stranger leapt up inside me and took over my tongue. “I imagine somebody did, want their baby, I mean. Their o
wn real baby, that is.” I breathed in the shadows, real deep, then let the shadows out. “I know it. Because I did, once. Want it. Mine, I mean. When I was a girl.”

  Ev’s face was bent close to mine. I could smell the moonshine. He looked confused. Then his eyes hardened, turned like sharp stones in the brook. “You what? You telling me this mess ain’t your first?” His look burned through me as he straightened up. “So you whored around, did you? Before? Who was the fella?” He raised his hand and down his palm came, grazing my cheek, just catching my nose and lip. He looked at me, shocked, and I guessed he felt sorry. And then, “You shut the fuck up about whatever you did, and I’ll make like I never heard you say it.”

  Later on, after the radio landed on our doorstep, it seemed like every time I turned it on I heard the song “Blue Eyed Darling” by Roy Acuff and his Smoky Mountain Boys. “You’ll always be my blue-eyed darlin’.” Under that cold crescent moon, I searched in my mind for the blue of Ev’s eyes, their twinkle.

  As I wiped blood from my nose, my voice was hardly more than a squeak. “Deal,” I said.

  I chalked everything bad up to his drinking.

  And on the ground at my feet I spied a tiny piece of pink ribbon—a hair ribbon? I picked it up and put in my pocket. A trace of some other woman likely, who’d run afoul of love and lost part of herself by the mud of Seeley’s Brook.