The Portrait of Jirjohn Cobb, page 24
By the second match Abner looked about. It was such a bare friendless room. Unpapered. Unpainted. No rug. A 2-hole gasoline plate, on an upended soap box, in one corner. A cot, with blankets, near the rear wall. A cracked vase with some brushes in it. A smeary palette hanging on a hook. A whole row of paint-tubes—50 at least!—on an improvised shelf. The executor of this estate, Abner reflected, was, indeed, living rigorously up to its testator’s specific instructions: that the interior of this “shrine”—or whatever it would rightfully be termed!—should remain “exactly and precisely” as it was when that testator passed on. Match in hand, Abner turned about. And found at last what he was seeking. A source for light in this place. The source in fact—as was to eventuate! The said source proving to be a half-burned candle mounted atop an old-fashioned onyx table. And to whose wick Abner promptly touched his dying match. The table was, he found, mounted on well-oiled casters, for when his elbow accidentally touched it, it moved gently off. Plainly, it—with its affixed candle—was the mechanical means of directly illumining his Uncle’s work; of, indeed, illumining whatever his Uncle did. The candle was a Gargantuan candle of outsize dimensions—a so-called “Super-Jumbo plumber’s candle,” as Abner had heard it called in the hardware shop at Bad Axe. The molten wax had run down its sides and formed voluminously around both its base and the cold onyx table, literally welding the two solidly together so that the table was nothing more than a great candleholder which could be moved here and there on the light casters.
What a way to live, Abner reflected. By candlelight—24 hours a day!
One decade backward of even the coal-oil-lamp age.
Yet, if his Uncle’s eyes had been affected by all forms of brighter light—what else could the poor devil do?
And now as the thick wick grew hot—ignited—and the effulgence from that giant cylinder of wax poured forth, illumining at least every corner of the room, Abner looked up—only to find himself facing what he had come to view!
The portrait of his own grandfather! Such as it was!
Done larger than life-size—and upon the wall which had been back of him when he had stood with lighted matches. A wall, the plaster of which fortunately had been in fairish condition—at least for the area which was to carry the pigments.
A man with huge red beard, and high brow, looked down at Abner—a man dressed in long shiny swallowtailed coat and high, stiff collar. A man minus an arm—but simply because that arm had never been completed; and minus a foot—for obviously thy same reason. As Abner stared at the portrait, a church bell near—and outside—chimed. Abner did not have his watch; he had left that object—simply because it had stopped ticking!—with his other things up in Bad Axe. But he counted the chimes. One—two—three—four—five—six—seven—eight—nine—ten. 10 o’clock at night. He bent his attention once more to the portrait.
He winced a bit, as he saw the trailing whisky stains down the replica of the old man’s stiff shirt-front, left by the witty deHaven. Somehow it didn’t seem quite right. For deHaven must have known what Abner’s own mother had known so well: that the old boy had been such a teetotaler! He would make cider—she had said—but the moment it turned hard, would empty it all out! And this whisky on him now seemed—seemed downright sacrilege.
The thing was a daub. Even Abner could see that. Could have seen it even if he hadn’t gone through Detroit’s art gallery—which he had. For one thing, it was all out of drawing. One shoulder was larger than the other. Even the old man’s face was asymmetrical. His torso was too long. The painting was a monstrosity—in some respects.
But—it had been drawn, and colored, by a man who had lived for decades with its subject—lived with him at morning, at noon, at night. A man who at least had tried to supply some, if not all, of the things which had been there.
For the coat was minus a button—and the thread hung down raggedly. Just a realistic painted streak of black, that thread. But only a man who had known his subject would have painted that m. The old man’s stiff shirtfront was, moreover, at two places, locked together by bits of rusty wire. Painted wire, that is. Barnwell had been better, plainly, on inanimate objects than on faces. But as to that painted wire, it didn’t represent penuriousness. For, according to Abner’s mother, the old man had given freely to everything and everybody in the countryside where he’d lived. And had left $25,000 to Barnwell besides.
It could only represent, therefore, Abner reasoned, a man who didn’t give two whoops in perdition for fancy, foolish appearance.
The face, in fact, was kind. Barnwell had caught something there. Kindness! Abner wished he could have known Grandfather Jirjohn.
The china-blue eyes of Grandfather Jirjohn Cobb seemed—at first scrutiny—to be unusually naïve and ingenuous; though, as Abner gazed questioningly at them, he saw a profound shrewdness emanating from them. And wondering how on earth Barnwell had achieved that piece of subtlety, Abner realized suddenly that it was the large scale to which the eyes were drawn that gave the first impression—but that the less than life-size pupils gave the second—and, moving slightly in the light available to him, he saw, by the altered reaction from the glaze, that Barnwell had evidently tried many sizes of pupils to achieve the one effect he finally had achieved: the eyes of a man who was not just anybody’s fool.
Whiskers—literal whiskers—stuck out of Grandfather Cobb’s nose. Painted whiskers, here of course. Made merely by flicks of white from a fine-pointed brush. But most realistic. A touch, moreover, that only one who knew the old man—knew him after he had passed from the age of romantic foolishness—could have put in. A touch that perhaps only one who was descended from the old man would have put in. For the whiskers themselves—and the putting of them in—were both symbolic of persons who scorned adorning things with falsity.
And the old man’s beard! It was a most peculiar red. Barnwell, Abner reflected, would most certainly not just have slapped red on the portrait there—to get a red beard. The 50 tubes or so of paint on the improvised shelf belied that. Barnwell must have tried dozens of reds—mixed dozens more—to get that peculiar brown-blue-red red! This then, Abner told himself, was—at least in the particular light he was now viewing it in—the color of his grandfather’s very own beard. And now at last he understood why, when he himself shaved, his own bristle was red—and so unlike his yellow hair. Did de Haven marvel at this fact—for de Haven had once said, while up on Abner’s farm, that all the male Cobb cousins seemed to have red bristle—still no, de Haven had been too busy pouring whisky down the old man’s shirt-front! Did Wooster Manville-Ferris marv—still, Wooster had let a small spider drive him away from even seeing his own grandfather. How about Rinella—of the red hair? Did she see her grandfather’s beard—in her own hair? Still no—Rinella Cobb, it seemed, had been too busy grousing because the subject of this portrait had left his $25,000 to the painter thereof—and the painter, in turn, had wasted it away—preventing her $100,000 from becoming $102,500. And how about Delia Gaines? She had had red hair when a girl—it had turned black—by gosh, had it?—probably she’d dyed it!—well, did she see her hair in this bear—however, Delia Gaines, according to Gray, had been too busy, while in this room, holding her nose. Against an alleged stink in the place. Which, to Abner, was a mere odor of paints and oils—nothing distasteful.
Now he was studying his grandfather’s hand, which, because the latter was shown only inserting the tips of his fingertips dignifiedly under the overlap of his coat—doubtlessly some characteristic gesture of the old gentleman—was practically all exposed to view. The back of that hand was fiery red—and so chapped that the skin showed broken in parallel grooves. Just stripes of brown red—but realistic—telling a story. A story of how—well it had been family tradition how the old man had always refused to wear mittens or gloves in winter—and no one had probably ever stopped to think of how those hands must have cracked in that defiant gesture against Nature herself. Barnwell had. And had certified to it here.
The more Abner studied the thing—as the candle at his side burned furiously away—its wax running down its sides—the flame at times wavering—the more he pitied those 5 benighted individuals who had sent back their keys to Gray without even having a look at the old chap. Why—this thing wouldn’t probably last for 10 years. The plaster would fall out of the wall. The painting would be gone, perhaps, in a year.
Now Abner became aware of another subtle touch in the otherwise monstrous portrait. The old man’s coat showed patched, at one point, with a square of burlap. Painted burlap—Abner could see how the crude strokes had been interwoven by Barnwell to give the impression of thick warp and woof. And it meant that this was a picture of Grandfather Cobb as of after his wife had passed away. For no wife would ever allow, on a coat, a patch of any other color than the coat itself—let alone burlap! Abner studied the thing closer now. Intrigued by the matter of its being thus dated. And now he saw that there was heartsickness back of that daubed face. It was a man fearfully bereaved. But keeping his bereavement gamely to himself. And all brought out, in a sense, by the mere fact of a painted patch on a painted coat.
Indeed, the longer Abner studied the thing, the more he saw—and the more he marveled at those others who had at least deigned to come here, to be but content with a single supercilious scrutiny of the thing—or, as in de Haven’s case, a pouring of whisky down the shirt-front replica. Abner felt that he could stand here for hours and view this man—this man, much of whom was in himself—who was him, perhaps—who was, for all Abner knew, the picture of himself as he, Abner, might be—in another 40—years. “Indeed,” Abner thought, “I am not looking into the past—by gosh!—I am possibly looking into the future. The future—”
And suddenly he heard the same churchbell he had heard before—he recognized its peculiar quality. But this time it chimed but once only.
The half-hour—past 10!
He had been here a full 30 minutes. One-half of the time “bequeathed” to him by Barnwell Cobb, his uncle. And it had seemed to him—studying that picture, as he had, with a different eye than the eye of just the art critic—that he had been here but a minute. Yet a half-hour was gone. And he knew now that he could find more in the next half-hour than he already had. Take for instance—that carven green jade ring painted on the old man’s finger? Was that some relic of his famous trip, as cabin boy, on a windjammer to China? If it were, then that scar on his temple might be of the same trip. Indeed, the scar might have resulted when he bought the ring—
And as Abner went off on this fascinating new speculatory tack, the light from the candle just bade of his elbow commenced to be wildly wavering—instead of steady, as it had been. And he heard a slight grumbling sputter—as though the candle were acting up. Curiously, he turned to see why a Gargantuan candle like that could ever get temperamental—only to find that it had been doing more than that: it had been burning downright irregularly. Melting away so much further on one side than the other that the natural wax depression which held the wick now lay on an alarming slant.
And the reason it had melted away so much faster on the low side of that slant was because—that side of the candle hadn’t been all wax. No! It had held something imbedded within itself—something, the round shiny end of which now stuck up a full half-inch above the sloping top of the candle—a tiny metal cylinder or something—and about a half-inch in diameter!—and which must have been inserted originally in a recess hollowed in the side of the huge candle—and wax poured back in to cover it. Now its entire end had been exposed—stuck up, in fact, no more than a quarter-inch from the burning wick—was even now causing smoke to trail upward from the enraged and cheated wick.
For a full 10 seconds Abner stood—trying to digest what he saw.
And then, somehow finding his wits, he leaned over the lighted candle and, with his handkerchief, four times folded to shroud his fingertips from the doubtlessly hot cylinder end, took hold of it firmly. By grasping the candle itself with his other hand—and continuing to rock that cylinder end stoutly back and forth in the now partly pliant wax, the whole imbedded cylinder came out. Clear of the candle. Proving to be just a miniature tin can or canister. A canister about an inch and a half long, and which—if Abner wasn’t mistaken—had been used recently, the entire country over, to distribute samples of a new type of baking powder. No label was on this one, and so it gleamed tinnily. Its cover, quite oddly, had lain, while it was imbedded in the candle, at the bottom end. And Abner pried it off the can with a twist of his thumb and forefinger. Dropping it to the floor, where it tinkled and bounced merrily off. The now-opened miniature canister contained, he saw, immediately, a rolled-up piece of grey—even dirtiesh grey!—paper, tightly packed within, and just protruding over the edge—asbestos paper of some kind, Abner realized, because of its deep dark hue and a peculiar “feel” it gave forth when he touched it hastily and experimentally with one fingertip. He drew the roll forth, however, and dropped the still quite hot canister to the floor. By the light of the candle which was now commencing to be brighter and more steady again—since the peculiar mechanics of vaporizing wax had been regularized!—Abner, with jaw hanging half open, unrolled the little roll of grey paper, finding, as he did so, that it was practically of tissue-paper thinness!—and that, when it was completely unrolled, he held in his fingers a long narrow strip of it, typed on both sides in type of a miniature smallness he hadn’t dreamed ever existed, but off a ribbon that had been so new and so jet-black that the letters were apparently plenty legible even above the dark grey background. What was not given to Abner to know, of course, was that the paper was merely asbestissue—Color O!—that unique invention of the International Fireproofing Corporation used for making festoons of artificial flowers for use in public places where fire hazards existed; nor, likewise, did Abner know that the tiny typewriter type on this long strip was so-called “minitype,” used by photo-engravers, and publishers, to type copyright and credit lines directly onto photographs that already were far too small to suffer any size-reduction. But he was at least able to see that the typed letters constituted a message—to someone!—if only because of the normally sized signature, in apparently India ink, at the bottom of one side!—and, by bringing the narrow strip of grey paper directly under and close to the now brightly burning candle flame, and his own face closer to it, and squinting his eyes forcibly so as to focus powerfully on the narrow, yet extremely close-set lines of extremely tiny type, was able to ascertain that that message ran:
Whoever YOU are, you were interested enough in MY work—and YOUR OWN grandfather!—to study us both, in the poor creation I’ve left—and to study us both, moreover, for a good half-hour to an hour, depending on my calculations as to the melting rate of this candle, and depending also on how many before you took a brief two or three minutes’ survey! But whoever YOU are, stick this paper in a safety box the minute you get it, day or night, for be apprised that it constitutes a legal deed-of-gift—to bearer—of my $25,000 in gold—which I didn’t lose in any fool Panic! And I only hope to God that the one of you who does get this paper proves to be that country-boy up in Bad Axe, for he at least has sent me a card now and then on my birthday, care my lodge. But be that as it may, the gold is buried, in a red-painted iron box about the size of a fish-tackle box, on an island called Bleeker’s Island, in Big River, off a town called Shelby’s Bluff, on which island I camped a whole week in the summer of 1929, just after I got my inheritance, and just before, of course, the stock market cracked. As for the box, it will be found buried 6 feet deep—I put in a whole night doing it!—exactly 10 feet north of a so-called “cyclone slot” that existed on the island—at least in 1929—and evidently dug by the then-owner, one Gail Yancey, but which was covered by a flat government island-marking stone. I discovered the slot—which was only a pit—through starting to bury my gold under the stone. Since cyclones are not feared today as they were then, the old slot will of course have been filled in by the new owner who I understand has done much surface improvement and landscaping on his island, but the slot’s former location should be easily findable by an unnatural mound caused by swelling of a too-much-tamped fill, or a depression caused by insufficient tamping. If, however, its one-time site is quite unlocatable today, due to expert landscaping, the point where the box is, is also on the approximate mid-line of the island at low water, and 60 feet south of the up-river shore (or point) of the island—also at low water. They do say that that end of the island remains submerged even when the river rises. If you don’t know power launches—and have to go out by rowboat only—the best way is to start from well upriver; an old-timer on the river told me that in swift water a rowboat, starting from Beatty’s Bluff and heading straight across, makes the island just—and nicely; or, in slow water, the same but from Jackson’s Point. However—don’t take along a shovel, else you’ll have the whole community, at the place from where you start out, following you! Chances are 10 to 1, anyway, that you’ll find a piece of pointed driftwood that you can dig with. And thanks, whoever YOU are, for scanning my poor piece of portraiture. It doesn’t do justice to the remarkable man it endeavors to portray.
Signed................... Barnwell Cobb.
It was exactly 45 minutes later that Abner Hick, the signed “deed-of-gift” locked safely in a downtown day-and-night safety box against all claimants, was on a train headed for Big River. To get his inheritance—as such it really was—of $25,000 in gold. Before man might dig it up—or flood might cover it!
CHAPTER XXVI
VERDICT RENDERED!
Thus—the story of the man with the tight-fitting yellow derby and the absurdly rustic clothing.
As it might have been told, had a professional tale teller—one, that is, who could facilely combine incident with characterization, and intersperse patches of descriptive color with bits of dramatic dialogue—told it. Instead of its being narrated, as it was, vastly condensed—yet, despite such condensation, with many an “I”—and with many a temporary halt—though, to be sure, no halt ever suggested that its teller was in the process of inventing facts. Rather, each halt proclaimed a narrator who was not at all used to coordinating facts into a graphic web.
