A Spectral Hue

by Craig Laurance Gidney

  At first, the two men thought she was the ghost of Hazel Whitby. (Wray stuck to the angel theory.) Olds didn’t think so. “I think she’s much older than Hazel,” he told them one night. “Sometimes, she shows me scenes from her life. Or at least, I think they are. The point is, she might have inspired Hazel Whitby, like she inspired us.”

  When Hosea saw her world, he’d called out the name “Hazel.” The image of the marsh-bell flashed in his mind. Marsh-bell? Marcia Bell? Magenta? Fuchsia? Was that her name? When she appeared to them, like a stemless marsh-bell when the three met in Shimmer Marsh, who or what she was hardly mattered. Whether she was an angel or a ghost, she radiated euphoria, and they, in turn, tried to capture it and mirror it back through their works.

  Hosea initially worked on his art on Sundays. But that began to change. He would work for an hour or two. Soon, it became the whole afternoon. One time, Gladys saw her father working in his study.

  (“I saw him working with his eyes closed,” she said to Xavier, “and the marker he was working with was not that shade. It might have been blue, or green. But every mark he made was that color. I swear.”)

  Gradually, Hosea found himself drawing more and more. On Saturdays, on evenings after work. He filled several notebooks full of the scrawling pseudo-letters. Hosea was a very compartmentalized man. He was a creature of routine. He wore the same mechanics’ uniform emblazoned with his name, the same dark, steel-toed boots. He always slept in a stocking cap to keep waves in what little hair he had left. He always had a beer after dinner to unwind, and watched Bonanza. But, lately, he found himself missing shows, or skipping after-dinner drinks. Sometimes, he would get so involved with his artwork that he was late to meals, or forgot to take the garbage to the curb. Once, he frightened Doreen by getting up in the middle of the night to craft more magenta letters. She saw him with his eyes closed, a beatific expression on his face.

  (“That’s when Mama said it was a cult,” Gladys said.)

  Hosea and Edna Wray carpooled out to the marsh together later that week. It was their little ritual to a have drink in Olds’s silver Airstream. (“A libation for the muse,” is how Mrs. Wray put it.) When they drove up, they saw Old Scarecrow standing at the edge of the wetlands, speaking to the empty landscape. He was shirtless and bedraggled looking. Scarecrow’s hygiene wasn’t a priority at the best of times, but now he looked feral, covered in mud, his unkempt hair free of the cap he usually wore.

  The two of them convinced him to come inside and wind down. Hosea walked Scarecrow back to the Airstream and Mrs. Wray set the percolator on to boil coffee.

  It took a while for lucidity to come back to Scarecrow. He shivered as Edna and Hosea gently washed him over the sink.

  “I don’t think he should be out here alone,” said Mrs. Wray. “I have an extra room.”

  The next morning, Hosea drove over to her house before he went to the shop. Old Scarecrow was cleaned up, dressed in one of Mr. Wray’s old shirts, and huddled over a cup of coffee.

  “How’re you doing, Jimmy?” Hosea asked. He sat down next to him.

  Scarecrow stared into his coffee, as if it held answers somewhere in its black depths. Finally, he said, “You mind if we move? I can’t talk here.”

  “What do you mean?” Edna Wray asked.

  Scarecrow glanced at the curio cabinets full of the dolls. Hosea followed the gaze, and he saw her. The woman in magenta, in miniature. Not painted porcelain and dyed gauze but an actual human female. The dolls’ hair was always straight; Wray never altered them. But these dolls all had her hair—wild, wooly, like a bush or a baobab tree. Or like the head of a marsh-bell. Their vivid gowns and veils rippled. The glass eyes were no longer beads of black. They glinted with bistre and hazel notes.

  “Let’s go into the kitchen,” Hosea said, and in saying that, the spell was broken. They were just dolls again, behind a thin glass coffin. They reconvened in the kitchen.

  Scarecrow said, “She’s destroying my mind. I sleep, and I see her. And when I wake, it’s the same. She wants more. More work. More tributes. I can’t focus. It’s too much.”

  Edna finally sat down. She was frowning. “She has blessed us. We are lucky that we were chosen to spread her message of beauty.”

  “Well, it sure don’t feel like it now,” James Olds said. “It feels like a burden. A curse. Every waking hour, she’s there. I wish she’d leave me the fuck alone.”

  When Scarecrow cursed, the pressure seemed to drop in the room. That ‘fuck’ was as strong as a bomb going off. Edna stood up. Her lips were pressed in a thin line. “Get out,” she said. “I won’t have profanity in my house.”

  “Edna, calm down,” Hosea said. “I’m sure that Scare—Jimmy didn’t mean it. I understand his frustration, though. Lately, she’s been eating up more and more of my time. I have a wife and child. And a job. I can’t spend all my time with that nonsense.”

  “I see,” said Edna, in a way that suggested that she didn’t see at all. “Divinity enters your life, and you just turn it away because it’s inconvenient.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything ‘divine’ about the magenta woman. At all.” Olds stood up. “I think she’s selfish. And vain.”

  “Out,” said Edna Wray.

  Hosea drove Scarecrow home, and then he went to work. He stayed out of contact with the coterie and during that time, the visitations and the urges to create lessened. He breathed a sigh of relief, though he missed their camaraderie, and, if he were being honest with himself, the visits to the otherworldly version of Shimmer Marsh.

  He made himself forget about the meetings in the marsh, choosing to focus on work. He even went to church for a couple of months. The will-o’-the-wisp orb was simply ignis fatuus, or a burp of sulfurous gas.

  The shoebox dioramas began appearing in town months after, in random places. One was left in the library, in the children’s section. Another on the counter of the coffee shop. They depicted the marsh, and used cellophane Easter grass, blue construction paper, and tiny shells, painted magenta, studding the landscape. People began finding the things in their garages, on their porches, or beneath their decks. Hosea did his best to ignore them. Scarecrow and Edna had probably found another fool to join in their odd rituals.

  The Quarles had dinner one evening with the Princes, Charlton and Lorinda. Their daughter Peony was the same age as Gladys, and while they weren’t close they were friendly enough. Peony was a frail child, and was allergic to a laundry list of things, including dust, chocolate, strawberries, carrots and milk. Peony was also asthmatic and had to sleep with a nebulizer. As a result of these limiting ailments, Peony did not have many friends. Doreen told Gladys, before they visited the Prince house, “Be sure to be nice to Peony. Try to find something in common.”

  “I’ll try,” Gladys said. “But she smells funny. Like medicine and mouthwash.”

  “Gladys!” Doreen snapped at her. “You be nice!”

  There was a sulky nod before they got in the car.

  The Prince house was on the opposite side of Shimmer, furthest away from the marsh. Like many of the houses in town, it was a one-story rambler. Charlton had a boat parked in front, alongside a powder blue Ford in pristine shape. Lorinda kept her house immaculately clean. There wasn’t a speck of dust anywhere, and the wood furniture was polished to a high gloss. The house was perfumed by the odor of antiseptic cleaning products. Tart lemon and the chemical smell of varnish. Lorinda’s hair was a perfect beehive, a molded dome of black hair follicles and hairspray. Charlton’s shirt was so stiff with starch that it was a wonder that he didn’t cut himself on the sharp angles of his sleeves.

  Dinner was simply terrible. Dry chicken cutlets in some kind of beige sauce, probably from a packet. Mashed potatoes without a dash of seasoning. Green beans from a can that had been cooked into a grayish-green sludge. For dessert, there was some kind of brilliant orange gelatin mold that held clouds of cream and maraschino cherries. After dinner, the adults went to the living ro
om where Lorinda and Doreen went to one corner with tiny glasses of sherry and he and Charlton sat opposite them with gin and tonics. The alcohol, at least, was well-mixed. The girls went up to Peony’s room.

  “Peony showed me her room,” Gladys told Xavier. “It looked like a hotel room. The bed was tucked up tight, with hospital corners. You could bounce a penny on it. The carpet looked like office carpet. You know the kind, industrial blue and with no nap whatsoever. There were no toys of any kind. There might have been a book shelf. I don’t remember. Everything was so bland and orderly. The fact that the room was showroom-new and neutral made the picture in the room stand out even more.

  “Against one wall was the strangest painting I ever saw. It was a painting of a face. It wasn’t photo-realistic, mind you. But there was such detail. Like the texture of her skin, or the way her brown eyes had little sparks of gold in them. Her hair was an afro. Back in the late ’50s, we thought natural hair was ugly. I don’t think I ever saw a woman with unprocessed hair. There were no picks or Afrosheen or ‘Black is Beautiful.’ In fact, back then, if you called someone Black, those were fighting words. The paper bag test was a real thing back then. ‘If you’re black, stay back. If you’re brown, keep your head down. If you’re light, you’re all right.’ That just the way it was. And in that wild mass of hair, marsh-bells grew, just as if her dark hair was the soil. And that’s not all. The marsh-bells seem to glow.

  “I was a little thing. Eleven, or twelve. But I recognized that there was some link between that painting and my father’s work. Peony told me that her mother had painted it.

  “I remember running down to the living room, where the grownups were smoking and drinking, and telling Daddy that he had to come to Peony’s room. I might have even pulled on his jacket. Mama wasn’t too pleased. She thought I was acting up. But I didn’t care.

  “I don’t think I can do justice to the expression on Daddy’s face, when he saw the picture. All of the adults came up to look at the painting. Lorinda Prince told Mama that she’d started painting because Edna Wray encouraged her to after she saw Wray’s collection of dolls. I don’t think Mama liked the painting. I believe she called ‘imaginative.’ You know, instead of simply saying that it was good. But Daddy…

  “He was transfixed. He studied every inch of the painting, down to the paint stroke. He said to Lorinda, ‘You see her, too?’ Mama frowned. Mr. Prince and Peony looked confused. I forget what Mrs. Prince said, but I remembered the title of the painting. ‘Marsh-bell Queen.’

  “Daddy burned down the Whitby mansion a week or so later.

  “Years later, when Mama was gone to Glory, he told me why he had burned the place. ‘The magenta woman, or the Marsh-bell Queen, is made manifest by the act of creation. But once you make her manifest, she infests your brain, fills it with color, and the landscape where she lives. I had to sever that connection somehow.’”

  Linc

  Once upon a time there lived a boy named Lincoln who lived in a city of white marble mausoleums, and tropical summers. He left his house because he was odd and didn’t fit in with his perfect family. They were jewels, sparkling and clear, like diamonds. Lincoln was also a diamond but one with a flaw at his center. This flaw was a dot of color, one that marred his soul.

  ***

  Once upon a time there lived a girl named ____ who lived in a coastal town at the edge of a large marsh. She ran away from her perfect house because she was enslaved but that was not the only reason she ran. She was also odd and didn’t fit in with the other slaves. She saw and heard things the others couldn’t. Things like: the sound a color made. Or the taste of a shape.

  ***

  When people come into the museum, all of the artwork goes dormant. The muse stops appearing in her woven or painted or sewn vistas. She stops moving and the marsh is frozen. The visitors’ gaze is toxic to the muse, and Linc can’t help but feel anger at their vacant, lizard-brain stares. They view the work created in her honor as an oddity, a visual freak show. See the two-headed calf, marvel at the bearded lady, see the weird marsh-bell artists. To them, the work of Whitby, Grayson and the others are novel bits of folk art. Not really art per se, but elevated craft. They can’t see that the art is a portal to a heavenly dimension, a vision of paradise. To them, the museum is a zoo, and the art on the walls or on pedestals are listless animals. Linc can’t help but hate them, as they tramp in with their fanny packs and baseball hats, smelling of fast food and bad coffee. He winces as he hears their sneakered feet squeak on the floor, moving from image to image, gawking, slack-jawed. He knows that most of them think that the work is made by simple-minded Negroes, crude and amateurish and superstitious. They don’t think it’s Great Art. To them, the Whitby-Grayson Museum is a backwater gallery, a grotesque bit of Americana. They’ll roam the former fish-processing plant and then go back to their SUVs, forgetting everything they saw, relegating it to a footnote.

  Linc hates these types of visitors, but he tolerates them. The ones he can’t stand are the ones like Howard Lenski. The academics. The ones who view the muse as a symbol of some kind, an abstract idea. Not a living thing. The ones who want to pin her down after killing her with ether. They want to dissect her, flay her, and catalog her. He’s heard Lenski refer to Shimmer artists as “Art Brut” or “Modern Primitivism.” He’s overheard groups of visitors say the artwork was created “in the grip of a collective mania.” This makes his blood boil, and it’s all he can do not to snap at them. Of course, for the most part, neither group can see her, can sense her.

  But Xavier is different.

  ***

  The marsh grows on his motel wall. Not the marsh outside, but her marsh. Her: the muse. He doesn’t know her name. But that doesn’t matter. All that matters is her love, and his work.

  He started drawing, in permanent marker, on the space above his bed. It’s just the outline of things, in black ink that has a strong chemical smell. The Bayside Motel wallpaper was beige and fading. He knew that he’d probably be charged for defacing the property. But he didn’t care. Each stroke of the pen bought him in contact with the muse.

  ***

  Violet rage, fuchsia ecstasy.

  He’s been on the journey from one end of the spectrum to the other. From outcast to acolyte. From darkest purple to hottest pink. The muse shows him the pattern, and in showing it, reveals her own journey.

  ***

  She shows Linc the ship. The dark interior, like a belly, that devoured her father. He lay below her feet, in chains and shit and piss with the other men while the women and children stayed on the deck, under the watchful eyes of the pink men with their guns. She’s allowed to wander the deck, because she’s so small, but she never does. She stays next to her mother, who holds her and sings in a language that she’s forgotten. Once a day, the men are let up on the deck to stretch their legs. When she sees her father, she hardly recognizes him. His skin is ashy and he’s thin. His eyes see, but there is no spark of recognition. The men run around the deck, guided by the pink men, and then they go back beneath the deck, to that hollow, hungry place. She shares with Linc:

  The air heavy with the smell of salt, fish, algae, sweat, urine, rum, vinegar and unwashed bodies;

  The relentless endless expanse of the sea and its tones of blue, green, brown and grey;

  The illness that swarms around everyone on the ship, black and brown and pink, the hollow eyes, the curve of scurvy, the bloat of malnutrition, the patches of dry skin and cracked skin, bleeding lips and gums;

  The blistering sun that is sometimes red as blood or orange as madness or white as death; the violent storms that streak the sky with whips of lightning;

  The powdery taste of hard tack and the stink of salt pork, the blood and guts of the fish that her mother and other womenfolk have to clean;

  The sound of the waves as they smash against the hull; the slap as a body is thrown overboard to the waves; the shrill sounds of the pink men’s words.

  ***

  “
Hey, Howard,” Linc says into his phone. “I’m not feeling well today. A stomach thing.”

  “I think I can manage. Xavier is coming in. Maybe I can put him to work, ha ha,” Howard says. “Get better soon.”

  “Thanks,” says Linc.

  The outline of the mural is complete. It crawls across wall, pools of water and grassy islets. Cattails and sawgrass. And yes, many marsh-bells waiting to be filled in with color.

  A day passes before he realizes that he hasn’t eaten. His stomach croaks like a frog, it rumbles like thunder in the marsh. He puts down the pen and markers and the spray paint. She releases him, and fades away. And the world desaturates. Drains of color, of vibrance. His tall, thin lanky body demands food, and sleep. Linc remembers the aftermath of a methamphetamine bender. The crackle-creak of bones. The hazy, humid and waterlogged brain. The distant call of sleep. His body is wrecked. It is a wretched and useless thing, stringy and he can’t wait to slough it off, and return to the sacred place.

  ***

  “Are you all right, Mr. White?” Ms. Doshi’s voice comes from behind the bullet-proof glass. It takes a moment for her to come into focus, because after the comfortable twilight of his room, the lobby’s light is harsh and retina-burning. It’s a light that scours out his soul.

  She likes natural light.

  He blinks Ms. Doshi into focus. The sari she’s wearing is a light blue. The color of calm waters. The gentle blue is shot through with gold threads.