Free Now Is the Hour by Tom Spanbauer Page A

on the picnic table in two lines of round spots, colors I’d never even known existed she carried in a wooden case.
    Sitting that evening in the flat world, at the green picnic table, the skinny white house we lived in, the red brick barn, the gas pump behind us, I watched her, Theresa, the artist from Portland, dip the brush in the round colors, painting what was out there, painting what I had never really looked at before, brushes of color onto the white canvas the way the world looked. My elbows on the table, her with the gold, the green, the blue, the alfalfa green blooming purple, me with the colors and her, her long body next to me, her Evening in Paris, the sun going down, sun on my neck, the purple-orange-pink-dark-gold sun on Theresa’s face and arms.
    It was almost dark when Theresa laid her brush down.
    Is the painting finished? I asked.
    For now, she said.
    I touched the painting around on the four edges.
    I asked: Have you ever seen
The Wizard of Oz
?
    Yes, Theresa said, I love that movie.
    The magic part where black-and-white turns to color, I said, is my favorite.
    Who knows what Theresa said then, maybe she just looked at me. Maybe she wanted to know why I said that. All I remember is that the way her eyes looked at me gave me the gumption to ask.
    At the end of the alfalfa field. I said, All’s I can see out there is flat. Where’d the green and purple mountains come from?
    If I wasn’t up close I never would’ve noticed that she smiled. When she spoke, Theresa spoke the biggest magic ever. Words my mother could never give me.
    The forest and the green mountains are inside, Theresa said. That’s what an artist does. She travels the world looking for something inside.
    Now twelve or so years later, here’s me looking with these same two eyes at my two tennis-shoe feet on the gravel on the side of Highway 93 on my way to San Francisco. Right next to my feet, my backpack. The moon is so bright, the backpack has its own shadow.
    When I left home this morning, besides my Levi’s, two pairs of socks, my other T-shirt, a couple of pairs of jockey shorts, my toothbrush and my toothpaste, my roll of toilet paper and sack lunch, my white shirt with the iron burn on the collar, I packed three things in my backpack.
    Grandma Queep’s corncob pipe.
    A photograph, and in my pocket a wadded-up piece of paper and a dollar bill — I’ll tell you about the photograph and the wadded-up piece of paper and the dollar bill later.
    And Theresa Nussbaum’s painting. A magic that long ago set me off into the world, into myself. A magic my mother never knew.
    I was careful and put a plastic sack around Theresa Nussbaum’s painting. Laid the photograph alongside. Tied the sack on with rubber bands. Put my socks and underwear around the painting and the photo and the pipe so they won’t get squished.
    Theresa Nussbaum’s trees and green mountains are traveling through the world with me, an artist, looking for what’s inside.
    Later on that evening, after Dad finished milking the cows, Mom called out the kitchen window to Theresa and me to come in and eat dessert. Theresa and I set the painting on a shelf on the back porch to dry.
    Pineapple upside-down cake and vanilla ice cream. Dad got to have two pieces, but us kids got only one piece, but I went in the kitchen anyway, and chipped away a piece of cake and brown sugar stuck to the black frying pan, and ate it.
    Then it was just adults talking and smoking and then at one moment, my father said, Hey, Mom, why don’t you play us a tune.
    Asking Mom to play the piano was like asking Mom to breathe. But this night my mother leaned back and folded her hands, her cut-to-the-quick fingernails, her rough, red farm hands, into the lap of her new green and gold and kind of see-through dress, her slip dyed the same color green. Her mouth one thin Orange Exotica lipstick line.
    And there they were. My mother’s eyes. Her