by William Gay
Then one year he’d painted a picture so perfect he felt he could not have done it. Perhaps he’d dozed and elves had completed it while he slept. It was a picture of a hay cart loaded with straw in the hall of a barn. A pitchfork, rude farm implements, leaned against it. But what was perfect was the light. He had caught the quality of indirect light perfectly, soft diffuse dust-moted light that fell through a high gable window, the harsher sunlight falling on the earth past the hall of the barn, each blade of straw on the cart imbued with soft gold light.
He was drunk on the power to re-create light on canvas. He painted one picture after another in an orgy of creativity. Bucolic pictures that existed nowhere save in the geography of his imagination. He painted firelight flickering warmly on the walls of a room, soft yellow lamplight falling through a window, lantern-light from a sleigh on reefs of drifted snow, moonlight on snowy mountains, the light from bonfires on the faces of homecoming game revelers. They were pictures of a time that was irrevocably gone and perhaps had never truly been.
After he had put up a small show in Huntsville a newspaper called him the light painter and the appellation had stuck. Soon the light painter was in great demand. The more sophisticates sneered at his paintings’ sentimentality the more folks embraced them. The paint would scarcely be dry on a canvas before someone was pressing money upon him. Then a lithograph company signed him to a contract. They made prints of his paintings and advertised them in magazines and sold them for more money than the light painter himself had been able to get for the original canvases.
Tidewater began to think of The Lightpainter as a sort of alter ego and he sometimes referred to himself in the third person in a self-deprecating way as The Lightpainter. He thought this was mildly funny, though no one else did.
I’m The Lightpainter, he had told Lisa and Jenny when they were small. He had taken them to the creek, they were in scarcely to their knees and afraid to wade deeper.
I’m watching you, Tidewater told them, I’m always watching you. If anything goes wrong I’ll zip into a phone booth and leap out of my clothes and Fm in my Lightpainter superhero uniform, cape and all.
We’d drown before you found a phone booth on this old creek, Lisa giggled.
Let’s see, Jenny shrieked. Take off your clothes and let’s see your uniform.
Well, Tidewater said, out of his depth here and in truth not very good at games. My costume is in disguise too. It has a secret identity and the truth is it looks a lot like ordinary clothing.
♦ ♦ ♦
ALONG ABOUT THEIR fifteenth year Lisa began to acquire a new circle of friends. They came and went in the light painter’s house, bright as summer flowers, gliding effortlessly on peals of laughter. They seemed more sophisticated than Jenny, they discussed books she had not read, the colleges they were going to, boys Jenny seemed to know by name only. Jenny grew a little bright, a little desperate. She talked too much and said awkward things.
More and more she sought out the light painter. She’d sit hour-long and watch him work. He seemed to be her last refuge, as though he could make her fit, make her part of the gaudy crowd coming and going in shiny cars.
Finally Tidewater mentioned it to Claire.
I can’t see how you think it’s Lisa’s problem, she said. She has her own life to live. It was always you Jenny wanted anyway. And when she’s away from here she has her own set of friends, who I don’t want Lisa involved with.
When he brought the subject up with Lisa she snapped at him. You need to open your eyes, she told him. You never know what’s going on right under your nose. She’s changed. She’s gross, she lets these awful boys do things to her. She does things to boys.
In Tidewater’s view of the ways of the world he suspected that most girls let boys do things to them and perhaps some of them even did things back. He guessed what was at issue here was a question of decorum.
Yet he didn’t say this or anything else in his own defense because he was appalled at himself: in a moment of clairvoyance he suddenly saw that he knew Jenny better than he would ever know this smooth, confident young woman, as if Jenny had vouchsafed him a glimpse into the disordered interior of her very soul, a lowering of barriers that all the rest of the world had denied him. Blood or no blood he had to admit that he was not a very big part of Lisa’s life anymore, perhaps no more a part than Jenny herself. It was nothing he could rationalize away, nothing he could make right. It just was.
JENNY WAS IN her sixteenth year when the decision to blackball her was made. Like most of the decisions that mattered in Tidewater’s life this one had been made by a committee of Claire and Lisa and passed down to him.
He couldn’t argue that things hadn’t changed. Jenny’s life had the appearance of unraveling. They saw her less now, sometimes it seemed to Tidewater that she came only when she had nowhere else to go. She stayed away longer and longer, like something you have tried to tame reverting to wildness. Lisa brought home rumor after rumor about her. She was suspended from school, she was pregnant, she was on drugs. Lisa watched Tidewater as she told these stories at the dinner table, like a cat laying dead mice at the feet of its master.
Tidewater and Claire were lying in darkness save for the fluorescent face of the clock.
I don’t think you can just throw people over the side, Tidewater said to the ceiling. She grew up with us, this is home to her.
That’s just the point, Claire said. She is grown up. And she’s thrown us over the side as much as we have her. She has other interests, and they’re interests I don’t want Lisa taking up.
If you mean sex then maybe you ought to talk to her.
Talk to her? Maybe she ought to be talking to me. I expect I could learn from her.
I wonder if her mother talked to her.
For God’s sake. Don’t put me in this position, Charles. Make me a total bitch while you stand aside and let what happens happen. The way you do. And anyway sex is not what I meant. It’s part of it but by no means all. I mean drugs and alcohol and the whole nine yards. What if she and Lisa are out together with a bunch of drunks and drive head-on into another car? What if it came down to her or Lisa? If you were forced into a choice what would you say?
God, Tidewater said, lying still in the darkness, wishing every question had one answer and one answer only, and that he knew them all. Wishing everything was black and white instead of incremental variations of gray.
Besides, she’s not even Lisa’s friend anymore, no matter how hard you try to pretend they’re still ten years old. For the last several years she’s been your friend, not Lisa’s. You’re the only one she cares about.
That’s crazy.
And you’ve always had a soft spot in your heart for her, Claire said, then added: Or a hard one someplace else, which is what I always wondered about.
He lay in silence a long time before he answered. Finally he said, That was a sorry thing to say, Claire.
You’re right. It was a sorry thing to say. I guess I meant it to be funny. Hard, soft. It was just something to say.
It wasn’t funny, Tidewater said.
No. It wasn’t.
Tidewater’s position was made more ambiguous by his secret, and he lay there in the dark thinking about it. His mind worrying it the way a tongue worries a sensitive tooth.
A while ago he had fallen asleep watching a football game and sometime in the night Jenny shook him awake.
You fell asleep on the couch.
I guess I did.
They’re asleep, everybody’s asleep.
What time is it?
Two o’clock in the morning.
I guess I ought to go to bed then.
Charles?
What, Jenny?
I like it here, Charles. I don’t want to have to leave.
Hey, kid, nobody’s going anywhere.
Okay. Can I kiss you goodnight?
Sure, he said thinking—surely thinking, this was import—she meant a peck on the cheek. When he offered hi
s cheek she laid a palm alongside his jaw and turned his face and covered his mouth with hers. Her robe fell open and he could still see her body all white light and ebony shadows. Her naked breast touched him like a jolt of electricity and her sharp little tongue was alive in his mouth.
When he shoved her away she almost lost her balance and they struggled for an insane moment, him expecting any second Claire or Lisa to materialize in the doorway the way it would happen in a movie and he knew it looked exactly as if he were trying to wrestle a sixteen-year-old girl onto the couch.
She released him and took one graceful step back and calmly adjusted her robe. Goodnight, Charles, she said, her one-cornered smile opaque and enigmatic as always, the smile that said: You think you know what this means, but you’re badly mistaken.
If you feel this strongly about it we can wait a few days and see what happens, Claire said. Maybe she’ll move in with somebody or something.
I suppose we’ll have to do something sooner or later, he said. Do whatever you think best.
♦ ♦ ♦
EVERYTHING WAS ON A PATH that seemed imbued with inevitability, events ran forward like ball bearings on a grooved incline.
A boy let her out in Tidewater’s yard. They were arguing. The boy got out and slammed the door. They struggled for possession of her purse. Tidewater watched from the porch. The boy slapped her. The straight fall of her hair swung with the force of the blow. He seemed not to know that Tidewater was The Lightpainter, not to care that he was creating a disturbance in The Lightpainter’s yard.
Keep your hands to yourself, Tidewater said, coming down the doorstep.
How about trying that with your mouth, the boy said. He looked far older than Jenny, not even a boy, perhaps a man in his twenties. Tidewater saw that he was drunk. That The Lightpainter might have bitten off more than Tidewater could comfortably chew.
I don’t want trouble with you, Tidewater said. But I want you away from my house.
Or what?
Tidewater hadn’t thought that far ahead. Or I’ll call the law.
Call the son of a bitches then. But that little thief of a slut’s got my property and she’s going with me.
When Tidewater grabbed him the man’s feet slid apart in the gravel. His dishwater blond hair fell lankly across his face. Tidewater was trying to turn him. There was a rank feral smell about the man, a smell of sweat and whiskey and slow ruin. Tidewater wrestled him about into a hammerlock and walked him backward to the open car door and half threw him onto the seat. An audience had aligned itself on the porch. The man came up off the seat with a longneck beer bottle out of the floorboard and slammed Tidewater in the face with it. Tidewater went backward with his hands over his face. The motor cranked, tires slewed sidewise in the pea gravel.
He went up the steps wiping blood out of his eyes. I don’t need any of this, he said.
Jenny was hanging on to his arm, trying to touch his face.
Why do I feel I should have been charged admission to see this? Claire asked.
Running water onto a towel The Lightpainter glanced upward at his broken reflection. Blood was seeping out of his hair and into his beard. He looked like a lost and dissolute Jesus, a wild-eyed Jesus illy used and set upon by thugs with longneck beer bottles.
WHEN HE CAME OUT of a place called the Painter s Corner with two sable brushes and a tube of alizarin crimson Jenny was sitting in the passenger side of the van, staring off toward a Dumpster on the parking lot where winter birds foraged for crumbs. He got in and stowed the brushes and paint in the glove box.
I’m glad to see you, he said, and was, feeling obscurely that something had been missing, that his family was complete.
I’m glad to see you too. How is everybody?
Well, we’ll ride out and see. Is that what you had in mind, a ride out to the house?
I don’t think so, she said. My life is complicated enough with how Claire feels and all. What I need is a favor, and you’re the only one I know to ask.
I’ll do anything I can, Tidewater said, taking care that the wariness he felt did not creep into his voice: he guessed a favor for Jenny might entail anything from a ride somewhere to bailing a boyfriend out of jail though he expected it was money.
Where are you staying?
She seemed not to be taking care of herself. She had on a sleeveless T-shirt though the day was chill. There was an air of ruin about her, sweet corruption. There were dark smudges under her eyes and her long brown hair was lank and none too clean. There was a suck mark on her throat like a crescent-shaped birthmark, when she raised a tendril of hair out of her eyes he saw the dark stubble of her armpit and he could smell her, feral and dissolute.
I need forty dollars. I borrowed it off this woman and I’ve got to pay it back.
It has to be paid back right now?
Well, it’s a check I wrote. Postdated. If I don’t pick it up she’ll turn it in to the cops and they’ll get me for a bad check.
Tidewater took out his wallet and gave her two twenties. There was a folded fifty in a side compartment he always thought of as his emergency fund and he withdrew it and laid it on top of the twenties in her palm.
Get a coat. Warm shirts or something. It’s turning wintertime. You never did tell me where you were living.
I’m living with this friend of mine in the housing project. I hardly ever stay at home anymore, I can’t take the fighting. Her boyfriends hitting on me.
Tidewater didn’t know what to say. He felt like counting out more money, as if it was all he had, a down payment on a life someone was going to repossess anyway.
I’m thinking about leaving. Just heading out down the Trace and going all the way to the gulf. Natchez. Is it warm down there?
I don’t know: I was never there in the winter. I’d guess warmer than here.
That’s where the pirates used to be, Natchez Under-the-Hill. I’d fit right in.
Now the pirates run fancy restaurants and gift boutiques and get their booty off the tourists, Tidewater said.
I’d still fit right in. Bye, Charles, I got to go. Thanks for the money.
She opened the door and got out, clasped her arms and shivered. Gooseflesh crept up the flesh of her upper arms. A Wind blew papers across the parking lot like dirty snow.
Get a coat, he said.
I will.
Jenny, he said without knowing he was going to.
What?
Let me help you, he said. You come on back and live with us and we’ll work everything out. It’ll be hard, but we can do it. If we have to we’ll see a counselor. Somebody.
She looked intently into his eyes. Her eyes were pale violet with darker flecks and there were tiny lines in the grainy skin at the corners of them.
I don’t need anything like that, Charles. Don’t believe everything Claire and Lisa tell you.
Take care, he said. She walked away then turned and raised a hand and waved with just the fingers. Tidewater watched her go wondering where she was off to, half glad he didn’t know. He had striven for the simplicity in his life, the linearity. Jenny’s life was not linear. It was made up of switchbacks and side roads and mazelike dead ends and to him it seemed chaotic, each day some new crisis, each night some new pleasure. He watched her walk out of his life with a sense of loss and shame for the faint relief he felt.
ALL DAY A CURIOUS band of light lay in the southwest. Weather crawls across the television screen told of winter storm warnings, an early ice storm already rampant to the south in Alabama. Tidewater stood in the backyard watching the heavens. Small nameless birds fluttered in the branches. Dry leaves drifted and tilted on a rising wind that already had winter’s edge on it. Above the light the sky took on the color of wet slate. The light swirled toward him like a silver mist rising off some country already locked in the seize of ice.
He drove into town and bought bread and milk and candles. At the hardware a butane camp stove. The supermarkets were full of people pushing overflowing baskets
toward the checkout lines as if the countryside lay under siege.
By dusk a cold gray drizzle was falling. Sometime in the night he awoke and went outside. It had turned very cold. The rain was freezing on everything it touched and the brick walk gleamed dully and the trees glittered like they were fashioned from glass.
He woke again when the power went off and the house ground down to silence. All the myriad mechanical sounds of the nighttime house vanished and all he could hear was Claire’s measured breathing and the soft hiss of ice against the window.
When they arose in the morning the world had been transformed. Tidewater’s breath caught in his throat as a child’s might. Every leaf, every twig, every blade of grass was caught in its own caul of ice like a purer finer symbol of itself.
The day drew on cold and strange and silent. Everybody seemed to be waiting for something. There was no television, no stereo, no lights. Tidewater had a show coming up in Memphis in less than a week and he sorted through paintings and wrapped them carefully in furniture pads and stacked them in the van. But after a while the cold deepened and the house grew more chill yet and he brought wood from the garage and built an enormous fire in the fireplace and sat before it reading a book.
Everyone had assumed the phone was out of order as well and when it rang in midmorning Tidewater jumped as if it had broken some physical law.
What? Lisa said, and something in her voice made Tidewater pause in midstep and turn, the coffee cup halfway to his mouth and forgotten.
He could not quite fathom the look on Lisa’s face. It said: I know something you don’t know, and I can’t wait to tell you.
Jenny’s dead, Lisa said.
Dead? Claire said. She can’t be dead. Dead how?
Lisa’s face twisted, grotesquely torn between laughing and crying. She lowered the phone. The hand holding it jerked spasmodically. The phone began to shake uncontrollably and Tidewater crossed the room and took it gently from Lisa’s hand. When he held it to his ear there was only a dial tone and he recradled it. She froze to death, Lisa said.