Tumbling Blocks (19 page)

The alarm went off at two a.m., waking both Gabe and me.

“Puppy run,” I whispered, patting the growling bulldog tattoo on Gabe’s warm back.

“Mmmm,” he murmured and went back to sleep.

I pulled on my cashmere robe, opened Boo’s crate and pulled a reluctant, sleepy puppy out. His little body was toasty as a freshly baked muffin, and his yawn ended with a little squeak.

“I know, Doodleboo,” I said, carrying him downstairs. “This is a drag, but your little bladder can’t make it through the night. We don’t want you to pee in your crate.”

After he was done, we were coming back through the kitchen, lit only by the automatic nightlight, when I ran into Ray, who was filling a mug of water from the tap. He was dressed in plaid flannel pajamas and a dark blue robe.

“Oh, hi,” I said, surprised. “We have bottled water if you’d prefer it.”

“This is fine,” he said. “I’m making some herbal tea for Kathryn.” On his long face, the foothills of his wrinkles were shadowed in the semidarkness. “She’s having a little . . . insomnia.”

“Is she okay?” There was something in his voice, a hesitation, a split-second break, that made me ask again. “Ray, is Kathryn all right?”

He turned his back to me and carefully placed the mug in the microwave. “Yes, Benni, she is. For now.”

CHAPTER 9

O
F COURSE I WANTED TO PRESS RAY FOR MORE EXPLANATION, but this moment wasn’t the time for it. Was something going on with Kathryn, something she was not telling her son, and Ray was subtly letting me know?

“See you tomorrow,” I just replied and carried Boo back up to bed. Whatever it was, surely it had to come out before she went home. At least I hoped so. I said a quick prayer that it wasn’t something serious.

The next morning, the sun shining through our pale curtains woke me with a jolt. I sat up, panicked. I’d slept right through Boo’s early morning bathroom break. I looked over at his open kennel and gave a sigh of relief. Obviously Gabe covered for me and let me sleep.

Downstairs everyone was already having breakfast and perusing the Monday edition of the
San Celina Tribune.

“Boo’s eaten, and I took him outside,” Gabe said, pouring me a glass of orange juice. He was dressed for work in a white shirt, red and gray houndstooth tie and gray Brooks Brothers suit. “Mom is going to hang out at the house today. You said something about getting our Christmas tree? We’ll decorate it tonight?”

“Uh, yeah, I guess.” I glanced around at the domestic picture of Gabe, his mother, her new husband and the two dogs. Everyone seemed satisfied and happy. Kathryn sipped her tea, tidy and pink-cheeked. Ray smiled and gave me a little salute. The dogs chewed merrily on their pressed rawhide bones. Had I imagined the tiff between Kathryn and Gabe yesterday at the ranch? Had I imagined Ray’s weary, sad voice earlier this morning?

“I need to work on my speech about Abe Adam Finch and outsider art,” I said, pouring myself a cup of coffee. “I’ll be at the folk art museum most of the morning. Then I’m going maternity clothes shopping with Elvia.”

“What shall we do for dinner?” Gabe asked, fixing me a bowl of oatmeal and handing me the brown sugar box, knowing that I’ll only eat it with lots of sugar and melted butter.

“Let me prepare supper,” Kathryn said.

“Oh, no, I couldn’t—” I started.

“Great idea,” Ray said. “You have a full day, Benni, so this is how we can help. Besides, I’m sure Gabe would love to eat some of his mom’s home cooking. That is, if you don’t mind?”

“I’m always up for anyone cooking but me,” I said, smiling at him. Cooking was not an arena where I worried about competing with Gabe’s mother. I glanced over at Kathryn. “Gabe has been pining for your chicken verde.”

Kathryn’s thin mouth turned up at the corners, pleased by my remark.

“Chicken verde it is,” she said. “You mentioned something about inviting your friends over to decorate the tree?”

“I thought we’d ask Beebs and Millee across the street. They don’t have any family, so they’ve kind of adopted me and Gabe. And I’ll ask Elvia and Emory and Dove, Isaac and Daddy. And, of course, Sam and Teresa.”

Kathryn nodded. “Let’s invite them to supper, too. It’s been a long time since I’ve cooked for a crowd. My daughters like to do that now. Is there a grocery store within walking distance?”

“No, but there’s Dad’s truck,” Gabe said. “The keys are on a hook in the hallway.”

“I’ll make a list and send Ray,” his mother said.

Though I should have felt guilty, I didn’t. With the outsider art exhibit opening Wednesday night, only two days away, I had a million things to do. The most important was writing my speech. I wanted to go over and hug her, though we hadn’t gotten to that point in our relationship. Instead I said, “Thank you, Kathryn and Ray, from the bottom of my overly committed heart. You don’t have to worry about Boo, I’ll drop him off at day care. And Scout won’t bother you at all.”

“Then everything’s set,” she said, clasping her hands together, her face looking relaxed for the first time since she arrived. “It’ll be nice to be busy.”

After I finished my breakfast, I walked Gabe out to the car. “I’ll come by and pick up the painting today. We need to get it hung. I think D-Daddy has the alarm situation under control.”

“It’s in my office closet,” Gabe said. “If I’m not there, ask Maggie for the key.”

I kissed him quickly, touched his smooth, cool cheek. “You doing all right?”

He gave me a perplexed look and opened his car door. “Of course, why wouldn’t I be?”

I just shook my head. “See you tonight.”

Within the hour, I was dressed, had dropped Boo off and was in my office at the folk art museum, my books and articles on outsider art spread across my desk. Mondays were always quiet. It was the only day the museum was closed. The artists’ studios were open, but not many people were working. I could hear a distant buzz coming from the woodworking room and some muffled conversation from the large room where the quilters and weavers met. I’d run into D-Daddy coming through the museum where he was painting some trim in back of the main gallery.

“Alarm people gave us the all clear,” he said. “We’re ready to rock and roll.” He grinned at me, his bright blue eyes lively under his thick, white pompadour.

“Rock and roll?” I said, laughing. “You’ve been hanging around the young folks again?”

He gave me a mischievous look. “Not young people. People your age.
Young
people, they rap and roll.”

“Ouch. Don’t remind me. If anyone needs me, this old fogey will be in her office working on her speech. I can’t believe we’re opening on Wednesday.”

“We’ll be ready,” he said.

“I know you’ll be.” I wasn’t so sure about me.

“Constance already called twice today,” he called after me. “I told her I didn’t know when you’d be comin’ in.”

“Bless you,” I called back.

I was determined to avoid Constance until I finished my speech. This obsession with Pinky’s death was taking up too much of my time. I’d done my due diligence and “investigated.” The next time we talked I vowed to put my foot down and tell Constance she needed to let her friend rest in peace.

MY MAJOR AT CAL POLY SAN CELINA HAD BEEN HISTORY, so I always looked forward to the research aspect of my job. My special love had always been oral history, specifically the history of everyday people. It had always intrigued me more than the exploits and accomplishments of the famous. Outsider art was essentially the oral history equivalent in the art world. Whether it be quilts or woodcarving or weaving or pottery, it was the art of the average man and woman.

I looked through my extensive notes and flipped through the dozen or so books I’d ordered from Elvia about folk and outsider art. The area was larger than most people realized, encompassing a vast number of regions and cultures. And that was just in the United States. Folk art from other countries was a whole other, incredible world. I couldn’t even begin to delve into that with this speech. I would have to restrict myself to the United States.

One of the amazing things about folk art was how a figure carved by an unschooled black man in rural Alabama was so similar to carvings found in nineteenth-century Africa. The same with quilt designs from an elderly white woman in the hills of West Virginia and the obvious pattern influence of her ancient Celtic relative two hundred years before. Had these patterns and skills been passed down through the generations? Many scholars thought it possible.

How to start? I tapped my pencil on my blank tablet for about ten minutes before deciding to just dive in. Usually, once I started writing, it came easier.

“Outsider art. What is it exactly? We might ask, what is it outside of? Who is the insider? Who came up with the term anyway?”

I put my pencil down. That sounded awful. Like something a middle school kid would write. I leaned back in my chair and stared at the ceiling. Maybe I should start with Abe Adam Finch’s biography and then delve into the definition of
outsider
.

I dug out the three articles I’d found written about him. A couple of the articles speculated that he suffered from a form of agoraphobia, but it was just that, speculation. It was believed he lived somewhere in Nevada because all of his communication was done through his niece, Nola Maxwell Finch, who, before she moved to San Celina, lived in Las Vegas. All requests for face-to-face interviews were refused, though he had been known to answer questions through the mail. There was only one small photo of him, taken in profile, backlit so that his features weren’t distinguishable. He appeared to be extremely thin, with a hawkish nose. In both photos he wore a fedora-style hat pulled down over his eyebrows.

“Abe Adam Finch,” I wrote. “He was born in 1929, the same year the stock market fell, though he said the event didn’t really affect his family, since they were already poor. He was the middle of nine children, the son of a cotton sharecropper in Mississippi. As soon as he could walk, he picked cotton, took care of cows and chickens, baled hay. He went to a local one-room schoolhouse when he could but never made it past sixth grade. He remembers liking school, especially when the teacher allowed him to sit in the back and ‘draw his pictures.’ He felt compelled to draw and paint from his earliest memory. In 1946, when he was seventeen, he left home, hitchhiking around the country. World War II had just ended, and the economy was starting to boom. He worked throughout the West at a large variety of manual labor jobs digging ditches, hauling bricks, laying pipe, trimming trees.

“‘I was always the one helping,’ he answered one journalist’s questions. ‘Never the man in charge. That was okay by me. I tended to daydream a bit. My pictures, they were talking to me in my head and telling me how to paint ’em.’ An unfortunate accident at a lumberyard in Oregon blinded him in one eye. He credits that incident with forcing him to start painting seriously. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Maybe it just come to me when that wood chip took my eye that life is short. You got to go where your heart leads while it is still beating. I just love to paint my trees.’

“He burst into the art world ten years ago, coming virtually from nowhere, it seemed, when Lionel Bachman, a San Francisco art collector, saw one of his paintings in a souvenir shop in Las Vegas. Critics have praised Mr. Finch’s work for its use of vibrant, often unpredictable color combinations, its childlike energy and its celebration of the relationship between the animal and human world. Various critics have said his work shows an almost obsessive energy, an unpolished directness that, one critic noted, made him sense that Abe Adam Finch might well be an artistic savant.”

What did the critic mean by that? That Mr. Finch was, somehow, mentally challenged? Was that the reason his niece protected his privacy so diligently? In the few places where he was quoted from questions mailed to him from journalists, he sounded like anyone else. Then again, anyone, including his niece, could have written out the answers to those questions.

I stood up and stretched. It really didn’t matter. What I had ferreted out about him seemed like enough background for my talk. Most of it I took from his official biography. The articles I’d found all told the same story, gave the same quotes and then were filled in with the art journalist’s critique of Abe Adam’s work, speculation about why he was a recluse and sometimes their own adventures in hunting him down. All efforts to find him eventually came to a dead end. They commented on the friendliness of Nola Maxwell Finch, but her absolute dedication to keeping the public, especially journalists, away from her reclusive uncle. I contemplated calling her and asking if she could add a little something to his biography, something that would make the journalist coming from the
L.A. Times
actually write an article longer than two sentences.

As quickly as I considered it, I discarded that thought. We were lucky enough to be given this painting. I was sure she wouldn’t appreciate yet another person wanting a little something more about her uncle.