Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  Who knows but some young fella with darkness on his mind hadn’t peeked in through my old window to see Ev pushing back the mat, lifting the board, and feeding jar after jar through the floor—Ev thinking they’d be safer where, if a thief tried to get at them, it would be over his dead body—Ev rocking back on his heels to nurse one last, self-satisfying drink. Who knows but such a young fella hadn’t heard how Ev talked when he got drinking: “Just because I don’t look like much doesn’t mean I ain’t rich. I got twenty-two thousand dollars, and it ain’t just sitting in a bank.” And who knows but the young fella didn’t just decide on a lark to go shoot the shit with him?

  For the first time since leaving your world, I honestly wished I was there with Ev that night before New Year’s Eve. The pair of us smoking cigarettes and chewing tobacco, and, if there was juice in the radio’s batteries, listening to Hank Snow give the old year the boot, singing his song about moving on. Ev might’ve banged on a pot for a drum and I could’ve sung along….

  I had a bad feeling watching that young Buzzy fella stump up to Ev’s in the dark. The headlights of a car cast a passing glow over the dirty snow by the road. The young fella pulled a pint of something from his pocket. Swinging it, he pounded on our pretty door, which had gone a long time without its birds and butterflies getting freshened up with paint. He pounded fit to bust the lock.

  “Old man! Open up! Got a drink for you. A fuckin new year’s drink a fuckin day early.”

  I wanted to cry out, I would’ve if I could have: Ev! No! Make like you ain’t home. But even if I could’ve warned him, it was too late. Ev opened the door just wide enough to hiss, “Git lost, I don’t want no drink, don’t want nothin from you.” I wondered if it was the preacher’s words speaking to Ev’s heart, or the doctor’s.

  But young Buzzy wasn’t taking no for an answer. Maybe his mind was as feeble as his hearing, though his body sure wasn’t feeble. As Ev tried to shut the door on him, Buzzy heaved it to with all the weight of his shoulder and sent Ev skittering backwards. Before you could say “uncle,” Buzzy was inside, his voice buzzing mad as a hornet. “Don’t say no to me, you fuckin old bastard.”

  The sound of Ev’s screams flew straight up through the chimney to where I hovered above, helpless. I heard the crunch of something ploughing into something, the sickening thud of something hitting the floor. I made myself slip down through the stovepipe and look. There was Ev sprawled there, Buzzy standing over him. Ev had fallen so fast he might’ve clipped his head on the opened oven door—there was more trash heaped inside it, saved for one ginormous blaze? Maybe Ev had opened it hoping to throw a bit more heat? Or maybe it had been closed but got bumped and swung open as Ev fell. To this day, no one can say for sure.

  Now Buzzy was crouched over Ev, hollering as he lay there on his back: “Where is it? Where’d you put it, you old fuck? Gimme the fuckin money and you won’t get hurt.” Then Buzzy wrestled his arm around Ev’s neck and hauled him onto his side. He was holding on like as to strangle Ev and punching him in the face. Blood poured out of Ev’s nose and mouth so bad he could barely breathe let alone yell for help. His voice was a terrible, tiny bleat: “You’re gonna kill me.”

  On account of his heart, did he mean, or the blood pooling everywhere?

  If I’d had a heart, hearing this would have stopped it cold.

  “Get my pills. Getmypills.” I could barely hear Ev’s voice through the ugly welter of blood and Buzzy’s flailing around. He was rooting like a mad dog through Ev’s stuff like as to trash the place, if trashing trash was possible, searching for something—money?

  “That cabinet—there—” Ev’s voice gurgled, he was gargling blood. Buzzy was sweating bullets. He got his bloody hands on a pill bottle, popped the top off, and emptied the whole thing into Ev’s open, gasping mouth as he laid there. The pills’yellowish green mixed with red spilled over the floor. Land only knows what was going through Ev’s poor old mind. Now Buzzy was tossing stuff. He found Ev’s pocket watch, that old one of Father’s I had given him that hadn’t worked in years, and another watch that looked like it, which Ev had got somewhere and also scratched his initials into. Buzzy shoved both watches in his other coat pocket, as he’d thought enough to keep his vodka pocketed. As he did this, I saw his wild eyes roll upwards, taking in the hatch to the attic.

  I will never forget the sound of Buzzy’s greasy, bloodied boots stumping up my yellow stairs. Their count of one-two-three-four-five-six to the count of Ev’s breath jigging in and out around the pills. The blackish-red pool under his head spreading wider.

  At the top of the stairs stood that bureau Ev had scrounged somewhere. Any fool could’ve seen the lonesome five-dollar bill sticking out of the top drawer. Who knows but it wasn’t the proceeds from a Fluffy painting? When Buzzy opened the drawer to grab it, what did he find inside there but two old purses stuffed with money. Four hundred dollars. Buzzy stuffed the pockets of his dungarees with all that cash.

  It’s a good thing Ev had stuck the jar with my ring under the floor or Buzzy would have grabbed that too. By now the fire was well and truly dead and Buzzy could almost see his breath, skidding downstairs, stepping over Ev and fleeing as if Ev might up and stop him, Ev laying there like that. Didn’t even have the courtesy to shut the door but left it flapping behind him. The storm door was still propped open with the broom.

  His face bashed in, Ev could have been dead for all Buzzy cared. Somehow he was still breathing. The only trace of warmth was from the dark puddle spreading under his head. In no time a-tall, the puddle started to cool and thicken.

  Outside, Buzzy took off like a scared raccoon. I suppose he’d got what he had been looking for? His boots left a pinkish trail on the snow by the roadside. He stopped long enough to pull the bottle from his jacket and take a soothing swig from it. Like I said, I am not too clear on Buzzy’s name. Maybe a person who would do what he did has no name, just a pair of hands that happened to have blood on them. He’s the one who has to live with what he did, as I guess his people have to, too. I tried and tried to think of the people he came from, especially his mother.

  I’ll bet five dollars Carmelita Twohig would have known something about them. If I had been the praying type, I’d have called on the sweet by-and-by itself, on all of its peaceful, airy nothingness, to send Carmelita tooling along in her car just then and have her stop. Carmelita would have noticed the door hanging open. She would have known what to do. Even if she’d had other plans, she would have gone for help, she’d have called the police and the ambulance and maybe, just maybe, the hospital could have saved Ev. I imagined Darlene washing away the blood, dressing Ev in a clean white garment, Ev lying in a spotless, snow-bright bed for the first time in his entire life. The police might have tracked down Buzzy, caught him right away with those watches on him, and the money. Ev’s blood on it.

  Being hand-less myself, as I’ve said, there was nothing I could do.

  Close to town, I glimpsed Bradley Colpitts’s cruiser climb the hill below the police station. He pulled into the lot outside it and parked the car for the night. He was getting off early since he’d worked through Christmas, double time and a half. He went inside to wish his buddies a happy new year, since he would be taking the next two days off. They asked how he and the wife would ring in the new year and clapped him on the back, horsing around. Bang some pots and pans and be in bed by midnight? Wink, wink.

  As Buzzy stumbled alongside the roadside, then into the woods, I thought the trees might be the only friends he had, never mind the ones in the trailer. I thought of Emery Allen being from that harbour named after Woods. I loved the woods myself but wondered all at once if I had stayed a town gal, would I have been spared the life I lived? Spared the backwoods evil I had just witnessed, a hungry kind of hopelessness having at it.

  By and by, I watched Buzzy slip from the woods and stick out his thumb, and after a while a car came along and stopped for hi
m. I watched him get in, and the car moving along the highway till it passed the road to Bear River and stopped, and I watched Buzzy get out and head up the dirt road towards home. Pretty soon his house came in view, the motley coloured rags from Frenchys poking here and there from the snow butted up against the foundation. I hoped this bit of insulation made the place cozier than it would’ve been otherwise. Buzzy’s mama and her man were inside, passed out. Maybe they’d been quarrelling, how her man would have to move out if she hoped to keep getting her cheques.

  As Buzzy fell into bed I thought how he and his mama weren’t so different from Ev and his ma, maybe. Neither had much of a leg up living under the laws of the land or learning what a lot of folks call proper behaviour. Oh, it was horrible what Buzzy had done to Ev. But I realized, just like Ev’s Ev-ness wasn’t his fault, maybe Buzzy’s buzziness wasn’t really his fault either. The fault, I figured, was being dirt poor, the products of dirt-poorness being more than qualified to eat themselves alive.

  “‘See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil,’” Aunt used to say. Now I see why her lofty way of thinking was a wall built as protection from the low life creeping over the ground below it. I had overheard Carmelita Twohig telling people Ev got uglier and meaner once I was no longer in the picture. Before this terrible thing happened to Ev, I wager a lot of folks, some folks anyway, felt he had it coming to him. There’s that weary old saying, What goes around comes around. Maybe it’s true.

  But a memory stirs in me, a pleasant one from when we were first married, of Ev training sweet peas to grow up a length of fishing net he’d strung behind the house, flotsam he’d drug from the shore. “Plenty of use left in that.” He had sounded so pleased with himself, and no wonder. It was like everything cast off by somebody else was cast there specially for us. He had picked me a little bouquet when the first of the sweet peas bloomed, flowers so pretty it almost hurt to look at them—pale pink, purple, white, and a deep, deep rose. I’d have done anything to paint those flowers exactly as they were, but paints in such colours could not be had for love or money. I’ll bet they still can’t be.

  But something about how tender, paper-thin, and fragile those blooms were made my heart sing for Ev, even as it made my heart cry for him, too.

  Begging Buzzy for his life, he had sounded like the kid Buzzy must have been once also, raw-boned, scared, and delicate in a sad, doomed way. Doomed by a world that don’t give two shits whether a kid prospers or not, or lets badness take root. Still, it grieved me how he left Ev laying there like that. Even when I remembered back to Ev raising his hand to me that once, and making me work so hard on orders, and scrimping on food sometimes, and other, little things he said and did which I have chosen to forget.

  What I said about “seeing is as seeing does”? It means there are places this windy soul of mine will never go. The difference between what ailed Ev and what ailed me was that his trouble was buried too deep under his skin to be seen. The way a person is in life carries over to how they are remembered in death. What separated me from Ev was his hunger, the hunger that coils up inside a person and leaves them always wanting. I had learned a long time ago not to hunger for anything.

  If I could have laid beside Ev on the floor, I would have. Held his hand and comforted him, poor Ev, laying there in the cold as his heart slowly, slowly gave out. I’d have banked the fire all through the next morning and afternoon and through the next night. I’d have drawn water from the well, helped him sit up, and tried to get him to drink and swallow one of those big pills, though his jaw was busted and his poor nose broken in three places. I’d have sung him to sleep, all the songs we used to hear on the radio, about precious moments, whispering hopes, and happy harvests, land rest Ev’s ragged, hungry soul.

  So I hung around for his sake, hovering close but not too close. Like his guardian angel, a Cat’lick from down the French shore might say. I hovered there pretty much steadily through the next day, New Year’s Eve Sunday, and through that night and into the very dawn of the new year, nineteen hundred and seventy-nine, when Ev finally quit breathing. It was a mercy when he took his last breath. Yet, even after he was gone, part of me lingered until the afternoon of New Year’s Day, when a boy passing by noticed the door banging open, and peeked in and saw the body.

  It was a gruesome enough sight for a grown-up to behold, let alone a child.

  But do you know what Buzzy did that Sunday, the day before Ev’s body was found, while Ev had lain slowly, slowly dying? Well, I glimpsed him going up the road with his wallet full of Ev’s money, then taking it out to buy a skidoo off a man who had it for sale in his yard. A New Year’s present to himself, I guess—Happy New Year, Buzzy. A skidoo was something that sure would have made Ev’s life easier by times. Better than biking through the snow, I’d imagine. Yet he never would have spent that kind of money on himself, especially not on a luxury. Maybe Buzzy was fixing on turning over a new leaf, figuring out a way of getting around besides hitchhiking.

  Once Ev quit breathing, my loftiest self watched for his arrival up here. Best be on the lookout, I thought, you don’t want to be caught off guard. He was bound to turn up any time. I was set to greet him singing Hank’s song “I’ve Been Everywhere,” which helps a newcomer see some benefits to being here.

  If I knew you were coming I’d’ve baked a cake.

  As soon as the boy found the body, he went running for help. Someone called a doctor named Black in Digby and he came out with the ambulance. The rest, I guess, worked like a party line. A head nurse at the hospital called the police and got them to come out to Marshalltown. Two officers arrived to inspect the murder scene, one of them the officer who knew Buzzy from giving him rides here and there. They got a police photographer to come all the way from Yarmouth to take pictures of Ev and the house. Isn’t that something, not just once but twice having a man come all that way to take your picture. Ev was lying there a foot and a half from the range, those pills still in his mouth. The empty pill bottle was on the floor. Someone, I don’t know who, thought to close the oven door before the man came with the camera—good thing, I didn’t want him or anyone banging their shins on it, especially if Carmelita Twohig were to happen by and find someone sporting a major shiner.

  You see? I’d have wanted to tell her, that’s exactly how I got that big black bruise that time, and you thought it was Ev did it to me. You and Bradley Colpitts both.

  It wasn’t till suppertime, after the photographer finished taking all his pictures, that they finally put Ev in the ambulance and took him to the county morgue at the hospital. I wish Darlene had been at work; knowing she was there might have made it easier. But she and Bradley and the kids were at her mama’s having New Year’s dinner: ham and scalloped potatoes and pie. Her mama, formerly a Twohig, was Carmelita’s sister, you see. Surprise surprise, there was Carmelita sitting at the head of the table holding court.

  The police called in another doctor, one from up the Valley, to open Ev up to see just how he died.

  This is my husband, I thought. I could not listen to the sound of a knife slitting skin.

  I could not look when the doctor held something in his hands, then weighed it.

  A heart. This was my husband. Heart failure was the cause of death, I heard the doctor say. Coronary something something something.

  How much do you think the pain in someone’s heart weighs? There is no way of measuring any of it.

  This is when the air swam around me, its sorrows and its joys pooled together in a feeling that was cold and hot, that was hate as much as it was love. Each smoothed out the other so the nothingness was a stew simmered so long you could not tell one ingredient from another, potatoes from carrots, meat from gravy, only draw in its soft, tasteless flavour. It was a flavourless savouring of all who had lived and died and were never to show our faces again on this or your side of the veil but would be here waiting, and maybe even all those who had yet to come into your wor
ld as well. I saw at last that glory has no need of faces to kiss or arms to hold the weary or for the weary to be held by, or of feet to carry the weary to or from those arms, or any need of fleshly anticipation at all.

  Yet I felt myself surrounded. My loved ones were themselves and not themselves, bearing no traces of the selves we had lost. None of us was as we had been, there would be no reunion in this or any by-and-by. Yet here we were. Even Ev was here, where there was all the air and sound and light a person could ever need.

  As for Ev’s heart, perhaps it had failed from the get-go, broken in ways no one could fathom, least of all him. As for Buzzy, I wonder if the almshouse next door hadn’t shut he might have found a home there, what with his problems. How he had trouble telling right from wrong and saw things that weren’t really there. Hallucinations, his head doctor called Buzzy’s problem in court. But I am ahead of myself.

  On New Year’s Day I happened to see Buzzy give those two pocket watches of Ev’s to his mama’s man to bury behind her house. It struck me as a lot of trouble to go to for one timepiece that barely worked and another whose hands were still froze on the moment they’d been froze on when I’d pulled it from the lawyer’s envelope in Yarmouth, my inheritance from Father. Neither watch was much good to Ev now. So it was no great mischief that for a few months the watches stayed buried, until Buzzy’s wristwatch gave out and he needed something to tell him when he was supposed to be where. So his mama’s boyfriend dug up both of Ev’s watches and gave the one that sort of worked to Buzzy.

  I figure this was the start of Buzzy’s undoing, the beginning of the end for him. His mama’s man took the other watch in to the police. I hope if Ev was watching, he gained some satisfaction when they saw his initials scratched on the back. For that matter, I hope Father gained some too.