by Ninie Hammon
And if she wanted to paint at home, why in the shed? There wasn’t no windows in the shed. No light. Unless you took a lantern in with you, the only light was from the open doorway, and in the late afternoon like it was, with the sun already gone down behind the mountain, there wasn’t hardly enough light in there to see the rake and the hoe, let alone a canvas.
When he found her in the shed standing in front of the easel painting furiously, he spoke to her. But she ignored him. He spoke again and stepped around to the side of the easel so he could see her face.
Then he knew why it didn’t matter that there was no light in the shed to paint by. Mama was paintin’ with her eyes shut. She had her head tilted back, eyes closed like she was sleepin’ as brushes hurried across the canvas.
Brushes she held in both hands!
How could anybody paint a picture with both hands? It was like watching Mr. Beddingfield play the banjo. T.J. had always marveled at that, watching the old man’s hands, wondering how he could do two entirely different things at once, his left moving around, holding down one set of strings and then another, while his right fingered different strings on the other end. Mama was doing somethin’ like that. Her right hand painted the top of the picture, puttin’ in the frame around a window, while her left hand filled in a table and the beginnings of a bowl of fruit on the bottom. He had watched in stupefied fascination. And fear. He was terrified and he didn’t know why. All he knew was that there was something profoundly wrong about what his mother was doing. Wrong with his mother.
She suddenly dropped both paintbrushes in the dirt at her feet and stepped back from the canvas. Then she tilted her chin back down and opened her eyes. She looked surprised, then stunned and then, like T.J., she looked scared. She stared at the paintbrushes on the ground, at the paint smears on her fingers, as if to confirm that she had, indeed, been paintin’, but it was clear from the look on her face she didn’t have no idea what she had painted until she opened her eyes and seen the canvas.
T.J. didn’t tell Dobbs about that. He didn’t tell nobody. His mother realized he was standing next to her and she told him not to talk about the picture, like the picture was bad somehow, though it was only a simple picture with a table, a bowl of fruit and a window behind it. You couldn’t see nothing out the window, though. It was blank. Empty.
She had taken a cloth then and smeared the still-wet paints until there was nothing on the canvas but splotches of color. Later that day, when the smeared colors had dried, his mother had used white paint to cover the smear so the canvas was blank like it’d been before.
He understood why she might want to use a canvas more than once, though she couldn’t do that when she painted the caricatures of children at the dock, took the dollar bills and the change — she charged a dollar and fifty cents — from the tourists and stuffed it down into the pocket of her smock. Every one of them pictures was painted on a brand new canvas.
“I ain’t gonna never do nothin’ like that again!” his mama’d told him, more like she was making a promise to herself than to him.
T.J. had pushed the image of his mother painting that day out of his head.
Until it happened again.
He saw the shed door ajar and found her as before, gawked at her while she slapped paint onto the canvas in a fury that produced an incredibly detailed picture, much more skillful than the first. But it was the same scene. A still-life of fruit on a table. And a window in the background. But the window was huge in this picture. Much, much bigger. All out of proportion to the table and bowl of fruit, it took up almost the whole canvas. Just like before, the window was blank.
He had sneaked away, didn’t disturb her. Didn’t want her to know he’d seen her do what she had swore she wasn’t never gonna do again.
The third time she done it he didn’t see her actually painting but went into the shed and saw a canvas with wet white paint sittin’ on the easel. Two days after that, he met Dobbs in the woods to tell him about his mama being “different.”
Dobbs tries to be positive about it. He always tries to look on the bright side of things. He doesn’t see no harm in what she’s doin’, even if it is a little odd.
T.J. can’t seem to convey to his friend the strangeness of it all, the otherworldly quality of his mother standing there with her head thrown back, swipin’ paintbrushes in a frenzy over the canvas, completing an entire picture in minutes.
And so he goes home, packing one of the Matchbox cars from Dobbs’s collection. It is a Ford Mustang, bright red, with miniature doors that actually open on both sides. It is Dobbs’s favorite — well, they’re all Dobbs’s favorites. But he shoved it into T.J.’s hand and told him to take it home to play with overnight.
T.J. knows Dobbs is as mystified as he is by Mama’s behavior, even if he tries to put a good face on it. He gave T.J. the car to try to take his mind off things, to make it better somehow. It’s a simple gesture, but so heartfelt T.J. took the car in silence, saying nothing because he had a lump in his throat.
So now T.J. sits, runnin’ the car back and forth across the floor in front of the window in the beam of sunlight that will disappear in a few minutes when the sun passes behind Big Bear Mountain.
The sudden, high-pitched, wailing shriek that rips open the late afternoon silence so startles T.J. that the car leaps out of his hand and flies across the room.
He does not remember leaving the house, crossing the yard to the shed or throwing open the door. He is simply sitting with the red Mustang with the doors that actually open in his hand and then he is standing in the doorway of the shed and he has no sense of the passage of time in between.
In the shaft of sunlight illuminating the dark shed interior, he can see his mother in the dirt in front of her easel. She’s lyin’ on her back, screaming, as if fighting some invisible monster, writhing back and forth, cryin’ “nooooooo!” Her hands at her neck. It’s like she is caught in the grip of some horrific nightmare and he steps forward instinctively, puts his hand on her shoulder and shakes it.
“Mama…?”
Her eyes pop open. Too wide, looking from side to side, clearly terrified and looking for some horrible thing that is the source of her terror.
Then she focuses on T.J.’s face. Her own face begins to lose the contortion of terror, begins to relax, transform into a confused, disoriented look.
“T.J.?” she says and reaches up to touch his face.
“Mama, what’s wrong?”
She seems to remember then, and she looks up at the painting on the easel. She instantly sits up and scoots on her butt away from the image as fast as she can, frantically, until her back collides with the wall of the shed, then she keeps diggin’ her heels into the dirt to shove herself away, digs holes in the dirt, trying to move. All the time with her eyes fixed in wide-eyed horror on the canvas on the easel.
T.J. follows her gaze, turns to look for the first time at the painting.
He cries out. Makes some kind of sound that is foreign to him, like it’d come out of somebody else’s throat.
It is a portrait, as detailed as the ones he seen the one time he went with Dobbs into the library in town, paintings of LeRoy Ackerman, the president of Ackerman Coal, who had donated the money for the library, and other white men T.J. didn’t know. But the object of the portrait is not staring forward, all serious, features dignified and solemn.
It is a little girl, not a man. A little white girl with short, curly blonde hair. Perhaps he knows her, but her face is so contorted her features are hard to make out. And her skin is an odd color, purple, her lips pale. On her neck are ugly marks, dents in the skin. Her eyes are open, starin’, bloodshot so there is no white at all around the blue centers. There is a small trail of blood inchin’ out between her lips and oozing down her cheek in a pink dribble.
T.J. has never seen a dead person before, unless you count the body of his grandfather in his coffin at the church the day he was laid to rest. But he doesn’t need to have seen a c
orpse to know that this little girl is dead.
T.J. took the piece of paper with the survey on one side and the window on the other back from Dobbs and was amazed that his hands were not shaking. They should have been. His whole body felt like it was vibrating, thrumming like a bow string after the arrow is released.
“You remember that red Mustang you used to have?”
Dobbs looked at him like he had lost his mind.
“I never had a red Mustang.”
“The toy one, the Matchbox car. You remember — the one with the doors that actually opened.”
T.J. was surprised when Dobbs continued to look blank. He’d have bet his pension Dobbs remembered every one of them cars in that box.
“If you say so, T.J., I guess I had a red one. What are you getting at?”
“That’s the one you gave to me to take home and play with the day Mama painted the picture of the little dead white girl.”
Dobbs remembered that part well enough. Neither of them would ever forget the event that shaped the next three years of their childhoods.
T.J. looked down at the drawing on the piece of paper in his hand. It was a window. It was. He didn’t want to believe that, didn’t even want to think it, but he had grown up, was no longer the little boy pushin’ the red Mustang back and forth in a shaft of afternoon sunlight. And the man that little boy had become had learned along the way that ignorin’ an awful reality didn’t make it go away.
“I remember your mama saying how … you can’t un-know the truth.” Dobbs’s voice was quiet. “Once you see it, once you know what it is, you are forever responsible for what you do about it.”
It was like Dobbs had read his mind. It had often been like that over the years, like where one’s thoughts stopped the other’s began.
“T.J. … why are you so convinced this … these pencil lines are a window and that the drawing somehow connects to your mother who also painted windows?”
“Started out paintin’ windows, empty ones. But they didn’t stay empty.”
“What does one thing have to do with the other? Why would the woman in that hospital bed draw a window?”
“Why did my mama draw ‘em? I asked myself that a thousand times during them years. Asked you, asked the stars, asked God. Why was this happenin’ to my mama? What was the force that compelled her to draw when she didn’t want to, to draw things she didn’t want to? What was the force that opened up a … window into the future so she could paint what she seen there?”
“The woman in that bed was born half a century after your mother died. What possible connection could there be? Why her?”
“Why anybody?”
He sighed, and all the energy and emotion drained out of him and he felt very old and tired.
“We done had this conversation, Dobbs.” And this time Dobbs didn’t look blank. This time he only nodded. He remembered.
“We’ve had it more than once.”
As the two of them had watched the events that unfolded in Possum Run Hollow for the next three years, they’d asked themselves and each other for an explanation of what was happening over and over again. And why. And they’d never gotten a satisfactory answer to either question.
The force, the energy that had swept out of the frail little woman named Eulalie Hamilton and transformed canvas after canvas was as inexplicable as it was powerful. It had been so powerful, in fact, that it had finally consumed her, burned her out. The power had killed her.
But not before she painted one last portrait. The picture of a young woman with a bullet hole in the side of her head who wasn’t even born when she painted the picture.
T.J. looked down at the lines on a piece of paper in his hand. In truth, they could have been a Cracker Jack box. But they weren’t. The lines formed a window. He couldn’t explain why he knew or how he knew but he was as certain of that as of sunrise on Easter Sunday morning.
There was no reason it should be so. No explanation that came anywhere near it. But the cold, hard reality was that his mother had painted “what hadn’t happened yet” for a horror-filled three years of his childhood. And if what he held in his hand was indeed a sketch of a window, drawn unconsciously by the woman lying in the hospital bed not thirty feet away, then maybe she was slidin’ relentlessly down the same slope. Whatever it was that had swept his little mother away into the rapids, and eventually into her own death, could very well be lappin’ at the feet of a young woman whose name was Bailey Donahue. Or Jessie Cunningham. One or the other. Or maybe somethin’ else entirely.
Chapter Ten
Bailey was going home.
Goody.
The doctor had given the go-ahead last night when he’d made his rounds, telling her all manner of things she should do, shouldn’t do, could and could not do. Bailey hadn’t listened to any of them.
Of course, that’d been after the shrink had made his third and farewell appearance, peering at her over the top of his wire-rimmed glasses in a look calculated to seem studious and astute that was wooden-nickel phony. He was no more a real shrink than she was Bigfoot. Oh, he might have the credentials, might even — though she doubted it — have graduated from the school from which they were issued. But he was either monumentally incompetent or lazy. She opted for Door #1. What real psychiatrist asks a suicidal patient if she still wants to die and then buys the answer that she’s had a sudden and miraculous change of heart? Seriously?
She wasn’t a particularly convincing liar. Though her life for the past few years had honed skills in that department she hadn’t realized she possessed, she still wasn’t very good at it. Any mildly proficient psychiatrist would have seen that her story about why she’d wanted to die — about how her lover had dumped her for someone else and she had no family, no friends, and suicide had seemed the only alternative — had more holes in it than a wino’s raincoat. This dude had smiled angelically, looking like a beneficent Friar Tuck with his bald head and soap ring of hair beneath and handing her a basketful of platitudes about life and hope and the ‘practice of daily gratitude.’ He had actually said that!
She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d patted her on the head when he left. He probably would have, but somebody must have told him she had a bullet in her brain beneath her black curls and he didn’t want to be the one who dislodged it and dispatched her to the fate that had put it there in the first place.
He’d checked the box on some idiot form that said she was mentally healthy enough to be discharged. She could go home.
But not to the little white frame house on the corner with the big live oak tree in the yard with one limb that stuck out straight from the trunk, low enough so you could reach it if you put one of the chairs off the patio under it, and once you were on that limb, the whole rest of the tree was yours, to climb up to the heights and look out over your small corner of the world.
That was the closest thing to “home” Bailey’d ever known because it was there that she’d befriended a frightened little Puerto Rican orphan named María who had become the little sister she’d never had, bound to her by shared loss that knit them together closer than any DNA, flesh-and-blood bond.
But that home hadn’t been Bailey’s first. She had come there from somewhere else. A brick house with weeds for a yard and so many children that the foster parents couldn’t keep their names straight. Not that they tried. “Hey, you!” accompanied by grabbing an ear or a hank of hair was sufficient to get their message across. It was a simple message: I’m bigger than you are and this is my house. The father had knocked the boys around when he got mad — punched them in the stomach so it wouldn’t leave a mark, and fondled some of the girls in ways that made Bailey’s skin crawl. Bailey wasn’t there long enough to attract his notice, though. Apparently, some injury he had inflicted on the boys had left a mark after all and a teacher reported it, and Child Protective Services workers had descended on the place like crows on roadkill.
Before that had been the place where the mother staye
d drunk all day and the older girls did all the work. And before that had been … nowhere. The place in her mind containing the memories of where she’d been before the alcoholic mother — and what had happened to her in that place — was as empty as an old shoebox. At first, she’d filled the shoebox with imaginary stuff — that she had been the only child of adoring parents who lived in a house with a lawn and a tire swing and a princess bed and her mother read her stories and sang her to sleep every night. Even as she was doing it, she knew the “memories” she was putting into the box weren’t real. She only did it because the empty box was frightening, invited curiosity and inspection, became an itch she wanted to scratch and she knew that eventually she would pick at it and pick at it until the scab came off and the box would fill up with reality too hideous to look at, too monstrous to countenance. Later, when she was older, she’d acknowledged to herself that the box was full of fantasy. And that was fine as long as she kept the lid on it.
She had met Aaron at a coffee shop where she waited tables, a second job to pay for the night classes that would earn her a teaching certificate. She had never aspired to be an art teacher, but neither had she aspired to eating Ramen noodles three meals a day and that was her future on the income from freelance artwork.
She admitted to him later, one rainy Sunday when they lay together in bed in her tiny studio apartment listening to fat raindrops splat against the windowpanes, that she had spilled his coffee on purpose so she could spend time with him, helping him clean the stain off his obviously pricey suit jacket. He had laughed then, that wonderful rumbling laugh of his, and told her the jacket he’d feigned such concern over was made of some super whiz-bang, state-of-the-art stain resistant fabric you could dump a truckload of road tar on and it’d wash right out. And that he had a dozen more in his closet like it.
She’d had no idea at the time that Aaron Cunningham was the Aaron Cunningham, of the Newport Cunninghams, who’d described themselves as wealthy — ‘rich’ was gauche — and had Aaron’s life all plotted out, as they had orchestrated the lives of his two older brothers before him. Add water and stir. Marrying Jessie — a penniless artist, for heaven’s sake! — was not in their playbook and they never forgave him. If they could have flipped a magic switch to make their daughter-in-law vanish in a puff of smoke, they’d have crawled over two miles of rusty can lids to get to the switch.
