by Joan Barfoot
He complained endlessly that neither his church nor his country had adequately attempted to save him or his mission. “No one cares,” he said bitterly, “for the true word, and all those souls being lost.” He now focused on Nora’s soul, and maybe her mother’s. “You know,” he told Nora, “the duty of the child is to honour her elders. Honour means obey, did you know that?”
“No, it doesn’t.”
One good reason not to have children is the grievous contrariness of adolescence. Nora’s mother owed Uncle Albert for drawing fire from Nora that might otherwise have been directed at her. Nora owed him for honing her skills in stubborn refusal. Her weapons were short skirts and tight tops and multiple ear-piercings, as well as more make-up than even she was comfortable with. “If you go about like a harlot, trouble will follow and lead to damnation.” He actually talked that way, even at breakfast, even about eyeshadow and lipstick.
“Oh, piss off.”
“Nora,” her mother said helplessly.
Nora had a boyfriend, what was his name? Ron, Don, one of those. She liked the feelings that rose up with his hands and his mouth, although was aware he was practice and not the real thing. She got home from their wrestlings very late, once in what really was the middle of the night. In the morning she had trouble waking up for school. There was Uncle Albert, upright at the kitchen table, frowning so hard he was trembling. “The Lord,” he roared, slamming his fist on the table, “strikes down the likes of you. Change your ways, my girl, or be damned to the fires of hell.”
She was tired, she was exhilarated, she was young and triumphant and blooming and strong. “I’m not your girl. Anyway, how about you? I thought God was supposed to be love, but I don’t ever see you being loving or even nice. Aren’t you scared”—very bold this, and fed up—“of going to hell yourself for being so hateful?” He rose from his chair faster than such a big man should be able to move. He slapped her hard, whack! Nora slapped him back, smack! At which point her mother stepped between them, and soon afterwards Uncle Albert packed up and left, although not silently. “I am warning you one last time,” he told rude, disobedient Nora as well as her anxious, disobedient mother, “you are damned to hellfire if you do not bend to the will of the Lord.”
“Yeah, right,” said Nora, watching the red-faced old man—not so old, maybe just fifty—lift all his possessions, in two suitcases, into the trunk of a taxi and drive off without looking back. Unforgiving. In a huff. Hardly Christian.
For a time he lived on a rotating basis with members of his ferocious church, but their numbers dwindled, times changed, the church building was sold to an insurance agency, and Uncle Albert, embarrassingly, took to preaching loudly in the open air. Several times he was arrested for public mischief, breaching the peace, being a general nuisance, and Nora’s mother was called to bail him out. Then in a park one spring day, in full, furious oration, mid-sermon, an aneurysm blew out his brain.
Nora’s mother wept for the brother who’d protected her and read to her and taught her to ride a bike and play cards. For all Nora knew, she wept also for the brother who harangued and commanded, who slammed his fist and slapped her daughter. Nora herself was just startled: her first real acquaintance with death. That he’d been large and very strange and annoying and present, and all of a sudden was nowhere.
Nobody disappears entirely, though. Uncle Albert lives on, in Nora’s world specifically, in stories turned, for better and worse, into pictures. Also, from opposing his Cyclopean fervency she was perhaps predisposed to be entranced, ringing Lynn’s doorbell, by a naked, glinting, mischievous man.
She has had no pity for Uncle Albert. Now she is surprised to find that she does. Not sympathy exactly, but pity. Because he counted on something, he believed: in his case, that taking his word to the heathen wherever they were, from distant deserts and villages to kitchens and parks, would vault him to his picturesque, angelic, harpish version of heaven—authority over others on earth, gratitude and salvation in eternity, what could be better? No wonder he felt sure of himself. But his world overturned. Arrogant missionaries became unwelcome at gunpoint, young nieces were heedless, the number of women willing or even able to cook oatmeal for breakfast, much less to roll on floors with their muted dresses thrown over their heads, markedly dwindled. Everything he thought he knew flew right out the window, his foundations slid from under his feet, his structures collapsed, his brain exploded.
With the exception of her brain blowing up, that’s more or less what’s happened to Nora. So in that sense she finally feels if not sympathy, at least some empathy for Uncle Albert, and some pity for his mid-life surprise, a sudden whoosh, thump, much like Philip’s.
Uncle Albert’s funeral was minuscule, just Nora and her mother and a few hangers-on from his church. Who knew such people were in only temporary decline, that they would rise up once again in myriad fundamentalist forms to take aim, among many more fatal targets, at people like Nora? At Uncle Albert’s funeral, held in a tiny, spartan chapel borrowed for the purpose, their voices were few and small and quavered with age rather than rage. But if people marched in the street here and clamoured at the gate shouting, in good approximation of Uncle Albert, “You will burn in hell,” it made sense to Nora to lie awake sniffing the air in the night, listening for cracklings.
If asked—and she was asked, just did not answer as well as she should have—she could have said her work was far more fundamentalist than people of any faith who opted for rules, anger and punishment; fundamentally, in her view, missing the point of their faiths. They have dark views of both humans and gods, those people; also, apparently, of their own subterranean impulses. All very well for Philip to suggest they were basically frightened. So what?
What should it matter to Nora if the butcher, the same wretched man who’d taken offence to her early representation of lush bleeding hearts on a tray, was offended again, arriving at their door bearing meat but stopping short in the doorway of the living room, where Nora had just carried the first three Beth-pieces so that Sophie could pack them up to ship off to Max? Why should Nora have to care if this white-aproned Jason Schmidt, a man who resembled one of his own sides of beef, pointed at the pieces and in a tone falling far short of praise thundered, “What are those supposed to be?”
“We’d have been smart,” Nora later said to Philip, “to turn vegetarian. No butchers in the house then.”
That was when they were still making jokes.
Who knew, too, that the blood-speckled Schmidt was so extroverted, such a leader of his small but dedicated community church, that he was able to bring its members several Sundays in a row from their plain side-street chapel to the gate in front of Nora and Philip’s house on the hill, where they set out with shouts and placards to denounce, almost immediately in front of resulting reporters with cameras, tape recorders and notepads, the residents of the house? Well, except for Philip. By definition he could not be a harlot or a Jezebel. Jezebel? Nora couldn’t think what Jezebel had to do with anything, unless they just meant untrustworthy, subversive women in general.
Certainly their objections were pronoun-related. The perversity they perceived involved a crucified woman, they saw blasphemy in the mere presence of tits. That was their sole, voluble point.
The women congregants, those traitors, tended to wear not the muted print dresses of Uncle Albert’s day but unbecoming pastel stretch pants and, on bad-weather days, cheap, heavy jackets, unpleasant boots and dark woolly hats. (No, they didn’t, not all of them, that’s just how Nora prefers picturing them.) Nora bundled up and went to the porch, sketchpad in hand, to stand calmly (but not calmly at all) drawing them. That was her initial public statement on the matter: stubborn work.
Voices were raised. Old menacing hymns were sung. A few small stones were even thrown, although those tended to be tossed by kids darting among the legs of the grown-ups. “It’ll blow over,” said Philip, but offence spread virus-like. Venomous letters to the editor were written to newspa
pers well out of the region, rabid-voiced calls were placed to radio phone-ins far away, and there were, Sophie reported, vigorous discussions under way in Internet chatrooms. The media enjoyed this sort of story, reporters and editors entranced by conflict between woman and mob or, alternatively, between fancy-pants artist and faith. “You could not buy this amount of attention for any money on earth,” Philip said. Which was true. Not many relatively obscure artists are so abruptly thrust into fame.
By the second Sunday, signs saying, “Death to blasphemers” were being waved to embarrassingly frightening effect and Nora called the cops, who caused the crowd to disperse. But shit continued arriving, plain or paper-bagged, overnight on the doorstep. Hateful words kept appearing on the front fence, so that Philip sighed and headed outside with scrubbing brush or paint. One woman found herself capable of spitting on Sophie’s shoe in the bakery. “Heavens,” Nora remarked to Philip, “who could have imagined all this?”
He was less flippant by then. “You, maybe,” he said quietly. That stung.
Nora ordered a household boycott on the products of the Old Town Bakeshop, on the grounds that Mavis, the owner, had silently accepted not only her spitting customer’s discourtesy but its unhygienic result. Philip, while he said to Sophie, “Whoa, spitting, that’s nasty,” also complained that a boycott was, as he put it, although smiling, to Nora, “cutting off all our noses to spite your face.”
“Fuck off,” she said.
He missed his cupcakes and cream puffs. Nora suspects that now and then, out on his own, he disloyally sneaked back to Mavis. “It’s only a few assholes,” he argued, “it has nothing to do with the kind of people I hang out with. Remember them, Nora? The other people who live around here? The ones you’ve liked well enough for years until now?”
She supposed so. She used to have friendly acquaintances here, did she not? But why, then, was there little in the way of defence? Why did the pathetic clutter of people at the gate grow larger the second week, and still larger the third? “That’s your town out there,” she told Philip. “Getting to be quite a mob, don’t you think?”
“They’re not all from here. It’s the kind of issue that draws cranks from all over.”
Apparently so. Some people gravitate to causes that permit—encourage—the unleashing of rage. They discover passions in themselves they may never have particularly noticed before, and enjoy the permission to behave in a group in ways that are ordinarily well out of bounds. There were squealing tires and footsteps, what might have been footsteps, out in the darkness of night. There were hateful, hissing phone calls reminiscent of Lynn’s, both less personal in obvious ways and more personal in their capacity to frighten.
Nora was braver in daylight. “What a bunch of rubes, what a backwoods place this must look to the rest of the country,” she told Philip. The disturbances were, briefly, juicy national news, although, unlike Philip, Nora had no clue how to deal with the media. She was not only no hail-fellow-well-met, she preferred her work to speak, or remain silent, for itself. An actual review, for instance, of one of the contentious pieces called it provocative and compelling. It went on to say that “What might have been a parody of The Last Supper is instead a finely visioned, luxuriously wrought, almost sexual and definitely sensual claiming of the female view of sacred event,” and Nora saw no particular need to add to that.
But Philip said that while sketching protesters was provocative (that word again), it was insufficient. “You need to say something for the record yourself,” he said on the third Sunday.
What should she say, though? She was no theologian, not even religious. Ideas of goodness and love were interesting—look at Sophie!—and the visual connections were too, but beyond that Nora was curious, not connected.
“Would you say you’re a Christian?” was the first question one of the reporters asked after Philip herded a small crowd of them onto the porch, where they could hear her over the racket of the disgruntled rabble left at the gate.
“Those are the stories I’m most familiar with and the ones I’ve used, but as I understand it, just about every religion has at its heart love and respect for whatever’s sacred in every human. Male and female, I would point out. As if any worthwhile god would care about gender.” She thought that sounded all right, even if Philip was wincing. “All the great religions have that in common,” she went on boldly, “but people distort them for their own purposes. For a sick kind of power mainly, I think.”
“So you’re saying your paintings are the real truth?”
Had she said that? That would make her insane, as mad as the people out in the street. “No, of course not, but then again, I don’t think those people”—gesturing carelessly towards them—“should be claiming truth either.” She glanced at the wavering placards. “I guess by and large I would say that if there are blasphemers in this town, I’m not among them.”
A cameraperson grinned. A reporter wrote fast. Nora did seem to be making them happy. “Do you think Christ was a woman?” another one asked.
“I can’t see what difference it makes. It does interest me, though, how much these people hate women. So much anger and noise about the mere idea and image of female divinity.”
“Hate?”
“That’s what it looks like, wouldn’t you say? All this over a pronoun? Come on.”
“Oh, good work,” Philip said dryly as they watched the results on the late TV news. “That should calm everything down.”
What she should have said was something more like, Look at the different kinds of beauty and love in my work. At the potential beauties of faith, too—shouldn’t they include and be everyone? Also, See how humans fall short in practice. Why is that? Shouldn’t we ask? Instead, she finished up with a bright smile and another wave of the hand. On TV the smile looked exceedingly glittery, the wave rather frantic. Oh well.
Philip was right, in a way: in the longer scheme of their lives here, the uproar didn’t last long. Demonstrators’ interest dwindled on the fourth Sunday, when just one camera and notebook showed up. On the fifth Sunday there was an early-spring ice storm, which damaged a tree at the front and killed a couple of shrubs and prevented activity at the gate or anywhere else. And after that, barring occasional bags of shit and unpleasant phone calls, it was over.
Much got broken in a fairly brief time. Not Nora’s will, certainly not, but some trust, some affection. She wasn’t about to take the inhabitants here on faith, as it were, any more, that’s for sure.
She’s not sure about Philip either, and whether something may have been broken there too. He did his best for her but honestly, his heart didn’t feel totally in it. Now the question arises: did the strain of straddling the fence, not to mention painting and repainting it, wind up months later killing him? Not that alone, of course not. But it was an anxious, strenuous time.
That doesn’t, at the moment, bear considering.
How fortunate Nora has been in her important men: Uncle Albert, who commanded “Draw the story”; Max, who urges always” See more, look harder”; and Philip, who pulled her close and said, “Don’t worry, you just go ahead and do what you see,” but who also said, “They’re frightened. We ought to be able to understand that, whether they understand what you’re doing or not.”
What is she going to do without that voice? And the rest of him.
What if she decided to see him after all, one last view, as any normal widow would do? And while she was at it, what if she also ruled out cremation in favour of keeping him perfect and whole? She could still do any of that, there’s always at least a couple of days when widows have power, and there must be better farewells than a leap out of bed and a scream.
But already he is not perfect and whole, and already she has seen him, that last encounter when she turned to him in their bed. Better to concentrate on his head thrown back with laughter, pushed forward with anger, all his range of expressions and postures, the tilt of his shoulders in one mood, the slant of his hips in anothe
r. Long ago she did quite a few portraits of him: a focus on musculature from the waist up, barrel chest, taut forearm tendons, straining neck, that sort of thing; and from the waist down, those marvellous hip-slopes some men have, like arrows, and those long thighs, those planted feet. Somewhere out in the world, Max may know where, there are also renditions of his face, done back when she was practising the hard discipline of the portrait. “Let me see, let me see,” Philip would demand, and when she did he would say, “My God, aren’t I gorgeous,” and they would laugh.
Now she lays her head on the table. Right in front of Sophie, as if they are friends and have no secrets, Nora puts her head down. She feels Sophie’s hand on her forearm. The gesture is kind. It’s a moment. It is, in fact, a surprisingly comforting, almost tender one.
They hear the front door open and close, and light steps in the hall. Nora raises her head, Sophie leaves her hand where it is. Here is Beth in the kitchen doorway; but what an unfamiliar Beth, with her fluff of angel hair plastered with sweat and darkened by dust, her floaty dress dirty and limp, her feet and legs grimy. Grubby once-white sandals dangle from her fingertips. “Heavens, what’s happened to you?” Sophie asks.
“I went for a walk. Out along the highway. What are you doing?” Beth’s eyes are on Sophie’s hand, on Nora’s arm.
“Looking at the paperwork from the funeral home. Come join us if you like.” And strangely, instead of going upstairs to get cleaned up, Beth does sit down at the table. There’s a hot outdoorsy, musky sort of smell to her, and dust puffs out of her skirt. “Why were you walking?” Nora asks.
“I got restless.” Does she mean bored, could she be bored by a death in the house? Ah well, doesn’t matter, it’s Beth.
“Do you think,” Nora returns her attention to Sophie, “many people will show up for the service?”
“Quite a few said they hope to, but it’s hard for a lot of them on short notice. Did you get hold of what’s-her-name? His first wife?”
