Brighten the Corner Where You Are

by Carol Bruneau

  And just so, in a similar spirit, they had cut up and carted off the house in order to safeguard what remained after rust, moths, and four-legged thieves had their way with it. I hear it sits in the capital city of Halifax, inside a big stone building full of other people’s paintings, real artists’ paintings, some might say. Imagine that, a house inside a house, our little home inside a big, fancy home for art, real art. I don’t imagine there are too many fancy art galleries with a murder scene on display. Why, in my mind’s eye I still see that dark pool under Ev’s head.

  For there are aches and pains that don’t go away, the hurt of things that happen that no one—no matter how hardhearted, stupid, or absent they are—should ever have to bear.

  Which brings me to that baby of mine. Swayed by those old songs of the sweet by-and-by and heavenly shores, I used to dream I would see him again, too, at least feel his presence somehow. Like a pulse of air between a butterfly’s wingbeats—something, anything. A person believes what she wants to believe, life is just easier that way. But in the dark of night, under the moon, the truth comes out and shines. I think of that gal, Catherine Dowley, getting out of the car that day, coming in to see me while Ev was chopping wood. The woman who marched in out of the blue and called me her ma, then wrote me a letter. She was the girl who was with that lady, Mrs. Crosby, in Stirrett’s store the day I bought the Sunday joint meant to last Mama and me all week.

  And here’s the sad thing, if you believe all things are possible, that things rise from their ashes. Even if you look at all things with an opened heart and an opened mind, and no longer try to dodge how things really are, it’s like Aunt said: “You still have to pull the plank out of your own eye before you can stoop to pluck the dirt from your neighbour’s.”

  While I lived, I had a plank the width of a door hampering my sight. But now that plank has been removed, I see the letter come together again, the letter that Catherine wrote me, after saying she was mine. The letter I burned in the stove the day it came. Before me now, pieces of it rise from stove ash and glue themselves back together into sheets of creamy notepaper. The fire’s smoke pulls itself down the chimney, through the stovepipe, and out on to the pages. Its grey ink forms sentences in her handwriting, words as bold and brave as can be. I read them spread before me, before they float off into this otherworld to be read, past, present, and future, by the stars however the stars want.

  And I had been so sure that seeing my baby boy, no longer through any old glass darkly but face to face, would set crooked things straight. Even drifting away on wings of air, Catherine’s words make a lie of him. Just as they did from the day the letter landed in our mailbox and Ev dropped it into my hands and onwards. Even saved from the firebox, its ashes burn forever. The truth of her words scalds me, now that I believe them, can let myself believe them.

  For the letter said it was Father, harness maker and father of the timeless timepiece, who arranged everything. Who set it up with the people who took my healthy little baby—a good family,an upright family who took in other unwanted children—and raised her as their own.

  My baby girl. Why would she lie? This isn’t to say people don’t lie, that some don’t like lies more than they like the truth—I for one can vouch for this. Yet, what was the use of her coming around all those years after? The sin for which Ev had struck me come to haunt us both in the flesh. She wouldn’t have wanted to know me as I was or live as I did. Her presence would have poisoned Ev against me for the rest of our days. It would have poisoned me against him, if I had welcomed her into our house. Into my heart. Ev would’ve beaten my spirit black and blue, called me names I could never repeat. If I were very lucky, he’d have tried to make up for it by pouring cups of cold tea.

  Oh yes, my eyes have opened mightily. Now I see. The shadow over my life was not the mistake of putting up with Ev or denying someone her birthright, but failing to see how our fate, hers and mine, and in a way, Ev’s, was Father’s doing. The daughter of my mistake who should have been the daughter of my heart was the daughter of the fib he told to protect Mama and me—from what, gossip?

  Strip away a fib and what you are left with is motherless sorrow, the need for more love than you could ever give or receive. Some get the world they guess up in their dreams and some don’t. You make do. It helps to fall in love with the sun as it sinks, the blossom as it falls, the rustle of feathers even as one bird raids another’s nest. To stay in love and make do, oh yes, it helps to make fibbing—call it what you want—an art. For the boundless nothing that is behind, before, below, and beside me covers all things. I figure you had best call it love.

  Epilogue

  How does it end, again? My life? My story? Maybe it never does. There’s that little metal shack that stands on our piece of heaven in Marshalltown; it’s the very size of our house and on the very spot where it stood. Is the red behind its steely slats meant to conjure Ev’s bingeing temperament, his murder, or my perseverance? The place looks to me like a joyless grey cage. I guess some folks like to remember me that way: caged. Caged inside my marriage to Ev, caged inside a body they saw and some still see as unfit.

  What these folks don’t see is that these cages made me the bird I was and the bird I am, made me sing in the way I did, the way that brought me happiness and joy and a starry life I wouldn’t have known otherwise.

  Up on the ridge beside our grave, someone has planted a bush that blooms each spring with big mauve flowers. Our grave, I say: mine and Ev’s and his parents’. The bush is fancier than the bushes Mama grew in her garden: snowball bushes, mock orange, spirea, honeysuckle, lilacs. Someone has left a little silver angel bearing the word Peace atop our headstone, along with three dried red berries for the birds that might visit. I would like to think maybe it was Carmelita Twohig who left those berries—but no, there’s a stone with her name on it just a few rows over. It says she’s been here a couple of years now. But never mind Carmelita.

  Someone has planted a tulip beside our stone, mine and Ev’s and his parents’, a white imitation tulip that will last a long, long time. I reckon it’s a nice thing to have in winter, to remind us all that even on the dirtiest old days something blooms. That’s right, even when fog pushes itself from the bay and over the land and paints everything the same old grey, something down there where you are will keep right on flowering.

  Author’s Note

  Since Maud Lewis’s death in 1970, her story has become so mythologized it’s just about impossible to separate hearsay from reality, original information from an ever-deepening well of common knowledge. While certain commercial interests sugar-coat Maud’s life, few can gloss the misery she must have suffered living with advanced rheumatoid arthritis under conditions of dreadful poverty. Yet her paintings show a huge creative spirit, joie de vivre, and an astonishing ability to defy adversity.

  These remarkable qualities of hers were first made public by photographer Bob Brooks and arts journalist Murray Barnard in their 1965 Star Weekly article. Besides her paintings themselves, Brooks’s photos of Maud and her husband, Everett, in their tiny home, its every surface adorned with her joyful artwork, are our most vivid record of her. Here’s a woman who looks shy and canny, is physically disabled and perhaps bemused but unfazed by the photographer’s attention—as happy and content as she claimed to be in interviews and as contemporaries remembered her, and at ease with Everett despite his well-known faults.

  Maud appears no less happy in the CBC’s 1965 Telescope documentary, The Once-Upon-A-Time-World of Maud Lewis, in which Everett shares views that probably weren’t so unusual at the time but would rightly see him condemned today. As her friend Olive Hayden, the warden’s wife at the Marshalltown Almshouse, insisted, “[Maud] was happy. She had what she wanted. They said [Everett] was mean, but…. He might’ve been mean, but…he wasn’t to her. No, I think he really loved her, and she did him” [Elder Transcripts]. And just as Everett’s attitudes weren’t that uncommo
n, as others have noted, neither was the poverty that was the couple’s “normal” all that rare in rural Nova Scotia in the 1940s, ’50s, and early ’60s. Simply put, Maud and Everett were products of their time.

  Precious few people who knew the couple are still alive or able to share their recollections of either individual. Through a stroke of luck, I was put in contact with ninety-seven-year-old Kay Hooper, one of Maud’s friends and a regular visitor to the Lewis home. Hooper attests to the misery Maud was subjected to amidst Everett’s drinking and controlling, miserly ways. “It was not a happy place,” she told me, calling Maud’s living conditions “shocking,” “sparse,” and “horrible,” and suggesting that “Maud was not used to anything better.” During her visits, Hooper recalls Maud as “very shy” though “she enjoyed company.” Owing to the deformity of her chin, “she had a hard time looking up at you…and was always trying to hide her hands. [In conversations] you had to ask questions to her…. She would tuck in her hands and talk…about the weather…. She never painted in front of you.” With great fondness, Hooper remembers admiring a beautiful milk pitcher Maud kept money in, Maud dumping out the “two or four dollars” that were in it, giving it to Hooper, and insisting that she take it. As for Everett, Hooper says, “I didn’t think much of him, didn’t take to him. He would sit quiet in the room, just waiting for the money.” She also recalls Maud standing by the road, thumbing a ride to Yarmouth to escape him. If Maud wasn’t abused physically by her husband, without doubt he exploited her financially while depriving her of amenities many of us (though certainly not all) take for granted.

  But who can say what Maud really thought of her experience? So much is lost to the vagaries of recycled second- and third-hand memories, and even of public records. To this day, for example, Maud’s exact age remains unclear, with various sources listing her birth year as 1901, 1902, and 1903. My decision to abide by the birthdate recorded in her grandmother Isabella Dowley’s family Bible—March 7th, 1902—on display at the Yarmouth County Museum, reflects my choice to negotiate a middle ground in writing this version of Maud’s story. As with many things in life, I suspect the reality of her experience lies in between abject darkness and cheery sunshine, in the grey areas of shifting light. Not to sugar-coat any aspect of Maud’s life, but in dramatizing parts of this shadowy ground, I ask you to remember that, as Margaret Atwood says, all fiction is speculative.

  –Carol Bruneau, July 2, 2020

  Acknowledgements

  Many people assisted my work throughout this project. Huge thanks to my publishers, Terrilee Bulger and Heather Bryan, to Jenn Embree for the beautiful cover design, to Kate Watson, Karen McMullin, proofreader Penelope Jackson, and the rest of the Nimbus team for all their support, and most especially to my editor, the visionary Whitney Moran, who planted the seed for a Maud novel, bore with me when I balked, and whose ingenius insights and brilliant guidance have helped make this story so much more than the sum of its parts. You are one powerhouse crew!

  In my efforts to portray the world from the perspective of a disabled person, I owe more than I can say to disability activist and author Jen Powley, to whom the novel is dedicated. I’m intensely grateful to her for reading and commenting on an earlier draft, sharing her time and insights so generously and with her typical “brutal” honesty and humour. Jen’s guidance has been crucial in shaping my main character’s viewpoint.

  I’m equally indebted to Kay Hooper for sharing her memories of Maud and Everett, and to those who shared their first-hand research, original interview material, knowledge and insights into the couple’s lives, and to the archivists, curators, conservators, and artists whose work ensures that Maud’s art lives on. I am extremely grateful to Beth Brooks, daughter of the late Bob Brooks, whose photographs first brought Maud to the public eye, and to Sandra Phinney for their generosity. Without Beth’s insights and her kind willingness to share her time and her research for the 1998 NFB documentary The Illuminated Life of Maud Lewis, directed and produced by Peter d’Entremont, my project would never have gotten off the ground. The information she shared in conversation originated from her interviews with numerous first-hand sources. My thanks go to Sandra for so enthusiastically sharing her research and writings on Maud, and helping me, as Beth did, to steer a middle course between fact and speculation. I have relied on their wisdom regarding the birth and adoption of Maud’s daughter, Maud’s relationship with Everett, and Everett’s ways with money, and on people’s anecdotes gathered in interviews by Phinney on Ev’s drinking and Maud’s life in Yarmouth. These, along with stories Beth and others gathered in interviews with people who knew Maud and Everett during their married life—among them Larry MacNeil, the son of Maud’s secretary, Kay MacNeil; Ursula Sutherland, wife of Digby Royal Bank Manager Hysom Sutherland; Doctor M. R. MacDonald; and Olive Hayden—helped immeasurably. I’m grateful as well to Lisette Gaudet and the Yarmouth County Museum and Archives for all their assistance in providing their files on Maud and for their exhibits that helped me imagine life in Yarmouth when Maud was growing up. For genealogical information and other details about the Dowley and German/Germain families, and about Emery Gordon Allen, the father of Maud’s daughter, Ancestry.ca was a godsend.

  Like thousands of people, I’ve been moved by the late Bob Brooks’s photographs of Maud and Everett. As well, I’ve been inspired by the Maud-related works of visual artists Laura Kenney and Steven Rhude.

  For cold hard facts, I’m indebted to Jennifer Stairs, Office of the Nova Scotia Judiciary, for providing the court documents regarding Everett Lewis’s murder and the perpetrator’s conviction. These were critical in crafting my version of Maud’s story. In determining the logistics behind Maud’s treatment in 1968 for a broken hip, I’m grateful to Carla Adams, Media Relations, Nova Scotia Health Authority, for providing clarification. I’m deeply grateful for the expertise shared by conservator Laurie Hamilton and curator Ray Cronin in their respective books on Maud’s painted house and her body of work and art practice. For information on what is correctly called the Marshalltown Almshouse, I’ve relied on Brenda Thompson’s work A Wholesome Horror: Poor Houses in Nova Scotia.

  Finally, many others provided the encouragement I needed to create a fictional work based on but not limited to facts and notions about Maud’s story. I’m deeply grateful to Shawn Brown, Cindy Handren, Kathleen Hall and Kevin Coady, Steve and Jane Roberts, Joan Bruneau, Tim and Martha Leary, Lorri Neilsen-Glenn, Ramona Lumpkin, Binnie Brennan, Kim Pittaway, Nicola Davison, Lesley Crewe, Marilyn Smulders, Sheree Fitch, and Elissa Barnard, whose father wrote the Star Weekly article on Maud and Everett, for their kindness and generous support. I’m eternally grateful to Bruce Erskine and our sons, Andrew, Seamus, and especially Angus, who has fed my interest in Maud since a class trip to the AGNS with Mary Evelyn Ternan. Finally, thanks to Lynne Duxbury Smith and to Richard Kaulback, whose childhood memories of visiting the Lewis home conjure an Everett with a kindly twinkle in his eye and, just maybe, something of an unseemly fondness for young girls. Take both attributes as you will. I did, and acknowledge the liberties I’ve taken in creating this story of Maud. Any inaccuracies or inconsistencies in “the facts” as presented here are mine and mine alone.

  Notes on Chapter Titles

  All titles in this book have been borrowed from country and gospel songs Maud may have heard when her radio was co-operating.

  “Abide with Me,” hymn by Henry Francis Lyte, 1847, set to music while he was dying of tuberculosis.

  “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Bob Wills and His Texas Playboys, 1946.

  “Brighten the Corner Where You Are,” lyrics by Ina Duley Ogdon, 1913, music by Charles H. Gabriel, 1913, recorded by Red Foley, 1959.

  “Ev’ry Precious Moment,” by R. Roy Coats, copyright 1968 by Robbins Music Corporation, New York, NY.

  “Hello, Central! Give Me Heaven,” by Charles H. Harris, 1901, recorded by the Carter Family, 1934.

&
nbsp; “I’m Moving On,” by Hank Snow and His Rainbow Ranchers, 1950.

  “I Saw The Light,” words and music by Hank Williams, 1948.

  “I’ve Been Everywhere,” written by G. Mack in 1959, recorded by Hank Snow and His Rainbow Ranchers, 1962.

  “I Will Lift Up My Eyes,” by Margaret Lindsay, copyright 1967 by Robbins Music Corporation, New York, NY.

  “Keep on the Sunny Side,” lyrics by Ada Blenkhorn, music by J. Howard Entwisle, 1899. Recorded by the Carter Family, 1928. (According to Wikipedia, Blenkhorn was inspired by a phrase used by her disabled nephew who always wanted his wheelchair pushed down “the sunny side” of the street.)

  “Let the Lower Lights Be Burning,” by P.P. Bliss, recorded by Johnny Cash, 1962.

  “Open Up Your Heart,” by Buck Owens, 1966.

  “Standing on the Promises,” by Russell Kelso Carter, a medical doctor who wrote novels as well as hymns, 1886.

  “Where We’ll Never Grow Old,” by Jas. C. Moore, recorded by Jim Reeves, 1962.

  “Whispering Hope,” by Alice Hawthorne, recorded by Jo Stafford and Gordon MacRae, 1962.

  “Wildwood Flower,” first recorded by the Carter Family, 1928.

  “Work for The Night is Coming,” lyrics by Anna Coghill, 1854, music by Lowell Mason, 1864.

  Bibliography

  Ancestry.ca. Emery Gordon Allen, John Nelson Dowley, Agnes Mary German/Germain, Ida Germain. ancestry.ca/familytree/person/tree/152047736/person/182020358377/story Accessed December 17, 2019.