Giovanni's Light Read online

  Reverend Williams had just been getting undressed when he’d seen the glow out his bedroom window and decided to get dressed again and walk toward it. Mrs. Williams joined him.

  Tommy Elwood had decided to investigate. As had Frances Nickerson and grumpy Diane, who thought that maybe Elwood’s Market was on fire and wouldn’t that just take the cake, after a Christmas like this!

  “Oh,” exclaimed Miranda when she got to the bonfire and saw Pasha’s little red head sticking out of Anna’s coat. Tears began to run down her cheeks as she stood there, thinking about how she hadn’t really believed she would find Pasha, and how she loved Pasha, and her grandmother, and she couldn’t wait to get back home to write about tonight.

  Will Campbell caught the tears with his pencil and kept on drawing.

  Edward Crimmins stood next to Neddie and said quietly, “This is some bonfire, isn’t it.”

  Neddie had never seen anything so beautiful in his entire life. He looked up at his father and said, “I love this bonfire!”

  Will made a few quick lines, to capture the curve of Edward Crimmins’s arm on Neddie’s shoulder. Then his pencil lingered a little longer, to record the light of adoration in Neddie Crimmins’s eyes.

  This is really most astonishing, thought Frances Nickerson. With so many people here, there is so little talking. Well, perhaps it is an improvement. Or perhaps it’s simply too cold for conversation. She noticed that a window was open on the second floor of Elwood’s Market. Will Campbell, she thought. That’s where he lives. Oh, well, he’s an artist, and artists are very absentminded.

  Frances Nickerson made a note to walk this way tomorrow morning. If the window was still open, she would close it herself.

  Chapter Fourteen

  WHENEVER PEOPLE tell the story of Ryland Falls, they always go back to the snowstorm as the big event that changed the town.

  Before the snowstorm there was no Ryland Falls Museum. Edward Crimmins had not yet donated the funds to build it. That came after Will Campbell painted Giovanni’s Bonfire. When Edward Crimmins first laid eyes on it, he declared it was so magnificent that it had to have a proper place to hang.

  Edward Crimmins was a clock manufacturer not an art critic, but he had definite opinions about things, and in years to come it would be a quiet source of pleasure to him to know that he had been ahead of the experts. In time, Will Campbell would become a well-known artist, and Giovanni’s Bonfire was the painting that had established his confidence and his career.

  Before the snowstorm, Ryland Falls was a pretty little town at the bottom of Old Rag Mountain. After the snowstorm, that did not change. But the sights and scenes familiar to all the people who lived there became familiar to many people who had never seen Ryland Falls, but knew it through Will Campbell’s eyes.

  An old vine slinging itself over the crook of a tree seems to be grieving in the arms of a stronger partner. A bush rigged with cobwebs in a vacant field is a bowl of light. And grumpy Diane, gazing wistfully through the window of Elwood’s Market, dreaming of a lottery ticket she has yet to win, dreams for everyone.

  Will Campbell’s paintings reminded people of what they had forgotten, or never knew—that life can be sad and beautiful, lonely and dull, but it is never unimportant or without mystery. What Will Campbell saw encouraged other people to look long enough to see it all.

  Ryland Falls now has another Christmas custom. Sometime during the holidays, Will Campbell always comes to the museum to tell the schoolchildren the story behind his most famous painting.

  He is older now, with gray hair, and he doesn’t use a skateboard to get around anymore. But he has the same pale eyes and ability to enchant children. They gather around his feet on the museum floor and listen as he tells them how one Christmas night he was packing to leave Ryland Falls forever when he looked out the window and saw Giovanni’s bonfire—hanging behind them on the wall.

  Some of the children can point to people in the painting they know, such as Miranda Bridgeman, whose books are now in the local library, and Neddie Crimmins, who became an architect and has children of his own. Their parents recognize many of the older people gathered around the bonfire, such as Tommy Elwood and Frances Nickerson, who now rest in peace on top of Cemetery Hill. And on one particular day not so long ago, after Will had finished his usual talk, a dark-eyed young woman no one recognized walked up to him and said, “That little girl with the cat is me.”

  Will’s eyes widened. “Anna?” Giovanni had often spoken of her, wondered how she was.

  She nodded. “Sitting on my mother’s lap. Only I didn’t know I was sitting for my portrait, too.”

  Will laughed. The grown-up Anna had the same direct gaze as the little girl in the painting. She leaned forward and stared intently at her younger self.

  “When I was little,” she said, “I used to lie a lot. It was a way of making things come out the way I wanted. And then we moved in with my grandmother and I didn’t have to tell stories anymore. But whenever I thought about that Christmas we spent in Ryland Falls, the more I wondered how much of what I remembered was just made up.”

  She took her eyes off the picture and looked at Will. “Now I know that everything I remembered was true.”

  “As true as I could make it,” Will replied.

  Will’s first painting of Giovanni was not his last. Over the years, Will visited him on the mountain many times. They would sit in front of the woodstove and talk about the weather or look at Lucia’s book or not talk at all and just let the friendship grow in peaceful silence between them. Usually Will brought along a sketchbook. And several times a year, he brought his class.

  The children loved to go to Old Rag. Giovanni would show them how he made his tools, got water out of his well, and used what he found on the floor of the forest in different ways, such as turning a tree root into a door handle, or weaving an old vine into a sturdy basket. Will would sit there quietly and draw. By the time Giovanni died, the people of Ryland Falls knew and loved the reclusive woodsman well.

  But there is one figure in the painting nobody except Will Campbell remembers at all. He is standing slightly in the shadows, to one side of Giovanni. Tall and solemn, without looking sad, he gazes not upon the bonfire but upon the townspeople, as if he were silently recording who was there.

  Once, the stranger raised his eyes and looked up at the window, where Will was sitting out of sight, and a smile played around his lips—as if he knew a secret or was part of a plan that nobody standing around the bonfire knew anything about.

  “Who was he?” asked one of the children.

  “He wasn’t anybody from Ryland Falls,” said Will. “But I remember thinking at the time that maybe I had passed him in the street or seen him looking out from behind a restaurant window.”

  “Maybe he was an angel,” another child said.

  Will Campbell smiled. “That’s a suggestion that has been made before. I don’t know. I just painted what I saw.”

  Every Christmas, the mystery of the stranger standing next to Giovanni is reexamined and so far no conclusion has been drawn. But before the snowstorm, very few people in Ryland Falls would have come down on the side of an angel. Now, people’s imaginations seem to be more open to possibilities—about everything.

  On the surface, one might not notice anything terribly different about Ryland Falls. At Christmastime, people still put electric candles in their front windows, enter the gingerbread-house contest, and attend the Messiah sing-along. They make lists, bake fruitcakes, and go to caroling parties. Who is going to get the tree is a question that has not entirely been resolved.

  But newcomers to the town marvel at the way everyone seems to move toward Christmas as if they were being carried upon the current of a deep and reliable river. Most of the world quickens its step the closer it gets to Christmas. In Ryland Falls, the opposite is true. People become more peaceful, their steps become more measured, as if they don’t want to disturb anything important that is getting ready t
o happen.

  Or not happen.

  Nobody in Ryland Falls expects history to repeat itself. But the closer it gets to Christmas, the larger is the general sense of expectation—as if the entire town stands ready to experience something extraordinary that could involve angels or the sudden descent of a mighty force that changes everything.

  Like the snow.