DAUBS OF COLOR IN THE COLD (Pt. 5 - The End)

I don’t know how I forced myself out of the painting the way I did. I’d been standing there, tangled in the venom of Uncle Mason’s words. The clouds above had stopped drifting. The ripples of the canoe’s wake stood mid-crest. The waterfall had frozen over. I had to escape. I spun away from the painting and planted my face in my hands.

The Uncle Mason’s voice echoed through the gallery with unflappable calm. “Albert Bierstadt was born in Prussia, before Germany even existed. His father was a cooper, which in early eighteenth-century Europe made him next to worthless. They came here when Albert was only a year old. His parents did better here than they ever would have in Prussia. How could Albert not embrace America and everything that came with it? He traveled to Düsseldorf in his twenties to learn how to paint, but he came back and made America the subject of everything he did. At the time he caught a lot of shit for his showmanship and skill at advertising himself. But entrepreneurial flair and selling yourself—that’s baseball and apple pie, and it served him well. America gave Bierstadt everything. How could he not believe it was the work of God?”

I turned toward him slowly. Once I could lift my face out of my hands, I asked, my hands open in a plea, “Do you really believe that?”

“It doesn’t matter what I believe. He believed it.”

“Then he was an asshole.”

“Anna, our beliefs don’t take form in a vacuum. You know that. They take root in what we know, what we experience every day. You know a nice middle-class suburban existence, so you have the luxury of taking the time to learn about the roots of institutionalized injustice and then passing judgment. You don’t know what ‘hard-scrabble’ means. You don’t understand what it means to be so worried about keeping a roof over your head and feeding your kids that you don’t have the time or energy to worry about the predation of the system. To you fixing the system is a worthwhile goal. To people you’ve never even met the system is just a boot coming down on their throat, and they’re just trying to position themselves so that when it connects, they’ll still be able to breathe.”

“Are you saying I don’t have empathy?”

Uncle Mason’s head sank. He put his hands on his hips.

“Are you?”

He raised his head, his eyes cast to the ceiling. Or maybe the heavens. The pop and squeal of the fireworks were going off. In the gallery’s lachrymose silence they sounded closer than they were.

“Uncle Mason!”

His shoulders sank. His arms fell to his sides. His head drooped. He looked like the condemned hanging from a scaffold.

“Uncle Mason?”

“Shut up!”

His outburst struck with a bone-shattering thud. I was afraid to move. The sole of my flip-flop scuffed the cement floor, and I bristled at the inferno that would spill from my uncle’s face as he turned to excoriate me into ashes. But he never turned around. No conflagration. I steeled myself against the incoming worst.

“This was a mistake,” he said in a mohair whisper, more to himself than to me. He started to amble across the room. “I shouldn’t have brought you here.”

“Because I don’t agree with you?”

He shook his head. “Because of that. Because you think that’s why I’m frustrated.” He reached the wall, turned, and collapsed into it. Directly above his head was a painting called Marat Assassinated. “I’m sorry, Anna. I look at the young woman you’ve grown into over the last six years, and I’m… proud isn’t a strong enough word. I sometimes forget that you’re still a kid. I know you don’t like to hear that. No teenager does.”

Uncle Mason’s eyes drifted off me and into space, onto something I couldn’t see. “When I was your age,” he said, “I would fight with your grandparents all the time. The Iran-Contra hearings were on television every day, and… I could not understand how good people like my parents didn’t find it disgusting. I couldn’t understand why they weren’t as angry as I was. I remember screaming at my father, ‘Don’t you care what they’re doing down there?’ and him saying, ‘It has nothing to do with us.’ I felt like my parents, these people who gave me life, who I trusted for everything, weren’t the people I thought they were.”

He looked back at me. His face was soured by fear. “I want you to learn, Anna. I want you learn to not be so scared that you confuse frustration with hate. I don’t want you to hate your family.”

“I don’t hate you, Uncle Mason.”

“No. Not me. Your parents, your grandparents, everybody who doesn’t see what you see. Disagree with them all you want, but know that they will always love you.”

“What are you talking about?”

He swallowed. “Talk is cheap, Anna. It’s not what people say that matters. It’s what they do.” He bolted to his feet and marched. I followed.

To the muslin curtain.

Uncle Mason grabbed a corner and pulled. The curtain fell and revealed a painting of postmodern watercolors, abstract non-patterns that seemed to depict nothing.

“This… isn’t Guernica?” I asked.

“It’s the only piece in this whole gallery that’s an original.”

“And we can go in it?”

“Yes.”

“Who painted it?”

“I did.”

“This is yours?”

He didn’t answer.

“Uncle Mason?

He was drowning, flailing. And he was fighting but not the water. Every line of rescue tossed at him he was grabbing and throwing back. He drew a deep breath and said, “The people who created the prints in this gallery made me paint this. It was part of the price.”

I turned back to the painting, tracing the brush strokes with my pupils, trying to see what kind of tithe this was supposed to be.

Uncle Mason said. “I want you to go in without me.”

“Why?”

He wouldn’t look at me. “Once you’re in, you’ll see.”

I kept looking at him, trying to read him, to feel him. He looked old, and I felt tired. His eyes quivered, and I felt frightened. His jaw was viced, threatening to shatter his teeth.

I took a breath of adamantine resolve and turned back to the abstract. At first it was a series of swirls that overlapped, interlocked, and bled into one another. Different shades of red from a deep crimson to a milky pink. As I circled the painting with my eyes, I noticed lines, sharp delineated bolts of black that darted in and out of the red. At the outer boundaries of the painting they were wisp thin, barely noticeable. I followed them through the whirlpool of red to the center of the picture. The crimson was mottled with black mold. At its heart, small enough to barely draw attention, was an ember of darkness beyond black, a deep puncture that exposed a void weaving through reality. I stared into the absence and found myself enveloped in a chill so bracing I clutched my arms around me. I looked back into the red, almost as if expecting to find warmth. Instead an indefinable horror joined with the cold. I felt like I was choking, and as I jerked for air, I entered the painting.

I found myself standing in an alien netherplace, an enclosed rotunda that had risen from a swamp like a desiccated hand and threatened to curl into a fist. Obelisks stood dripping with putrefied flesh. A penannular pool of ichor and tar hissed and belched flights of obscenity. Steps, pock-marked and eroded by rage, starved to devour the feet that would tread on them. Columns excreted by some long-slain menace in its death throes. Every accent and flourish of the rotunda had been mined from open wounds. The entire edifice was a violation.

Five figures stood before me, their faces hidden by impenetrable shadow. Drawn over their heads were hoods that grew out of their shoulders and chests like necrotic tissue stitched together. They stood otherwise naked, pale sexless humanoid malignancies with blackened veins visible through what served them as skin. Their hands were pressed together in prayer. Each finger was a wriggling tuber loosing noxious secretions from its head.

The figures were gathered around a cauldron that was roiling in an unknown tongue. Above, spread-eagled and suspended by chains at her hands and feet, was a woman. She was beautiful, no older than thirty, and dressed in an intricately woven robe with a plunging neckline. She was crying, begging for her life.

Uncle Mason bled out of the darkness. He walked in slow deliberate steps, weighted down by grim imperative. In his right hand he held what looked like a bronzed paintbrush. The teardrop bristles glittered in the cauldron’s iridescence. He held it like a dagger as he approached the woman. She cried out his name in a hysterical plea.

Uncle Mason drove the paintbrush into her heart.

He watched the anguish drain from her face as her life poured out of her chest, into the cauldron. He watched the blood spiral down the bronzed handle of the sacrificial stylus. The light in his eyes was snuffed out, and in the darkness his resolve abandoned him, leaving him alone with just the agony of consequence. He stood still as stone. As he watched the stream of blood slowly die to a trickle, he retraced every step he’d taken on the road to this moment. A freezing wind was sweeping away his tracks, leaving him lost in a cold waste, his only company the wind’s haunting moan. He held his goal in hand and found it weightless.

I backed away until I was in the gallery once again. I turned and saw Uncle Mason seated on the floor, a condemned man. I backed into the wall.

I whispered, “Was that—?”

“Melissa.”

I slid down until I was seated on the ground across from him. All I could do was cry and look at the man.

He couldn’t look at me. “She didn’t want to have kids. She… didn’t want me to be a father.” He looked up at the painting. “She was right. That is my self-portrait.” He bowed his head before his tears erupted.

I wanted to ask him for the full story, his complete biography that detailed his every decision, the thoughts that had nudged him toward his every crime, even the ones I was afraid to imagine. But I couldn’t bring myself to make the simplest stammering utterance. An angel had cut off his wings and presented them to me. I thought of The Night Café and how Van Gogh had given a prostitute his severed ear, gift-wrapped and all. Was Uncle Mason crazy?

No. He wanted me to learn something.

I watched the man weep as I puzzled through the lesson, starting at the sides and working my way to the center. He’d lied when I first asked what was behind the curtain. And it was a lie to scare me out of ever wanting to peak beneath that veil. He had never wanted me to know who he was. Had been. That wasn’t who he was anymore. Or was it? Wait, why did he keep this gallery at all? Uncle Mason had wanted this gallery to learn to understand people he didn’t agree with. He had committed murder to achieve it, a murder he instantly hated himself for. He found the crimes of the white men who commissioned the paintings, who painted them, who committed the acts glorified in them as disgusting as I did. Because he was one of them. But he showed me his self-portrait. He’d decided that I needed to know who he was. He made that decision in the middle of our argument, after I’d challenged him to accuse me of having no empathy. Then he’d said, “This was a mistake.” He’d brought me to the gallery for a different reason.

And I was seized by a horror I’ve never since experienced again. I understood why he’d brought me down in the first place, and I remembered my mother was still above me, watching the fireworks. I understood that he’d showed me his self-portrait because he’d changed his mind, and I remembered Melissa, dying, shattered by the shock of what the man she had loved was doing.

I looked at Uncle Mason seated across from me. I was revolted by what he had done, but I couldn’t deny the guilt spilling out of him. I felt betrayed, but I had no desire to exact vengeance. I stood and walked over to him. I placed my hand on his shoulder. He never looked up at me. I walked out of the gallery.

I never saw my uncle again. A week later the compound would be completely cleared out and put on the market without a word to any of us. My mother would call him as soon as she found out. He would tell her that he was moving the offices to Toronto and would need to base himself out of there, but he would still take care of anything anyone needed. My mother would say that was typical of him.

I have no memory of walking upstairs, through the house, into the backyard. But I remember looking up once I was there and seeing the fireworks still going off. The clouds had rolled in and swallowed the moon and stars. All the lights on the property had been snuffed off. The only illumination in the oceanic darkness was from Uncle Mason’s fireworks.

I saw my mother standing among some of my other family. It was a random grouping. Her, Uncle Rick, Aunt Theresa, one of my older cousins, and one of my younger. I was only able to see them by the light of the pyrotechnics. As the incendiaries exploded, they painted my family in rainbow fire. Every color wrapped around them and made them glow.

I wedged myself beside my mother. She turned to me, smiled, and pulled me close. I rested my head on her shoulder. There was no discord, no divorce. Mom and I just watched in silence as fiery daubs of color painted the cold above.