Amos worked the brush along the water's edge, laying the blue up to the line of the reeds; the stars he would put in later, last, the way she had. The can on the shelf beside him was light in a way that had begun, this morning, to trouble him. He knew the weight of a gallon can the way a postman knows a satchel. He did not need to look. He looked anyway.
What was left would do perhaps a third of what remained of the river. The final stretch — the broad, slow bend where the water widened before the boat — was still pale underdrawing on the far wall, cleaned and primed and waiting. A third of a can would not reach it. He did the arithmetic standing still, eyes on the work, and it did not change its answer for being done twice.
He climbed down, one rung at a time, the way Ellen Voss had made him promise — "both hands, Mr. Hartley, I have seen your file, both hands" — and stood in his old work clothes and looked at the wall, and at the can, and at the wall again.
One more gallon. That was all. One more gallon of Marlene Blue, mixed to Formula Card No. 001, and the river would run whole again from the dark corner to the boat, and the room could open.
She had painted it in the summer of 1985, in the six weeks between school years, and she had treated the commission — which paid, Amos remembered, less than the cost of the paint — as if the library had handed her the Sistine ceiling and a deadline.
The children's librarian that year, a formidable woman named Mrs. Abernathy who had run the Eastown branch since before the war and terrified everyone except Marlene, had asked the school board whether any art teacher might "brighten" the reading room. Brighten. Marlene read the letter at their kitchen table and snorted. "She wants a border of ducks," she said. "Stenciled. Possibly a rainbow with a face."
"What are you going to give her?" Amos asked.
"The river," she said. "At night. With the animals crossing to the boat."
She painted it the way she did everything, from the inside out and at full conviction. She sketched the hills on brown paper at the kitchen table for a week of evenings, then went to the library after closing and drew the whole composition onto the plaster in charcoal, standing on this same ladder, talking to herself the way painters do, in a running negotiation with the wall. Amos came in the evenings with sandwiches and a thermos, held the ladder, and handed up brushes.
Her rule for it — she stated it to Mrs. Abernathy on the first morning, politely, in the tone of a woman laying a foundation stone — was that a public room should be painted the way you'd paint for your own children, only braver. "For your own children you'd be careful," she said. "You'd make it sweet so it couldn't frighten anybody. But some children in a public room are frightened already, by things that have nothing to do with pictures. A public room has to be braver than sweet. It has to say: the night is dark, and look — the night is full of stars, and everything in it is going somewhere, and there is a boat." Mrs. Abernathy, who had asked for ducks, stood in the doorway with her arms folded and listened, and then said, "The boat had better be finished by September, Mrs. Hartley," which from Mrs. Abernathy was a blessing.
So the hills went up, deep and kind. And the river came down out of the dark corner, star by star. And along the banks and across the shallow painted ford she set the animals, not cute, never cute — Marlene had a horror of cute that amounted to a theology — but dignified, each one mid-journey, wet to the knee, bound for the far wall. A heron stepping like a gray bishop. A doe and her fawn. The geese in their white file. A bear cub riding its mother's back with its paws over her ears. And rabbits — a great many rabbits, because the summer children had been allowed to request animals and every one of them had requested a rabbit, and Marlene had put them all in and made it look like a decision.