Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  The devil you know is better than the devil you don’t know, I thought, as a dog came up and nuzzled my skirt. He was a mid-sized dog, big to me, but he didn’t bark. Though if I had had any treat besides cigarettes in my pocket I’d have been ready to bribe him if he acted up. Before I could change my mind and take off, the door cracked open and Ev Lewis peered out at me. What I saw first was his ragged shirt tucked into his pants.

  “Yeah? What can I do you for?”

  I held out the ad.

  “Put it away.” He cocked his head towards the mutt. “Guess you must be all right if Joe likes you. Some others, he’d bite the head off of.” He stepped backwards, as if to allow each of us a more fulsome look at the other. From that bit of distance, the crooked smile on his lips was like a half-moon laying on its side.

  No beating around the bush; talking to his shirt, I cut straight to the point. “How much do you pay? Where would I sleep?”

  He held up one hand. It was bony and long-fingered, with thick yellow fingernails. “Hold your horses—settle down, we’ll work out a deal, how’s that?” He kept looking at me, suspicious now. Worried. “First things first. I got to know that whatever’s wrong with them mitts of yours ain’t catching.”

  “Swear on a stack of Bibles, no, it ain’t, isn’t.”

  He clicked his tongue. “When didja say you can start?”

  “What? Well. Any old time, I guess.”

  He waved his hand like as to sweep me into the house, the way that Grand Hotel doorman had done years ago before barring Emery Allen on account of his attire. And I could not help thinking, all those years later, what if I had gone in and left Emery out there in the cold, all alone and lonesome in his suit.

  “But, wait. What about my stuff, back at my aunt’s? Quite a trek to Digby.” For I had spied the car out back, the one he sold fish from. Figured this should be a strong enough hint that he would give me a lift.

  But no way, no how. “I’ll see ya when I sees ya, then,” he barked before shutting the door.

  So I walked all the way back to Aunt’s, hobbled was more like it. It was well after dark by the time I got there. Aunt stood in the kitchen wringing a dishtowel, twisting her hands.

  “I was worried sick. Waiting and waiting before I put on the tea. Where’s the milk?” Her face fell as she caught a whiff of cigarettes off me. “I knew it!” Without another word, disgusted, she stumped up to bed.

  After a bit, I worked up the nerve to go and rap on her bedroom door. “Got a job, I did.”

  No answer, nothing but the silence of a stone.

  The next morning, I heard the sounds of breakfast being readied downstairs. Before I could greet Aunt, she looked up from setting the table. “The job isn’t looking after that reprobate, I hope. I saw the ad at Shortliffe’s. If Lewis wasn’t so pitiful he’d be a laughingstock.” She looked me in the eye, her eyes widened. “Oh my Dinah and all that’s sacred—you answered it? Why?”

  I think it was her reaction that washed away whatever misgivings I might’ve had. I waited for her to say something about honouring Mama’s memory and behaving, holding up a shred of dignity for myself. But for once, Aunt Ida was speechless. So I chimed in.

  “Because it is high time I acted like a grown lady.”

  “But, why on earth him of all men? The man barely owns a pot to do his business in. What fool would think he needs you—or anyone—to keep house. What house?”

  If I’d had similar doubts before, now my mind was made up. Everett Lewis was no Emery Allen, especially in the looks department, that’s for sure. But he owned a car and a house, which was more than you could have said for Emery, as far as I knew. And we all know looks can be deceiving.

  That very day I hiked back out to Marshalltown with everything I owned in the world in Mama’s cardboard suitcase, including the wax cylinder and Father’s watch.

  Next there were voices. Fingers digging into my armpits—Ev’s—someone trying to raise me to my feet. Someone else yelling, “Don’t. You don’t know what’s broke.” I remember a flashing light, red, the colour bleeding everywhere. Wood smoke in the air. Me being loaded into the back of somewhere, light flashing dark.

  And then whiteness. Such a dazzle it hurt when I truly came to. I wasn’t wearing my red sweater or nightie but a shirt tied on back to front, my bare back against the sheet. I was a child again, lying in a crib.

  “You did a number on that hip.” It was Nurse Darlene, this was the very first time we met. “Don’t fret. You’re in good hands.” The last person who spoke that way had been Mama, when I quit school. But Mama had chased her words with a sigh. “You get to stay home with me. Never mind, we’ll have fun. You’ll get used to it.”

  Thinking of Mama confused me. “Am I home?” My voice was bumbling and stupid. The place was too big and bright and bare to be the place I shared with Ev.

  “What?” Darlene’s voice was so calm. “Oh no, darlin’. You’re in Emerg. You had a fall, I hear. Hope you didn’t wait too long for the ambulance.”

  “Ev?” My voice keened but surely it was someone else who called out, “Where’s Ev?” I looked around as much as I could, pinned flat on my back. The pain was like I imagined fireworks might be, bright but distant. Ev was nowhere in sight, where had he got to? He’d hitched a ride home with the ambulance men? Or he was off having a chew of tobacco, biding his time before he lay into me about how stupid I’d been taking the stairs by myself. If I wasn’t so stupid I would have made it down them all right, down to the bucket or even the outhouse, and back up to bed without a peep, and we would not be stuck cooling our heels in this place.

  Darlene’s face was like a doll’s, I remember, with wide, painted eyes and long lashes. Her lips were a pale pink that reminded me of the odd forget-me-not that springs up amongst blue and white ones. She tucked the blanket over my hands.

  “You’re the artist, aren’t you? A friend of mine—”

  I imagined Ev’s proud answer, if he’d been anywhere handy to give it: Yeah, she is. Five bucks, and she’ll paint you something real nice. She’s good at flowers and that. But she will do whatever your heart desires.

  The pain made me think out loud, “Oh go on, shut your gob.”

  Darlene leaned in close. “What was that, honey? Is the pain real bad? Must be, with that hip. Doctor’s on his way, he’ll fix you up. Just be patient.”

  When wasn’t I patient?

  “A friend of mine knows you, really likes your work.” Darlene peeled back the blanket, held my hands in hers, studying them. When I breathed in, the pain lit up my spine and cartwheeled. Then Nurse took a gander at my legs. I knew they weren’t too pretty, with those big black bruises on my shins from banging into things. It was hard to avoid doing so in the house. “Best keep your eyes to yourself, miss,” I said and laughed in spite of everything. Nurse Darlene yanked up the covers right quick. “That’s better,” I piped. “See? Nothing to get riled up about.”

  It is better for all concerned when no one looks too close at your ailments. Nurse gave me a needle for the pain. “Your friend, is she a Twohig?” I asked, but missed hearing her answer.

  I woke from a dreamless sleep. The sheet was pulled away. The yellow shirt was flipped up, my lady parts there for the world to see. A young man with a black cord around his neck pressed a cold metal disc to my chest. Darlene tugged a bit of the sheet over me but not before the doctor got an eyeful. Then the two of them disappeared and I was alone.

  I smelt Ev’s presence before he stepped through the curtains around the bed and came close. I was woozy from the needle but not too far gone to know that Ev was a little tipsy. He took off his cap, waved it. His breath was sour sweet like old wet leaves. His voice hissed the way rain does through fog.

  “Think I don’t know what you were up to, sneaking off in the middle of the night? Goin’ to meet ‘a friend,’ wouldn’t p
ut it past you. Aiming to meet up with that cop, maybe? I know what you’re like. Think you can pull the wool over my eyes.”

  What is in that dynamite juice of yours? You know that’s crazy talk! I wanted to say, but it hurt too much. When I didn’t answer, he growled about the hospital people making him wait outside. “They don’t know their arses from their eyeballs, telling a fella he can’t see his own wife—”

  Just then the doctor appeared. He shot Ev a look and cleared his throat. “Mrs. Lewis?” He spoke as if I could be someone else. “You have a bad fracture, compounded by your other issues.” Suddenly Ev had the sense to keep quiet, though it wasn’t like him. Issues was a word that I knew applied to offspring and magazines.

  When Ev spoke it was to put this stranger at ease. “If you are scared of what ails her being catching, don’t be. Been with her thirty-odd years and I ain’t caught nothing off her yet.”

  The doctor glanced at Ev and shook his head. He looked about the same age as Constable Colpitts but wasn’t near as handsome. When he smiled at me, he looked barely old enough to drive a car. “We can’t do the surgery here. They might do it in Yarmouth or Kentville, but I’d rather send you to the city. Halifax.” I didn’t like the sound of this, had never in my life been to a city, let alone a city so far away—what, a hundred and fifty miles from here?

  Luckily Ev piped up and I forgot all about him drinking and hinting in so many words that the fall was my just desserts. “Now what would that cost, doc? How much would a trip like that set me back?” Out of the corner of my eye I glimpsed something in Ev’s hand. It was a fat roll of dollar bills that looked sullied with mud or dried blood. Banks didn’t bury your money for safekeeping, did they?

  “To see the specialist?” The doctor looked confused. “That’s taken care of. But the ride there and back mightn’t be—”

  “How much, for the ambublance and that?”

  Poor Ev! But it struck me that the pity I felt for him, that let me excuse him time and time again, could only go so far. For if Ev had learned to read like some of us, he would not have struggled so with his words. Yet, like my tumble downstairs wasn’t my fault, his failing wasn’t all his fault either. So he got hot under the collar, who could blame him? And he stuck by me, nudging those musty bills at the man. “Look here, doc. Money’s no object. It’s my wife we are talking about. I got an investiture here, see?” The devotion in Ev’s voice would’ve swept me off my feet had I been up to standing.

  But I understood. I was that investment, all Ev had in the world besides the house. What if I never walked again? Never painted again? If I didn’t get proper treatment it might well be. It flew through my head—as if in one ear and out the other—that Ev’s not springing for the trip meant our livelihood could dry up, just like that.

  “If Maud was my wife,” the youngster said, “I’d have her looked at in the city. I’ll let you think about it.” But there was no need, Ev’s mind was made up.

  “Quit jawing about it, let’s git her to the affirmary or the Vee Gee or wherever. They won’t dick around, will they, not like you fellas. They’ll fix you right up, Maudie. Nothing but the best for my gal. Best get us down there quick, down to Half-an-axe.”

  Halifax, the capital city of Nova Scotia. I did not like the sound of that big place any more than I liked the sound of the Infirmary. Hospital sounded respectable, Infirmary like a warmed-over word for almshouse, somewhere with cots and locked rooms. But then I thought back to Olive and her kindness. Maybe wherever I went there would be three square meals and nurses to put me in a warm tub bath, a step up from the cold-water lick-and-a-promise sponge baths I gave myself now and then at home. Maybe there’d even be someone like Mae to wash my hair and comb it. I remembered how I’d given her cards in exchange for a hairdo, and how, before the almshouse closed and Olive and her husband and their boys packed up and left, in exchange for Olive’s kindness I’d given her paintings for the dining room to cheer up her charges. Who knows if the paintings helped or not? By the time the place burnt those paintings were long gone, the man in the moon knows where.

  I’d have given anything to see Olive waltz into that hospital room, but the best they had was Darlene. “Could I see that nurse, please?” My voice was small and weak and must have worried Ev and the doctor. They both peered down at me, then the doctor pressed something pinned to my pillow, and he and Ev left me by my lonesome.

  That smiling Darlene appeared, back from emptying bedpans, dressing bedsores or what-have-you, all the things nurses do, still as pleasant as could be. “Soon as the ambulance is available, they’re taking you.” She patted my arm and straightened the pillow, she was that sweet! And I noticed the flush in her cheeks—I knew that look. It had been forty years since I had seen it, eyeing myself in Mama’s gilded mirror. But I hadn’t forgotten. It was the look of a woman in lust.

  “That friend of mine just popped by.” Her blush spread to her voice, made it rosy too. “He’s wondering if you’d like a visitor—once you’re shipshape again.”

  “Oh?”

  She blushed even deeper, this wasn’t just my imagination grasping for something to spurn pain. “Constable Colpitts. I think you know who I mean.” She quickly changed the subject. “My gosh, how long did you lay there, after you fell? Must have been miserable, poor dear.”

  Do bears poop in the woods? I fastened my eyes to hers as she poked me with a needle and said the medicine would kick in soon.

  “Oh yes. I know him. He’s come by a few times. You tell him I said hi.”

  She pressed one hand to my wrist, used her other hand to hold up the watch pinned to her top. “Mr. Lewis has got quite the pile of cash on him, doesn’t he? There’s no problem covering the ambulance, anyways.” She patted me. “Don’t you worry about a thing.”

  Like I would worry. If there’s one thing I was good at, it was not stewing over stuff I couldn’t fix. I refused to ruminate over Ev having the money, though Constable Colpitts would likely want to know where it came from, and, I suppose, how it got so dirty. Even with the hospital smell all around, I’d caught a whiff of its moldering smell, like rotting leaves.

  Then Nurse Darlene drew up the sheet and out I went like a light.

  14.

  Keep on the Sunny Side

  I wasn’t completely stunned, if that’s what you’re thinking. If there’s one thing I had learned from Emery Allen, it was just as Mama had said and like Bob Wills sings on “Milk Cow Blues”: no man will tie the knot if he can make whoopee for free. Lovin’ didn’t factor into the deal me and Ev Lewis brokered, an arrangement meant to benefit both parties. I got a place to lay my head, he got company. I reckon if anyone got the shitty end of the stick it was him, seeing how I couldn’t skin or cook a rabbit to save my life, or build a fire or scrub a floor, never mind what Aunt had said about ladies in town hiring me.

  I bunked down at night on his daybed. But it wasn’t very long before Everett started acting like a man, overstepping the terms I had agreed to. Demanding more than just company, I mean—once he knew what ailed me wasn’t contagious, that he wouldn’t get “lobster claw hands” from touching me. At least I was canny enough that no fella was going to have his fun with me then pull a stunt like Emery had—pull a “Hank Snow” as I thought of it years later, when “I’m Movin’ On” came out.

  So Everett gave in to the one condition I set before him. “Okay okay okay, I’ll marry you, for frig’s sake—but under one condition of my own. It ain’t gonna be in a church, I can garnishee, I mean guarantee you.”

  I suppose him and I didn’t get off on too bad a foot with our bargaining.

  “Fine by me, as long as I get to be your legal wedded wife.”

  No one can say I walked into my marriage to Ev blinkered or blindfolded. If Aunt had had her druthers, she’d have rescued me a second time. But then, she had no idea how close I had come to throwing in my lot at the almshouse. I didn�
��t tell her because I knew how baffled and hurt she’d have been and what she would say: What were you thinking, there? “If you can’t beat them, join them.” Was that your reasoning?

  Which would not have been so far off the mark. And I am still not sure how she’d have lived it down, having kin living off the county purse.

  For my thoughts had run to something like this: The next best way to meet my fate head on, maybe even play a trick on it and have the last laugh, might just be hiding in plain sight, in the poor farm’s shadow. Of course, by the time I came along there was no farm over there, just the building that passed for a home. You could say Ev Lewis saved me by the skin of my teeth. I would say he did. There was a lot to be said for getting married, still is. I figured being married would be for me what Aunt’s churchiness was for her, a comfort and a shield against what the world could dish out. Nobody dared call a married lady a slut. Why, that would be like calling a preacher a crook! Which Ev would’ve done without hesitation, mind. But, being obtuse, he said there was no way he would stand before a justice of the peace, either.

  His mother kept house for a man in North Range, Ev said, and we could have the wedding there. I sent Aunt an invitation. I believe the funds she sent were to pay a preacher, but she made herself scarce. Maybe under threat of his mother, Ev finally agreed to have a preacher if not a judge officiate, the lesser of what he saw as two evils? I wore my dark blue beaded dress bought from the Eaton’s catalogue while Mama was still living. It wasn’t meant for winter wear but served its purpose that freezing-cold day just past mid-January, when Ev and I tied the knot.

  The day we wed was one of those perfect blue-and-white winter days, snow sparkling on the evergreens. Not a cloud was in the sky, the distant bay was one big, clear stretch of sapphire. Blue jays called from the trees back of Mrs. Lewis’s employer’s house, and I do believe the crow watching from the tree out front could have been Matilda’s grandmother. Tiny snow flurries twirled down, sparkling pink as a show of petals blowing off apple trees in bloom—so it was as good as a May or June wedding. The preacher met us in the parlour. I don’t know where the man who owned the place was. “While the cat’s away the mice will play,” Everett’s mother said. She was tall and bony like Ev, with iron grey hair and the same grey-blue eyes, except without his twinkle. She moved like a stiff old bird, upright and cheerless, and I figured that her dress, never mind the small stain down the front, must be her best. Ev hardly looked at her when he introduced me: “This is her, what answered my ad.”