Gryphon_ New and Selected Stories - Charles Baxter [161]
Granny Westerby had given Nicholas a look. “Nicholas,” she had said, “don’t be that way. The blessèd words are there for all to see, these words.” Occasionally she treated him like a schoolboy. He was used to this treatment from women, who doted on him.
Of course, she didn’t really want to sell her art. None of these proletarian folk artists did, and they wouldn’t have parted with their signboards and dolls and little sculptures, their private expressive outbursts, if they hadn’t needed the money, usually for advanced—that is, optional—medical procedures, or if they had owned personal computers hooked up to the Internet and a blogosphere on which they could have editorialized. The art they made was dying out, as they were. Most working-class oldsters had cancer and diabetes and heart troubles from lifetimes of labor-intensive work and carbo-overloaded diets. Sometimes the income from their art rescued them from the crowds at the outpatient clinics and got them some form of private care. Anyway, he liked to think so.
Granny Westerby was out in her backyard, seated on a bench in front of what looked like a picnic table scattered with brushes, paints, bottles, brake drums, and turpentine, when Nicholas arrived in his rental car. A radio playing rural white gospel was blasting away from inside the house. The old lady’s gray hair was pulled back in a bun, and she had one eye shut as she finished painting a phrase on the side of a wine bottle. Beside her, her golden retriever, Roscoe, eyed Nicholas as he approached. But the dog did not get up; he seemed to lack manners in this respect. Everyone in Alaska had at least one dog, Nicholas had noticed. The dogs seemed to be instrumental in getting their owners through the winter. On the Alaska license plates, Nicholas thought, the state motto should have been “The Dog State.” Granny W. looked up from her work.
“Oh, good,” she said. “It’s you.”
“Well, I told you I was coming. Hi, Granny,” Nicholas said, presenting her, suitor-style, with a clump of cut flowers he had bought at the florist’s on the way out. She glanced at them, grinned briefly, and nodded. “Thank you kindly. Would you please put them in water?” she said. “Inside?” With the slightest movement of her head, she indicated the back door of her house. Like her dog, Granny W. lacked conventional hospitality. Nicholas scritched Roscoe on the head before going inside. The dog continued to ignore him.
In the kitchen he found himself surrounded by a welter of antique kitchen equipment: a bread box, flour sifters, rolling pins, popover trays, a flyswatter, a manual toaster. A soiled teddy bear looked down from one of the cabinets. He found a flower vase in a heavily painted blue cupboard above the radio, from whose loudspeaker the gospel music had concluded and some maniac was now shouting rubbishy doomsday predictions. Nicholas cut the stems of the flowers with a steak knife, filled the vase with water, and dropped them in before noticing that, on the side of the glass, Granny had written, in her characteristic royal blue lettering, MY GOD WILL HEAVE ME.
“Heave”? Granny W. sometimes had the diction of a rustic religioecstatic prophet. Maybe she meant “heare.”
Okay. So be it. He saw an unplugged TV set in the corner of the kitchen, next to the dog dish. Across the glass face of the picture tube, Granny had painted, DO NOT GIVE OVER YOUR HEART TO IGNORANCE. The set would not be turned on again anytime soon, not with this lettering on it. It was like a personal admonitory test pattern. Nicholas loved it; the altered TV would be worth quite a sum on the open market.
Back outside, he sat down next to her and waited while she finished decorating the wine bottle with words. “I used to like autumn,” she said, without looking up. “I always loved the spiritual requirements. Not anymore. How about you?”
“Oh, actually, no,” he said. “I’ve never thought that. I like warmth better than cold.”
“Of course you