And the boat waited at the end of the wall with its lamp lit, low in the water, its little cabin stacked with books, piled like treasure. "They're not fleeing," she told a small girl who had stayed late to watch and asked, in the grave way of six-year-olds, whether the animals were running away from something. "They're going to the library. It's on the other side of the river. Everything crosses at night so it can read in the morning."
But it was the corner that people remembered, and it was the corner that, forty-one years later, Amos had argued about with a city arts administrator over the telephone — a polite young man who used the word completion twice before Amos stopped him.
In the lower corner of the long wall, where the river made its final bend toward the boat, Marlene had stopped. Not run out of summer, not been defeated by the plaster. Stopped, deliberately, with the underdrawing showing — a stretch of bank and shallow water sketched in charcoal and sealed, awaiting color that never came, no bigger than a child's desk. There was a heron in it, half-drawn, one leg in the water and one still in the pencil. Generations of children had asked about it.
"The part that's theirs," Marlene said, the evening she sealed it — the two of them standing where he stood now, the ladders folded, the whole river shining wet and new around them. "Every public thing should have one part that isn't finished by the people who made it. Otherwise it's just a present. This way it's an invitation. Someday some child is going to be ready — some child with the eye, and the nerve — and she'll finish the corner, and it will be hers and not mine, and that's the difference between a mural and a — " she hunted for the word and found it — "a poster. A poster is done. A place isn't."
She had been right about that the way she was right about most things: slowly, and then all at once. The corner stayed unfinished. Marlene's letter about it — "unfinished on purpose, in perpetuity, or until claimed" — still hung framed in the branch office beside the fire certificate, and the library never let a contractor touch it. It became a piece of Eastown folklore; grown men and women came back to the branch and stood before it like people reading their own names in a book.
So the restoration, when the library finally scraped together the will to do it, had terms, and Amos had stated them himself, in writing: the mural would be cleaned and repaired and brought back to its colors everywhere except there. The corner was not damaged. The corner was waiting. It was not his to finish, and any restorer who could not see the difference between a wound and a door had no business on the ladder.
The city, which had no budget for restorers at all, had agreed to everything with the speed of an institution signing a paper it does not expect to be read. Materials only. Amos had asked for the work himself, in a letter to the library board, and he would not be refused — and in the end, mostly because there was no money to refuse him with, he was not.
He had been mixing paint for fifty-four years, and he thought about the beginning of it most often when he was tired, the way other men think about water when they are thirsty.
- A rented former feed store on Division Avenue, with a tin roof and a floor that still smelled faintly of sweet grain no matter how many times he washed it, and a landlord who took one look at Amos Hartley, twenty-six, with his second-hand mixing equipment and his wife's teaching salary standing behind the whole enterprise, and rented to him anyway — an act of faith Amos never stopped counting. By day he sold paint — other men's paint at first, off shelves he built himself. By night, in the back, under a bulb on a cord, he mixed his own. He had a feel for color the way some men have a feel for cards, and he trusted it completely, and kept records. Every batch went into a notebook. Every custom color a customer asked for — and in those years customers asked for wild things, colors matched to a dead mother's kitchen wall, to a photograph, to a dream described across the counter at closing time — went onto a card, with the formula in his small, exact hand. The Color Archive began as a shoebox. It was a shoebox with a system, but it was a shoebox.
Marlene taught art at the school all day and painted, among everything else, the first store's sign — HARTLEY PAINT, lettered so well that the sign-painter who had quoted him forty dollars stood in the doorway and watched her do it for nothing, for the pleasure of the thing. "You've married above your lettering," the man told Amos, not unkindly. "I married above everything," Amos said, and the man nodded as if a technical point had been settled.