The girl has a hard time believing this is true. The light was so beautiful. There was nothing sinister about it, or the marsh, as far as the girl is concerned. It was like a giant firefly, all golden-green.
“Iris!”
Tamar’s yell pulled her from the vision. Tamar was leaning down into her face, and vigorously shaking her shoulder. At first she was confused, as the mundane world of the kitchen came back into focus. Then, for one second, Iris felt a flare of anger. Tamar had severed her connection with the nameless girl. How dare she!
“…there, I thought you were having a fit,” Tamar was saying. She was so loud. Even the bracelets she wore were irritating. “What were you doing?”
Iris found herself unable to speak. Words wouldn’t come. There was no real way to explain the glorious link she felt, or the vividness of the image. She knew Fiona, her thick brogue, her homely warmth, her thrilling stories of the Old Country. She could smell the marsh air, the salt, the sweet, the sulfurous.
Tamar didn’t wait for Iris to speak, though. She grabbed the piece of paper she had written on. “What the hell is this?” Tamar said.
Iris looked down at the paper. It was covered in ink, in some places quite thickly. At first she couldn’t make sense of it. It was a mix of fluid lines and squiggly ornaments, endlessly mirroring themselves. Here and there, through the spiky jungle of black ink, were bright spots of fuchsia. The color seemed to burn through the paper.
Iris said, “I’m so sorry, my love. She is here.”
Tamar looked confused. Then she said, “You mean the Colored Spirit?”
Iris said, “Look.”
Her finger pointed towards a face, hidden in the riot of black and fuchsia. It was in the web of Iris’s work. For now.
19: Ensemble
Xavier
“He just used Magic Markers,” said Gladys Winston as she handed Xavier a cup of coffee. “Nothing fancy.” Mrs. Winston (née Quarles) was in her late sixties. Her silver hair was pulled back by a scrunchie. It contrasted nicely with her dark skin. Her face was unlined, but her neck was wrinkled. She wore a blue floral muumuu and flip-flops. Xavier could smell the flowery, old lady perfume she wore; it was the same as his own grandmother’s. Mrs. Winston had been excited over the phone to show him her father’s work. “It’s at least as good as that stuff in the museum,” she'd told him. “But they don’t want it because of his one mistake.”
Xavier couldn’t disagree. Hosea Quarles’s work was spread out on the living room coffee table. All of the work was contained in several oversized scrapbooks, with each page encased in plastic. Hosea’s chosen canvas was graph paper. Xavier sat on the plastic-covered sofa, sorting through the images. Lenski had not done the work justice. The shapes of the letters were somewhere between cuneiform and hieroglyphics. The wedge-like shapes almost became recognizable forms, like the head of a blossom, or the crescent moon. Like all of the Shimmer artists' work, it was both carefully crafted and woefully amateurish. Was that supposed to be a feather? And that weird, ridged shell-thing kind of looked like a small A. Also, Xavier knew that this scrawl of bright marker wasn’t just a meaningless jumble of pseudo letters. What did they mean? Were the letters invocations, or praise songs? Or were they a curse, a malediction, or a warning? There was a tropical sensibility to the shapes, one that summoned a vegetable heaven, a fungal realm that grew in his mind. He felt ants move beneath his skin, and then, a rain of cold needles like bad acupuncture piercing him.
“Do you mind if I take some pictures of these?”
Mrs. Winston consented. As Xavier snapped pictures, she said, “You know, he wasn’t in his right mind when he did it. None ’em were. In my humble opinion.”
“How do you mean?”
“It was a cult. At least, that’s what my mother said.”
1958
It started with James Olds, the bottle tree artist, Gladys (Quarles) Winston told Xavier. He was a loner who lived in a trailer out by the marsh, where his house faced the old Whitby manse. He was a strange man, who lived what would now be called an ‘off the grid’ lifestyle. Mr. Olds was a peculiar-looking man. He was tall and bony, and he walked with a pronounced limp. He’d served in the Korean War, and the feeling was that when he came back, he wasn’t right in the head. Rumor had it that he had been dishonorably discharged on a morals charge. You would see Mr. Olds limping around town and back to his marsh-side shack all the time. People called him the Scarecrow of Shimmer. Even to his face! And he didn’t seem to mind at all. When she was young, Gladys just just knew him as Old Scarecrow. He was friendly enough, though he would mutter to himself on his many trips back and forth to his ramshackle home.
Mr. Olds began collecting glass bottles one spring. All types: soda bottles, medicine bottles, wine and liquor. He would roam around town with a battered shopping cart, picking up bottles from trash cans and behind stores. Sometimes, you would see him along the highway shoulder, picking them up, muttering to himself. Some people saved bottles for him, and gave them to him when he trundled around. Gladys’s father, Hosea, was one of those people. Hosea Quarles was a heavy drinker. Her folks went through bottles of gin and whiskey quickly. Her mother, Doreen, would always have a drink ready for him when Hosea came home, a g&t or a dirty martini. Both of them smoked, as well. Gladys didn’t have friends over because she was embarrassed by her perennially tipsy parents. (“I don’t drink or smoke, to this day,” she told Xavier.) Luckily, her parents were the jovial kind of drunks.
One evening, Scarecrow dropped by and Hosea gave him an empty Johnnie Walker bottle, the kind that looks like a genie’s bottle. The two of them got to talking—about the current war (Vietnam) and the one they’d both served in. (Hosea had been stationed in Germany the same time.) When he wasn’t mumbling to himself, Mr. Olds was quite charming and intelligent. He had strong opinions—about civil rights and the current direction of the country. Hosea eventually asked him, over cigars and bourbon, what exactly Olds used the bottles for. Olds responded by inviting Hosea to see for himself. “I don’t get very many visitors,” Scarecrow said.
Later that week, Hosea did just that. Scarecrow’s house was a silver Airstream that he kept shiny so that when the sunlight hit it just right, it blinded you. It was small inside, with barely enough room for two people. Scarecrow had to stoop down because he was so tall, and Hosea was a big man, built like a football player. The inside of the house was as spotless as the outside. That’s when Hosea saw the bottles Mr. Olds collected. They were transformed.
Some were painted, both in solid colors and patterns. Some of the painted bottles had shards of glass, beads and sequins affixed to them, and others were wrapped what looked like wallpaper or gift wrap. One bottle was affixed with shells, and another had the delicate mouthlike flowerets of a marsh-bell encrusted on its side with wax drippings. All of them were in the same palette range, a purple-red color. The color of sissies. Hosea thought these crafts were beautiful, in an odd way. He said so—the first part, about being beautiful, not the part about being odd.
“What inspired you?” he asked Old Scarecrow.
“I’ll show you,” he replied. “And you will see it, or you will not.”
“See what?” Hosea Quarles was a no-nonsense kind of man. To him, the most beautiful thing in the world was a car in perfect condition, the engine purring like a cat, the paint job showroom shiny and flawless, the chassis architecturally sound. He wasn’t into artsy-fartsy stuff, or mystical mumbo jumbo, and this statement was too close to that for comfort. In the end, though, Hosea was a polite man and let Old Scarecrow lead him to the ruins of the old house on the edge of the marsh.
It was still standing, but it was in poor repair. The front veranda was more or less intact, though it was covered by creepers. More of Old Scarecrow’s bottles were lined up against the house. Maybe fifty, or hundred or even more. All of them had a section that was painted or woven or stamped on with that magenta color. The color of lilacs, azaleas, bougainvillea, and the marsh-b
ell orchid. The color was so intense that it glowed through the darkening twilight.
“James, why are we here?” Hosea asked.
“Watch,” Old Scarecrow replied, pointing toward the marsh. “And stay quiet. She don’t show herself to everybody.”
Hosea was on the verge of saying something, but what would be the use? The Negro was crazy. The rumored morals charge floated up in his brain, so he made sure that Old Scarecrow was always in front of him. Old Scarecrow just gazed out at the marsh as the sun set. It might have been an hour. Every time Hosea got antsy, Mr. Olds said something like, “It won’t be long, now.” Thankfully, the nights were getting much longer so they didn’t wait for too long before the sky darkened.
After a few minutes, Hosea said, “I’ve waited long enough. I have to get home to my family. I promised Gladys that I would read a bedtime story to her, and…”
His voice trailed off, because he saw it.
What was it, though? It was a floating light that moved through the marsh grasses, heading toward the house. It moved delicately like a dandelion’s seed head, but it was as bright as a firework explosion. He couldn’t keep his eyes off it, as it cut through the marsh. The ball of magenta light never reached the veranda. It hovered a discreet distance away. It stayed there a good while, as a thousand unasked questions piled up in his head. He thought it was beautiful, a lacy filigree thing. He thought of Tinker Bell, the tiny fairy from Peter Pan. Then, he thought that he was going insane, like Old Scarecrow next to him. Maybe it was contagious.
After a while it—she—left, and skittered across the expanse of the Shimmer Marsh. She moved through the air as if it were water, and she was one of those bioluminescent deep-sea jellyfish.
“I have to leave,” Hosea said as soon as it (she) winked out. Old Scarecrow said nothing as he walked Hosea back to his car. He didn’t think about what he saw as he drove home. What was there to think about? What he had seen must have been some trick. Maybe Old Scarecrow’s mobile home had some sort of weird gas leak that caused hallucinations. Or the orb was just some kind of mutant lightning bug. Back home, Doreen asked him what had happened at James Olds’s house.
“Negro is nuttier than a fruitcake,” Hosea told his wife. “He turned all of those bottles into some kind of arts and crafts kinda thing. He believes that some ghost woman told him to make them.” He neglected to tell her that he might have seen the ghost woman.
Doreen said, “I don’t want that man in our house anymore. He’s harmless enough, but he could go psycho at any moment. I’ve read all about schizophrenics.” (Doreen read True Crime magazines avidly. There was a stack of them in the john.)
Hosea agreed with her, and put the matter out of his mind. When Old Scarecrow came around, he left the wine and liquor bottles in the garbage. The old fool could get them from there if he wanted them so much.
Most of the year passed by without Hosea Quarles thinking about the weird incident. He had a couple of dreams about the will-o’-the-wisp thing, nothing too major. Nothing Doreen or Gladys knew about. He developed a distinct dislike of the color magenta, though. He outright told Doreen that one of her new evening gowns, which was that shade, was ugly. Doreen returned the gown the next day. Gladys went through a pink phase, like most girls her age. Every now and then one of her toys or barrettes strayed into that color range, and he felt the mildest discomfort.
Gladys expressed interest in piano lessons that year. Every Saturday morning, Doreen drove their nine-year-old daughter to Edna Wray’s house, which faced the Shimmer Marsh but was still in town. Doreen went up to New York for a Broadway show one weekend, and instead of sleeping in, Hosea had to take his daughter to her lesson. The lesson only lasted one hour. Mrs. Wray welcomed him to stay for the duration in her kitchen, where she had coffee and some danish he was welcome to have.
There was a curio cabinet full of dolls in the living room on the way to the kitchen. It was something that he wouldn’t have noticed, save for one thing. All of the dolls wore outfits all in that ghastly pink-purple color. Hoop skirts, pencil skirts, ruffled blouses, evening gowns, all of them, lurid magenta. All of the doll women were Negroes. He could see that some of them had been white, blond-haired porcelain dolls, but someone—Edna?—had glazed their skin brown.
She don’t show herself to everybody.
Hosea found himself standing in the Shimmer Marsh. He knew that it wasn’t the real Shimmer Marsh, because the colors were too intensely saturated, as if someone had painted upon the grasses and waters, making them luminous. Also, there was no humidity in the air or wetness by his feet. The water was clear as crystal, the muddy depths smooth as a swimming pool bottom. Fish swam in the water, minnows the color of gold or silver coins, trout with iridescent scales, and catfish the size of a child. Birds glided through the mauve sky, eagles and terns and herons. The grassy islets were inundated with marsh-bells, their circular multi-trumpeted heads rising above the marsh grass like miniature suns.
Also, he wasn’t alone.
The doll woman, Scarecrow’s pink orb, they were the same. The woman was young, not more than twenty, and her hair was a wooly dark bush. The shape of her hair reminded him of the clumps of leaves in baobab trees in Africa. Her hair had the same witchy, organic quality.
“Who are you,” he said, even though he knew she wasn’t real.
She told him.
The words blew past in strange shapes. It went by his ears in a storm of petals, color and sound that he could only just grasp.
“…Daddy?”
Gladys’s voice bought him back to Edna Wray’s living room. He was so disoriented, he wobbled on his feet.
“Have a seat, Mr. Quarles. Gladys, go and get your father a glass of juice. I have orange juice and lemonade in the fridge. Go on, now.”
As soon as Gladys went into the kitchen, Mrs. Wray said, in a low tone, “You saw her, didn’t you?”
He didn’t bother to deny this. Instead, he asked, “Who is she?”
“She’s an angel, of course!”
Just at that moment Gladys returned with the glass of juice, which Hosea gulped down in a hurry and left Edna’s house. Back at home, he thought, The swamp drives people crazy. Then he thought, What if Edna is right? What if she is angel? But angels don’t travel in pink bubbles, like the Good Witch in The Wizard of Oz. Mostly, though, he wanted the whole business out of his mind.
But as hard as he tried, his mind kept drifting back to that tranquil technicolor marsh, to that orb, to those dolls and those transformed liquor bottles.
***
“Daddy began drawing the things not long after,” Gladys told Xavier. She was a wonderful storyteller, and chose the right words with the precision of a jeweler. Xavier could practically see the story unfold in front of him, like a movie. “He only drew on Sundays, because, you see, he thought that she was angel, just like Edna Wray said.”
“Did Scarecrow—Mr. Olds—think she was an angel?” Xavier asked. He sipped the tea Gladys Winston provided. The teacups and saucers were all milky green Jadeite, something that Dr. Giordano would geek out about. He was into Populuxe aesthetics.
“I don’t think that he did think she was especially divine,” Gladys Winston said. Her eyes weren’t on him. “He thought that she was a nature spirit of some kind, connected somehow to the marsh-bell orchid.
“Anyway, the three of them became as thick as thieves. They would hang out at the old Whitby place, waiting for her to visit them. I guess she was a kind of a muse to them. A spirit that inspired them to make artwork.”
“What did other people think of their work?”
“Bear in mind, Xavier, that Daddy wanted to keep this secret, and, to a certain extent, so did Mrs. Wray. She believed that they—Daddy, Old Scarecrow and herself—were chosen, like Biblical prophets. Like Job and Jonah and Ezekiel. Old Scarecrow thought of his art as a gift, custom made for her. Not to be shared. And Daddy, well, he thought he was writing down the words she’d say to him, during his visions. Wor
ds in a forgotten language.”
Xavier thought about the Mystery cults built around Greek and Egyptian deities in ancient times, or the secret ceremonies of orixa worshippers. He’d seen YouTube videos of people speaking in tongues, their bodies controlled by invisible entities.
“Did he ever talk about them—the visions?”
“Not to me. But there was this one time… Bear in mind, I was little, maybe eleven or so, and I overheard Mama and Daddy fight. She’d accused him of going off the deep end, like James Olds. And Mrs. Wray had always been a little off since her husband ran off with a white woman. She would insist that she was a widow, even though people saw him down in DC with his white girlfriend. He told Mama that he had to keep drawing. ‘She’s telling me her story,’ he said. I never forgot that.”
Xavier flipped through the scrapbook. What story did the words tell?
“That’s when Mama called the group a cult,” Gladys continued. “She said that the marsh woman had driven Edna Wray and Old Scarecrow crazy. Now, it was driving him insane. Daddy was stubborn, though. He accused Mama of being a shrew, and kept on visiting the Whitby mansion. Mama canceled my piano lessons; she thought Mrs. Wray was a bad influence.”
“So, it was a kind of…artists’ salon they had there, out in Shimmer Marsh?” Xavier could see them all working on the porch of the decayed mansion, waiting for the woman’s spirit to manifest.
“I guess,” Gladys replied. “I just know Daddy and them other two hung out so much that kids at school used to tease me. They said that Daddy had a screw loose. I even got into a fight with a boy once. Got sent home, and everything!”
“Why did your dad—Mr. Quarles—burn down the Whitby manse?”
“He told me why years later, when Mama had passed.”
***
Every time he worked on his art, Hosea Quarles would see the marsh and the sole inhabitant of it. He could more than just see it. He felt the breeze on his skin, smelled the salt air. Each sensation became another shape in the magenta woman’s strange alphabet, a shape he was compelled to commit to paper. Edna Wray described her moments with the magenta woman as sacred. The dolls she made were avatars in her honor, a way to thank her for blessing Edna with her presence. And James Olds talked about the magenta woman as if she were his girlfriend.
A Spectral Hue Page 17
