. The lad
abruptly stopped and peered back over his disappearing footsteps. He turned, staggered back to where he’d been,
and was soon flailing in the snow as though searching for something. Walter saw the boy’s bare foot and realized
he had lost his boot.
As the snow came down furiously, the man bolted
out the door, grabbed the boy, found the lost boot and carried them both back
into the heated shack. The boy was
shaken by the almost violent rescue, and Walter was a bit stunned by his
over-reaction to the little emergency. He coughed heavily before he was able to
catch his breath. Walter didn’t often
forget to limit his exertion, as he’d
been advised by his doctor at the Veteran’s Clinic. But he noticed the fear that seemed to arrive
with the snow was now gone.
The boy looked around the interior of the little
shed and thought it was pretty neat.
Everything including the workbench was smallish, like a playhouse, and
all of the tools were lined up precisely where they belonged on the wall at the
back of the bench. The tiny coal stove
pushed out a welcome warmth. After they introduced
themselves, Walter put David’s wet socks on the stove to sizzle and dry. They talked of school and the weather and even
soap operas. Soon David could see the
storm let up as he gazed out the window, a French door mounted horizontally
with lots of glass panes and a wide view of the field. When his socks were dry … actually singed a
bit … he put on his boots and continued his way home. David was pleased to find a new friend. Walter was, too.
David didn’t always find Walter in the little building
each afternoon on his way home from school, although he would often peer in the
window, ready to wave and say Hi. Only
when the snow slammed down in a howling wind with near blizzard strength did David find the man out in the backyard shed.
On such days Walter left his wife to her radio
programs, lit a fire in the stove and settled down in the tiny building to be
with his thoughts. He stared out over
the field as the snow piled up and the fear continued to grow in his belly. His mind was pulled back to those frozen snowy
days in the Ardennes Forest. where he had been one
of 81,000 American casualties in the
deadliest battle of the War. His mind’s
eye again saw the trees explode around his foxhole and the snow and dirt plume
up around him as mortar shells landed everywhere. Once again he felt his limbs freezing and the
terror mounting. He saw himself lying
with dead buddies around him in that awful frozen field, his lips mouthing the
mantra, “It’ll Get Better, It’ll Get Better.”
But it didn’t. Something tore
through his chest and he woke up back in a Belgium field hospital, drowning in a sea of pain. Now, a decade later, sitting in the little shed
in the middle of a snow storm, the fear came back to him and he sought to meet it
again as he stared out on the field. Walter
didn’t know if he wanted to conquer his dread or simply shine a light on the
pain. He just didn’t want it to hurt so
much.
On those snowy days when David came across the field from school, Walter would lurch from his frightful reverie
back to the present. The boy found himself
welcomed into what he now thought of as a kind of man’s playhouse, and he would
stomp the snow from his boots and walk
over to sit near the tiny stove.
There was one particular snowy day when something new began,
as David remembered it. Walter had asked casually about school and the boy
pulled out his drawing pad and said he was supposed to draw something for
homework. It could be anything, but he didn’t
know where to begin. The man took the
pad, propped it on his knee. Taking a
pencil from the bench, he drew a great
northern moose. The likeness was quite
good, and it was apparent that Walter had training. Walter gave the pad to David and showed him a few techniques for drawing animals, using triangles and circles and ellipses. David was thrilled to produce nice drawings by
his own hand with this technique. Over the next few months, the boy drew 13
moose, 11 dogs, 5 cats and a cow, the latter on the day his father stopped by the side of
the road to let him capture the animal in his sketch book.
Walter
was rather surprised at himself, that his
skills came back to him so quickly. When
he took some wrapping paper down from a shelf and spread it on the
workbench, ideas and old talents spilled
from him as he began to doodle and draw,
shading and edging his work. He wished he had real drawing paper and soft
pencils and maybe sticks of charcoal. He missed the paints and pastels he had owned
years ago, before being drafted and sent off to war.
David now found Walter in the shed each day when
he crossed the field on the way home from school. Snowy or sunny, on rainy or windy days, Walter’s renewed interest in his art began to
blossom in the tiny shed by the side of the field. When David entered the little building, there was always a new sketch or drawing
hanging on a wall. Eventually there were
paintings of dense bright colors that suggested but didn’t define their
subject. David really had no words to
describe the paintings, but he sensed
their power and violence, and he could feel
fear saturating each piece.
After the southern winds blew through the valley
in April and the sun began to climb
higher in the sky toward the solstice, school
ended and David didn’t cross the field again until autumn.
He could have walked up Conkling Avenue during the summer and
crossed the field to visit Walter, but when he had last stopped by the little
shed in June, Walter was painting in a frenzy, as if driven by a demon or the
clock. Conversation had been rushed as
the man wheezed and coughed, holding his brush with two hands now, laying on
the colors from dozens of new tubes of paint.
On the day school began again in September,
David crossed the field and came to the shed.
The man was not there. Paintings
were evident through the window, but not
Walter. The boy passed by on two or three more occasions before
finally working up the courage to go around to the front of the house and ring
the doorbell.
Walter Katowski had died, said his wife, stifling
a sob and wiping away the tears. “War
wounds,” she said. “He had only one lung, you know. Lost the other at The Bulge,” she continued. “Winters were tough on him. I don’t know why he sat out there in that
shed all the time.”
“To paint,” said David “His paintings are still there in the shed.”
She looked at him as though he was crazy, but then
walked with him to the little building in the back yard. In a moment they were both inside. Mrs. Katowski looked quite puzzled as she
gazed at all the artwork, and she began
to cry quietly. Walter’s paintings were
arranged in a line around the inside of the shack, as in a crowded gallery.
David noticed something about them. There was an order to their arrangement and
he could sense a drama unfold as his eye moved along the line of paintings that
began on one side of the door, went down one wall and over the workbench, then
under the window that looked out on the field, across the other wall and
finally back to the door. The objects in
the paintings, whatever they were, never gained any more definition, but the
colors toned down and became less garish as the line of paintings progressed. The edges of the objects softened. Imbalances came into balance and the chaos let
up. The fear came to rest.
At the end of the line was a painting quite
different from all the rest, but David knew it had been painted by Walter. It was somewhat larger than the others, a
beautiful painting of the field in summer, as seen through the multiple panes
of the shed’s window. It was … and it still
is … the most wonderfully executed landscape that David had ever seen. Viewed through Walter’s eyes at last was a
world at peace.
copyright
2007 by David Griffin
The Windswept
Press
Murrells Inlet, South Carolina
