The Night Watch

by Sean Stewart

  Wire wasn’t sure if this was pure kindness or an oblique hint that her long day’s trek had left her smelly. Whatever the reason, hot water seemed an excellent idea. By the time she got out of the tub and wrapped up in a borrowed robe, Bell had tea waiting for her. Wire settled into the rocking chair beside the wood stove and put her hands around the hot mug with a sigh of pure bliss. Curls of steam drifted up from the tea, smelling of blackberries; weak competition at best for the wet wool aroma of her socks drying on the cast-iron stove top.

  Raining had painted beautiful ivy borders around the top and bottom of Wire’s cup. She had hand-painted most of the cups and plates in Cedar House, and there were plenty of other traces of her handiwork about. The teapot had been embellished with a cantankerous blue and whiskered catfish, the front door appeared to be swathed in brambles, and dozens and dozens of birds quarrelled, perched, and fluttered on the kitchen and living-room walls, painted just below the ceiling.

  Raining was wearing jade-green pants and a black sweatshirt with red calligraphy painted on it. Raining had once told Wire that a painter never dressed by accident, however casual she might look, and Wire wondered what this outfit was supposed to communicate. How relaxed she was, as if she didn’t know how deeply she had buried herself in the wood? Or maybe, a mother now and running from a broken marriage, she didn’t choose her clothes quite so carefully at twenty-eight as she had at eighteen.

  “You know, Wire, with your hair slicked down and that flowered robe, you look like one of those tall Pre-Raphaelite heroines by Morris, or Rackham,” Raining said. “A damp Lady of the Lake, standing in the drizzle with a rusting Excalibur and thinking, ‘Now where is that idiot Arthur?’”

  Wire laughed. Once, at Wire’s request, Raining had asked her mysterious Companion to Art to show a portrait of herself. Instantly its display screen had filled with a color plate from Birds of the North-Western Americas, 1881, written and illustrated by Tristam Flattery, F.R.S., and showing a black-crested bird with dark blue wings and body, kindled to sapphire by a shaft of morning sun. Under the plate ran a brief caption:

  Like all members of the Corvidae, Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri) is clever, craven, and frequently obnoxious. An indifferent mimic, but dedicated thief, its personality is more marked than pleasant. Cunning and occasionally bold, it is far more volatile than the calmer gray jay (Perisoreus canadensis), and seems clearly to exhibit pride, mirth, and even vengefulness. Its call is a raucous chak! chak!

  Wire had thought she was going to die laughing, and from that point on nursed a deep respect for the Companion.

  Truly Raining was a jay of a woman, all rags and feathers and elbows and eyes; beady black Chinese eyes that were always watching, watching, watching. Raining had the most inquisitive fingers Wire had ever seen, with the possible exception of her husband, Nick. They had been well-matched in that. But his hands were patient and relentless, where Raining’s were smarter and more nervous.

  Taking a sip of tea, Wire leaned forward to get a little closer to the stove. Her toes wiggled in front of its hot glass face.

  “Oo, yich,” Lark said. She had spotted a centipede rippling its way across the living-room floor and now squatted over it, watching intently. On her face she wore an expression of acute absorption so clearly one of her father’s that Wire glanced instantly at Raining, and saw the weeping ghost in her eyes before she could blink it away.

  “My little scientist,” Raining said.

  Wire sat, sipping her tea.

  “So. You came to lecture me.”

  “What?”

  “Your dress,” Raining said. “You always wear Sensible Blue when you want to Make Me See Reason.”

  “I do not!”

  “You are so obvious, Wire. Sometimes I swear I can hear your toenails growing. Let me save you some time,” Raining said. “The long-awaited squad of Southside soldiers has arrived at last, and there is to be a delegation sent to discuss their deployment. You are trying to get me to join it—not because you care about politics, but because you think I should patch things up with Nick.” She glanced over at Wire. “Am I more or less right?”

  “More or less. It’s not just my idea, though. There’s an invitation from the Mandarins.”

  “Thank you a thousand times for your trouble,” Raining said. “Alas, I must decline.”

  “Don’t get polite with me, Rain.”

  “I thought you’d find it a refreshing change.”

  Wire drank the last of her tea. “I think you’re scared. I think you don’t have the guts to act like a grown-up and stick it out.”

  “You have no idea, Wire.” Raining’s voice was low and very quiet; not like her at all. “You have no idea what happened on the Southside.”

  “I know you loved him enough to leave the Forest, once. That kind of love doesn’t just go away.”

  Bell poked her head in from the kitchen. “Bath time, Lark!”

  Lark, sulking, allowed herself to be led off for her bath, and Raining took out her easel. By the time Lark returned with clean teeth and frog-green pajamas, Raining had dragged out her tackle box full of paints and hung two bright candles overhead from hooks screwed into the living-room ceiling. At one point Raining’s great-grandfather had dragged a generator into the wood, but it was forever breaking down. The Forest didn’t care for things that were too overtly technological. The candles were a compromise, made from lengths of bright-burning fibrous butane, dipped in a beeswax medium for greater sylvan authenticity.

  Lark flopped onto the couch and lay on her tummy playing with the Companion. “Horses,” she murmured. Wire watched her study the paintings of horses that came up on the screen: Matisse, Daumier, something Greek, something Chinese with seven feisty-looking stallions.

  “These are pretty,” Wire said, looking over Lark’s shoulder at the next picture, a painting of three adult horses and two colts under an oak tree. An impossibly golden, cloud-quarrelled sky was spread above them.

  Raining glanced over. “George Stubbs,” she said briefly. “‘Mares and Foals in a Landscape.’” She studied the paints arranged in little jars before her, then slowly opened one that Wire had rarely seen her touch, the zinc white Nick had mixed for her in Southside. No emotion showed in Raining’s face, but Wire could see it in her fingers, tightening around the paint pot’s lid. An unlucky color, white. The color of death.

  “Stubbs’s perspectives are bad and his skies just pretty gauze, but his horses are excellent,” Raining said. “Look at the bones in their lower legs.” Quickly now she opened up the other jars and mixed her colors, scooping out chunks of paint and cutting them together with her palette knife. “That’s where his real passion lay. Those great haunches and hooves, so much more real than the ground they’re standing on!”

  “Cats,” Lark said pointedly. Obligingly the Companion made the Stubbs disappear, to be replaced by something Egyptian.

  Raining painted.

  “Landscape, now. There’s a very deep art in landscape,” Raining said. She worked quickly. First, two large color masses, hard cobalt-blue for the sky, dirty white for the snowy ground. Then a silvery object: trapezoidal front, upright rectangle, longer sideways rectangle. A truck, the shape suddenly obvious. Circles below for tires. It was always a miracle to Wire how Raining could bring a world into being under her hands. “What’s wrong with Stubbs is that his work is fake.”

  “You mean it’s not realistic?”

  “I mean it’s a lie.”

  Raining rummaged in a drawer and returned with a sheaf of sketches and photographs of the Southside. Landscapes in color and black-and-white, half-drawn portraits, architectural studies, pictures of trees and machines. With a small cry of triumph she found a photo of one of Nick’s many reclamation projects, an ’02 Chevy pickup scarred with rust. “Never paint without references,” she said. “Painting is about the particular. Not the lazy half-things we imagine, but real objects, real places. Real people. Truth.”

  Raining
let her hand wait, and then dart in again. A few quick vertical strokes, brown up close, blue in the distance—barren trees, brittle with cold. Behind them, the pale white light of an early spring sun. She cut a bit of sky-blue into her white ground paint with her palette knife, then added a drop of glistening linseed oil, thinning the color. She cleaned her brush in a pot of turpentine, dipped it in the new paint, and applied it to the canvas, laying down a long blue shadow to stretch out from the truck.

  Wire would never have believed in blue shadows before she went to Southside to help Raining prepare for her wedding. Now she remembered them, and the sparkle of ice-crystals in the freezing air, fired by the slanting sunlight, unbearably bright. The sting in your nose when you tried to breathe with your mouth closed. The squeak of dry snow underfoot.

  “If you look at the landscapes of Constable, for instance, you will see the utter opposite. He has such a profound respect for his subject. Such a single-minded determination to witness what is. But that doesn’t mean only realists are telling the truth. Look at Turner’s seascapes, or the trees of Ma Yuan. Those show both the substance and the spirit, as Ching Hao says.”

  Raining filled out the bitter landscape: the cold light, the sky hard blue overhead, milky at the edges. She cleaned her wide brushes. “Because in painting, truth is the only thing that matters.”

  With a finer brush now, her hand moved in again. Somehow, with a stroke or two of paint, a dab here and there, the landscape changed. The pale sun warmed. Using her precious 00 brush, Raining etched tiny strokes of silver and azure, and—Wire didn’t understand how this worked—yellow and orange to make the snowfield scintillate with a pale, luminous blue. Again and again, Raining’s hand went darting back to her palette, dipping the brush in almost haphazardly, careful not to blend her paints too much, so that every brush stroke held a different color. She painted powdery snow caught in the truck’s tire treads, and sunlight burning around bare branches.

  She spent the most time on the truck windows, making them glitter with white frost. Utterly opaque. The driver barely a shape, an unseen darkness behind. At the bottom of the front window, on the driver’s side, a tiny clear patch, the work of the defroster. Behind it, only the darkness of a suggested shape, and a single flesh tone: perhaps the half-glimpsed edge of a heavy hand.

  “What are you doing?” Wire asked.

  “I don’t know,” Raining said.

  On the couch Lark’s small black head, propped between her hands, slipped a little closer to the Companion as she stared blearily at a picture of ladies and gentlemen in late nineteenth-century dress, calmly taking tea with a tiger in their midst.

  Bell peeked into the room, asking if they wanted more tea. Raining glanced around. “Mom? What’s the most important thing in a husband?”

  “He has to laugh at your jokes,” Bell said.

  Raining nodded. “Yes. That’s what I thought too. Just checking.”

  Bell left. Raining painted, touching smaller and smaller color shapes onto the large masses she had started with. She painted the new damp in the air, the pine boughs heavy with snow. She put down her brush; picked it up; put it down quickly in the turpentine and started to clean up. “Don’t think too much,” she muttered.

  She looked at her daughter. Lark’s cheek now lay against the Companion. Her eyes were closed and her mouth was open in the unselfconscious sleep of a child. “I hate being a mother,” Raining said.

  “Rain!”

  “Nick and I used to say, ‘How do single parents cope?’ Just like that. So smug. Well, the answer is, they don’t. I don’t, anyway. Not most days. I sing songs with her and I tell her stories and we draw pictures together, and I love her more than breath. And the minute my energy flags, the smothering boredom comes down again and I wish to God I could be free of her.”

  “You are not a bad mother,” Wire said. “You love Lark. I know that.”

  “Yeah, well. I loved Nick too,” Raining said. “I’m twenty-eight years old, Wire. I’m not a girl anymore. This is not pretend. This is my life, my real life. It’s not the study, it’s the painting. And I made it all myself.”

  Raining knelt by the couch, bending over Lark, touching her cheek with a hand strangely hesitant, as if she were unworthy of her daughter. She said, “Do you know what they do with children on the Southside, Wire? They sacrifice them. They take each one out onto the High Level Bridge when it is old enough to walk and turn it loose. Most run back to their parents. Some start forward for a few steps and then turn back. And sometimes, in a very few cases, they keep walking. They toddle and slip and fall and pick themselves up again, and keep walking north, while their mothers and fathers watch. Until they cross over the Bridge to the North Side, where the spirits are. And they never come back.”

  Wire looked from Raining to Lark and back again, horrified.

  “Nick promised me he wouldn’t bring Lark to the Bridge, but he did. One autumn day he offered to take her for the afternoon so I could have time to paint. I jumped at the chance, I was so bored of being with her, so desperate to get away, to paint, to have time to myself. He took her to the Bridge while I was working.

  “When he told me what he had done, I had waking nightmares about it constantly. I’d be sitting in a chair with a cup of chicory, talking or sketching—and then suddenly I would see her, falling in the snow and laughing like she does, and scrambling up, and walking away across the Bridge forever.”

  Wire could not speak.

  “But you’re right,” Raining said. “I should go back.”

  “Go back!” Wire cried.

  Raining put down her brushes and collapsed into the big armchair, flicking a centipede off its right arm. “I haven’t painted worth a damn since coming home.”

  “You can’t go back to that son of a bitch to improve your painting, Rain! You can’t trust Lark with him!”

  “It’s not that my technique has decayed. It’s me,” Raining said. “If I didn’t love him anymore, that would be one thing. I could walk away from that like a finished canvas.”

  “I won’t let you go back,” Wire said. “If what you say is true, the Southsiders are barbarians. Cannibals! Nick most of all.”

  “Didn’t you come in on the other side of this argument?”

  “Don’t change the subject!”

  “—She said, changing the subject.” A characteristic Raining smile, thin and sharp. “Don’t feel too sorry for me. I squeezed two drops of blood out of Nick for every one of mine that hit the floor.”

  Wire winced. “That, I believe.” And then, “Are you really going to go back?”

  “There is no borscht worth eating in Chinatown,” Raining said. “Or perogies, no good perogies either. So you see, I really ought to go.”

  “And you love him.” Wire threw up her hands. “For once I get you to listen to me, and then I wish I hadn’t.”

  “You know,” Raining said, “if Nick and I do get together again, then everything was wasted. The tears and screams and fights, the guilt. The loneliness. Everything I put Lark and Nick through was for nothing. What do I say when I see him, Wire? ‘Hi honey—I’m home! Did you miss me?’ We don’t think so.”

  “Bark like a dog,” Wire said.

  “What?”

  “Whenever I’m really in trouble and I don’t know what to say, I bark like a dog. It throws people off.”

  Raining laughed. “I’ll have to remember that.” She walked over to the couch and picked up her daughter. Lark woke at once, fuddled, blinking around the living room with solemn eyes and wondering where her bedroom had gone. She squinted at the new painting. “What’s this?”

  Raining held her, and they stood for a moment together, two sleek black heads studying the painting of the snowy landscape; the hard blue sky; the truck, its windows blind with frost.

  “Your father,” Raining said.

  Much later that night, Raining sat at the workbench in her stone-flagged studio just down the corridor from the living room. Everyone e
lse had gone to sleep.

  She was drawing Nick’s face on the screen of the Companion, working by the light of two butane candles. It had been just over a year since she had left him, but she had not forgotten his face, oh no. She studied his head. Even before she had left him, baldness had started to creep up his forehead in two ovals, like a truck window defrosting. She admired the plates and bones of his skull. Their rough geometry. She pushed and pulled her tonal values, erasing out highlights and filling in tiny shadows all the way down to his hard eyebrow ridges, not beautiful but such a pleasure to model, their familiar masses alive under her stylus as if she were modelling his head out of clay.

  Not a bad likeness.

  “Say something. Hey? We’re not even fighting.”

  Nick’s mouthless face regarded her until she looked away and put down the Companion. Which is how he had always answered her ironies.

  Raining saved the drawing of Nick. She held the Companion in her lap. Once it had been little more than a machine, a computer device her father had bought in an art shop in Chinatown for her fourth birthday. The Forest had gotten into it, though; it was something different now, a place where her art and the Forest’s magic met and spoke. “Mirror, mirror, on my knee / Does he feel the same as me?”

  Its screen cleared, and then filled with Edvard Munch’s “Night by the Oslo Fjord.” The distant island, the empty moonlight. The tiny figure on the embankment.

  The wide dark water, green and black.

  Some time later Raining put down the Companion. She found her copper candle-snuffer, and gravely extinguished the candles, one, two. She stood and pushed the window above her workbench open a crack. A damp cold eddied into the room, smelling of mud, brush, wet cedar needles, cold dirt, cold water, decay. The Forest was full of the sounds of wind and running water and other things not human, which are the same as silence. She listened to it for a long time.