“I’ll tell you about Vincent,” Colene said. “He’s one of my favorites, for all the wrong reasons. He was the son of a pastor, and he was sort of restless and moody, so he didn’t succeed in anything. He was a salesman in an art gallery, a French tutor, a theological student, and an evangelist among the miners. All he did was get more depressed. So at age twenty-seven he tried painting. He figured he wouldn’t live many more years, so he might as well do what he could while he could.
“The truth is, he wasn’t much. His first paintings were dark and somber and maybe sort of crude. He was trying to express the misery of the poor miners he had seen. But he kept plugging away, though no one cared, and he turned out a lot of stuff, something like sixteen hundred sketches and paintings in ten years. But he seemed pretty crazy to the neighbors, and nobody much wanted the paintings. He talked another painter, Paul, into joining him for a while, but then he got mad at Paul and threatened him with a razor. Then he cut off his own ear. No question about it: he was mad, and they put him in a madhouse for a year. When he got out, he painted seventy paintings in seventy days, standing out in the hot sun.
“But he was having hallucinations, and he couldn’t stand it any longer, so one day he took a gun out to the field. He went behind a pile of manure and shot himself in the chest, maybe figuring that manure was all he was worth. But he messed up again, and didn’t make a clean job of it. He staggered back to the house. He smoked his pipe through the night, then got a bad fever, and the next night he said, ‘There is no end to sorrow,’ and died. He was thirty-seven.”
“There is no end to sorrow,” Esta repeated.
Colene glanced at her. The girl was listening, but her expression was inscrutable. Girls were good at hiding their feelings, when they had reason, even from other tormented girls. Colene realized why her own parents hadn’t understood her; she had been too good at hiding. She continued with her story.
“But that wasn’t the end of it, quite. Later they figured out that maybe he wasn’t mad, he just had a bad ear infection. The pain was so bad he cut off part of his ear trying to get at it. And his paintings really weren’t bad. In fact some were pretty good. In fact he was later credited with being the ‘Archetype of Impressionism,’ which was the idea of being emotionally spontaneous in painting. His paintings made it into the best museums, and finally one sold for about eighty million dollars. So maybe poor Vincent Van Gogh should have hung on a little longer. He wasn’t the failure he thought he was.
“I came to know him sort of by accident. There was this print on the wall, titled Van Gogh in Aries, and it was like the dabbling of a child. I mean, I’m no painter, but I could do as well as that. I saw the guy had just spread bands of color sideways across the canvas, and then dabbed splotches of color on to represent flowers. He didn’t even try to shape them; they were just blobs. He had part of a house to the side, and a tree. I figured he spent maybe ten minutes on the whole thing. But here it was on the wall, so somebody must have liked it. So, well, I’m sort of ornery, and I wanted to know what was in this painting that would make anybody want to hang it on a wall. It’s like not getting the joke when everybody else is laughing; maybe the joke’s not worth getting, but still your nose is out of joint because you don’t like feeling stupid.”
“Yes,” Esta breathed. She was coming to life.
“So I looked at that painting a lot. And you know, it changed. When I caught a glimpse of it from afar, those splotches really did look like flowers; my imagination filled them in the way I thought they should be, and it was better than meticulous detail would have been. And I saw that what I had figured was a supernatural red ocean beyond a white beach with a blanket on it was really the roof of a house, and the beach was the wall with windows. What had looked like a sailboat was a vent in the roof. But I also saw that the tree looked sort of like a monster with a trunk, maybe an extinct elephant. And some of those carelessly scraped lines formed tulips. It was really a very nice garden, and I’d have loved to be there, instead of in my own dingy little life.”
“Yes!”
“So I knew I’d misjudged Vincent, and he was a good artist. He just wasn’t wasting energy on unnecessary frills; he was going for the essence. Maybe a critic would see only the quickly clumsy brush strokes and the places where bare canvas showed through, but a real person can see the garden and just about smell the flowers. That’s the difference between critics and real folk: the critic sees only the hole, while the real person sees the donut.
“But the point is, it was a tragedy that Vincent killed himself. He was a genius in his own peculiar fashion, and no one knew it then, but now they do. I wanted to kill myself, but I hung on just a little longer, and then I got into such a wonderful adventure you wouldn’t believe. It would have been a real shame if I hadn’t lived for that. And I know your life may not stem like much now, but—”
“I’m not suicidal,” Esta said.
“Because you just never can tell what’s around the corner, and—” Colene paused. “What?”
“Well, I’ve thought of it, but I don’t want to die, really. I just wish—” She shrugged.
They had completed their circuit of the block, and now the car was gliding up. A hand extended from the window, holding a package. Colene took the package, and the car went on without stopping.
“Let’s go fix your bike,” Colene said. She realized that she had blundered, going on an assumption. Esta showed all the signs of being severely troubled, but there were other ways to be troubled.
“But maybe the way Vincent thought he was mad, when it was in his ear, I’m like that,” Esta said. “I guess it really hurt in there.”
“I guess it did,” Colene agreed. “I had a pinched nerve once, and it laid me up for three days. If he had something like that in his head, maybe he was hearing things and hurting and getting dizzy, and it was all just that bum nerve in his ear. If it could have been treated, he would have been all right. But they didn’t know about that sort of thing, so they just called him mad. Maybe he wasn’t suicidal either, but there just wasn’t any other way to get away from it.”
“Yes. There is no end to sorrow.” It was evident that she related well to that thought.
At least she was responsive now. The story about Van Gogh might have been misplaced, but it had evoked several reactions and seemed to have broken the ice. Colene chatted about inconsequential things as they completed the distance to the house. It turned out to be an ill-kept place with an un-mowed lawn and peeling paint. Colene knew how it was; her folks both worked, and when they were home they had other—not better, but other—things to do than keep the grounds in order. So they did the minimum to keep up appearances.
The bicycle was in the garage. It was a standard ten-speed model, with a flat rear tire. That was always a mess, because the derailleur got in the way and it was hard to take off, and the adjustments were always out of whack in little invisible but critical ways when it got put back together.
Colene turned it over and spun the wheel. There was no visible damage. “This will fix it,” she said. “I just have to take out the valve core, here. Do you have a tool?”
“A what?”
Evidently not. “Then tweezers will do it.” The girl found tweezers, and Colene used them to twist the core out of the valve. Then she shook the bottle of sealant, and opened it, and squeezed its thick yellow juice into the tube via the valve. She screwed the core back into the valve and spun the wheel around. “See, this gunk clogs up the pinprick hole, and presto, no leak. It’s like magic. Got a tire pump?”