There was a painting of Jerry Dozier, the town wino, the town beggar, in his shack at the edge of Prince. He was counting the silver dollars stacked neatly in old socks, hidden under the floorboards. He was laughing cruelly, and indicating with idiocy the townfolk who kept him alive and wealthy.
Guy Earl and his wife Iris were the subjects of two small vignette canvases, set side by side. Theirs were unspeakably frank and alarming. They told in as few lines and tones as a master could demand, that Guy and his wife should never have been married. What can a full-blooded woman do with a husband who cannot have sex?
There were more. Many more. Twenty-six in all; some quite large, others small, but each revealed — without a definite place to point the finger — the innermost personality, the vilest secret, the facet that damned most completely, of everyone Duvoe had met in Prince.
In one morning, the first morning of display, the town of Prince had its soul bared. It recoiled in horror from what it saw.
The gasoline bomb exploded through Duvoe’s window shortly after one o’clock. Perhaps it had been thrown by Vern Bressler, whose portrait had revealed that he was half-Negro. Perhaps it had been thrown by Emil or Maxine Lupoff, whose relationships to a local waitress and an intern at the Prince Medical Center were revealed in a long, horizontal canvas, predominantly red.
But no matter; the damage had been done. Everyone who had seen those paintings would remember them. Those who had not seen them learned about them, in grossly exaggerated rumor (needless in the face of Duvoe’s art).
Duvoe was accosted on the street by Gregg Bancroft who swung on him, without hello or preamble. Duvoe held his own quite nicely; he looked down on Bancroft, who was nursing the raw, fist-made gash in his cheek, and said: “If you trouble me again, Mr. Bancroft, I will have to unveil a further canvas I’ve done. Mayor Walker’s daughter is seen from a slightly different angle.”
Gregg Bancroft limped back to his office. He was shot, later that day, by Mayor Walker, a man known throughout the area for the jealousy and protectiveness he felt toward his daughter, the reigning high school football queen.
Jerry Dozier was robbed and mercilessly beaten by a small but intense group of Negro boys from The Hill, a poorer section of Prince where Jerry Dozier had often cadged meals from those not much better off than he had seemed to be.
Vern Bressler’s wife left him. She was so repelled by the concept that the man she had married twenty-two years before was half-Negro, that she attempted to forget in a wild round of drinking and debauchery. She was inevitably placed under custody of the Prince Medical Center, for her own protection. There was some talk of insanity.
Wilma Foltin was summarily dismissed from her librarianship, and Guy Earl sold out his holdings in Prince, left town during the night, and left a note for his wife, Iris, the pith of which seemed to be that half a man was no man at all.
Since Duvoe’s shop had been burned out, the front window broken and the canvases destroyed, the reminders were gone, but not the perpetrator. Whatever threat of blackmail through revelation-of-painting he employed to thumb-under Daniel Makepeace (owner of the Prince Hotel) it was sufficient to force Makepeace to display still another, larger painting in the huge front window of the hotel.
This painting, unlike the others, dealt with an entire scene of activity, involving more than essential characters. It was, in fact, a crowd scene. A large crowd scene. It had been done primarily in the shadow colors of blue and dark grey and amber, flashed throughout with angry bursts of violet, stark white, red, and yellow. It was perhaps twelve feet long by four feet high, and its detail-work was both graphic and arresting.
It neatly divided the town of Prince into two armed camps:
The townspeople who were determined they would not see their town ruined by the scandal; who were determined even if they had to take the law into their own hands that they would not stand trial with those who had done it; who loathed and despised the perpetrators of that long-forgotten crime they had thought was buried by time and forgetfulness.
And then there was the other group …
The townspeople so adroitly pictured in Duvoe’s canvas, who had set fire to that house on Fairlawn Boulevard, so many years before, burning alive the old man and his wife.
On one side, the murderers.
On the other, those so frightened, they were the avengers.
It was a matter of defense before the world outside Prince learned of this suddenly uncloseted skeleton and stepped in for retribution. At which point everyone would begin to shout mea culpa!
In the rage for justice — an out-of-hand justice with its foundation laid in the quicksand of mob rule — terrible things were done to those beast-eyed residents of Duvoe’s canvas. Few managed to escape the noose of insanity and fanatic verve that swept Prince. And in the storm, the eye of that storm moved silently, nearly forgotten. Duvoe packed his easel and brushes, and prepared to leave town.
Till the door of his motel room was kicked inward by one of the few who had escaped.
The bearded man spun from the suitcase lying packed and open on the bed, and confronted his visitor with an air of mixed surprise and horrified fascination.
Reverend Archer seemed quite at home with the pistol in his hand. “Another instance where scripture and science don’t conflict?” Duvoe asked.
“What are you, some merchant of evil? A purveyor of miseries?Who are you! ” The Reverend’s face was blotched with emotion. He spoke heavily, each word syllable drawn out emphatically, with hatred and bewilderment in the tone. The pistol stayed very level, aimed directly into Duvoe’s face.
The bearded man smiled and turned back to the suitcase. He pulled tight the inside straps and began to close the bag. The Reverend stepped up behind him and spun the artist viciously.
“Answer me, man, because I’m here to wreak vengeance of one kind or another, and nothing will keep me from seeing you dead if you don’t talk your way out of it.” He was both appealing and condemning. He hated, obviously with an intensity he could not feel for an abstraction: evil. But at the same time he sought an answer, a way out of what he had come to do. He was a man of God, and he could not kill … unless it was to kill an abstraction.
“Who are you?” His temples throbbed. His voice was vengeful, urging, throaty.
The bearded man smiled again. Wistfully. “I’m a wandering agent of Satan, padre. I’m just a doer of evil because it’s my stock in trade. I’m a traveling salesman of sin.”
The Reverend’s hand lashed out, suddenly. The bearded man’s gibes were too much, and the pistol caught Duvoe at the right temple, spun his back against the bedpost and opened a livid wound in the flesh at his hairline. He put a hand up to his face and smeared the warmness down toward his cheek. “Go ahead, Reverend. Go ahead, do it again. It won’t stop what’s happening in your clean, ordered little town. It wouldn’t stop it if you killed me a thousand times over.”
“But go ahead anyhow, Reverend. Do your damnedest!”
Archer stood shaking at his own brutality. His hand holding the pistol wavered and trembled, while the holy man’s eyes shut tight in an agony of self-examination, consideration of depths till then unknown. He had destroyed himself more than a bit with the action.