Big Lies in a Small Town - Diane Chamberlain Page 0,57

but I’m sure you’ll take care of adding more detail in your cartoon. I do applaud your liberal use of reds. Few of the artists have been so bold with color.

With these slight changes, the Section believes your final mural will be a success and we are enclosing a check for your first payment of $240. Please send a photograph of the full-scale black-and-white cartoon as soon as possible.

Sincerely, Edward Rowan, Art Administrator, Section of Fine Arts

Anna read the letter three times to be sure she understood. Her sketch had been accepted, and she’d actually been paid for her work. She could barely believe that doing something she loved could result in so much money. Mr. Rowan hadn’t found the sketch perfect, but perfect enough, and that was what counted at this stage. Anna had been told that he was persnickety and always had to find something he wanted corrected. That was fine. She would happily address his concerns. She already had the roll of cartoon paper. Now she could move forward.

She needed to find her models, though. Three women for the Tea Party. A Negro woman for the peanut factory. A white man for the lumber yard. There were no people in the painting of the Cotton Mill Village, and the men in the fishing boat were at such a distance that she didn’t need to see them in detail. So she needed five models in all. She hoped she wasn’t biting off more than she could chew.

On Friday, she’d spoken by phone with the art teacher Mayor Sykes referred her to at Edenton High School and asked if she might have a couple of art students willing to help her in the warehouse.

“I won’t be able to pay them,” she’d explained, “but the experience should be illuminating to them as future artists.”

The teacher called her back to say there were two students, a boy and a girl, who would work for her a couple of hours every afternoon for school credit. Anna was relieved. Not only did she need the help, she would also be glad to have some company in the spooky warehouse. She called the mayor’s office to give him the news and asked if he’d had that key made yet, but he said he’d thought it over and a key didn’t make sense, since the large garage doors had no locks.

“Why bother to lock the door, then?” he’d asked. He assured her that her supplies would be perfectly safe. She was disappointed, but she had to trust that he knew his town better than she did.

As soon as she set down the letter from the Section, she called the art store in Norfolk and ordered her canvas and paints, both in tubes and cans. She would have a great deal of canvas to cover. She hoped Pauline had been serious about going to Norfolk with her to pick up the supplies. Then she called the lumber company and ordered the wood she’d need for the stretcher. So much wood! It made her nervous to imagine the work she had ahead of her, building that stretcher, and she hoped and prayed she had the measurements right.

She took a photograph of the approved sketch to the post office to show Mr. Arndt. She was nervous, of course, knowing her plans for the mural didn’t line up precisely with the suggestions of the “movers and shakers” in town, but Mr. Arndt studied the photograph with a smile on his face.

“What a masterful job you’ve done,” he said finally, looking up at her from his desk chair. “I wish I could see the colors.”

“It is quite colorful,” Anna said, glowing from his compliment. “You’re all right with the Tea Party being so central to the composition?”

He laughed. “Oh, I knew you were going to get those ladies in there one way or another!” he said. “Can I keep this?” He lifted the photograph. “Hang it up on the post office wall? That okay with you?”

“Of course,” she said, relieved that he liked it well enough to show it off.

She celebrated by taking Miss Myrtle to dinner at the Albemarle Restaurant that evening. Miss Myrtle laughed when Anna ordered the Yankee Pot Roast.

“Well, that figures!” the older woman said.

Everyone in the restaurant seemed to know who Anna was and several people approached their table to talk to her about the mural.

“I can’t believe you’re paintin’ somethin’ that’ll take up that whole wall in there!” one of the women said. Another