Better Late Than Never

This story contains content related to (victory over) substance addiction and sexual abuse. ********************************************************************

Once the holiday hoopla was over, I hung out around my back door firepit, feeding the flames with fallen pine boughs and sipping on a bottle of bourbon I kept tucked in my breast pocket. Between that and the fire, I didn’t seem to feel the cold front that was promising a storm later in the day.

I shook my head at the bottle in my hand. I knew it wasn’t a great habit, but I had my reasons, although that never impressed my 12-step sponsor who’d called earlier in the day. She liked to check in around New Year’s to make sure I wasn’t guilt-tripping myself. “Resolutions set you up to fail,” she liked to say, “Whereas with a decision, you can always tweak what’s not working. Just start walking. Take some action. The only changes that matter are the ones you actually implement." As usual, her words sounded good. But I was the kind of person who could go a long time without making a move. “Call me when you’re ready to change,” she always said before she hung up. And we didn’t talk that often.

I was only mildly soused when a commotion from the front of the house alerted me that a UPS driver had a signature-required delivery. Those guys were always anxious to get on their way after making the hour-long drive from Seattle out here to the boonies, and I tried to be quick about it. But today I stopped cold when I saw my cousin Celia’s return address on the package. I knew what she’d sent me, and I thought for a moment about refusing it. Was I ready for this? Would I ever be?

“Ma’am?” said the driver, watching me while I stood there doing nothing. I finally shrugged and signed, because to turn it down would have been like cutting off my own arm.

Nonetheless I felt a little numb watching the UPS truck disappear down my property’s one lonesome road. I was sure that what I held was Celia’s biography of our family’s notorious Uncle Hank, a reclusive and mysterious painter who’d taken the art world by storm in his youth, frustrated collectors and afficionados for decades with pranks and canceled appearances, dangled his genius under the nose of those who cared, and then abruptly disappeared and died without ever re-entering the limelight. When Hank Scott’s skeleton was discovered on a remote Idaho ranch in 2010, there was nary a canvas to be found. Celia’s book would be the first new development in Hank’s story since then.

There was a strange irony in the book being delivered here, because this piece of land had been Hank’s old address - before he burned it all down, that is, in what everyone assumed had been a drunken binge, or a drunken rage, or a drunken stupor. Something drunken. Talk about full circle. Here I stood with the book in one hand and my best friend, Wild Turkey, in the other.  

Wrestling with an upset stomach that had nothing to do with the alcohol, I carried Celia’s parcel inside the house as if it were a bomb and laid it carefully on the bureau. I went to the hutch for one of my best snifters. This was a three-finger situation.

  In a way, this book really was a bomb. For years, Celia and I had been sharing our dirty secrets about Hank, and when his body was found, we spilled every last story that remained, but only to each other. That’s when Celia birthed the idea for the book. We suspected there was a stash of Hank’s highly coveted art prints kicking around somewhere in the family, forgotten in somebody’s basement. With those prints and our secrets, you could make one hell of a splash.

So, it looked like Celia had finally commandeered the prints and written the manuscript. Suddenly I couldn’t wait to see it. I tossed the package onto the kitchen table and impatiently took fabric shears to the thick brown wrapping. The manuscript was hefty, 400 pages at least.

  My phone was buzzing, and I picked it up to hear the voice of Ricky, the only West Coast art dealer who still believed in me. Ricky never said hello. “How’s life in your little forest hide-out?” was his jaunty intro.

  “I’m not hiding out, Ricky! I’m enjoying an existence uncluttered by all the stress and useless information that surrounds you in the concrete jungle! How’s your stressful life in the jungle?”

  Ricky’s chuckle turned into a dramatic sigh. “Ahhhh….stressful! Cluttered, yes, and there’s a lot of useless information, it’s true. But some not so useless. Let me read a headline from the Times…” I heard him thrashing about with a noisy newspaper, “Here it is. Heiress’ Tell-All Will Reveal Painter’s Treasures and Crimes. They’re talking about Celia’s book on your Uncle Hank, right? And this headline is from the Pasadena News….. Publishing World Bids Millions For Scott’s Lost Prints and Biography.”

  “Yeah, she finally wrote it,” I said. “She’s been busy.”

  “And people are paying attention! Did you know it had been published?” Ricky loved delivering a scoop.

  I cleared my throat, stalling a little to increase the pleasure of one-upping him for a change. “Well……” I said, drawing it out. “The book isn’t actually published yet. In fact, as we speak, I’m holding the galley proofs in my hot little hands.”

  “You’re kidding!”

  “Not kidding. The package arrived 10 minutes ago. If you hadn’t called, I’d be reading it right now.”   

  Ricky was suitably impressed, but couldn’t resist a return to his favorite topic before hanging up. “See?” he said, “People can accomplish things. Get off your duff and paint something fabulous! Then I’ll sell it and we’ll both be rich.” It was always about money for Ricky. But I saw his point. We hung up affectionately, and I went back to the book.

  Celia had sent me the printed proofs of the book rather than e-mailing a digital copy, and that signaled her indulgence of my preference for old-fashioned reading. But as it turned out, this was just the beginning of her largesse. Clipped to the front page was a handwritten note:

Dearest Erin, As the only other person in our family unlucky enough to have been wantonly molested by our dastardly Uncle, this book needs your 2 cents. Please add it. Let me remind you that your financial woes could be solved if you’d just pick up a brush! You promised me you would….LAST year…and here we are again. I can’t bear the thought of you living on pennies when you could have so much more. So, as my dearest confidant and favorite cousin, I want you to have 50% of the proceeds from this book. That should help - til you get that monkey off your back. Don’t mean to nag, just sayin’  Love, Celia.

  On the book’s title page I saw a highlighted blank space next to Celia’s name. She’d been living for years on a fat inheritance from her father’s mining fortune, so she could afford to be generous. Sharing authorship would guarantee me a legal portion of what would probably be a small fortune.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with visions of what I could do with ample cash. Well, I could quit worrying about my future, for one. Overhaul the suspension on my jeep or – hell - buy a new jeep. I stroked my chin as the next thought flashed clearly in mind. Rehab! I could finally afford one of those expensive celebrity centers to help me kick the habit. I had always known about the low-cost, do-it-yourself program, of course, consisting primarily of pouring alcohol down the drain, divorcing drinking buddies, and avoiding liquor stores. Cause if I could ever get off the bottle, I knew I’d have a better life…but that had become a pretty big if.

All that was left of what Celia and I referred to as my “good years” were 2 large shipping crates currently stacked in my spare room. One crate held paints, brushes, palette knives, and my favorite easel. The other crate contained 7 acrylic canvases that had been called “inspired” by people who were supposed to know such things. Those paintings comprised the best work I’d ever done, and they sat there, glowing in the dark, reminding me of who I could be.

Unfortunately, those “good years” hadn’t lasted long. It seemed that by giving voice to the best part of me, I had dragged my demons to the surface as well. After the good years, my life became a swamp, with memories of Hank’s abuse taking over and shutting down every creative impulse. Any hopes I had of making it as an artist…not as some monumental scallywag the way Hank did it, but as a painter who would gratefully respect the system, enjoy the circuit, cater to the crowds, and cultivate the press…all that went right down the drain. I began drinking almost as much as Uncle Hank, then spent years tormented by echoes of shadowy afternoons in his studio.

I had started out as his favorite niece. Then he turned me into his mistress, but after this went on for years I was still only 11. By then I was his lapdog. I followed his every step, mooned over his every word. My parents, awed by Hank’s growing fame and constitutionally oblivious to my needs, noticed nothing amiss. They kept sending me back to Hank’s studio for long weekends, summer vacations…

But as fate would have it, while Hank was busy stealing my childhood, I unconsciously took something from him as well: his superb technique, his unerring eye for spatial balance. While I sat on the ramshackle couch in his studio and jealously watched him make love to whatever canvas he was working on at the moment, I absorbed his very instincts. It wasn’t until years later that I identified the feeling of sitting there, playing the role of devoted lover while the entire universe of texture, form, scale and placement, proportion, gradation and light flowed into my cells as literally as if I had been hooked up to an I.V. of Hank’s brilliant life force. While I reclined and watched, and he stood gallantly painting, our beings seemed to merge. If what we did together in the dingy bed was illicit, surely to highjack his virtuoso soul was even more so. It was as if his brushstrokes issued from my own hand, as if I examined the canvas with his own painterly eye, as if I stood back on his craggy legs to gaze in satisfaction at what I myself had made.

All this crap came out in therapy, of course. But after working so hard to remember, soon I wanted nothing but to forget. That’s when I really got to know my bourbons! Later, as Hank’s estate was settled, it became clear that nobody in the family cared about his charred wreck of a homestead, and the cousins deeded it to me without a second thought. I cleared the burned timbers and built a small house with the help of local contractors who didn’t mind working for barter. I dug up the foundation of Hank’s house and put in a large garden, and on the site toward the back of the property where his infamous painting studio had stood, I planted a beautiful apple orchard.

This was my own little paradise now, and I refused to let Hank’s ghost trouble me here, to hell with the memories. But as I stared at Celia’s book, some spooky form seemed to be resurrecting. I felt like vomiting. Instead, I poured another drink and carried the galley out the back door just in time to see that my fire had shrunken into a puny jumble of black-orange coals.

Under the trees, breathing the open air, I felt somewhat better. My head cleared. Relieved to be doing something physical, I dragged a fallen branch to my fire pit, broke it into pieces, and piled it all on the coals until golden flames leapt high. Then I flopped into the big Adirondack chair to catch my breath, and looked over at that damn book where I’d thrown it carelessly on the ground. With a spirit of grim determination, I heaved it onto my lap, and began again.

On the cover was Hank’s most famous water color, a wild and jagged seascape of the Washington coast where he’d spent his middle years, all dunes and scraggly sea grass and magenta wildflowers. You could reach into the painting and touch the sand. You could hear the flowers rustling in the brusque cross-current of wind. The placement was superb, the energy mesmerizing.

Such a tease was Uncle Hank, as flirtatious in personality as he was masterly when it came to his craft. His work just got better, and people were desperate to own him, not just his paintings, but him. Galleries, agents, critics, patrons all salivated shamelessly, because Hank was the real thing. And everyone knew it.

But he was such a horrible person! Hank had been an enthusiastic philanderer who publicly beat one of his wives, and shamelessly contested the many paternity suits brought against him for alimony. And then there were the things he did with little girls.

I skimmed through Celia’s own sordid story about Hank, then the endless chapters of his villainy until I felt heady from the beauty of the artwork, but dizzy from the misbehavior. I don’t know how much time passed while I sat there, but every paragraph received my eye, every painting my heartfelt scrutiny. By the time I turned the last page, I could barely move. Perhaps I would just sit there and have a heart attack. It certainly seemed possible.

Still holding the book in my hands, I tried to shake off the heavy feeling. Why drag Hank’s miserable history back into the national spotlight? It was easy to imagine the explosive sensation that would follow the book’s release as radio commentators and talk show hosts eagerly dissected the grisly details.

Suddenly, from down near the orchard several hundred yards away, I heard a high-pitched, howling wind. The storm was moving in. The next sound was the whiplike slashing of branches as the crowns of the apple trees let loose their bare saplings into the power of the gale. Between the cry of the wind and the clattering pitch of scraping branches, I seemed to hear some kind of voice. I can’t tell you what it said, but I felt its message arrive in my body with the force of a gunshot.

The next thing I knew, I was balancing all 400 pages of that book on the apex of my fire. Flames immediately licked the bottom pages, and a slow brown singe began to spread. To help it along, I stacked small sticks as if I were building the perfect Boy Scout teepee fire, then covered the whole mess with several haphazardly placed large logs. Soon this tangle would become a righteous blaze.

Then I turned on my heel and went inside the house. First I’d empty bottles, then I’d open those crates. And call my sponsor. I always did prefer the DIY approach.