Ev barked out a laugh. “The hell you know about lumbering and hauling, or anyt’ing else? Wouldn’t know work if it snuck up and bit your arse. Living the life of Riley, you are. Always have, always will. Not like me.”
Once Ev got an idea, shaking it loose was like freeing the very last drop of molasses from its all but empty carton.
“What I mean is, why tell folks what they can guess up for themselves, if they have half a brain? You show them too much, they’ll think you’re calling them stupid.”
This got Ev’s back up in a way I never expected. “Who’re you calling stupid? Folks are stupid, seeing what they come and spend their money on. If I wanted your stupid opinion, the fuck I’d ask for it.”
“Good enough.” I folded my hands together as best I could. Suit yourself, I thought. “Didn’t mean to argue.” I pulled my sweater tighter around me. Fall was here all right. The trailer had a little oil heater but no way could we afford to run it. Now Ev was jawing about the price of tea, how Red Rose was owned by crooks. I did not make a peep, didn’t need to, for I had begun carrying on a chinwag with myself as I often did. This time the chit-chat in my head was about colours, how you could get a charge out of folks who liked their hills and maples in winter to be white by painting these things green or, heaven forbid, orange. It was no great mischief that Ev preferred not to hear about this. It would be a strange marriage, wouldn’t it, if man and wife were complete copycats, their every thought and deed a round of Simon Says. Fancy that, like seeing nobody but yourself in the mirror for thirty years!
I had my own ideas, like Ev had his and Secretary had hers and, I’m sure, the Hanks, Snow and Williams, had theirs. As far as I could tell, pictures were not a lot different from songs, songs not a lot different from pictures. They all had their riddles and rhymes, though these might sink into you differently. Like when you first heard a song on the radio, you might forget the words but the tune would worm itself into you and stay long after the song quit playing. I learned this as a tyke sitting on Mama’s lap while she played piano, and later on when she had me pick out tunes for myself on the keys.
Oh, the melodies! What a grand time we had, the two of us tickling the ivories in the parlour while Father was at work and Charles was at school. “When You and I were Young, Maggie,” “Shall We Gather at the River,” that tune we loved so much from Sparrows. When Mama got going, fingers thumping the keys, dishes rattled on the sideboard. The pictures atop the piano jumped in their silver frames, photos of me, Brother, Mama, and Father, displayed so nice. I’m not sure what Mama would have thought of Hank Snow, Hank Williams, Hankshaw Hawkins, or Buck Owens. Maybe not much.
Or maybe she would have loved them all, who knows? When I get to see her, I will ask. I figure they’re all up here somewhere, Hank Williams especially. There ought to be a special place for him, you’d think.
But all of this is a roundabout way of saying how each picture has a melody of its own that’s hard to copy. No tune sounds quite the same played twice on the piano, at least no tune did when I played it, not the way Al Jolson’s sounded the same on that wax cylinder played over and over. My point? When Ev helped with his stencils to trace the same old lines time and time again, I felt a bit like a machine, not an Edison but a spirit duplicator like at the hospital—the Ditto machine that printed the day’s menu in mauve, with boxes to tick for this or that food, the choices of which I hadn’t seen in a dog’s age, until my first time in there. Now there’s a story and a half….
I’ll bet by this time I had painted Fluffy a thousand times and Lion and Bright a thousand times on top of that. The truth was, I needed Ev’s help making those lines on the boards. I often thought how in cutting out his cardboard stencils and tracing my lines and my shapes, he was getting a free lesson in learning to make pictures of his own.
As I later saw from up here, he had a lot to learn about scaling things to size. Why, just the other day I happened to see a painting of Ev’s for sale. It had oxen like mine and two tiny horses with tiny people riding them, one horse on either side of a rabbit big enough to swallow them all in one bite. What, I wonder, was he thinking?
Slaving away in the trailer, God forbid, I could have used Ev’s hands guiding mine as I filled in all the shapes with colours. It took everything I had to stay inside the lines. You could say, like Aunt would’ve, that while my spirit stayed willing, day by day my flesh weakened. One could hardly save the other.
As for salvation, poor old Aunt had saved me once, of course, which you shall hear about in due course. But she could not save me twice, let alone thrice. By the third time I needed saving, she wasn’t alive to try.
Can I just say it was my own fault for not bunking down in the trailer that night like I could have? But after that chinwag with Ev about painting and whatnot, the last thing I wanted was him thinking I felt uppity or miffed at him. He hadn’t been so wrong about tea being pricey and folks being stunned. (Take the Twohig woman: even when she acted nice, what kind of brains lay under that bird’s nest hair of hers, the blue chiffon scarf she tied over it?) Truth be told, it is cozier lying snugged up to someone than lying by your lonesome, in a house or in a trailer. I did not like to lie alone out there, you can take this however you want. So after our chat I let Ev lift me down from the trailer, help me back into the house, and carry me upstairs. With the two of us slung together in bed, I made like the trailer hadn’t entered my life. Now don’t you get the wrong idea. I was sixty-six years old, Ev was a good nine years older. Despite what Olive said once about us being so sweet together and in love, him and I weren’t ever what you could call lovey-dovey. But age didn’t stop him from rubbing against me, exercising his married rights. No rest for the wicked, I guess. Like always, I laid there wishing I was asleep. In minutes, I was.
You can blame my bladder for what happened—like Aunt said, fleshly weakness will trip you up every time. In the night I got up to take a pee, made it on hands and knees to the hatch. Ev was out cold, on account of his imbibing, I suppose. Going down shouldn’t be a problem, I thought—figured once I got downstairs I’d use the bucket, then finish the night on the daybed. But one foot must’ve caught on something, the bottom of the bureau? Through the hatch I went. Instead of leading me to a blaze of stars overhead, my stairway sent me on a cartwheeling tumble where the only stars were the ones sparking in my head.
As I flew and skidded downwards, my flowers came to life. Stems reached up and wound themselves round my ankles trying to catch me. Their hold only meant I felt the bump and scrape of each riser as I fell. I thought for sure I was a goner, that the blooming staircase the constable had been so taken with had done me in.
Looking back, was this a practice flight? Like Matilda’s babies being pushed from the nest to find their wings. But in my dazed brain, Bradley Colpitts crooned about the six steps Ev had put in once I was more than a glint in my husband’s eye.
A grassy meadow of daisies would not have softened my landing. Yet the sparks I saw were no longer stars but fireflies flitting through me.
Hadn’t Ev said my posies were a frill? I let them distract me, fixed on them and not on my bladder, hips, and spine. It wasn’t Ev’s fault the stairs sagged and quaked with wear, wasn’t his fault I’d had to go. Or that he was in dreamland as I came to, arse over teakettle at the bottom, wedged between the range and the stairs. Somehow I wormed into the cubby under them where warmth from the fire’s embers was trapped.
Gazing up, not a star to be seen, I thought, You have landed in a cellar! The cellar of the house in Yarmouth where Mama, Father, me, and Charlie lived, one happy family. But no, I had fallen through a hole in the sky? My hip throbbed to the in-and-out of Ev’s snore overhead. His snore throbbed me back to Earth. I would have fallen off the planet otherwise.
Why wouldn’t he waken? It did no good to think hard thoughts, did it. Hard thoughts never helped anyone. But my mind couldn’t be stopped in that moment from
dreaming up the last time I’d been trapped in a place so dark.
When Mama died it was like someone threw me down a well without a rope, a deep dark hole I hardly knew how to see inside of, let alone climb out of. Nothing hurts worse than losing your mother. Do you know, I would wake up and the feeling of being down that Mama-less hole would be in my bones, grief as deep as marrow.I figure you can get used to pretty near anything. But the hurt at losing Mama and the longing to see her again would never leave me. Charlie had married and divorced and taken up with a new wife, of course. He was busy pleasing her. I didn’t want to ruin their lives too. Making up for lost time after his old wife gave up on him, the last thing Charles needed was a cripple on his hands. A cripple with a ruined reputation.
After paying doctors’ and lawyers’ fees, there wasn’t much left over from the sale of the house. What remained went to Charlie—the sole male heir, the lawyer called him—save Father’s watch.
“It’s not how I wanted it to be,” my brother said in the fella’s office. He wouldn’t look at me as he spoke. “You could have the piano—we don’t have room for it in the apartment.” Same as we don’t have room for you, Maud, he meant without saying it.
“Fine and dandy,” I said, choking back a big fat well of nothing. A homeless gal owning a piano she could no longer play: wasn’t that just swell! “Guess you might as well sell that too, Charlie, if you don’t want it.”
“You can come live with me,” Aunt Ida had said after Mama’s funeral. It meant leaving Yarmouth for her place in Digby. But what choice did I have, hitch a ride to Arcadia and go knocking on the poorhouse door? Aunt liked to talk almost as much as Mae did. Except her talk wasn’t about pretty stuff like curls and waves.
“You’re safe with me, and with God,” she told me when we got off the train. “He values every sparrow, why wouldn’t He count every hair on your head?” We were all special in His sight, she believed, though it might seem some got treated more special than others. The Lord loved those who helped themselves and in Glory all would be equal, she said, though here on Earth everyone suffered. What didn’t kill you made you better equipped to resist temptation, was how Aunt put it. She said evil came in many guises. One guise was stubbornness. Another was giving in to despair. I missed Mama so bad it was all I could do not to.
“Rest assured, He sees what’s best for us.” This was Aunt’s promise as she showed me my room. The dress she had sewn for me was laid out on the bed. Her having sewn it reminded me of Matthew Cuthbert buying that dress with puffed sleeves for Anne Shirley in that book Mama and I had read together once, Anne of Green Gables. Except this dress was as plain and simple as could be, made of navy blue gabardine. The sight of it made me light up—a smoke, I mean.
Aunt wasn’t exactly pleased. “Would you put out that cigarette, for pity’s sake. You don’t want the bedclothes smelling of it, do you. And the curtains I just washed.”
Digby was a pretty town but smaller than Yarmouth. It was hilly, with steep streets lined with big trees sloping down to the waterfront with its wharfs, fishing boats, and ferry dock. Like Yarmouth, it had plenty of nice houses, their sun-dappled yards filled with tumbling roses. Aunt Ida’s house stood on a street up behind the prettier places, trees blocked our view of them and of the water. I missed seeing the water, missed watching the comings and goings of sailors, fishermen, and teamsters. Still, I hoped things would get better at Ida’s. I’d brought all my worldly possessions with us on the train, which amounted to some clothes and paints and one of Mama’s records, that old wax cylinder, and that keepsake of Father’s, the old silver pocket watch that had long ago given up the ghost. Aunt had nothing to play Mama’s record on. I whiled away the days in silence painting in her porch. But painting couldn’t mask the fact that, kind as she was, Ida and I were like oil and water, not the best mix. She tried to be patient, but after a few weeks her patience wore thin.
“Tidy up, would you, dear? That turpentine stinks up the rest of the house. Anyone coming to call will think it’s kerosene and we’re infested with vermin. They’ll be scared to sit by us in church.” She laughed to couch this with humour, for she meant well. “Oh don’t look at me like that, I’m kidding. We are all put on this Earth for some purpose—even lice must be, to humble us. Your purpose is seeing that the house doesn’t reek of any bad habits. Am I clear?”
She barely heard me say yes, she was. Clear. Oh, ye-es. Mama always said it was living a spinster’s life that made Aunt Ida gabby when she got the chance to be. I owed her for taking me in when no one else would. I supposed the least I could do was lend a willing ear.
“And might I suggest that you’re a little old to be spending every waking moment on a hobby. It’s high time you thought about earning some kind of a living. God rest her beautiful soul, Agnes was more than a bit indulgent with you. If you can hold a paintbrush you can hold a Fuller brush. You know, dear, cleanliness is next to….” Her lip quavered. “I could put you in touch with ladies who’d be glad to pay you to come in and clean. It’s not what your mama and father intended for you. But we have all got to do things we mightn’t want to.”
There wasn’t much I could say to argue with that.
Before bed, she and I would listen to the radio for an hour or two in her parlour. Four years earlier, the Carter Family had that big hit, an old song Mama and I knew from the movies, about a little girl asking the operator to put a call through to her mama in heaven. Sara and Maybelle Carter sure knew how to pull on your heartstrings with that line “You can find her with the angels on the golden stair.” Every time the song came on, Aunt’s eyes would glisten, with sadness I thought at first, until I realized it was a look of hopefulness. “There, you see?” she said, wiping tears away. “We’ll all be together again someday.”
Meanwhile, Digby soon proved that it was no Yarmouth, I can tell you. The rumble of an automobile passing, the toot of a train whistle, broke the silence if and when Aunt stopped conversing. These noises pulled me back to the world I knew existed somewhere, a world I had no part in. I would watch Ida take up her hymn book and flip through it, humming until she found her favourite song. Then she would sing, “‘Are you washed in the blood, in the soul-cleansing blood of the Lamb? Are your garments spotless? Are they white as snow? Are you washed in the blood of the lamb?’”
Mama had loved her sister, had looked up to her, maybe even been a little afraid of her. Aunt wore her churchiness the way fishermen wore oilskins to protect them from the weather.
When I didn’t sing along, she would get after me. “There’s more to life than having fun, Maud.”
“You might like a bit of fun yourself, Aunt Ida.” Instead of singing hymns and burying your nose in the Good Book all the time, I wanted to say.
“Too much fun paves the way to hell, if you’re not careful. You of all people should know.” As she wagged her finger at me, she smiled. I wanted to believe that smile had a touch of deviltry. I wanted to think Aunt wasn’t always so good and righteous. That underneath her goodness was someone who might just sneak a penny candy without paying if given the chance, and be glad, of course, to turn around and give the candy to you or the next person.
“As you said yourself, Aunt, every life’s a ‘work in progress.’”
“Exactly right. Like one of your paintings, I dare say. Oh, I never said they weren’t nice, dear. There’s things to like, how you can copy a picture. That one you did of Forchu with the lighthouse and the boats looks just like the postcard.” But then she snapped back into her holier self. “No matter how hard we try to improve, no matter how willing the spirit is to better itself, the flesh is liable, you know.” I trusted that she spoke more in sympathy than in judgement. But then, quoting her Bible again—“‘From darkness I knit you’”—in her very next breath she grew prying: “Now why in creation would a girl like you seek comfort in darkness?”
What she meant was: What in cre
ation is wrong with you, Maud?
The upshot of her question, what she was really saying, was, That fish man who comes around is no man for any self-respecting woman. That shifty fella who’s got his eye on you.
I knew full well who she meant. The man’s name was Everett Lewis.
Wedged there, if I could but stretch out one leg, then the other, somehow roll onto my hands and knees, could I get myself outdoors onto the dirt, crawl across the road’s pale strip of moonlight to that other world, the world of neighbours? The road Ev didn’t want me crossing. The neighbours Ev didn’t want me visiting.
To call on anyone meant going against him. I couldn’t move an inch anyway. I ground my teeth against the throb of cracked bones. Imagined dashing like a deer after windfall apples, skittering back into the woods. Bit down hard on my fist, keeping that quiet.
I didn’t want to wake him, didn’t dare wreck his sleep.
Moonlight barely reached in under the stairs. Instead of the cellar in Yarmouth, I guessed up the cellar at the almshouse Olive had told me about, the room next to the laundry, where misbehavers got locked away. Ev used to have the key to it dangling from the big ring of keys he would take to work.
The pain was like that room. Don’t go in there, use your head to make it disappear. I fixed my mind on better things, happier things. Like the first time I saw Olive, a stout, smiling lady going by with a rabble of yammering women and girls in tow. As they passed my window, this kind-faced lady who looked to be in charge waved to me. When I told Ev, he said, “Oh that’s the warden’s wife. She treats them lunatics like they are her own. Don’t mind a bit giving them praise when praise is due.” Next thing, he came home from his night watch, saying “Olive wants you to come over for dinner sometime.”
“Oh yes, and like I would do that.” My face had burned. I didn’t even try to say it nicely. He couldn’t see why I would object to going there for a nice big feed, saving us—him—from cooking. “Don’t think I’d like the food,” I said. “They probably don’t let you smoke, either.” Then a hymn had come on the radio, the one about being washed in the blood of the lamb. Speaking through it, Ev kept at me. “You ask Olive real nice, sure, and she might let you take a bath too.” “Oh yes” was all I said. Over my dead body would I take a bath there, who cared how nice Olive was?
Brighten the Corner Where You Are Page 24