“Plenty. But I can’t write you a policy without them. Not on those quilts. Not on any of these things.”
“I’ll look into it,” Eddie said, shaking his head.
“I need to take two weeks off.” Eddie was standing by the newly covered Number Four. Mayhew had just come in.
“Can’t do it,” Mayhew said.
“You ran this place without me before I came.”
Mayhew looked at him and said nothing.
Eddie wanted to hit him, but instead he lit a cigarette. Then he said, “I’ve earned it.”
“There was a lot of wear in those old cloths,” Mayhew said, not looking at him. “I didn’t ask you to put new ones on.”
Eddie looked at him. “They were worn out.”
Mayhew opened up the cash register and began counting the bills.
“I’ll see you in two weeks,” Eddie said, turning to leave. There was only one pool game going on, on Number Three. Two silent young blacks were shooting nine-ball.
“No you won’t,” Mayhew said, not looking at him.
Eddie said nothing and walked to the door.
“If you’re not back tomorrow, you’re not coming back,” Mayhew said.
Eddie walked out the door and past PacMan and Space Invaders. Outside it had begun to snow. He would have to go back sometime; his Balabushka was there.
“Eddie,” Arabella said, “I’m scared.”
“Scared?”
“It’s all been so fast. We don’t know if we’ll be able to sell these things.”
It was almost midnight; they had just come from painting the wooden stands and trying out the track lights. The lettering on the glass in front had been finished that afternoon. They would open Saturday.
“It’s going to work,” he said.
She sat heavily on the white sofa. “I hope so,” she said. She leaned her head against the back of the sofa and closed her eyes. “Sometimes you go at it in a way that scares me. Headlong.”
He didn’t speak for a minute, looking at her tired face with the eyes still closed. “I held back all the time I was married and running the poolroom. I just sat tight and watched television a lot. It wasn’t any good.”
She opened her eyes wearily. “Maybe not.”
“It wasn’t any good at all. Martha and I didn’t do anything. We drank too much and bought things for the house and every now and then we had a fight. I went out to the poolroom every morning and brushed down the tables and put out fresh chalk and after a while I was fifty years old.” He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray by the chair. “There aren’t many things I can do. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to play pool again well enough to make money from it; and even if I can get the money to buy another poolroom, I don’t know if that’s what I want. It’ll just be more of the same.”
She was looking at him. “You’re nowhere near burned out. Even if this fails you’ll find things to do.”
He looked at her. “Name two.”
“Eddie,” she said, “I’m going to bed.”
After she had left the room he got out the blue-covered journal that he used for business expenses and began going over the figures: the cost of installing lights, the money in quilts and metal sculptures, the two-months’ rent deposit on the gallery, the cost of operating the car. He had about five thousand left in the bank. It was all that was left from twenty years of running the poolroom. It was less than he had made several times in his twenties from a single night of shooting straights.
He set the book on the table and lit another cigarette. On Saturday they would go to Madison County to see that druggist and his wood panels. Arabella had written the man up two years before for the magazine when Greg was running it; she had shown Eddie the article, with photographs. They were Biblical things, forceful and direct, like Betty Jo’s quilts. He went to the closet and took one of the plastic bags from a shelf, and got the quilt out. He spread it over the couch and adjusted the lamp shade so the light fell brightest on the center, where the Hebrew children were ready to be put into the fiery furnace.
He would never have found the quilts without Arabella, nor the metal sculptures that stood against the living-room wall now like an audience. There were plenty of people in Kentucky who called themselves craftsmen and folk artists, but most of them were second-rate. It was only through Arabella’s experience with the magazine, the fact that she had already gone around the state with Greg and seen dozens of the people who tried to make a living from work like this, that he was able to avoid wasting time with junk. She had provided the judgment and knowledge; he had only contributed money and nerve. Desperation, maybe. He looked at the bright applique flames under the light—red, orange and yellow, coming from the furnace door. For days the picture had been in his mind at odd times, as persistent as an advertising jingle or the desire for money. The three dark children were strapped by a red surcingle to a broad shovel, like the thing bakers used. They lay rigid, their wide cartoon eyes open in fright, their mouths little dark lines. A huge hand gripped one end of the shovel, ready to push them in. Of all the things he had looked at in the past week, this was the one that held his attention the most.
He made up his mind. He would take the quilt to the shop tomorrow, but it would not be for sale. He would keep it for himself.
He spent the afternoon installing wooden brackets and rods for hanging the quilts—three along one white wall and two along the other; it was dark outside by the time he hung Betty Jo’s Fiery Furnace in the middle of one wall. He climbed the ladder and aimed two floodlights directly at it. Against the white, the colors of the quilt were brilliant, and its five pictures, centered by the Hebrew children, were like a mystical comic strip.
He had the two smaller metal statues in the trunk of the car, which was parked outside. The Little Bo Peep was about three feet high; it was the shortest of the five pieces he had bought. He got it out of the trunk and carried it in his arms like a sleeping child. Little Bo Peep was made from bumper parts welded together, partially covered with a blue cloth pinafore; her head was two small hemispherical hubcaps fastened together and painted with a pouting face. She carried a shepherd’s crook made from a tailpipe.
He positioned her on a wooden pedestal to the right of the quilt and adjusted the track lights to spotlight her. When he came down from the ladder, he stood at the far wall and looked at them together. The effect was striking. He seated himself on an empty pedestal and began to decide which quilts he would display and which keep folded on shelves. He knew them all by now.
He did not like the wooden carvings at first, and the old black man who made them was difficult; but he had to admit a lot of work had gone into them. There was a series of eight panels called THE EMERGENCE OF AMERICA INTO THE WORLD OF MEN that must have taken years to do. The wood was dark, close-grained walnut. Each of the panels was roughly a yard square and each was carved with figures in relief in the manner of the drawings of a precocious child. The man who had done them was lean, very old, and so black that he was nearly purple. Like Marcum, he had a song and dance about museums and galleries in Louisville and Chicago; when Eddie questioned him about his claims of being an important artist, he began pulling newspapers and magazines out of an old metal cabinet in his shop behind the pharmacy. There were columns in old newspapers—several with pictures of him and of one or another of his wooden panels—but the clippings were old and yellowed. His real triumph was a two-page spread from the Sunday Courier-Journal showing several of the panels in color and a picture of the artist in a white smock at the counter of his drugstore. The caption read, “A KENTUCKY WOODCARVER INTERPRETS HISTORY.” The date on the paper was September 1961.