At Home on Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [67]
He slanted a glance toward her, his eyes only barely visible between the fall of his hair and the curve of his elbow. “Not if you have a license.”
Lindsay, turning back to her canvas, glanced at him. “What?”
“That’s what the fellow said, isn’t it? He was giving you a ticket for keeping wildlife without a license?”
Lindsay shook her head and popped another staple into the canvas. “We’re not a zoo, Noah.”
“Maybe you could be.”
“Maybe you could focus on your work.”
“You could at least look it up. You’re all the time telling me to look stuff up.”
“All right,” she said, pulling out the last wrinkle in the canvas and holding it taut as she placed the staple. “I’ll look it up. There,” she added with satisfaction as she stood the canvas upright and admired her work. “As soon as you finish your practice test, I’ll show you how to do this.”
He gave another grunt. “Just more work for me to do that I don’t get paid for.”
“Every artist needs to know how to stretch his own canvases.”
“I’m not an artist. I’m never going to be an artist. It’s all just a big old waste of time, anyway. Just like this test. Here.” He grabbed the paper and once again thrust it at her. “I’m done.”
As he pushed up out of his chair she said, “Sit down.” She stared at him. “Now, suppose you tell me what this is all about. What do you mean you’re not going to be an artist?”
He glared back at her. “I mean you’re wasting my time with all of this isosceles triangle crap, and nobody gives a rat’s ass about the French Revolution, and by the time I learn how to stretch canvases that social worker lady will have me living somewheres else and they don’t teach art in public school. It’s stupid. It’s all just a big fat stupid waste of time.”
He bolted up from his chair and swung toward the door, and before Lindsay could draw a breath to try to stop him, he turned reluctantly back. His face was still tight, but some of the heat had gone out of his eyes, and he spoke as though the words were being dragged out of him. “Look,” he said. “I don’t mean to make you feel bad. You’ve been real nice to me—you all have. But it was never permanent. And I don’t mean to hurt your feelings or nothing, but folks like you—well, you just don’t get it. You think if you’re nice to people they’ll be nice back, and if you do the right thing good stuff happens, and all you need to get by in the world is a good education and maybe where you come from that’s so. I ain’t saying it’s not. But for kids like me that’s not the way things work, don’t you get it? Kids like me don’t need to know algebra. We don’t grow up to paint pictures that hang in fancy city store windows and we don’t wear ties and we don’t go to college. I’ve been going along with it the best I could, but it’s time to get serious. What you’re offering, it ain’t for the likes of me. And that’s all there is to it.”
When he was gone Lindsay felt tears of anger sting her eyes, and she brushed them away impatiently. “Damn it,” she whispered. “Damn it.”
She wandered around the studio for a moment, kicking a chair leg, balling up a scrap of paper and flinging it into the trashcan. And then she turned to her newly stretched canvas.
Barely thinking about what she was doing, she took it to an easel and sat down at her work space. She squeezed colors at random onto her palette and in big, bold strokes transferred them to the canvas. Cobalt blue, rich scarlet, deep sienna, pthalo green. And now an upward curve of ochre, a slash of sap green, a shadow of umber. Gradually, the face of a boy began to emerge. His hair was dark, his face was intent, and his eyes were filled with passion. She worked until it was almost too dark to see.
13
Easter
The town of Blue Valley, Virginia, was strictly divided along two lines: the Methodist side, and the Baptist side. The division was physical as well as spiritual, since the two churches dominated the main intersection of town, with the Methodist on the right and the