ALL THE LEAVES OF the butternut tree had fallen today. Flossy had been watching for it these past two weeks. Leaves began drifting down as she got up this morning and got herself into her best clothes to go to Halifax. They dropped steadily as Lottie Fulton pulled into the laneway to pick her up for the long drive ahead. Though it was dark by the time they’d returned from the opening of Mealie’s retrospective at the Northgrave Gallery, she could see the tree was bare with a harvest moon glowing behind it.
After all the excitement, Flossy was weary and more than a little empty. The show had been a great success, but it was just another of the things to do for Mealie that was now behind her. Soon, all those little things would be a pile of leaves beneath Flossy’s feet and there would be nothing left but the barren limbs of loss. She had just closed the Chronicle Herald’s full-page spread on Mealie’s life and work. Tomorrow she’d send it to Ruth in Oakville.
Over the two months since her death, Flossy and Richard had been sorting through Mealie’s things, though it was clear to them she’d done a lot herself. Ruth had wanted to stay in Great Village, stay with them, but they packed her off to school with a promise that she could come back at Christmas, if she still wanted to, after she’d seen the Bishop’s Step-Cousins Barnes exhibit, for Mealie. Marjory had actually been almost helpful in the weeks after Mealie’s death. She was good in a crisis and she and Richard were talking, at least.
Mealie’s house had been appraised to put on the real estate market when Richard offered to purchase it. Now he was keeping a small apartment on campus and coming to Great Village on weekends. He’d wander across for coffee most mornings when he was there because he and Flossy had many decisions to make and an art show for which to prepare.
Jimmy checked in on her as usual, bringing his squash, potatoes and beets, but now he was talking more about the girls, the war and his own memories of their years living on the farm. She had gone to her lawyer in Truro and transferred her share of the farm directly to Jimmy and Noreen. They had both been wonderfully kind over Mealie.
She stared at the painting Richard had hung on her wall, Mealie’s Remnant, her last finished picture as far as they knew, the one Flossy had happened upon in her kitchen that hot day in the summer, oh so long ago — the rugged olive of newly turned earth, the blood-red energy at the heart of the painting, the blue-purple stippling she adored. This one she wouldn’t lend to the gallery. It would stay with her. She stroked the edge of the picture, closed her eyes and lightly ran her fingers over its rucks and wrinkles, as if from the artist’s Braille she might read Mealie’s thoughts when she was alive and creating it. But, alas, it would not speak.
A great light had gone out from Flossy’s life. All those other losses of the past, Thomas, David, her mother, they’d all been bearable because she’d had Mealie near. With her gone, Flossy had lost her language, her wall, her echo, her own Roger Fry. There would be no other who would ever know her as well as Mealie Marsh. Companionship like that didn’t come by but once in a lifetime and that was a lucky lifetime indeed. Grieving was Flossy’s study now, the delicate art of holding on and letting go.
Meanwhile, life picked up and carried on for the people all around her. They talked about the weather again, the price of creamed corn, laughed in her presence once more, told jokes, forgot names, but some days Flossy could scarcely make sense of it all. She’d never realized that joy was fugitive too, like light and colour.
And yet she waited and watched. Walking the shore these days, bundled in her warmest sweater, each vibrant autumn colour tripping down to the tired earth, the sandpipers long gone to Argentina, she observed the restless salt waters rolling in and out. She felt incomprehensible comfort beside that vast indifference, the tides that would come and go long after she was gone and any trace of her. It was the Remnant that would endure, outlast the trifling details of any one life, that small, consistent courage to pluck a string, reach for a note, finish a poem, or, like Mealie, burnish one’s spirit onto canvas. It was there that she spoke in colour, of her life, their life, any life, all life.
Flossy watched for that perfect lilac line on the far shore but the conditions seemed never precisely the same as when she and Mealie had last been there together. Other colours, though, mysteriously, seemed waiting for her to admire, some she’d never noticed before, never dared expect.
There were times when she looked out onto the bay and it brimmed with manic cerulean waters, waves tumbling to shore like children out the doors on the last day of school. Other days, with rain and fog hovering, she could see only one beleaguered ribbon of blue far out in the middle of the saddest wasteland of red muck; still the most godforsaken beautiful place she knew.