Right now she lay smiling in wonder as the wheat field, raised to stubble, flamed up in her eyes as the opening sky filled with a golden dawn.
They had her bed facing the windows. That way she could look out, watching something else to experience other than what kept her down.
There she did have a universe to review, lying with her face fixed towards the open windows. Two windows, long Victorians, elegant even bare of shades or curtains and with screens ripped open.
Through these windows she caught daylight shifting through its course, flickering with life almost everywhere. At the end of the long view, beyond open land, she also had an unchanging miniature made by the clustering uncertain hope of trees, a grain elevator, two church steeples–those sure marks of a small dying town.
“Painters coming today.”
The woman in the bed looked attentively as if listening to the younger woman bustling to clean up, fix the medicine, empty the bed pan. To the best of her ability she’d never be rude. But as often as she could the woman in the bed turned her face back to the windows. Carefully inspecting the scene, up-close, wide, afar.
“They’ll do it white . . . damn.”
The woman in the bed understood what was happening to her, slowly, day by day . She knew, as did the family in the house: Her son, his wife, their two children– her audience agonized. That filled her with sorrow for them.
“The old girl says it’s too fine a house for anything but white. Guess what? White paint’s on sale in town. . . “
The woman in the bed had been put into the southeast front room, ground floor, of a once-grand, now weathered farmhouse. A house built by long buried pride. Behind her, more windows gave out onto a wide handsome porch, although she was too weak now to turn and admire it.
“They’ll be her barn painters. Zimmerman wouldn’t send anyone else. Imagine somebody so rich they got barn painters? That’s what comes with 10,000 acres of river bottom….. But white is so empty. Why not give this old house some life, . . . blue trim would do it some justice …
“That better? . . . Want the radio on?”
The woman in the bed didn’t say anything about the radio, thinking of how nice it was to have a fine young woman’s voice close by.
“For sure you’re getting breakfast. That son of yours, he’s up. Thinks he’s making coffee someone could drink. ”
The daughter-in-law laughed; the woman in the bed nodded. They had that man in common.
Alone, the woman in the bed waited with a pleasant expression, unflinching as stone. Sixty years of training helped the woman in the bed, who still believed that such things as suffering were best ignored.
Her little-girl eyes grew brighter and younger as the face skin shrank away. The large brown eyes might flicker over a thorn of pain– on the instant dim a degree– yet in another their calm openness returned. Then again they looked to the windows.
“Morning mom, studying the world?” Her son stood at the side of the bed.
Turned to the windows she hadn’t heard him come in. More and more the people of the house materialized from behind her back as if out of a television set.
At that moment, outside the windows, the sun peaked the horizon. Every color flared.
She tried moving towards his voice.
This big bearded man looming over the bed amazed her every time–something so fine had sprung from her?
“Painters coming. Get ready. You’ll see them around. Just say ‘boo.’ They’ll run. Couple of spooks–dumb but harmless.”
He reached down to her hair–not the wasted hair of the moment but that of his childhood.
His hand lay on her heavy yet protective, a man’s hand without doubt, but once so tiny she’d cradled it like a leaf.
“May take days to paint this wreck. It’s the biggest thing that witch owns. Guess to her that’s what it is, just another barn and we’re the livestock.”
She smiled at that and her eyes shone with soft self mocking light. Then the son touched the strength in her that he still clung to. It made him take back his hand from her hair. A gesture of awe, fear too, and most of all a quick deep twisting inside that he had to clench down fast.
“Don’t go away. Stay!” Those were the words he stifled. For sure they weren’t eloquent people. She’d raised him to take things quietly.
The woman in the bed gave off a sure sense of confidence. Because of that her son dreaded more than her death that the woman in the bed might begin to show fear. If the woman in the bed began to be afraid, he’d feel more lost than he could bear.
“Barn painters, barn swallows. Tell me about it, OK? They bother you any and I’ll cage ‘em.”
He sipped the last of his coffee, she following his lips. He drank from the same mug every morning. She smelled all the mornings it held– would come to hold– his lifetime, virile and bitter sweet as the coffee itself.
“Gotta go, see ya tonight.” Bob gave her his usual awkward farewell. Pawing down the sheets that hemmed her in.
Like a dog burying its bone, thought the woman in the bed, and would have laughed if she could, her eyes still fixed on her son.
Alone, the woman in the bed turned back to her windows. She wouldn’t mind not looking at anything else, forever and ever. But then too she also wanted her son at hand, needed him too, standing there by the bed, day in and day out, deep rooted in their own soil.
They knew it wouldn’t be long.
Then the painters came clattering. Their old truck brought a trail of dust for the woman in the bed to consider; magician’s smoke hiding the road. It lingered on after they’d turned in.
When the men got to the front door, she tried seeing them. She rolled up her eyes for a glimpse. She could still catch a piece of the porch ceiling above the headboard. Nothing there now except an abandoned wasp’s nest on the broken porch light fixture.
She heard Anne greeting them at the front door, trying to be pleasant. There was one deep voice. The other came high and jerky.
“Maybe retarded,” she told the empty room.
That dog barked for half an hour after they arrived.
“Leave those men alone! Let them start!” Anne yelled from somewhere inside the house.
The woman in the bed pondered–was the warning for the kids, that dog? Could it be for her?
Their clankings mixed with random bone shattering clamors, a continuum of scuffling coming from no where. Her eyes roamed about for the sounds, from ceiling to windows, back and forth.
The windows offered her no clue.
A first stench of paint rolled in. It came through the open windows, from the hallway, seeped in at her from under the bathroom door. It pervaded, another kind of medicine. To her it carried a sharp suspense.
“Mom, you’ll never believe this!” whispered Anne in a panic, moving about the bed on tiptoe. “This is what you get when you rent. I wouldn’t let deadbeats like them near a place I owned!”
Another clean sheet spread. Again the young woman darted off–children into the paint, painters stalking the house.
The woman in the bed began to feel anxiety. “Alive enough for that,” she thought, and smiled.
Tall painter, short painter; they came into the bedroom. Head to foot they were covered in dried white paint. White streaked cheeks, white flecked hair. White framed every fingernail she could see.
Their eyes were most vivid. “Like albinos turned inside out, she thought.”
The tall one stared at her, dolorous, eyes bitch black against all the white. The small one blinked about in wild blue silliness. Naturally, the tall one had the bass voice.
“Ma’am, we gotta close your windows,” he drawled, apologetically; skinny to match his height.
“Can’t have no open windows, lady.” The short one snorted. A laugh, she wondered?
“Sure is a big house,” bellowed one.
“Looks spooky.” whispered the other.
They worked in tandem–the little one brisker to keep up with his companion. To shut a window they each put a hand to the sill, one each on the frame, and pulled.
The windows behind her were locked shut. Their rusted parts turned with a hair-raising screech.
“Yep, houses is special. Gives me the willies. Made me think twice when the old lady called about this job.”
She supposed they went everywhere together; knew they couldn’t possibly be married.
“Now for them windows beside you, ma’am. Just lie still.”
The bed moved. It inched away from the windows. The painters jerked like zombies. One at her feet, one at the headboard. They poked their tongues out at her as they went –blood red against the white paint.
“OK weren’t it, lady?
“No complaints, right?”
They left the bed turned to the windows halfway out into the room. For her it was an island. Shipwrecked, she thought.
Somber as ushers, they lowered the last two windows, her windows, with terminal bangs.
“All down, tight.”
“Yep, we’ll get her. Even if we ain’t painted a house in . . . ”
“Me, I don’t recall . . . Jus’ barns, no houses, ya know.”
“Sure is a big old house. Wouldn’t want to live here. Spooky.”
Painters left to work on another room. Alone again the woman in the bed tensed, pain sweeping over her like a wind. As if she were the land before it. Outside, a July morning wilted. The horizon shuddered in heat.
Flies buzzed her, trapped inside the closed windows. When some of the flies settled on her sheet it came to her as another rueful joke: buzzards.
Anne brought the fan. “Those creeps just left you out here in the middle of no where! I’m gonna call Zimmerman! It’s just too much. I can’t move you back by myself . .”
The woman in the bed caught the rattler tail of distress in the younger woman’s voice. “Don’t bother, Anne. It’s fine like this.”
By late morning she guessed the painters were already finished with the high, ornate eaves of the tall house. They used extension ladders, the tops of which she saw carried by. One time the short painter thrust a white hand up giving her a jaunty wave.
Another time a rope dangled down loose against the top half of one window. It whisked out of sight, quick as a startled snake. She heard a thud. Something hit the ground. A beer can plummeted down through her view.
At noon Anne gave a report, “It’s unbelievable, mom, how those goons do it. Never seen anything like it. Once they got set up they don’t stop. They’ve painted all around the top of the house easy as frosting a cake . . . they’re already almost down to the tops of the upstairs windows. Still wish they would use some blue trim.”
Then the painters stopped for lunch on the lawn. Talking loudly enough for her to hear them. Beer cans pop-fizzled like firecrackers.
“Biggest barn she owns …” One said, through a mouthful of something.
But then suddenly the older boy broke his arm. The woman in the bed heard it coming, the wail rising up from behind her, from the direction of the riverbed.
“Oh my God, Josh broke his arm,” screamed Anne, to make it official.
Without thinking the woman in the bed tried moving to answer the child’s cry. She knew about boys and arms, pain too. She sank back helpless without a second try.
Anne rushed in. “Gotta get Josh to the Doc. Jason says they were diving into that damn dry creek. Kids!”
Afternoon light seared the window glass. Wheat stalks sharpened into glinting spikes.
“Fan keeping you cool? I feel terrible leaving . . . You OK? Sure?
Jason and the dog are staying here. I told him to keep you company. Don’t know how long it’ll take. Doc says they’ll set it right now.“
In a dash for the door, Anne kissed her mother-in-law on the forehead.
“Don’t let those crazy painters near you! Here I’m leaving a baseball bat for you.”
“That’s nice, Anne. I’ll be fine. Hope Josh will be OK.”
The two women looked at one another knowing full well the woman in the bed was too weak to wield the bat.
In another minute the station wagon could be seen racing down the road towards town. A dust bowl storm in its wake.
Later, Jason and the dog did appear. The little boy rested his chin on the bed sheet and stared at her intently.
“Aren’t you scared, Grandma?
She managed to reach out and stroke the young hair. The freshness of him came to her in a tingling rush, up through her fingertips.
“Josh is OK,” How could that croak she heard belong to her? “Your daddy broke his arm when he was a boy and he’s just fine.”
“But they making it all white!”
Then the child took his worried small self away and didn’t make another appearance.
The house fell back far away, to her the same as in the dread eternity of her nights.
Painters came stumbling through her window frames, out on the lawn. She saw them again once, out toward the edge of the field, arms full of empty paint cans.
Sounds of their long ladders shifted about the house, along with the rhythmic scraping of old paint. Paint fumes waned vague and monotonous.
The painters progressed towards her, down the outside walls. When they reached the porch, she knew it.
“Guess I’m the end,” She said to the fan as it rotated in her direction.
Now she heard up close the wet smacking of brushes, the squeal of rollers. The popping of beer cans.
“Hot one!” Screamed one of them from the porch.
She heard scraping clear as her own heart beat. Imagined shards of dead paint knifing the porch floor. The occasional breeze sent white flakes fleeing across her windows.
The painters finished the porch. With that, the glow across the ceiling dulled a degree. She quickly looked up in concern. The porch light socket had disappeared.
A gray cloud spread in a slow breath from headboard halfway down the length of the bed; It was another kind of sheet spreading over her from head to foot. The change caught her full attention.
The painters appeared in the frames of how own windows– the two tall windows beside her bed.
“Hi,” boomed one.
The other, still out of sight, belched. “Hey lady, put your hand on the window. Feel the pain?”
Both painters chuckled silently beyond the glass. A pantomime of mirth in white.
“Don’t mind him, ma’am, he fell off a barn once.”
Straining for strength, she looked beyond the two figures as they clambered about on the scaffolding, framed in fine old wood.
She darted glances around their heads and between their legs. She tried looking as far as she had ever looked. Farther than the horizon.
“Yep, Zimmerman’s gonna be real surprised. The old witch won’t believe we done it all in one day.”
The little one began spraying over a lower pane of glass. Spray nozzle sizzled, dangerous as grease in a frying pan.
Sundown coming quick. And she could think of nothing strong enough to stop them. Her mouth framed remonstrance. She heard nothing back.
Each hop from the little one brought another spray. Hop, hop, hop, the view through the lower half of the windows disappeared.
With more dignity, the tall painter worked down each window from the top, in long, ceremonial sweeps.
They converged in amazing precision.
One bulging blue eye winked at her from inside the final clearing of damp white window. An aura of sunset-flamingo framed this eye.
“Hope you get better soon!”
“Yep, cancer’s a tough one.”
Slurp. All is gone.
At the close of dusk the family returned. Car doors banged. The dog began barking again. A blast of voices. One scream. Cursing. The house rushed back to life and light.
Bob turned on the ceiling light In the bedroom. He stood blinking, disbelieving. The instant of flipped on clarity made the glaring confinement even more shocking. He stared into a shocking white cell. So white that at first it was a blinding burst.
“God damn son of bitches! They’re dead meat!“ His thunder rolled off into the searing whiteness.
Voice cracking, Anne joined in, “They painted over everything, Mom. Every window. It looks …it looks like a barn from the road! ”
Anne shrank back in the doorway, hands covering her eyes.
“I’m sorry mom, but I just can’t handle this. It’s too horrible. It’s so cruel . . We couldn’t get back . . .elbow broke in two places. Jason and the dog hid in the closet . . . They even painted the kids bikes.”
The son swayed tall, fierce. He glared in fury at her drawn face, the frail curls of damp hair. Her wasting body even smaller now.
In one afternoon he’d lost her to a white pillow and sheet, into a white box of a room.
He followed the tears cracking her closed lids. Tears trickled down to her small struggling mouth.
Skin taught to breaking over his knuckles, fists clenched, he slugged the nearest wall. His blood smeared in the plasterboard on his finders.
But then, as quickly as his fury had erupted. His hands fell limp.
The son who knew her so well . . .
The woman in the bed was laughing.