You couldn't help yourself, you had to stop and watch.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms (Historian): The young hang mirrors in their homes. The elderly hang paintings. And, if I may make an ungenerous observation, residents of rural communities display crafts—those dubious products of spare time, limited motor skill, and inexpensive yarn.
Bodie Carlyle: Invisible as spy writing, only Mrs. Casey could tell where the white wax disappeared on the white egg.
The stove would be crowded, with boiling out of every pot a different smell. Onions. Beets. Spinach greens. The stink of red cabbage. Black coffee. Plus the vinegar smell. In each pot, a different color: yellow, red, green, blue, or brown. Everything boiled down to the color of the cooking water. No lunch ready.
Her eyes crossed, looking straight down her nose, so concentrating on the wax that her mouth hanged open, red lipstick every day of the year, without looking up, she'd say, "If you two are chewing tar, spit it out." She'd say, "You'll find graham crackers over the stove."
Me and Rant.
If you stood there long enough, maybe she'd say how the wax was to keep dye off the egg. At her elbow would be hard-cooked eggs that still looked white, but in truth were half decorated with the parts where dye couldn't go. Just watching her, it could slip your mind how you had an ant hill waiting outside. Or a dead raccoon. Even a box of wood matches.
Even being hungry for lunch, you'd get nosing into Mrs. Casey's egg work.
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: It's compelling that so many cultures practice a meticulous yet transitory art form as a spiritual ritual, prayer, or meditation.
Bodie Carlyle: Her elbows on the table, one hand dipping her embroidery needle in the wax, her other hand holding the eggs, not looking at Rant and me, one day Mrs. Casey says, "Pull up an egg or get out." She says, "You're making me nervous."
Mrs. Casey gived us each a needle and a cold hard-cooked egg and told us not to shake the table any. "Get an idea in your head," she said. And she showed how to dip the tip of a needle into the candle and bring one clear drop of wax back to the shell of a store-bought leghorn egg. "Draw your idea with the needle," she said. Drop by drop. White on white. Invisible. A secret.
Rant says, "You tell me. I can't figure what to draw."
And his mom says, "Something'll come."
From the Field Notes of Green Taylor Simms: Whether it's Piranski eggs or the sand mandalas of Tibetan Buddhists, their common theme is to somehow achieve an intense focus and complete absorption of the artist's attention. Despite the fragile nature of the artwork, the process becomes a means of stepping outside of the temporal.
Bodie Carlyle: Rant, me, and Mrs. Casey around that kitchen table, all leaned together around that candle with the little flame drowned in sun from the window over the sink, drawing stuff only we could tell, none of us figured to be hungry. None of us, anything more than the wax and egg in our hands. Even with the pots of greens and onions boiling, the kitchen air nothing but steam and food smell, none of us so much as jumped when the screen door went—spree-whap—and Mr. Casey stood standing there.
"What's for lunch?" he says.
"Thought you were eating at the diner," says Mrs. Casey, still looking cross-eyed on her egg.
Rant stopped, just holding his egg, not dipping back drops of wax from the candle. Rant's hands and breathing, froze solid.
Me, I was drawing a wax day on my egg, a sun with rays, a tree, my house, a wax cloud in the sky, but only I could tell.
Mr. Casey, he says, "Irene." He says, "Don't do this to the boy."
And Mrs. Casey says, "You told me you were eating at the diner."
Leaned over the stove, sticking his nose in the steam above each pot, sniffing, Mr. Casey says, "Don't ruin him."
Still staring cross-eyed at her egg, the invisible secret of her idea, Mrs. Casey says, "Do what?"
Rant not drawing anything.
And Mr. Casey says, "Don't ruin the boy for getting married." And he reached for the bowl of eggs beside her elbow on the table. The eggs, plain white but really halfway decorated with all morning of her secret writing. Invisible art.
"Not those," Mrs. Casey says, her eyes snapped up, looking over the tops of her eyeglasses.
But already two eggs gone, disappeared inside Mr. Casey's hand.
And yelling loud, outdoors loud, Mrs. Casey says, "Not those!"
Mr. Casey turns to the window and—tap-tap-taps—the eggs against the sink edge to peel them.
Me, I drew a wax bird in the sky, flying over my house, invisible. I put itty-bitty drops of wax in the tree to make apples.
Lunchtime that day was the first I ever felt time get stuck. With Rant and his mom frozen solid, the smell of egg sulfur and vinegar dye and vegetables boiled to stains, a week, a summer, a hundred birthdays come and went. We sat with the sun stopped a century, smack dab in the window above the kitchen sink.
Even the clocks held their breath.
Mr. Casey ate the eggs, looking out the kitchen window, his shadow making the candle flame bright enough to see on the table. The hard-cooked smell of sulfur from the peelings he dropped down the drain. He gobbled the two eggs and the screen door went—spree-whap—behind him.
After that, the sun moved to touch one edge of the window frame. Time came unstuck. All the clock hands started back to tick.
Sheriff Bacon Carlyle (Childhood Enemy): Don't make Chet Casey the villain for the crimes his boy done. My take is you're not born loving nobody. Love is a skill you learn. Like house-training a dog. Maybe a talent you do or do not build up. Like a muscle. And if you can't learn yourself to love blood family, then you'll never truly love. Not nobody.
Bodie Carlyle: The first egg Mrs. Casey spooned into the dye, that's the first time all afternoon we saw each other's secret picture.
Wood-spooning my egg into the pot of boiled red cabbage, the stink of vinegar and farts, she dipped the egg out colored blue. Sky blue. Blue except where the wax showed a tree with apples, a house, a cloud, and a sun in the blue sky. My house, where I wanted to get home to before Mr. Casey come back.
Spooning her own egg into the pot of boiled-down beets, Mrs. Casey dipped it out all red. Blood red. Red except for, all around, the fancy work of wax lines, complicated as spiderwebs or lace curtains. But not curtains—words, handwriting. Fancy as poetry you'd find in a valentine card. Too fancy to read.
Spooning up Rant's egg, his mom says, "What color?"
Green, Rant says.
"Green it is," she says.
She stirs the egg around in the pot of soggy, slimy spinach greens. Dipping the egg out of the pot, the wax lines make it look striped, side to side. Sectioned up to make squares.
Rant touches a finger to the egg. Touches it a second time. He lifts it from the spoon his mom holds. Pinching it by just one end, Rant dips the egg a little ways into the pot of boiled onions. The yellow dye.
Lifting the egg out, Rant holds it, striped half green and half yellow. The white lines of wax cutting the sides like the lines on a world globe at school.
"That's a beautiful pineapple," Mrs. Casey says.
"Ain't a pineapple," says Rant.