Haint Blue

I’ve painted maybe three hundred porch ceilings in this county, and I could count on my two hands the ones that weren’t blue. The Pruetts’ was going to be one of them.

They’d bought the old Combs farmhouse out on Lick Branch, the one with the wraparound porch and the tin roof. I quoted them six hundred and forty dollars, materials included, to scrape and prime and paint the porch ceiling white, and they didn’t argue it, which tells you they were from Louisville. They were doing the whole place over the way people do now, gray floors and black light fixtures and a sign over the door that said GATHER. Nice people. Mr. Pruett worked on a computer from the kitchen table. Mrs. Pruett had a garden she was fighting with. They had a big yellow dog named Biscuit that would lean on your legs till you fell over.

The porch ceiling was haint blue. Has been since the house was built, I’d guess, painted over every few years by whoever had it. That soft blue, kind of a robin’s egg gone a little green. You see it all through these mountains and down South, and if you ask why, half the people will tell you it keeps the wasps from nesting and the other half won’t tell you anything.

“It’s so dated,” Mrs. Pruett said, looking up at it with her hand over her eyes. “We want it bright. Clean.”

I said yes ma’am.

* * *

The first morning I was up the ladder scraping, an old woman come walking down the road from the next place over and stood at the bottom of the Pruetts’ steps. Hazel Sizemore. I knew her a little. She’s ninety if she’s a day and still walks to the mailbox a quarter-mile each way.

“Earl,” she said. “What are you doing to that ceiling.”

I told her.

She stood there a long time. Then she said, “Don’t.”

I asked her why not.

“Because it’s blue,” she said, like I was simple. “It’s blue so they think it’s water. They can’t cross water. You paint it white and there’s nothing up there to stop them coming in under it.”

I said, Miss Hazel, it’s their porch.

“It ain’t,” she said. “It’s Lizzie’s porch. Lizzie Combs. She just ain’t the one sitting in it.” And she went back up the road with her mail.

I’m not going to make out I’m a brave man or a stupid one. I’m a house painter with a truck payment. I finished scraping and put a coat of Kilz on it and then two coats of Bright White, semi-gloss, and it looked real nice, I’ll say that. It made the porch look like a magazine. Mrs. Pruett clapped her hands.

* * *

She called me four days later. Wanted to know if there was something in the paint that’d upset a dog.

Biscuit wouldn’t go out the front door. He’d go to it, she said, and stop, and back up with his tail tucked, and go stand in the hall and whine at it. They’d been taking him out the kitchen way. Then that night she’d woke up about two and heard the porch swing going. Chains creaking, regular, back and forth, back and forth. She thought the wind. But Mr. Pruett went down and turned on the porch light and there wasn’t any wind. Swing was just going. Nobody in it. Then it slowed down and stopped like somebody had put their feet down.

“I know how that sounds,” she said.

I said I’d come look at it.

* * *

I went out the next afternoon. The swing was hanging still. Biscuit watched me from the hall through the screen door and wouldn’t come out to lean on me.

I looked up at my ceiling and I didn’t say anything for a while.

It was scratched. All over. Long thin marks in the new paint, four or five side by side, the way your fingers would leave them if you dragged your nails down a wall. Hundreds of them. But that wasn’t what made me go cold in the legs. What did that was I got up on the ladder to look close, and I seen the paint was curled up at the edges of every scratch, the way paint curls when you push through it from behind. From the far side of the boards. Like something had been up between the ceiling and the roof, in the dark, digging down to get at the blue that wasn’t there no more.

Or digging up. Trying to get back where it was.

I couldn’t tell you which. I still can’t.

I told the Pruetts I’d made a mistake with the primer and I’d redo it at my own cost. I went to the hardware in town and they mixed me a gallon of haint blue without me even saying the name of it, the man just looked at me and nodded and got the card out. I scraped my own white off. Every scratch. I primed it and put two coats of blue on it and it was dark by the time I was done and I didn’t stay to see how it dried.

* * *

Mrs. Pruett called me a week after. She wanted me to know the dog was fine.

“He goes out the front now,” she said. “He lies on the porch all day. Right under the blue. We can’t get him to come in at night.”

I said that was good. I said dogs know.

“And the swing’s stopped,” she said.

I said that was good too.

There was a little quiet on the line. I could hear their house behind her. A clock. The dishwasher going.

“Earl,” she said. “Do you do inside ceilings?”

I asked her why.

“No reason,” she said. “Only the rocking chair in the front room. The one that came with the house. My husband keeps moving it to the corner and it keeps ending up by the window. Facing the porch. And at night you can hear it going. Back and forth. Very slow. Like somebody sitting at the window, wanting back out on her porch.”