Fishbelly
In my Aunt Edith’s studio I am quiet.
I have not been told to be quiet, I am just quiet, for her
studio—with its intricate tools and brushes and long-necked
lamps on benches, its smells of paint and standing water and
shaved pine — seems to me a place to be quiet, watchful, reverent.
I shut the door, slowly, and stand o= to the side. I lean up
against the wall with my hands behind me, at the small of my
back. I feel with my palms and fingertips the whorled, rough-cut
boards, and I watch my Aunt Edith. Her back is to me, one lock of
silvery hair hanging down about her face. With her full, calloused
hands, hands nearly as big as a man’s, she pulls the wet print from
the face of the wood—all orange and fishbelly and pale blue,
maybe the scab hills south of Billings at daybreak—and she
studies then the colors and densities and textures, and finally
hangs the print up with the others to dry. She is slow and deliberate, and maybe this is why I am quiet: her attention demands my
attention, her care says there is something happening here beyond work or play. And the prints themselves, which seem, like
the best of stories, to wake me up, to fairly pull the breath from
my lips. I look at them. And look again.
“Oh,” Aunt Edith says, turning now, her wrinkled face sliding
into a wide smile. “I didn’t hear you come in. Goodness, how
quiet you were! Shall we get some ice cream? Hmm? I think
maybe I would like a bowl of ice cream. What about you, Joe?”
I am too old to be talked to this way, fussed over, but Aunt
Edith, who is really my great-aunt, my grandfather’s older sister,
has no children of her own and doesn’t know, and so I don’t
mind. Also, I very much want a bowl of vanilla ice cream dotted
with raspberries fresh from her garden. “Yes,” I say. “I think I
would like a bowl of ice cream too.”
Later, we go to dinner. I get ready in the third-floor bathroom.
Aunt Edith’s house is grand and yellow and sits on the rimrocks
above the Yellowstone River and the city of Billings. You can
see forever out this window, clear to the Bighorn and Beartooth
mountains. You can see as well downtown — the thin streets and
tall hotels and shiny bank buildings — which is where we’re go-
ing for dinner. I scrub my face with soap, comb my hair, tuck
my shirt into my jeans, and lace up my best sneakers. I rush and
scrabble down the first flight of stairs, which curves around and
down the cone-topped turret of the house, and step more care-
fully down the next flight of stairs, in case Aunt Edith is ready
and waiting for me.
She isn’t. I stand around and study the framed photo of Aunt
Edith’s dead husband, his long, bearded face. He looks kind
enough, I guess. Maybe a little disappointed. He failed, I have
heard, at farming, and Aunt Edith supported them by teaching
school. After he died, Aunt Edith started painting and making
prints instead. Her work hangs in all those bank buildings down-
town now, is up at the Yellowstone Art Museum too, and all over
the color inset pages of the journals she has stacked on the far
end of the kitchen table. My Aunt Edith is an artist. It’s thrilling
and obscene to say it. Artist. It is a word that sounds like the look
of red wine in upturned glasses or pictures of Spain. Aunt Edith
is as well an atheist. I know an artist makes things, but I don’t
quite understand what being an atheist entails, though I think it
means her dead husband will not be waiting for her in heaven,
like my mother says my father will be waiting for me.
Darkening
What you do is open slowly the thick furnace door, for just as soon
as it is cracked the coal fire roars and oily smoke and sparks rush
out. You take a great, long metal tool — which has a looped handle
on one end and another handhold in the middle that you twist to
open and close the claw on the far end— and reach into the fire
and claw up and lift the clinkers, the tortuous looking byproducts
of burnt coal, and drop them one by one into the ash can, a black
and rusting metal bucket in front of the furnace. Then, your face
and hands and neck washed with dry heat, you hang the claw
back up and take a thin, long-handled shovel and scoop up what
cinders and loose ash you can, though much of it lifts, rolls, and
eddies in the fire’s twisting wind, and shovel it too into the can.
You relatch the furnace door and breathe a moment. In the crook
of your arm, you wipe your ashy, blasted face.
You are not done. You pick up the ash can by its handle—
careful not to let the hot bottom bump against your legs— and
climb the basement stairs and shoulder your way out the front
door, the cold October wind suddenly in your lungs, and haul
