"God doesn't have my bills to pay," replied Mirelle.
"Ask and you shall receive but remember, the Lord also helps him who helps himself." Lucy paused to brush hair from her eyes, flouring her forehead liberally in the process. "I mean it, Mirelle. The parable of the talents can refer to creative gifts as well as old coinage."
It was Lucy who provided a direction to her efforts when she realized that Mirelle had little time to complete any ambitious work. It was Lucy who discovered the answer in Mirelle's creche figurines and forced Mirelle to take time out from her frenzied endless housecleaning to make Christmas figures for the church bazaar. Mirelle had managed three dozen various animals, shepherds and kings before her cranky kiln broke down. She had the satisfaction of seeing every one sold the first day of the bazaar. It was Lucy, however, who insisted that she give only a percentage of the additional orders to the church. There hadn't been much profit but there had been enough for a book on furniture refinishing which Steve had wanted, and a new sweater for herself. And the following year, she'd had to start work in October to fill orders for her creche figures.
Lucy had sought and found an answer for her, and that year Mirelle had broached her much-hated inheritance to cast a bronze figure. She'd done a woman sitting, leaning on one straightened arm, her feet drawn up under her skirt. The dreamy face was upturned as though the woman were watching something in the sky.
" 'Beside the streams of Dove,' " Lucy had said with an embarrassed laugh when Mirelle had presented it to her friend.
Mirelle had had to turn away, deeply touched, that Lucy would perceive so accurately the thought in her mind when she'd done the figurine.
"Mirelle, it's the loveliest thing I've ever owned," Lucy had murmured.
"It's 'thank you' for blasting me out of the slough of despond."
"Just 'thank you' the girl says, with a masterpiece." Lucy's voice was unsteady. "You funny, funny kid. If you don't look like Mrs. Average Dumb Housewife, and you can turn out… ach, go away."
Mirelle had, almost on wings, she was so pleased with the reception of her gift. It wasn't as if she'd been afraid that Lucy wouldn't understand, but because her friendship with and affection for Lucy was such a fragile thing.
"You can't ever rush a friendship," she'd tried to explain to Steve. "It can flop, all of a sudden, like a souffle."
"Oh, Lucy's all right," he'd replied sourly. "Fred's my sort of guy, though. Sure knows his mulches."
Mirelle never tried to explain again. She often wondered if Steve hadn't been a little jealous of their friendship, and annoyed because Lucy encouraged Mirelle to be independent.
In her own way, Mirelle had quietly followed Lucy's advice: she ran like hell to keep up with the children and her housework, and always found time to work a little each day. Until they'd left Ashland.
" 'But she is in her grave, And oh, the difference to me.' "
Mirelle quoted the last lines out loud, carefully putting Tasso's sketch back in the file. "Let's face it, there aren't many Lucys in the world for Wordsworth or Mirelle. But then, how many are needed?"
She took down the photo album and thumbed through it, snapping out four photos of Lucy at various summer parties. Reluctantly she took out the obituary clipping, with its dull-looking, full-face portrait of Lucy.
The sense of loss had not diminished. Mirelle swallowed against the tightening of her throat at remembered grief. Lucy had not been much of a letter writer. There had been only two brief notes between Ashland and Spartanburg. The last one had told Mirelle of the cancer which Lucy had known was poisoning her body even before Mirelle moved away. Then Reverend Ogarth had sent Mirelle the newspaper clipping and a personal note. She could remember every word:
Lucy asked that I write you when the funeral was well past, his letter had started. She said that she'd told you of her illness but not that the cancer was inoperable nor that her death was only a matter of months away. She was like that, giving unceasingly of herself.
I know how close you were to her. Nothing I can say can ease this blow for you, Mirelle. But she gave me a message for you. I was to remind you that you must keep running, as hard as you can. She made me promise not to write you until after the funeral.
The tears rolled down Mirelle's cheeks onto the clipping. As she brushed them aside, she knew what she was going to sculpt next.
She had used the only prepared form she'd had for the soldier. It was infuriating to have to make a new armature with this concept boiling up inside her. She compensated by making the frame much larger.
Work big, bigger. Lucy was bigger than life anyhow. Well, Lucy was practical, too. Mirelle thought as she prepared the wires.
The thing with working small is that you finished quicker. But I don't want to finish fast. Not this time.
Mirelle made four attempts in the next two weeks before she was satisfied with a pose that expressed her conception of Lucy. She wanted to capture a certain attitude. Lucy had had a habit of finger combing her short front locks out of her eyes. She was constantly in motion and constantly losing hair pins, always pushing the lock back from her forehead as she moved restlessly from one task to another, too busy to take time to find or replace the pins. Mirelle put the figure's right hand up, in Lucy's gesture. The skirt was flying, to express the vitality and energy of the woman. Lucy had worn her hair either in a chignon or a pony tail, long before that style became popular. Mirelle chose the pony tail to express youthful exuberance. For some time, she toyed with idealizing Lucy's unexceptional features but finally she decided that it had to BE Lucy to make the work successful. Lucy's vital inner self must spring through the bronze, fleshed out in beauty so that one could almost see the marvelous snap in the eyes: hear the rough-edged contralto voice, see all the intangibles that had made Lucy beautiful.
Can ye not see my soul flash down/A singing flame through space?
Mirelle chanted the old poem to herself as she thumbed a line down the skirt. For three weeks she had spent most of her time on the Lucy. During the two brief respites when plasticene had resisted her, she had done a rough plaster of the soldier and another happy pig figure to mollify Nick over Tonia's prize. Otherwise she had Lucied.
The doorbell rang and she damned the intrusion because she was so close to finishing the statue. As she went up the stairs to the door, she looked back at her work, highlighted by the sunlight. And sighed with satisfaction.
"Expecting someone?" asked James Howell facetiously.
"Is it the 26th already?" she cried in dismay, acutely aware of her clay-smeared face and dirty smock. She stepped back so he could enter. He placed his hat on the hall table.
"It most certainly is and it is obvious that the passage of time which I marked in dragging tempo, has flown by you in industry."
"I have been working. I'm sorry. We have a lunch date."
"I also have a commission with you, or has that flown your recollection?"
"No, it hasn't. But I have to confess that I've really done nothing on it. I started out to. But then, well, I had to do a pig for Nickie when the Lucy wouldn't work, and the soldier…" She stopped because she realized that the soldier was in plain sight on the workshelf. And that soldier was more James Howell than the man himself.