I READ ONCE that the act of observing changes the nature of what is observed. This is certainly true for Al and me. We are more attuned to the beauty of this old house, with its familiar corners, when Andy is here. More appreciative of the view down the yellow fields to the water, constant and yet ever changing, the black crows on the barn roof, the hawk circling overhead. A grain bag, a dented pail, a rope hanging from a rafter: these ordinary objects and implements are transformed by Andy’s brush into something timeless and otherworldly.
Sitting at the kitchen window early one morning, I notice that the sweet peas I planted years ago have flourished beyond all reason in their sunny spot beside the back door. Taking a paring knife from the utility drawer and a straw basket from the counter, I make my way to the vine and clip the fragrant blossoms, cream and pink and salmon, letting them tumble into the basket. In the pantry I take Mother’s tiny dust-covered crystal vases from a high shelf and wash them in the sink, then fill them with sprigs. I find spots for the vases all over the ground floor: on the kitchen counter, the mantel in the Shell Room, a windowsill in the dining room, even in the four-hole privy in the shed. I set the last vase at the foot of the stairs for Andy to take upstairs.
When he shows up several hours later, I hold my breath as he steps into the hall.
“What’s this?” he exclaims. “How glorious!” As he trudges up the stairs, he calls, “It’s going to be a good day, Christina, a very good day indeed.”
ONE HOT AFTERNOON I hear Andy pad down the stairs and out the front door. From the window in the kitchen I watch him pacing around barefoot in the grass. Hands on hips, he stares out at the sea. Then he walks slowly back to the house and materializes in the kitchen.
“I just can’t see it,” he says, rubbing the back of his neck.
“See what?”
He sits heavily on a stool.
“Lemonade?” I offer.
“Sure.”
I rise from my chair and grope along the wall to the narrow pantry, using the table, Andy’s rocker, and the wall for balance. Normally I’d feel self-conscious, but Andy is so lost in thought he doesn’t even notice.
Betsy—seven months pregnant and grumpy in the heat—left a pitcher of fresh-squeezed lemonade on the counter before returning home for a nap. When I lift the glass pitcher with both hands, it wobbles and I splash the liquid all over my arm. Annoyed at myself, I dab at it with a damp dishrag before carefully carrying the glass to Andy.
“Thanks.” Absentmindedly he licks the side of his hand where it’s sticky from the glass. As I settle back into my chair, he says, “You know, I spend entire days up there just . . . dreaming. It feels like so much wasted time. But I can’t seem to do it any other way.” He takes a long swig of lemonade and sets the empty glass on the floor. “Christ, I don’t know.”
I’m no artist, but I think I understand what he means. “Some things take the time they take. You can’t make the hens lay before they’re ready.” He nods, and I feel emboldened. “Sometimes I want the bread to rise quicker, but if I try to rush it, I ruin it.”
Breaking into a grin, he says, “That’s true.”
I feel a small glow in the pit of my stomach.
“You have an artist’s soul, Christina.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.”
“We have more in common than you think,” he says.
Later I reflect on the things we have in common and the things we don’t. Our stubbornness and our infirmities. Our circumscribed childhoods. His father kept him out of school; we’re alike in that way. But N. C. trained him to be a painter and Papa trained me to take care of the house, and there’s a world of difference in that.
SOME OF ANDY’S sketches are hurried outlines, a map of the painting to come—a hint of a figure, grasses growing this way and that, geometric slashes of house and barn. Others are precisely shaded and detailed—every strand of hair and fold of fabric, the wood grain on the pantry door. His watercolors are inky greens and browns, the sky merely the white of the paper. Al in his flat-visored cap with his pipe, raking blueberries in the field, sitting on the front doorstep, gathering hay; the fine figure of our dun-colored mare, Tessie, in profile. Andy sketches the scarred wooden table, the white teapot, egg scales, grain bags in the barn, seed corn hanging to dry in a third-floor bedroom. On his canvases these objects look the same, but different. They have a burnished glow.
Andy’s father paints in oil, he tells me. But he prefers egg tempera, he says, the method of European masters like Giotto and Botticelli in the late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance. It dries quickly, leaving a muted effect. I watch as he cracks an egg, separates the yolk from the white, and rolls the plump sac gently between his hands to remove the albumen. He pokes the yolk with the tip of a knife, pours the orange liquid into a cup of distilled water, stirs it around with his finger. Adds a chalky powdered pigment to make a paste.
After dipping a small brush into the tempera, he presses out the wetness and color with his fingers and splays the tip to make dry spiky strokes. He layers it over a pale wash of color or pencil and ink on a Masonite fiberboard coated with gesso, a smooth mix of rabbit-skin glue and chalk. Though he works fast, the brushstrokes are painstaking and meticulous, each one distinct. Cross-hatched grass, a dense, dark row of plantings. When wet, the colors are as red as Indian paintbrush, russet as clay, blue as the bay on a summer afternoon, green as a holly leaf. These bright wet colors fade as they dry, leaving a ghostly glow. “Intensity—painting emotions into objects—is the only thing I care about,” he says.
Over time Andy’s paintings become starker, drained of color, austere. Mostly white and brown and gray and black. “Damn it to hell,” Andy murmurs, cocking his head to look at a newly finished watercolor: Al’s shadowy figure walking down the rows in his visored cap, the white house and gray barn stark on the horizon. “This is better. Betsy was right.”
WHEN HE ISN’T upstairs painting, Andy hovers near me like a bee around honeycomb. He is fascinated with our habits and routines. How are the hens laying, how do you make a perfect loaf of bread without measuring, how do you keep the slugs from the dahlias? What kinds of trees does Al cut for firewood, what type of sail do lobstermen around here use on their boats? How do you collect the water in the cistern? Why are so many things in the house painted the same shade of blue? Why is a dory marooned in the rafters of the shed? Why is that long ladder propped against the house?
“We don’t have a telephone,” Al explains in his laconic way. “And the closest fire company is nine miles from here. If there’s a roof or chimney fire . . .”