Painting the Light

by Sally Cabot Gunning

  Ida snatched up the canvas painter’s duster she’d draped over the door, barreled down the stairs, grabbed the rifle, and called Lem. “Something’s got into the sheep.” She hung up, thrust her feet into her boots, grabbed the lantern, and raced to the door. Bett was ahead of her, waiting.

  Once outside, the sounds crashed on Ida’s ears: Bett’s primal howl; a sheep’s squeal of terror and pain. She opened the gate and let Bett through; in quick succession three stray dogs rounded on her, snarling, but Bett gave no ground, and Ida was about to call her off—better a dead sheep than a dead dog—when Lem pounded up the track on his horse and dropped to the ground, shotgun in hand.

  “Dogs!” Ida cried.

  Lem lifted the gun to his shoulder and fired; one of the dogs yelped and stumbled as he attempted to leap over the wall, but two others cleared it and made for the trees. Lem vaulted after them; Ida heard two more shots, then silence. She held the lantern high and inventoried the carnage at her feet. One lamb dead, two bloodied, a bloodied ewe.

  Lem returned and between them they carried the injured lambs into the barn, the injured ewe trailing in stoic silence; Lem went back for the dead one, taking care to separate it from the living ones, but he needn’t have bothered; by the time he knelt to examine the wounded lambs they’d died too.

  They sat in the kitchen, Lem stirring the fire, Ida putting on the kettle, setting out the cups. And the whiskey bottle.

  Lem pointed. “This some kind of habit now?”

  Ida ignored him. “Whose dogs were they?”

  “Looked like Croft’s. He’s been told enough times not to let them run loose nights. I’ll be paying him a call in the morning.”

  Ida fetched the kettle, but Lem had already filled his cup with whiskey; Ida poured herself some tea but left room. She pushed her cup toward Lem once, and when Lem hesitated, again. Lem dosed her.

  “What I can’t figure is why Bett didn’t sound the alarm earlier, keep them off,” he said.

  “Because she was inside, asleep on my bed.”

  Lem gave Ida a long look. “Sheets too cold with him gone?”

  Ida went to the sink, poured out her tea, picked up the whiskey bottle and filled her cup. She leaned across the table toward Lem. “This is a bad night following a bad day and I don’t need you at me about Henry Barstow.”

  Lem raised his cup. Point taken. Ida slumped into her seat. “They got three lambs. This puts me over on the count.”

  “I know.”

  “I wanted to do this. I wanted to climb that hill to Ruth and say I’d done it. They were my responsibility and now—”

  “And now you learned something, Ida. That’s how it works. Take the lesson, file it away, move on.” It was something Mr. Morris would have said. “What happened today that made it a bad one?” Lem looked at the clock. “Yesterday.”

  Ida hesitated. She would admit to a smallness in her, a thing that hated to be wrong, that hated to admit when someone else was right. But there was another thing in her, growing stronger by the hour, that wanted everything out in the open and told straight, no hedging, no subterfuge, no deceit. Especially not with Lem. “I ran into Henry’s wife in town. She’d come to pick up some things for him.”

  Lem drained his teacup and stood.

  “Where are you going?”

  “You’d rather I stay and tell you I told you so?”

  “I’d rather you stay and—” What? What would she rather he do? Put his arms around her as she cried over those sheep much as she’d cried in Henry’s arms over her mother? She already regretted that; she wouldn’t want to regret the same thing twice.

  But did she regret it? Ida flushed, thinking of Henry’s hands on her, a thing she found little desire to regret, but thinking of Henry at home with his daughters, thinking of those hands on his wife . . .

  His wife. The place where his hands belonged. Still.

  As if he were reading her mind Lem said, “The rules were written a long time ago, Ida. They were written for a reason. Don’t go thinking outside them and you’ll save yourself a lot of grief.”

  Lem came by in the morning to check on the wounded ewe and offered Ida a ride up the hill to report to Ruth.

  “I can walk up a hill.”

  “I’m going up anyway, but trot alongside if you like.”

  Ida got into the wagon. They rode the short distance in silence; Lem stopped at the side of the house by the back porch. “One word of advice. Ruth Pease was once a sheep farmer’s wife. Don’t tell her where that dog was.”

  Ida looked sideways and saw Lem grinning. “Go on and get out or I’ll make you help me unload this wagon.”

  Ida looked behind her and saw what she might have seen before: a bed full of cordwood.

  “I’ll help.”

  “No you won’t. Nothing gets easier for the waiting.”

  But Ida slid out of the wagon and grabbed an armful of wood. Lem shook his head at her, but didn’t say anything else, so they worked side by side, crossing from the wagon to the back porch, stacking the wood outside the door. After the third trip Lem stopped and leaned against the porch rail, his breathing coming hard, or that was to say, harder than Ida’s.

  “Getting old,” he said.

  Ida leaned on the rail beside him. “Just how old is that, anyway?”

  “Fifty-three come fall. If I live.” He grinned; pushed off the rail. “You go on inside, now. Ruth gets nastier as the day grows older.”

  Ida rounded the corner and walked into Ruth’s kitchen. Without sitting down she told the old woman about the dead sheep. She told her she was over the count. She didn’t tell her about the dog.

  “So, it will cost you,” Ruth said.

  “I know that, Ruth.”

  “Same as it will cost me.”

  “I know that too.”

  “So we share and share alike.” The idea seemed to please Ruth. She nodded, almost smiled. “You’ll stay till the livestock sale then, get me a good price, see if we can recoup. Now, are you going to sit down or are we done?”

  “We’re done.”

  Ruth peered at her. “Sit down. We’re not done.”

  Ida sat, but on the edge of the chair. Ruth went to the stove and began to fuss with the teakettle; Ida saw no recourse but to wait on a cup of tea she didn’t want and suspected Ruth didn’t want to give, but what Ruth did want to give was a sundry collection of advice that kept Ida long past the time when Lem’s wagon rattled off down the track.

  Ida walked back down the hill, looking out over the Sound, noting how it stretched out pale and calm in front, but how a dark line marked the farthest reaches at the horizon. She’d seen that line before—often, in fact. Perhaps that was the problem with Ida’s rendering of water—she’d forgotten about the dark line that always lurked in the distance.

  25

  “Did my father ever take you on a picnic?” Oliver asked. “My grandfather takes us on picnics.”

  Ezra had taken her on a picnic. He’d commandeered Ruth’s carriage and packed it himself with delectables he’d gleaned from Luce’s store: a thick slab of salt ham, crusty bread, sharp cheese, gleaming apples, a paper bag full of hazelnuts, a pair of enormous pickles out of the pickle barrel. Fudge. He’d also packed a jug of hard cider and another of lemonade and a pair of old quilts.

  He’d borrowed the carriage from Ruth and driven Ida out to Squibnocket; Ida had adored the endless sweep of dune peppered with the occasional green swath and grazing sheep. Yes, sheep—someone else’s sheep were quite picturesque, she could admit it—even to the point of regretting her sketch pad, but only for a second. It was September and brisk; Ezra spread the quilt in the lee of a dune, the rumble of the ocean at Ida’s elbow, the sun warming her cheeks. They’d been married how many months? Ida couldn’t remember.

  “Are you happy?” Ezra had asked her, and although by then Ida had begun to sense the full weight of the place, the full weight of her marriage, the hard edges had been dulled by the cider and the sun and
the surf. And the fact that he’d ask the question further warmed her. She looked at him and believed she could see down through the sinew to a heart she could speak to. “Yes,” she’d answered.

  They ate and drank and walked the shoreline, facing straight into the wind; they turned and allowed the wind to blow them back, Ida tucked in against Ezra’s sheltering side. They dozed in the sun between the quilts, Ida’s head on Ezra’s shoulder, Ezra’s hand on Ida’s breast, and then Ezra woke and inched her skirt up and his pants down and rolled onto her and really, what was the difference in that conclusion than the one on the banquette at Makonikey? What was the difference in one man gone to the bottom of the sea and one gone back to his wife?

  “Yes,” Ida answered Oliver. “Your father took me on a wonderful picnic.”

  So she invited Oliver on a picnic. She asked Lem if she might borrow the wagon, but he said no. “I’ve seen you with wheels under you.” Instead, he offered to drive them, which somehow turned into Hattie and Ruth coming along, which somehow turned into them all taking the carriage to the lagoon, to which Ida and Oliver could just as easily have walked. They couldn’t have carried Ruth’s folding table and chairs, however, or the huge jug of cold tea, or the basket of brown bread and boiled eggs, or Ruth’s picnic china, which was Ruth’s regular china but the pieces with the chips.

  After an argumentative setup—the two camps being tablecloth-because-no-civilized-person-would-sit-down-to-eat-without-one and no-tablecloth-because-the-wind-will-send-it-to-the-treetops—Ruth dispersed them to find rocks to hold down the cloth. Getting a sense of where the party was going and that this might be her only chance to give Oliver the fun day she’d envisioned, Ida sent him off on a scavenger hunt after specific rocks in a specific order: white rock; black rock; striped rock. But by the time he returned flushed and happy and laden with rocks of every possible description, the tablecloth had already been anchored with a dull gray stone on each corner.

  The tea and brown bread and eggs came out, to which Ida added her lemonade, muffins, and fudge, but for reasons known only to small boys, Oliver would touch none of it. Ruth began the conversation by relating the provenance of each chip in the china. Hattie getting blamed for most of it, she felt called upon to rebut, but when that got her no grace she switched the conversation to sheep.

  Hattie? Sheep?

  “When do we shear?” Hattie asked Lem.

  “What’s shear?” Oliver asked.

  “We clip off the sheep’s coat so we can spin their wool and make our coats,” Ida said. “Then they grow another coat before winter.”

  “Do you shear Bett?”

  “No, not Bett.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Because Bett sheds her coat.”

  “Why don’t sheep shed their coats?”

  Ida gave the nod to Lem on that one. “Because for thousands of years we’ve bred them not to. It’s now our responsibility to remove the wool for them. If we didn’t we’d have some pretty unhappy sheep.”

  “What’s bred?”

  Now Lem shot Ida the look, back to you. She was saved by a clap of Ruth’s hands. “Time to pack up!”

  Immediately another argument erupted between Hattie and Ruth over the proper packing of an already-peeled boiled egg.

  “Here’s how,” Ida said, snatching the egg and biting off half, handing the other half to Oliver.

  For the second time in their acquaintance, Oliver giggled. He also gobbled down the egg.

  In fact, it was time to shear, or so Ida thought, but Lem seemed to think otherwise, and Ida, no longer trusting her judgment on anything, didn’t argue. When Lem finally began to mobilize faster than Lem usually mobilized, Ida said nothing; for one thing, there wasn’t time.

  Shearing occupied them all—Ida, Lem, Hattie, Ruth, and Oliver—for a full day. Hattie’s presence was a surprise; she’d never drawn near the event since Ida had been around, but perhaps she now welcomed the chance to focus on something besides Ezra. Lem and Ida set up the pens; Ida and Bett gathered the sheep into the near pasture where they were funneled into the larger of the two pens; Lem hauled them out one by one into the smaller.

  As in the past, Ida was always amazed at how resigned the sheep became once Lem took them in hand; he rolled them onto their backs, holding them in a half-sitting position between his legs, anchoring them with feet clad in special moccasins designed for the purpose. He clipped the belly first, taking care to protect the ewe’s udder with his free hand; next he rolled the sheep and worked the back side until he could pull off the fleece in one whole piece, spreading it out on the table as if it were the ewe’s woolly shadow.

  That was where Ida and Hattie came in. They clipped the tags and dirty edges off the fleece, folded in the corners, rolled and tied the fleece with the tail ends, and stuffed it into the bag. In the past Ida had struggled to keep up with Lem, but either Lem had slowed some or Hattie was making more of a difference than Ida had planned to give her credit for. And then, of course, there was Oliver, crawling into the long bag to jam the fleeces in tight. Through it all was the din: lambs, unable to recognize their unclothed mothers, called and called for them: Where are you? The ewes answered back, even louder: Right here, silly.

  After the first fleece Hattie and Ida were elbow deep in the greasy lanolin, and after the first bag Oliver was too. All three of them were sweating through their clothes. Ida was used to it but Hattie wasn’t; the look on her face was something to catch, but you had to look fast and then get out of its way. As for Oliver, the sweat, the grease, the noise—he loved it all.

  Ruth too. This had been her life—the cycles of the sheep farm—and Ida only saw it now as she watched and listened. Ruth called out to Lem now and again, “Watch that one, she’s trouble!” but Lem never slowed and never seemed to have any trouble that Ida could discern. Everyone chipped in to load the wagon, and Ruth counted the bags as they were piled on; Lem drove the wagon to the dock, Hattie riding beside Lem and Oliver perched atop the bags. Ida stayed behind to clean up the detritus and attempt to ignore Ruth.

  “There, over there.”

  “I’ll get to it.”

  “There, I said!”

  “Why don’t you sit down?” Ida suggested. Surprisingly, Ruth did, perching on a stump within vocal range so she could recount sheep-shearing tales, occasionally lifting her face to the sun as if it were the last warmth she’d ever feel.

  As if to reward Ida for her labor, the next day broke as perfect as June days got; a bright sun gave off only the gentlest heat; a toothless salt breeze pushed the hair off Ida’s forehead; a hawk looped effortlessly overhead; the bright white sails of the schooners traced the Sound. Ida had planned to visit the salvage office in search of whatever it was the investigator thought he’d find, but at the last minute she tossed her pad and pencils into the bicycle basket; she didn’t want to let that day escape. When she passed Mr. Tilton cleaning the sidewalk in front of his store, she called out to him, “Has summer finally come?” He caused her a wobble when he called back, “For today, Miz Pease! Fine day for riding, isn’t it?”

  She decided to go with the breeze and set off toward Cottage City, pulling off the road at East Chop when she glimpsed the sails of a schooner in the distance. She was sitting taking careful measure of length of ship versus length of mast when a group of women in large floppy hats, some fashionable, some not, came walking along the shore and stopped within hailing distance of Ida; they began to unpack: Easels. Paint boxes. Folding stools. Thermoses. Blankets.

  One who appeared to be in charge of the group surprised Ida by coming toward her. Her hat was one of the less fashionable ones, her chin the most prominent, her eyes deep, dark, acute.

  “You’re not from the Institute.”

  “Whatever it is, I’m not.”

  “The Summer Institute. A curriculum for teachers, where they may refresh themselves, expand their knowledge, bring new ideas back to the classroom. It’s a fine idea and I like to support it. I
also like to get paid. I’m Cecily Matson, the art instructor.” She held out her hand.

  “Ida Pease.”

  Cecily Matson waved to where the group had arranged themselves in a semicircle on the sand. “We’ll be sitting over there painting the schooners. They come by here regular as clockwork. Feel free to join us if you like.” She leaned over and examined Ida’s painting, which for some reason Ida had neglected to shield from view. “Ah, they called to you too. Have you tried the schooners before?”

  Ida shook her head.

  “Then allow me to be bold. You’ve got it right except for the foremast. On a schooner, the foremast is shorter than the aft one.”

  “Always?”

  Matson smiled. “When is always ever always? But almost always.”

  Ida stood up, rinsed her brush, emptied the water pan, capped the water bottle.

  “Oh dear, we’ve driven you out.”

  “No, I’ve sheep to tend.” It wasn’t as much of a lie as some others, yet it wasn’t as true as some others either, such as Yes, Miss Matson, you’ve driven me out, but Miss Matson didn’t look like she believed Ida anyway.

  “Oh, stay, do.” She pointed to Ida’s pad. “The way you’ve worked the light on the water. I’ve been attempting to convey to the ladies—sometimes it’s the absence, not the presence, of color that makes a thing spark. Here, may I show them?” And before Ida could object, the annoying woman picked up Ida’s painting and held it high. “This is—”

  “Ida Russell,” Ida said.

  26

  Ida unlocked the office door, side-stepped the ghost of Perry Barstow, and turned her attention to where she’d left it last—the desk drawer. If she expected to find something illicit or at least disagreeable she found only the banal: a worn glove; three pencil stubs; a crusty newspaper article about a New Jersey shipwreck; a receipt from Tilton’s itemizing nails, lamp wicks, lamp oil; a toothpick; a dusty horehound drop; the key to the file cabinet.