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On the wall of my grandfather’s house there is a painting. It hangs above the mantle where a portrait might be, spelled and warded so that stray embers will not catch the oils and dissolve the image to smoke, or perhaps so that young girls won’t run their candy-sweet fingers over the textures of the impasto. My grandfather, since the dawn of my years, sits there in his wide-tall chair in front of the fireplace. He puffs away on his briar pipe, and stares deep into the painting at details I cannot see. The light of the fire makes the shadows long on his face and the years longer still. I wonder how long those shadows stretch in the depths of his heart.
The painting itself might appear unremarkable to those accustomed to viewing art without observing. Two gnarled trees grow in a strath of calico grasses under a clouded sky. The land is dull in the light of the thunderheads building in the sky, with only slivers of sunlight peeking through at the tops of the clouds. The trees, pines, stand on either side of a stream, forming a direct line between each other. I once told this to Barnabas who reminded me that two objects in space are always in a line. Mathematically correct, but missing the point I think.
I’m not sure Barnabas has ever looked at the painting, and without stopping and really looking, it could be a piece out of a corporate boardroom or decorating the toilets of a fancy restaurant. Moody, but in a prosaic way. Where a glance provides enough feeling to make you long for the moors, but shiver and be glad to be safe and warm inside. But if you stop and look at the painting, you can feel its pull. You can feel there is something there.
Once when I was old enough to trade my plush toys for storybooks, my grandfather motioned me to his feet. I rolled up in a ball, my back hot against the fire clutching my copy of Babbity Rabbity as a totem.
“Once,” he started in the way elders have always told their stories to the young. “Once upon a time there were two boys.
“Two boys with linked fates. One lived high in a tower with jewel-velvet hangings, the tang of sky on his breath. The other lived below the earth, where light filtered green through fathoms of water, where one must ward off the chill of rot with the brilliance of fire. But when one is water like the lake and one is air like the sky, where are you to meet but the red-brown earth? And meet they did, eyes the color of the tree canopy in sunlight and eyes the grey of churning seas, cautiously judging, searching for belonging. But how could boys from high and low see on the same level?
“They clashed in every which way – in thought and fist and word. The world, too, clashed around them – through them. How they hated one another. Until one day they saw each other in the light of a cursed flame. One seeing eyes clear like storm clouds, and the other eyes the green-gold of gillyweed in the light of the sun. No longer could they pretend that they were denizens of separate worlds. No longer could they deny the strength of their feeling. From that day on, they were cursed with this knowledge.
“When you are older, my Snidget – older than you are now but still young, you may understand. How deep hatred can go. Sometimes, it lances so deep as to pierce a tender heart. In the hollow of such a wound, seeds can grow. Seeds of obsession, of longing — of desire for something more beautiful than the tatters of the world you fight for. All of these seeds can be nurtured into love – or deep regret.
“The boys grew into men, as boys often do, their lives diverged in appearance yet entwined into a knot, bound by the curse. It was nourished by longing glances and sacred dreams and most of all by fear of feeling and of ill-eased hope. And every time they were eye to eye, through happenstance or fate, their tongues fell heavy in their jaws. For you see, this curse could be lifted, the life within them changed from burden to ease. With such simple words the curse could be lifted. But each man was too proud and so the curse grew, roots next to nerves and veins, reaching down to plant into the earth, fixing them to a single possibility. They lived through the years like this, in hard-earned cheer and mundane sorrow, the curse sapping the unrealized joy of a path untrodden.
“One spring morning, the green-eyed man, heavy in soul, journeyed to a sacred stream that, rumor had it, granted wishes. He walked up hill and dale following the river to its source. And on his way there he found his dearest wish. The grey-eyed man across the river with a wish of his own. Would you believe that the earth itself held her breath as they regarded each other across the water? The current slowed to a stop and the grasses ceased to sway. For every call seeks a response. And with the men called there, existence narrowed to a pinprick, only on them. I wonder what chance they could’ve had in a different world, one where they met with kindness and grace instead of animosity at this riverbank, and long long before. The men shuddered against themselves, stilling arms that wanted to reach and hugging their sides in the only comfort they could accept. Pride and habit silenced their voices. It could have rescued them, but they turned away from each other. Their wish granted and then rejected, the curse consumed them. The roots in their legs reached loam at last, reaching as deep as their feeling for each other and their heartwood spread like a blush until the men were as wooden as they had felt all their lives.
“And so now those men are anchored in the earth, by their action and inaction. By the depths of their repressed love and the stillness of their tongues. Still they are in that quiet strath and also here before us in this fine painting. There they are, standing as solitary pines. Touching the sky always, forever. Reached into the earth instead of around each other. Together, but forever apart.
“So my dear Snidget, I want you to remember the power of words and the power of love. To be free with your feelings in the face of the unknown, so that you might never regret what you didn’t say to someone precious and so that bitterness will not twist your hope from the greatest gift of the soul into a mere knot of wood.”
So then I knew why the painting tugged at me with that unspeakable gloom: a tragic tale I could not understand at my callowed age. I looked to my grandfather, watching the fire dance on his round lenses, a light that did not reach the eyes behind them. I asked my grandfather, “Why do you stare at it so?” but he did not answer me. Not so directly. Instead he rose from his chair, walking past me to the fireplace. Silhouetted, I saw him. His hands trailed along the mantle’s edge before coming to rest at its center. I could not see, but I knew what lay there. A filigree box, so ornate that even I did not dare touch it, though at times I desperately wanted to. I heard the release of a latch and the creak of hinges and a deep sigh that filled the room. All was silent, except for the ticking of the grandfather clock from the far wall. A long moment and the shut of a box and my grandfather returned to me, lifting me fondly into his lap.
“Enough of that,” he started, smiling broadly and blinking away the gathered water in his eyes. “How about some Babbitty Rabbitty, Snidge?” He took the book from my hands as I offered it to him. I traced the features of his face, a treasure map to stories. From his wild pepper black hair down the branched scar on his face to the tip of his nose. He laughed and kissed my head. I settled in against him. His deep voice resonated peacefully against me as he read and I drifted off to sleep.
It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in my grandfather’s lap, a long time since that night, and never again did we speak of it. A memory locked away in my heart, but when I look at those trees, it feels like a secret trying to escape from the labyrinthine prison that holds it. Alone in the room, with the courage of years, I go right up to the painting, the heat of the fire roasting my shins. Ever so delicately, I run my fingers on the filigree box. It’s warded not by magic but by years of attention and care, and it is easy enough to open. There, resting inside on midnight velvet, is a wand. Not my grandfather’s wand, nor my mother’s nor any wand I recognize. I run my finger along it with just a sliver of magic. Hawthorn, unicorn hair, and by the looks of it around ten inches in length. I look at the wand then back up at the painting. And I know that it is a story and also not just a story. I think of what my grandfather might have looked like when he was younger, dark haired and sleeping next to the sky. I vow to myself to heed my grandfather’s words. I just manage to close the lid of the box when my grandfather shuffles into the room.
“I love you, Grandfather,” I say as he sits into his chair.
With a glance at the painting, he looks back at me and beckons me over for a hug.
“I love you, too.”