What Would They Say in Birmingham?

IT ALL STARTED in the bathroom in the back of the bookstore in Florinna, Alabama, the store owner, Mrs. Horne, gesturing magnificently at the blank wall and talking about Arabian stallions, and the mural painter, Lucy, backed up against the toilet, nodding and saying, “Yes, yes,” while wondering how in the world she could possibly paint seven horses in a race with the wind around the toilet-paper holder and faux-marble sink.

Lucy spent a lot of time painting in small rooms because of the idea people had that a mural “opened up the space.” Before 2005 she had painted mostly coastal scenes in new developments along the beach, but Hurricane Katrina had taken the charm out of blue herons in low-lying marshes at dusk, and sunlit waves on gleaming sands. Now she found herself farther inland, painting alpine scenes, rushing brooks and country roads winding toward distant mountains.

Mrs. Horne, the bookstore owner, had decided on a Vermont village with a red barn and a church steeple, but last night she had gone to an inspiring neighborhood-development meeting where the speaker, a handsome man with a square jaw and penetrating eyes, had talked about a sense of place. “Build your own memories into this town!” he commanded. “Sure it’s a beautiful old town with loads and loads of history. But it’s your town now, and you must give it your own history. Your grandmother’s porch, your great-aunt’s garden, a scene from your favorite book. Build into the town everything that you love.”

So Mrs. Horne threw out all Lucy’s sketches of Peacham, Vermont, and decided she wanted for her mural a rendition of the frontispiece of her favorite book as a child, Wesley Dennis’s magnificent illustration of seven Arabian stallions dashing across the desert in Marguerite Henry’s book King of the Wind.