by S. M. Hulse
I arrive at the Elk Fork park where the festival is to be held while it’s still early morning, my easel, canvas, paint box, and other supplies in a bag slung across the back of my chair. I tell the volunteer at the artists’ tent my name—my fake name—and wait to be called out as a fraud, but she simply hands over a map, a copy of the competition rules, and a name tag. I carefully pin the latter to my jacket. Maybe today will be a reprieve after all.
The park meanders along the banks of the Wounded Elk, and I choose a spot overlooking the river. There’s another artist farther down the bank, but his easel points east, toward the high mountains at the edge of the city limits, so our paintings won’t be too similar if they end up near each other at this evening’s show. I assemble my easel, glance at my watch—I have only two hours to complete my painting—and start making a quick compositional sketch. To my left, two willows arch gracefully over an eddy, their branches trailing in the water. To my right, the river tumbles over a series of rocks; a kayaker steers his craft through the passage, and I lock the image in my memory. Straight across the water, a paved pathway hugs the bank, studded with new streetlights meant to look old-fashioned. Past the path, a row of brick buildings line First Avenue, one with a zigzagging fire escape cascading down its rear wall, another with a faded ad for a defunct brand of cola still ghosting its bricks.
And beyond them, just visible in a gap between two buildings, stands the blackened facade of the courthouse.
I stop sketching. Stare. Footsteps approach, pause behind me. People here to observe the artists. I trace over a couple lines of my sketch until they’ve gone. I look across the river again. Suddenly the courthouse seems to dominate the view. It’s just a glimpse, really, a ragged-edged gray slash. No one will notice if I omit it. But I can hardly seem to see anything else. I could move, set up my easel somewhere else. Another glance at the watch. Fifteen minutes gone.
I sigh, settle a primed canvas onto the easel, fix it in place. Squeeze a rainbow of paints onto my palette. Choose a broad painting knife. I hold the knife over the palette, and hold it, and hold it. Takes me a moment to realize I’m stuck, because this has never happened before. I’ve never really had to decide what colors to blend and build; that’s always been something I’ve simply known intuitively. I never expected that this most familiar sort of painting could feel so awkward, so alien.
Shouldn’t be hard. How many times have I done this? Paint what people want to see. Make the colors more intense, amplify the beautiful, omit the ugly. Swirl brilliant blues together for the river, shape the willow branches from greens so vibrant they appear in life only for a fleeting day or two at the height of spring, play the sunlight off the brick buildings in an array of oranges and pinks. Paint something someone will happily write a handsome check for this evening so he can hang it over his fireplace.
A couple stops behind me. Still my palette knife loiters over colors that are already starting to thicken as they dry. So this will be how I humiliate myself: not by painting something inferior, but by painting nothing at all. I hear the couple walk away, their steps hesitant. To my right, the other artist has already blocked in the major shapes of the mountains and valley.
I drop the untouched palette beneath my easel, pull a couple paint jars from my bag. I only have the two, and they’re small. They’ll have to be enough. I choose my cheapest palette knife, use it to scoop up a hunk of the dark soil beside my chair. I tap most of the soil into the first jar, deposit the rest in the second. I shake out the tiny pebbles, the largest grains of sand, then pour some water into the jars from the container I brought—river water would be better, but I can’t get to it—and mix the muds until each is the consistency I want.
More people behind me. I replace the blank canvas on my easel with a piece of stretched watercolor paper, wet a brush, hesitate only a moment more—too late to change my mind—and start to outline the wide curve of the river. The line goes down lightly, and I chase it with others for the trees, the path on the far bank, the buildings (just broad blocks at this point, no decision yet about the courthouse). I choose a wider brush, start laying down washes. This Elk Fork mud is grayer than the Eden mud, with no hint of the dried-blood red tinge I’ve come to expect. Grittier, too, since I haven’t filtered it, with visible grains settling into the heavy tooth of the paper; I hope it will stay in place until I can cover the painting with a sealant. For all its differences from my home mud, it feels comfortable, and the painting forms easily beneath my brush, the way I expected it to under my knife.
There’s a small crowd around me now. I continue working, building the color as if I were using watercolor, light to dark. Twice I reach down for more soil, add it to the first jar to thicken the slurry. Whispers behind me. I try not to listen, hear only have you ever seen and monochrome and, over and over again, mud. I paint the water, its dips and rises, the weeping trees, the buildings, each a slightly different shade of brick. I paint the tops of the barefaced mountains, where their rounded peaks peer over the buildings. I paint the clouds, their shapes threatening but the light gilding their edges reassuring. In the lower right-hand corner I paint my name, stop myself drawing the F for Faber just in time: J. Grady. And then, last of all, with only minutes left in the competition, when I’ll have no time to change my mind or alter the painting, I paint the damaged sliver of the courthouse, its broken edge the darkest shadow in the piece.
* * *
I skip the afternoon artists’ gathering at a downtown pub, skip the panel discussion at the Elk Fork Library, too. After sealing and framing the painting and dropping it off at the gallery, I spend most of the afternoon at a small, dark bar in one of the brick buildings that just missed appearing in my composition. I nurse a single beer for a couple hours, then order another to make up for the time I wasted on the first. When that’s gone, I order a third, leave when I start to think I might drink it.
The gallery hosting the evening show is in the heart of downtown. It’s a straight shot past the courthouse, but I go the long way, along the river path. The hospital is just a few blocks away, and Samuel walked this path every day when he took his infrequent breaks from my bedside after I was shot. Can’t stop myself wondering if he walked it before the bombing, too.
What were his thoughts that morning? Whatever words I ascribe to them seem wrong, like a monologue written for someone other than my brother. I can imagine the actions I’ve been told about—parking the truck, carefully moving the suitcase housing his bomb—but I see those things from the outside, as an observer only. It’s an impossible failure of putting myself in his shoes. I want it to be reassuring, this inability to imagine what was going through his head, proof that I could not have known, could not have prevented what he did. But instead it makes me feel that I didn’t know him as well as I thought. That the closeness I’ve always felt to him was in some way a lie.
I time my arrival at the gallery well; it’s reasonably full, but everyone is still milling around the hors d’oeuvres. I turn down a glass of wine and slowly tour the perimeter of the room. The gallery is a classy one, all polished wood floors and track lighting, the sort of place I usually feel intimidated to enter, and I can’t help but feel a small thrill to see my own work on its cool gray walls. My painting is in the middle of the far wall, opposite the entrance; its monochromatic color scheme makes it easy to spot amid the pastels and watercolors. A couple stands in front of it, the man gesturing at the river with the hand that holds his empty wine glass.
“Josephine?”
A sudden memory of Devin blocking my path the day of the bombing, addressing me with the name no one who knows me uses. I put on a smile, turn to face the woman asking. She looks to be in her fifties, dressed with an effortless elegance I envy, just a little too much makeup on her face. I search her eyes for any indication I’ve been found out, that she’s about to say Josephine Faber, but her expression remains pleasant. “I’m Frances Bailey, owner of Highcrest Gallery in Whitefish. Call me sometime; I’d like
to discuss your work.” She hands me a business card and disappears into the crowd before I have a chance to respond.
“Is that yours?”
I look up to find Asa standing beside me. He gestures toward my painting. This is so far from the context in which I expect to see him that for a moment it’s almost like I don’t recognize him. I manage a nod.
“Watercolor?”
“No.” I tuck the gallery owner’s business card into my bag. “It’s mud, actually.”
“Mud?” The couple studying my painting moves on to the next, and Asa starts toward it. I follow reluctantly. He stops in front of my painting, clasps his hands behind his back and leans forward from the waist, as though he’s at a museum and expects a guard to appear at any moment to ask him to please step back, sir. “Mud,” he repeats. “How about that.”
“I meant to use acrylics like I usually do,” I explain, “but I’ve been experimenting with earth as a medium lately, and at the last minute I decided to try it today.” It sounds so simple put like that, a casual decision. But it feels momentous, like something I can’t go back from.
“It’s incredible.”
“It’s not so different from watercolor. I can use washes and layers the same as I would with traditional paint.” This should be an easy conversation. Something safe and impersonal, something I know enough about to fight off awkward silences with explanations and descriptions. But the longer I look at my painting—no, the longer I look at Asa looking at my painting—the more I realize it is, in some ways, an inversion of the chiaroscuro paintings I’m so fascinated by. Instead of a vast darkness illuminated by a single flame-point of light, I’ve painted a broadly lit scene in which everything points toward that darkly damaged edge of the courthouse, a black hole at the center of my painting. I came to the festival intending to paint a canvas very like those I’ve spent most of my life creating: bright, textured, warm. Sanitized. Instead I’ve done something very different—felt compelled to do something very different—and I’m still not sure why, or whether I am pleased to have done so.
Asa keeps his eyes on my painting, and I try to figure out what he’s looking at. Is it something as simple as the brushwork, the undissolved grit visible in the washes, the shape of the trees and the water and the brick? Or is it that darkest of buildings, those few brushstrokes, those last layers of mud I did not want to paint but felt I must?
“There are a couple interesting pastels over here,” I offer, rolling backward a few inches. Asa doesn’t move. Has he seen the card beside the frame, the one that gives my name as something other than what he knows it to be? “I didn’t know you would be here.”
It isn’t quite what I meant to say. I didn’t know you planned to attend the festival would have been closer, or maybe, I didn’t realize you liked art. But Asa steps back from my painting, finally, looks at me again. “I didn’t, either.” The words seem burdensome, somehow, his tone flattened beneath their weight. “I didn’t mean to—I just happened upon the show and came in. I didn’t plan it.” He tugs on the hem of his T-shirt, distorting the clean-water charity logo on the front, then lets it go, squares his shoulders. “I’m going to the hospital soon. Catherine’s parents come to spend time with Em every evening, and when they arrive, the nurses tell me to go home. Get some rest, they say. I never do. Before Garrett and Ruby were discharged, I’d visit them. Now I sometimes take my laptop to a coffee shop and try to work on my sermon or answer email. Mostly I just wait to go back.”
“I should have realized—”
“I’m always early,” he says. “Every day. I’m supposed to switch off with Catherine’s parents at eight, that’s what we agreed, but every day I end up down here at least an hour before. I wish I could just go to the hospital now, but if I show up early Em’s grandparents will leave and that’s not fair to her or them, but somehow I still can’t help myself coming early so I’ll at least be nearby. I came in here because I saw the balloons and the sign and all the people, and because if I’m in here I’m not walking around outside. If I walk around I’ll end up back at the church.”
The boarded-up windows. The chain-link fence. The blackened courthouse.
And here I’ve painted it into my damn picture.
He’s looking at it again, over my shoulder. “God created man from dust from the ground,” he says. “Some would say that’s where the artistic impulse comes from. He created us in His image, and we, in turn, are ourselves driven to create. How interesting that you have also chosen earth as your medium.”
Asa doesn’t voice it, but some people, I know, would say that children, not art, are the clearest expression of that creative drive. As for my paints, well, maybe Asa sees some divine significance in them, but as far as I’m concerned it’s semantics. Yes, I sometimes paint with mud. But even parts of my store-bought acrylics come from the ground, from metals and minerals that have been mined: cadmium, chromium, cobalt and the rest. My newer paintings aren’t greater, or truer, or more authentic acts of creation, just because I’ve started to use a rawer form of what the earth offers.
But I find Asa’s words encouraging. Maybe it’s just his tone. Maybe it’s the fact that a preacher speaks a certain way, imbues his words with an authority even heathen ears like mine recognize. But maybe there’s something in it. Not the God stuff. But maybe it’s true I’ve found a medium that feels like mine. A medium that feels like I was made to use it.
A faint smile crosses Asa’s face. “Look,” he says softly. “You won.”
I turn, see one of the judges pinning a yellow ribbon to the frame of my painting. “Third place,” I correct.
“Still,” he says. “Congratulations.”
One of the pastels takes second, and a painting of sunlight on the river that I admired earlier wins first. Asa and I watch as the judge walks around the gallery and affixes the ribbons, applaud with the others when he is done. The auction will start soon.
“I should go.” Asa looks gaunter than just a few days ago, more exhausted. “I’m glad I got to see your painting. You’re very gifted.”
“It was good to see you,” I say, and think I might mean it. I should say more, something about Emily, but another artist taps my shoulder to congratulate me, and when I turn back Asa is gone. I glance at my watch: 7:04.
Still almost an hour for him to wander the streets.
* * *
I’ve started to think about what will come next. I’ve tried not to. But the hours are long up here, Jo, longer than I remember them being when I was younger. Writing these messages to you on this map has become the centerpiece of my day, and I make myself wait until almost sundown, both so I have something to look forward to and so I can’t use up too much map before I lose the light. My handwriting is getting better all the time, because I linger over these moments, these words.
I stay close to the cabin. It’s too risky to venture farther away; I was foolish to chance it before. So now I stay close, and I let the hours pass. Nothing to read; I told you that. I tried whittling, which confirmed you got all the artistic skill in the family. I watch the birds, all day sometimes—a red-winged blackbird came almost to my hand a couple days ago, but I haven’t seen him again. I don’t cook now that the deer meat’s gone; I’m down to some trail mix, a bit of beef jerky, and some canned beans I can’t hardly stand to look at anymore. Not much you can do with any of that to fancy it up. I’m on the last hole of my belt; when that’s too loose, I’ll try for squirrel. Thought I was done eating squirrel.
It looks like plenty written out that way, but really it hardly takes up any time at all. I don’t mind looking at the trees and the mountains and listening to the birds and all that, but it lets in too much time for thinking, and if you think long enough about anything you’ll start to doubt.
I’m not stupid, Jo. I knew it could go to shit. I didn’t think it would, but I knew it could. So I thought about it just enough to bring a few things up here to the cabin a couple days before, but that’s it. That and t
he hay in the feed room; I guess you’ll have seen that by now. Not like me. Usually I’ve got every little thing planned out, every little worry accounted for, so I’ve been trying to understand why I dropped the ball on this one.
If you were reading this, you’d already have figured it out, wouldn’t you, Jo? It’s because I couldn’t stand to think about not seeing you again. What I ought to do is leave. Get out of these mountains, maybe out of Montana. Lay low, stay off the grid. I know how to do that. But it would mean leaving you behind on your own, and I really do know you’d be okay—some things would be hard, but you’d be okay—but I can’t seem to do it. I’d always wonder how you were. What you were doing. If you ever forgave me.
And even though I have to stay up here in this damned cabin, even though I can’t come back to the house and ask you all those things, even though in just sixteen days—or is it fifteen? I might’ve lost track of one day—you’ll have to abandon the house and go somewhere else, it still seems better than leaving.
Because if I stay here, Jo, I know you could find me. If you wanted to, you could find me.
* * *
“How come you never left Prospect?”
I shrug, meet Hawkins’s eyes. “Where would I have gone?”
We’re back at the Knock-Off, Tuesday night, two-dollar well drinks, the place packed for a change. Hawkins has shoved his ketchup-stained plate to the side of the table and leans over his crossed arms so we can hear each other. “I don’t know. I was surprised you didn’t go to college, at least. You graduated salutatorian.”