Chapter 5 #2
He had not told me. That was the strange part.
He had won the bid in June, and we had been talking for a month by then, and he had never once mentioned it.
I learned about it the way the town learned about most things — at the grocery store, from a woman named Hattie Pringle who taught Sunday school with me and who had heard from her husband, who sat on the council, that the painter was finally ready to start.
I came in to the shop that Tuesday with the news on my tongue.
I said, before I sat on the crate, You're painting the centennial mural.
He looked up. He looked guilty for a half-second — the quick boy-caught flicker of a man who had been hoping a thing might come up another way — and then he set his brush down and he turned around and he leaned against the workbench and he looked at me.
He said, I am.
I said, You didn't tell me.
He said, I was going to.
I said, When.
He said, Now.
He let the now sit. He let it sit the way he let glazes sit, with patience, knowing the air would do the work for him if he didn't rush it.
He said, I need you.
I said, For what.
He said, The mural.
I said, Ezra, I can't paint.
He said, Not painting. Writing.
He pushed off the workbench. He walked across the shop to the large flat file where he kept his renderings. He opened the second drawer. He pulled out a sheet of paper four feet long. He laid it on the floor between us and weighted the corners with paint cans.
I knelt down.
The sheet was a draft of the mural. It was sketched in pencil and shaded in colored chalks, and the design ran the length of the page in five panels, each panel a decade of Ember Falls' history.
The farmland in the twenties. The main street in the thirties.
The factories during the war. The bright clean optimism of the fifties.
The harder, knottier present of the seventies and eighties bleeding into the rest. Each panel was beautiful. Each panel was full of life.
In the lower half of each panel, he had left a blank strip.
He pointed at the strips.
He said, Text. I want text running through it. A line, a phrase, a fragment, something. Something that says what the picture is really about. Not a caption. Not a label. A piece of writing that does the same thing the image does.
He looked at me.
He said, I want it to be yours.
I knelt on the concrete floor of his shop and I looked at sixty feet of his work, drawn small on a single sheet, and I felt my hands go cold and my throat tighten and the slow turning thing in my chest that I had felt the day he had said good connection — and I felt also, underneath all of that, the small dry warning of a woman who knew exactly what saying yes would mean.
I said, My father will see it.
He said, Yes.
I said, My name will be on it.
He said, Your words will be on it. That's the point.
I knelt there. I knelt for a long time. He did not push me.
He had laid the sheet down and he had said the sentence and he was now standing with his hands in his pockets and his back against the workbench and he was waiting, in the small quiet patient way he waited for paint to dry, for me to come to my own conclusion.
I said, Yes.
I said it quietly. I said it the way I had said yes to the description of the phoenix on the third Tuesday of August, which was to say like a yes to a question I had not been allowed to be asked.
He nodded.
He said, We start Monday.
We started Monday.
I want to record what the next two weeks were like, because they were the first two weeks of my life I had been visible.
I do not mean visible in the sense that other people saw me — they had always seen me, in the smaller more decorative sense in which the pastor's daughter is always being looked at — but visible in the sense that I was doing a thing that the town was watching, and the thing was mine.
We worked from a scaffolding rig that Ezra had rented from a contractor in Wheeler County.
The scaffold went up on Monday morning. By Monday afternoon I was twelve feet above the sidewalk in a pair of overalls Ezra had handed me at the base of the ladder and which I had pulled on over my dress in the small unattended doorway of the abandoned drugstore next door.
The overalls were too big. I had rolled the cuffs three times.
I had pinned my hair up under a bandana.
I looked, at three p.m. on the first day of the mural, like nothing I had ever looked like in my life.
The town saw.
They saw on the Monday afternoon. They saw on the Tuesday morning.
They saw on the Wednesday at lunch when half of Main Street walked down to look at the progress.
They saw the pastor's daughter in overalls.
They saw the painter who had earned a road name as a joke.
They saw the two of us, twelve feet up, leaning over the same blank brick wall with our heads close together, his hand pointing at a section of the rendering and mine writing in a notebook against the railing, and they saw the small clear fact of us working — together, equally, with our names both about to be painted at the bottom of the wall when the mural was finished.
The whispers started.
I heard them in the grocery store on Wednesday.
I heard them in the parking lot of the church on Thursday.
I heard them, with the small careful pauses that disapproval makes, from the parents of two of my piano students, both of whom asked, that week, if Annie and the Patterson boy might switch to a different time, not for any reason, just our schedules.
I heard them from the women's Bible study, which went quiet when I sat down on Wednesday evening and stayed quiet for the rest of the hour.
I waited for the fear to arrive.
Instead, I felt visible.
For the first time in my life, the people of Ember Falls were seeing me — not the pastor's daughter, not the piano teacher, not the small careful figure in the second pew with her hands folded — but the woman who was writing words worth painting onto walls.
They could disapprove. They were going to disapprove.
They could pull their children from my Tuesday lessons.
They could go quiet at the Bible study. They could whisper at the grocery store and pause at the parking lot and trade their long careful looks at coffee hour.
The whispers were a kind of weather. The visibility was a kind of weather too.
Both of them were going to happen whether I asked for them or not, and the only question, finally, was whether I was going to spend the rest of my life standing inside under a roof I had not chosen or whether I was going to stand outside in the open and find out what the weather actually felt like.
I stood outside.
On the Friday of the second week, with the first three panels finished and the sun moving west off the grain elevator at five p.m., I sat on the scaffolding platform beside Ezra and I drank lukewarm coffee out of a thermos he had brought and I read him the line I had written for the 1960s panel, and the line went, The road was not built for escape. The road was built for return.
He set the brush down.
He looked at me.
He did not say anything for a long time.
Then he said, Hand me the script brush.
I handed it to him.
He bent to the wall and he began to letter my sentence onto the brick, slowly, in the flowing curling script he had developed over a decade of painting, and I watched my own words become permanent under his hand at twelve feet above Main Street, in front of a town that was, finally, watching, and I sat on the platform with the late sun on my face and I understood, in the small clean way you understand a thing only once, that there was no going back.
I did not want to go back.
I wanted, instead, to keep going up.