“It is, Mr. Holcomb,” I said. “And I think it belongs to your whole table, not only to my son.” Carl Holcomb, the president of the engineering firm, a tall, spare man in his sixties with white hair cut like a soldier, picked up the envelope and turned it over once in his large hands. He had still not taken his eyes off the soaked painting that lay open on the tablecloth, the little oil of me at thirty in the snow. The restaurant skylight rattled with rain. Behind us, the caterers stood in a line along the wall, their white aprons gone gray, wondering whether to clear or stay.
Mr. Holcomb opened the flap and drew out a letter in the handwriting of my wife. He read the first lines silently, and then he handed it to me. “Mr. Atkins, I believe this one is yours to read.” I did. I read it standing up, in a dripping suit, to forty guests in a room that smelled of garlic and rain. “To Brandon, on the day he finds my paintings. They are not mine anymore. They were never really mine. They belong to every man who built a fence in Oklahoma, and to every wife who stood at a window waiting for him. Hang them where people can see their own fathers.”
The second page was the sale of Atkins Fence, eleven million one hundred thousand dollars, to a western pipe company. The third was a deed of gift, signed by me and by a lawyer in Claremore. The Rose Atkins Collection, forty one oil paintings of the prairie, was given to the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, to be shown in a permanent gallery. The museum director would be calling on Brandon on Monday morning. Not as a punishment, but as an invitation. I laid the third page down beside the wet canvas. “Son,” I said, “I did not know they were in the dumpster. I came to give you this.”
Forty one paintings of the prairie were saved from a dumpster, and a long Monday became the best day a father and son ever spent.
Brandon stood at the end of the table with his hands hanging at his sides. He was fifty one years old and he looked, in that moment, like the boy who once stood in the doorway of the barn in 1986, holding a fallen sparrow and not knowing what to do with it. Kristin, his wife, her mascara running, said in a small voice, “Brandon, you told me your father wanted them out of the house. You said they reminded him of your mother and he could not bear to look.” Brandon did not answer. He took one step forward, then another. He knelt in the puddle by the dumpster and lifted the soaked canvas off the pavement.
He held it against his chest, rain and paint running down the front of his tuxedo. “Dad,” he said. He tried again. “Dad. I took them because I needed the space for the new bar in the basement. Kristin wanted to turn the farmhouse into a rental. I told her you said yes. I never asked you.” The words came out in a flat monotone, a man reciting his own indictment. “I told myself they were just pictures. But I saw her signature on the back of each one. I saw it, Dad, and I carried them out anyway.” His shoulders folded. “I do not know who I am.”
I knelt beside him in my wet good suit, which had never been worth anything. “You are a man who made a mistake on a Tuesday afternoon,” I said. “Your mother painted this when you were a baby and the roof leaked into the kitchen. She was so tired. She painted anyway, because she said a tired woman needs somewhere to put her love.” I wiped the water off the little oil with the cuff of my sleeve. The colors had smeared only a little. The snow, the wire, the sun coming up behind me. “She wrote your name on the corner, Brandon. She did not write mine.”
Mr. Holcomb crouched down on the other side, which I would not have expected from a man of his age and importance. “Mr. Atkins, I know a woman who restores paintings at the Philbrook,” he said. “She does not sleep on Sundays, and she owes me a favor. Bring the canvases to her door by eight tomorrow morning, and she will have them dry and stable by Monday.” He turned to Brandon. “That is what I meant when I said you were going to have a long Monday, son. I did not mean you were fired. I meant you will spend it carrying forty one paintings up three flights of stairs.”
Brandon looked up at his boss, and he laughed. He could not stop. He laughed and wept at once, kneeling on wet asphalt, and then Kristin was beside him with her arms around his neck, saying, “I am so sorry, Virgil, I am so sorry.” I forgave her before she finished. One by one, the guests came out of the restaurant under umbrellas and gathered by the dumpster, and without being asked, a dozen of them began to lift the canvases out of the alley and carry them inside, as gently as if each one were a sleeping child.
We loaded all forty one into the bed of my old Ford that night, under a tarp, and drove to Tulsa in the rain. Brandon drove. Neither of us said a word for forty miles. Then he said, “Dad, the one of the thunderstorm over the Kansas line. Do you remember when she painted it?” I said she painted it the summer of the drought. “She was so happy,” he said. “I remember her standing at the easel, singing. I was ten.” I said, “I remember too.” We were still a little while on the highway, with the wipers going.
The Rose Atkins Gallery opened at the museum in April, with every painting on the wall in a plain oak frame. On the first Saturday, a woman in a Carhartt jacket stood in front of the little one of me in the snow for twenty minutes. Brandon, in his suit, stood next to her. At last she turned to him and said, “My daddy stretched wire like that in 1974. I never knew anybody painted it.” Brandon swallowed hard. “My mother did, miss,” he said. “That one is my father.” She looked back at me, a bent old man at the back with a cane, and she smiled. “Then you are a lucky man,” she said.
