That The Mind Hinders Itself

    Macie Mitchell

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      A mother paints white walls mustard, hoping she will birth a boy. She holds the brush between thin fingers and dips it into the bucket of paint at her feet, presses it hard against the wall and slides it back and forth, unconcerned with the way it streaks. It has only been seventeen weeks, but already she is swaddled in the rose blanket that covered her small body when she entered the world herself. Her womb is a swollen pomegranate, her hair wet with coconut oil, feet sore and belly hanging low like her mother’s. There have only been women before her.­

      When she is finished with the paint, she slouches, mocking the twisted birch that she sees through the only window in the room, sapphire venetian blinds clinging to each side, the tree centered between them. To the right of the window is a large framed print of Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries. She stares at it for a while, noticing the thickly painted waves moving into shore, the overlapping layers of sand, and the thin beams, lacking sails, painted thin with just one stroke.

      She begins to cry. She sometimes weeps for hours while looking at these boats, praying for a boy. But this time she stops shortly after she begins, stands straight, and wipes her sweating hands on the mauve dress sewn for her by the woman she met in the pews of Saint Anthony’s. Her mind moves to stained glass halos and cheap, plastic rosary beads. It moves to the woman who noticed her in a room of one hundred parishioners, who watched her flip through hymnals and mumble her Hail Marys; the woman who stitched together hand-dyed linen to cover her growing stomach.

      She lifts the dress to her knees and moves toward the window. She pulls on its wooden handle and forces it open. As she climbs through, she snags a stitch in the dress on a small nail sticking out from the frame. She twists the string off the nail and wraps it around her finger, tight, until she has enough grip to rip it from the seam.

      Her bare feet press down into the grass outside of the window. She looks to her left and takes the handle of the axe that she had leaned against the house months before. She drags it toward the tree and swings the blade at its base. It takes her just a few minutes to cut it down. She watches its white skin hit wet soil and then lights three Newport golds in a row, inhaling smoke from rotten tooth to pregnant belly. A bee stings her dirty arm and the yellow walls of her baby’s room buzz as she collapses into a patch of dandelion. From this angle, she sees the mottled belly of a wood thrush flying alone.   

      Her mind wanders to the kitchen. A can of red beans on rice can feed two for three nights, we can get by on twelve dollars a month, this was the only can of paint I could find in the garage, I hope he’s a boy, I hope he likes red beans, I hope his teeth grow straight. Her mind moves through these thoughts each time she tries to paint the room. She stays there, her limbs strewn about dandelion, for two days.

 

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      I try to paint pictures with fat brush strokes of golden sunflower. I try to imitate the irises. I think of the mulberry trees and the cypresses. I try to move my brush into the shape of an olive branch, an olive tree, olive grove.

      In December of 2002, over thirty million dollars’ worth of Vincent Van Gogh’s work was stolen from the museum named for him in Amsterdam. The paintings were taken in daylight by several unarmed men, some of whom were security guards hired to protect the paintings. I imagine these men, their hard cheeks and bald heads, their weak forearms and failing hands unable to bear their weight. The paintings were only missing for a few hours before police found them in an abandoned car nearby.

      I used to steal books from the school library. I used to rip out paintings and shove them into my coat pockets. I would bring them home for my mother and she would hang them on the walls. The librarians knew and trusted me, so I never got caught.

      Among the paintings stolen by the thieves in Amsterdam (and by me from my school’s library) was Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen, one of Van Gogh’s earlier works that depicts a group of people leaving a church, all dressed in black. The original sketch of this painting was sent—along with a letter—to his sick mother in 1884. It contained only one person, a peasant girl, standing in front of the church with a spade in her hand. X-rays of the painting indicate that Van Gogh later added the other church members to surround this woman. He also painted autumn leaves on the previously bare trees, making the work more colorful, although the feeling of the painting is still grim.

      I think what attracted me—and maybe the thieves—to this painting, was its blurred figures with their smudged faces bleeding into the bushes growing behind them, the way the church leans to the left as if the wind is pushing it that way. I think I am attracted to its ability to make one feel remorse but not understand why.

      Vincent began his career in the darkness of northern Amsterdam, similar to Rembrandt, with maroon circles beneath eyes, cream bonnets against shadowed skin. Black chairs, black potatoes, black shoes. Everything was dimmed. Lacking the color he is now famous for, his earliest paintings are still the most worthy of theft.

      We don’t talk about this darkness. But this is where many of us come from. We begin painting with black ink on our closet doors, alone on the steps of churches, in our unborn baby’s rooms. We don’t talk about Van Gogh’s sick mother. We only talk about the time he ate yellow paint and how he smeared onto canvas at least eighteen images of olive trees between 1889 and 1890, during his stay at the asylum in southern France. Couple Walking among Olive Trees in a Mountainous Landscape with Crescent Moon, The White Cottage Among the Olive Trees, Olive Trees Against a Slope of a Hill, Olive Trees with Yellow Sky and Sun.

      The Saint Helena Olive is the only type of olive tree that has gone extinct. In the late 19th century the trees became very rare, only twelve to fifteen of them growing in the world. They were eventually thought to be extinct, until a single tree was found on a cliff near Diana’s Peak in August of 1977. This tree was nearly unsalvageable, suffering from numerous fungal infections, which may have been worsened by damage sustained during attempts to conserve it. Its discoverers managed to save it, but the last remaining cultivation died in 2003.

      I wonder what they thought when they saw this lonesome tree alive on a cliff in the middle of the South Atlantic. I wonder if Van Gogh ever saw a Saint Helena Olive. I wonder if they even grew in France, if their branches twisted through the fields of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where he painted so many olive groves in his solitude of 1889. My mind often takes me to the lonely woman he painted in front of the church, her dress dark and the trees bare. I wonder if this woman was his mother and I think about my own, standing alone in her mauve dress, crying over boats.