The Carpenter Piece: A Tale of the Arts Department

“The ‘beast’ secession, offspring of the ‘dragon' Slavery, drawing in his train a third part of our national stars, was pierced with the deadly wound which could not be healed. It was the combat between Michael and Satan of Apocalyptic vision, re-enacted before the eyes of the nineteenth century…”

Francis Bicknell Carpenter

Professor Thomas Skillruud was vaguely aware of the concept of Yelp, and, like so many conventions of the Information Age, he regarded it with the same disdain as Twitting and TickTock dancing. He could not and, if pressed, would not Yelp.

“I specifically requested soft scrambled eggs,” Central Illinois’ preeminent specialist in 19^th/20^th Century American art therefore persisted mano-a-mano.

“Yeah,” his server “Calli” nodded in a tone even drier than Tom’s breakfast. “Scrambled eggs. They’re just naturally soft.” She poked the few remaining egg curds with a white thumbnail. “They feel pretty tender. Was the rest hard? And if so, why’d you eat the hard part?”

“No, no. It’s a means of preparation, a matter of timing and technique.”

“I mean, you ate ‘em, so how hard could they have been? I’d get you another order, but you’re not presenting a very compelling case.” Her eyes narrowed, as if onto the old guy’s grift. “Anything else?”

“Could you top off my coffee?” Tom sighed.

“Making a fresh pot. Might take ten or so minutes.”

Professor Skillruud stared dismally about the paneled dining room. The guest lecture at SIU/Carbondale had largely been a bust, with a meager turnout for the visiting scholar’s reception that had turned out to coincide with the off-campus Applebee’s Half-Off Apps Happy Hour. Tom was eager to return to Millington and the insular comfort of the University. He had an evening birthday dinner with Bryce Wehrhaus, an old faculty chum, and hoped a New York strip and whatever passed for a single-malt at the Beltway Tony Roma’s would compensate for the lack of a gift.

And then he spotted it, hanging above a corner two-top next to the restroom corridor. Abraham Lincoln was a popular fixture in rural Illinois, and it might not have registered with Professor Skillruud had this not been a very specific Abraham Lincoln. He abandoned his breakfast scraps and the check and crossed the empty dining room. Craning across a sad john-adjacent table, Tom locked eyes with Abe, and his heart quickened. Oil on canvas – no reproduction here. 

Francis Bicknell Carpenter. A few years back, Tom had nearly tussled with Capitol Security gaining admittance to the Senate west stairwell on an impromptu drop-in to view First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation. Carpenter, a New Yorker who’d spent six months in Lincoln’s White House capturing the full breadth and depth of the event, had called the proclamation eventually freeing the Confederate slaves “an act unparalleled for moral grandeur in the history of mankind.”

No signature, not that that was a dealbreaker. Carpenter’s purported signed portrait of Mary Todd Lincoln, uncovered in 1929, had been reproduced in several biographies before restorer Barry Bauman declared it a forgery. Tom’s heart rhythm receded as he realized the brush strokes, the texture and luster of the vintage paint, the grain of the canvas itself, were off by a good century at least.

“I thought you were like in a hurry or something,” California or Calvinia muttered behind his shoulder.

“How much?” Skillruud demanded.

“Seven-seventy eight. If you hadn’t ate the eggs—”

“How much for the painting?”

Caliban frowned and stared anew at Lincoln and his company. “This painting? Shit, I dunno – it’s been here since I was a kid.” Professor Skillruud deferred comment. “How much you wanna pay?”

“Are you authorized to sell?” Tom inquired, suspiciously.

“Uh, I guess not,” Cali conceded, glancing anxiously at the rotund middle-aged man now removing Tom’s breakfast plates before he could reopen the egg imbroglio. “Lemme get Don.”

As he caught snatches of the baffled and agitated debate between restaurateur and employee, Tom further scrutinized the “Carpenter.” The skill itself was admirable – the painter had captured what Tuckerman had acknowledged to be Carpenter's "facility in capturing a likeness." Finally, Don unceremoniously handed the egg-encrusted plate to Calimine, sanitized his palms on a jelly-streaked apron, and strode calmly toward the professor.

“How much you wanna pay?” he asked.

**

“It smells vaguely of fried onions,” Dr. Wehrhaus murmured.

Tom delicately wrested the “Carpenter” from the old man’s knobbed fingers, and the history scholar and Lincoln buff retrieved his Glenlivet with a shrug.

“It was languishing in a corner of some Southern Illinois hotel – the owner told me his mother had painted it when he was a child, at least 40 years ago. I plan to ask Professor Aboud – our department historian – to clean and restore it. I mean, I know it’s not a genuine Carpenter, but…”

“It’s a very competent imitation,” Bryce protested, sloshing aged scotch. “I have a reproduction of First Reading in the office, but this being a product of artistic fancy…”

“How so?” Skillruud asked defensively.

“Well, I mean, who do you think that is standing next to the president? Come, Thomas, you must have studied antebellum history in whatever public school you attended. Or did you simply assume him to be a White House bootblack?”

“I did not,” Tom murmured, buttering his roll with gratuitous brutality. The inference of racism was more bristling than the sleight to his humble educational roots. “Frederick Douglass?”

The gaunt historian tipped his glass in tribute to a dim but hopeful student. “The notorious abolitionist himself. And that third party, the older gent with the spectacles, is William Lloyd Garrison, editor of the abolitionist journal The Liberator. Now, abolitionists were viewed as terrorists by pro-slavery interests and anything but heroes by most white Americans even in the North. You’ve read Carpenter’s Six Months at The White House With Abraham Lincoln?”

“Of course.” He had not.

“Even a seventh grader knows slavery was merely one hot-button issue in the War Between the States. States’ rights, the North’s support and the South’s opposition to protective trade tariffs, political polarization. Abolition was an unpopular cause even in the northern free states.” The warm roll in Tom’s fist began to bleed margarine. “In 1860 in Boston, Douglass was threatened practically with dismemberment. And Garrison, my God, Garrison. The Liberator consistently condemned the U.S. Constitution as a pro-slavery document.”

Wehrhaus drained his Glenlivet. “So to postulate that Lincoln, politically besieged as he was even within the Union, would confer with known radical abolitionists at the height of the war, is, frankly, ludicrous. I’ve said as much in my new book – you did read the copy I messengered over last week?” Bryce brightened as he glanced over Tom’s shoulder. “Oh, my. You didn’t.”

The server deposited Bryce’s pineapple upside-down cake before the old man, who now appeared to Tom even more satanic in the celebratory candlelight. “You shouldn’t have, Thomas.”

Tom wiped buttered fingers on what he discovered to be his tweed jacket. “Dig in. I’ll be back.”

**

Despite the black ice now shellacking the Tony Roma’s parking lot, Professor Skillruud found himself hastening Professor Wehrhaus toward the Buick like Artur Dmitriev guiding a brittle-boned Oksana Kazakova toward Olympic ignominy. The faux-Carpenter was wedged precariously under Tom’s left arm, wrapped in the reassembled “Hey, Birthday Boy!” paper the arts prof had applied in the Party City lot, and a single-ply doggie bag hung from his numbed right fingers.

“Hey, you!”

Skillruud and his skating partner went into a brief skid before Tom collided with the bumper hitch of an ice-crusted Dodge Ram. As the stars cleared, he looked up into the barrel of a pistol. The slight man behind it wore an insulated black coat zipped to the throat and a black knit balaclava, like an extra in some high-pyrotechnic Tom Cruise action film equipped with a prop from Kevin Costner’s new cowboy flick.

“The painting,” the gunman shouted.

“It’s a fake!” Skillruud squeaked. “I mean, it shows a technical mastery, though, thematically—”

“Jesus, I don’t need the thing’s fucking provenance!” the stranger shouted. “Just gimme the fucking thing!”

The thief stepped forward, and his right foot left the ground. The gun skittered against the tire of a nearby Tesla, and Skillruud released painting and professor and advanced on the bandit, clubbing him with the full centrifugal force of his leftover T-bone. The thief scrabbled to his feet and dove toward the rear of the Ram, again slipped, and thunked on the pavement. Skillruud took the opportunity to seize the painting and Bryce, and virtually iceboarded to the Buick. Somehow, he fishtailed out of the lot, and, once on the Beltway, thought to confirm Birthday Boy’s physical and emotional welfare.

“For a moment, I thought we were, as they say, goners,” Tom breathed, cranking the heat. “Though I wonder if that six-shooter of his might have been a toy.”

“Wrong gun,” the historian mused before the snoring began. It was for Tom the evening’s bright spot.

**

“My God, Tom, are you certain you’re all right?” Associate Professor Aboud inquired as he accepted the parcel. “You’re, ah, black and blue.”

Professor Skillruud touched his face and inspected his hands. “I hoped I’d escaped unscathed.”

“No, your socks, Tom -- one black, one blue,” Malik noted. “I wonder if perhaps you’re more rattled than you believe. Nonetheless.” Malik tore the Birthday Boy scraps from the counterfeit Carpenter. Espresso eyes widened behind his stylish lenses. “Is this real? Of course, I don’t mean real. This paint is clearly of 20^th Century manufacture, and the technique, while competent, is hardly--”

“I thought old Wehrhaus might appreciate it, as a novelty. He has that Emancipation Proclamation reproduction, you know.”

Malik nodded. “He’s the Civil War scholar, correct?”

“Or nostalgist,” Tom murmured dourly. “Needless to say, apart from the opportunity to bludgeon me intellectually, Bryce seemed unimpressed. However, a gift is a gift. I could compensate—”

Malik smiled at the parsimonious prof’s perfunctory proffer. “Please. You say this thief specifically demanded the painting? It may well be nothing…”

Tom leaned in closer, studying the leonine Douglass. “Yes?”

Malik turning the “Carpenter” over. “Might I remove the paper? It looks as though it was cut from a grocery sack.”

“You have carte blanche.”

Malik carefully pried the oxidized staples from the framed canvas and pulled the rear liner free. After a cursory glance, he looked up. “Look at this. The stretcher bars.”

Skillruud inhaled sharply as he peered at the wooden frame over which the canvas had been stretched. “Obviously hand-cut, from the rough corner joints. And as obviously hand-stretched and manually nailed – not the uniform tension or stapling you’d see in a modern canvas.”

“In addition, the tacks would appear to be of 19^th Century manufacture,” Aboud observed. “If I could remove enough of the gesso from the tacking margin, I should be able to determine if we’re talking about the rabbit skin glue/gypsum gesso typical of Carpenter’s era. If we are extremely lucky, we may be able to identify animal DNA with a simple PCR test. Where’d you find this, again?”

“A greasy spoon hotel restaurant north of Carbondale. The owner told me his mother painted it – she was a grade school teacher for 50 years.”

“The name? Oh, here it is, in the lower corner. Geraldine B. Cooperidge. Wish she’d signed the painting itself. You’re aware of the infamous Mary Todd Lincoln portrait deception?”

“Yes,” Tom stated tersely.

**

“Mr. Cooperidge?”

“Yuh?” Don was as ebullient as he had been the previous morning.

“This is Professor Thomas Skillruud, from the University?”

“Yuh?” the restaurateur reiterated with a butter-knife edge of wary annoyance.

“Well, some of our people here were quite impressed with her work, and wondered if she might have painted any other, ah, historical subjects?”

“Yuh? Hold up. Hey, Cal, you wanna grab that open-faced and the burger for the Plattners? No, it’s that egg guy. He wants more of your grandma’s pictures. And don’t give me that face – we know you never came home last night. Mr., uh….?”

“Skillruud. Professor. We’d be interested in seeing any additional Geraldine Cooperidges you might have in your possession?’

“You mean like for money?”

Tom paused, and swallowed. “Of course.” 

“Well,” Don drawled. “We gotta have a little family pow-wow about that. See, I just run the restaurant – my brother Ron actually owns the hotel, and most of Mom’s pictures are in the guest rooms. I couldn’t really give a rat’s ass, but Ron actually got pretty piss-, pretty aggravated when he found out I’d sold the one by the johns.”

“How many of your…mom’s paintings would you say your family has displayed in the guest rooms?”

“Well, we got about 50 rooms, and there’s one in each, two in the Lincoln Suite. I think that one’s a cow. Oh, and a bunch of lemons. You know, we probly shoulda put the Lincoln picture in there...”

“Well, hindsight. So, do you think I might talk with your brother?”

“Ron? Well, I guess maybe you better, the way he went on. But he went out of town yesterday afternoon, think he said to look at some new mattresses up in Peoria or Millington or something. But I’ll give him your number, you want.”

Tom blinked, and waved off a student in his doorway. “Ah, yes, please. Anyone else in the family inherit your mom’s artistic bent?”

“Hah?”

“Her talent.”

Don grunted. “Unless you count what Calipygia and her no-good friends did on the rail underpass by the Dollar General. It’s signed, if that helps. Didn’t in court.”

** 

“The rabbit died,” Malik announced. “And was dispatched to the glue factory, I suspect somewhere around 1863. I’m waiting for the carbon dating results on both paint samples and the canvas, but I suspect I know what we’ll find. I’m on office hours for the next two hours – call me as soon as possible with your permission, and we’ll begin the next steps.”

Tom disconnected, then nearly impaled himself on a Quad bike rack as Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition” erupted from his smartphone.

“Ron Cooperidge. You that professor wants Mom’s pictures?”

“Ah, yes,” Skillruud piped. “Your mother’s art has sparked quite a bit of interest here in the department.”

The hotelier grunted. “That’s doubtful – she couldn’t paint worth shit.”

“But you were upset your brother had parted with the Lincoln piece.”

“Well, hell, it was our mom. Plus, some of those pictures were like heirlooms we’ve had in the family for maybe 100 years.”

“I thought your mom painted all of them.”

“She and Dad weren’t made of money, and when the ‘art bug’ hit her, as she put it, Mom used anything at hand. There’s a lot of sentimental value attached to that shit. How much for the whole lot?”

“Well, of course, the University would want to do some provenance research to ensure…”

“Some what?”

**

“Surrounded as I am by artists and scholars, I tend to forget that the masses aren’t necessarily fluent in our jargon,” Tom began, taking a seat beneath Healy’s The Peacemakers. “So it didn’t initially register with me how odd it was that our gun-toting desperado told me he didn’t need the bogus Carpenter’s expletive-deleted ‘provenance.’”

Wehrhaus smiled like a dyspeptic feline. “Were you aware the oldest known English occurrence of the word ‘fuck’ in adjectival form is attributed to a note in the margins a 1528 manuscript copy of Cicero's De Officiis? By a fucking monk, no less.”

“That didn’t seem to fit with what I’ve experienced with the Cooperidge clan,” Professor Skillruud pressed on. “But who else beyond the artist’s family could have known we had the painting? There was something else last night that didn’t immediately strike me. When I noted the curious nature of our thief’s weapon, you responded in what I took as garrulous gobbledygook that it was the wrong gun. I now believe our man had mistaken your orders, selected a different weapon than you’d specified for his staged holdup. When I retired to the men’s room, you called him, directed him to rob the painting.”

Bryce shook his liver-spotted head as he shifted. “I employed some…hoodlum to steal a painting you had already gifted me.”

“It wasn’t yours yet. I was planning to have it cleaned by our art historian and authenticator. If by some chance the painting was an accurate record of an actual event, it could have discredited your new Lincoln treatise.

“Which, by the way, it does. Geraldine Bicknell Cooperidge’s family somehow came by Carpenter’s sketches and rough draft works, including his aborted depiction of Lincoln’s meeting with the abolitionists. My guess is, the president asked his guest to keep the politically sensitive meeting confidential, and Carpenter was an honorable man. When Cooperidge took up painting, she used Carpenter’s preliminary drawings as a sort of color-by-number template.”

Professor Wehrhaus nodded slowly before he yanked open a drawer at his right elbow. He pawed about for a moment, then leaned to peer into its depths.

“Sweet Jesus,” Tom sighed, moving to the left side of the desk and tugging at the opposite drawer.

“Ah, yes, the locked one,” Bryce declared, slapping his forehead. “I mean, it is a loaded weapon. Oh.”

“Which your accomplice discovered. So instead, he just grabbed Ulysses Grant’s six-shooter—”

“Tecumseh Sherman’s, a reproduction. We were in no real danger at any time.”

“Well, we weren’t. That was the last thing that bothered me once I’d composed my thoughts. When I released you and the Lincoln painting and pummeled our tormentor, he dived for us. Not for his – your -- gun. Not for the painting. For you. You were his first priority. I’ve known you for 30 years, and I can’t imagine any family member coming to your aid, much less committing a felony for you. Only a grad assistant would be stupid and obsequious enough to do that.”

“God love ‘em, the imbeciles,” Bryce murmured.