Love Letters from Ladybug Farm (14 page)

“I’m in,” Lindsay said, getting to her feet.

Cici pushed up wearily. “Remind me again why we wanted to do this?”

But no one had an answer.

On Wednesday afternoons from two to four o’clock, Lindsay taught an art class in the long, stone-floored, whitewashed building that had once been a dairy barn. She put up flyers in the bank, at the post office and library, and at Family Hardware, where they carried the selection of paints and canvases she recommended. Her first class consisted of three people who had never held a paintbrush before. Lindsay launched into the basics of complementary and tertiary colors, perspective, composition, primary, secondary, and reflective light sources, and the following week not a single student returned.

She was disconsolate until Cici pointed out that all of her students were well over the age of fifty, and that adults simply did not have the time or the patience to learn theory. They wanted results. It turned out she was right. Bridget volunteered Lindsay to do a watercolor demonstration at the next garden club meeting, and she signed up six new students on the spot. They did not want to be artists. They just wanted to paint something.

And so, with her expectations lowered, Lindsay found the classes to be one of the most enjoyable things she had ever done. Attendance varied from week to week, mostly housewives and retirees. They did landscapes and florals and still lifes, with an occasional cute bunny, deer, or raccoon to keep things interesting. For the more complicated compositions, Lindsay sketched the figures on the canvases before the students arrived, and she often mixed their colors for them. It didn’t matter. Most people came to art class for the socialization, anyway, for the sense of accomplishment and the pleasure of having something to show for their time. They finished a painting in one or two classes, and everyone went home happy.

Today each of her four students was finishing up a nine-by-twelve oil painting of an old-fashioned red water pump on a garden path with a barn roof in the distance. Lindsay had taken her inspiration from a photograph she’d seen in
Country
magazine, and had carefully sketched the pump and the barn roof onto each primed canvas the night before. She had suspected—correctly—that the class would not have the attention span for anything more complex today.

The class consisted of three women and one man. The women, who all rode to class together, used art class as their once-a-week catch-up time. This week they wanted to talk about the magazine article, and about their memories of the old days of Blackwell Farms, and about what fun it was to have their corner of the world featured in a real magazine. Susan had sent a copy of the article to her daughter in Minneapolis, with a note—
This is where I take art classes!
Miriam remembered when the very building in which they were painting used to have cows in it.

“There was a little store right up front, there,” she said, “where you could buy fresh milk every morning if you got here between six and eight. It was still warm from the cow sometimes! Of course,” she remembered, “then the government got all involved with that pasteurizing nonsense and nobody could buy raw milk anymore. You mark my word, that’s why all the schoolchildren have allergies these days-no fresh milk.”

Lindsay concentrated on her lesson. “Now, everyone, take your fan brush, dip it in your painting medium and a little bit of titanium white, and scumble it into your blue sky for clouds. Just like this.” She demonstrated on her own canvas. “Be careful not to get your brush too wet, or your clouds will be raining.”

She smiled as she turned to examine everyone’s work. “Maybe a little less paint, Pauline,” she suggested, moving around the table where the four easels were set up. “Very nice, Susan. Frank...” She paused behind the chair of her only male student, a white-haired man with a neatly trimmed beard who came to class each week in the gray uniform of a garage worker. She had learned that he had owned and operated Highway Car Care for forty-five years before retiring. He had the most delicate touch with a brush she had ever seen in an untrained artist. “That’s just wonderful. May I?”

Frank seemed a little shy—as well he might be, stuck in the middle of a group of chattering women—so Lindsay liked to take every opportunity to highlight his work and make him feel welcome. Besides, as anyone could clearly see, he had a natural gift for painting.

Lindsay took his painting and displayed it on her easel at the front of the room. “Look how he has the shadows running parallel across the path,” she said, pointing with the handle of her paintbrush. “And the clouds seem to melt into the sky, just as they should. He picked up a little alizarin here to give weight to the bottom of the clouds. Very nice. Oh, and look.” She smiled as she pointed out the final detail. “There’s even a little bird here, flying into the barn loft. I like that. Let me show you how to do that.”

She showed the ladies how to double-load a fine-tipped brush and let them practice on a piece of canvas board for a minute. “You see, it’s really nothing but a lopsided
W
,” she said. “There you go. Not too much weight on the brush.”

She left the ladies to practice making
W
-shaped birds, and returned Frank’s canvas to him. “You might want to add a bit more shadow underneath the barn eaves,” she suggested, “to give it depth.”

He picked up his brush and dipped it in dark paint. “It’s not just a bird,” he said.

Because Frank hardly ever volunteered information, Lindsay was surprised—and interested. So were the other ladies, who looked up from their work to listen. “Oh?” she said, wanting to encourage him.

With infinite care, millimeter by millimeter, Frank traced a dark line beneath the roofline of his barn. “I met my wife in 1962,” he said. “She was a singer—I mean a real one, traveled all around. She was even on the road with Patsy Cline for a while.”

Lindsay sat on the edge of the table, fascinated. “Really? I didn’t know that.”

“No reason you should.” Frank continued his meticulous work on the barn roof. “She was real talented, my wife. Who knows what she might have been if she hadn’t met me?”

Frank took a sable brush and gently, ever so gently, blended the line he had drawn into a shadow. “There ain’t much call for singers in a little place like this, outside of church and all, and I worried that she’d be sorry to trade the life she’d had for raising a family. She never let on to me if she did, and over the years I just kind of let it go by.”

He wiped his brush with a paper towel, dipped it in turpentine, and wiped it again, carefully cleaning each bristle. “She was always doing something with her hands, beautiful things, you know, embroidery and rug hooking and crochet. Her quilts won prizes at every county fair. She made all the kids’ clothes, and hers and mine, too, long after we could afford to buy them off the rack. Now and again one of the town women would come up to her and say wouldn’t she make a dress for them and she’d say no, her sewing was just for her pleasure.

“Well, it shames me to say it, but as time went on, I started to wish maybe she’d spent a little less time making pretty work with a needle and a little more time with me, you know, doing the things I liked to do. I mean, I could see the value in making clothes, but all those little do-dads and framed pieces and fancy pillow slips and whatnot, I just didn’t have much use for them, to tell you the truth. So by and by, I just up and asked her why she spent so much time on that foolishness, anyhow, and you know what she said to me? She said, ‘Well, now, Frank, there’s all kinds of art. Singing is one kind of art, and painting is another kind, and that carpentry you like to do so much, that’s another. I guess I’m never going to be a famous singer like Patsy Cline,’ she says to me, ‘but sewing is how I keep my voice alive.”

Not a paintbrush moved in the room. Frank inspected the brush he had just cleaned, found it satisfactory and carefully placed it in the felt liner of his wooden paintbox.

“After she passed,” he went on, “I spent a lot of time watching the TV, especially late at night, you know, when a body has trouble sleeping. There was this painter on one time, you probably know him. The one that does all those stone cottages with yellow lights?”

“Thomas Kinkade?” Lindsay supplied.

“That’s the one. I heard him say he puts his wife’s initial into every painting, like a secret code only she would know about. And I thought that was nice. And I thought about all the different kinds of art, and about then is when I decided I’d learn how to paint. So now I put Wilma’s initial in everything I paint—sometimes in a tree trunk, or a blade of grass, or a shadow on the road-as kind of a secret code between her and me. To keep her voice alive.”

“That’s beautiful, Frank,” Lindsay said softly. She touched his shoulder, smiled, and stood up.

When the class was brought to a close, Lindsay instructed everyone to sign his or her work, and supervised the cleanup. Frank meticulously cleaned each brush until no trace of pigment remained, just as he always did, rubbed down his wooden palette with linseed oil, just as he always did, and said, “A man is only as good as his tools,” just as he always did. He did not say another word about birds or ladies.

“Still waters run deep,” Miriam murmured to her at the door, watching Frank get into his pickup truck and crank the engine. “Whoever knew old Frank had anything to say?”

“We all have something to say” Lindsay replied. She smiled at the other woman. “That’s why we’re here, isn’t it?”

She was straightening up the tables and putting away the supplies when she heard a light rapping against the frame of the open door. She turned and smiled to see Dominic standing there. “Hi, Dominic. What’s up?”

“I hope I’m not bothering you. I couldn’t tell if you had any students or not.”

“They just left. Come on in.”

He looked down at his boots. “I don’t want to get the place dirty.”

Lindsay laughed. “Take a look around. You can’t do much more damage than I have already.”

Dominic was a nice-looking man with golden tan skin and sun-weathered gray eyes. His salt-and-pepper hair was worn long, grazing his collar, his hairline just high enough to make his face interesting. He was only an inch or so taller than Lindsay, and slightly built, but when he rolled up his sleeves, as today, the ropy muscles of his arms told a story about a life of physical labor.

“I stopped by the house,” he said, “but it looked like they were pretty busy up there.”

Lindsay shrugged. “We’re pretty busy everywhere.” And she explained, “We’re having a wedding here.”

“Oh?” He looked surprised and, oddly a little anxious. “One of you ladies getting married?”

Again Lindsay chuckled, dumping her paintbrushes into a cup of mineral spirits in the utility sink. “Hardly. We’re thinking about going into the wedding business, and this is our first one.”

He shook his head in slow admiration. “You ladies sure do keep yourselves busy.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

He gazed around the room, smiling at the four identical paintings of red water pumps—some more identical than others—but mostly interested in the larger canvases that were drying on the long walls. Noah’s paintings hung intermixed with Lindsay’s—studies of hands, which were difficult for any artist and which he clearly had not yet quite mastered, some wild impressionistic renderings of animal eyes in the dark, some architectural studies, and a whole series of monarch butterfly wings. Dominic studied them for a time.

“Are these Noah’s?” Lindsay nodded. “He’s a talented kid.” He turned. “Did I hear someone say that his grandmother was Emmy Hodge? I knew her, you know.” And he gave a slightly self-deprecating grin. “Had a huge crush on her when I was Noah’s age, the whole glamorous older woman thing and all. She was only here for a summer, but that was long enough to set me to dreaming about going to Paris and becoming a famous artist so that she would fall madly in love with me.”

Lindsay gave a wide, delighted smile. “Is that right?”

“Of course, by the next summer I was in love with Kathy Willis and wouldn’t have recognized Emmy Hodge on the street. Good thing, too, because I still can’t paint the side of a barn.”

Lindsay chuckled again. “Me either, to tell the truth. Which is why I don’t teach barn-painting.”

“I’m not clear how Noah ended up here. Did one of you know his folks?”

“Actually no.” Lindsay swished each brush back and forth in the mineral spirits, cleaned off the excess liquid with a paper towel, and set the brush, bristle side up, in a stand to dry. “We thought his parents were dead—so did he. His mother left him to be raised by his grandmother, and when she died his father took him and moved out of state, which is how she lost track of him. I had actually looked into adopting him last year, and that’s how his mother finally found out where he was. Apparently she’d had a pretty rough time of it during the early years, but she’s back on track now, working as a counselor for troubled teens in Richmond. The tragedy is that not long before she found Noah, she discovered she has terminal cancer. When she realized how well Noah was doing with us, she decided it wouldn’t be fair to burden him with her last few months of life. She asked us, actually, not to even tell Noah she was alive, but Ida Mae knew his grandmother, too.” She gave a small, resigned smile.

“But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? At least he got a chance to know his mother before she died.”

Lindsay shook her head sadly. “She made us promise not to tell him she was sick. And once he found out she was alive ... he didn’t want to see her. We’ve done everything we could to encourage him, without breaking our word. And she still thinks the kindest thing she can do is to stay away from him. So our hands are really tied.”