Love Letters From Ladybug Farm - Donna Ball [41]
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