The Painter From Lindell

Witward was not a kind man and knew no kindness himself. His broken childhood home and removal from it rendered love unfamiliar to him. Now: Now, his hair was gone; his legs had grown weak, and his arms sore. Time had taken the tax owed to it by the miserable, sapping the vigor he had desperately fought to hoard for himself.

The ancient man pulled his equally ancient jalopy in front of the general store, the rubber of the tires squeezing against the concrete as the rough surface scraped across familiar grooves in the rims. The hinges of the driver’s door groaned, and Witward forced it back into the frame. Time had been unkind to Witward, and in return, Witward had been unkind to the car.

Friday was the day that Witward did his shopping. He would jot his chicken scratch onto whatever scrap paper he could find in the kitchen: rope for things, onions, oil can, new pigments. They were never things he needed, just excuses, really, to let him wander somewhere that wasn’t the stagnant, boring home he had spent almost all of his life trapped within.

But before any shopping was done, he stopped at the Country Diner, where he got his same-old breakfast: sunny side up, you burn it, he ain’t payin’, keep the bacon crispy, and it better be on top like a blanket; coffee, hold the everything, sugar’s for the weak and milk is for the wee little babes. Three generations of the Oakes family had served him this meal every Friday for fifty-four years, and they had each gotten it wrong precisely once. Jackie was the most recent since her grandmother retired and her mom moved on to greener pastures.

“That mom of yours ever gonna get off her high horse and come back around?” Witward asked precisely halfway through his meal after the Davidsons had left and just before the Haber family came in.

“Good horses is hard to come by, Mr. Witward. I’m a bit scared of ‘em though, so don’t worry,” she would whisper, “I’m stickin’ around for a while.”

“Eh,” Witward would grumble, “Girl like you, why, you’re supposed to be ridin’ off into the sunset. You’ve got a life to live, why, a husband to find. Someone to take care of you.”

“Oh, but I do love takin’ care of myself,” she would tease. He would admire her tenacity, the way she never let him get away with his rudeness. He paid a tax to her the same as he paid to live; only for Jackie, that tax came as a missing piece of bacon for every unsubtle remark.

He’d leave a good tip and go on with his day, never wishing her the best.

The Calhoun’s General Store, run by Ron and Bethany, stocked all the items on his list. They were a younger couple and two of very few in the town that could tolerate Witward. Bethany found amusement in the old man’s crotchety and incorrigible demeanor, while Ron enjoyed the small paintings and doodles Witward would deliver as silent apologies.

He would say the same thing every time as he clambered back into the driver seat:

“I’m sure you can do better than that husband of yours.”

And she would reply, same as every other time, “I’m sure I could too, but I don’t want to. He’s too sweet on the eyes,” and gives a little wink and a gentle laugh. For just a second, Witward would grin, quickly wiping the smirk off his face and replacing it with his usual frown.

Bethany would help the elderly man carry out his strange assortment of items, waving goodbye as his car clunked wearily out of town, up the road, and onto the hill a few miles out of town where Witward’s home stood.

Nearly ten days passed, and Witward never returned.

With a significant concern for the habitual man’s break from routine, Bethany hung up her apron and drove out of town to that old house.

Wild growth had overtaken the well-tended grass, the rose bushes had become as unruly as a young girl's hair, and the car sat un-tarped in the sun.

She rang the police, who knocked on the door, and when no answer came, they let themselves in. They confirmed the worst and took Mr. Witward’s body to the morgue, ruling his death a suitable and fair one from old age.

The medical examiner made a call to the only relative Witward was known to have—his foster brother, Alexander—and in three days, Alexander had sorted out his affairs at home and came to the small town of Lindell.

Despite its little quirks, the historic brick hotel on Main Street was a pleasant stay for anyone. The steps from the back parking lot sloped slightly to the left, and cracks in the sidewalk occasionally caught the edges of shoes. The water ran too cold and, after a loud burp, would suddenly run far too hot, and the toilets flush so loudly they could wake up the whole town.

But Alexander didn’t mind. For him, it seemed a good way to experience the life of his estranged brother. Staying in his brother’s home wouldn’t feel proper; Alexander had never even seen it, let alone stayed there overnight. A fact which seemed strange to Bethany, who met him at the hotel on the day he arrived.

“Witward said you were just up last month, I thought,” she told Alexander.

“I—well, maybe my brother misspoke. I’ve never been to Lindell. Why, I haven’t seen Witward in a decade.”

“Just seemed like he was always talking about you. Visiting with you, your kids. Making trips out to Northrup for the holidays.”

“Talking about me? That doesn’t sound like Witward at all, at least, not how I remembered him.”

“Well, talking—complaining. I’m not sure there was much difference between the two with him.”

Alexander feigned laughter, fighting back the urge to roll his eyes in embarrassment. “No, now that’s more familiar.”

“So, this was a lifelong habit for him?”

“Oh, sure. For as long as I’ve known him—which ain’t his whole life, but well, damn close.”

The two shared a laugh before she suggested, “Why don’t you go see Jackie at the diner? Ron and I’ve paid up for a meal for you. Thought you might be hungry after the drive.”

“That’s especially kind of you, ma’am. I appreciate it. Forgot to have myself some breakfast this morning, so I'm aching to fill my belly.”

“Jackie will take good care of you. She was so fond of your brother.”

“I—well, sure. I’m sure she will. Thank you again, Mrs. Calhoun.”

She showed him down a block or two and left him at the diner to return to the store. Alexander walked in, and the young woman greeted him rather snarkily, “About damn time!”

He seemed taken aback by her attitude, and so she clasped her hands and apologized sincerely, “Oh—I didn’t mean nothing by it. Your brother, he just—”

“Was rather a rude man, I know,” Alexander replied.

“Oh,” she said, hanging her head, “No, not at all. He had just said once that you and him had the same sense of humor. Liked rough banter, he told me.”

“Witward said that?” He asked, and the girl nodded vigorously.

“Clear as day. Told me a number of times, actually,” she muttered, “Kinda hard to forget.”

Alexander smiled, knowing well what the young lady muttered despite having not heard it clearly. His brother played like a broken record. Now, it seemed someone had replaced the record with something entirely foreign.

He didn’t have the heart to tell the girl the truth, and so he replied, “Well, enough back and forth. Where’s the damned food, huh? Didn’t your mother teach ya’ better?”

And the girl smiled, skipped off toward the kitchen, and made up the same breakfast Alexander’s brother had every Friday. They'd never spoken of it, but Alexander found their shared love of sunny-side-up eggs and nearly charcoal-crisp bacon amusingly coincidental.

He enjoyed the meal and left a good tip and went on his way. His kids had helped him pick out his new car, and he had worked hard to keep it in good condition, figuring it would likely be his last, with his age considered.

Witward’s home was just as Alexander expected: tidy beyond a reasonable degree, obsessively organized and neat, each choice deliberate, and each decoration and piece of furniture a direct expression of control. It was perfect, save for the dust that had built up, but Alexander could forgive his departed brother for something beyond his control. If ghosts could clean, Witward surely would have, and so his brother concluded rightly that ghosts could not.

Alexander spent some time just lingering about, room after room, taking in the silence of a home he had never known but that his brother had built. He built it alone, with no wife, children, or guests. Even when he still spoke to them, Witward never invited Alexander and his family for a visit.

It was a great surprise to him when the last room he explored was a studio. Piles of blank canvas leaned against the wall, bins filled with crushed, empty tubes of oil paint, and broken palettes blotched with dull blues, purples, greys, and blacks. There were no warm colors save for one tube of burgundy paint.

Alexander, wholly unfamiliar with the hobby, wasn’t sure how much any of this would be worth in a sale. He looked through the blank canvas to find a price tag. The pile was unstable, and the rugged snow-capped mountain came tumbling despite his attempts to clear it safely. Behind this useless pile was a finished painting, left perched upon the hidden windowsill to dry, and kept far away from all the others and even further from the pile of canvases that appeared unfinished or abandoned in their subject.

The bottom left-hand corner bore the title Painter, dated just a few days before Witward’s death. It was his last piece and, to Alexander’s untrained eye, the finest.

It was a self-portrait, though only his brother’s old, crooked back was visible, hunched over a canvas within the real one. His brush stroked diligently, putting the final touches on the work. In this painting of a painting, Alexander noticed a much younger, frightened man physically recoiling from the ridicule of children and adults in front of a home.

The home was their own from childhood: the children, their classmates, the adults, their teachers, all of whom always misunderstood and harbored suspicion of Witward for the consequences of his birth. Despite all explanations, they remained unable to understand. It was not Witward’s fault his flesh and blood parents resented him; the innocence and dependence of a child is no crime to have committed. And it was certainly not his fault when the government did the proper thing in removing him from a home where he had only known indifference and neglect.

Alexander set the painting up on the easel and sat across from it, looking over each little detail with the same intensity as the monstrous eyes. Finally, it struck him that his brother, who had never expressed his own emotions, had expressed his fear too late—his actual fear—the fear that had lingered with him his whole life, the same way Alexander now haunted the abandoned home.

This home didn’t feel like home, and Alexander’s home never felt like a home to Witward. They had tried, of course, but sometimes, these things just don’t stick. Their parents thought they had done something wrong or that Witward himself was wrong: broken, unfixable, and unable to love. But it is rather hard to love when you’ve never known what it feels like to be loved.

Alexander thought of the rejection he had always felt from Witward and realized it had lingered with him similarly. He had done just the same as their parents. When Witward sought to reject Alexander, he distanced himself from his brother. He felt lonely, like his brother never cared for him and had no desire to care for him.

But now he saw it clearly in the painting: that his brother had always felt that way, that he had always been lonely, truly and honestly lonely, not just in feeling but in practiced reality.

It took Alexander two days to catalog all his brother had left, a task made easy by Witward’s compulsions. In the following weeks, they would hold an estate sale to sell all of Witward’s earthly possessions, leaving everything as required by law. 

All with the exception of one thing, which was taken and framed carefully before being displayed prominently on the wall behind an old, retired oak desk in Alexander’s office.

Few days remained in his life now, he became keenly aware of that with the death of his brother. But he made the most of his retirement that remained, and every day, took a moment with his morning breakfast—the sunny side up, the burnt bacon—to look at the fears that bogged down Witward’s pursuit of meaning and joy.

He raised his coffee mug to his brother’s arched back, sipped from the scalding dirt-colored contents that ushered like the sea from his shaky hands, smiled hopefully to the rising sun, and carefully tucked a sliver of his yolk-stained egg in its bacon blanket on a second plate.