BIG SOUTHERN CHAPTER 42

1935

DANIEL

Daniel gets his mail at Pingree. He parks at the canal—he's just gotten used to driving a pickup, rather than riding a horse, down the bank—walks a couple hundred yards to the townsite. Inside the store, at the back, the P.O. boxes' brass faces fill the lower halves of a couple walls, and on the third, the long side over the mail window, a CCC artist is working away. The camp down at Springfield, having two hundred young men, sent this fellow up here to do a mural and the others out to kill rabbits, make roads and reservoirs on the desert. Looks to Daniel like he drew the long straw, but his possession of talent probably had something to do with it.

Two teenage girls, Grace Bradford and the Valentis' oldest, pretend to shop but can't hide their interest in the artist. Daniel has witnessed the area nubility circling the store more of late, the good looking young artist a possible conduit out of not just temporary boredom but a life that doesn't seem very promising, given the economic times.

Also in the store, C.E. Johannson, ten years older than the girls and prowling circuitously for a different reason: his eyes are on the girls, specifically on Grace. Daniel has seen him hanging about, particularly after C.E.—some call him Charlie, some call him Ernie, his final moniker yet to settle in—has finished the school wagon route, either morning or afternoon.

The CCC artist's almost done, paint mostly applied, the mural complete with Indian tepees, horses, canal building, a small farm being plowed—a little crowded, Daniel wants to say as he opens his box with the proper combination, but he refrains, he's no artist.

The CCC worker is just a boy, really, and he's been eager to talk about his work in the past. Even when Daniel knows he has no mail he stops in to see the mural's progress, ask a question or two. He's made a few survey maps, so he can say he's dabbled in the art world—it'd be a lie, but he could say it. The sixteen footer he made for the proving up of the canal took him and two others a year, though, so he knows the difficulty of scale, the urge and the restraint involved when it comes to keeping the proper size to things. The artist here is being furtive, though—he's obviously, to Daniel at least, drawing his work out, having a last minute plan that the authorities might deem sabotage.

The boy had been studying art in Brooklyn, did some pottery there even, with some famous—to the artist, not to Daniel—sculptor, and he was going to apply a technique to the mural that might not be approved of, but which, if he waited long enough, it would be too late to undo. The CCC camp would be gone. Daniel had asked him if he didn't realize they could still take it down, paint over it after he had gone, and he'd replied that he was betting that the work would grow on them if they just let it sit a while, get past the shock.

"Craquelure" is what he called it, a fancy French word Daniel supposed just means cracking. He went to an art museum in Boston when he was schooling, saw old oil paintings that had cracked, making for random patterns that were more fascinating than the paintings themselves, at least to him. It wasn't uncommon to see vases made with a random cracking, something to do with how you fired the clay or the glaze. Daniel kept waiting to see how it was done, kept coming in to see the final touch, kept coming in to find the artist tinkering, pretending, dawdling. October was approaching, the water just half a stream down the canal now that so few needed it. The Camp was packing up, too, he knew, the Taber road done, a couple cattle guards left to put in, the boys grumbling about cold nights and shortening days.

"When's it going to happen?" Daniel asks, standing by the ladder. Glenola, the postmistress, is in the back sorting letters for the outgoing afternoon train and the storekeep is counting his money up front, so they are alone, but the artist looks both ways from up on his perch.

"Tonight," he whispers. "When they close. Camp's leaving in the morning."

He had told Daniel the precise steps to his method, but he'd paid no attention. He pretty much knew what the reaction would be, though—a sort of mock outrage, the notion that a cracked thing had less worth than an uncracked one, much in the way something old isn't as good as something new. And they'd paid for something new, by God! He couldn't help but smile a bit, considering the near future.

"I'll be looking forward to seeing it tomorrow," he tells the youth, looking up. "And good luck." He turns away, then turns back. "Now and in the future."

© 2025 Ralph Thurston