A Stranger's Wish (23 page)

Suddenly I realized we were approaching the twin hills south of Honey Brook, the place where Jake had had his accident. I sat up straight and watched as Clarke’s headlights picked out the intersection where someone had run a stop sign and changed a young man’s life forever.

“This is the spot,” I said. Clarke nodded. He slowed as if in respect for Jake.

“Look!” I grabbed his arm and pointed.

There beside the road, just visible in the dusk, was a little white cross, the kind people sometimes put to mark a place where someone has been killed. I stared at the little marker on which hung a small wreath decorated with a gold bow and gold flowers.

“Someone else was in an accident here,” I whispered. “And whoever it was must have died.”

I felt Clarke glance at me, and I tried to smile reassuringly. He reached out and softly touched my cheek.

“Why don’t you take tomorrow off to recuperate?” he suggested when we arrived back at the farm. He helped me out of the car and we walked slowly toward the steps. “Uncle Bud and I will see to it that your car is back by tomorrow evening. Okay?”

“Thanks,” I said. Even though I was feeling pretty much back to normal—if I didn’t turn my head too quickly or try to raise my arm above my shoulder or put all my weight on my right hip and leg—I knew school would be more than I could handle. “You’re a good doctor, Dr. Griffin.”

I reached out impulsively and hugged him. I was more than pleased when he returned the embrace with enthusiasm.

15

O
ne evening I carried my art portfolio downstairs after the dinner dishes had been cleared away and went to the kitchen table. I needed to select a new picture to take to The Country Shop to replace the one Clarke had bought, and I might as well see what reaction I got from Mary as I did so. My feeling was that she’d come running.

I placed the paintings on the table and began shuffling through them. In a short time I had two piles—possible and not possible.

“What are you doing?” Ruth asked as she wandered over. “Oh, look! It’s our barn!”

She picked up the watercolor and held it for everyone to see. John and Elam glanced up and nodded, and then they went back to their reading. Mary put her darning aside, rose, and came over for a closer look. She’d managed to resist longer than I’d expected.

“Why the two piles?” she asked.

“I think these might be good to mat and frame for possible sale, and these I don’t think are all that good.”

“They all look good to me,” Ruth said.

Mary spotted one of a salt marsh I’d painted on a visit to New England last summer. “Where is that from?”

“It’s what the tidal marshes look like near the ocean in Connecticut.” I doubted she’d ever been to the shore. “Lots of birds live there as well as other animals.”

Mary reached out and touched the paper with a tentative finger. “I love the soft effect that watercolors can give, but how did you get the effect of the little blurred circles? I saw it before in a book at the library, but it didn’t say how it was done.”

“While the paint is still wet, you sprinkle a little sea salt on it. The salt absorbs the paint, leaving lighter, star-shaped areas the size of the salt crystals.”

“Sea salt?” Mary was fascinated. “Does the salt melt?”

“No, it dries on the picture and you have to brush it off.”

She pulled out another picture, this one of the night sky. “That’s not just white paper for the moon. What did you do?”

“That’s called wax resist. I drew the moon on the paper with a soft yellow candle before I painted. The paint doesn’t stick to the wax, and you have an interesting textural detail.”

She looked carefully at all the paintings in both piles, asking questions as she looked. Finally she turned to John, her face vivid with some emotion I couldn’t quite read. Worry? Despair?

“John?” she said.

Pleading, I realized. She was begging him for something.

He looked up and studied her quietly, thoughtfully. His eyes moved to me and then back to Mary. She stood with her eyes closed and hands clasped as if she were praying, waiting.

“Okay,” he said, ever taciturn, and went back to his magazine.

Mary’s face shone, lit from within by some great joy. “I’ll be right back.”

She ran from the room. I looked at John and saw him follow her with his eyes. Something in his expression let me know he had just made a great concession for her. I realized that John loved his wife, and that pleased me. In typical Amish fashion they didn’t show much affection in public, but there was deep emotion behind the stoic German facade.

Mary hurried back with an art tablet hugged to her chest.

“They’re not like yours,” she said shyly and held the tablet out to me.

I knew I was holding something very precious, and I opened it carefully. On the first page was a watercolor of a table, this table if the cover was any indication, with a basket of apples sitting on it, a trio of the fruit caught rolling across the surface. She pointed to the patch of white on one of the apples, the reflection of light.

“I read that you don’t paint white. You let the paper be your white. Is that right?”

I nodded as I turned the page. A horse grazing. A fat ewe with a lamb frolicking beside her. A bouquet of dahlias. A weeping wisteria.

“Mary, these are very good.” I wasn’t being polite. They
were
good. The technique, though elementary, was sound and the composition excellent.

“Oh, look!” Ruth pointed. “It’s the barn again.”

I studied Mary’s painting of the barn. It was more realistic than mine, very detailed, but nicely done. Ruth pulled mine free from my pile and laid it beside her mother’s.

“This is early morning.” She put a finger on Mary’s painting and then mine. “And this is in the afternoon.”

“I love to capture light and shadow,” Mary said.

“The sign of a true artist.” I smiled at her and she beamed in reply.

Next came a collection of quilt paintings—a Star of Bethlehem hanging on a line, a Log Cabin draped over a chair, a Wedding Ring lying over a bench. I thought of the Susie Riehl postcards I’d seen. “Mary, let me show you something,” I said, grateful for this perfect opening.”

I ran up to my room for the Susie Riehl postcards and, on my return out of breath from my dash, I put Susie’s postcards in Mary’s hands. “I bought these in a quilt store.”

Mary nodded, not getting my point.

I turned the card over for her so she could read Susie’s brief bio. “She’s Old Order,” I said.

Mary blinked. “And she sells her paintings?”

I nodded. “Just like other women sell their quilts or the carpenters their woodwork.”

By now Elam and Jake were also gathered around the table looking at the postcards and Mary’s art. The air hummed with excitement and possibilities.

I indicated Mary’s paintings, some of the subjects similar to Susie’s but in Mary’s unique style. “Would you ever sell any of these?”

Mary looked at John, who had been pretending to read while listening carefully. At the word “sell” he looked up. He didn’t say anything, but maybe his silence was a good sign. If he didn’t want her to sell because it was against the
Ordnung
, surely he’d have said something immediately. And it wasn’t the selling that was the issue. Not really. It was the painting itself, the creating of something that wasn’t practical like a quilt, that didn’t actively turn people’s hearts to God like writing, that had no intrinsic value except beauty.

“Income, John,” Mary said softly, her voice almost lost in the hissing of the lantern. But John heard her.

I knew that in many ways income was the least of it for Mary. It was the pictures, the painting. But if income in a financially strained family legitimized the painting, it was all right with her. She fairly glowed.

I also knew that putting the word “Amish” in front of the word “artist” would make Mary’s paintings a collector’s dream.

John nodded. “I have to think.”

“Let her sell them, Father,” Jake said, not a surprise.

Elam nodded. “I agree.” And that was a surprise.

John looked at his son, the person to whom the financial health of the farm mattered immensely.
“Ja?”

Elam nodded again.

John looked at Mary. “I’ll think. We’ll talk.” With that he went back to the latest issue of
Amish Life
.

I set my easel so I had a fine view of the brook that ran through the patch of woods on the acreage down the road from the house. I’d already done a charcoal value study of the scene and knew what I wanted to do. As I prepared to paint, filling my water bottle from the brook, taping my nubby paper in place, preparing my palette, I despaired of catching the mystery, the life of the moving water.

In the small brook there was a pool no more than five by five feet, and capturing it and the tiny cascade that fed it meant painting negatively or painting shadows. I wet the paper and then added a wash of manganese except on the rapids and on the bright spot where the sun cut through the trees. Using cobalt and a little burnt sienna, I dry brushed the blue-gray very lightly over the white areas so the tint rested only on the nubs of the paper, creating subtle shadows.

I knew any reflections of the trees and grasses that lined the brook would be more ambiguous than the real object and, though duller, more interesting. I painted the actual forms realistically, the reflections more vaguely, working quickly because of the moving light. To suggest the leaves floating on the pond, I used a bit of cadmium orange-red and cadmium orange, and then I added rice. The pigment concentrated under the rice, creating strong splotches of color.

I finished by making marks or little lines to suggest thick tufts of grass and the reaching tree limbs.

As always I was lost in my work, and it wasn’t until I was finishing up that I heard the snap of a twig. A deer? A smaller animal? How long had I been painting? I rubbed the back of my neck and looked toward the road and the sound.

A man stood watching me. Often people stopped to watch when I did plein air painting. Many times I had stopped to watch another artist at work. Why did my spine prickle so over this man? He looked harmless in khaki cords and a navy sweater, but somehow I felt threatened.

“Nice picture,” he said as he walked toward me.

I nodded, watching warily. I knew that he couldn’t begin to see the painting from his angle and distance.

“I saw you painting when I drove by and I had to stop. I’ve always wanted to know how a person painted.” When I was noncommittal, he moved closer. “What’s the first step? Do you start from the top and work down or what?”

“The background comes first with watercolors,” I said hesitantly even as a shout cut across my comment.

“Come on, Kristie! It’s time to go!”

Thank You, Lord!

“That’s Jake” I announced. “He’s come for me. I have to go.”

I got up quickly from my camp stool. I knew my relief must be obvious, but uncharacteristically I didn’t care. I gathered my supplies, hurrying to get away from this man who so inexplicably bothered me. I dumped my water, stuffed the used paper towels in a plastic bag, threw the paint tubes into their box. I collapsed my easel, telescoping its legs and stashing it in my canvas bag.

As I threw the bag over my shoulder and held my painting carefully flat in front of me, I glanced at the stranger.

But he wasn’t there. I looked around in surprise. Sure enough, the woods were empty. With an eerie, unsettled feeling, I hurried to Jake’s van.

“Who was that?” Jake asked, pointing to a car disappearing over the crest of the hill.

“I don’t know. He said he saw me working and stopped because he wanted to know how I painted.”

“He saw you painting?”

“That’s what he said.”

“From the road?”

I nodded.

Jake shook his head. “You can’t see the brook from the road. The underbrush is too thick. Even I couldn’t see you, and I knew you were there. That’s why I yelled.”

I looked back the way I’d just come. My spine prickled again as I saw Jake was right. No casual driver could ever have seen me. The man had known I was there and had sought me out.