Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  There were flowers by the bedside. Bluebells and cornflowers. I’d thanked her for those, too.

  “Don’t thank me. Carmelita Twohig brought them.”

  Maybe I had been hearing things?

  Then I’d asked Secretary if she had seen Ev.

  “Not hide nor hair.”

  So now, surrounded by darkness, there was a writing tablet, a piece of white card. Night Nurse—Nurse Nightingale?—propped the card on a magazine, bit off the markers’ lids, laid them atop the tablet tucked in the sheet.

  “You’re supposed to be asleep, like the rest of the ward.”

  Nurse Nightingale’s footsteps whisked off, retreating. In her place I saw an apparition of Ev. I spoke not to it but to the circle of light on my lap:

  “Remember when we had no money for pencils and you touched a stick to the fire, handed it over. You always did keep me in smoking sticks.”

  A spill of weak laughter, my own.

  Quit bellyaching. You never did ’preciate me. The apparition’s voice went round and round in my head, like Joe chasing his tail.

  One by one, Secretary’s markers rolled out of reach. There wasn’t enough light to draw by. The apparition vanished, replaced by the faces of the dead, Mama, Father, and Aunt watching from their corners.

  It was hopeless. To finish the work I had waiting at home, I needed a special pen. A quill pen made from one of Matilda’s feathers, this would help me finish her picture. I needed to fashion such a pen. I needed to finish her portrait. I needed to get home.

  Stubbornness is a hard habit to break, especially when you lack the will and maybe the sense to give in and quit. I spent enough time in your world to know a lack of weakness is what normal folks revere and cling to. Maybe it makes them feel immune to trouble and better, less guilty about having things others have no hope of having. Maybe supposing “there is us, and there is them” makes the world easier for them to judge on their terms. People love the sound of She don’t have much but she keeps on keeping on. I don’t suppose anyone, normal or not, finds enjoyment in hauling themselves out of bed in the night and outdoors to an outhouse in the middle of a blizzard to do their business, all in the name of dignity. Plenty of country folks did just that in my time.

  But I am here to testify that sunny thoughts can get you through that hardship, even in the dead of winter. No one prospered by sunny thoughts more than I did, too bad they aren’t contagious. Though, truth be told, some nights in Marshalltown the only way I knew I hadn’t croaked was by seeing my breath or my shadow. The moon was a big old eyeball peering down, watching over me. For years it lit my path from the house to the privy and back. You could say it saved me making the misstep that would’ve ended my life sooner.

  But then everyone’s end comes sooner or later.

  Though I could barely grip a marker, in that summer-stuffy hospital with the dead cheering me on, I got a second wind. Secretary’s markers were a rainbow array of colours. I guessed up and filled in shapes—brown for horses, blue for moonlight edging white for snow, green and orange for trees, black for a sleigh, red for the coats and caps two newlyweds wore. I added a church, bells in the belfry. To the snowy road I added streaks of blue. The light I saw was the moon on the crest of the new fallen snow, like in “The Night Before Christmas.”

  It was good practice for when I would start back in on Matilda’s portrait. But it took all I had in me, bracing one fist with the other, pushing the marker’s tip over that little piece of card. The sun was just coming up as I coloured in the red bits. I could hear seagulls waking, there was one that hung around the window. I overheard Ev say, later on, that it liked me—I wonder if Darlene told him so, or Secretary? It hurt my heart not being able to pen a verse like the ones Mama and I had writ on our cards. Best Christmas wishes. Folks never get too far away, For friends to wish them joy to-day. Never mind, I told myself. And then I heard the crows. Was it too much to hope that Matilda and her kin had leap-frogged from pine to pine and from telephone pole to telephone pole all the way here from Marshalltown, looking for me?

  They were coming to take me home; I had a pretty good idea I wouldn’t be hanging around in hospital much longer. The jays and robins struck up their morning hootenanny. I remembered Xmas was a long way off but I wanted to be sure Secretary got my card, the best way I knew of thanking her again for everything. But I wanted Darlene to have a card too, in case Ev didn’t think to bring her candy, if he ever thought to come in that is. I’d just close my eyes first, take a moment’s rest.

  When I woke, the markers were gone. Nurse Carla was rubbing at some blue on the sheet. I fought to get my breath. “Hope…that…spot…won’t…get you…into trouble.”

  She clucked at me like a little hen—“You’re quite the card, aren’t you?”—and she tugged away the sheet. My back-to-the-front shirt had ridden up but I was past caring. “Don’t worry, hon. Yours isn’t the first I’ve seen, won’t be the last.” She held up my handiwork. “Is this for me? You sure are jumping the season. Ah, you’ll be back in the saddle by then, surely.” Her voice was so cheery I think she believed it, trundling off with the sheet.

  Then a voice whispered to me: “Maud? What’s keeping you?” A voice as kind as Secretary’s but older if not wiser.

  “Aunt Ida?” I called out, “Ida, is it you? Are you there?”

  Matilda answered back. Her answer was a clicking sound.

  “‘In darkness you were made, fashioned from the depths of the earth.’” Oh, back in life Aunt was full of such foreboding. Comfort or caution,I took it as a veiled warning to behave myself. A reminder of what we learn soon enough, that we come from dust and, in the blink of an eye, return to it.

  The sunshine filling the room should have kept me alert, made me listen harder for the crows. I knew their warning system, clicking and chattering when they’d found food but foe was near. Was death my foe? Only if you consider it an enemy. It was near impossible to breathe. A menthol cigarette would have fixed me up. I wanted Secretary—Get my secretary, I tried to say. She would bring me one. But Secretary had said goodbye. I remembered her leaning over me, tears in her eyes. I wanted Darlene; maybe she would bring me a cigarette if I said I wouldn’t set the bed afire. All the times I had drifted off with a smoke in my hand and nothing had happened. Poor Aunt—living in her house, I had put more than a vacant fear of hellfire into her. Hellfire burning her place down for my sins. I would have sold my soul for a smoke: “Sell your soul and Gehenna will be your reward, that’s a fancy name for hell,” she’d said. I would go to Gehenna and back for the heavenly reward of a smoke.

  One to see me through, wherever I was headed.

  I dozed in and out of myself. The snarl of my breathing was a coyote. On a winter night. Closing in. “Darlene,” it cried out, “Darlene!”

  “Dar’s on nights.” Hands drew the sheet tight, bound me as tight as the mummy I was once but not even for a day. Bandages wound round and round and round my chest to keep the milk from coming in. A mummy swaddled like a stillborn baby boy, a baby son born dead.

  “Would she want the minister, you think?” The voice was mustard-pickle sweet. It was honey from a spoon. It was green as fresh-cut grass.

  My no was a bee buzzing in a jar.

  “When’s Dar in? She might want to come in a bit early.”

  Ev never once mentioned that night, afterwards. I never brought it up, though months later, out of the blue before heading off to work, he said he figured he would dig more graves before summer was through. “And you best button your lip about it. Ain’t nobody’s business what goes on next door. Nature’s way, putting the poor little bastards out of their misery is how I see it. Putting them out of it before misery gets ahold of them. Nature takin’ care of business, proper thing. Can’t argue with that.”

  No, I couldn’t, could I.

  I am not sure what all Ev got up to over there next door at nig
ht, other than burying babies that ought never to have been born, and keeping wayward women and girls, indolent men, and lunatics in line. Some mornings he came in smelling of women, my imaginings of which brought but a very cold comfort. Once, down by Seeley’s Brook, I found a locket in the grass. A locket with a picture of a man in it. The man looked nothing like Emery Allen, but seeing that stranger’s picture made me pine for him suddenly. Never mind what-all Emery had done, leaving me in the lurch the way he did.

  Then all I could think of was Aunt’s saying about “Suffer the little children.”

  Babies died all the time. Not just human babies, bird babies too.

  Like the time later on when I was helping Ev dig potatoes—that is, he was digging; I was tossing fresh-dug spuds into the bucket—when I should have been up the house, painting. A ruckus of squawking burst from the trees, and I spotted the crows. It could’ve been Matilda’s mother and father, they were raiding a nest of robins. The last I’d seen of the baby robins was their pink, hinged beaks straining up from the nest, opening and closing, not long after they’d hatched.

  Then there they were, four or five of those babies lying on the grass, still too young to have proper feathers. Their wings were so thin you could see the bones through the reddish feather-flesh.

  Dead, those babies were beautiful and ugly both.

  “So much beauty in the world, Ev, even so.” I dropped a potato into the bucket, let the sound it made mark my words.

  Way too late, I flapped my sleeves to scare off the crows watching us.

  Ev just shook his head like I was half cracked. “Don’t bother. If it ain’t crows that gets those babies it’ll be cats. Either way someone gets a good feed. Babies die all the time, ain’t a thing you can do to stop them.”

  Going from the fat into the fire might be one way of putting it, the way things happened. Yes sirree, babies died all the time, I longed to offer my agreement.

  When my time came, to go to the Yarmouth Baby Hospital, I mean, Mama took me. How she must have worked to swallow her pride. Father kept his distance. The months leading up to this, he and I might’ve been two stray dories passing before the eye of a storm. It was a hot night in August 1928. Mama and I got there in the dark, I can’t remember how. Mama comforted me, by now she plainly pitied me. “We reap what we sow, I suppose, like ‘bringing in the sheaves.’ You’ll forget the pain when it’s over.”

  (To that I still say, as Ev might, if he had half an inkling of the pain that surrounds birthing: Horse. Shit.)

  They gave me something to put me into “twilight sleep.” All I remember is lying on my back, a nurse forcing my knees apart. Another nurse grabbing onto both ankles to help her.

  It was a twilight with no stars, even darker than the night Ev buried that baby.

  When I came to, I asked could I see it? The creature that had taken so much room inside me and in doing so had snuffed out any joy in our house. There was a nurse on the far side of the room, and Mama.

  “He’s gone, Maud. They’ve taken him.”

  “Where?”

  “Buried him, of course.”

  “Where?”

  The nurse left us alone. Mama had tears in her eyes. “I don’t suppose I told you, you had two baby brothers who died. One was George, he came three years before you, and one was Victor, he came a couple of years after—you were too little to remember, I suppose. I should’ve said, I guess.” It was like the sky opening up, the torrent that spilled from her. “I know how it feels, a bit, to go through all that and end up with empty arms. Cruel, I know. No other word for it. But there it is. We don’t know what’s in store for us. I suppose, like Ida says, we have to trust that Someone Up There knows better than we do. That everything happens for a reason.”

  I thought of Mary-Molly cooing over that dying girl-baby in Sparrows, Jesus coming in a soft, gauzy cloud to take her up in his arms. There wasn’t much conviction in Mama’s voice, just weariness.

  “You’re hurting now,” she said. “But you’ll see it’s for the best that your baby is in heaven and isn’t here to worry about. Think of it, what people would say. ‘There goes that Dowley girl with her…offspring.’” The word swung like a bat between us. “This doesn’t touch the fact that he would be yours and yours alone to feed, clothe, and school—and on what? The money cards bring in?” Mama reached out then, smoothed the hair pasted to my brow. “Oh, my darling girl, it’s hard all around. Hard enough rearing kids in a home with a mother and a father. Too hard a row to hoe for a woman on her own.” Her voice was as starched as the sheet pulled up to my chin. “Now, we will put this behind us. I won’t have you moping. The sooner you’re up and about, the better. We’ll put this whole sorry episode to rest, like it never happened. You have the rest of your life ahead of you still. Well, to some degree anyways.”

  When Mama left, the nurse came and wound gauze round and round my chest till I looked like a boy, titties flat as fried eggs. This would stop my milk from coming in, she said.

  A few days later Father came to the hospital to visit. He acted real shy, like Fluffy had got his tongue—or I was a vague, distant acquaintance he was used to seeing around town but hadn’t passed by in a while. Except, he had a little bunch of lilies for me from the flower shop. When I cried, he got up and left. I heard him ask the nurse to put the flowers in a vase.

  Well. I imagined my dead baby boy as a dead bird buried in the ground, like the jay Mama buried that time under the viburnum bush. Except with no bush, no flowers, nothing, to mark his grave, wherever it was. I didn’t ask. I didn’t want to know.

  And I went home, and I painted, and you could say I became invisible, a ghost living under house arrest on Hawthorne Street. Better Hawthorne Street, I thought, than the Arcadia Poor House as punishment for my wickedness. Father was never the same towards me, though he did not stop loving me, Mama said. I could describe for you how I passed the rest of my days in Yarmouth. But it would be the same as describing how paint dries, and how, like a weed that comes up from the soil but doesn’t flower, sorrow becomes something you hold inside of your body.

  “Out of darkness comes release,” Matilda and them croaked through the curtains. Light flickered, dark shapes fluttered past the window.

  I saw Matilda fly overhead three times, land, and perch on the roof—the hospital roof or Ev’s roof, it doesn’t matter, roofs were all the same now. Not a feather stirred. Then a crowd of Matilda’s babies lifted me and carried me up above, where the wind is.

  What I can tell you from up here is, it’s a healthy wind that draws dampness from the fields in spring and spreads a cool warmth over the woods in summer.

  Before my very eyes, the world became a mist-covered vista teeming with every tiny living thing that was imaginable but invisible to you.

  And this is the vista, the view, folks shrink from their whole lives?

  For land’s sake, I died. There’s worse things than dying.

  Pretty much the next thing I knew, I found myself here.

  11.

  Abide with Me

  Airborne, I reeled and spun willy-nilly—it took a little while to latch onto the wind’s direction. Across the bay a fogbank loomed. At the water’s edge four crows played tug-o’-war with a starfish. One crow sorrow, two crows joy, three crows a wedding, four crows a boy. Hovering over the town, looking straight down, who did I see but Nurse Darlene and Constable Colpitts—together. They were sitting in the window of a diner on Water Street sharing a plate of fish ‘n’ chips. Darlene was wearing a bright pink top and drinking orange soda through a straw. Bradley Colpitts was in uniform but appeared relaxed and right at home, being in a place with ample headroom. Darlene looked so happy I couldn’t help feeling glad for her. Tall, sincere, and rosy-cheeked, Bradley Colpitts was the kind of fella you would be happy to have your daughter date, or even be a daddy to her children. I guess he
rarely got a day off, being on call and that. But the way he was laughing and grinning, he didn’t seem at all harried or tired. Then I spied the jewel on Darlene’s finger; it sparkled sharp as the sun shining on Digby Gut. I should have been surprised but somehow I wasn’t.

  I thought sorrowfully of my gold wedding band, lost to the world.

  But it warmed me to see the lovebirds together, though I would be lying to say it tweaked only a fledgling regret. The pair could have been me and my beau forty years back, sharing an ice cream soda and hot turkey sandwich at a Yarmouth lunch counter. Except I could tell the way Darlene and Bradley Colpitts carried on, they had a ways to go before knowing each other as intimately as me and my beau had. Of course, with her job and all, Darlene didn’t have time for smooching and spooning like I did back then, especially with the constable working all hours. At least Colpitts’s work kept him on dry land and not out at sea where fishing had kept my Emery. So that was promising. For them, being sweethearts. Getting together on regular dates and that.

  Truth be told, in spite of his nosiness, I had grown kind of fond of Bradley Colpitts, from a distance. He was the sort of fella who would make a good brother, I guessed from the visits he had paid me. His suspicions about Ev notwithstanding.

  Catching an eyeful of him and Darlene, I nearly missed seeing who was at the next table. Land, if it wasn’t Carmelita Twohig sawing into a Salisbury steak. I admit the sight and smell of that meat made me long to be back in your world, if only to eat up a dinner like the one Carmelita was enjoying. Bradley Colpitts only had eyes for Darlene, so I couldn’t tell if he’d noticed Carmelita sitting there before Darlene smiled over and called out, “How’s the steak?” Carmelita looked up as Bradley turned and glanced her way.

  “Miss Twohig,” he said stiffly, sounding displeased. The last thing he wanted, I suppose, was lunch with Darlene being interrupted. Carmelita put down her fork and said, “That’s some sad about Maud Lewis. I heard she didn’t last the night.”