Log Cabin

WHEN THEY GOT HOME FROM THE HOSPITAL, SHE PUT THEIR BABY IN THE BASSINET NEXT TO HER SIDE OF THE BED. Six feet away, she rocked herself in his mother’s rocking chair and wished he’d start a fire on the hearth in front of her. She wrapped the brown knitted blanket around her shoulders and tried to imagine what scene she could paint next.

He came to take the baby. Said he wanted to let his son hold their newborn. But his son, hers only by marriage, had pneumonia. She protested and put up a fight to keep the baby in the room with her. Why would he risk infecting their newborn? she asked him. He won, even though he didn’t have a good answer.

At the windows, January’s snowdrifts rose like dough up and over the sills. The exhausted apple tree sprawled its frozen naked branches across her field of view. The chickadees landed, fed, and launched themselves, relentless in their pursuit of seed. She stood and opened the flue, ignoring the pain and rush of blood. From the copper bucket, she selected six branches to use as kindling and tossed them onto the ashes. As the gray dust settled, she tore strips of newspaper, half-heartedly crumpled them, and let them tumble where they may onto the wood. She held her face in her hands and dropped down on all fours, struggling to catch her breath, unsettling more ash. She knelt to finish building an ignitable pyramid, but as quickly as she could, she shifted her weight to her left thigh and sat on the slate, gingerly, facing her work, aware of the injury that would take weeks to heal.

The first match refused to burn for very long. She struck several more that caught and died. Only after she turned her face away, redirecting her heavy breathing and dripping chin, did one stay lit long enough. She touched the match flame to the paper and the fire was started. She made her way into the rocking chair again and forced herself to rock.

Her sister-in-law, Beth, walked into the bedroom sometime later. She thought she had heard Beth’s husband’s voice at some point recently. He shuffled his way through the door carrying a rocking chair. The two of them, Beth and Tom, lived up the road next to their furniture workshop.

Tom set the rocking chair down and stood behind it. “Beth’s woven this one with green and red Shaker tape to match your eyes and hair. How you doing?”

“Thank you. It’s lovely,” she said, wondering why people hide their kindnesses for so long.

Beth sat in the new rocker and said she’d brought a pot of soup over for tonight’s dinner.

Tom looked up and pointed to the painting over the fireplace. “This one has lasted a year, hasn’t it? Maybe more than?” he asked.

Then Beth asked, “Didn’t you paint that on your honeymoon?”

She had painted it with a sense of hope surging within her. It was the hope one has when marrying someone who has failed in marriage before. She had taken a leap of faith into his story. Gravity had pulled her to him with the force of the moon. On that canvas, she’d painted a seascape, their view from the hotel. A set of small persistent waves rolled onto the beach of this ocean cove’s embrace. The Pacific was now far across the country, but until today, she was transported back there when she looked at this painting. She was one of the black cormorants resting after a long morning of diving, now perched above tide pools, drying her feathers in the sun. Until today, she could smell the redwood-scented breeze from an ancient forest that shall not be cut down. She’d heard the call of an adolescent eagle in the canopy.

Now she could feel her hope, like a butterfly who leaves behind uneaten portions of its cocoon, making its escape.

“You want it? You can have it, Beth. In trade for the rocking chair.”

“Our chair is meant as a gift to you,” said Beth.

He brought their crying baby back, handing her to his wife. “She’s hungry or soiled. Don’t know which.”

“I’ve been rocking in this chair all alone without any life on my lap. Where’ve you been? Putting her in danger, that’s where.” She pumped her legs to get a good motion going and began to nurse their baby.

She asked Beth, “Could you take Billy for another night?”

“No, Billy’s staying with us.” He patted Tom on the back and escorted him from the room.

Beth stood and said, “I’ll go see how Billy’s doing.”

Billy would always stay with them. With Billy, came all his shortcomings. Her husband’s name will end with him. Their daughter will never be the son he’d always hoped for. She looked down at her baby and felt like she’d known her for years now. Knew for sure she’d become a swimmer, a painter, a writer. Maybe she’d turn out to be a builder too, like her dad.

Two years ago, when they were dating, he’d built her a one-of-a-kind painting apparatus in a small alcove of his log cabin. At an arm’s reach above her head there is a scroll of canvas rolled up around a four-foot rod. Endless feet of rolled blank canvas. He offered it and the space to her, dedicating it to her future creations. It became her art studio. Every few days, when inspiration strikes, she pulls down a length and affixes it to her customized easel. She paints with acrylics because they dry fast. Once completed, the painted canvas can be cut free of the scroll and framed. He is the frame maker.

All the paintings are intended for their walls, but most don’t stay longer than a few weeks. She cannot look with joy upon those hung in rooms where she and her husband have exchanged harsh words, after he has stormed out, after she has slammed doors, after they have said things that they’ll regret. Her paintings, anchored in a place in time, were made with naivety. Within each is her optimism, the hope that no negative experience will take place near them.

But when the conflicts happen, when his insensitivity suffocates her, then paintings become artifacts, unmoored and tossed on violent seas. Once a painting is tainted, it fails to evoke positive emotions. She can no longer feel the inspiration that prompted her to paint particular circumstances, objects, feelings, and scenes. She can only feel the failure and the sorrow, the concretions of unhealed pain. Feelings of profound loss swell inside her. She becomes tangled up in nostalgia and is drowned by remorse.

With her sleeping baby in her arms, she walks through the house. She looks at what remains of those things she has portrayed in paint. Above the bookshelf in the den is exhilaration, the way the airwaves feel when a violin becomes a fiddle. Next to the back door are magic tricks, too slick to figure out. In the kitchen, but headed for the town’s bakery soon, is a scene where melody and harmony are portrayed as a rhubarb tart enveloped in the flakiest of butter crusts.

She rounds the corner to their largest room, the living room, where no paintings hang. But on the wall next to her husband’s chair are butterflies, pinned, mounted to a board. He made their shadow box himself. Below it is his small table upon which sits his pipe stand and one pipe at rest. Once in this room were her renditions of blue phlox, the green of fried garden-fresh tomatoes, a cardinal at the feeder. These have all left their cabin. What remains here is his tribute to what once was alive. Askew in one corner is his favorite canoe paddle, dusty, cracked, forgotten.

The paintings that used to decorate this room have been dismissed over time. She let them go, one by one, after fights during the months when she was pregnant. She didn’t want them to be suspended here, commemorating those moments when she felt pain and happened to look up at them.

Beth tiptoed into the room. “Goodbye, take good care,” she whispered.

She smiled and wiggled a pointer finger. Turning away from Beth and toward the window, she studied the gnarled apple tree branches. She knew what her next painting would be. She whispered to herself, “Strife clings to moments like pipe smoke.”

She remembered when Tom asked her why she gave away her paintings for free. She explained that no one profits from loss. He didn’t understand. So, she said something like, “New paintings need to be made in order to promote life’s evolution. They help me invoke the liberation that each new day brings.”

Sometimes the paintings are given to friends, sometimes they make their way to library walls, school hallways, the market, the gas station. Whomever wants them can have them. Her husband agrees that they do not have room for all of them. From basswood, maple, and ash, her husband likes to build their frames. He begins building even though he knows only half their dimensions. He knows the width, but not the length.

They live in a house hewn by hand long before he met her. Each tree was praised by loggers before they were felled. He was there. From his acreage they were taken. He chose pine, cedar, and oak. The builders became his friends. He learned to build a cabin with joints so well-fitted that little metal was added. He abides in the knowledge that this is a shelter for his family who congregate within select trunks and sap that dried long ago. He sees the knots for what they are. Those oval dark concentric markings are the remnants of branches.

She feels how strange it is to live within fallen trees so fixed in time, no longer able to grow and change. She is unaware that this juxtaposition bothers her so much, that it fuels her drive to renew her creations day after day. All they can agree on is that she gathers together moments in time and expresses them colorfully. It saves her somehow, and she can continue doing so.

He joked once that her paintings are the logs of her life even as she dwells in logs. She laughed, but not long afterward she reconsidered while silently fuming. She told herself that she is sheltered by dead trees. Framed by her husband. He doesn’t realize he’s the problem. She doesn’t tell him his carelessness is killing her. She will never paint the painting that she can look at forever. Hopefully, she’ll feel differently about their daughter.