Eve Colgate watched the truck go, then looked at me, her eyes probing my face as you might test an ice field before you walked out on it.
'What did he mean, sharecropping?' I asked, to be saying something under those eyes.
She turned back to the drive, watched the dog trotting up it. 'That's what they all call it. The small dairy farmers are all giving up. They're selling their herds to whomever will buy them, and their land to Appleseed. Then they contract to Appleseed, putting the pastureland into vegetables. They grow what Mark Sanderson tells them to and he pays them whatever he wants.' She ran a hand through her blunt gray hair. 'A lot of people are bitter about it. But they do it, because they're farmers and this is what they know, even on land that's no longer theirs.' She gestured with the folder in her hand. 'Harvey's grandfather settled that farm. But fifty cows aren't enough anymore. I have even fewer. We're talking about consolidating our herds and investing in new equipment.'
'Will that pay?'
'I hope so. I don't know what Harvey will do if he has to sell his cows, or his land.'
'He says he'll go to Florida.'
She said, 'He's never been farther than Albany.'
'What will you do?'
'I—' She paused. Her crystal eyes moved over the hills and pasture, ocher and charcoal and chocolate under the bright sun. 'I have options Harvey doesn't have. Don't misunderstand me: this farm supports itself, it's not a hobby. But neither am I totally dependent on it. I have no mortgage, no bank loans. I can weather bad times.' She turned away from the drive. 'Shall we walk?'
I lit a cigarette, turning to shelter the match from the wind, and we headed down the slope behind the house. The dog sniffed at me. I showed him my hand and when he stuck his cold nose in it I carefully scratched his ears the way Eve Colgate had. He wagged his tail grudgingly and bounded away.
Eve Colgate watched the dog, then looked at me appraisingly. 'He usually won't let a stranger touch him.'
'Professional courtesy,' I said.
She continued to look at me for a short time, absorbing me with her colorless eyes. Then she laughed.
'They say I'm eccentric, Mr. Smith,' Eve Colgate said as we paced over yielding earth criss-crossed by papery yellow grasses.
'Is it true, or just convenient?' I asked her.
'It's true enough.'
'Where are we going?'
'I need to show you something.'
We didn't speak again, striding side by side through last year's field. As we walked I could feel Eve Colgate's mood change. She grew distant, tense.
Finally we came to a small outbuilding, weathered siding and corrugated steel roof in a clearing where a dirt road curved up from the valley. We stopped at the padlocked door. Eve Colgate looked at me, looked down at the mud at her feet; then, her lips drawn into a thin line, she pulled a single key from her back pocket and thrust it into the lock, jerked it open. She pushed the wide sliding door just enough to make an opening a person could fit through and she went inside.
I followed her into a single square room, flooded with unexpected brightness from a skylight. Unexpected, too, was the fact that the interior was finished: sheetrock walls and ceiling, white; gray deck paint on the broad-plank floor; double-glazed frosted windows, allowing light but no view out or in; and heat, electric heat from baseboards running all around the place.
The warmth and closeness of the air, after the sharp cold of the morning, was unpleasant, and it intensified the strong, heady smell of turpentine that rolled toward me as I came through the door. But that wasn't what stopped me dead two steps inside. What did that was the canvas leaning on the wall before me.
Six feet high, eight feet wide, unfinished, but already with the power of a nightmare, barely contained. Brutal, slashing lines; sullen, swollen forms whose weight seemed to threaten the canvas that held them; a darkness, a lack of clarity that made you want to shake your head, clear the film from your eyes. When you did that, when you stared long and deep enough, the thick grays and decaying browns, even the black, began to unfold, revealing the taut wires of color within them—blood red, cobalt, the green of a Kentucky sky in the minutes before a twister hits, other colors I couldn't begin to name.
I had seen paintings like this before. They were in the Museum of Modern Art, at the Whitney, at the Tate. There had been at least one in every large twentieth- century show at every major museum for the last thirty years. Landscapes, I'd heard them called, but that was only by people who needed distance, needed to name and so deflect the pain and anger that lashed out from these paintings to rip open the places inside you where you hid things you had let yourself believe were gone forever.
'Jesus Christ,' I said finally, and then again, 'Jesus Christ.' I looked at Eve Colgate, who was standing in front of me, a little to one side. Her, back was rigid, as though she were expecting a blow, bracing herself. 'You're Eva Nouvel.'
She turned to face me. Two hot spots of red shone on her cheeks, but her eyes were completely calm. 'Yes,' she said, in a voice that matched her eyes. 'And now you know something that not a half dozen other people in this world know.' She pushed past me and out through the narrow opening. I turned back to the unfinished canvas for a long look, then stepped over the threshold, joining her in the crisp, bright day. In silence we skirted a pasture where black-and-white cows nosed at a carpet of hay. Beyond the pasture was an apple orchard, where new, mature, and ancient trees ran in parallel rows up and over the hillside. We walked beneath them under branches studded with buds. The dog threaded in and out as though stitching the orchard together.Eve Colgate, without looking at me, spoke. 'You recognized my work. I didn't expect that. It may make this easier”.
At the edge of the orchard a low stone wall curved sinuously along a ridge. Eve Colgate leaned on the wall, her arms hugging her chest, her back to the sun. I leaned next to her, watching the shadows of the high, cottony clouds move across the hills.
'If you know my work,' she said quietly, 'perhaps you know my reputation.'
'Eva Nouvel is a recluse. A hermit.'
'That's right.' She put her hands on the wall behind her and slid onto it, cross-legged. The black dog settled into a round pile in the sun.
