“It’s Matilda,” I tried to explain. “I just took a notion to—”
“You fool woman. That don’t look like any crow I know of.”
“Oh, but Ev, I got it in my head to try, it’s just for myself—”
“You mean no one ordered it? You got that pile of orders and you’re here wasting good paint, and a good board, and fucking hell, who’s gonna buy a pitcher of a crow that don’t look like a crow, anyway? You’re off your fuckin head.” He’d grabbed the board and peered at it closer. An ugly look spread over his mouth. “Wasting time, always wasting time. And me busting my arse to feed you.”
I don’t know why, I guess the constable’s visit was fresh in my mind and the queasiness the visit had caused made me speak up. “Ev,” I said, “did something happen with them two little girls? Those two that came that day with their folks and their brother, remember, that little boy.”
“What two little girls are you talking about? I don’t have the foggiest notion what you are on about. Not you too—crazy as all the other bitches and sons-of-bitches out there in the world. Oh they’re out there, crazy as all hell. Don’t take nothing to set ’em off like a pack of curs, does it. You should know, you’re one of them.” He glared, pointing his finger at me.
I wanted to ask about my ring, too, but knew better.
I knew he was right. I knew it didn’t take anything for folks to lie and set themselves against someone. But the minute he turned his back, I slid Matilda’s portrait in behind a bunch of finished boards. I wasn’t ready to give up on it quite yet.
Before I knew it, Easter came. It fell on the second week of April that year, ’66. Matilda’s brood had hatched; even before I glimpsed the chicks’ heads peeping from the nest I heard them clamouring to be fed. Matilda and Willard ferried food to them, flying back and forth on missions that often took them out of my sight. I reckoned they couldn’t feed those babies often enough. Sleet pelted my window pane fit to scrub the tulips off. I worried about those poor fledglings. To take my mind off them I daydreamed, training my gaze on the raw, muddy ground outside. Imagined bunnies frolicking, snowdrops poking their heads up, deer leaving the woods with their tiny spotted fawns to drink from barnyard ponds. Resting my hands, I thought of the little cards I had painted in bygone days, the rhymes I’d penned inside. Loads of Easter wishes are hurrying your way/Hope they’re in time to bring you/Much joy on Easter Day. Land, if I could have painted anything now it would have been cards. Cards would have helped me practice the fine details I wanted for Matilda’s picture. But cards were much too small and finicky, I had lost the touch. Even if I had kept it, who would I send cards to? Any kith and kin I had left were as good as dead to me; poor Aunt had left your world years ago. I could have sent them to customers but Ev would have had words about that: “What, now you’re sending them freebies? Give ’em the cow, they ain’t gonna pay for milk!”
Ev had a point, of course. He always did.
I was setting there mulling over that Easter verse—so much pleasanter nowadays to let verses dance in my head than having to put them down with a pen and ink—when the car pulled in. It was late afternoon. Ev was off somewhere, perhaps combing the shore for whatever the tide had drug in.
Rap rap rap. Guess who it was. I opened the door to that sweet-faced policeman. It struck me, maybe I’m foolish, but I thought, here’s a fella needs to be needed. What other reason would a man that age have for coming way out here to call on two old birds like Ev and me? Especially since I had the idea the man didn’t care much for art. In any case, I knew he was barking up the wrong tree. Unless visiting the dump was a criminal act, no crime that I could think of had been committed, by Ev or yours truly.
Stepping inside the officer gave his name again, as I’d forgotten it: Constable Somebody. He had told me before but, just like the other time, I let it go in one ear and out the other. Same as last time, he asked, “Is your husband home?”
“Nope.”
“Can I ask where he is?”
I did not hesitate for a second. “At work.” Of course, this was five years after the almshouse shut, it was that long since Ev had had a regular job. But he worked plenty hard scouring the countryside for what we needed (though after twenty-eight years of wedded bliss, like any other couple, we had more than enough stuff, we had stuff spilling from every corner). The gods’ truth, my words to the officer were hardly a lie, not even a small white one. Yet he persisted.
“Look. I hate to bother you, Missus—” He sounded healthier this time.
I jumped right in: “You can just call me Maud.”
He nodded then launched in. “We’ve had complaints. Again. Mr. Lewis loitering, bothering the girls—a clerk at Shortliffe’s, a teller at the bank. Unfortunately, the same general complaint as that couple reported.”
“Couple?”
“The couple with the kids, a while back—I think you know who I mean.”
I suppose I did, how could I forget? I remembered Ev’s playfulness, inviting those little girls to see Fred the trout and his squirrel that day, the squirrel that would sit atop the doghouse and torment Joe something fierce. I remembered the candies they’d refused to take. The only hurtful thing Ev had done was pass Matilda off as his crow instead of mine.
“What would they have to complain about? That was more’n a month ago. I’m afraid they are talking through their hat. Making things up. Ev wouldn’t hurt a flea.”
“Well, maybe not intentionally.” The constable took the liberty of sitting down on Ev’s chair, so I could see more of his face as he spoke. The lower part of his cheeks were flushed pink, the shoulders of his coat shone wet. His mouth looked kind of disappointed. “Maybe not.” Repeating it, his voice sounded stiff. “But how do you get along with him, Missus?” He cleared his throat. “Has he ever—?”
I felt suddenly hot, my shoulders prickled with the insult of it. For suddenly I could see what he was insinuating: had Ev ever hurt me? “Of course not.” Though I wasn’t fully clear what precisely he was asking. As if me and Ev got into it, scrapping with each other.
“He’s never caused harm. Are you sure?”
I tilted my head back as far as I could, twisted my gaze up to meet his. At the same time an angry spark fired through me. Oh yes, the Twohig woman had been spreading lies about Ev. Hurling slings and arrows against Ev was the same as hurling slings and arrows against me. If anything happened to Ev, I would be in a bad way. It felt like my eyes were weighted with lead as my gaze sank to the mat. Then I thought even Carmelita Twohig wasn’t so awful as to incite a perfect stranger’s wrath against Ev, against us. I nodded. My smiling face felt as pink as the officer’s. “I expect I would be pretty sure about something like that.”
He leaned forward to meet my eye. He looked ashamed for a young fella, for a cop. The two kinds of people who, from what I gathered, would feel or show little shame. “That’s good,” he said. Not that I had experience with cops. I could imagine this one in his mama’s kitchen drinking milk. Their chit-chat as sweet as this day was long—now that spring was here, at least according to the calendar.
“Others don’t know Ev like I do.”
“Well, sure. I’m sure you’re right but—”
“Ev wouldn’t hurt a soul.” I raised my voice so there would be no misunderstanding. “He would not lay a harmful finger on nobody. Willful or not.” Belting this out sapped my breath, left me feeling dizzy.
“Now, calm yourself, Missus. I’m not suggesting—” The constable’s voice was gruff but quiet, chastened, Aunt Ida would have said. Perhaps he figured he had better straighten up and fly right, that is, not poke his nose into other peoples’ business, or be too hard or too soft on folks in what, for all he knew, might be a delicate situation. “It’s my duty, that’s all, to investigate complaints. Other people’s complaints, I mean. We get complaints all the time, we have to look into them. Even if a lot o
f the time they’re just rumours.” I fancied he turned pinker, if that was possible.
“Who’s complaining, exactly? Do they have a name?”
“Well, now, I’m sorry, ma’am. We can’t name names unless charges are pressed.”
“Charges?”
“Should any of the complainants decide to proceed—”
By now I was mightily offended, not just miffed. Carmelita Twohig’s powdered face loomed again in my mind. “Now why would they do that?” To slight an innocent man, the one person in the whole world who has stuck by me through thick and thin? I wanted to say. Who has kept me all these years, even when I wasn’t the woman I’d let on I was. The one who, in spite of this, kept on keeping me. Like our wedding vows said, for better and for worse. In sickness and in health, and that.
I smiled sideways at the constable, kept a stony silence.
“Well, that’s good, that Ev doesn’t…that you’re getting along okay, Missus. No need to be upset. Look, I shouldn’t have suggested—I’m just responding…doing my job.” He shrugged inside his stiff, shiny coat; I heard its rustle. Oh yes, I could picture him sitting in a big sunny kitchen, an older woman like Secretary doting on him. He handed me a card with his name on it. I held it up to the window and read it out. “Constable Bradley Colpitts.”
“If I can ever be of assistance, Missus. Call. Don’t suffer in silence.”
I tipped my head back and forced my eyes to wander up to meet his once more and linger there, though it hurt my spine something fierce. “Why would someone like me need your help?”
His gaze raked over the range and the stairs and the daybed, taking them in in one eye-gulp. “A woman of your, ah, stature. You mightn’t want to speak up, perhaps.” He made a rough sound clearing his throat, so his cold was back or he too was a smoker? “Where others might be less afraid to. Afraid, I mean, of people knowing their affairs.”
Affairs? Stature? Fame, I guess he meant. I stood four foot tall in bare feet if I was lucky, though some of you have me pegged at five two. Five foot nothing!
Fame, as if I were a proper mucky-muck! I couldn’t help but blush.
“Afraid?”
I figured the constable must’ve seen me in the Star Weekly magazine the year or two before—or on the television. Heaven only knows how Ev and me appeared to folks in the pictures the nice man from Yarmouth had taken of us. The man and his friend, another fella, a writer, had arrived after another man and a lady from Halifax came all the way to Marshalltown to see me and buy some paintings. I guess word of Ev and me got around, one thing led to another. These two from the city must have tipped off Mr. Brooks who came all the way from Yarmouth with his camera—or maybe Mr. Brooks tipped off those two buyers. As with the chicken and the egg, it’s hard to know what begot what. This is how things happened once word of my paintings got out: word spreads like a grassfire if the wind is right. What I hadn’t reckoned on was how tickled pink these folks were by Ev and me. I admit I was tickled pink by their attention, gobsmacked by it, you could say. Land knows if that sweet Mr. Brooks had not taken our pictures, Ev and me and my work mightn’t ever have got known beyond the lobster-arsed end of Nova Scotia.
Mr. Brooks had dropped by one dull February day—right out of the blue he appeared, asking if he could come in and take our photographs. Given no warning a-tall, I had no chance to spruce myself up first. Luckily I had my hair up in my best hairnet, one with a rhinestone band keeping it off my forehead, and I was wearing my best apron with pink flowers and touches of green edged in pink grosgrain ribbon, a decent sweater, and jewellery. Not only my gold brooch with its orange, red, and green stones, but my silver cat as well, with its tiny red stone for a nose.
Mr. Brooks kept aiming his camera at me while I worked on a painting of a man in a jacket and cap like Ev’s, with a team of oxen hauling logs. Do you know, he got down on his knees, right there on the linoleum, like I was the Queen of Sheba and he was my subject, saying he wanted pictures of my face not the top of my head. Then he had me stand outdoors in my coat, hat, and mitts to get a picture of me holding my sleigh painting. We went back inside and Ev chewed the fat with him as he snapped pictures of this and that around the house. He got Ev to stand at the range dishing out my dinner, and had me seated like a Royal Highness before my table-tray with a square of pink material over it for my linen. Dinner was a rabbit stew Ev had made. I admit it made me blush with pride, untarnished pride, having this admiring set of eyeballs take everything in. Once upon a time, in my earliest married days, I might have fretted like Aunt Ida, only for all of thirty seconds, that unfamiliar eyes would linger overlong on where my scrub brush fell woefully short. But this visitor cared only about the beauty wrought by my paintbrush. He never mentioned my hands but I knew he was looking at them. He was too polite to say anything, obviously better brought up than some who came along before and since. I could tell by the way he smiled at me what he was thinking. It wasn’t exactly pity in his eyes so much as wonder, a guilty kind of wonder as in “there go I but by the grace of God,” like Aunt used to say. I reckoned Ev saw it too, the look in his eyes. After a while Ev got him to leave me to my work while he toured him around his rabbit snares and sheds. I wondered if he might be offering our guest a swig of the cocktail he’d got up to brewing down there.
Little did he know, the attention Mr. Brooks brought us would soon let Ev buy his liquor already made from the liquor commission. Before our visitor left, he came in to thank me for my time and to say goodbye.
I should be the one thanking you, I almost said.
It turned out Mr. Brooks had a friend, a scribe of some sort named Mr. Barnard who had just moved to Halifax, a city I could only half imagine, from a metropolis I could not begin to: Toronto, Ontario. The day Mr. Barnard came calling was a sunny one in June, warm but not too hot in the house. Ev was cooking up some fish. Mr. Barnard asked Ev and me a whole raft of questions, about how long I’d been painting and how Ev managed all the housework while I was on Cloud Nine doing what I did, painting and bringing in the bacon, like someone said.
“Always a pleasure meeting an artist,” Mr. Barnard said.
This well and truly made me blush—nearly as pink as during that chat I was telling you about, between me and Constable Colpitts a full year later. “Well I ain’t no real artist, I just like to paint,” I told our kind visitor.
“Listen at her,” Ev piped up. “She don’t like to brag or nothing. My Maudie is like that, see.” He was blushing too, with pride and something else—I hate to say it, maybe a teeny trace of envy—that his little wife was the reason these fine men in suits had called in, Mr. Brooks and then his friend, not just to buy a painting or two, which they did, or to hear Ev’s stories, which they also did, but to see me doing what I did. And not just see me for themselves, but each promising as he left to tell people who couldn’t get to Marshalltown all about me.
Mr. Barnard was no sooner gone than Ev went on a talking jag, which happened if he’d been sipping. “He liked what I done with the garden. Said, too, he never smelt a tastier dinner—hinting to have some, I bet. I hope you’re happy. Another slick, fast talker seeing you got a man in your pocket doing all a wife ought to do for her husband. You could’ve said how good I am at fetching water and hauling wood, holding up the business end and keeping you in smokes. All the stuff I do, to keep you happy. You could’ve let ’im know—”
Talk talk talk talk talk. At times, I had to admit, the sound of his voice was a bit like the sound of a rusty saw cutting a wet log.
“Uh-huh,” I said, to let him know I was listening. “You are. You do.”
Mulling over both men’s visits, I was happy, oh yes. I hung onto the feeling. It was like having a sunflower bloom inside me and its big nodding head ripen with seeds for the birds. For happiness is like this, you soak it up like summer sun to remember during the cold, dark days of the winter ahead. Though, truth be told, during eac
h of their visits, stealing glances at those men, I kept wanting to laugh. Not unkindly, but like a trickster sure the joke was on others. Nerves, probably. The risk of being tickled so pink I was scared I’d wet my pants?
No way I was going to let Ev pick that sunflower of happiness until it seeded the ground and withered of its own volition. The joy it spread was a lingering glow. I was beside myself with glee when that summer the magazine came in the mail. Instead of stuffing it in the box, the postman brought it to the door. There we were, Ev and me, our pictures splashed across several of its pages. I dare say I hardly looked happier before or since, the light from my window catching a warm, fiery twinkle in my eyes. Do you know, seeing those pictures I felt something I had not felt since I was a girl dressed in finery chosen by Mama: I mightn’t have made a Queen of the Apple Blossom Festival, but I was almost pretty.
Pretty is as pretty does. This is what a smile does to your face.
A smile is God’s facelift, my hairdresser friend Mae used to say, unless you are a movie star.
Ev raked his eyes over Mr. Brooks’s photos like he couldn’t quite believe what he saw. “What were you grinning about, anyways? Grinning like the fucking cat that caught a cannery. That you got me wrapped round your pinkie finger?” Of course, Ev came around soon enough after I read out what Mr. Barnard wrote. He wanted me to read the whole article out loud, so I read the parts he would like real slow and skipped the parts I knew he would not. A big smile spread, tugged at his mouth, at hearing himself called “a hauler of water and hewer of wood,” as I put it, making up and adding parts here and there to flatter him.
I’d learnt a lot from those visits. They helped prepare me for what came next. I was good and careful to wear a different getup when the television people came to see us—a clean blouse with a different pin, the palette brooch with its dots of different coloured paints that a lady gave me. I needn’t have fussed about the state of my skirt, seeing as how I sat behind my table-tray the whole time, let Ev do almost all the talking. Like Mr. Barnard had done, the television fellas asked a load of questions. They kept calling me an artist. “I ain’t an artist,” I had to tell them too, “I just like to paint.” The fella that talked the most asked how much I charged for my paintings, would I take more if someone offered it?
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