Last Message Read Online Free PDF Page A

life.
    I had been so frightened, so emotional that first day that I hadn’t moved an inch throughout the night. I just lay there, breathing through the straw, too anxious to sleep. In the morning, when Jean came and uncovered me and gave me breakfast, I was exhausted. We were both so scared that he covered me up again. I must have slept for about fifteen hours after that. I had lost my watch in the crash, and the Noels told time by the sun. I woke in terror, thinking I had been buried alive. But then I remembered where I was and pushed myself up and out. I sat there, leaning against the wall, looking at the chickens, who turned their heads in their jerky fashion so they could gawk at me with their slow-witted eyes. The pigs snorted and watched too, peeking through the gaps in their pen. I looked at them and they looked back. But the sow occasionally glanced up and beyond me, and when I turned to see what seemed to be catching her attention, I saw a crude painting nailed to a board above me, with a thin film of grime on it. It was hard to tell what it depicted, but it had a great deal of yellow in it, great slashes of glowing yellow, contrasted with startling reds and oranges and a blue as bright as the French sky. I couldn’t turn away. I stood up and brushed the grime off the painting and at that instant I could clearly see what I was looking at, and I nearly fell facedown into the manure.
    I knew what the painting was.
    â€œWhat? What was it?” I said out loud.
    â€œYou are doing it again,” said Dad, “and it’s pretty annoying.”
    â€œEither tell us what he is saying or be quiet,” added Mom.
    â€œI’ll be quiet. It’s just that…you’d understand if you were reading it.”
    â€œWell, clearly, we are not.”
    Your great-grandfather McLean may have been a farmer, toiling hard on his land in southern Ontario, but he made sure all his children knew about literature and art. He often took us to galleries in the city and, as you know, turned me into a lifelong fan of the great artists. I knew then, and I know now, when a painting is worth a fortune.
    I know a master’s original when I see one. I know a Vincent Van Gogh.
    That was what was hanging in that pigpen in Arles.
    â€œHoly crap!”
    Mom and Dad both turned around and looked at me. She even took her hands off the steering wheel for a moment. I glanced up at them, muttered “Sorry” and then went back to the letter and continued to read.
    The Noels were about as ignorant of the world as a young family could be in 1944. They had no running water, no electricity, and had certainly never been anywhere near an art gallery.
    My mind began to race. How could a Van Gogh sunflower be in this pigpen? How could this be? Then I thought about what I knew of the great artist.
    He was as famous for his insanity as he was for his genius. I had heard the story of him cutting off his ear. I tried to remember what else I knew about him. And then I remembered—Van Gogh had lived in southern France…in Arles!
    A shiver went through me.
    I quickly thought of what else I knew. After the gruesome self-mutilation, he had been put into an insane asylum nearby. All his friends in the area were ordinary people, some of them peasants. They pitied him and often accepted his “horrible” paintings—the worthless works of a lunatic—as gifts.
    The first day the Noels had me into their home, I tried to ask them about the painting. It was hard going. I didn’t learn much. But as the days passed, Jean was able to convey to me that his father had given him the painting, that it had been in his grandfather’s woodshed for many years before the turn of the century, and that he had been told that it had been done by a crazy man with red hair and beard, who knew his grandfather. Once or twice, Jean picked up a pencil and paper and drew what he was trying to say. That helped with details. Apparently,