Sold the last one off the wall at the market, then had to walk away from the empty nail
Bit of a mad one Saturday. I do the market in Galway most weeks, stall of prints, hares and herons and the odd bit of bog. Usually I'm lucky to shift four or five and I'm grand with that, it's more about the chat than the till.
Anyway a woman came back for the third time in about an hour. Kept circling the big one, the heron in the reeds, the one that took me three blocks to get right because the legs kept coming out like stilts on a stork. Third visit she just says she'll take it. Framed, cash, no haggling, and I wrapped it in the good paper I keep for that and off she went under her arm in the rain.
Here's the thing though. I went to take it off the wall and there was this clean pale rectangle where it had been hanging, and I got a bit of a pang off it. All winter looking at that thing every Saturday and now there's just a bare patch of hessian.
Got home and the small fella asked had I sold "the bird" and when I said yes he goes "so you don't have it anymore" and looked at me like I'd lost something. Which I suppose I did. The whole point is to sell them, that's the job, ink and paper and a few pound for the coal. But there's a difference between knowing a print is out in the world somewhere and standing in front of the empty nail it used to be on.
Anyway the woman was delighted, she said her mother had one of my hares years ago at a fair in Spiddal, so it's gone to a good home. Still. Weird aul feeling all the same.
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The empty nail got me. I sell at a small stall here in Kraków sometimes and I still can't get used to the gap on the wall after something goes, it looks wrong for days. Also, three visits before she bought it, that's the real compliment I think. She wasn't deciding whether, she was deciding when. And the legs, I know that fight, heron legs are a nightmare, they go stiff and cartoonish so fast. If she circled it that long, you got them right.
Kraków, well now you're at the other end of the heron's flight path entirely. The gap on the wall is the worst of it, yeah. I left the nail there for a fortnight like a fella in mourning. My wife says take it down, I says no, the nail earned its spot. It's still there.
And you're dead right on the three visits. First one is the eye, second one is the argument with herself, third one is the wallet. She was never deciding whether at all. Took me a while to cop that and stop hovering like a bouncer every time someone came back.
Heron legs though. You know the exact thing, they go like a child's drawing of a flamingo if you're not careful. I carved the reeds first and left the legs to the last block so I couldn't bottle it. Second version had a knee joint in the wrong place and the whole bird looked like it was doing a jig. Binned two blocks before that one. That's the job sometimes, you carve the same leg four times so a woman in Galway can look at it and go grand.