wheat field with crows€¦ · “yes, madame,” he said. “it serves to keep the sun out of my...

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WHEAT FIELD WITH CROWS

Auvers, France, July 1890

On the day he was to be murdered, Vincent van Gogh encoun-

tered a Gypsy on the cobbles outside the inn where he’d just eaten

lunch.

“Big hat,” said the Gypsy.

Vincent paused and slung the easel from his shoulder. He tipped his

yellow straw hat back. It was, indeed, big.

“Yes, madame,” he said. “It serves to keep the sun out of my eyes

while I work.”

The Gypsy, who was old and broken, but younger and less broken

than she played—because no one gives a centime to a fresh, unbroken

beggar—rolled an umber eye to the sky over the Oise River Valley,

where storm clouds boiled above the tile roofs of Pontoise, then spat at

the painter’s feet.

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C h r i s t o p h e r M o o r e

“There’s no sun, Dutchman. It’s going to rain.”

“Well, it will keep the rain out of my eyes just as well.” Vincent stud-

ied the Gypsy’s scarf, yellow with a border of green vines embroidered

upon it. Her shawl and skirts, each a different color, spilled in a tattered

rainbow to be muted under a layer of dust at her feet. He should paint

her, perhaps. Like Millet’s peasants, but with a brighter palette. Have the

figure stand out against the field.

“Monsieur Vincent.” A young girl’s voice. “You should get to your paint-

ing before the storm comes.” Adeline Ravoux, the innkeeper’s daughter, stood

in the doorway of the inn, holding a broom poised not for sweeping but for

shooing troublesome Gypsies. She was thirteen, blond, and though she would

be a beauty one day, now she was gloriously, heartbreakingly plain. Vincent

had painted her portrait three times since he’d arrived in May, and the whole

time she had flirted with him in the clumsy, awkward manner of a kitten

batting at yarn before learning that its claws may actually draw blood. Just

practicing, unless poor, tormented painters with one earlobe were suddenly

becoming the rage among young girls.

Vincent smiled, nodded to Adeline, picked up his easel and canvas,

and walked around the corner, away from the river. The Gypsy fell in

beside him as he trudged up the hill past the walled gardens, toward the

forest and fields above the village.

“I’m sorry, old mother, but I’ve not a sou to spare,” he said to the

Gypsy.

“I’ll take the hat,” said the Gypsy. “And you can go back to your room,

out of the storm, and make a picture of a vase of flowers.”

“And what will I get for my hat? Will you tell my future?”

“I’m not that kind of Gypsy,” said the Gypsy.

“Will you pose for a picture if I give you my hat?”

“I’m not that kind of Gypsy either.”

Vincent paused at the base of the steps that had been built into the

hillside.


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S a c r é B l e u

“What kind of Gypsy are you, then?” he asked.

“The kind that needs a big yellow hat,” said the Gypsy. She cackled,

flashing her three teeth.

Vincent smiled at the notion of anyone wanting anything that he

had. He took off his hat and handed it to the old woman. He would buy

another at market tomorrow. Theo had enclosed a fifty-franc note in his

last letter, and there was some left. He wanted—no, needed to paint these

storm clouds before they dropped their burden.

The Gypsy examined the hat, plucked a strand of Vincent’s red hair

from the straw, and tucked it away into her skirts. She pulled the hat on

right over her scarf and struck a pose, her hunchback suddenly straight-

ening.

“Beautiful, no?” she said.

“Perhaps some flowers in the band,” said Vincent, thinking only of

color. “Or a blue ribbon.”

The Gypsy grinned. No, there was a fourth tooth there that he’d

missed before.

“Au revoir, Madame.” He picked up his canvas and started up the

stairs. “I must paint while I can. It is all I have.”

“I’m not giving your hat back.”

“Go with God, old mother.”

“What happened to your ear, Dutchman, a woman bite it off?”

“Something like that,” said Vincent. He was halfway up the first of

three flights of steps.

“An ear won’t be enough for her. Go back to your room and paint a

vase of flowers today.”

“I thought you didn’t tell futures.”

“I didn’t say I don’t see futures,” said the Gypsy. “I just don’t tell them.”


8


He set his easel at the pitchfork junction of three dirt roads. Three

wheat fi elds lay before him and a cornfi eld behind. He was nearly fi n-

ished with the painting, the golden wheat under an angry blue-black sky

swirling with storm clouds. He loaded his brush with ivory black and

painted a murder of crows rising from the center of the picture into an

inverted funnel to the right corner of the canvas. For perspective, so the

painting wasn’t entirely about color on canvas, although many in Paris

were beginning to argue that all painting was just color, nothing more.

“And what will I get for my hat? Will you tell my future?” Self-Portrait—Vincent van Gogh, 1887

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S a c r é B l e u

He painted a final crow, just four brushstrokes to imply wings, then

stepped back. There were crows, of course, just not compositionally con-

venient ones. The few he could see had landed in the field, sheltering

against the storm, like the field workers, who had all gone to shelter since

Vincent had started to paint.

“Paint only what you see,” his hero Millet had admonished.

“Imagination is a burden to a painter,” Auguste Renoir had told him.

“Painters are craftsmen, not storytellers. Paint what you see.”

Ah, but what they hadn’t said, hadn’t warned him about, was how

much you could see.

There was a rustling behind him, and not just the soft applause of the

cornstalks in the breeze. Vincent turned to see a twisted little man step-

ping out of the corn.

The Colorman.

Vincent stopped breathing and shuddered, feeling in every muscle a

vibration, his body betraying him, reacting to the sight of the little man

as a recovered addict might convulse with cravings upon the first sight of

the drug of his downfall.

“You ran from Saint-Rémy,” said the Colorman. His accent was

strange, indistinct, the influence of a dozen languages poorly pro-

nounced. He was round-bellied and slope-shouldered, his arms and legs

a bit too thin for his torso. With his little cane, he moved along like a

damaged spider. His face was wide, flat, and brown; his brow protruded

as if to keep the rain out of the black beads of his eyes. His nose was wide,

his nostrils flared, reminding Vincent of the Shinto demons in the Japa-

nese prints his brother sold. He wore a bowler hat and a leather vest over

a tattered linen shirt and pants.

“I was ill,” said Vincent. “I didn’t run. Dr. Gachet is treating me here.”

“You owe me a picture. You ran and you took my picture.”

“I’ve no need of you. Theo sent me two tubes of lemon yellow just

yesterday.”

“The picture, Dutchman, or no more blue for you.”


10


“I burned it. I burned the picture. I don’t want the blue.”

The wind tumbled Vincent’s painting off the easel. It landed faceup

on grass between the ruts in the road. Vincent turned to pick it up and

when he turned back, the Colorman was holding a small revolver.

“You didn’t burn it, Dutchman. Now, tell me where the painting is or

I’ll shoot you and find it myself.”

“The church,” Vincent said. “There’s a painting of the church in my

room at the inn. You can see, the church is not blue in life, but I painted

it blue. I wanted to commune with God.”

“You lie! I have been to the inn and seen your church. She is not in

that painting.”

The first fat raindrop plopped on the little man’s bowler, and when

he looked up, Vincent snapped his paintbrush, sending a spray of ivory

black into the Colorman’s face. The Colorman’s gun fired and Vincent

felt the wind knocked out of him. He grabbed his chest and watched as

the Colorman threw his gun to the ground and ran into the corn, chant-

ing, “No! No! No! No!”

Vincent left the painting and the easel, picked a single, crushed tube

of paint from his paint box and put it in his pocket, then, holding his

chest, he trudged down the road that ran along the ridge above town a

mile to Dr. Gachet’s house. He fell as he opened the iron gate at the foot

of the stone steps that led through the terraced garden, then crawled to

his feet and climbed, pausing at each step, leaning on the cool limestone,

trying to catch his breath before taking the next. At the front door he

struggled with the latch, and when Madame Gachet opened it, he fell

into her arms.

“You’re bleeding,” said Madame Gachet.

Vincent looked at the red on his hands. Crimson, really. Not red. A bit

of brown and violet. There weren’t enough words for the colors. Colors

needed to be free of the constraint of words.

“Crimson, I think,” said Vincent. “This is my doing. This is mine.”


11

S a c r é B l e u

Vincent awoke with a start, gasping for breath. Theo was there. He’d

arrived from Paris on the fi rst train after word came from Dr. Gachet.

“Calm, Vincent,” said Theo in Dutch. “Why this? Why this, brother?

I thought you were better.”

“The blue!” Vincent grabbed his brother’s arm. “You must hide it,

Theo. The blue one I sent from Saint-Rémy, the dark one. Hide her. Let

no one know you have her. Keep her from him. The little man.”

“Her? The painting?” Theo blinked tears out of his eyes. Poor, mad,

brilliant Vincent. He would not be consoled. Not ever.

“You can show it to no one, Theo.” Vincent convulsed with pain and

sat upright in the bed.

“Your paintings will all be shown, Vincent. Of course they will be

shown.”

Vincent fell back and coughed, a wet, jarring cough. He clawed at his

trousers.

“Give it. Give it, please. The tube of blue.”

Theo saw a crushed tin tube of paint on the bedside table and placed

it in Vincent’s hand.

“Here, is this what you want?”

Vincent took the tube and squeezed the last little bit of ultramarine

blue out onto his fi nger.

“Vincent—” Theo tried to take his brother’s hand, but Vincent took

the blue and smeared it across the white bandages around his chest, then

fell back again, letting out a long rattling breath.

“This is how I want to go,” Vincent said in a whisper. Then he died.


wheat field with crows€¦ · “yes, madame,” he said. “it serves to keep the sun out of my...

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