Read Online The News of the World by Ron Carlson - Free Book Online Page B

don’t know, but God it thrilled me! Some of the edges floated like folded velvet; I’d never done that before. I’d never seen it done before! This was no landscape that I knew. The whole time I’d been in the studio, I’d only had two thoughts. One was simply a picture of Story’s face as she hung up the phone: that worry. The other was so profound it powered me through the day. I wanted, more than anything, for my children and grandchildren to come visit and play volleyball on the lawn. The picture made sense and gave reason to everything in my life.
    The garlic man, not a farmer but Cummings from the Food Center, had to come all the way through the house and he startled me, appearing at the studio door. I hadn’t heard him for all the water in my ears.
    Cummings was also the butcher, and as he stood at my studio doorway in his bloody apron, he seemed one of the Fates come to abbreviate me at last.
    â€œI’ve got your garlic,” he said, and the first glorious strains of the herb drifted my way.
    â€œGood!” I must have said it a little too loudly as Mr. Cummings stepped back and raised his hands in self-defense. To assure him that I meant no harm, I placed my brush and palette aside and asked him in to see what I was doing. He folded his arms over his apron and browsed my canvases, nodding steadily. The spectacle of the three huge canvases, flashed and spiraled with those strange colors, and the volleyball sitting on the table behind them seemed to confuse Mr. Cummings, but his nodding quickened. His assessment was only “Yep,” followed by seven or eight small “Yep, yep, yeps.” It didn’t strike me until we had unloaded two hundred pounds of garlic onto the front lawn, that Mr. Cumming’s yepping had been identical to the sad and final pronouncements of a doctor whose suspicions have been confirmed.
    When he left, I didn’t hesitate. I took up my hammer and jammed my pockets with the short galvanized roofing nails, and wondered why the opinion of one of the most prominent village tradesmen didn’t bother me; why in fact, I took his incredulity as encouragement; why, in fact, I felt absolutely encouraged by everything in the world: the flat noon light, the impending thundershower, Mudd Miller’s black Honda motorcycle leaking oil on his driveway across the street. Oh, I just breathed it all in and began tacking the garlic to my own sweet home.
    I framed all the doors in garlands first, in case there wasn’t enough garlic, tapping the nails through the center of each bulb, spacing them three fingers apart. Then I ringed the windows, the basement windows, and the storm cellar door. The oil each clove gave its nail slathered down my wrists to the elbows, but after twenty minutes, I couldn’t smell a thing. It all gave our house a fuzzy, gingerbread look, not unbecoming and kind of festive. By the time I finished, I was high, high with a new taut certainty that I was unquestionably on the right track, and high with a sort of major garlic sinus dilation. My eyes felt poached.
    I ran to the studio to retrieve my car keys, but was again arrested by the three paintings and worked for a furious moment on the third. This “volleyball” was becoming more elongated than the other two and looked like, I’ll say for now, a rose setting sun in a green and ocher sky. But something told me that when I looked into the canvas I wasn’t looking all the way to the horizon. Something was trying to get out; I love that sense. When the phone rang, I came to and strode out to my old Buick. I sat still in the driver’s seat for a moment, listening to the phone ringing. It sounded like a vague, intermittent alert for the future going off in garlic house.
    In my book, Life Before Science, it said:
    Garlic and garlic substitutes were often used by tribes in Africa, Asia, Austrailia, and England to heat a childless domecile. The huts were