Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  15.

  Open Up Your Heart

  So much for travelling. Ev said I slept all the way to the city. To think he paid all that dough for the ambulance and I did not see a bit of scenery. But they were nice at the hospital. The doctor there was a dapper man with silvery-blond hair. The nurses treated us kindly, though I’m not sure what they made of Ev. After he fixed my hip, the same doctor came to check on me laying up in bed. He took a pen from the pocket of his white coat and while he was writing on something clipped to a clipboard, Ev pulled out that musty money. He nudged it at the doctor, gave him the eye, tried to get him to take it. Ev’s look was prideful, cocky.

  “I want her to have the best. I want her back on her feet—can you do that for me?”

  The doctor eyed Ev like he had never seen so much cash, but sounded put out.

  “That’s not how things work.”

  Now it was Ev’s turn to act miffed. He pocketed the cash, it looked like a rolled-up sock in his pants. And suddenly I knew where he’d got all that dough, saved up from the mail and pulled from the tin we kept customer’s money in, not to be put in any bank but buried out of sight and out of mind.

  “Well, if this is how city life works, city life ain’t for me.”

  Before I knew it, Ev left, disappearing without so much as a goodbye. Maybe he caught the Acadian Lines bus home, though the fare, seven or eight dollars, would’ve made him flip his lid! Maybe he thumbed his way back? I only know that I was a fish out of water laying up in that big hospital for weeks on end. The worst was not being allowed to smoke in bed. You were supposed to go all the way down the hall to a room with jigsaw puzzles and a television set. It was all I could do to haul my sorry arse to the washroom. I’d have liked to take a gander at the TV, thought I might get lucky and see myself and Ev on it. I missed seeing his face.

  Finally, the ambulance took me back to Digby General. At least Darlene and them weren’t such sticklers about smoking, except that they nagged about my lungs. Said if I didn’t get back on my feet, I’d fill up with pneumonia. I laid around there for a good three months. By this time, you mightn’t be surprised to hear, I had got used to regular hot cooked meals and other fineries we lacked in Marshalltown. The nurses took turns sponge-bathing me and washing my hair, which brought back memories of Mae giving me the royal treatment. It also brought back the words of that hymn about being washed that made me see red, a woolly lamb with its throat cut, except instead of being white I pictured it as a tiny black sheep. And as I enjoyed the nurses’ pampering, another of Aunt’s sayings came to me: “Pride goes before the fall.” Maybe it was prideful of me to enjoy these creature comforts, as if I was owed them. Comforts, or feeling you deserve them, will soften up the toughest old bird. Maybe it wasn’t pride pushing me so much as it was the flesh’s weakness seeking its due. Maybe it was Aunt’s ghost whispering in my ear.

  Rest assured, the torture of getting back on my feet paid for any comforts I enjoyed.

  One day Darlene came in with a newfangled thing called a walker, saying, “Use it or lose it. You can’t go home till you can manage on your own.” I wasn’t used to her being a bossy-boots like I was used to Ev. She got me up off the chair she’d had me sitting up in. After lying so long in bed, my legs were like jelly and my chin was soldered to one shoulder. I guess someone had to make me do it, or I’d have never walked again. After some time Darlene had me moving down the hall like a snail, but almost on my own steam.

  “Good,” she said. “But there’s no way around it, you’re gonna have to do stairs.”

  She and the other girls would take turns day in and day out, helping me move towards the stairwell. It overlooked the entranceway to the parking lot. Through the big glass doors you could see people lounging outside, patients and visitors, nurses, orderlies, and gals from the kitchen and laundry taking smoke breaks and that. There was nary a bird, save the odd seagull circling.

  One afternoon Darlene took the walker away, gave me a cane. Standing there at the top of the stairs, gripping onto it, I chickened out, refused to budge. “Them stairs aren’t going nowhere. I’ll try ’em tomorrow. Or next week. Or the week after.” The truth was, I was scared skinny. All the weeks lying around had stolen my gumption.

  Darlene was full of gab. “I’d have thought you’d be keen to get back to your painting and having hubby spoil you. He told me once how much you like his cakes. A nice white cake—or spice cake, is that your favourite? He never said—” Just like that, though, she quit talking. I guessed what she was thinking. Ev had made himself scarce as hen’s teeth since he’d left me in the city. He hated hospitals, hated their smell—hospitals made him sick, he’d said. It made sense, I guess, if you’d never lain in a nice, fresh hospital bed or eaten hospital grub, three square meals a day that other people cooked.

  Of course I stuck up for him. Someone had to. If a fella’s own wife won’t stick up for him, who will?

  “Cakes aren’t the half of it. Cigarettes, candies—he spoils me something fierce. The candies he buys me?” Hunched into myself, I gave a good strong laugh, which made my chest hurt. “All these years and I guess he still figures I am not sweet enough, need all the sweetening up he can give me.” I gave another good strong laugh, which hurt my heart or maybe my conscience, just a bit, for telling Darlene this fib. Though nothing pained me nearly as much as her nudging me nearer the stairs did.

  She kept one arm about my waist, held my hand in her other hand, squeezed my arm tight under her other arm, like we were skating partners. Of course, I had never skated in my life, nor had Ev, each of us for our own reasons. But I imagined us whirling around the frozen surface of a pond like the skaters in my paintings, never mind my feet would have slip-slided every which way. The notion made me smile like a fool. Peering down into my face, Darlene rightly took this to be a sign of nerves.

  “Don’t let go,” I said. If I could have raised my head up, lifted my eyes and looked off into nothing, it mightn’t have been so scary. But all I could see were my feet in my slippers on the edge of the hard, speckled riser.

  “Come on now, I won’t let you fall.”

  “You’d be in some pile of doo-doo if you did.” I laughed louder, muckling onto her for dear life. In my mind I begged, Don’t make me. Please please please, no more stairs for me in this life. “Tomorrow,” I said. But, like Ev going out of his way to drum up orders, Darlene wasn’t one to take tomorrow for an answer. “What, don’t you trust me?” She laughed, her warm breath in my ear. “Who else lets you smoke?”

  It was only three steps but it might as well have been thirty. She made me grip the cane with my left hand, the railing with my right—easier said than done with my fists balled up tighter than ever. She had a saying that was supposed to help me remember: “Left foot leads going down, right foot leads going up. Because going down is hell, yes? Going up is h-e-a-v-e-n, proper thing.” Aunt would have approved.

  I snorted, balking. “So lefties go to hell, eh?”

  Darlene looked flummoxed, her face flushed against her uniform’s snowy white. “Hell? It’s a manner of speaking. Hell is just what you make it, surely.”

  I had to laugh yet again, thinking of Aunt, though every part of me hurt like the bejeebus. I gripped the railing like my life depended on it. Darlene stayed right behind me, her breath warming the top of my head. With her arm around me, one step at a time, I did it. I reckon I went to hell and back.

  “A bit more practice and you’ll be fit to go home.”

  Back in my room, who was waiting to see me but Secretary, with a box of Peppermint Patties and a bouquet of pink carnations. Now that was heaven.

  A few weeks later, the day before I left hospital, I was having a sit-down in the lobby when I saw the police car pull up outside—it was hard to miss it—and who hopped out but Darlene? She was wearing a yellow dress and a boxy pink jacket and carrying a grocery bag, with her uniform in it, I su
ppose. Smiling behind the wheel, Bradley Colpitts watched her come inside. Just before he pulled away from the curb, Darlene twirled around and blew him a kiss. I knew then that those two were more than just friends.

  I recovered enough to get along in the house, going from the daybed to my table-tray and to the pot to do my business, a path like a triangle made of three yardsticks. It was all right. But my days of enjoying the trailer were done. In my absence, the Light & Power had been cut off. A family of chipmunks had moved in. I couldn’t climb up inside it on my own and Ev wouldn’t lift me, scared I’d bust something else. As wondrously as the trailer had landed in the yard, my ability to use it left me. So much for the delights of a house, a studio, on wheels.

  “‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh,’” Aunt used to say. Though I have yet to meet the Hoary-Bearded Man in White Robes whose mention made her tremble, I had to agree. He or Somebody or Something gave and took all right, though not always in equal measure, it seemed to me.

  Ev set up my paints in my corner, like old times. My heart sank when I saw the boards that had gathered dust, the unanswered mail, the backed-up orders. “Better get at ’em and to ’em,” he said in a no-nonsense, teasing way. Fixing on holding a brush steady in my hand, bracing that fist tight with my other fist, took my mind off losing the trailer, which I suppose Ev sold. It took my mind off most of what ailed me, almost like before. And Ev did his best to brighten things up. He picked a sprig of wild blue asters and stuck it in a jar of water. I had a hankering for the sweet peas he grew out back but they were long past their prime. A person makes do with what Nature provides. Though those wild blue asters weren’t the most cheerful posies, foretelling as they do a hard frost and the end of fair weather.

  I had expected things in Marshalltown to be pretty much unchanged, and they were, all but one thing. Matilda, Willard, and their flock seemed to have abandoned us, maybe seeking greener pastures. Secretary said she spotted a big murder up the road, though, which Ev confirmed was Matilda and them. I knew they never nested in the same tree twice, but this didn’t mean they wouldn’t be back. We had nothing but trees. I stayed hopeful.

  Secretary got a travelling nurse to come when she could to sponge-bathe me and see that I was getting on okay—at least I thought Secretary arranged it until the nurse asked how I knew Miss Twohig. Turned out Carmelita Twohig was the one paying for her visits. I bit my tongue. Ev saw to it that I got toast with my tea, and beans or sardines with toast for supper, my choice. I had to laugh the time a stranger came to the door while Ev was off on one of his jaunts, a man wearing what looked to be pajamas, who announced that he was here to bathe me. I don’t know why, but I thought of Olive rubbing a washcloth over someone’s back, some poor feeble-minded girl-child, sudsy water lapping over her. The sound of someone else’s breathing through the keyhole, and Olive chasing whoever it was away. Over my dead body, a stranger would wash me!

  “Oh no you ain’t!” I told the man in pajamas and shut my pretty door in his face.

  “You didn’t!” Secretary laughed into her glove when I told her. “Carmelita Twohig must’ve called him. Least she could have done was warn you first. I wonder how come she got a man? Guess the VON were hard up for help that day.”

  Well, as you might guess, I learned early on in our marriage it was best to keep my trap shut. If only Ev could have done the same—talk about a man with the gift of gab, talk talk talk. When he was in his cups he could have talked a person under the table or into the roaring path of a truck. The same as later on, I mostly stayed hunkered in my corner. Like I’ve said, if I had a brush in my hand I was content and could handle pretty near anything. If I had been the praying type, my prayer would have gone like this: Lord, let me paint and I will take whatever you dish out.

  But one morning he had started drinking early, right there in the house, and by eleven o’clock I’d had enough of an earful to do me two weeks. When I put my hands over my ears he got owly, fixing for an argument, I could tell.

  It wasn’t a bad day outside; I figured if I went out there and loitered by the road for a spell, he might simmer down or have nodded off by the time I took myself back inside. I had my coat on, and the painting I’d finished the day before tucked under my arm—aiming just to look at it, find some company in it, I guess. Thinking how when all else failed it cheered me up to look at what I wanted to see, things I had guessed up placed straight and square in front of me on the board, the way they looked in my mind. As I was standing there a car stopped and a man got out and said he was going to Yarmouth, he could give me a lift there if I wanted. Just then I heard something let loose inside the house, something hard hit the floor or the wall.

  “All right,” I said, and just like a fool, with no purse and no money and nothing but my painting, I got into the car. I didn’t say two words the whole sixty miles, just kept my head down for most of it. I was scared to look up as we entered the town, scared it would pain me too bad to see what I was missing—all those places like the Grand Hotel and Frost Park. When the man asked how long it had been since I’d visited, I shrugged. He shut up and kept driving down Main Street. I looked up in time to see the top of Forest Street but didn’t make a peep. He kept going, past Pearl Street and Emin’s Lane and Moody’s Lane, and it occurred to me that maybe I should be scared, that here I was being carried off by this stranger who for all I knew might take me down to the Chebogue River and throw me in, or worse, deliver me to that place in Arcadia. But he slowed down by the Lewis Fountain, a beautiful watering hole for people and horses alike. A present to the town, Father had said when his business was thriving, given by the wealthy Lewises, no relation to Ev as far as I knew, a family who owned a big shipping business.

  Just past the fountain, the man turned down Lewis Lane and delivered me to someone’s house. A woman named Mitchell came to the door and looked baffled, but she remembered Mama and our cards and invited me in. And she fed me then proceeded to call some ladies she knew who soon showed up with presents. A pound of this and a pound of that. Butter, flour, sugar. “For me?” I said, and they laughed, and not one of them would accept my painting in return. And when the tea and cookies she made were gone, she went to the phone and called the man back, I guess he was her son or her nephew or some such, and he came to drive me home. Imagine, driving one hundred and twenty miles in one day.

  Slouched in his chair, Ev nearly cried when I stepped through the door and plunked down my presents. He was relieved, I guess, but beside himself and none too pleased that I had taken off and not even said where I was going. Once he’d had a lick of the butter, his relief gave way to anger. “Running off like that, who were you chasing after, huh? Going off with the first fella who strikes your fancy. What’s all this stuff anyways, his payment for your whoring? Try that stunt again, don’t bother coming back. I oughta turf you out now!”

  But I climbed the ladder and went to bed, worn out from my long excursion. He was right, I figured. I had no business disappearing on him like that, even for a day, even when he was drinking. For better or for worse, our vows had said.

  And back then, just when I figured Ev Lewis had every right to turf me out on my ear, if that’s how he saw it, knowing my past and seeing as painting pictures was all I could do to make money, something happened that gave me a leg up.

  We heard Joe the First bark before we saw the car pull in a few days, maybe a week after my jaunt to Yarmouth. A lady got out and came to the door. The day was warm for spring, and we had the inside door open to air the place out—of course, all that did was invite the bugs in. Ev was kneading dough for porridge bread to go with our butter and some beans. His fingers were stuck together with oatmeal and molasses goo. I’d just lit a smoke, was thinking on what to fill a board with: a snowy scene to cool my thoughts, or a scene from the docks, lobster boats riding the tide, gulls angling for bait?

  The lady stuck her head in, not a bit shy. “Is this where I’d find
the artist?”

  She had a wavy hairdo, dark and glossy. Ev smacked his lips, looked her up and down. Acted like I was no more than a fly setting there. You have got the wrong place, missus, I thought. When the lady spied me behind a stack of magazines and whatnot, her eyes lit up. They moved to the picture propped between a breadbox and a tin of peas. She dug in her purse, took out a two-dollar bill. She laid the money down right in front of me, then reached for the painting. It was one I had slaved over, of a boy with a red rag on his head, kneeling before a lake in autumn, feeding nuts to a squirrel while its relatives looked on. I’d taken great pains with the reds and yellows and greens, using fine, careful brushwork to show the grasses and leaves and reflections and the look on the boy’s face and on his squirrel buddies’ faces.

  Only then did I start to get up. “Sorry. That one i’n’t quite dried yet—”

  Ev scooted over and snatched the bill out from under my nose. He stuck it inside the empty Player’s tin sitting atop the table. “Hold on. It’s dried enough. You like this one, the wife’s got plenty more where it come from.” He dug under some papers and fished out another one I’d done, with yellow finches and bright blue delphiniums.

  “Why, I’ll take them both.” The lady took out a change purse, laid down two fifty-cent pieces and a dollar bill.

  “Sold!” Ev added this sum to the Player’s tin and danced a little jig for her on the spot. “Whaddya say, Maud? Thank the nice lady for taking these off your hands.”

  The lady beamed. Even glimpsing it at a tilt, her smile looked as sweet to me as a cat’s. “Oh—are there more?”

  Ev grabbed a picture off the wall, the tulips I’d done on the piece of linoleum I’d found that day a good while back at the dump.

  “That’s okay,” the lady said. But she asked if I took orders. A friend of hers was looking to have two pairs of shutters decorated for her cottage down the shore in Queen’s County. Oh my sweet Dinah, I thought years later when Hank Snow went big, wondering if these folks might’ve known him since he was from that part of the world, Liverpool. At the time, though, Queen’s County meant frig-all to me. Just as well, since Ev was the one doing the talking.