“Why didn’t you tell Henri that?”
“If you have faith in your gift, you don’t talk about it with people who’ve never paid any dues,” I said. There was a sunporch off the living room, an easel by the picture window, a tarnished silver glow in the sky above a mountain that looked made of slag. “Can I see your work?”
“What makes you think Henri has never paid dues?” she said.
“He thinks he’s better than other people. Only one kind of person does that: somebody who hasn’t gotten his ticket punched.”
Her bluish-green eyes were sullen and receded in her face, perhaps because she wanted to show me her art but felt it would be a betrayal of a friend. How do you recognize a real painter or writer? They’re monks, no matter what they pretend to be. “I don’t like people staring at me,” she said.
“I came here because I needed to thank you for coming to the jail,” I said. “You’re brave, Miss Jo Anne. It’s written all over you.”
She looked at me uncertainly, her lips parting, her eyes focusing on me as though I were not the same person who had walked in unannounced from a storm and immediately become a harbinger of trouble in her life. She drew in her breath, a flush of color like the petal of a broken red tulip on her throat.
“I’ve got to make a confession also,” I said. “I’m twenty-six and a failed English instructor, and with justification, some people would say I shouldn’t be hanging around a girl your age.”
“I’ll decide who hangs around me and who doesn’t.”
“Could I look at your paintings?”
“Help yourself.”
The light was poor on her sunporch, the barren landscape a playground for dinosaurs, a solitary hill in the distance that resembled a dead volcano, the sun a gaseous imitation.
She walked among her paintings and turned around slowly. The hem of her dress fluttered fr
om the warm air of a floor fan. There was a softness around her mouth that made my heart ache, and I knew I was straying into a situation that was wrongheaded and maybe exploitive.
“I was drying my canvas when Henri came over,” she said. “I paint things not many people care about. Maybe they’re not that good. Henri is the only one to see them. What do you think?” She picked up a canvas that was propped against the wall and held it up for me to see. “This is one of a dozen on the same subject.”
I wasn’t ready for it. The intensity and depth of the image made my stomach clench. I wanted to scrub it from my mind so I would not have to view it in my sleep. The canvas had become an entryway into a ragged pit in the earth where eleven children and two women were assembled like a church choir, their heads shaped like darning socks, backdropped by smoke and flames, their mouths black holes, their screams trapped under the paint.
* * *
I LOOKED AT EACH of the paintings, all of them an extrapolation from photographs taken after the 1914 Ludlow Massacre just twelve miles up the road: armored cars mounted with machine guns; soldiers in campaign hats armed with Springfield rifles; the body of a dead miner lying by a train track; incinerated shacks, the families bunched in front of them in their best clothes, as though attending a funeral, their meager belongings—a pipe bed frame, a hand-crank laundry tub, a tin bread box, a tricycle, its tires melted—poking out of the ashes.
“Not many people know about the Ludlow Massacre,” I said. “At least in Texas, they don’t.”
“My father talked about it all the time.”
“He was a miner?”
“He was a preacher. He was born blind and never saw light except in his sleep. We ran a hotel that was built on the Goodnight-Loving Trail. It looked like a palace.” When Jo Anne smiled, I wanted to touch her face.
“Are your folks still living?”
“No, my mother died of cancer, and my father was sucked up from a storm cellar by a tornado. I rode the Greyhound all over the Panhandle looking for him.”
“Sorry?”
“I thought maybe the tornado had set him down somewhere and he’d lost his memory, like Moses wandering around in the desert. I spent two years looking for him, then I sold the hotel and came up here and bought this house and enrolled at the junior college.” She stopped. “I told you how I feel about people who stare.”
“I don’t mean to. Can I see you after you get off tonight?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I’ll be tired.”