Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  I don’t know where Constable Colpitts was the day the boyfriend brought the watch into the station and set the big black ball that would take out Buzzy rolling against him. The good constable might have been in Florida taking Darlene and the kids to some flashy theme park. I caught wind of a transfer being in the works; they were sending Colpitts to Yarmouth to work with the police there. I don’t imagine Darlene was thrilled about uprooting the family, leaving her job and moving away from her mother and, well, her aunt.

  I never felt the same about Bradley Colpitts after his last visit, and my feelings for him cooled further when Ev got attacked, though it wasn’t Colpitts’s fault the attack happened. Not his fault he was home having a beer and a snuggle with Darlene that Saturday night, a bit more than a snuggle. Quite a bit more, since I saw later on that she was expecting. Who knew Bradley had it in him to be such a family man? He’s a good dad, I have to give him that. I just hope he watches his P’s and Q’s. Being a cop has its dangers and I would hate to see Darlene left to raise three kids by her lonesome. I would hate to run into her hubby up here, by that I mean feel his presence mixed up with the rest of us in all our boundless, shapeless form. Except for folks who wreck their own chances for peace and create one of their own making, I have decided there is no hell. There is more than enough badness down where you are to qualify as punishment, even for the worst of youse.

  Show me someone with no stain upon them and I will show you the Bay of Fundy drained flat and entirely emptied of water. I figure you have to forgive people. What I mean is, never forget what they have done but bear no grudge. As he wolfed down his doughnut while Ev was being beaten, maybe Bradley was thinking about Darlene, wondering if she was happy. Maybe she had a late shift and he needed to be home to put the kids to bed. Maybe he just wanted to sleep. I hope he rested easy. I hope he and Darlene and even Carmelita Twohig rest easy.

  Buzzy, though, has to get up each day knowing what he did.

  One fine April morning, the cop who knew Buzzy from hitchhiking took another cop out to the gas station in Deep Brook where Buzzy was known to hang around. He might have even worked there sometimes filling tires with air or pumping gas, I wouldn’t know. The cops went in and invited Buzzy to go for a ride. They brought him into Digby for questioning. When Buzzy said he didn’t know a single thing about how Everett Lewis died, they locked him up in the little jail for the night. The next day they got Buzzy’s mama and his sister, a friend of the rappie-pie fella, to come in and talk to him. “You’d feel better with all this off your chest,” they said. He seemed upset, maybe realizing those watches should’ve stayed where they belonged, not in the ground, I mean, but in Ev’s house.

  A few months after this, one fine Thursday in July—a full nine years almost to the day after I left your world—Buzzy appeared in court. It was just a preliminary inquiry, they told him, which meant they just wanted to hear what some people had to say. He wore a colourful shirt that his mama might’ve bought for him at Frenchys—like I said, I had seen her going in there the odd day. I would like to say his shirt was all the colours of the rainbow but it wasn’t, not by any stretch. I had trouble looking at him, which is why to this day I wouldn’t be able to tell him from Adam, as Aunt would say.

  “You are charged with the second-degree murder of Everett Lewis in contravention of section two-eighteen-point-one of the criminal code,” the judge said.

  Buzzy might have cried but I can’t say for certain. He let out a choked sound after the judge heard his statement read out and found him guilty. At least he didn’t have to go through a trial, people said. They sent him some place up in the Valley, I believe it was, maybe to some county home, to serve out his sentence. Five years, I think he got, for summoning the Reaper to Ev’s door sooner than the Reaper might’ve come without help. Ev was eighty-five or eighty-six, depending on what he told you. Buzzy was just nineteen, wouldn’t turn twenty till that fall. I don’t suppose they have birthday cakes in jail. Even back then, twenty was still a kid. The judge must’ve thought so, choosing not to send Buzzy to Dorchester or someplace really rough like that.

  Now Buzzy has done his time, like we all do our time, I suppose, one way or the other. He is down there somewhere living his life, only he has to live with that picture in his head of Ev lying there, up until his own death, and for long after.

  17.

  I’m Movin’ On

  I have pretty much laid to rest Aunt’s sayings, even the one about seeing through “a glass darkly, then face to face.” Face to face with whom? I always wondered. But the thought kept me going, that eventually I might roll in Emery Allen’s arms again. Sing along once more to Mama’s piano playing, laugh at Father’s jokes, watch Mary Pickford with my brother—heck, eat dinner with Aunt after church. I hoped we’d all be together, hugging and eating pie. One big blueberry pie with more than enough pieces to go around three and four times, forget twice. I hoped things would look like they did in my pictures, that every wall in heaven would be filled with paintings as plentiful as stars. My paintings becoming what I came to see as my “children” seemed no big stretch of the imagination, seeing how they slithered from my brush, birthed by one fist bracing the other.

  If on this side of the veil more than the wind’s voices lingered. If the earthly side of it wasn’t all practice at losing what you loved to defilement and hurry-up-and-waiting.

  Now the crows’ cawing on the ridge rattles me, would rattle my bones to dust if they weren’t dust already. Even silenced, Ev’s voice goads me at times, almost as bad as when we lived cheek by jowl, though I have more or less forgiven him. Imagine the two of us cooped up in that house! It could have been worse. Your world passes, this world goes on. Somewhere Mama, Father, Aunt, and those friends of mine, Mae and Olive and Secretary, whisper to me. Oh yes, their voices are in the trees, in the crackle of dry leaves under strangers’ feet. Maybe my own voice is an airplane zipping across the sky, though I wasn’t much for travel, content to stay right here.

  But I’m restless now; maybe it’s time to pull a Hank Snow, then shut up for good. Before I do, I’ll give this a try, knowing even as I do, it’s doomed to fail.

  “Aunt Ida?” My voice wisps over the wooded hills. “Can you hear me? I still owe you money. Maybe I should’ve heeded your advice and not gone back to Marshalltown that day or ever. Hid myself away instead, reading the Bible like you. ‘The Lord helps those who help themselves,’ you said. That’s just what I did, I helped myself.”

  Aunt doesn’t answer, of course. There’s only the slosh of waves against the shore, tossing up bits of rope and fishing gear and a shoe, always one lonesome shoe, as though in every cove, every bay, off every coast, some poor one-legged jack has gone overboard.

  “You’ve got two hands, two feet, and a head on your shoulders. There is no reason to take up with that terrible fool,” Aunt had said. In some ways she was right. But it’s a little late to say so, isn’t it.

  I hope wherever he is now, Ev wasn’t watching the day a crew came to Marshalltown with a fleet of trucks, including one hauling a flatbed. They unloaded hammers, saws, and pry bars. Why, after Ev left your world the house had fallen to such wrack and ruin I hate to tell you the state of it after the squirrels and raccoons moved in. The roof rotted, it rained inside, half the ceiling fell in, and the range rusted out. Eventually the critters abandoned the place. Only Matilda’s grandkids could tell you what became of the warming oven decorated with my ruby red poppies—some human critter had made off with it? The wallpaper I had so long ago painted over with flowers and deer and whatnot hung in rags. All the scroungings, scrimpings-and-savings of our lifetimes lay in heaps laced with scat—every cookie tin, knick-knack, postcard, and note.

  The only recognizable thing was my staircase, my stairway to the stars, a stairway to nowhere. I’m still surprised that after I left Ev didn’t cut it up and sell each blue-flowered riser for whatever it would fetch. If he had done, Buzzy
might not have made it to the attic and gotten his hands on Ev’s four hundred dollars. Though I never saw this myself, I heard it said that after I passed, if a stranger came looking for a piece of my art painted on the wall, why, Ev would cut it right out of the wallpaper and sell it to them.

  I reckoned this pack of strangers with their trucks meant no real harm as they set to clearing out the mess of rusty old junk, the rubble of our lives. They set about taking apart my stairs, working real gentle, riser by riser. They numbered and wrapped up each piece in some sort of cloth, like it was bone china, and loaded them all into one of the trucks. Fools, I thought. What good was a staircase in pieces with nowhere to climb to? I figured they’d sell each piece to the highest bidder. What remained of the range was so rusted out they didn’t need to worry about it.

  But, seeing what happened next, if I’d had a heart it would’ve felt like a knife was being plunged into it. They started sawing into the house like it was an empty cereal box. They cut off what was left of the roof, opened the attic to the sky, cut off each gable. Before my very eyes, they sliced the place up into ten big slabs. Mouldering gables, slabs of mouldering wall, both halves of mouldering roof. They took too much care with each slab to be hauling them off to the dump, I thought. Taking great pains, they loaded them onto the flatbed truck. By now the place was practically torn down to nothing. There was just the floor, the linoleum worn to black smudges on the punky boards—land only knows what had become of the mat, maybe moths had eaten it up. A man took a noisy round saw to the floor and cut it up, too, loaded what boards weren’t too far gone on top of all those big pieces.

  Taking a rest, they milled about admiring their handiwork. I guess they were too tired to notice what was lying in the sour old dirt the house had stood on top of. I guess they were in too big a rush to pack up their tools and tie down everything on the truck, to see some broken glass, a few nickels and dimes laying there waiting to be picked up, and something else, something gold. Pure gold, only a little the worse for wear, it looked like to me, after sitting under the house for going on five years, ever since that night Ev was visited by the preacher, then robbed by Buzzy and left for dead. I guess it was a lucky thing Buzzy hadn’t stopped to look under the mat. Otherwise he’d have lifted that board, reached down, and felt the jar below, and I’m guessing he’d have taken it along with the four hundred dollars and those watches. Why would Buzzy have hesitated? He could have given the ring to his mama, or he could have pawned it—then who knows where it would have ended up?

  It was a funny thing that Ev had kept the ring—who knows, maybe he’d forgotten about it till he went to see the doctor. Maybe he only remembered it being buried out back in the jar when his heart trouble and the cost of pills weighed heavy on him. Maybe he had wondered then how much it would fetch. Maybe having it close by gave him comfort.

  It was a funnier thing that those folks so bent on cutting up and carting away the house as though its pieces were precious jewels never thought to look for anything small, shiny, and truly valuable. As the truck lurched off—where they were taking their treasures was anyone’s guess—I had to laugh, even though it was sad. I couldn’t help imagining some oversized child making believe the house was a puzzle, sitting on the floor with his tongue between his teeth as he tried to put it together.

  Curious, I followed the flatbed’s progress for a ways, watched it lumber over hill and dale, past Digby and the dump, and head past Deep Brook. There I let it disappear from view and took myself on a little side trip down the road towards Guinea. I recognized the trailer by the flowery wreath on the door. It was the kind of wreath a person who liked Phentex slippers and skirts for toilet paper dolls might favour. And sure enough, I spied her behind the picture window. The window had fancy-looking drapes and sheers hung for privacy. But I could see into the living room. Carmelita was sitting on a puffy blue chesterfield with a little girl beside her. She was showing the girl how to knit. The child had Carmelita’s eyes and mouth, but, fortunately, not Carmelita’s thinning bluish hair—thinning, I supposed, on account of all the teasing she had done to it over the years. The little girl was having trouble casting on stitches. When Carmelita bent to help her she kissed the child’s hair, took the tangle of yarn and needles from her small hands and set them down. The child wriggled closer, buried her face in Carmelita’s shallow bosom. Then she pointed to something on the wall and smiled. That child had a smile on her that would stop a clock, truly.

  They had the TV on, a wrestling show or something with loud cheering, but listening closer, I could hear them talking.

  “You like Nana’s picture?” Carmelita was grinning from ear to ear. “Some sweet, isn’t it? Some day it’ll be yours, dear. Let me tell you about the lady who did it. A lot of stuff about her pictures didn’t make sense. She was a corker, that one. A character. But you know, all these years and that picture still makes Nana smile. Every time I look at it, I smile inside. Though that lady’s life, oh my, I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Now when’s your mama supposed to come and pick you up? Guess we should pack up your knitting; we’ll work on it next time.” Then Carmelita hugged and pulled the child onto her lap, though the child might’ve been a bit big for this, and started singing “You Are My Sunshine,” some old song like that.

  Seeing this made me happy. Maybe I should have been happy, too, seeing the cut-up house get hauled away. The way some folks would be happy eleven years later seeing the almshouse burn. Little did I know that once Ev’s house got to where it was going, my story would be chained to it, my life and my work like one big keepsake for strangers from all over to buy pieces of, wanting reminders of me. Some look at that house the way you look at a cage. Well, if it was a cage, I tried to make it like one you would put a beautiful pet bird in. An indigo bunting. Or a bird like Matilda, which would have been all right so long as the door stayed open.

  This brings me to the part of my tale I expect you’ve been dreading. That day in the North Range cemetery with Carmelita Twohig and my other mourners gathered in song was the last time I saw Matilda alive. Oh yes, that was her cawing from a treetop all right, I’m sure now that it was, as the rainbow arced over the bay. Now don’t be silly, that rainbow was just a happy coincidence, a sign of gladness, not a bridge or stepping stone to anywhere. Why would you need anything but forgiveness in your heart to get from there to here? Though folks are entitled to feel in their hearts whatever brings comfort, I do hope the daughter I turned away somehow found it in hers to forgive me.

  I never heard Matilda’s caw again after that day. I have heard it said crows can live as long as forty years—only five years fewer than Ev had to his age when we married. Matilda was getting up in years. I believe she was twenty-two or twenty-three years old when I left her world. I was ageless when she left mine.

  Not too long after the funeral, I saw a big black bird laying by the roadside as you head toward town. It must have got hit playing chicken with a transport truck, its poor body was flattened to the pavement. Then I spotted Willard and them watching stock-still from the trees. They were standing guard over the body, hardly making a peep besides that somber nattering sound crows make when they’re rattled but wary of bringing further doom upon themselves.

  I knew then that the dead bird was Matilda. I guessed she never had a chance, stalking a piece of tinfoil tossed from a cigarette pack that had blown to the centre line. A shiny-feathered youngster, a teenage version of Matilda, hopped up to the carcass and chattered a string of mournful notes. “It’ll be okay, don’t worry, little buddy,” I lied, whispering down to her. Matilda’s daughter, she had to be. A bird after her mama’s heart, a bird to make her mama proud, I mean. She flew off in search of safer shiny things to pad the family nest. Before this young one knew it, she would be brooding over her own clutch of eggs, bringing Matilda’s grandkids into the world, your world. A consolation, it cheered me up some from the sorrow of Matilda’s fate.

  All things m
ust pass. No one knows better than I do that it’s true.

  Now, picture my ring laying there by its lonesome on the barren ground fourteen years later, without the house to shelter it from wind, rain, sleet, snow, and thieving men. On the day they took the house away, I was a bird, a bluebird resting atop the telephone wire like Matilda used to, watching the crew’s slicing, dicing, and loading unfold. After the truck disappeared from sight past Deep Brook, after I finished spying on Carmelita and her granddaughter, a cawing caught my ear. Rising above the wind’s whistling, it spoke of an incoming storm. So I let the wind blow me straight back to Marshalltown.

  The treetops swayed, the wires did too. But birds have an uncanny grip; it takes a lot to knock a bird off its perch. I stayed put, looking down on the bruised ground where the house should’ve been. As the wind howled, a crow swooped down out of nowhere and joined me. She was a beautiful young thing, as glossy and clever and quick as my old friend. I guessed by her call and the way she looked up and seemed able to see me that she must be kin. A few generations removed from Matilda, but kin all the same—Matilda’s granddaughter? If that spinster woman Carmelita Twohig could have a granddaughter, why couldn’t Matilda? Before I could do the arithmetic, this black beauty swooped down to where the house had stood and plucked something up in her beak. Something gold and shiny, exactly what a crow would covet. The object’s glint caught my eye as she flew upwards with it. I wondered if Everett’s old mother might have something to do with this. I dare say I near felt the old woman’s presence above the crow and me both, looking down. A warm little gust blew as the crow alighted before taking off again. As her flight stirred the pine needles I spied what she’d dropped in the nest. It was my ring. It wasn’t the only shiny thing up there—Matilda’s grandchild had quite a collection. A key ring, a little length of silver chain, some mismatched earrings, a cat’s collar with a bell. I reckoned that, on the ever-fading and most unlikely chance I ever did meet Ev’s mother face to face, at least I would be able to tell her Ev had safeguarded what was hers, as best he could, from what my aunt would call the threat of rust, moths, and thieves.