The Art Room in the Old Depot

And people came. I had not asked them to. They parked along Depot Street and stood in the gravel with their coffee. Farmers who should have been greasing combines. The whole Lutheran soup list. The girl from the newspaper. Old men from the cafe carried their chairs over, set them in a row, and offered opinions on the engine. By ten o’clock I would guess there were two hundred people standing there watching children paint a grain bin, and it was quieter than church.

Lyle sat in his kitchen chair, which Tom had carried across the tracks for him.

About eleven, Darius came and got me. “Mrs. Lindholm. We need you to not look for a minute.”

“What am I not looking at?”

“The engine.”

There were five or six of them around the cab window with the small brushes. So I went and wiped little hands for a while. When they called me back, there was a man in the window of that engine. White hair. A striped cap. One arm out the window, waving.

Josie pulled on Lyle’s sleeve. “That’s you,” she said. “You’re driving.”

Now, Lyle was never an engineer. He was a conductor, and a conductor does not sit in that seat, and he is a man who would ordinarily tell you so. He looked at that painting. His chin worked.

“Well,” he said. “I guess they finally promoted me.”

He got out his handkerchief. And then I saw something I had not expected. Curt Maas, who had been standing at the back of that crowd all morning with his hands in his jacket pockets, walked up through the gravel and stood beside Lyle’s chair and put a hand on the old man’s shoulder, and the two of them just looked at it.

Marge would have liked it, Lyle said. I heard him. Curt said he believed she would have.

When the last of the green was on, I had every child press one hand in paint and put it along the bottom rail, under the train. It took the better part of an hour. Lyle stood there with his clipboard and checked them off.

Curt called me the next Thursday.

“Anne, the board meets Monday the twelfth,” he said. “I’d like you to come.”

“Curt, I’m not coming to argue. I told myself that in April and I’ve stuck to it.”

“I’m not asking you to argue. I’m asking you to sit there.” He cleared his throat. “I’d take it as a favor.”

So I went. The same library and the same folding chairs, though not the same crowd. In April there had been nine people. That night they had to bring in chairs from the cafeteria, and there were still men standing along the biographies. Tom sat on one side of me. Lyle sat on the other, in a clean shirt buttoned to the neck, with the clipboard on his knees. Curt had asked him for it, and he had brought it, but he had not let go of it yet.

They did the minutes. They did the bills. They approved a bus repair. Then Curt put on his glasses, and he reached down beside his chair and set something on the table in front of him, next to the microphone.

It was a blue bowl. It leaned. It had paper clips in it.

“I want to go back to an item from April,” he said. “Line fourteen. Elementary and middle school art. Thirty-one thousand dollars.”

Nobody moved.

“I read that line out six months ago and I read it like it was a line. I’m going to read it again.” He looked down the row. “Lyle, could I have that?”