Painting the Light

by Sally Cabot Gunning

  A pause, steeped in regret. “Mose and I hadn’t spoken much of late.”

  Ida went to the desk and pulled out Ezra’s letter with its mention of the Maine job. It should have taken Barstow a few seconds to digest it, but he seemed unable to remove his eyes from the page. Then again, it was probably the last mention of a living brother that he would ever see.

  Ida took a good sip of whiskey and filled their glasses again. She’d felt the first glass as a looseness in her limbs; she felt the second as an expansion, a warming, an illumination inside her head. While she was up she went to the kitchen to check on the stew—it had taken on enough character to be presentable. “I don’t know what you’ve been doing for meals,” she called, “but if you’d like to share this—”

  “It smells wonderful. Thank you, yes.”

  “Bring the whiskey.”

  Barstow brought the whiskey. Ida set it on the kitchen table, laid out two bowls, the bread board, the crock of butter. She motioned to Barstow to sit but with a half bow he indicated that she should do so first; the gesture was one Mose had often used, but in Mose it had always read as jest. Mose. At the salvage company Henry Barstow had offered his sympathies—twice—but what had Ida said? Nothing. She set down her spoon. “I’m sorry I didn’t say it before. How sad I am about your brother.”

  Barstow looked up from his stew and nodded once, a short, businesslike nod, the kind her father and brothers would have used before moving the talk along, as if in danger of being pushed over a precipice.

  “I liked him,” Ida said. “And that means more than you might think, since I didn’t like my own husband much.” She could hear the whiskey in her voice. Her words. She attempted a laugh that came out like something torn. “I wonder how many widows say that.”

  “Perhaps not many, but I’d guess a few think it.”

  Ida said, “Did your wife ever get her portrait?”

  Barstow’s eyes widened. “You remember that? As it happens, she didn’t.” But there Barstow changed the subject, asking about the leased office in Boston, of which Ida knew little beyond its existence; about where to get some roof shingles, of which Ida knew a lot, having had to arrange for repair of the barn roof the previous winter; about what had happened to the Mayhew boy who fell overboard Monday, of which Ida knew nothing. He asked, and she told, of her old home on Beacon Hill in Boston, but her words felt cold, detached, the things that had once warmed the place now dead. She asked and discovered that he’d left the island years before to open a carriage shop in New Bedford, but something about that topic seemed to trouble him; again, the double lines between his brows; again, he found another topic. He waved at the empty walls. “I see nothing of your work.”

  “The sheep consume my time these days. Singly and in the aggregate.”

  Barstow smiled, and sure enough, Ida felt the corners of her mouth lift in answer. She took a breath, allowing her smile to widen. It felt so good, so comfortable. What was it in this man that made her feel that she could be herself? But in the next minute Ida was shocked to feel the first burn of tears since Ezra’s death. Why? Because she couldn’t remember when she’d last felt comfortable with Ezra. Because an old and searing loneliness had just blasted through her. Because she’d finally said the words out loud and to a near stranger: I didn’t like my own husband much.

  5

  Ida gave the ewe another drench. Others—Ezra surely, Lem probably—wouldn’t have bothered, but Ida found herself reluctant to give up. She wasn’t sentimental about the flock—she was already too much the farmer’s wife for that—but she’d had enough of death. The animal lay in the straw without struggle, not a good sign, and after Ida emptied the horn she walked out into the hay field to gaze out at the Sound and think. She’d gotten as far as acknowledging that Ezra had probably intentionally deceived her about the farm, when she spied movement along the track and heard a distant song. Oh, Shenandoah, I love your daughter, Way—aye, you rolling river . . . The song stopped just as Ida was able to recognize Henry Barstow’s long, effortless gait, but as he drew close she knew by looking at him. “The farm is Ruth’s,” she preempted.

  “The title was transferred to Ruth Pease on January the seventeenth 1896.”

  And when had Ezra pledged his troth? How odd that Ida couldn’t remember either the proposal itself or the date of it. It had been after the New Year and before the second of February, because Ezra had blown into the Boston town house declaring an ancient Candlemas tradition of betrothed couples always sharing a bed on that day. There had been a storm outside and a fire inside, and Ezra had entered so confident, so sure of his success, that Ida couldn’t summon enough energy to resist. Oh, she’d made a feeble attempt. If her parents had been alive, of course, he’d have been summarily ejected, but she was alone in the house with no one but the maid, and the maid had wandered off somewhere as soon as Ezra entered.

  “Hold, now,” he’d said to Ida when she stepped back, raised her hands to fend him off. “You can’t be thinking of turning me out into that?” He pointed at the window, where wind and rain assaulted the glass hard enough to make it rattle. He took off his coat. Ida remembered that—he took off his coat—and then she remembered nothing until she was standing in front of the fire in her corset and Ezra was lifting the corset cover over her head even as Ida was protesting that they weren’t yet wed and Ezra laughed and said If you think I’m waiting on that now and Ida distinctly recalled thinking that if they made a child before the wedding her parents would surely eject her from the house and where would she ever go and then she remembered that her parents were dead and by that time Ezra had unhooked her corset and was kissing her naked breast . . .

  As if reading her thoughts Henry Barstow said, “You weren’t Ezra’s wife at that date.”

  Ida flushed so violently Barstow peered at her in concern. “Are you all right, Mrs. Pease?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “I only mean to say if you’d been married on the seventeenth of January you’d have had to sign the deed too.”

  “I see. Yes. But it doesn’t matter. I’ve decided to go back to Boston as soon as I get packed.” Of course it wasn’t so much a decision as an acknowledgment of the facts. Without a home or an inclination or an attachment, with the hinges on her paint box about to rust shut, what on earth could keep her where she was?

  “How?” Barstow asked.

  “How?”

  “I mean to say, with what? Until the property issue is settled—”

  “Are you telling me I don’t even have enough money for the boat?”

  “The boat, yes, but then what? Looking at the records, it appears your Beacon Hill property was sold soon after your marriage. Where would you live? How would you pay for food and clothing?” He looked, it appeared, at her waist, where she’d cinched her skirt with an old, frayed, purple belt, the only one with enough holes to accommodate her shrinking waistline; since Ezra’s death she’d hardly bothered about food. Ida pulled her jacket closed over the gap.

  “I’ll do my best to settle the estate as soon as possible,” Henry continued, “but realistically—”

  Ida raised a hand to stop him. She turned around and set off for the house, Ruth’s house, where it appeared she was now trapped.

  Fool. To have married a man she knew so little. To have lived with him for over two years and learned even less. Ida climbed the stairs to the room she’d shared with him and opened the closet. At least she knew his clothes: the suit she’d once admired, the oiled jacket she’d once worn, the nightshirt with which she’d been intimate. She began to pull clothes off the shelf and toss them onto the floor. She might be trapped here but she wasn’t trapped forever; when she was able to leave she wanted to be ready, not to waste a night or a day or an hour attempting to sort through Ezra’s mess. She pulled her trunk from the closet and faced the rows of pegs, too many of them filled with Ezra’s things; she plucked up the vest she’d last seen him wear standing on the deck of the Cormorant waving
good-bye . . . to Chester Luce. Only now, gazing backward at that misty image, did she realize she’d never been centrally positioned in his focus.

  Focus. That’s what she should be doing, focusing on her life, not on Ezra’s death. She whirled and stormed across the hall to her studio, established with some mild objection from Ezra in the northeast corner chamber, but as a year and then two went by without children, he’d ceased to grumble over the wasted space. She pulled her paint box off the shelf, determined to reclaim something of the day, to recall something of who she was before her life became as peripheral to the dead Ezra as it had to the living one. A bowl of apples, a pair of brass candlesticks, and three worn-out old books piled irregularly one atop the other sat in the middle of the table; she’d sketched in the objects but recalled deciding to wait for stronger light before attempting to introduce paint and had never gone back. Now the late-day light burnished the candlesticks and highlighted the apples, picked up the gold letters on the spines of the books. She could do this now. She should do this now. She thought of the bowl of lilies her mother had placed on the card table in the foyer, and how pleased she’d been that Ida seemed to have captured their exact purpose, which was to stop visitors with the beauty of the lilies, then draw the eye from the golden bowl to the gold inlay on the table. But what was the purpose of this mishmash of objects sitting idly in the center of an old, scarred table, the apples already shriveled, wasted, sacrificed to Ida’s pretentions to paint? She returned her paint box to the shelf.

  When Ida checked on the ewe the next morning, it was dead. She called Lem to do the butchering—a chicken was one thing, a sheep was another—and by the time Lem arrived Ida was deep in preparation to paint the pie cupboard. She’d donned one of Ezra’s shirts, wrestled the cupboard onto an old sheet, scraped it free of its chips and flakes, and pried the cover off a tin of brick-red paint she’d found in the barn. Lem peered into the can with her.

  “Not exactly what I thought you’d be painting.”

  Ida made no answer. She dipped her brush and drew it over the vertical face of the cupboard; as the fumes reached her she crossed the room and opened the window. The sharp December air whipped into the kitchen, carrying with it the sound of wind and sea and sheep—not the high-pitched sound of fear or pain or panic, but the mid-range sound of normal sheep-to-sheep conversation. Yes, in her two years on the farm she’d learned something about how sheep talked.

  “Has Ruth ever spoken to you about the farm?” Ida asked Lem.

  “Now and then.”

  “And did you know it’s her farm? That she wants me out and you in to manage it?”

  “Not all of that.”

  Ida slapped her brush down, wiped her hands on Ezra’s shirt, and stepped up closer to Lem so he’d be sure to see the churning black in her pupils. “How much of it?”

  “I knew Ezra’d deeded the farm to Ruth in exchange for a loan. She wouldn’t lend the money otherwise. Figured he’d buy it back when he could.”

  “And you never saw fit to tell me this?”

  “Not my business, Ida.”

  “Even after Ezra drowned.”

  “Assumed you knew.” He paused. “My wife, I’d have told her.”

  Lem had been widowed for twenty years; once in Ida’s presence Ezra had teased him about marrying again, but Lem had cut him short. “If you can’t match what was, why go backward?” Yes, he would have told that shadowy, matchless woman the exact state of his affairs up front.

  Ida opened the turpentine jar and dropped the paintbrush in it. She put the top on the paint can and hammered it closed. Spots of brick red flew onto her shirt and onto the wall behind the cupboard. Lem picked up the rag, dipped it in the jar of turpentine, and wiped off the wall. He handed it back. “Put the rag on top of the can before you hammer it next time.” He headed for the door but paused. “If I knew you didn’t know—” He stopped.

  “What, Lem? What would you have done?”

  “I don’t know, Ida, and that’s the truth of it. I just don’t.”

  6

  Ida had long grown sick of mutton by the time Henry Barstow returned. She’d walked into town, heading for Bradley’s harness shop to get a halter repaired, but was diverted by a group gathered on the shoreline. A crisp breeze chilled her west-facing nose but the sun in the east warmed the back of her neck; Ida decided to linger. Numerous vessels still lay scattered along the shore but fewer than at first; even now a crew was at work digging out around a schooner, no doubt in hope of her lifting with the next good tide. Another group stood with their eyes fixed on the middle of the harbor where a salvage lighter sat parked. Ida picked out Chester Luce at the fringe of the group and walked up. She pointed to the lighter.

  “They’re refloating the Addie Todd,” Luce said. “They salvaged the cargo of lumber, and the divers are down there patching the hull now. They’ll start pumping her out soon.” He didn’t seem to have much more to say to Ida, and as no one else did either, she walked on to the harness shop and left the halter, too distracted to remember to ask when it might be done. She was thinking instead of the windfall that would have come to Ezra and Mose if they’d stayed put in Vineyard Haven. After they bought the Cormorant they’d shelled out three hundred and fifty dollars for pump, compressor, pipes, and a diving suit for Mose, but not three days later they’d raised a large coasting vessel and made back the whole sum plus a fifty-dollar profit. Soon after that they’d salvaged a cargo of tar and been paid 60 percent of its value. A bronze bell got them twenty-five dollars, an anchor and chain another hundred. In the slow times Mose had worked as diver-for-hire at five dollars a day and added that to the coffers, and those were just the sums Ida had heard about. How could all of that have been lost at cards? Ida considered the long evenings she’d spent alone. Easy enough.

  Ida headed home by the main road. As she passed the salvage office she could hear singing, muffled through door and walls but clearly Henry. She paused outside until she’d identified the tune:

  Well, I had an old hen and she had a wooden leg,

  Just the best old hen that ever laid an egg,

  She laid more eggs than any hen on the farm,

  But another little drink wouldn’t do her any harm . . .

  “Turkey in the Straw.” Ida smiled; she pushed open the door. Henry had managed to get the stove to stop smoking and had dried out what needed drying, returning it to the shelves, but the junk still sat in a pile although it looked to be a neater pile. Beyond the pile, a bicycle leaned against the wall.

  A bicycle?

  Henry followed Ida’s gaze. “It’s a beauty, isn’t it?”

  “I . . . yes.”

  “Do you ride?”

  “Yes . . . no . . . that is . . . I want—” She wanted to ride a bicycle. She was suddenly, desperately determined to learn to ride a bicycle. Once Ida had been on the dock when a group of women with bicycles had wheeled off the boat and spun down the road; they were dressed alike in flat straw hats, close-fitting jackets with leg-o-mutton-sleeves, skirts that fell just above the ankle, and gaiters. She’d gazed after them until they’d turned the corner, not one faltering or falling, and she could still summon the image of them sweeping away from her—upright, confident, smiling. Free.

  Ida pulled her eyes from the gleaming machine and whirled on Henry Barstow. “I want to learn to do it.”

  Barstow gave Ida a thoughtful look. He pulled the bicycle out from the wall and pointed out its features: leather seat, curved handlebars, and the latest innovation—coaster brakes. “You see?” He used his hand to roll the pedals forward—go—and backward—brake. He leaned the bicycle back again the wall, went to the stove and poured out a coffee that came thick and black from a pot, as if it had been sitting on the stove for days. He offered it to Ida. He began to talk, more than Ida had heard him talk yet—of his carriage shop in New Bedford, of how the automobile would soon put a crimp in his business, of how he’d begun to add bicycles to his inventory, of which bicycles were
best, of the various features of each. Some of it Ida bothered to follow and some of it she didn’t, but she liked the sound of his voice—that deep, male richness that she’d come to miss. Or perhaps it wasn’t the maleness that she liked—it wasn’t often of late that she’d enjoyed the sound of Ezra’s voice—but the calmness in it. It told Ida she could relax and be herself in its presence. But of course there was also the heat of the stove and the coffee burning seductively down her throat . . .

  Henry switched to talk of their mutual affairs. He still needed to inventory the warehouse but he’d received the valuation on the property itself; he began to sift through the papers on the desk looking for it, the golden hairs on the backs of his hands glinting in the light, but as Ida watched him deftly peel back sheet after sheet she remembered another encounter she’d once had with Henry Barstow.

  Ida and Ezra had walked into town for a rare dinner out at the Bayside and it had been a lovely evening, one of those times when Ezra had seemed like the Ezra of their courtship. He’d reached across the table to feed her an oyster, made a fuss of wiping her lips with his napkin, even rested his hand over hers, right out in the open, right on the tabletop. She remembered looking down at their joined hands on the starched white cloth and thinking that maybe it would be all right.

  And then. Tracking backward, Ida could now see that her marriage hadn’t gone wrong in one great avalanche—it had been more like the steady drip of snowmelt off a spring roof. That evening, that particular drip, had as its catalyst Tully Mayhew, just back from California and hailing Ezra through the restaurant window; with him were Mose and Henry Barstow. Ezra leaped up, ran into the street, slapped and laughed with Tully, and then returned to the table. “Tully Mayhew’s back!” he told Ida, as if this was news she’d been waiting on for weeks. “They’re headed for Duffy’s. You don’t mind, do you?”