You Have Never Been Here

by Mary Rickert

  “So you see, when you find me sad and ask what’s on my mind, or when I am quiet and cannot explain to you the reason, there it is. If I had never seen the paintings, maybe I would be a happy man. But always, now, I wonder.”

  She waited but he said no more. After a long time, she whispered his name. But he did not answer, and when she peeked at him from the squint of her eyes, he appeared to be asleep. Eventually, she fell asleep too.

  All that night, as they told their stories, the flames burned heat onto that icy roof, which melted down the sides of the house and over the windows so that in the cold morning when they woke up, the fire gone to ash and cinder, the house was encased in a sort of skin of ice, which they tried to alleviate by burning another fire, not realizing they were only sealing themselves in more firmly. They spent the rest of that whole winter in their ice house. By burning all the wood and most of the furniture and eating canned food even if it was out of date, they survived, thinner and less certain of fate, into a spring morning thaw, though they never could forget those winter stories, not all that spring or summer and especially not that autumn, when the winds began to carry that chill in the leaves, that odd combination of sun and decay, about which they did not speak, but which they knew would exist between them forever.

  The Corpse Painter’s Masterpiece

  The corpse painter lives in a modest Cape Cod at the end of a dirt road, once lined with pasture, cows, and corn. The farmland was sold off in the seventies for the new mall. Everyone said the corpse painter was quite foolish for refusing the developer’s money, but what else can be expected of a corpse painter, after all? He remained in his little clapboard house with the pink rose bush growing around the mailbox. The old mailman, Baxter, used to put on a gardening glove to deliver the mail there, but the new one refuses; the corpse painter’s mail is piled up at the post office in town, undeliverable because of thorns.

  The mall entrance was not on the dirt road, yet for almost three decades, the corpse painter had to put up with the (mostly young) drivers who came out of the mall parking lot and made two wrong turns (or thought they were taking a shortcut) and ended up with their headlights glaring into the corpse painter’s living room. The lights from the mall were bad enough. It hunkered like a strange massive spaceship obliterating the golden fields, the languid cows, the purple horizon. Those who found themselves at the end of the dirt road, facing the broken picket fence, the mailbox wrapped in roses with thorns like teeth, the corpse painter’s sign dangling over the crooked porch, often realized where they were with a shock of combined pleasure and fear, like finding Santa Claus in a graveyard. Many had heard rumors of the corpse painter but dismissed them as childish myth. They took some pleasure in discovering the fact of him until the full implication took hold. The corpse painter needed neither dog nor keep-out sign; his occupation was enough. Only those entirely foreign to the area would linger, trying to determine if it would be a good idea to knock and ask for directions, though no one ever did. The lights of the mall glowed in the rearview mirror. Better to go back, it was thought. Visitors were quite rare anyway, it was not the sort of mall to attract outsiders, and by 2010, it was no longer a mall, but an empty building in an empty parking lot, though the lights still burned there, meant to keep away the kind of trouble abandoned buildings attract. The corpse painter often sat on the top step of his front porch, enjoying the effect of lights brightening against the dusk—anything can be beautiful if looked at long enough, even the ugly mall with its unnatural sunset, the white light an illumination, like bones.

  The sheriff, who had been there before, knew that the corpse painter’s stone driveway, which appeared to arc over a small hill to the barn-converted-to-garage below, had a tributary that veered narrowly to the back door of the house. The sheriff knocked on the aluminum door there, cataloguing, as he always did, the repairs needed to restore the place, which the corpse painter left unattended as though it was something meant to decompose.

  When the corpse painter came to the door, he opened it wide. The sheriff wiped his shoes on the mat, remembering how he used to come with his own father as a boy. “Don’t want to drag in mud and blood,” the sheriff’s father always said. Every time. The sheriff, who hated the saying, cannot get it out of his head. He wipes his shoes on the mat and hears his father’s voice. The sheriff doesn’t believe in ghosts, but he does believe in hauntings.

  “Evening,” the sheriff says, though why, he doesn’t know. He takes off his cap. He was raised to be polite.

  The corpse painter, who is a thin man, delicate in a way the sheriff finds disturbing, doesn’t say anything, only stands there, watching. His eyes are large, gray-green. From what the sheriff can remember, the corpse painter takes after his mother, though she was a better housekeeper. She always greeted the sheriff, when he was a boy, with cumin bread, which she said kept restless spirits away.

  The sheriff turns from the corpse painter’s penetrating stare. “What’s he like?” his wife asks. They have a modern marriage, not like his parents. “Now, you know not to say anything about this,” his father always said after they visited the small house in the country, which, only in later years, filled the sheriff with shame as though he were the adulterer of his own mother.

  “It’s him,” he says. Trying for mercy, he looks out the kitchen window at the junk-littered yard: a broken bicycle, a three-legged chair, unbound rope, something blackly snakelike, a deflated innertube, perhaps, all loosely scattered near the infamous fire pit.

  The sheriff turns, hoping to catch the corpse painter unaware, to see something within those ferrety eyes that he could report; instead he sees what he always sees there. “He’s all right,” the sheriff tells his wife. “I just can’t stand the way he looks at me.”

  “What’s that mean?” his wife asks. “You have to be specific.”

  “Ok, let’s look,” the corpse painter says.

  The sheriff puts his cap on and walks ahead of the corpse painter as they’ve been doing for years now. The sheriff knows that there are rumors about this; not everyone approves. He could lose his job over it, and imagines that one day he will. Over the years he has brought the corpse painter thieves, drug dealers, and murderers. Mostly murderers. Once, a long time ago now, there was a young woman no one claimed.

  “She’s already done,” the corpse painter had said, shaking his head. “Don’t bring me anyone beautiful.”

  The sheriff’s boots crunch against the stones in the driveway. He inserts the key in the hatch and lifts it without ceremony, the air suddenly infused with the stink of death.

  “Can’t get ’em much uglier than this,” the sheriff says, and immediately regrets it. He always was a smart aleck, which he has mostly tamed over the years, except in times of deep emotion. “Sorry,” he mumbles. He meant to do this right. He meant to show compassion, but in a situation like this, it is hard to know how to do that.

  But the corpse painter is already reaching in; nothing in the back of him betrays anything to the sheriff of the particular unusual nature of this situation. “Like he was going to stack a cord of wood,” the sheriff later said to his wife, who, not satisfied, thought that maybe, just maybe after all these years, she might have to visit the corpse painter herself. She’d bring a pie, or banana bread, perhaps, though she knows from experience these sweets will most likely grow mold or turn sour, thrown in the trash; who has an appetite near death? Maybe it’s different for the corpse painter, maybe it is a celebration, she has no idea. She didn’t mention the idea of bringing food, and the next morning wondered how something so obviously bizarre by the light of day could seem so normal in the dark.

  “What time?” she asks when he leans over to kiss her good-bye.

  “The usual.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  “Was there ever any doubt?” the sheriff says, trying to be cheerful, though it comes out sounding smart-alecky. His wife, up to her chin in blankets, looks embarrassed. “Good,” he says, trying to make
it right, and she does look peaceful when he leaves the bedroom, her eyes closed, her face like stone. The sheriff thought his wife would grow out of it eventually, oh, not the sorrow, he never imagined that, but he thought one day she would crawl out of bed, shower, maybe go back to work, the way he had. In the beginning she’d be in bed when he left in the morning, and still there when he came home after dark. She was like that until, quite by accident, she discovered her love of prison funerals. The sheriff backs his car out of the driveway. He’s careful about it. He’s always been a careful driver, but children are so small. At the bottom of the driveway he taps the horn, then proceeds at a reasonable speed for the early morning traffic of schoolchildren; he flicks on the radio, and listens for the weather, which is the only thing he cares about on the news anymore. The sheriff thinks about the corpse painter, who stayed up all night, painting, that’s the hope. The sheriff is concerned about what he might find when he goes back there this morning. The corpse painter is a little nuts. Obviously. Who can blame him?

  The corpse painter’s father was one of those men who became a success in prison. He had a little business on the side, selling, of all things, paper sculptures. Even now, the sheriff can’t believe that the other prisoners would have any interest in such nonsense, but sometimes a fad takes hold, especially during the holidays. Last Christmas, the sheriff decided to test his theory that the success was based on illusion, nothing that would matter in the rational world. He doesn’t know what became of the necklace he’d given his wife; he assumes the chocolate-covered cherries were eaten, though he never saw her take a single bite; but the little paper house, with the paper picket fence, the paper shutters that opened and closed, the paper tree with blobs of something hanging from the paper branches, leaves he supposes, maybe bats, remains on the fireplace mantel where his wife put it on Christmas morning. He noticed, but did not comment on, the fact that she liked to decorate for the seasons. In the spring she set a saucer of wheat berries up there, watering them until they sprouted like grass, which she cut all summer long with the fingernail scissors that she used to use on the boy. Yesterday he’d noticed the small yard was littered with torn leaves, proving she’d gone out at least long enough to scoop a handful of the dead things up. This morning he’d seen the house, the tree, the yard all draped with black crepe paper. Did she do this for every funeral? Was it a bad sign or a sign of something good, or a sign of nothing, which is what the sheriff mostly believes in now. After all, he’s seen things. He’s seen bodies that look blasted, eyes open, the expression of horror locked there. For a while the sheriff thought if he only knew how to read those eyes, he’d find in them the reflection of the murderer. It was a crazy thought, of course. He never told anyone how his own son’s eyes locked him inside their irises. Why had she let the boy out that morning? What child rides his tricycle in his pajamas? He never asked. They weren’t reasonable questions and the answers wouldn’t satisfy. Sometimes, after something horrible, a person goes crazy for a while. He screwed his head back on; he got on with his life. Not everyone does.

  The corpse painter sits on his front step; too late to watch the sunrise, he watches the mall lights blink off, all of them at once, a sacred moment like seeing a shooting star, or a fish jump. He would like a cup of tea, but he’s too exhausted to get up, too exhausted even to put the kettle on. When he inhales, deeply, he sees his breath. As a youngster, his mother told him it was his own soul he was seeing. The air smells sharply cold, the scent of dead leaves and the dirt turning hard; he also smells the oils he works with, rosemary and eucalyptus mostly, a little rose for the anus; his hands are a rainbow of pigment. He coughs. He should go inside. Put on something warm. Judging by this morning’s temperature, this will be the last body of the year. There’s no burying when the ground is frozen. His mother would have said the spirits made it happen the way it did. Another week, by the looks of it, maybe even another day, the body would not have been brought to him. The corpse painter made a rare trip to town for the sheriff’s son’s funeral, a strange affair with an open casket. The corpse painter felt revulsion when he saw the poor child made to look so unnatural, as though sleeping on the pink satin pillow. Certainly it was no comfort to the mother, how could it be, the child’s lips reddened, the cheeks rosy as a clown’s? Afterward, everyone was invited to the sheriff’s house for some kind of party, but the corpse painter went home instead.

  Yet, when the sheriff comes, pulling into the driveway, heading toward the garage, he doesn’t appear to notice the corpse painter sitting there. He stands slowly, his muscles sore, as though he’d been out all night dancing. He walks around the back, crunching across the gravel. The sheriff doesn’t jump, exactly, but he seems startled by the corpse painter, as though he’s grown more comfortable in a world where a man’s passage is marked by the unlocking of locks, the rattle of heavy keys.

  “Mornin,’” the sheriff says, tipping his head slightly. “All set?”

  The sheriff has been bringing bodies to the corpse painter for twenty years now; he is the closest thing the corpse painter has to friend or family, and when has he ever not been ready? He has no idea how to respond to something so obvious; it would be like asking the sheriff if he misses his son. There is a lot the corpse painter doesn’t understand about the way folks interact, but one thing he is certain of is that people want to be seen, not buried like that poor boy, beneath rouge and cream. Why else would there be death, after all, if not for revelation?

  The corpse painter says none of this, of course. It, too, is obvious. Instead he merely waits until the sheriff turns away, they walk to the garage, their footsteps brittle across the stones; the corpse painter looks at the ground, a habit developed as a boy. He knows he’s reached the garage when he sees the warped wood flaking chips of red. He pulls the door open with a rumble, like thunder.

  The Sheriff hesitates before stepping inside, a handkerchief held to his nose. The corpse painter flicks on the light. He watches the Sheriff walk to the body, painted with pigmented oil, decomposing even as they stand there, the closest thing there is to living art, shimmering beneath the naked light, a harlequin, the illusion of movement created by the pore-size spots of color, gradated with white.

  “You make him look—”the Sheriff starts, but catching himself, stops.

  The corpse painter has had all night to look at the body, he can see it with his eyes closed, now he studies the Sheriff whose fleshy face, usually as constant as a mask, twitches and contorts, a small muscle beneath the eye, the flare of nostrils, a pulse at the neck, a protrusion beneath the cheek, certainly the tongue working there. “How?” the sheriff croaks.

  The corpse painter knows the sheriff is not asking about technique. The corpse painter also knows how much courage it took for the sheriff to ask the question. But how? How to explain? He doesn’t think he can say it any better than he already has, on the body.

  “You’re invited to the cemetery if you want. My wife will be there. She’s been making them do it nice.”

  The corpse painter considers the offer. After all, this is not just any body, this is his father’s body, the man who made the corpse painter’s own body a harlequin of bruises, which is only a footnote to the horrible things done, and yet the corpse painter knows that creation never travels far from destruction.

  “All right,” the sheriff says, apparently mistaking the silence for an answer. He turns around, going back to the car for the box to carry the body in, knowing the corpse painter will follow.

  The funeral goes the way they usually do. No one seems to care that the body, in spite of the cold, is beginning to leak through the poorly joined slats. The sheriff knows that a few people think his wife has gone nuts; he resents the way they humor her, even as he appreciates it. The prison chaplain does the blessing and a reading of the sheriff’s wife’s choosing, always strange and incongruent, though everyone pretends that excerpts from The Velveteen Rabbit and Peter Pan are perfectly normal funeral meditations.

&nb
sp; The sheriff doesn’t know what was read for the corpse painter’s father, though later he wished he’d paid closer attention. He couldn’t concentrate. He kept thinking of what lay inside that wooden box, a man who had done terrible things, made beautiful by one of his victims.

  The sheriff’s wife always invited the chaplain, the grave diggers, and the sheriff to the house after the funeral. Embarrassed, they always declined. The sheriff had no idea what strange emotion infected him that day, but he said yes, he’d come home for lunch, and then rested his heavy arm on the chaplain’s shoulder, more or less dragging him along. The wife blinked in surprise at this. She whispered to the sheriff to drive home slowly, which he did, arriving at the house with the strange company of chaplain and grave diggers, just in time to see her scuttle inside with a bag from the Piggly Wiggly, which they all pretended not to notice.

  She set out a tray of lunch meat and cheese slices, a basket of rolls, pickles and olives. When the sheriff saw what was lacking he went into the kitchen for the jars of mayonnaise and mustard, which his wife spooned into small bowls. They ate off paper plates perched on the edge of their knees, the scent of brewed coffee filling the house.

  The conversation was stilted and strange, but afterward, when the visitors left, the sheriff’s wife kissed him on the forehead before he returned to work. That night, she set the leftovers out for him, the bread slightly stale, the meat and cheese dry, but the sheriff made a big deal out of how he was hoping this was just what they’d have for dinner. She turned away, so he wasn’t sure, but he thought she smiled.