Snicker Doodle

I looked at his painting and snickered.  His women looked like sullen wax candles melted weeks ago because they stood too close to the hearth.  He could not afford the slow constant heat of good coal, even though we were in the coal fields where Zola had researched Germinal.  Every night as the sun disappeared I scavenged behind the coal wagons that hauled the miners’ piles to the rail spur.  But last night, a pair of armed constables chased me off, one hollering “Van Gogh, if I catch you, you’ll wish you’d never come to visit your failed-preacher brother.”  

The coal hopper was empty as we finished the bread and wormy apples that was our dinner. He went to the vestry and gathered a pile of dusty hymnals and discarded bibles in his arms and returned to the cottage.  Once Genesis and Exodus were sacrificed, Vincent threw whole volumes onto the grate.  The flames leapt high, pages like orange-rimmed black leaves scattered onto the scarred wooden floor and the women’s forms now shook as if seized by St. Vitus’ dancing frenzy.

I slapped an ember that had landed on my knee and decided I could do no more for my troubled brother and decided to leave at first light. “I am ambitious.  I have connections.  I know what sells and I can tell customers what will sell next year and they will buy it.  But not your black, brown and gray doodles, Vincent. Good night.”