Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  His back was turned when something darkened the window in a flash of shade too big to be a crow, too quick to be a passing cloud. I swear, the constable must’ve had eyes in the back of his head. He spun around, was out the door faster than you could say “uncle.”

  I heard him yell out Ev’s name, heard the shed door slam. Joe was barking up a storm. Honest to God, I thought, what now? Oh my nerves—all I could do was sit down at the table and wait. I don’t know why, but it was like waiting for the sky to fall or a tree to come crashing down. Joe calmed down and then, by and by, Ev came inside, Constable Colpitts right behind him.

  Ev scowled, keeping silent as if the constable had cut out his tongue, and went upstairs. I caught a glimpse of Colpitts smiling at the sight of him crawling up through the hatch. I did not say a word, just watched Colpitts eyeing the ceiling. Don’t know what Ev was doing up there. We heard stuff being tossed about and something being scraped across the floor. All I could think of was the cardboard suitcase I had brought with me years ago, with my beautiful blue wedding dress inside it—it had been a dog’s age and a half since I had taken that dress out and looked at it; it was likely nothing but dust.

  Soon enough, Ev must have found what he wanted—was it something I’d misplaced on him? I hated to think—for he came down the stairs, backwards like always on account of his height, then stood before the constable. He had a jam jar in his hand and he shook it in front of Colpitts’s nose. It had a bit of silver in it—not much, maybe a few nickels and dimes.

  “There! Satisfied? This is all the cash money I’ve got in the world, officer. Them folks at the bank are full of baloney, telling you I been hoardin’ it. They are full of shit. You think if I had money I would give it to them? No sirree. I would sooner have it go up the chimbley in smoke than trust my money to them birds. Lyin’ and thievin’—that’s what them bankers do.”

  Colpitts’s voice was calm. “I’m not interested in your money, Mr. Lewis. I think we have got some wires crossed, I think you are mistaken about why—”

  “Only wires crossed are the ones them bastards from the Light and the Power have set up draining the juice from us, goddammit. How do I know I ain’t paying to light up the whole county? Them streetlights in town, how about those? And that fella and his woman up across the way, how do I know I ain’t paying for them? Since the stuff runs off them wires like water from a brook. That’s how it works, i’n’t it?”

  “It’s not your money and it’s not how you pay for your power that concerns me, Mr.—Everett. What worries me is things I have heard about you liking the girls, maybe a bit too much for their liking.”

  Ev’s eyes narrowed. “What girls? Who is it you are jawing about?” Then he half smiled. “Oh, I see. You been talking to that Stick woman, what’s her name. One of my wife’s—”

  “Twohig,” I put in. Sure, the way we said Carmelita’s name made her sound like a Stick.

  Ev glowered, gaping at me. “Excuse me, officer, I don’t mean no disrespect. But you have got the wrong fella, you have no fucking business coming here disturbing the peace. Upsetting my wife with your lies.” Ev looked at me and his eyes were like Willard’s, and I saw how it wasn’t exactly a picnic—never had been, never would be—his having to go back and forth to town, over hither and yon, getting cigarettes for me, paint, boards, and tinned goods, and ferrying them home on his bike—and on hot, sultry days like this, to boot. Just like it couldn’t have been a picnic for Willard keeping Matilda fed while she brooded.

  “And you—” Ev took a plug of tobacco and worked it between his jaws, then went to the open door and spat it out onto the ground. Turning, fiddling with a pot on the range, he wouldn’t look at me. I knew what was in his mind: “What are you thinking, entertaining the law in my house?” He peered into the constable’s face, and I swear Ev grew a few inches taller rolling up onto his toes, the two of them with their heads bent over. That posture will give you a pain later on, I wanted to say. “I don’t suppose you got a warr’nt.”

  The constable looked flustered. His face was ruddy and his smile had soured to an unhappy smirk. “A warrant. Hmm. No, as a matter of fact—you’re right. And my being here is my doing not the missus’s. I wanted to have a look at all she’s done here. I was just calling in to see how she’s doing, see that she’s all right.”

  “Why the fuck wouldn’t she be?”

  “Well, I suppose you are the one who might answer that.” Colpitts glanced over at me. His whole face was a smooth pink apology.

  “Well I suppose you oughta git your arse out of here before I call your boss-man. Mr. Mayor, that’s who you work for, ain’t it?”

  “Ev.” I used my mouse-voice. It was the best thing I had to calm him down.

  “Shut up.”

  Constable Colpitts reached inside his jacket. “Now, Ev—” I held my breath, half expecting him to bring out a gun. His big hand came away empty.

  “You don’t know me, you got no call—it’s Mr. Lewis to you, don’t you forget it.”

  “Good. Good then.” The officer lifted his eyebrows and gave me a questioning look. He nodded, bit his lip so his jaw looked firmer, and then he strode out the door, not another word about my paintings, and the next thing we heard the roooom-rooom-rooom of his black-and-white Barracuda car and a little squeal of rubber as its tires gripped the pavement.

  “Now, he was just paying a visit, just being—”

  “Did I say you could talk? ‘Just bein’ neighhhbourly,’ that’s what you’re gonna say, isn’t it. Only someone as stupid as you would call a cop neighbourly. Now git your arse outta here, leave me alone. Go sit in your goddamn treeelor till you get some sense back into your head. You stupid bitch.”

  Truth be told, Ev had a point; though the way he made it left something to be desired. I should question Constable Colpitts’s interest in me, and so I did question it. Yet it seemed a waste of time to fret over whatever darkness clouded the officer’s friendliness. I figured it was better to dwell on the goodness in a person’s heart, otherwise you would spend your whole life sad and worried.

  As I hoved myself back to the trailer, wondering how I would get back into it, I thought of my fairy godfather, the kind man who had delivered it. Imagine someone giving away a trailer, like trailers grew on trees! Of course I had been bashful, for all of thirty seconds, about accepting his gift. But somehow sidling up to, clawing, and shimmying myself aboard my heavenly little abode, I reminded myself how Ev had his sheds, his drinking shed in particular. On days like this the house was not just sweltering but buzzing with flies and mosquitoes, never mind the heat from cooking should have been fierce enough to stun them. Instead the bugs seemed to like it. But there were other reasons for loving the trailer. Keeping my paints out of the house spared Ev breathing their fumes, no matter the weather. I knew those fumes could be trouble. When they weren’t turning your thoughts to mush they set up such a pounding in your head it was like someone from the Department of Highways was in there working a jackhammer.

  Inside the trailer a sweet little breeze poured through the screens. It carried the scent of grass and a hint of the marsh’s rotten-egg smell, enough that these smells, mixed with the smells of paint and sun-warmed metal and plastic, concocted the fragrance I’ll call eau de trailer. By and by, as I took up my brush, some gentle cawing from the trees outside reminded me that I was not alone, that Matilda and Willard and them were nearby, always nearby. They were friends who would not fail me. Not that Constable Colpitts failed me—but he had no idea how being on the wrong side of Ev had its repercussions. I chose not to think about these, or about Ev next door stewing, ruminating, I mean. I set down my brush and looked all about me, admired each nook and cranny in my mansion-on-wheels. When I started back at the board I’d been working on—a picture of three black Fluffies—I daydreamed about my mansion being hitched to a truck, rolling along the highway all the way to the dock in Digby. But
instead of my mansion riding the ferry across the big, vast Bay of Fundy, I had it perched on a steep, wild cliff on this side of the bay. I pictured myself there in all kinds of weather, painting up a storm.

  ’Course, I did not need to leave Marshalltown to paint up a storm. By and by I started humming the “Stairway to the Stars” song. And as I painted I got to remembering back when I was a kid and how Mama taught me piano, and how, if things had worked out a little different, if my hands had worked better by the time that song came out and if Mama hadn’t died right after it did, I might have played it for her.

  But nothing in life works out perfect, I thought, and I stopped to have another cigarette.

  To pass the hours after losing my baby, I took up serious smoking. Mama looked the other way. To get me out of the house she would send me up to Rozee’s Beauty Parlour, where Mae had our cards for sale. Once Mae gave me a permanent wave, after saying how pretty I would look with the right ’do. I liked Mae, she talked so much I hardly needed to speak. I loved the feeling of her washing my hair, her strong fingers massaging my scalp as the soapy water sluiced from my forehead into the sink. If not for her talking I would have drifted right off to sleep, staring at the drain. “Look who’s in the moon,” she teased once.

  Afterwards, as she worked away, tugging and twisting what she called my lovely locks around the curlers, I daydreamed, even guessed up a kind of a movie, one that starred Emery Allen. A talkie in real-world colour, it began like this: Emery stepping out onto the porch of a big old house, squinting at Woods Harbour shining through a maze of spruce-covered islands, then going inside, locking the door behind him. A sea captain’s house, it was filled with treasures from the seven seas, dressers stuffed with fine linens, a silver tea service on a grand mahogany dining table, needlepoint upholstered chairs to seat a whole crowd of company, just waiting for rear ends to sit on them. Except none did. There was no wife, there were no children, no friends or relatives, just Emery himself rattling around the big, square, tall-ceilinged rooms, pining for what was no longer his but could have been, once, and should have been.

  Of course, Emery was no sea captain, that I knew.

  Mae liked how I kept still with my head down. After she finished doing my hair she smoked a cigarette with me, waiting for her next customer. She talked, I listened. There was no need to be ashamed, not around her, she said.

  “You’re not the first to have a baby and give it up.”

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” I told her, blushing all the same. What she had said just went to show how people talked, and how badly the truth got twisted in the telling.

  “The Crosbys are nice,” Mae said. “Mrs. Crosby’s a sweetheart.”

  “I reckon they are?” I butted out my smoke. Her next customer had come in and Mae was already holding out the cape to wrap around the lady’s shoulders before her shampoo. To my mind, Mae saying someone was nice meant they were a good tipper. Her comment about this Mrs. Crosby made me feel a bit bad, for Mama had a strict arrangement with Mae, who did my hair in exchange for cards. Dis-for-dat: the barber system, Mae called it.

  The next time I went to see Mae, half a year later, she said as she usually did what a nice head of hair I had. “If you like frizz,” I said and came out of my shell enough to laugh. She waved her comb like a magic wand and said “Frizz-be-gone!” And I wished it was a magic wand and this could have been the old days, before Emery Allen, before the baby hospital, before…. I knew she was looking at my hands but instead of acting like she wasn’t, she came right out and said, “You poor dear—I’m afraid to ask, but have they gotten worse?” Then she asked if I had any paintings she could put up, because customers liked having things to look at while waiting for their perms to take.

  That day I paid for my haircut with the money Mama gave me. Mae said nothing more, just slipped the money into the drawer. “Book you now or later for your next cut?” Her voice was warm but rushed. Her next customer was already waiting in the chair, Mae asking her how the family was, the kids and that. I guessed if you didn’t have a family to talk about, you didn’t have much.

  While I was smoking, Ev came and peeked in through the screen at me. He looked sorry for getting mad, said he wanted to make sure I was okay.

  “There you are, smoking again. Jayzus. You think them store-boughts go for nothing? You know they ain’t good for you, chock full of tar and that. You’re gonna give yourself the emphasizema, you don’t watch out. Christ.” Then he opened the door, climbed inside with me, and craned over the table, taking in my progress. “Not bad, not too bad a-tall, for a cripple.” He nudged my arm, made me laugh, pulled a face that showed his gums—his toothless baby smile. “Don’t be slacking off. And I got a reward for you, over the house—you know them Rosebuds you like?” The chocolate ones, he meant, and yes, I would do anything, well almost anything, to feel and taste the sweetness of a chocolate Rosebud melting on my tongue. “You be good, and I might bring you a couple. Save you hobbling over.” It was like we were two people who hadn’t ever shared a place, were good pals, a fella and a gal taking a shine to each another, and him saving me the trouble of leaving the house to go on a date. After thirty years wed! How many couples you reckon could say that?

  He stepped back down to the grass and disappeared, and came right back with a little box of Rosebuds. Some had been eaten, but the ones that were left were nice and soft and half melted. “Here you go—these’ll keep you going till supper. Or breakfast, if you ain’t fussy about eating in this heat. Heat like this, a body don’t have much appetite.”

  Then off he went to chop wood, or dig clams, or catch a mackerel. If he did catch one, it would keep till morning, I supposed.

  So I painted through supper hour and into the evening, and when it got real dark I snapped on the round white light above the table and painted some more. Ev did not like the trailer having electricity, as you may have guessed. He had his reasons laid out plain and simple: folks in our shoes could pay for grub or pay for power, it was a choice. Only the rich could afford both. As far as Ev was concerned, a person could live without light but not without grub. He was mostly right; our lives were proof in the pudding, like they say. I knew different, though. Light was as important as food, just look at plants, how they croak without it. Still I took pains to burn the trailer’s light sparingly, waiting till I could barely see before turning it on. Then I leaned into the brightness it shed upon the table. I reckoned this light could not cost more than what a week’s worth of sardines cost, or what I brought in with a few paintings. Plus the blueberries out back were coming in, and if the sunshine held and the patch gave Ev a good yield, this would bring in more money. Never underestimate the power of light!

  I listened to Joe out there barking at a passing car. When I finished the painting, I set it by the window to dry, then I turned out the light and set there in the quiet polishing off Ev’s Rosebuds. With their sweetness in my mouth I took a tour in my imagination, of all the coves, hills, and valleys I had guessed up for my pictures. What a nice trip. Then I imagined staying in the trailer all the rest of my days and never leaving it, not even to splash my face in the cold water from the well. One day Secretary would come to pick up that week’s work and find me asleep, and try as she might to wake me, she would not be able to.

  Land, I thought back then, if that were to happen, what would become of Ev?

  I could just see him sniffing at the air for a whiff of me in the paints drying in their cans. The only other sign I had been there a handful of butts laying in a scallop shell.

  A whiff of turpentine or sardines mixed with the smell of tobacco smoke: that would be the extent of the earthly spirit I would leave behind to console and comfort him. Truth be told, I worried how he would get along without me.

  12.

  Ev’ry Precious Moment

  With Ev on the go so much, you could say I was lo
nesome—but never lonely, no sir. I was never bored, not with how I travelled in my head. While Ev went off on his bike, when I didn’t have a paintbrush in my hand, I read letters people sent, from all over creation—from famous folks and regular folks alike who had seen us on TV. Some of them sent me presents, magazines, little tubes of real artists’ oil paint and real artists’ canvases, and trinkets, oddments like that brooch I told you about, the little palette set with tiny coloured jewels. Some of them wrote to thank me for paintings they had come all the way to Marshalltown to buy.

  As you know, not everyone who dropped by was a buyer. Quite a few were just tire-kickers, like Ev called them. Some just wanted to take my picture, some wanted to talk. I confess it made me want to lock the trailer’s door and pretend I wasn’t there, even when they rattled the latch and stood there, thinking if they waited long enough I might appear.

  That was just the cost of being famous, Ev said. “Yup, and being famous ought to let you pick the wheat from the chaff, oughtn’t it? You find out who your real friends are. Take that police whatsisname. Now there’s a tire-kicker. If he was a real friend like you think, wouldn’t he be here buying something? The gall, coming here and pestering you when you got work to do! Christ knows what shit he’s filled your head with. And you stunned enough to listen.”

  That summer the berries were loaded down back. Ev set up a scarecrow to frighten off the birds—sure, by then Matilda’s latest brood had flown the nest but only so far, and the whole crowd of them would sit up in the trees watching him pick. One morning before I could ask Ev to help me into the trailer, he took off down to the patch. I took the foolish notion to go down there too and see if I could pick a handful—as if I were one of the birds of the field, craving the berries’ sweetness in my craw. Of course blueberries were best baked in a pie with loads of sugar, the sugar brightened up their shoe-polish taste. But it took a lot of berries to make a pie, berries Ev could hawk in town.