Brighten the Corner Where You Are Read online

  Never mind the dark, he didn’t wait for me to catch up.

  More pickles, more money, more whatnot. Much as Ev didn’t care about other people’s stuff, there wasn’t a person on the planet had less than us, he sometimes fixed on thinking. Like Matilda and her murder living off what nature afforded, Ev and me lived off of the kindness of people like my secretary, and before her, Olive Hayden and her husband. He just wanted a bit more for himself, like people owed him.

  I admit, now and then his habit of want left me wanting.

  “Just let it go,” I called, only half under my breath. “What good is a pile of cash to any one of us, when the time comes.” When the reaper comes, I meant, what comes for all and sundry one day, rich or poor, a nicely feathered nest or not. Poor you, I thought half aloud, thinking anyone owes you the sun or the moon. Like hell they do, I wanted to say, unless once you’re out of everyone’s sight, even the birds’, each person gets his or her comeuppance.

  Though I wouldn’t hold my breath on that account. Back then I hardly knew what I was talking about. As far as comeuppances go, I’m still waiting for one, fingers crossed. It could be like waiting for a big hammer to drop, but so far, up here in this otherworld, there’s no sign of one. As for being out of sight, give it time and we all slip from sight, some faster than others, after we’re planted. Not to be morbid. And given what happened to Ev later, I’m just as glad I never mentioned the reaper that night. Not to be superstitious. But sometimes giving voice to such notions can be an invitation, opening the door to things best kept shut out.

  2.

  Let the Lower Lights Be Burning

  Before I took it into my head or had reason to keep an eye on any man, I would watch Mama at the piano. Her fingers danced up and down the keyboard accompanying herself like Mary Pickford in Sparrows as she trilled “Shall We Gather At The River.” She was so happy when she played, the house could’ve burnt down around her before she would notice something amiss while singing to me. The words “the beauteeful, the beauteeful rivvver” took me right back to when I was a little girl, before I knew about the curse and fellas and spooning and all that.

  I remember a beautiful blue-green bird came to visit our house in Yarmouth. He was no parrot, he wasn’t all the colours of the rainbow. But in my imagination the glister of his feathers showed flashes of pink, violet, and gold. Before he flew away forever, I used to dream of finding a gilded cage for him, the way I would dream sometimes of raising my head high, having it turn like an owl’s. In my dreams, the beautiful bird talked more than Matilda ever would or could. He would sit in his cage atop the piano and sing the sweetest song while Mama played and I turned the page for her each time she called out “Turn!” But when she missed a note and said “Darn,” he would repeat, “Darn darn darn.” In real life, I would peer into his tiny black eye, get swallowed up by it. In a dream he tweeted my name, “Maud Maud Maud,” but then chattered, “Cripple cripple cripple” till I opened the door to his cage and watched him fly away. No bird or human needed to speak these words for them to echo in my head.

  When I turned fourteen and quit going to school, I could have used that bird to keep me company. But by then he had flown from our yard never to be seen again. You could say Mama and me grew even closer, sad to have him gone, missing the joy he provided.

  Back in those golden days, though, I used to love going on our family picnics. Father would borrow a horse and buggy from Phillips Moving for the day and off we would go, all four of us, through the countryside down Arcadia way. On the grassy bank of the Chebogue River, Mama would spread an old quilt for a blanket and we would sit and feast on egg sandwiches, jellied chicken, biscuits, and cake.

  My brother, Charlie, would throw rocks into the gently swirling current. In between snoozes, Father would tell us stories. Holding me on her lap, Mama would comb snarls from my hair with her fingers. Her hands smelled of the rosewater and glycerin she rubbed on them after working in the garden. Our picnic spot looked out over the village, Arcadia’s houses and stores backing onto the river where fishing boats with bright red, green, and blue hulls bobbed on the incoming tide. At low tide you could see the stilts and staging the wharfs and houses were built out on. High tide covered them up, the river acting like a dress—a dress, say, that could hide the leg braces cripples wore. The leg braces the doctor had recommended for me.

  “Nonsense. My girl will wear nothing of the kind,” Mama told Dr. Wheedie. “She’s only nine years old, you said she could grow out of this…trouble she’s got.”

  You see, I was born pretty much okay, my chin only tucked down a little, my hands like anybody else’s. After I’d started school and it looked like my chin was not going to raise itself from my chest like people hoped and my knees and ankles and wrists and knuckles started to swell—with pain for no good reason—she had taken me to see him. She worried I wasn’t growing the way I should be.

  “She gets the very best, Doctor. Not a day goes by she doesn’t get milk, cream, butter, eggs, fish, meat.”

  “Her trouble could be any number of things,” the doctor said. I heard words like arthritis and rheumatism and others that made Mama shake her head in wonderment.

  She began taking me there oftener, though the doctor just repeated these things every time. He prescribed Aspirins and suggested a brace for each leg. But I didn’t want to wear those braces kids with club feet wore, for pity’s sake. Mama didn’t want me to either.

  “Perhaps your daughter will grow out of it, this condition she has. Children do. Grow out of things. As long as she manages to get to school, there’s nothing really to worry about.”

  It was Dr. Wheedie’s polite way of saying there was nothing he could do to fix whatever I had. Whatever it was didn’t keep me from trying my hand at the piano, being just like Mama.

  This one sunny day in Arcadia, as I sat with Mama on the picnic quilt, Charlie threw a ball, expected me to catch it. “Butterfingers!” he yelled when I missed. “Stupid!”

  “Charles!” Mama cried and hugged me to her so fierce I thought I would smother. I wasn’t a baby, by now I was eleven going on twelve. Though maybe I didn’t look it, being on the small side. Wriggling away from her, I stuck out my tongue at Charlie. “Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me!” My singsong cry woke Father from his nap. “Charlie!” Then Father’s voice softened. “How ’bout a game of catch, then we’d best grab the reins and get a move on, eh, Mother?”

  Mother, he called her, not Agnes or Mama or Dear. I helped Mama fold the quilt, pack the picnic things into the basket, and put them in the buggy. Then she lifted and held me up high enough to feed the horse sugar cubes she’d brought for our iced tea. She was robust for a lady, and taller than Father.

  I forgot Charlie’s taunt until we had put the village behind us and came upon a grim-looking building big enough to be a school. It was painted white and had three storeys and a hip roof, and rows of windows like sad eyes staring out. A tangle of wild roses grew out front. In the side yard long lines of laundry flapped in the breeze. In the field just up from the road, men, women, and kids were bent over, picking rocks.

  “That’s where you’ll end up, Maudie,” Charlie said, matter of fact. “That’s where cripples go.”

  “Charlie!” Father’s voice was a bark. Charlie laughed and dug his elbow into my ribs, then tickled me so hard I thought I would pee. But I wasn’t laughing. I couldn’t laugh. The feeling in my throat was like having a bee stuck there trying to escape.

  Mama’s eyes burned. “For goodness’ sake, Charlie. Jack?”

  “Over my dead body.” As Father spoke, Mama cuddled me closer. “Over my dead body you or any one of us will end up in a place like that, sweet pea. Now shut your mouth, son. I’m warning you, not another word.”

  We carried on in silence. By and by, Mama pointed to some daylilies growing by the roadside. She opened her mouth to speak, and
I knew she wanted to stop and pull up some roots to take home. The lilies were yellow, rarer than the orange ones in our yard. But before Mama could say anything, Father cracked the whip and told the horse “Giddup!”

  “You have nothing to worry about, my darling,” Mama breathed into my ear. “People in places like that don’t have a soul in the world to care for them. Otherwise they wouldn’t be there. No wonder the ones off their heads get that way, no one to love them.”

  I couldn’t resist calling out, “Like you, Charlie!”

  “Takes one to know one. ‘Don’t try to understand me, just love me.’ That’s you, sis.”

  Father lost his patience. “Charlie. That. Is. Enough.”

  Then Charlie pulled something from his pocket, put it in my hand. “Here you go.” I could tell he was sorry for teasing. It was a moon snail shell just big enough that when I held it to my ear, I heard the sea inside. Mama started singing “Arcady is Ever Young,” her best imitation of Elsie Fox Bennett’s twittering soprano. “Far away in Arcady/Summer never passes/Warm the wind that wanders free/Thro’ the bending grasses.” Cuddled up to her, I knew I would want for nothing so long as I had her and Father. Before we knew it, we were clip-clopping up to the Lewis Fountain for the horse to get a drink.

  But a parent’s protection only goes so far, see. It wasn’t that I hated learning, or that the kids were mean, or that they mocked me—if they did, they seldom did it to my face. In the schoolyard I did my best to keep up at skipping rope, playing chase, hide-and-seek. Increasingly, instead of skipping rope I skipped class. Mama told the teachers my absences were due to growing pains.

  “It’s not like she’s got polio,” the doctor said.

  Some days when I was playing by myself in the garden, girls a grade or two ahead of me would peer over the fence between our yard and the Thibeaus’ on their way home from school. They would holler out, “Hey, Odd-may Owley-day! How come you won’t look up? Are you scared of us?” As if yelling my name out in pig Latin would block Mama or my brother from hearing them. I figured they only came around because they had a crush on Charlie. One had a dad who was boss at the woollen mill; she was the worst, saying “neck” so it rhymed with “sick.” “Lift your chin off your nick! Cripple!” The rest chimed in, “Nick nick nick,” till I wanted to nick them with Mama’s garden claw. I wouldn’t have, of course. Mama came out waving her trowel. “You girls get going! You should be ashamed. Don’t let me catch you here again!” The girls hightailed it then, cutting across Hawthorne and behind the barn and in back of the shops on Main.

  I thought their taunts bothered Mama more than they bothered me. If I was bothered, I kept it to myself. That day, Mama was peeved worse than when folks she considered friends were slow paying Father for his work. That day she seemed mad at me. “Well, I never. Maud, come here! You’re better off in the house. Why you’d want anything to do with those brazen pups is beyond me.”

  Not that she meant this in quite the uppity way it sounded. In her very next breath, she said how sticks and stones will break your bones but names will never hurt you. That line was one a little old bird could’ve repeated in its sleep.

  Mama got out her box of pastels. They were still special to me, though many were broken and the ones in our favourite colours, blue, brick-red, and green, were worn to nubs while the beige and grey looked brand new in their paper wrappers. I tried to peel the paper from the tip of a reddish-orange one, to draw honeysuckle. But my fingers got clumsy when I was worked up. Mama’s anger upset me more than anything the mean girls could have said.

  “Tell me you didn’t do something to irk those kids. You know, if you’d speak up for yourself it would make my life easier.” She seized the pastel and peeled it for me, passed me some cardstock. Then she sighed and stroked my arm. “For pity’s sake, imagine if we drew the world like it is. Wouldn’t be much fun, would it. Here, amuse yourself while I make us tea.”

  Her words made me buckle inside. For the first time ever, I defied her. “Mama. If tea stunts your growth like Teacher said at school, how come you let me drink it? How come some kids drink it and grow straight and tall?”

  Mama’s eyes glistened. She seemed to sink into herself. “Oh, my darling—next time anyone says one mean word to you, you tell me, and I’ll have Father get after them and their parents, too.”

  Just what every fourteen-year-old gal wanted, her papa going after her bullies, hoping to reason with them.

  “Mama. They’d tease me all the worse then.”

  Never minding what I had said about tea, Mama served me some in my special cup. The cup was a deep purply pink with prickly china flowers on it painted gold, and fancy script that said “For A Good Girl.” My grandmother Isabella, Father’s mama, had given it to me for my twelfth birthday, the same way her mother had given it to her. “The Dowleys are nothing if not good.” Mama winked, she’d got over her bad mood. Maybe Granny Dowley reminded her of her sister Ida, reading the Bible and that. The same birthday Granny Dowley gave me the cup, she had shown me the page in her old family Bible where she’d written my birthdate, March 7th, 1902, in her big, spidery hand.

  Mama gave herself the cup that was hand-painted with violets. She said it reminded her of the countryside around South Ohio, where she and Father lived when they first tied the knot, before they moved to Yarmouth. “Quiet? Nothing out there but a church, fields, and a couple of houses. You couldn’t get me to town quick enough.”

  The tea was milky and sweet, the way I liked it. I forgot about tea doing bad things. Calmed, I set to drawing while Mama watched. The turquoise pastel was so short I could barely hold onto it, but it was the only colour that would do.

  “My, that’s a pretty bird you’ve done. What sort of a bird is it?”

  “An indigo bunting, have you forgot?”

  “Clever girl.” Mama picked up my picture, held it by the window to admire it. It was as if I’d brought the real bird back to her garden. “You’ll do better staying home, believe me.”

  And she was right.

  After that I fixed on copying pictures I found around the house—pictures on candy boxes, cookie tins, calendars, and in magazines. Charlie made fun of me. “What’s the point, taking all that time to copy what’s already there? I’ve got a Brownie camera can do the trick in jig time, only like the movies, black and white.”

  “Dumb bum. It’s the colours I care for.”

  “What, you can’t picture them in your head?”

  “’Course I can. Bah.”

  But drawing and painting and copying the world from pictures of it didn’t mean I liked being housebound. From the parlour, I watched girls littler than me skipping double Dutch in the street, boys stealing jump ropes to lasso them like horses and play chariot. Just watching this, I felt the swelling in my ankles spread like an invisible bruise. If I could have drawn the pain, purple would’ve done.

  One day I did go outside, and after a while tried to join in. A mean girl tied her jump rope to my foot, said she’d invented a game, did I want to learn? She had another girl take the rope’s other end. When the Boston ferry blasted its horn from the dock, they yelled “Tug-o’-war!” My feet flew out from under me, landed me flat on my rear. The shame I felt was hot and sudden as the flash of a knife. Their friends came and made a circle round me. “Ring around the rosies/pocket full of posies/ashes, ashes, we all fall down!” Their voices were shrill and sweet. But instead of tumbling down and squatting with me, they ran off, though not before the sight of bare shins, ankle socks, and scuffed saddle shoes got burned into my head.

  One pair of shoes had no toes. The kid wearing them wasn’t just bad but was poor. I’d heard Father say her family had “bad debts.” Being poor was bad, being rich was good, everyone knew. I caught the poor girl’s eye before she darted off with the others. It was funny they let her play with them. Poor thing, you could end up in the poorhouse, I almost cried out. I wo
ndered if Granny’s Bible or Aunt’s had anything to say about poorhouses, as they sounded like places of punishment, which the Bible seemed big on. Hell: being poor and bad was sure to land you there, while being rich and good would spare you from it.

  As for the teasing and mockery dealt to me, looking back I figure it was good training for being married to Ev. Like Mama used to say, What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

  Before you know it, I’ll have been gone as long as I was alive down your way. Then again, time means diddly on this side of the veil, and no matter which side of the veil you’re on, it plays tricks. Down where you are, people smile at my pictures and say, “It’s like she lived two hundred years ago, what never-never land was she dreaming of?” Let them wonder while perusing my pretty scenes of villages, coves, and woods where even in bleakest winter leaves don’t fall from trees but glow red and orange. Sometimes my days below felt like two centuries, mind you. But time does equally odd things in so-called glory.

  That night Ev buried the jar out back happened more years ago than I can count, even if I had fingers to count upon. I have an idea that what he buried that night wasn’t the half of what-all he planted out there over the years, and I don’t just mean potatoes and turnips. Wondering what precisely was in that jar haunted me for a good long while, and haunts me still. Was there money that had come in the mail the day before? Except for this and the other odd niggling worry, I am carefree as the bird in Wilf Carter’s song, I’m my own person. No more pain, no more guilt—free. And there’s the view, like I was saying, grander even than Matilda’s or any view I could have guessed up if I had lived a thousand years, below, I mean. Of course, it helps not being required to turn my head or look sideward at everything; certain things used to slip by me on account of that. Some might say it’s a pity that in life I lacked the luxury of flitting hither and yon, like a Matilda unburdened of her young, taking in the sights. No telling where I would have got to—maybe as far as Saint John, New Brunswick, or Boston, or New York City, or even to Nashville, Tennessee. Who knows where a crow can get to?