Twisting Topeka (3 page)

Now all of the walls, minus this last one,
were covered in cheerful, bright, harmless paintings of healthy
settlers with muscular forearms (the men) and apple cheeks (the
women) going about the business of bringing prosperity and corseted
civilization to their clear-skied home. It made him want to break
all of his own fingers.

He chewed his pipe. He sketched
the rough outlines of the last scene. The proposal passed by the
committee showed that this was to be a scene of hog judging at the
state fair. And all of the hogs were going to have Marcelled tails.
As he sketched, he could feel the watcher leaving. The examination
had lasted long enough to assure the visitor that John Steuart
Curry was still behaving just as he ought. He was working in a
reverse Panopticon, with one prisoner and many guards; there was
nowhere in the rotunda that was out of sight. So he’d had to create
that space.

Curry climbed down from the
scaffolding and set to work erecting a canvas walled tent around
his work space. The same construction that had obscured him while
he worked on each of the other walls in turn. He’d made sure early
on, casually, to mention to a janitor that the enclosure helped the
newly painted walls to dry evenly. It was designed to help the
paint sink into the plaster, to help make the frescoes permanent.
Complete hogwash, of course. But he was sure the comment had made
the rounds of the building, and no one had been by to challenge him
about it. After the walls were up he checked for gaps, slipped
inside and set to work, painting.

*****

Another early morning, three weeks later, and
John Steuart Curry wiped the paint from a final brush and packed up
his things. He stretched and his back gave a satisfying crack.
Crouching on a scaffolding day after day was not easy, even in
overalls.

He stepped outside the canvas tent and
listened. Nothing. It was the golden hour when the building was
clean and ready for the new day, but the earliest of the
secretaries had yet to arrive. There was a night guard downstairs,
but he never came up. Too many stairs for old knees. For another
thirty minutes the Capitol belonged to Curry and no one else. There
was time, but much to do.

He turned and started
disassembling the tent, folding the canvas neatly and rolling the
scaffolding out of the rotunda and into a side hall. There was no
time to take it all down, but he didn’t want it to obscure his
work. His masterpiece.

With that done he turned to the other walls,
surveyed the satisfied paintings a last time, and fitted his nails
under the very corner of the nearest one. He pulled, gently,
holding his breath, but there was no need to worry. The canvas that
covered the fresco underneath peeled cleanly away.

He’d been worried that his little
game might fail, that covering the newly made murals with canvases
painted to match the approved panels might not work. That the
paintings would stick to the walls or that the murals would not.
He’d spent months before beginning on the rotunda painting all of
the canvases, and given each finished wall a week to dry before
tacking the canvas on top. A week while he lay on the scaffold and
chewed his pipe, read, and ate ham sandwiches. The extended length
of time he’d spent on each wall was not really an issue. There were
some advantages to being an artist. No one in the building had the
remotest idea how long it took to produce works like
his.

In fifteen minutes, it was done; and he could
look on his work as a completed thing, a whole thing. He was
pleased. No, he was exhilarated. He turned in a slow circle and
stopped chewing on his pipe. The murals spread around him in a
swirl of color and activity. Released from their hiding places,
they burst forth in a maelstrom.

Rather than the dozen discrete scenes promised
in the plans, a single continuous parade of people looped around
the rotunda. Carrie Nation stormed a saloon, hatchet raised. Clyde
Cessna flew loops through the blazing sky, trailing smoke. Charles
Curtis sat, placidly observing Carrie Nation, with his hand resting
on a law book while Fred Harvey poured him a cup of coffee. The
Dalton gang lay on a table, bullet holes much in evidence. James
Naismith played a game of basketball with John R. Brinkley as a
herd of goats grazed nearby. There was no beginning or end to the
panorama of life. It eddied and churned around the rotunda and in
the eyes of each of the figures was the fire of certainty, the
conviction of the righteous.

Curry realized that this was the
first opportunity he’d had to see his vision in reality and all at
once. This was how God must have felt when the first sun rose on
his creation. This was why he had come home. It was the Kansas he’d
loved as a farm boy, the Kansas he’d nurtured in memory while
struggling and starving as an artist in the East. This was a Kansas
of individuality and passion. Kansas as it was, and as it most
feared being seen.

John Steuart Curry smiled. From the pocket of
his overalls he withdrew a check equal to every penny every school
child had collected to pay for his work on the murals and taped it,
not without the smallest of pangs, to one of the marble door
surrounds. Done. Or almost. He still had to sign his work. With a
final dip of a brush into a last pool of paint, Curry stepped to
his masterpiece and wrote:

To the People of Kansas, a gift.
From a true Native Son.

John Steuart Curry,
1941

John Steuart Curry as illustrated
by Lana Grove

The Printed
Word

Miranda
Ericsson

The timeline of my childhood is
constructed around images of well-worn covers and lines memorized
from favorite reads. Reaching back in memory, I can’t recall a time
when I wasn’t surrounded by books. My parents were both avid
readers, and the colorful spines of their collection, lined up in
no particular order, were shelved and stacked in every room of our
old house in the Potwin neighborhood of Topeka. I was an only
child, and I think my parents decided to make up for my lack of
playmates with piles of colorful picture books and classic
children’s novels. I learned to read the way that most children
learn to speak, through immersion. I went from one book to the next
without breaks in between, and read whatever titles I
wanted.

Even my name was borrowed from
literature, though Mom said I was named for Dickinson and Dad said
it was Bronte. We laughed and agreed that either way, I was an
Emily!

We visited the library every week,
because we couldn’t buy everything we wanted to read. I knew all of
the children’s librarians at the Topeka & Shawnee County Public
Library by name, and they always sent me home with a bag full of
recommended reads. I knew even then that I wanted to be a
librarian, because I wanted to help people find books,
too.

I didn’t start out as a book
collector. I wasn’t trying to gather books, at first, they just
appeared through opportunities. Garage sales. Library sales. Gifts.
Once I had them, they became a part of me, and I rarely got rid of
them. When I lost my parents, their collection became mine. Our
shelves interlaced throughout their home, now mine again. When I
was alone with my books in the house where I had grown up, I could
close my eyes and breathe in that smell and feel close to my mom
and dad again. I could pick up a book that had been a favorite of
my dad’s and find his notes in the margins. I opened my mother’s
books and traced my finger over her signature on each inside front
cover. It made me feel close to my parents to read the books that
they had read. My favorite books were often paired in my memory
with a setting, too, like the comfortable chair by the window, or
the soft grass near the garden, where I had first read them.
Printed books can connect me instantly to the past.

I had only been a librarian for about
three years when the Topeka & Shawnee County Public Library
announced its decision to get rid of the print collection. I
couldn’t believe that it was actually happening—my own library,
bookless! Well, not bookless, but that’s what we call it when a
library goes all digital. Our library would still offer books for
download, 24/7, but the printed books would be gone for
good.

I didn’t want to accept it. EBooks are
convenient, sure, and they inspire and entertain. They’re still
books, after all. Reading a printed book is something more,
though--a sensory experience. It means heft in your hands, fingers
sliding on paper, the sound of flipping pages, and that smell of
ink and paper that makes me feel soothed and excited all at once.
How could anyone give up all of that, for good, in exchange for
pages on a glassy screen, swiped with one finger?

I thought that our library was safe.
Digital libraries had been trending for several years, but so far
it had been mostly academic and medical facilities, and I had to
agree that it made sense, there, with the most current, accurate
information being all digital anyway. The few public libraries that
had gone bookless reminded me of the computer labs from my
undergrad days, or of Apple stores: rows of LCD screens instead of
rows of books, clean sight lines, the hum of devices and clicking
of keys. They looked like nice places to study, but they didn’t
quite look like libraries, to me.

But Kansas was completely bankrupt.
Library funding had been slashed big time, and a lot of librarians
were let go. Topeka’s library had to pick between digital or print,
and decided that providing technology to bridge the digital divide
was more important than retaining the traditional stacks. I was a
technology advocate, and I was as stuck to my smart phone as anyone
else, but I hated the idea of getting rid of print
completely.

I took to Facebook and Twitter to get
folks interested enough to speak out, and I tried my best to
convince the board to reconsider a hybrid collection. I cited
studies showing that our brains have a different response to words
in print, as opposed to words flashed across the glowing screen,
and I argued for preservation in print, as an option, just in case
digital access failed somehow. There was nothing I could do,
though. The money just wasn’t there, and hard choices had to be
made.

The Topeka & Shawnee County Public
Library became bookless back in 2026, and survived the budget cuts,
and thrived as a house of tech-mages and a hub for community
engagement—and it turned out that I loved my job just as much as I
had before. I helped people learn how to use the newest tech, gave
advice on cover letters and resumes, hosted book discussions, and
recommended great reads. I was still a librarian.

I missed the books, though. I
remembered walking down the aisles, trailing the tips of my fingers
along the spines, and checking out stacks of new books to carry
home in a tote bag. I missed the quiet feeling of being surrounded
by books in the stacks.

It turned out that our library was on
the cutting edge of things to come. Print went by the wayside in
other libraries and in retail faster than anyone had predicted it
would, despite upswings in print sales here and there. Digital was
just so easy, and took up so much less space. That’s when I truly
became a collector, a gatherer. I rescued as many books as I could,
from yard sales and thrift stores, and the big chains and used book
stores, before they closed for good. I saved a lot of the books
that the library discarded, too, buying them on the cheap from the
library bookstore. I invested in built-in, floor to ceiling
shelves, and I finally spent some time weeding and organizing my
collection. My library.

I’m ready now, for whatever finally
brings down the grid. I’m not wishing for a technology crash or a
return to simpler days, truly. I never want to see my community
turned upside down, or my friends and neighbors struggling. But I
feel it coming, anyway, an inevitable collapse that has nothing to
do with my wishes.

Shelves full of colorful covers and
flippable pages greet me when I enter my home. Standing in my
living room, I close my eyes and breathe in the familiar smell of
paper and ink, and I feel hopeful. I know I’m not the only one who
held on to the past. There are others out there like me, keepers of
the printed word, and we have something to share. Each of us, with
our own ark of books, possess something that will connect people
back to the world that was lost.

Tovarishch
O’Sullivan