Boy Who Shoots Crows (9781101552797) (37 page)

But why now?
he wondered. Their contact in the past month had been negligible. In fact, not a single word had passed between them since that morning in the hospital. A couple of times he had suggested to Livvie that one or both of them should call on her, but Livvie had cautioned, “Let's just give her some space.” He knew that something had passed between the two women, but Livvie would provide no details, would say only, “It wasn't even an argument, just a feeling, is all. She needed her own space and I needed mine. Let's just leave it at that.” But on those occasions he had not failed to notice the look that came into Livvie's eyes, what seemed to him like a passing cloud of sadness. But he never tried to probe the secrets they shared. Women had always been a mystery to him, and he saw no reason to assume that that would change.

“I'll leave it on the secretary in the foyer,” Charlotte had written. “I'll put a key under the mat on the front porch. Just let yourself in.”

He reasoned that it was a matter of trust and nothing more. Charlotte trusted him, it was as simple as that. There was a time when he had hoped for more than trust from her, but he was satisfied now with the way things had worked out, and he considered himself a man who knew enough to count his blessings.

This fine spring morning, for example. Within an hour or so, the fog would all be burned away, the air clear and cool and the new leaves flicking like little green tongues whenever a small breeze stirred. So after he parked and climbed out and crossed the yard to her porch, after he laid back the corner of the welcome mat and recovered the key and inserted the key in the lock and eased open the door, he paused to look again at the line of trees beyond the garage, the barn and the field, to enjoy, just a few moments longer, the look and feel and scent of a hushed morning soon to fade.

Sfumato,
she had called it once. The effect of the fog as it smokes and blurs the trees. A painter's technique. A story about da Vinci, he remembered. Yes, right there on that porch swing, that's where she had told it to him, da Vinci and
The Last Supper
. Or had it been in the kitchen? He couldn't quite remember where that particular conversation had taken place, couldn't remember the exact circumstances. Not that it mattered.

“Sfu-mato,” he said aloud now, then smiled at the peculiarity of the word. A peculiar word for such a lovely morning. Leave it to Charlotte to even know such a word.

He pushed open the door then and stepped inside. The house was cool and dark and silent. He had hoped to smell coffee but instead detected the scent of wet ashes. She had probably made a fire recently, then closed the screen and gone to bed and allowed the fire to burn itself out, without ever remembering to close the flue.
A lot of BTUs going up the chimney now,
he thought. He told himself that he would close the flue before leaving, save her a few dollars on her gas bill.

Maybe it was only the stillness of the house that quieted him. He knew that he was alone in the house, no need for stealth or any attempt to maintain the silence, yet he found himself moving with a deliberate, even delicate step across the foyer. He didn't bother to turn on the hall light because he could already see the secretary against the wall, could see it well enough to make out the only item atop the slender shelf. It was a book of some kind, a slender, oversize book with a plain canvas cover.
Dark green,
he thought, though he would have to carry it outside to see the color clearly. Stuck to the cover was a Post-It note whose message in the dimness he could not read.

He stepped back to the doorway, held the book in the light.

For you, Marcus. Thank you
.

That's it?
he thought.
Does she mean it's a gift for me? Or does she expect me to do something else with it?

He opened the cover to the first page and saw that the book was a journal of some kind. It was, in fact, a sketchbook, but he had never seen one of those before and so assumed that the writing, a tight, cursive script in blue ink, with lines that slanted slightly downward across the page, defined the object. The first words were,
The morning of April third . . .

He stopped reading and looked up, looked out through the screen. He knew that date. How could he not? And suddenly there came a shortness of breath, a flush of heat. “God, no,” he said.

And then, another thought. He turned abruptly, looked up the stairs. “Charlotte?” he called. No answer. He laid the journal on the secretary and raced up the stairs, yanked himself forward with his hand on the banister rail. He found her bedroom quickly, knew in an instant that it was hers, but was relieved to see the bed empty and neatly made, relieved to see the dresser and nightstands and all else looking perfectly normal.

He then checked each of the other rooms but found nothing amiss. Went downstairs then and made a quick check of the house, glanced into every room, no sign of Charlotte. “So okay,” he told himself. “You're jumping to conclusions here. Now calm down.”

Yet his heart would not quit racing. He returned to the foyer, retrieved the journal, and stepped onto the porch.

He was reluctant to open the journal again but knew he had to do so. On the edge of the porch, he stood for a moment to look out across the yard. His morning, in the past two minutes, had taken on a quality of strangeness. He had always considered Charlotte Dunleavy an unconventional woman, and that was part of the attraction, but this was something more, an incongruency of actions that troubled him. The edges did not line up.

The rumble of a school bus came into his consciousness only after he saw the bus out on the highway, bus number seven, long and yellow and lumbering toward the middle school. Then the bus passed and the morning was quiet again, but the strangeness remained.

He looked down at the journal.

For you, Marcus,
the note said.

He needed a few moments to think. He needed to sit and catch his breath. He turned, considered the porch swing.

The one time he and Charlotte had sat together on that swing now seemed impossibly distant to him. In fact, he was not even certain that they had ever sat side-by-side on the swing.
Wasn't I in the wicker chair?
he asked himself.

He remembered words and looks that had passed between them and many things that had been left unsaid. He had to admit that the feelings from that time were still tangible, not as raw or clumsy as they had originally been, not as bruising, but still there nonetheless. The feelings as they returned to him now made the morning seem to shrink even tighter around him, made a kind of cloudiness fill his mind so that nothing seemed clear.

“Sfumato,” he said again.

The morning was still cool, though the day promised to be warm. In the distance beyond the highway, a line of blue hills was rising to the sky, seeming to grow minute by minute out of the evanescing fog. “The Tuscarora Mountains,” he said.

At his back, in the trees behind the cornfield, a crow cawed. In front of him, wisps of fog rose off the lawn. He could smell the wet grass. The sky was brightening in the east. In an hour the yard and the porch would be filled with light. Sunlight would stream in through the windows. But for now the porch was cool and dim and the house was quiet and smelled of ash. The crows were awakening in the treetops, beginning their noisy aria to morning.

He crossed to the swing and sat down in the center of the slatted wooden seat. The chains creaked with his weight. He laid the journal on his lap, he laid back the cover, and he read.

T
HE morning of April third was a soft, damp morning but one that smelled pink with promise. I awoke before dawn and sat in the darkness of my studio with the curtains open and a mug of green tea in my hands. By degrees the night slowly faded away, and after a while I was able to see a mist of rain coming down outside, a mist so soft that it made no sound on the roof or against the window. Only when I stood close to the glass could I hear a gurgle in the rainspout and see the gentle bubbling in a shallow puddle in the driveway.

When the morning was nearly light enough, I went to my easel, lifted off the sheet, and looked at the painting in progress, the Amish children standing in a yard as a buggy and a Harley pass in front of them.

I never finished that painting, but to this day I can see the finished work inside my head. I can see other paintings too, other scenes I will never paint, all of them complete here inside my head, each one of them a mockery of who I thought I was and would be.

Anyway, that morning. I stood there looking at my painting, sipping my tea, and feeling very pleased with how things were going. That misty rain and cat-footed dawn were quieting and made me tranquil. It wasn't exactly an overcast morning, the sun was softly veiled. I would call it instead a luminous morning. The line of fog across the horizon did not block the sunlight but diffused it. I remember thinking of it as a tempera wash. The important thing here is this: Thanks to the morning or my painting or whatever, I felt—and my phrasing is inadequate, I'm sure—quietly jubilant. I felt on the verge of something.

And I was, I surely was. My mistake was in thinking it would be something wonderful.

Anyway, when the light was sufficient, I opened up my paints, prepared my palette, dried off the brushes. I sipped the last of my tea and set the mug aside. And within minutes I was utterly lost inside the painting. By which I mean that I was simultaneously in it and outside of it. That's the strange thing that happened to me sometimes, the way I separated and became the unemotional artist wielding the brush, conscious of the length of stroke and the heaviness of the pigment and the degree of light that emanates from it, yet I became a part of the imagined scene as well. That second me was standing at the roadside, just outside the frame of the picture, watching as the biker and buggy passed each other. I could smell the cut grass as it flew up in little green splinters behind the whirring blades. I could smell the horse as it gamboled by and could feel the heat rising from its muscled flanks. I could feel the rumble of the Harley's engine vibrating my eardrums and feel the heat coming off its flared exhaust pipes. It was a moment frozen, yet alive and dynamic, with everything slowed down and stretched out so that all the details and undercurrents were exquisitely vivid to me. It was one of those moments that just happened sometimes. One of those wonderful moments.

The gunshot exploded as if it had been fired past my ear. I swear the room shook with it. I gasped and staggered backward and felt physically knocked away from my painting, literally yanked out of it. Then came three more shots.
Bam! Bam! Bam!
By the fourth one I was standing at the window, trembling and rigid while the paint dripped down the brush and onto my fingers. Twenty, maybe thirty crows were in frantic flight away from the trees. And me . . . It is no exaggeration to say that I felt assaulted. My head was suddenly throbbing, my blood pressure sky-high. And moment by moment my fury grew.

I ran to the kitchen as fast as I could. I don't remember now if a plan of action had occurred to me or not. If so, I didn't pause to think it out beyond the first step or two. When I try to recreate those moments in my memory, all I see is a furious, red-faced woman with her face made ugly by rage.

On a shelf on the wall beside the door leading into the mudroom I kept a pistol. Before I left New York, June had insisted—make that
ordered
me to buy one. “A woman living alone in the country needs to protect herself,” she said. But I fooled her and only bought an air pistol, a pellet gun that to an untrained eye looked exactly like a real gun. And I kept this pistol in the mudroom because it had already come in handy several times for chasing raccoons out of my garbage cans.

So there it was on the shelf that morning, my tranquil morning shattered yet again. I jammed the pistol down into my waistband of my baggy jeans and shoved my feet into my boots. And this time I laced them up—not like the first time I had confronted Jesse out there. Yes, this was the second time. The first time, despite my anger, I had tried to be pleasant, tried to reason with him, but he had treated me with such contempt that . . . I don't know, but maybe that had something to do with why I was furious now, because of the way he had already humiliated me. I felt in no hurry this time, furious but strangely calm and deliberate. Every little thing I did, right down to pulling my old gardening hat off the hook and jamming it onto my head, felt ordained.

As if I were my own painting come to life, I watched myself march outside and across the wet yard. In fact I can still see those moments in exquisite detail. The grass was glistening and jewel-like. With every step I sent tiny diamonds of moisture flying. I was wearing my Timberlands, baggy jeans, and a loose blue shirt with short sleeves and a V-neck. And I wasn't wearing a bra. I never wore a bra when I was working. It was one of those silly little superstitions artists have, I suppose, but I always wanted my work to be unfettered, unrestrained, and going braless helped me to feel that way. I remember the way the shirt rubbed up and down over my nipples as I marched across the field that morning. And the air was chilly, so my nipples were hard. It was a good feeling. I'm ashamed to admit that now, but it was. I felt predatory. Like a big game hunter with a nipple erection.