The Sign Painter
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I used to make my way by painting signs. It wasn't as difficult a livelihood back during the 30s and 40s as you might think. Every town needs signs. I even painted a few for soup kitchens in return for, well, soup. All I needed was packed into a wooden box fitted with a collapsible easel, although for really big signs I'd try to find floorspace in a warehouse or even a gymnasium. Any place with a roof and a dry floor.

Working on buildings, however -- now that was a real art. To paint directly onto the facade of some shopfront, I had to know something about its construction; there were different primers for plaster, brick or wood, and if it was already painted, sometimes I'd try to find who had done the work and with what sort of paint. I wanted my signs to last... at least until the next person painted over them.

My favorite "canvases" were barns. Large, boxy, red farm barns. I found them in the spring and summer every year while hitch-hiking coast to coast in search of jobs. (I tried my best never to be caught in farm country in winter, instead spending that season looking for WPA work in some temperate city like Seattle or Miami.) Barns became something of a specialty for me and word got around to the small midwestern towns I passed through. Many of these were populated by recent immigrants from Eastern Europe, who kept me fed and sheltered while I painted on their structures the peculiar artwork that I'd become known for.

Nevertheless, my employers were seldom friendly, instead seeming nervous and embarrassed when describing what they (invariably) wanted: mandalas, wheel-like symbols in bright colors, to keep away evil and guard their crops and livestock. While fieldhands clutched their battered straw hats or fidgeted with their coverall pockets, someone, usually a old woman, would step up and show me exactly what to paint. I would carefully copy onto vellum what she sketched for me with a stick in the barnyard dust and spilled feed. From experience I knew that the colors I used wouldn't matter much, just so long as they were bright and bold and easily seen from a distance. It was the power of the symetrical spoke-shaped design itself that the farmers insisted upon.

"God's Eye" was the name given these patterns, regardless of differing regional versions. Nowadays it's called folk art, I suppose. Superstition didn't bother me. Besides, I enjoyed creating something that was to me simply decorative, rather than the usual assignments -- "Rooms For Rent" "Shirts Cleaned And Pressed" "Bonds Sold Here - Do Your Part!" My efforts always pleased the farmers, who would relax visibly once the talismans were completed, as if the protective spells they cast had gone into effect the moment of the last brush stroke.

And then they'd refer me on to their neighbors down whatever country road I was traveling. I never asked what they wanted protection from, and I never returned to any of these burgs, there was always plenty of new work somewhere else. Funny, I didn't notice at the time that I was never hired for just one barn or in just one town; whatever it was that compelled these transplanted people to use my services seemed also to precede me, keeping the locals in a state of dread until they, too, might be protected by the Eye of God.

Eventually of course my skills aged, my hands grew too unsteady to paint the fine smooth lines my profession required. I settled on the mild Northwestern coast, far from the folklore and extremes of weather where I'd made most of my living. I'd kept every tracing of every mandala I'd painted, each labeled by date and township, and in my retirement decided to catalog these images. Maybe someday, someone would make sense of them. I sent letters and drawings to grange halls and county seats -- Is this barn still standing? And its owners who commissioned my work, how have they fared all this time?

At first there were a few sad replies: this structure is unused and in decay, that family suddenly moved away, this homestead has failed, that farmer died long ago. Then the answers in the mail stopped coming entirely. The painted talismans certainly didn't appear to have brought any enduring peace or prosperity in spite of the strong old-world beliefs behind them.

I gave up trying to document my years of work. Time was spent reading and meditating to the sound of the Pacific outside my windows. A knock on my door one night was loud and brisk enough to be easily heard above the ocean's roar, and startling enough to bring me to the peephole in a hurry. In the dark the man I saw seemed ordinary, and he looked straight at the tiny spyhole as if he could see me there and called out "I have a package for you!"

Well, I let him inside. I wasn't afraid. Other than being quite tall and thin, he was unremarkable, his brown tweedy clothing patched but clean, and he carried a cloth cap in one hand and a large shoebox in the other. "For you -- you'll recognize these things, I think." He took from the box two handfuls of fat envelopes, laid them on a table and yes, they were the same sort I had used in my correspondence. It was my handwriting on each and every one, addresses in Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, Illinois. Most had been opened but there were a few that had not -- maybe they had never even reached their destinations. As he carefully removed and unfolded a few of my drawings, stacked them by the envelopes, I stared, full of questions:

"How did you come by these?"

"You could say that I follow your work. Or did." This in a voice as open and ordinary as his appearance, so that it completely masked the strangeness of his visit, the mystery of the intercepted letters. It was like fog. Like one hypnotized I let myself down slowly into a chair, unable to take my eyes from his and uncertain just why that should be so.

"In fact when you stopped painting I lost my way for awhile. Oh, I did alright. But for years, those -- shapes -- that you brushed on the barns and homes of foolish farmers were like a beacon to me." Surely I was dreaming these words and his widening smile, full of sharp shining teeth that I knew weren't in fact those of an ordinary man at all. "I still travel the countryside of your former clients. It was easy to, ahhh, convince people to give me your letters, with the return address." Did he step forward and pass his tongue over his lips as he said this? "I've come here to thank you, in my way, because once wherever I wandered I only had to spot your bright work across some remote pasture or irrigated field, and I knew at last that there I would find... sustenance."

And his eyes might just as well have been the eyes of god, for they were the last I ever saw in this life .