by Molly Gloss
“She is a Pole,” the painter said, standing back in admiration of his own work. “A pious Polish girl, though I’ve drawn her as she is now, not pious at all but an innocent, an angel, restored to Genesis.”
This was not quite what Marie-Lucien had been thinking, but near enough that he murmured, “Eve in Paradise.”
The painter corrected him, in a tone of surprise, “Yadwigha, after death. Do you not recall how we watched her soul float up to the clouds?”
Marie-Lucien grappled through memory until he remembered the young woman lying dead on the bank of the canal, naked under the stares of half a dozen men. “It was only you who saw . . . ,” he began to say, but the painter was already going on, gesturing toward a Louis Philippe sofa that was evidently the model for the chaise in his painting. “She has been posing for me here, every night. Her spirit has attached itself to me, which I suppose is due to my catching sight of her as she departed her body. Poor girl drowned herself out of grief.”
Marie-Lucien said, smiling very faintly, “So not as pious as all that, if she killed herself. God condemns the suicide.”
The painter brushed this away with a gesture. “God condemns no one, it’s the priests who are always in a mood to condemn.” He gazed at his painting in silence. “The girl had suffered greatly, her husband and child dead in an overturned taxi. How can we condemn her for finding this world unbearable? I should have found it unbearable myself, years ago, and ten times over, if I weren’t a bit of a spiritist.” He turned to Marie-Lucien with a smile. “Art is the confession of its maker. You shall have to look at my art, to know why sadness has not grabbed hold of me in its teeth.”
It was Rousseau’s nonchalance that offended Marie-Lucien, and caused him to remember suddenly a remark the painter had made, a remark about the pleasure he took from reading about drowned bodies hauled from the river. At the time, he had been distracted from it; but now, recalling the tone and the words, Marie-Lucien said bitterly, “What do you know of unbearable? of grief? of great suffering? When you have lost your wife and your son, as I have, then speak to me of unbearable.”
The painter gave him a startled look. “Oh my dear M. Derain, I am sorry to hear of it. Sorry to hear of it. Your poor heart.” He draped his arm across Marie-Lucien Derain’s shoulders and drew him close.
But this was the beginning of the end of their friendship. Marie-Lucien took work soon afterward with a neighborhood pork butcher, and seldom found time to join Rousseau on his morning visits to the pleasure gardens. They carried on their evening explorations for a short while, but ended them after an argument: when Marie-Lucien objected to hearing another tale of ghosts, the painter said to him that people who had never dreamed when fully awake were loath to admit the realness of dream; and Marie-Lucien took this badly. Afterward he merely nodded when he passed Rousseau going in or out of the apartments, and if the painter spoke to him, he replied in as few words as possible.
In January during a spell of cold, bright weather, Marie-Lucien began working very late helping the butcher render fat, and one night climbing the stairs after midnight carrying scraps of meat for the cat and the dog, he passed the painter’s open door and saw a naked woman posing on the Louis Philippe sofa, her arm outstretched and beckoning, her pallid body clothed in moonlight. The woman, who may have heard his steps on the landing, turned to him a face not beautiful at all but transparent and luminous, lit from within; and then she resumed her pose, fixing her gaze perhaps on the moon that he could not see but which he imagined must be visible through the apartment window. Her expression in profile was difficult to interpret, her mouth seeming at the verge of amusement but her thick brows intent and straight. The painter, too, turned and stood very poised and erect, one thumb pushed through the hold of his palette, his brush held down in the other hand. The look he gave Marie-Lucien was a questioning frown of expectancy and joy; but they did not speak, and Marie-Lucien continued up the stairs, his heart thudding. When he sat down inside his own apartment the animals came immediately into his lap, and he rested his trembling hands in their fur.
In March, Marie-Lucien heard from M. Queval that the painter had hung a new canvas at the Société des Peintres Indépendants, a painting of a naked woman dreaming on a Louis Philippe couch. Word later went around the neighborhood that this new painting had brought Rousseau a flurry of minor attention, and the admiration even of other artists. When the pork butcher took his wife to the salon to view it, Marie-Lucien stayed behind and kept the shop open.
Often, during that winter, he heard the painter’s voice in conversation with himself or with his paintings, and from time to time the voice of this or that visitor. Twice, Rousseau gave parties to which Marie-Lucien was invited, but which he did not attend, parties at which the host played his violin very badly, and Marie-Lucien heard rising up through the floor the sounds of people applauding and laughing at the same time.
After the second party, the painter knocked on Marie-Lucien’s door to plead poverty and beg twenty-five francs. “I imagine if you had saved all the money spent on parties, you would not need to beg from your friends and acquaintances,” Marie-Lucien said to him, after he had given over the twenty-five francs. He had not wished to be the man’s friend or to be invited to his entertainments, so could not quite account for the sound of bitterness in these words. The painter was not at all taken aback. He kissed Marie-Lucien on both cheeks and said fondly, “My dear, you are like a brother to me,” which Marie-Lucien felt to be a grandiose figure of speech.
In the months afterward, he seldom saw the painter. Once, through his window, he watched Rousseau limping up the street to the apartments, appearing so sickly and pale that Marie-Lucien was struck with a moment of remorse; but then, to M. Queval who was standing on the front stoop, the painter complained in an aggrieved voice that he “suffered greatly” from a phlegmon in his leg. These were the same words he had used, speaking of the drowned woman, the very words that had begun their estrangement—that she had “suffered greatly”—and when he heard them, Marie-Lucien turned away from the window.
In September he opened his newspaper and was startled to read that the painter had died. Le Petit Journal was famous for the brevity of its reporting, and spent only a few lines to say that the minor artist H. Rousseau had died of a blood clot after surgery to remove a gangrenous leg; and that he had belonged to the Salon of the Independents, where he had paid twenty-five francs a year to hang his canvases.
It had been many months since Marie-Lucien had visited the Palmarium or the Orangerie. On the day of the painter’s burial he walked through the hothouses slowly; and then went into the menagerie. A jaguar trudged in circles, dazed and ill, in a narrow box where he bumped into all the corners; the lion reclined in a stupor. As Marie-Lucien was going out again, he turned to see if it was Rousseau he had glimpsed going in one of the other gates, though of course it was only a man with a thick mustache, a sickly complexion, a slight limp.
He stopped at a newsstand to buy a copy of Le Soleil for the obituaries, and read as he was walking back to the apartments that Rousseau was “a painter without any of the notions required by art”; and that his friends had spoken of him as a man of generosity, credulity, and good humor. His living relations were a daughter Julia, and granddaughter Jeanne; he had been preceded in death by two wives and six of his seven children. In the painter’s last days, Le Soleil reported, he had become delirious: had spoken of seeing angels, and of hearing their celestial music.
When Marie-Lucien, climbing the stairs, passed the open door of the painter’s apartment he saw a woman standing inside, a woman he remembered having seen twice before. She was standing in front of an unfinished painting, standing unclad as the figure in the painting, which was a figure of Yadwigha herself, her dead body lying beside a stream, watched over by the wide eyes of lions and monkeys. The ghost of Yadwigha turned to Marie-Lucien with an expression innocent as a child’s; a look of expectancy and of joy. And then she was a woman Marie
-Lucien had never met nor heard the painter speak of, a woman in black crepe, the painter’s daughter Julia. Behind her in the unfinished painting, death’s bright angel ascended through the impossibly blue sky.
The Blue Roan
AS SOON AS THEY HAD the cast on my leg I loaded the mare in the trailer and drove down to Jim’s place in the Indian Valley. I was overnight getting there, on account of my leg would swell up every little while, working that stiff clutch, and I’d have to pull the truck over to the shoulder of the road and prop the cast up on the windowsill or the dashboard and let the ache ease out of it for an hour or two. In the morning, in the town, I asked an old man standing in front of a store if he knew where the Longanecker farm was and I went where he said.
The house I took to be Jim’s stood most of the way up a hillside, above a flat, milky creek. There was a long slope of plowed ground between the creek and the house, and a woman working an old tractor across the field, towing a harrow. I don’t think she could have heard the truck over the tractor noise, but maybe she saw the dust we raised going up her lane, because she looked around sudden from under the brim of her hat and then shut the tractor off and stood down from it and walked up across the plowed ground toward the house. It wasn’t much of a house. The porch was rotted so it leaned downhill, and the roof had club moss along the eave edges. There was no barn, just a cowshed with manure piled up under it, and a lean-to at the end where she stood her tools. There was a post and wire fence that went around a couple of acres of grass and weed. An old pickup with a fender gone stood in the yard under the only tree.
There wasn’t any bridge going over the creek. I had to ford the truck across. I took it slow on account of the trailer and the blue roan, but it was a shallow crossing and the rocks were cleared out of it so the trailer didn’t buck too much getting over. The woman had beat me to the house and she was waiting for me when I got up the hill. She had her sleeves rolled up and was hugging herself so I could see she had rough red hands and rough red elbows, but her face under the hat-shadow looked smooth and fine-skinned, only a couple of pinch marks where the corners of her mouth tucked in. She had her hair drawn back in a knot but there was a thick bang of fuzz just under the edge of the hat and more of it leaking out at the neck. She maybe cussed that hair every day, too much of it and all frizzed like that, but it was a good color, gold-brown as wheat, and I can’t say I minded the way it made a sort of halo around her face. She had on filthy jeans that fit poor, but I could see why Jim would have married her.
I stayed in the truck. “I’m after Jim Longanecker’s place,” I said across the windowsill. “I wonder if this is it.” I was pretty sure it was, and as soon as I spoke his name those little tucks by her mouth squeezed in.
“Jim’s gone rodeoing,” she said, in a short way.
I had to ask her; I didn’t want to tell it to the wrong woman. “Are you Mrs. Longanecker?”
She watched me, holding her head straight and keeping her arms folded up on her chest. “I’m Irene Longanecker,” she said. “Who are you?”
“I’m a friend of Jim’s. I’ve brought down some news.”
Her mouth flattened out a little. It wasn’t a frown, but as if she had got tired suddenly, and she spoke like that too, with a flatness. “Where’s he at now? Lakeview?”
There was a big ark of cloud sculling across the sky above the ridge beam of the house and I looked at that while I took off my hat and sleeved the sweat-edge on my forehead. “The news I’ve got isn’t good,” I said. I had quit watching her, but I could see from the tail of my eye she had raised her head back a little out of the shadow of the hat and now she had one hand flat above her eyes to shade against the glare. “Jim’s dead,” I said. I had meant to say Your husband Jim has been taken from you—I had planned it, wooly and formal and old-fashioned like that. But I didn’t remember until right afterward, so it came out straight and maybe sounding a little hard-boiled, though I wasn’t feeling that way at all.
In the three years I’d known Jim he’d only come down to this place maybe a dozen different times, two or three weeks at a stretch during the off seasons. But he would get a letter now and then with his name spelled out in a spiky woman’s hand, spelled all the way out, James Thomas Longanecker, like there might be more than one Jim Longanecker anywhere. And Jim used to speak of his wife like he spoke of his good bird gun or his handmade saddle, like she was something he had that he was proud of. So when I told her he was dead, I didn’t know what I ought to expect.
She watched me a minute without moving, with the edge of her hand against her bangs to shade out the sun, and then her mouth moved again, slipping down in that tired way, but there wasn’t any sound out of her and the face she made wasn’t grief. She began to shake her head like she couldn’t believe it. She didn’t say anything to me, she just shook her head half a dozen times and then turned around and went up onto the leaning porch and cracked the screen door back and went inside.
I sat quite a while after that, creasing the edge of my hat with my thumbs, and then I eased my cast out of the truck and set down on the dirt and stood up. I held on to the door of the truck and stood there looking across the plowed hill to where the tractor waited in front of the harrow.
• • •
The boy came from behind the hill, driving the cow and calf ahead of him. I could see him watching me while he switched the cow into her little shed, and for a while after that he stood by the buildings just looking down the hill at me. I thought the woman might come out to talk to him but she didn’t. Finally he drifted down and stood at the edge of the field, watching me fight the tractor across those furrows, but he tired of that pretty quick and began to sidle up to the mare where I had let her out into the fenced pasture. She was soft-gaited, that horse, and light in the mouth, sweet-tempered and willing as any horse I’d seen. And she had that pretty roan color, that dark charcoal hide veined with while so it showed up blue, like the bluing on a new gun, and where the boy stroked her long stretched-down neck there was a shine I could see, bright as metal. Jim was killed on account of I loved that horse too much, I guess. So after a while I couldn’t watch the boy with her anymore and I called to him, “She’s testy. She’s been known to bite,” and heard it come out hard-boiled again. The sun was high up and hot and sweat was itching over my ribs and my leg was aching all the way up to the hip. I don’t know if he heard me over the tractor, but he gave me a look and went back up to the cowshed. He was maybe seven or eight years old. There was a ditch in his chin, just like Jim had.
Before too long, the woman came out and she said something to the boy and then came downhill to where I was. She had her sleeves rolled down now and her hat was gone so the sun lit up her hair like it was burning along the scalp.
“Dinner,” she said. “You’d better come in.” She didn’t come any closer than the edge of the furrows. She just shouted it out so I’d hear her.
The boy and I took turns at the outside faucet. I didn’t know what his mother had said to him and I was afraid he might ask me something about Jim, but he just washed his hands real slow, looking at me sidelong, and then went ahead into the house. I stayed out a while, wetting my hair and combing it back smooth, and I left my hat in the truck when I went inside. The woman was already sitting, spooning food onto the boy’s plate, and it felt like quite a while before she looked up and saw me standing in the door.
“Sit down,” she said, and that was the last thing anybody said until the meal was done, though the boy kept sneaking looks in my direction. When the woman began to clear the plates, the boy pitched right in. That left me sitting there, so I made as if to help too. She said, “You can go on out and sit in the shade. I’ll be out in a minute,” and stuck her chin toward the door. So I went outside. I stood a while. Then I walked back down to the tractor and started in at the harrowing again.
After a while the woman came out. She walked down to the edge of the field and said something. I couldn’t hear what it was so I shut off t
he tractor, and she walked across the plowed ground then, until she was standing right next to me.
“Thank you for the harrowing. Most cowboys don’t like to do that work at all.” Maybe she meant it as a complaint against Jim, but if she did I couldn’t hear it.
I said, “My folks were farmers. I used to know my way around a tractor pretty well.”
She nodded as if there was a meaning in this. “Well, I can finish it now. I appreciate you helping out.”
There was a little speech I had readied while I was driving down here overnight. I said it now. “I’d help you out a while, if you want. I can finish up this field, get it put to seed. Or whatever else you need done. I can’t rodeo much with this broken leg but I can do a little farming, I guess. I don’t mind working for bed and board. I expect there’s room for me to sleep in your toolshed, and I eat about anything.”
She gave me a look, like she was hunting for something in my face. Maybe she was just making sure it was a true offer. Then she ducked her head and said, “I guess you’re Glenn.” That caught me short and I must have looked it. In a minute, watching me, she said, “Jim wrote that you were his friend.” I’d seen Jim sweating out a few letters all right, but I’d never figured he would put me in one. I wondered what he had written. I don’t know why it made me feel itchy.
“What killed him?” she said, so it came straight out without a warning, and I was caught short again.
I bent my broken leg up and rubbed the knee above the cast. I looked at my hand, my fingers working at the knee. “A horse kicked him,” I said. “I guess he didn’t feel it. At least that’s what they said.” She didn’t say anything to that, so after a while I let out a little more. “I couldn’t make it here right away but I came as soon as I was able. It happened Wednesday night. You don’t have a telephone and I didn’t think the news ought to be put in a letter if it could be otherwise.” I thought it over and then I said, “I can drive you up there tomorrow if you want. Or tonight.”
