Painting the Light

by Sally Cabot Gunning

  “You seem . . . elated,” he said.

  “I’ve got a seventh healthy lamb, one I was sure was dead an hour earlier.”

  “They mean something to you, then.”

  “They mean money. They mean me getting off this island.”

  Silence. Again, Ida waited.

  “She got tired of waiting for me in Newport.”

  “She doesn’t much like waiting, does she?”

  “No.”

  “How long has she been here?”

  “Three days. She leaves in the morning.”

  “And then?”

  “We divorce. I told you.”

  Which wasn’t exactly Ida’s question. Or maybe it was. She pushed away from the sink. “Come.” She led Henry up the stairs and into her bedroom. She watched him look around, at the bed, the trunk, the bed again, the travel suit that still hung unbrushed on the closet door. She opened the closet and showed Henry the cubbyhole where the gold was stashed. “The paper the gold was wrapped in was six months old. Ezra was in Boston all the time. Why didn’t he just sell the gold to that Greave instead of hiding it?”

  “I don’t believe—”

  “You believe it was stolen, don’t you? That’s why you didn’t want me flashing it around the island. But I’ll tell you what I think. I think he was hiding it from me.”

  Henry said nothing.

  “And would you like to hear another little secret Ezra never shared? Oliver is his child.”

  Again, Henry said nothing.

  “I’m so tired of secrets. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the gold. I’m sorry I didn’t trust you.”

  “There’s no reason on earth why you should trust me.” Henry strode across the room to the trunk. “You’ve packed already.”

  “No. That’s Ezra.”

  Henry stepped back so fast Ida barked out a laugh. “Go ahead. Look.”

  Henry did. He actually did. He even lifted out several layers of shirts, trousers, nightshirts, woollies. He returned to stand in the middle of the room, to cast his eyes everywhere but at Ida. He spied the photograph of his father on the table next to the bed and crossed to pick it up.

  “I haven’t begun it,” Ida said. “I need you to tell me more about him. Did he share your coloring? He looks like he loved being a farmer. Did he?”

  Henry continued to gaze at the photo. “I’ve been told many times I was my father, but I wasn’t. I was never as vigorous, as brazen, as unconcerned about things.”

  “What things?”

  “Mose was more my father. I looked like him and it confused people, but Mose was the one. Carefree. Bold. You liked Mose, you’d have liked my father.”

  “You can’t think me carefree and bold.”

  Henry set the photo down and for the first time looked straight at Ida. “At times I’ve thought you carefree and bold. On the bicycle. At Parker House. Now.”

  “Now?”

  “I shouldn’t be here in this room. You know this, and yet you don’t care. Those curtains are wide open. My bicycle is parked at your door. Were Ruth or Lem or anyone—”

  “You’re right. I don’t care.”

  Henry strode to the window and whirled on Ida. “I wonder if you know what this does to me, being invited to your room, twice now, you all business, and me standing here thinking ‘I can’t breathe unless I touch her,’ and then I think of my circumstance. Your circumstance. And I know I can do nothing but tell you what I came to tell you; I leave for Newport in the morning.”

  “I should have gone to Newport two years ago,” Ida said. It was a joke, something to allow a retreat from the dangerous place they’d landed, but Henry didn’t seem to see the humor.

  “We don’t though, do we? We believe the words. We believe we have to try. Even Mose believed. Do you know what he told me of you and Ezra? That Ezra had gone mad over a Boston painter and if he married her she’d be the making of him.”

  “My money would be his making. That’s what he meant.”

  Henry shook his head. “I don’t think so, Ida. But sometimes it’s harder to give up a false idea than a true one. I have to go.”

  Ida stood up and crossed the room to Henry. “It wasn’t all business. Either time. Even that first time, at the gallery. You looked at my painting. You looked at me. You told me my painting was extraordinary. You told me to paint the next Ida Russell. I can’t breathe either, not touching you. But I look at our circumstances differently. I see them negating each other. My husband is dead. Your wife might as well be. Why must Ruth and Lem and—”

  Ida had stepped in so close she could have touched his arm; she did touch his arm; she leaned toward him, but Henry gripped her shoulders and stood her away. “Ida. No.”

  He left.

  19

  She felt the fool. It was true he’d spoken first, but it was also true she’d spoken second, and with such heat. And he’d stood her away from him. Ida paced the room in an effort to cool her cheeks, but it only inflamed them more. She spied her travel suit still hanging on the door and went after her clothes brush; she craved movement, distraction, a change of subject, mental and physical. She beat at the cloth with such ferocity she dislodged it from its hanger, and it tumbled to the floor, something sliding from its pocket: the tiny atlas she’d found in the Boston office. In an unconscious gesture she must have slipped it into her skirt.

  Well, she’d been after distraction. She picked up the book, sat down on the bed, and opened it to the flyleaf; E. A. Pease had been written in thick, black ink inside. Ezra had a way of writing his name as if he were angry at it, the beginning of the E jabbed so fiercely into the page it left a blot, the cross-stroke on the A dragging all the way into the P, the final e looking incomplete, as if in his haste Ezra had lifted the pen too soon, or as if to say, Ezra Pease is not yet done here. Except that now he was.

  Another memory, not even that old, but already so frayed and brittle Ida had refused to pull it out too often in case it caused an irreparable tear. It had begun as something of an occasion—albeit a rare one—Ezra coming home with both of them, Mose and Henry, in tow. Ida remembered the cold as the door banged open, the slap of Henry’s toolbox as he’d dropped it to the floor, the sight of the brothers, one on either side of Ezra like a pair of mismatched bookends, the feeling of life entering the room and lifting her like the wind lifted a bird’s wings.

  “Henry’s going to fix the clock,” Ezra said. “It turns out carriage makers are good at that.”

  “But only after you feed them,” Mose said.

  “No feeding necessary,” Henry said, but Ida had already unhooked the skillet from the beam.

  As they ate she watched the brothers and the way their bodies communicated with each other: a shrug of the shoulder, a raised finger, the barest look, as if they were bouncing a separate conversation between them without a single word while still adhering to the larger thread that included Ezra and Ida. And Ida. After a time a few of the knots that Ida had learned to live with loosened their grip. She relaxed. She cleared the table; Ezra took down the clock and set it in front of Henry.

  Henry asked, “Would you have a clean dish towel, Ida?”

  Ida opened the drawer, removed a clean, crisp towel, and handed it to Henry. He opened it, spread it out on the table, and smiled at Ida. “The best way to keep track of the pieces. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome. Thank you for doing this. The clock was my mother’s.”

  “I told him,” Ezra said. “I told him this was going to keep me in good for the next two months.”

  “It’s going to keep Henry in good,” Mose said. “Watch out.”

  “Oh, I’ve got nothing to fear. Ida knows not to bite the hand that feeds her. Don’t you, Ida?”

  “Seeing as how I just fed you—”

  Mose and Henry both laughed. Ezra did not. Of course Ezra did not.

  “Get the whiskey and get gone,” he said to Ida.

  “Actually,” Henry interjected, “I was hoping Ida co
uld tell me something about this clock. The workings are somewhat unusual.”

  “My father got it in Nova Scotia on a coastal trading voyage.”

  “Whiskey,” Ezra said.

  Henry got up, went to the pantry, collected the whiskey, and set it on the table in front of Ida.

  “Whoa!” Ezra said. “Don’t go giving my wife my whiskey!” He snatched up the bottle and jerked his head at Ida first, the door second.

  Ida didn’t move.

  “Are you deaf, dumb, or just plain old—”

  Henry had raised his eyes from the intricacies of the clock to look at Ezra. That was all—one look—but there was something in it that reminded Ida of the way Bett looked at the sheep. Whatever else Ezra had planned to say died on his tongue.

  Henry spoke into the unexpected void, to Ida. “Nova Scotia, you say. It fits. You see these kinds of workings in France.”

  Ezra snatched up the bottle and stormed out to the porch.

  “He’s just showing off,” Mose said, but looking at his brother, not Ida. “Showing us how obedient his wife is. He doesn’t talk like that when you’re alone, does he, Ida?”

  Now Henry looked at Ida.

  “He grows brave when we’re not alone,” Ida said. “For some reason he thinks I won’t embarrass him in public. But I don’t need to let him embarrass me in public, either.”

  “Or in private?” Henry asked.

  Ida nodded. From now, she thought. From now. Henry smiled at Ida, but not happily. She could tell the difference by now.

  “Mose!” Ezra shouted from the porch. Mose got up, grinning. “So I’m the one who obeys.” He left them.

  “I’m sorry for that,” Ida said.

  “Has he ever struck you?”

  “Lord, no.”

  “He’s not that brave?”

  Ida considered. “He’s not that afraid.”

  Henry smiled again—a better one.

  They sat in comfort, in quiet, Henry asking an occasional clock question, Ida giving an occasional answer, Henry concentrating on the tiny clock pieces, Ida concentrating on Henry’s hands as he worked.

  Yes, even then.

  As if in respect to Ida’s exhaustion, the sheep were quiet. No new lambs, no new pending lambs, no distressed ewes. But as soon as Ida breathed her sigh of relief she began to worry; shouldn’t there be new lambs, pending lambs, restless ewes? She called Lem, using as her excuse the trunk of clothes.

  “I have Ezra’s clothes packed up. You’re about the size. Would you like them? If not, I wanted to ask if you could take them to the Seamen’s Bethel.”

  “I think a shipwrecked sailor has more need of a good warm suit of clothes than I do.”

  “Can you take them?”

  “Can and will. Should do it soon too. Rose Amaral still hasn’t fully restocked the Bethel’s clothes locker since the storm.”

  That settled, Ida moved the talk around to the eerie quiet in the paddock and listened to a sheeplike chuckle on the other end of the line.

  “Don’t go looking for trouble, Ida. It’ll come.”

  It came.

  The ewe was old, too old to have been bred, even Ida could see that now, and the effort to expel her lamb was too much for her; the lamb got a single drink before the ewe died. They were coming faster now and Ida didn’t have long to wait for the next one; she tried the trick Lem had shown her the year before, rubbing the orphaned lamb with the birth fluids of the new mother in hope the mother would think she’d given birth to two and would take on the orphan along with her own. For a second Ida thought it had worked; the ewe nuzzled the orphan, sniffing her all over, before lifting a foot to kick it away. Now Ida was the orphan’s mother, which meant six bottle feeds a day.

  Next came one of those soggy, late March storms that weighed down everything it touched with a mix of snow, slush, and ice, bringing down the phone line and exhausting Ida as she attempted to slog through it. The sheep hunkered in the field shelter in a tight mass, making it impossible to identify one from the other, but making it easier to track them when they wandered off to drop their lambs in private. She found one in the lee of a cedar, huddled with her offspring on a bare patch of ground. The lamb had been licked clean, so Ida guessed it had been fed, but to be sure she lifted it and felt the belly. Full, but the lamb was shivering, and Ida feared hypothermia. This pair needed the barn. Bett could get the ewe there but it was a long walk for a tiny lamb through the snow. Ida picked up the lamb, keeping it low so the ewe could see it, hoping it would follow it to the barn. It did. Once there Ida rubbed the lamb dry with a burlap sack, watched it through its next feed, forked down some hay, and left them to get acquainted with the orphan already in residence.

  Ida’s next worry was the thick snow drift along the west stone wall. She collected Ezra’s crook, pulled Ezra’s wool cap down to meet her collar, and walked the wall, thumping through the snow with the crook. When she struck solid she scraped at the ice and snow until she’d uncovered a first-time ewe with a dead lamb; she picked up the lamb and again the ewe followed Ida all the way to the barn, where they found Lem unsaddling his horse and wiping it down.

  Ida made no effort to keep the relief out of her voice. “How’d you get here?”

  Lem pointed to the horse, never one to waste words on foolish questions. He collected the dead lamb from Ida. “It’s probably too late, but let’s try one more thing. Get me that orphan.” He disappeared into the far stall and by the time Ida returned with the orphan in her arms Lem had already skinned the dead lamb, leaving holes at the head and legs. He fit the skin over the orphan’s head, pulled each leg through, and fetched the childless ewe; she sniffed the strange lamb in the coat of her own lamb and snorted. She backed off, circled, sniffed again, and walked away.

  “I’ve seen it work plenty of times,” Lem said. “Guess this one’s too old. So you’re still mama. Here’s the good news, though—you’ve got yourself a milker.”

  The other good news—the only other good news—was that like most March storms, this one melted away fast. Once the hill had shed its ice, Ida trudged up it to give Ruth the updated tally: nine healthy lambs, one dead lamb, one dead ewe. She found the two women and the boy in the parlor; Hattie and Oliver on the loveseat with a book open between them, Hattie reading aloud to Oliver as Ruth perched close to the stove with a piece of sewing.

  Ida submitted her report.

  “Dead ewes count,” Ruth said.

  Oliver scrambled off the loveseat and tugged at Hattie’s skirt. “May we go see the lambs? Please?”

  Hattie exchanged a look with Ida.

  “I’ll take you down,” Ida said.

  “I’ll fetch him in a half hour,” Hattie said.

  “A five-year-old boy can walk up a hill alone,” Ruth said.

  Oliver raced off. Ruth got up and followed him, no doubt with some final instruction about muddy boots.

  “You’ll tell him?” Hattie asked Ida. “Really, you should tell him. He was your husband. You can talk to Oliver about him. I hadn’t seen much of Ezra in recent years.” Ida looked at Hattie in amazement, not because she hadn’t seen Ezra—who had? But because this wasn’t the story Hattie had been selling around town. What Ida actually knew about Hattie was shrinking by the minute.

  “I’ll tell him,” Ida said, “if you tell Ruth in no uncertain terms that Oliver is Ezra’s. Today.”

  “But what will you say to him?”

  Ida saw no need to challenge Oliver’s intricate network of father fables; she’d say what she had to say and let the boy sort it out for himself. But what exactly to say? “The truth,” she told Hattie. “With an extra word added. That we just found out his father was on the Portland when it went down.”

  Hattie nodded. “I’ll tell Mother.”

  Ida decided to start with the fun. Oliver raced along the pasture wall pointing at each new lamb until Ida said, “Want to feed one?” She led him into the barn, armed with a full bottle; by now the orphan had figured out wher
e the goods were and hopped over to Ida to lip her boot. Ida handed the bottle to Oliver; the lamb took it without fuss.

  “Its name is Bett,” Oliver said.

  “I don’t know,” Ida said. “I don’t want to call a dog and have a lamb come.”

  Oliver thought. “Bett—ee.”

  For an imaginative child, he sure came up short in the name department, Ida thought. “Come back tomorrow and you can feed her again.”

  Ida lured Oliver away from the lamb with a promise of hot cocoa at the house, but he insisted on stopping at the dog yard along the way to say hello to the real Bett. Once inside Ida fussed around a little too long, but finally she had Oliver seated at the kitchen table with a cup of cocoa and a slice of bread and jam in front of him. Ida sat.

  “Oliver, remember I told you my mother died?”

  Oliver nodded but didn’t look up.

  “My father died too. The ship he was working on sank.”

  There Oliver looked up.

  “We’ve heard some bad news about your father, Oliver. He was on a ship that sank.”

  Oliver peered at Ida.

  “It was a big steamship and everyone on it died. Your father died too. In a bad storm.”

  Oliver pushed his cup away. “I want to go home.”

  “Okay, we’ll go right now. But I wanted to tell you one more thing. Your father was also my husband. We got married after your mother died.” At least Ida hoped they did. She considered telling Oliver that his father had talked of him often, that he’d planned numerous visits, that he loved him, and it might have helped for today, but what of later when Oliver grew older and understood that for five years his father hadn’t ever visited him, that he hadn’t bothered to give the boy his name or provide for him in any way? It would add Ida to the list of liars and still leave Ezra the villain, two people Oliver could never trust instead of just one.

  “Come,” Ida said. “I’ll walk you home.”

  They walked up the hill, or rather Ida walked and Oliver raced ahead as if trying to get as far away from Ida as fast as he could. They found Ruth and Hattie sitting in frozen silence in the kitchen, Ruth’s arms crossed in a posture of denial, if Ida were apt to read into it; Hattie appeared to have been crying. Oliver ran past them, still in his boots, up the stairs, into his bedroom, and slammed the door. Ruth made to rise but Hattie snapped at her.