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jacob
by paul soupiset
Dark Green.
Straight-from-the-tube
color running from the mouth of the $1.47 aluminum container, his muse
had always inspired hard-edged acrylics. Cool colors. The skies weren't
so much sky blue as straight-tube cerulean; the yellow swaths in the landscape,
bolts of thalo. He liked acrylics and gouache and canvas he had stretched
by hand because he could say they were his.
On this particular June morning the painter made his way across the hills
and valleys of dirty clothes, hatchet lit by the seven o'clock sunslits
eking across the floor, then back through the white doorframe into the
studio. He set his freshly made peanut butter toast down on the plaster
column while reaching for the COLD handle on the utility sink some five
feet away. "The brushes are still soaking," he managed to articulate
in spite of the iced teaspoonful of Skippy he was still working on. Pink
Soap. Work the brushes. Clean your instruments. Rinse.
Jesus Savior, wash away / All that has gone wrong today / Help me every
day to be / Good and gentle, more like Thee. Bless Daddy and Mommy and...
"Jacob!"
That did it. She hadn't remembered what was so important about calling
her younger brother by his newfound nickname, Jake, but she would pay
for her mistake over the span of the next five minutes, the room hung
in silence. She would try again:
"Jake"
"Hang on there while..." his voice trailed off as he used the
X-Act to carefully cut the masking tape without slicing into the canvas.
He had worked a good part of last night with the stretcher bars and bulldog
carpet nails and trying to keep all the angles square and keeping the
sweat drops off the duct canvas and no way was he Donna slice into this
nice, new guessed canvas and ruin it all. He set the blade down.
"'Jake an' Winnie,' you should've said."
"Huh?"
"I said, 'Jake an' Winnie,' you should've said. Jake 'cause o' me
and Winnie 'cause o' my new dog."
Carrie winced. Another new friend. By age twenty-eight, Jake had amassed
a list of fifty pets he had kept and loved and lost over the years. This
made fifty-one. She sighed, knowing the pet would receive adequate love,
yet lack responsible care. She moved the toast and put the grocery bag
down on the plaster column. A slow man's still life. Food for the
day.
Tuesday was fine and Wednesday was better and cooler than it should have
been. But Jake knew that Friday was just two calendar squares away - he
put the fineliner between his teeth and grabbed the feedstore calendar,
exing another day closer to the party.
Go tell it on the mountain, O'er the hills and everywhere; go tell
it on the mountain
The canvas was ready.
Opaque White.
There's something
about a white canvas, primed for paint, ready to receive the first stroke
of a loaded #3 brush: you can sense a near-personified apprehension to
that which it is about to receive. No matter if the artist at the other
end of the stick is named Vincent or Leonardo, the canvas is always most
content in its static state: no pain.
No loss.
["For every masterpiece the artist has created in the past,"
the gessoed cotton reasons, "there must have been nine or ten failures
.... Don't tell me La Grande Jatte had no throwaway sketches, no conté
crayon workups sitting in the dustbin, no failed attempts because the
dots were too big or the colors were off or the framing had begun to sag
here and there and it's just too much risk and....]
When Thursday arrived Jake and Winnie were both sitting down. Jake was
kneading an eraser out of nervous habit and staring through squinted eyes
at the blank canvas. He had stayed in that position, resolute, for most
of the morning. The sun was behind him. Then his lips moved without a
sound as silent maternal instructions came back to him: "Compose
the subject in your mind first--see? You gotta know what you want to create
and then it just comes out from your heart."
It just comes out from your heart.
Like love? He stood quickly and it scared Winnie so that her muscles tensed
and started out of fear, and for a second, for a brief moment, Jake had
found the moment of inspiration. Creation was his as he roughed in the
scene with a coarse brush, ignoring for now any detail that might detain
his constant motion. The composition wouldn't have been recognizable to
anyone but Jake; still, he moved in and out through the void like Ray
Charles, confidently swaying with green and black and blue, green and
black and blue. Jake hovered over the water jar and got paint in his hair
when he guided it behind his ear. And angelic Winnie watched in dog-amazement,
longing to understand. The process continued until noon. He had a headache,
not from the fumes but from a bad habit of holding his breath while he
worked. Val Salva.
He looked at the acrylic story in front of him, eyes transfixed, while
he stepped backwards until he was blocked by the bedroll on the hardwood
floor. Still staring, lips still moving silently he began to nod his head
as his eyes narrowed to slits and the corners of his mouth turned joyful
in a strange downturned smirk that sufficed for a smile. It was a good
enough start, he thought. He rested.
Outside (past the window, past the garden, past the gate) there were three
kids arguing about money. The sound made Jake rise out of his bedroll
and yawn and walk toward the bookshelf and take down the leather leash
and approach the dog and announce, "Walk."
He pulled the keychain off the cuphook.
They made their way through the garden. Jake took slow, guarded steps
when he saw the children and verified they were the same ones who had
spied on him several times during the long days of that summer, probably
making bets about the origins of 'the idiot-boy who lived in the garden
studio.' They heard he was given a weekly allowance of art supplies from
the hobby shop. Charity, they said, from the owner of the store who had
once given oil lessons to Jake's mother.
They continued past the gate and past the three children (standing, quiet
now in a huddle) and headed across the street and downhill, letting his
fingers drag rhythms across the fence pickets, feeling the heat from the
sidewalk give way to the indifferent grass, and then down toward the ribbon
of water to pull the boat from the underbrush and loosen the padlocked
chain.
They would be gone on the water until supper.
Crimson Red.
Following bread and
rice and beans at the main house, Jake and Winnie went back to their place.
That night the painting continued with fervor. He had borrowed enough
electric lamps to fill every available socket. The tungsten light was
causing Jake to mix a slightly jaundiced palette, but he painted with
peace and happiness. The afternoon on the river had revived him, and he
worked until well after midnight.
The ivy-covered garden studio was partially hidden from the road during
daylight, but when he was up late, broad keystoned shafts of yellow lit
the way toward the pavement.
At the Cross, at the Cross where I first saw the light
June, no matter. It was chilly at two-thirty in the morning. Jake was
up, layering-in warm colors on the canvas, but it gave no relief to his
body, chilled to the bone. His eyes were fatigued and hands cramped but
the fear of arriving empty-handed tomorrow drove him to completion. It
was his contribution. His gift.
He had talked Carrie into the party against her will. "An anniversary
party," he explained, "t'have six or seven people like Todd
and like Marty over to the diner to remember Mama. You always said you
wanted to do somethin' like that. It's right, right?"
He remembered his sales pitch as he brushed the final details. Proud of
you. "I'm so proud of you."
Somewhere in the silent, 3 a.m. pitch black hours, Jake's isolation was
broken. The first sound was a hard knocking at the back door. It jarred
him after so many hours of silence. It continued, deafeningly louder,
insistent, yet without any voice, friendly or not. It was the only time
someone had come calling that late since --
Jake backed away from the door, looking left and right for anything to
hold - he picked up the leash and was breathing hard and trying to understand
the sound of his heartbeat pounding in his ears. Winnie was barking by
this time, yet he hadn't noticed. Jake was completely alone, afraid to
answer the knocking, afraid to call out to the main house. He looked down
and clipped the leash on Winnie and held the loop-end tight, wrapping
the slack around his wrist. With his other hand he grabbed the painting,
still damp, smudging it with the palm of his hand and backed toward the
front door. The second sound was the nob on the back door, turning. Jake
reached for the hasp to open the door opposite and provide a clear path
to run to the main house to Carrie and everything would be - "Stop,"
he yelped as Winnie doubled back and ran toward the paintbox. In a split
second's time the leash had become entangled around Jake's legs and he
compensated too far to the right and fell, shoulder-first into the glass
plate on the front door, leaving deep, bleeding marks on his left side.
The door swung wide against his weight and the remaining glass sliced
painfully past Jake's hand, through his wrist and ripped the cotton canvas
from top to bottom as the artist slumped to the floor in the doorframe,
shaking in fear as he saw the three neighborhood children sprinting back
through the garden path, their nocturnal prank turned awful, wrong, deadly.
Winnie ran toward the main house, already lit in response to the yelling
and sounds of shattered glass.
And Carrie would be the one to discover her brother in the June silence.