“Are you … Do you have inappropriate feelings for this boy?” Pauline asked, ever so delicately. “You sound rather smitten with him.”
Anna laughed. “No!” she reassured her. “Not at all. Not the way you mean, anyhow. What I do have is a fear that his talent will go to waste. That he’ll end up working on his family’s farm instead of doing what he’s meant to be doing.”
“You can’t save him, you know,” Pauline said. “We’re all born with limitations of one sort or another. A family that needs us or a bum leg or the wrong skin color. We just have to make do.”
Anna didn’t answer. She didn’t want to save him. She just wanted him to have the same chance as everyone else.
“What about the other boy?” Pauline asked. “The white boy?”
“Very nice young man,” Anna said. “He could be an architect, his sketches are so technically perfect. He wants to be an artist, but his drawings have no passion in them.”
“Like Jesse’s,” Pauline said.
Anna nodded. “Like Jesse’s.”
They found the shop without too much trouble and they were both astonished by the enormous roll of canvas. Fortunately Karl had thought to give them a good length of rope before they left his and Paula’s house, so with the help of the salesman in the shop, they were able to tie the roll securely to the roof of Anna’s Ford. She picked up the paints she’d ordered as well as some brushes and charcoal and other supplies. She felt that thrill of excitement she always got when she had new tools in her possession. On a whim, she also bought two stretched canvases as gifts for Peter and Jesse.
She drove well under the speed limit back to Edenton, and Pauline helped her carry the roll of canvas into the warehouse, where they set it down by one of the garage doors. A little breathless, Pauline stood with her hands on her hips and looked around at Anna’s vast working space, with its beamed ceiling, dusty skylights, and dark corners. “This is a … I don’t know … a bit of a strange place to work,” she said.
Anna laughed. “You should have seen it before it was cleaned out,” she said. “I hated it. But now it feels like home. Almost.”
“Oh my, look at this!” Pauline exclaimed, walking toward the cartoon paper where Anna had drawn her three Tea Party ladies plus Freda. “I recognize each one of them.” She turned to Anna. “You really are very good,” she said.
“Thank you.” Anna carried the sketch across the room to show her how the drawing would look in color.
“I wish I had some artistic talent,” Pauline said.
“Well, I don’t know the first thing about nursing, so we’re even,” Anna countered.
Pauline stayed a while longer, but Anna was glad when she left. Pauline was becoming a good friend, but Anna’s work felt like a greater calling at that moment than friendship. Was that a terrible thing? It was the truth, and once Pauline left, Anna happily organized her new paints and brushes and palette, feeling the thrill of excitement at the thought that she would soon be using all of them.
Chapter 29
MORGAN
July 7, 2018
The mural was entirely clean. Abraded, scratched, and worn, but clean.
And extraordinarily, nightmare-inducingly weird.
That stick in the black woman’s mouth? Once clean, it became a knife. But the weirdest discovery of all—the discovery that made me gasp out loud and had me running to Oliver’s office to drag him back to the foyer—was that one of the Tea Party ladies dangled a hammer from her hand. Like the ax, the hammer dripped blood, which stained the hem of the woman’s dress and pooled on the floor near the ladies’ feet. Anna Dale might have been crazy, I thought, but Mama Nelle appeared to have most of her marbles still intact.
Once I’d finished cleaning the lower right-hand corner of the mural where Anna had placed her rounded-and oddly distorted-looking-signature, I called everyone into the foyer for a viewing. I moved the ladder and my supplies table out of the way and all of us stood in the middle of the room. Lisa, Adam, and Wyatt on my left. Oliver and his visiting twelve-year-old son Nathan on my right. All I could see was the work that was still waiting for me to do, but everyone else seemed impressed.
“Awesome colors,” Adam said. He lightly punched my bare arm. “Nice work, Christopher.”
“Thank you.” I had done nice work. The colors popped. Not the way they would have with a coat of varnish, but still. Compared to the way the mural had looked when we’d first stretched it? A completely different animal.
“It looks pretty messed up to me,” Nathan said, and everyone laughed. I’d met Oliver’s cute son only a couple of hours earlier—he was spending a few days with his dad—but already I’d learned that this was a boy unafraid to speak his mind. I liked that about him.
“It has a way to go,” Oliver agreed with his son.
I looked at Nathan. “If you’d seen it before I started cleaning it,” I said, “you’d realize how much better it looks now. I’ll show you a ‘before’ picture later.”
“I like all the blood,” Nathan said. “It’s so sick.”
Everyone except Lisa laughed.
“If you say so, Nathan,” Lisa said, then let out a sigh. “Well”—she peeked at the phone in her hand—“I’m not happy it took two weeks just to clean this thing, but it obviously needed it. Quite a difference. And I have to say I have no idea what to make of it.”
“That Indian.” Adam shook his head. “So crazy.”
“What Indian?” Nathan asked, most likely scanning the mural for a warrior in headdress.
“He means the brand of the motorcycle,” I explained. “See the motorcycle tire and red fender poking out from between the women’s dresses?”
“Why is it there?” Nathan asked.
“Wish we knew the answer to that,” Oliver said.
As soon as I’d started working on the motorcycle, I’d understood what Mama Nelle had meant about Jesse covering it over. Anna had painted the mural thinly, but in the area of the motorcycle, the paint was extremely thick as though the cycle had been painted over and then repainted, maybe more than once. Maybe even more than twice. I couldn’t explain why, but Anna and Jesse seemed to have some sort of duel going on there.
“We should make a list of all the strange things the artist put into the mural, so we can add them to your wall text about it, Oliver,” Lisa said. “Make it sound mysterious. Make gallery visitors try to guess what message the artist was trying to convey.”
“If they figure it out, I hope they’ll tell me,” I said, shaking my head. I looked at Nathan. “Want to see what else we uncovered?” I asked him as I walked toward the painting. “You have to come closer to see.” I had a funny feeling as I moved toward the mural with the boy at my side. A sense of intimacy and ownership of the painting. It was more mine than anyone else’s in this room. “There’s also this little skull peeking out of a window.” I pointed to one of the little Mill Village houses where Anna had painted a small, hollow-eyed skull in one of the windows. “And there’s a little man in the reflection of that mirror the woman’s holding, right where you’d expect to see a reflection of her face. And there are not only drops of tea coming from the shattered teapot but drops of—”