by S. M. Hulse
The tube of black paint proved to be hardened and dried beyond recovery, and there was just a bit of white left, so most of my earliest paintings were created from colors blended to their truest, boldest intensity. No shadows, no darkness. My first attempts were terrible, but when I gave one to Samuel for Christmas the following year—a portrait of Lockjaw that, while painted with great affection, regrettably suggested the mule might continue to suffer from her eponymous affliction—he immediately hung it beside the kitchen table. Before long I learned to see its flaws and begged him to take it down, but he refused; it gazed back at us at dinnertime for years.
* * *
I position the canvas on my easel lengthwise, take a soft pencil from the box and begin to sketch. The canvas is already primed with a thin coating of neutral gray; my markings are faint but visible. I start with the mountains, their outline so familiar my hand moves almost of its own accord, shaping the low build of Eden on the left side of the canvas, working toward the sharper angles of Gethsemane on the distant right. I pencil in the wooden fence along the edge of Lockjaw’s pasture, the creek, the handful of aspens and pines scattered across the fields, finally the barest shape of the house. I settle it to the right of center, closer to the bottom of the canvas than the top, but it is clearly the focal point. Ordinarily I don’t bother with details at this stage—those come with the paint—but today I take extra care with the house.
I can’t save it. The house. In just over a month it will be mine no more. Will be no more. It’s almost refreshing to acknowledge this. To prove that I know how to do more than deny. That if I missed something these last weeks and months, it was because my brother hid it well and not because I refused to see what was. So maybe I am trying to prove something with this painting. Maybe I am trying to reject the kind of willful optimism I’ve crafted on canvas in the past. But I’m not used to thinking of my art in such lofty, purposeful terms, and mostly I think I simply want to paint the house exactly as it is, just once while I still can. Not better, not brighter, not more beautiful. To record it, forever, the way it stands before me today, so anyone who looks at the canvas in the future can bear witness to it just as I do now.
I hold the pencil lightly in my hand, angled beside the canvas, and for the first time in my life draw the long, low incline of the zigzagging wheelchair ramp alongside the porch; the motion is unfamiliar, these lines new and intrusive, and I feel awkward but persist. Then, before I can change my mind, I shift my pencil a few inches and sketch a wide patch of peeling paint. A dangling gutter. The broken shutter.
* * *
I’ve covered most of Canada with my words, Jo, with these letters to you. It’s a map of Montana, of course, so there’s not much of Canada, just small strips of Saskatchewan, Alberta, and British Columbia, but I’ve already had to move on to the Dakotas. I find myself wanting to cover the far-flung places first, to avoid encroaching on Prospect.
I suppose you’ve had to offer words of your own. You are my only family; the propagandists would have demanded it. Did they leave you alone afterward? I hope so.
I know what I’ve done has caused you trouble. I know it’s caused you pain. I’m sorry for that, so sorry. I regret plenty, but—I want to be absolutely clear about this—I don’t regret what I did. If it had gone the way I’d planned, I’d regret nothing. It’s not right, Jo. I know you’re facing a house of things to pack or sell or throw away, and I know you’re facing it alone because of me—that’s not what I wanted, not what I meant to happen—but you shouldn’t be facing it at all. The government has no right to take our home.
All these years I’ve played their game. I’ve paid their illegal, extortionate taxes, even knowing it was wrong, even knowing they have no constitutional right to levy taxes against my own property, because I didn’t want to risk losing our home. I allowed myself to be treated like a tenant on my own land. I sent them my money so rich men could get richer, so the undeserving could continue to suckle at the welfare teat. And what do we get for being docile, accommodating sheep? A notice evicting us from our own home, from the land our family has lived and worked and died on for generations. Do you think anyone had even a pang of conscience about that? Of course not. The government has been corrupted by avarice, by greed for money and power. It oppresses those it was meant to serve. We cannot—I cannot—acquiesce, not to this. If we don’t stand up for our rights, they’ll leave us with no rights at all.
I left no note, no manifesto. I didn’t mean for them to know it was me, didn’t want anyone to connect it to you. But this is some of what I would have written if I had. This is what it takes a bomb to make them hear.
I’ll stop now. I’ve used up my slice of North Dakota and most of South Dakota, and I know you don’t care for my “politics,” as you call them. I don’t want this to come across as an “I told you so.” But admit this much, Jo—some part of you, however deep down, is at least a little glad I did what I did.
* * *
Thursday I finally tackle the empty box still waiting in the living room. I take a stack of paperbacks from the bookcase and push them into the corner of the box, then pull another stack off the shelf and shove them beside the first, and so on until the small box is full and I can tape it shut. Do it in less than a minute, don’t stop to look at the titles or make sure the edges line up or that I’ve made efficient use of the space. Don’t give myself any excuse not to fill the box and fill it fast. I scrawl Books across the top in thick red marker, then push it against the wall. There. I’ve started packing.
Friday I again work my shift in the back room and, when another employee calls in sick, volunteer for a second shift behind the register. One Bear thinks about it for a long minute before he nods. My paintings still hang on the wall above the stuffed mountain goats.
Saturday I take the easel and canvas back out beneath the pine, and I lay down a wash of Payne’s gray across the mountains, a shade darker and bluer than the priming gray. Then I begin the painting in earnest, using the acrylics straight from the tube, even mixing a few with modeling paste, pushing and pulling with my painting knives until I’ve manipulated the thick pigments into textured ridges and swaths. The techniques are familiar; only the colors are different. My other paintings are saturated with color, mountains edged with violet, horses’ coats reflecting bright yellows and reds. This painting will have subtler, stiller colors, like those glimpsed through a window on a rain-soaked day.
It’s not right. I know it early on, but keep painting until I’ve got most of the canvas finished, until I can’t pretend it might work itself out along the way. Maybe the knives, which work so well for most of my paintings, aren’t precise enough for this kind of work. I replace the incomplete painting with a fresh canvas, begin again, trading my knives for brushes. This one takes longer. The brush feels clumsy in my hand, the whole process less certain, less intuitive than usual. Maybe that’s good. Maybe slowing down will help me capture the details I so often gloss over.
Hours later I sit back and eye the nearly finished canvas. The subdued hues are disquieting. I meant them to be soothing, but they cast the house into gloom, and that’s not how I see my home. But that’s not the only problem. This painting is more accurate, certainly; I’ve accomplished that much. The image forming on the canvas is very like the one I see on any given day when I drive up to the house after work. There is more detail here than in any painting I’ve ever done, more realism. I haven’t glossed over anything, blurred out, minimized or erased. It is faithful in a way my previous canvases were not. I take some pleasure in this proof that I have more range as an artist than I thought, but this isn’t what I meant to paint. Isn’t what I set out to do. Perhaps accuracy and truth aren’t quite the same thing.
I’ll have to try again, but not today. I’m losing the light.
Sunday strikes me hard from the moment I wake. Sunday is one week from the bombing, one week from the day Samuel left “for Wyoming.” Sunday is the day he told me he’d be back.
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br /> I lie in bed too long, get up only when I hear Lockjaw’s shattering bray from the barn. I hurry my morning routine, but almost an hour has passed by the time I make it outside. Lockjaw starts kicking her stall door as soon as she sees me, and I holler, “Quit!” The mule flattens her long ears but stops kicking. “It’s not like you’re in danger of starving,” I mutter. I go to the feed room, scoop a quart of oats into a bucket, toss a couple flakes of hay on top. Then I look at the four bales stacked beside the bin and let my breath out in a rush. I’ve seen them every day this week, but I haven’t realized until now. Four bales. Four. We never bring down more than two at a time.
I wonder if Samuel meant it when he told me he’d be back today. Maybe he really did intend to go to Wyoming, figuring a week would be long enough to be reasonably sure the FBI hadn’t connected him to the bombing. Maybe he’d planned to drive up to the house this evening, come inside, drop a bag of burgers from the Gas-N-Go on the kitchen table. I wonder if he would have told me what he’d done. If he’d trust me with that knowledge, saddle me with it.
Whatever he told me, I’d have believed it. I believed everything. Not just Wyoming, but the lies he told me before. An extra shift at work. A trip to the store. Sorry, Jo, big lumber order so it’s all hands on deck. Sorry, Jo, the first place didn’t have what we needed so I had to try another store. Sorry, Jo, there was a wreck on the highway and it was all backed up. And I’d always said, It’s fine, Samuel. It’s fine. Which of those stories were true? Which were lies? When was he at work? When was he in a storage unit building a bomb?
I knew he was a liar, but until the bomb I didn’t think he lied to me. It shouldn’t surprise me. Shouldn’t hurt this way to realize it. After all, I’ve seen him lie to others. Hell, I’ve lied with him; he taught me how. He’s good at it, better than me. Does knowing that and believing him anyway make me a fool? Does it make me something worse?
He said he would come back today.
I still believe he meant to.
And yet. Samuel knows what’s easy for me, what’s hard, what’s impossible. Retrieving hay bales from the loft is impossible. He brought down four.
I return to the house. I intended to pack more boxes today, but the possessions I use least are upstairs. The break-it-out-once-a-year kitchen appliances and utensils are in the upper cupboards, out of reach. The bookshelves are bare save for the top shelves. I have a grabber, but it’s meant for things like cereal boxes, not electric mixers and dictionaries. I pack a single box with the good tablecloths and napkins from the linen closet, sandwiching between them a pair of brass candlesticks my mother put on the table at Thanksgiving and Christmas. She never lit the tall ivory candles, reused them year after year.
I glance at my painting supplies, but can hardly stand to look at them.
I go back to the barn, call to Lockjaw. I shouldn’t ride alone. Not without someone knowing where I’m going and when I plan to be back. I’ve adapted well to riding without being able to feel my seat or legs, but I’ll never be as secure in the saddle as before my injury. If Lockjaw spooks or stumbles and I fall, I’ll be in serious trouble, especially if I’m any distance from the house and barn. Once, years ago, Lockjaw was stung by a hornet and dumped me near the southern fence line. Samuel came home from work to find Lockjaw grazing in the front yard and me exhaustedly dragging myself a few inches at a time across the front field. If he hadn’t been there, it would have taken me at least another hour to get back to my chair, and I hadn’t even been hurt.
I consider all this. Then I saddle and bridle Lockjaw and lead her toward the mounting ramp.
* * *
There is a tree high atop the eastern ridgeline that I have always loved. It’s a couple miles southeast of the house, roughly above where the Eden and Gethsemane mines would meet, had their tunnels ever united. The tree is just a Douglas fir like so many others on the mountain slopes, but its highest reaches stand above those of its neighbors, and as a child I ascribed almost mystical properties to the tree. I thought of it as a sentinel, a guardian watching over Prospect.
I talked Samuel into hiking there when I was eight or nine, and he agreed only after extracting promises that I wouldn’t complain about the steep trails or the distance. I held up my end of the bargain, though it took much longer to get to the tree than I anticipated, and my legs started to burn and ache when we weren’t yet halfway there. When we arrived at the tree, I was disappointed. It wasn’t any larger or more majestic than its neighbors; it had simply had the fortune to plant its roots on a rocky outcropping that rose a couple yards above the surrounding ground. There were no eagles in its branches, no musical whispering of the wind through its needles.
“This was a good idea, Josie,” Samuel said, his approval instantly banishing my disappointment. “That’s one heck of a view.” It was, too, a clear bird’s-eye perspective on not only our own property—its sprawling acreage, the gray roofs of the house and barn—but also the entire town. From the tree, the foothills across the valley were dwarfed by the true mountains behind them, like the earliest ripple of a tide lapping at a beach, the peaks behind building higher and higher, the most distant ones capped with white like the highest breaking waves.
I sit atop Lockjaw now, one hand holding the reins and resting on the saddle horn, the other shielding my eyes from the sinking afternoon sun. I look at the mountains first, then the town, finally the house and land. There’s an unfamiliar metallic reflection toward the front of the property. Still a couple vehicles parked outside the gate. I catch myself scanning the property for Samuel, hoping to see him walking to the barn or mowing the pasture. Sometime soon I’ll stop forgetting what he has done, stop expecting things to be the way they once were. I can’t decide whether it will be a relief when that happens or not.
I ride slowly down the mountain, giving Lockjaw a slack rein and letting the mule choose her path. I close my eyes, willing my mind to go as dark as my vision. Usually a ride to the high fir calms me, but my thoughts come quickly, in flashes and images, one after another, piling up so I feel hounded by them. The days till the eviction: thirty. The damaged courthouse. The photograph of Emily. Samuel driving back from Wyoming, Samuel still in Wyoming, Samuel never in Wyoming at all.
* * *
Hawkins is waiting in the barn when I get back, sitting on a storage bin in jeans and flannel, cleaning his fingernails with his pocketknife. He looks up when I lead Lockjaw into the barn. “You shouldn’t ride alone.”
“Don’t have much choice, do I?”
He doesn’t say anything else. Doesn’t get up, either, though I know he has to make an effort to stay seated. Hawkins’s instinct to help those he deems to be in need verges on Pavlovian, and being both female and disabled, I set off every help that person bell in old-fashioned Hawkins’s head. Mostly he restrains himself unless I ask, and when he can’t, he helps when I’m not looking. He mucked the stall while I was riding, for instance, but he doesn’t point it out and I pretend not to notice.
He waits until I’ve untacked Lockjaw and am on the far side of the animal, grooming her coat with a soft brush. “What’re you gonna do with that mule when…”
I wince, glad Hawkins can’t see me from where he sits. “There’s time yet to figure it out.”
“Not a lot.”
I wheel behind Lockjaw, toss the brush into the grooming tote with more force than I intend. “Jesus, Hawkins. I know I’ve got to take care of it, and I will.”
I see his temples jump as he clenches his jaw, but his expression doesn’t change. “Sorry,” he says. “I know your brother usually handles that kind of thing, is all.” He folds his pocketknife, tucks it back onto his belt. His hat has been sitting crown-down beside him—it’s white, of course—and he puts it on now, stands. “I came to see if I could take you to dinner.”
“I smell like mule.”
He lets one side of his mouth twitch upward. “Puts you ahead of most folks at the Knock-Off.”
The Knock-Off is
just around the corner from City Hall, in the lower half of a two-story brick building on a side street so narrow it seems charitable not to call it an alley. When the mines were open, it was the most popular place in town, but these days most of Prospect’s remaining residents prefer the newer sports bars in Split Creek, and the Knock-Off caters mostly to drunks and near drunks. This early on a Sunday, the place is almost empty; when Hawkins and I enter I see just one other customer and the bartender. We go to a table beneath high windows crowded with neon beer logos, and Hawkins kicks a vinyl-covered chair out of the way to make room for my wheelchair. The bartender saunters over with a couple menus; he drops them on the table, waits. Hawkins orders a fried chicken sandwich, I order a cheeseburger, and the bartender nods and scoops up the untouched menus.
I look at Hawkins, and Hawkins looks at the walls. A few pickaxes, black-and-white photographs from early days at the mines, an old-fashioned cap with a carbide lamp and reflector on the front. A photo memorial to each of the thirteen miners who died in the Gethsemane collapse. My father in the second row. He’s smiling, sunlight bright on his skin, blue eyes squinted nearly shut. I can see Samuel in him. He doesn’t look much like our father, really, but they have the same slim, sinewy build, and they stand the same way, rooted and sturdy, as though a person could push and push and push and still not move them.
“Nothing new to tell me about Samuel?” There isn’t—Hawkins would have mentioned it before now—but I want to say his name.
