He made a deal with Henry to rebate a hundred fifty from the first month’s rent—for paint, brushes, rollers and a ladder, along with the polyurethane for the floor. Eddie knew where to get the supplies at a discount, and he had them assembled by mid-afternoon. He used a pay phone on the corner to call the telephone company to get a business line put in. Then he called the electric company to turn on the current.
“Maybe we ought to be locating our stock,” Arabella said.
“We have to have the place ready before we put it in.” He was feeling terrific and he knew what needed to be done. He was wearing old jeans and a worn flannel shirt. He got down with a broad putty knife and began peeling up big flakes of linoleum, throwing them into a cardboard box. “I’ll get this crap off today. I’ve already talked to a floor refinishing place and they’ll be in with sanders tomorrow morning. We’ll scout out your artists the next day, while the varnish is drying, and then see what we’ll need in the way of stands for the sculpture, and track lights, and rods to hang quilts on the walls. We’ll figure out ads for the papers and a sign for out front.”
“Eddie,” she said, “you’re a one-man band.”
“Wait’ll you hear me do ‘Stars and Stripes Forever.’” The trick with the putty knife was to slide it in one smooth motion under the old linoleum. “This is going to be a first-class floor,” he said, working, pleased with himself.
Ellen Clouse ran a one-pump gas station in Estill County, an hour and a half from Lexington. There was a three-room wooden house, badly in need of paint, attached; and all three rooms were full of quilts in dizzying patterns. A sign over her front door read “QUILTS FOR SALE—GENUINE KENTUCKY CRAFTS.”
“I don’t make ’em myself,” Ellen said, “but there’s a half-dozen women do it for me. My mother quilted, but mostly I pump gas.” She was a broad, unsmiling woman in her fifties, with steel-gray hair and untied Adidas on her feet. “Some of these quilts is trash, but some are dazzlers. Look here…” She led them to one on the far wall. “This quilt is a Bible pictorial. There in the middle is the Hebrew children in the fiery furnace and that’s Abraham and Isaac in the bottom-right corner.”
“Appliquéd,” Arabella said.
“It’s the best way to do it, honey,” Ellen said. Her voice seemed surprisingly gentle for such a mannish woman. Eddie studied the quilt. It was divided into five brightly colored panels, with cloth cutouts of people and trees and a Noah’s ark and the curving flames from the furnace in the middle. The stitches that held it all together were fine and even. It was a good-looking thing once you got past the gaudiness, and it would take a lot of hours to make it. He looked at her. “How much is it?”
“That quilt was made by Betty Jo Merser over at Irvine, and she’s dead. Died last year of cancer of the Fallopian tubes. She wanted five hundred for it.”
“It’s a valuable quilt,” Arabella said.
“Let’s see some more of the best ones, Miss Clouse,” Eddie said.
She took them through the three rooms, where the walls were covered with quilts. In the third room there was a pile of them twenty or thirty deep, on an old wooden bed. There were coverlets and pillowcases too. Most of the decorations fell into one of two kinds: patriotic and religious. A few mixed the two of them; one of these had Jesus in a manger with the American flag overhead. One patriotic quilt showed crudely cut-out airplanes, with the legend REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR. It was signed, and dated in 1943.
By the third or fourth one, Eddie felt he could look at them and pick out the ones that were genuinely good. It was partly a matter of design and partly of construction. Some of them were cheap and random, but others—especially those made by the dead Betty Jo Merser—had a lot of energy to them and good, tight workmanship. But he had no idea how much money they were worth.
Just as this was beginning to bother him, there was the sound of a car horn outside and Ellen excused herself to wait on a gas customer.
When she had left, Eddie walked over to the Bible pictorial and felt its cloth. “How much could we sell this for?” he said.
“I’m not sure,” Arabella said.
“Do you know anyone in Lexington who has some of these, or some like them?”
“The woman who lays out the magazine has quilts. I don’t know where she got them.”
“And she’ll have books?”
“She must have.”
“That’s good enough. We can go see her after I varnish the floor.”
With the finish dry, the floor looked even better than he had hoped. He had bought good interior white and a heavy roller. He put out drop cloths, set up a ladder and did the ceiling. It might need touching up after the lights were put in, but he could do that easily. The ceiling was done by noon and he started the walls. Arabella bought Windex and paper towels at the corner drugstore and started on the windows.
The telephone had come and now sat on the drop cloths in the middle of the floor. During a break Eddie sat by it with coffee and a Big Mac and called a sign-painting place from the Yellow Pages. It would cost four hundred for a board sign to hang over the door, and a hundred thirty to have KENTUCKY FOLK ART GALLERY painted in gold letters on the window. He told them just to do the window. Then he got his roller and went back to the walls. Arabella did the rest of the windows and then started picking up trash in the yard. After Eddie finished the second wall his shoulder was aching; he rested it while he scrubbed up the lavatory bowl and toilet. The money would go out alarmingly for a while; but you had to be prepared to put up money when you gambled, and that didn’t bother him. He got some of Arabella’s Windex and polished up the bathroom fixtures, cleaned the mirror over the sink. He began to whistle. There would be furniture, and stands for display, and the lights and installing them. But Arabella was right. A place like this could really go. With Arabella talking to the customers, with her looks and her accent, and with her connections at the university, they might take off. Even if they didn’t it would be exciting for a while. And it beat trying to get back his lost pool game or working for Mayhew at the goddamned university recreation room.
Jane Smith-Ross had a big pictorial on the wall over her fireplace, with lambs and cows in a field. Eddie looked closely at the appliqués and at the stitching. The stitches were not as small or as neat as Betty Jo Merser’s. Maybe they could get an old photograph of Betty Jo and have it blown up and put it on the wall, with her birth and death dates. Make her into a kind of quilt celebrity. Who knew anything about such people, anyway? Looking at this one over the Smith-Ross mantelpiece, he felt a proprietary feeling about Betty Jo’s work. It was better than this.
“Can you tell me what you paid for it?” he asked.
“My husband bought it for my birthday four years ago. It’s from the nineteen thirties and I think he paid eight hundred dollars.”