NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
Branches in the huge southern red oak, in Diddlie’s yard, are waving violently as if stranded there and anxious for rescue. One massive bough grows out over the road with a sharp angle where it was trimmed, now growing back like an arm bent upwards at the elbow. Now, animated by a gust, it might be shaking its fist. While the white oaks are strangely still, across Oval Street and beyond, at bel and Steve’s place. The rain holds off until I reach his house. Bel lets me in, but doesn’t close the door. A brilliant flash of lightning is followed at once by thunder, and the sound of a tree coming down nearby.
“I can’t see anything. It’s like trying to see through frosted glass. Look at this rain!”
Having stepped in, I turn around to look outside with bel.
“Did it hit us?”
“No Steve, I can’t see where it went down.” Bel steps back as the wind blows rain in the front door. Leaf bearing twigs from the sweet gum at the roadside, land outside in front of us. Steve steps forward to close the storm door, when a drenched critter turns up to the left of the doorway, and takes shelter behind an azalea, under the limited protection of the overhanging roof.
Bell opens the door again. “What’s that?”
Another gust blows rain and leaves in and Steve pulls the storm door to. Bel puts her hand over his on the door handle and pushes it open again after the gust subsides.
“I can’t tell, Steve. Is it a possum?”
The rain slackens as suddenly as it starts. There’s a moment’s sunlight. I can’t see past them at the door but hear drips, and running water, and then mewing from outside. “It must be a cat.”
Steve steps outside into the saturated sunlit air. “It is a cat. Who’d have guessed?”
“Will it let you pick it up?”
Steve picks up the dripping animal with his hands behind the front shoulders. It hangs from his grasp like a wet tabby rag, mewing from its wide-open pink mouth. Bel leads the way back into the house.
“Come on Steve, we can dry it off in the kitchen.”
“Does it have a tag?”
“I don’t see one Fred.”
“Maybe it’s got a chip imbedded.”
Bel has got a towel around the cat and tries to dry it off squatting down on the kitchen floor.
“Fred, I think this thing has been wild for a while. She is in bad condition. Lots of mats and look at that torn ear.”
Steve puts a heavy old-fashioned glass ashtray on the floor, and pours some milk in.
“Ouch! Steve, get me the gardening gloves will you. This cat is wild!”
Bel has it wrapped up in the towel like a mummy, but a forepaw has escaped and thrashes back toward bel’s hands holding the towel. It is hissing and getting angrier the longer she holds it.
“Maybe you should let it go?”
“Well Fred, close the door, would you? And we’ll see.”
I close the door and bel lets go of the towel. The cat lets out a screech, which seems to come from the center of its body. It hisses and frees itself of the towel, and turns towards us for a moment, with its ears down. Now it runs behind the dryer and goes quiet.
Steve opens the door and offers the gloves to bel who stands up but doesn’t take them.
“What’s going on?”
We all look towards the dryer and the sound of claws on the metal venting pipe. The cat has climbed on top of the dryer from the back. Its ears are up and its wet tail is snaking in the air behind it.
Steve moves towards her with the gloves on, but the cat jumps down and escapes through the open door and down the hall toward the bedrooms.
“So much for the milk and hospitality!”
“We might as well go and sit down. It will come out eventually.”
“Steve, she’s probably got flees and ticks and…”
“I know but do you really want to search the house for that terrified animal right now?”
Steve leads the way into the living room. Painted cranes fly across a silk sky and settle onto a marsh depicted on three Chinese scrolls hanging over the fireplace.
Imagery from the gardens of paradise woven into the prayer rugs is subtly changed, rendering tanks, aircraft, and bombs. Yet they are not obvious, the stylized images of war have the same character as the garden images. Steve notices me looking at his Afghan war rugs.
“I did a double take, looking at the patterns.”
“These rugs are woven with the blues.”
“They weave art out of pain, Steve!”
“It’s the woolen blues!”
“Sometimes I don’t feel we should be treading on them.”
“Why not bel? They are rugs.”
“But Fred, they were made for prayer. Now we have them, and we just tread on them. Doesn’t that make you think?”
“Well, yes it does…but you appreciate them too.”
Steve looks up at bel and me.
“I think they are like a lot of other religious objects in that respect.”
“Such as, Steve?”
Rememeber, Pierro Della Francesca’s Baptism, for one. We kept going back to it in London.”
“Oh, how could I forget? We must have spent all day in the National Gallery.”
“We did bel, I mean that painting used to hang in a Church to inspire the faithful.”
“That’s right, part of an altarpiece in Sansepolcro.”
“Yup, Pierro’s Tuscan hometown.”
“We buy sacred objects and they become commodities.”
“That’s the art business Fred.”
“And business is secular, so what is left but aesthetics?”
Steve’s ring tones interrupt us. He takes his phone out of the pouch on his belt and looks down at the screen.
“It’s a text from Artie. She is stuck down the street behind a fallen tree.”
“So that’s where it fell!”
“Fred, looks like it fell right outside that vacant house below Macadamia’s place.”
Steve is texting back. Bel gets up and goes down the hall.
“I am telling Artie we can walk over to her.”
“Steve! Come here honey, look at this!”
Steve gets up and walks down the hall. “Fred, come on back.”
I follow him down the hall and see the cat asleep in the middle of their bed.
Steve walks out towards the kitchen.
“I’ll bet she drank the milk too.”
The cat wakes up and jumps off the far side of the bed and crawls underneath.
“Has she Steve?”
“YUP! We have been adopted.”
Bel is smiling, and she bends down, pulls up the bedspread, and looks underneath.
“That animal is used to living in a home.”
Bel and I walk back towards the kitchen where Steve is setting up a litter box using an old plastic dish washing bowl.
“What are you going to put in it?”
“Bel, we have some sand in the shed. I’ll use that for now.”
As soon as he has poured sand in the bowl we go out to find Artie. It is a short walk. The tree fell around the bend from the Strether’s on Wicket Street. It has fallen diagonally across the road missing the power lines by a miracle. The trunk is about eight feet thick at the base and the bark is covered in ivy and Virginia creeper growing over that. It is hollow and blackened, and broke off in a jagged fracture near the ground.
“There she is!”
Bel has found a way under the blockage where a huge branch holds the trunk several feet off the ground. We all duck under the fallen oak. Artie is standing by a small red pickup in a black slicker with the hood up. Her yellow shoes and white sox shine against the black wet road, which makes a dazzling reflection as the sun comes out again. Two thick boards stick out beyond the bed with a rag tied to the ends. Something else lies in back of the truck draped in a blue tarp.
“Did you guys bring a saw, Steve?”
“No I don’t have anything big enough for this.”
“We need Hank Dumpty. He’s got everything.”
“Right bel, so have Albrecht and Boyd.”
Steve has his phone out again. “I am trying Hank first, Fred.”
The sun goes in. A gust of wind brings rain down from a maple above and the leaves pull against their stems showing their light undersides as they dry out.
“Well, start her up and see if you can turn around and come the other way.”
“Wicket is one way bel. Besides I may be out of gas.”
“Can’t you tell?”
“No Fred, the gas gauge is broken.”
“That makes every trip a gamble!”
“Well, it stalled about ten minutes ago after I stopped and texted Steve during the monsoon.”
“When did you last fill her up?”
“I didn’t, this is a friend’s.”
I look in the driver’s window.
“How old is it?”
“At least fourteen-years-old … see, stick shift, hand crank windows and a cassette deck.”
Steve walks over to look at the truck.
“Paint work is in good shape Artie.” His ring tones sound, and Steve looks down at his screen.
“You have to turn around. Hank is up in Pennsylvania.”
“Okay Steve, say hi to Hank for me.”
“I don’t think you’ll have any problems going the wrong way. The cops never come around here anyway.”
“What about the Militia and Urban Safety Solutions?”
“Safety Shmafety… to Hell with both of them!”
“Hey, if you don’t see me at your house, come with gas and a posse!”
“You can coast most of the way Artie, down Bails Lane and Oval Street, so saddle up.”
Artie gets back in the truck and it starts. She turns around and heads back around Wicket street the wrong way.
The truck stalls with a shudder in Steve’s driveway and he excitedly pulls down the tailgate before she gets out of the cab. He loosens the tarp and now I can see what I came for, “Dr. Tulp’s Stone”. I had seen it before with Steve, in her studio, back in the winter of 2011, and that’s why he asked me over for the installation. It is one of Arties’s old carved stone pieces, covered in varying thicknesses of translucent resin. It gives the carving a painterly quality as you see the contours softened by resin.
“So Steve, where would you like it?”
Steve points out a spot to the right of the house where he has laid an oval gravel bed on the grass and stacked some big flat stones to act as a plinth. He gets a hand truck from his shed. Artie sets up the two boards to serve as a ramp, while bel and I watch. They both climb up into the truck bed and ease the sculpture onto the hand truck. Artie has two bungee cords to hold it in place as they wheel the sculpture down the ramp to the driveway and over to its plinth.
“It is all yours Steve, Steve, and thanks, I don’t know any one else who likes it.”
“You now, I always find a feline quality in this, Artie.”
“Well Sfumato had just moved in with me when I worked on it.”
Steve walks around the piece gesturing as he speaks and wiping his face on his sleeve. The sun is out heating the ground and humidity fills the air in sunlit columns of light coming through the trees.
“My eye is drawn along from this lower area, evocative of haunches and curved tail, up to here, where the two bumps suggest a cat’s ears. This topmost point suggests a cat’s snout when seen in relation, but overall, I think it is just the smooth undulating flow of the thing.”
Bel walks over to look more closely.
“This resin covering the stone is kind of smoky in places and here on top I feel I am looking through frosted glass.”
