The Barn Painting
by Travis Flatt
part 1
Eddie missed his football.
Instead of his mail-ordered, leatherbound pig’s bladder from Glasgow, Scotland, a Christmas present of such extravagance that he’d declined the year’s birthday present and also paid almost eight kroner of his own life’s savings — all of it, really — for shipping from the United Kingdom to here, Nowhere, Norway, where the school didn’t yet have its own football.
Eddie scuffed his shoes, attempting to dribble large rocks on his walk home from school, knocking the top layer of dust off the wagon-notched road. Now and then, he paused to take a gentle shot between the occasional open gate or slatless fence posts. The road from the school to his modest family farm ran mostly alongside Lucas’s sun-kissed wheat fields, which were vulgar in their endless expanse. According to Eddie’s father, anyway: “Oliver Lucas is a greedy man, Eddie; a Greedy Man.”
Today, the walk seemed much longer and hotter without his ball, which had been murdered by that beady-eyed weasel, Josef Lucas, son of none other than that very same “Greedy Man” farmer who owned half of the county. Josef was, of course, the most privileged boy in class, with a fleet of tutors at his disposal, but he was also the dumbest. And the meanest.
Eddie was certain that it was the ferret-faced Josef who’d slashed a ragged gash in his football, somehow committing this unstitchable assassination in the moments after Sister Agnes commanded that the boys set their “toys” aside in the corner after lunchtime break. Eddie didn’t learn until the bell rang that the ball had been cut. By then, the cowardly rat Josef had already run off for his opulent manor and limitless supply of playthings and entertainments.
The boys had come inside from break, sweaty and dirt-caked, with Josef crying that Eddie “played too rough” and “showed off.” His usual whining. Besides being ugly and stupid, Josef Lucas was, to top it off, a sore loser.
The killer was Josef. Must have been.
Eddie dreamt of marching up to the Lucas’s sprawling, three-story farmhouse and demanding a new ball, even though he knew he’d likely be shooed away by one of the help, postponing his chance to confront Josef, who would sit safely inside, laughing, listening, and sipping milk or something silly and American bourgeois like “iced tea.” Eddie pictured the little rodent enjoying his toy trains and famous phonograph, then became so mad he teared up.
Eddie’s father certainly wouldn’t buy him another football. All he’d get for asking was a scolding. Or, if his father was feeling generous, a sermon.
The day was hot and full of flies. Eddie, oppressed by the sun, knew that even if he slipped off through the trees and cut through the woods, he’d probably discover his father fresh home from the rectory to lecture him on “rancor” (Josef) and “avarice” (a new football) or set him to prayers and bible study. The best thing would be to endure the road and circle his house to creep into the backyard and put in a few hours of work on his treehouse. He was all out of nails, but he’d buried his hammer nearby in a safe place, and he could probably think up some repairs.
Eddie halted in the road, squinting, hand shading his eyes. Two men were standing ahead, leaning against the ancient, wooden fence near the small, turgid pond everyone called “The Graveyard” because foolish children often sank their flimsy fishing canoes in its shallow, rocky water or drowned night-swimming after drinking too much wine.
The two men were dressed in baggy black clothes, probably drifters looking for work, maybe off a train. Upon consideration, that last part seemed likely something Eddie had pulled from an American storybook. They’d be new hands working one of Lucas’s fields, resting from the afternoon heat, or just finished with the day’s reaping and mowing, ready to head back to their bunkhouse. Perhaps they intended to hitch a ride, though carriages rarely came down this road, perhaps only a couple a day. Maybe they were too new to know better.
Eddie decided to walk on by them. The road was the quickest way home. If it came to it — if the men were unfriendly — he’d run. Since the administration’s clerks had begun cramming the county’s children together into a single schoolhouse, he’d been repeatedly invited to join the athletic teams. If his father hadn’t forbidden what he termed “prideful displays,” Eddie was certain that he’d have won captain of the track and field squad. So, at any sign of danger, he’d take off around the Graveyard pond and, later, report to his father that strange men were hanging around the road. Maybe he’d be allowed to ride to town to describe them to the constable.
Back at school, he would taunt Josef Lucas. Their farm was attracting criminals and deviants, becoming a menace, a den of iniquity. Gambling and prostitutes, that sort of thing. The Lucas family, as Eddie’s father often said, were an ungodly tribe, an avaricious scourge to the community. What would the weasel have to say to that? The thought was almost worth the risk of courting danger from sinister men.
Now, drawing close to the two men, he began to smell something noisome and sickly-sweet, and he saw that a dead dog lay bloated in the road, burst like his football, probably sleeping and crushed by a wagon wheel. Worse, it lay partly in a small, thin puddle of greenish, scum-covered God-knows-what that a bit of shade had saved from drying.
Eddie slowed his walk and examined the drifters. One of the men was skinny, like a scarecrow. The other man was big, filling out his rags better, though they were clearly borrowed or stolen, and he stood hunched, slump-shouldered.
“Watch out,” said the skinny man, pointing to the dead dog.
Eddie walked wide around the canine corpse, taking the side opposite to the dark-clad men. “I see it.”
He continued a little way, and then the skinny man — Eddie knew his voice now — called, “Hey kid, you want to make some money?”
Eddie kicked a big rock and chewed at his lip, then stopped. He didn’t look back. “How much?”
“We’re painting a barn. Two kroner.”
Eddie kept walking. He thought he heard the two men step fully out into the road, leaving the fence. The skinny man said, “Alright, kid, five.”
Eddie looked back and saw that he was right: the two men stood near the dead dog, apparently oblivious to its odor. The skinny one was smiling at him. The big one was expressionless.
Eddie looked them over, standing in the dirt there with a stinking dog, the smaller one grinning and examining Eddie anxiously. He felt uneasy yet emboldened, annoyed. “Are you perverts?”
The big one snorted at that, and his shoulders lifted a little. The skinny one laughed aloud. “Smart kid. We’re not ‘perverts.’ Come on, eight kroner. Help us finish this barn. It’ll just take an hour.”
Eddie could buy all the nails and footballs he wanted for eight kroner. And probably a new hammer, too. “Alright. Where’s this damn barn?”
“Out there,” said the skinny man, gesturing to the field, which was freshly mowed.
Somehow, Eddie found that reassuring, the proper maintenance of the field. And there was, in fact, a barn far across the field, near the tree line on the other side — a little gray building, dilapidated and sunbleached.
“Doesn’t look like you’ve started yet,” said Eddie.
“Come on, then,” said the skinny man, and he hopped over the roadside ditch and ducked the fence to begin across the field. The big man followed at his heels. Eddie waited, looked up and down the road, checked over his shoulder to eye the Graveyard’s murky water a final time, and trailed at a distance.
It only took them a couple of minutes to cross the field. Flat grass made it easy, but the flies were thick and awful. Eddie’s overalls were sticky with sweat, and he wondered how the two men could stand to wear those baggy black shirts and pants. Maybe that’s all they had?
They’d come upon the long side of the barn, the side facing the road, which was unpainted, and a silver color like an old man’s hair.
“Well, where’s your paint at?” Eddie said, crossing his arms.
It’s inside, said the skinny man. “Mikel, you go get a few buckets.”
The big man looked like he didn’t appreciate orders but lumbered off to the left side, presumably going around to the barn door.
“We did get a start on the other side, though. Come take a look,” the skinny man began to walk around to the right side of the barn, going opposite the big man, “Hey Mikel, we’re walking around!”
Eddie knew that the woods out here were untamed. because he’d been hunting out here years ago, and he didn’t know the lay of the land well.
When they came to the back side of the barn, he saw the paintings.
Eddie stood, mouth agape. Finally, he said, “I thought you meant red. Like a barn. What the hell is this, mister?”
The two men had painted the barn but done so with pictures. The pictures were like something Eddie might have seen in a school book — or maybe inside a church — only bigger. Much bigger. These barn side paintings showed green grass with men and women lazing beneath a blue sky. This is what Eddie saw first. After he’d marveled for a moment, beheld the breadth of the paintings, he realized that the men and women were naked, some of them, anyway.
And amongst them, here and there, blending in like trees or bushes, were shapes. But they weren’t trees; they were animals, things that didn’t make sense. Dancing between human and animal forms were twisted tangles of life, pink and purple towers of entwined flesh rising and budding like flowers. Strange birds and beasts walked on distorted, elongated legs.
“What the hell is this, mister?” Eddie repeated, backing away. He looked over his shoulder and saw that the woods were farther away than he’d realized, but he was ready to run. Whatever he was looking at was wrong. It wasn’t something he should be alone with, not out here with these strange men.
“The Garden,” said the big man, “of Earthly Delights.”
Now the big man stood between Eddie and the corner from where they’d just come. He was pinched in between the two dark-clad drifters.
Eddie ran for the woods. The skinny man ran, too.
Copyright © 2022 by Travis Flatt
