AT NIGHT WE PAINT THE STARS

A short story

Photo by Marissa Price on Unsplash

If you’d asked her when she was thirty-one, Agnes would’ve said, somewhat sombrely, that she’d become disillusioned with life. Not with life in particular, mind you, but with her life. By the time she was thirty-four, she was feeling indifferent about it, almost to the point of being complacent. There was no explaining it, nothing she could put her finger on and say: “That’s it; that’s what the problem is!” Maybe if she would’ve taken a closer look at what life had to offer her, she might’ve understood how she’d allowed for her own melancholy to close in on her. She would’ve been able to pinpoint it, to a certain degree, or at the very least, discovered, that her feelings were more than a momentary pause, or some sort of strange interlude between life’s tragic events. And hers had been a life of tragedy as far as she was concerned. But she would’ve understood that sometimes there’s no escaping it, not unless you take things into your own hands and live it. And that was one thing Agnes could never do.

Agnes wasn’t disheartened by it all, after all, she still had her painting. She knew — or perhaps she thought she knew, (or maybe she just suspected) — that if she ever became a successful painter, people would be inclined to describe this part of her life as her “Dark Period.” It wouldn’t be because of the dark colours she painted with, but rather, the dark, underlying themes and depressing subject matter that seemed to show up in all of her work. It was a darkness of the soul that seemed to stare out of her subjects’ eyes, together with their plaintive expressions; something she couldn’t explain, even to herself. She knew there was more to it than her mood coming through in the paintings — it was as if her life was bleeding on the canvas in front of her and she couldn’t stop the flow.

So now, at thirty-eight, she’d resigned herself to the fact that this was all her life was going to give her. This was all it had to offer. She had a husband who didn’t love her, and sometimes — in fact most of the time — she had to ask herself how she’d ever expected him to love her in the first place. She had nothing to offer him as far as she could see. She felt as if she had become someone he could hang the blame on for everything that was wrong in his life. She was his excuse for the shortcomings and failures he’d experienced over the years. She was his life’s stale rationalization; the reason for his bitterness. She was the one he blamed for the stillborn birth of their only child fifteen years ago. She was someone for him to resent. And still, she didn’t see herself leaving him, not now, or in the near future, and doubted if she ever would — not with this year’s apple season underway, and a field full of workers she was convinced still needed her.

*

She looks at her mirrored reflection staring back at her in the darkness of the window, and thinks she looks like a ghost on the other side of life; a negative exposure of the self she doesn’t know anymore. She can see the embers of last night’s campfire smouldering behind her reflection.

It’s almost as if the embers are a part of her, she thinks, as if they’re coming from somewhere inside of her. She watches them as they dance like dirty fireflies — mimicking them — and then bumps into the naked bulb hanging from the ceiling like a noose, her shadow playing along the wall behind her. Her reflection stands mute, strobing in the darkness of the window like an old-time movie staring back at her.

  She turns away from the window and looks back at the painting she’d been working on. The rest of the room appears lost in the shadows, except for the strobing halo of light surrounding her easel.

“It’s the first in a set of four,” she says out loud, in answer to the Voice in her head. Sometimes she speaks to the Voice out loud, as if she’s talking to someone else in the room.

“Do you like it?” she asks. “It’s something I dreamed up last night,” she goes on, her voice sounding distant, as though it’s lost in a far away dream echoing in the closed confines of her mind. “It’s been a strange night of fantastic dreams though, hasn’t it?...Strangely cold too, or do you think that’s just part of the fantasy?” she asks, hugging her good arm to herself. Having had the strange compulsion to paint, she says, is like an obsession she has no control over. She explains how the dream compelled her, and motivated her…even inspired her.

She dreamed of Athena bursting out of her head — as if her own body was the head of Zeus instead of the temple it was a moment before. And it came with all the force and pain of a real birth. It woke her out of a sound sleep. The headache and cramp that followed was so severe, so intense, it reminded her of one of the voices she’d heard in her childhood.

It wasn’t the Voice, her Voice. It was different. It sounded like the soft moan of someone making love, something that was locked away in the misty chambers of her dreams. Reaching her hand under her nightgown, she discovered her period was on her, and knowing the headache wouldn’t let up until her idea was down on paper, or committed to canvas, she decided to get up.

“It was so unnerving,” she tells the Voice, “I had to include it in the mural.”

They always come to her like that, the visions — only she calls them Inspiration. They come with blinding headaches of flashing light, and a brilliance so disconcerting, the only rest she can find is opening her eyes and limping to her studio downstairs.

She takes her soiled nightgown off as soon as she stands up, and pulls on her old bathrobe, smelling the familiar scent of oil paint and turpentine that still clings to it no matter how many times she washes it. She cleans herself with the same vacuous inattention to detail that always seems to accompany her in moments of inspiration, and slowly makes her way downstairs. 

*

She stands back, wiping the paint brush on the rag she holds in the tiny fingers of her withered left arm. The action is so mechanical now, she doesn’t even think about it anymore. She puts the brush in a jar on the work table, wiping the paint off her fingers with turpentine she dips the rag into, and walks back to the hanging light bulb, turning it off and casting the room into a cold, earthy, darkness. She unties the belt of her bathrobe and lets the chill night air wash over her, feeling her nipples stiffen like they’re being touched by the hands of a secret lover.

I can imagine, can’t I?

Her full name is Agnes St. Vincent dePaul, a cruel joke as far as names go she told the Voice soon after her wedding. It was a name she struggled to accept during those first few months of marriage. She wondered how she was expected to sign her paintings with a name like that. She settled on Vincent, in honor of Van Gogh.

He never amounted to anything in his life either, she tells the Voice as soon as she thinks about it.

— just like you’ll never see fame in your lifetime, she can hear the Voice saying — well, maybe when you’re dead, the Voice tells her, as though it’s an afterthought.

She limps to the window, dragging her clubfoot, her half naked reflection bobbing in front of her like a cork on a stream. She gasps at the sight of the dawn clawing its way through the ebbing night. The clouds are a dark smear on the horizon and far away hills. In the makeshift campsite of the apple pickers, the dying embers of the campfire are nothing but a distant memory — as few and distant as the fading stars.

It’s another moment of inspiration she tells herself, and watches the sun splitting through the clouds in a ruddy attack of colours that soon has the whole sky ablaze. She runs her right hand down the stunted length of her tiny left arm, hugging herself tightly as she watches the morning come alive, reminding herself that it was a morning very much like this one fifteen years ago, when she gave birth to Chad.

“Red sky in morning, farmer takes warning,” she tells the Voice. “I should’ve told myself that. Maybe I’d still have Chad with me.” 

She shakes herself out of her self-absorption when she hears the creaking footsteps from upstairs, telling herself — and the Voice — that she still has to get breakfast ready for Gerald, and everyone else.

“He’ll be coming down to milk the cows and bring in the morning eggs,” she tells the Voice. “He’ll expect his breakfast waiting for him when he comes back. There’s so much to do.”

The Voice tells her she’d better start a load of laundry then — it’s always telling her sensible things, practical things — and looking out at the morning sky she knows she’ll be in the basement for most of the day hanging up bedding and sheets, and whatever other washing the apple pickers ask her to do.

  It isn’t as bad as it used to be, she tells herself, not with the new wringer washer Gerald bought three years ago. It’s cut her workload in half. A task that once took two and a half days, was now down to one. She knows she’d be able to cut the time down even less if she had one of those new dryers she saw in the Sears and Roebuck catalogue she found near the fence. But Gerald took the catalogue from her and burned it in front of her, page by page, telling her to get those thoughts out of her head. It was an expense he wasn’t willing to pay, he said, no matter how much she begged and pleaded. 

Hanging the laundry up was more than just difficult, she told him. When she’s outside, and the wind’s gusting, sometimes it takes her five minutes to hang up one sheet.

After a lifetime of hard work, Gerald told her, she was as capable as she was ever going to be, and having a dryer wouldn’t make her life any easier.

The Voice in her head told her to accept his reasons rather than push him too far, because he could be unreasonable when she pushed him too far — like burning the catalogue one page at a time.

— you went too far with that one, the Voice tells her.

Gerald is a large man. His huge frame dwarfs hers in comparison, but his wide girth makes it difficult for him to walk because of the injuries he suffered in the Korean War. When she first met him, she was sixteen years old.

“I was still living in Pennsylvania then, remember? Evanston. I was so glad to get away from there. It was never going to be anything more than just another small steel town outside of Pittsburgh — it’s probably a part of Pittsburgh by now. Do you remember those days?” she asks the Voice. “Do you remember how Gerald came to stay with us? Looking at the room Daddy built above the garage? He was twenty-two then, and almost handsome — though he was never what you’d call a great catch — not by a long shot. He was large though, even then. Remember? And he was constantly eating. I remember that about him more than anything else. He said he needed to eat four times a day; I think he ate more than that. He was two hundred and fifty pounds, if not more. Remember? Back when I first met him? He was stocky then, even though he was tall. But he carried the weight easily for a man his size, didn’t he? Now, I think he’s closer to four hundred pounds.

“Daddy used to say Gerald was wandering through life, bearing witness, whatever that was supposed to mean. Did you understand that? Gerald said he was waiting for his draft notice. Remember that? He was too young for the Second World War, and thought Korea was the place to prove himself. Daddy said he was lazy — shiftless — but agreed the army might do him a world of good. Might even change him. Well, it certainly did that, didn’t it?”

She’d believed a man like Gerald was the only chance a girl like her would have, so when his draft notice came, and he asked her to marry him — with every intention of taking her back to West Virginia — she said yes.

That was a lifetime ago she thinks; a lifetime lost, like a child’s breath on the wind.

— you mean like Chad’s? the Voice whispers softly, but she ignores it.

She was quick to discover she was no use to anyone picking apples, not with her clubfoot. It was too much for her to climb any ladder, let alone pick apples with her deformed arm. Gerald’s father confined her to the house, condemning her to a lifetime of household chores and servitude — woman’s work, Gerald called it — as his father pointed out she was no use to him, or anyone else for that matter, wondering out loud why Gerald even married her in the first place.

To Agnes, it was a prison sentence. When Gerald left for Korea and she found out she was pregnant, she never felt more alone.