Ancient Places

by Jack Nisbet

  Burton Stewart’s son recalled Leno as a source of constant entertainment—always smiling and joking, making plans about what stunt to tackle next. When Leno and Burton heard that the venting stacks from the old brick factory were slated for demolition, they stuffed Kiln Number Three’s 110-foot chimney with as many old tires as they could find and torched them, just to see black smoke pouring from its top once more.

  The two friends also brainstormed about ways to run the Z Canyon rapids, a wild stretch of river just downstream from their 1930s gold claim. At first, Leno conceived of a torpedo-shaped craft that could have come straight out of a Jules Verne novel, composed from various truck and tractor inner tubes stretched across steel piping. He figured that since it was shaped the same end to end and top to bottom, it wouldn’t matter how they went through the standing waves. The torpedo was never launched, but in 1958 Leno, Burton, and another friend purchased a bright-yellow Army surplus rubber raft and test-floated it through the Bowl and Pitcher rapids on the Spokane River. Well warned, they outfitted the raft with a splash guard and custom sweeper oars before launching at their mineral claim on the lower Pend Oreille. Their efforts resulted in a rough encounter with rocks and standing waves and ended with a desperate struggle to shore. In a painting of the failed attempt, Prestini inserted a figure of Neptune lurking behind a rock; the sea god is stirring a whirlpool with a log.

  Through all this mischief, the artist remained an engaged figure within the community. One spring, when a friend was hired to move the old Clayton Grange Hall to a nearby farm, Leno showed up with his pickup to help drag it across a low-lying pasture. Warm weather had thawed the ground faster than anyone anticipated, and the project bogged down in the slick yellow clays of ancient Lake Latah. Leno participated in two days of this misadventure, then made a colored-pencil sketch titled Hell at Dawn that captured the moment when the tattered building finally crested a rise above the bottomlands. While the mover’s flatbed truck strains to tow the Grange Hall uphill, an ancient bulldozer bumps its frame from behind. Two pickups, a farm tractor, and a stray dog all pull on extra splayed lines. Every machine, as well as every human and animal, is completely covered with mud.

  Vagabond

  Prestini did most of his artwork during this period in a converted garage that he called the Vagabond House. Children of all ages would traipse in and out of the studio while Leno painted away, talking a blue streak and often listening to popular tunes that inspired some of his creations. Leno liked to display his latest pieces in a tavern or restaurant, then sit at the counter drinking coffee while he listened to customers’ comments.

  His smaller paintings varied from quiet landscapes to cultural fables. Though such realistic or romanticized scenes were popular with his neighbors, they were dismissed as “calendar art” by Leno. “I can paint them without half trying,” he told a newspaper reporter. “They are for relaxation. Those I like most are my thought-type paintings. They are like myself, the nonconformist.”

  Prestini’s wide circle of friends included other nonconformists who had found their own odd niches in the world. Among these was Homer Holcomb, a legendary rodeo clown; one of Leno’s paintings depicts Holcomb wrapping his red blanket around a snorting Brahman bull. The back of the animal’s muscular neck snakes down from its bruise-colored shoulder hump toward eyes and nostrils that glow like angry coals. Those same Paint Pot shades recur in the painting Ghost Riders in the Sky, conceived when Italian American singer Frankie Laine’s version of the song was popular in the late 1950s. As a forlorn wrangler gapes at the night sky, dark clouds sweep a thundering herd up from the bright-orange and blood-red depths of hell.

  Leno’s more ambitious works used precise symbols to skewer human and corporate greed, the immorality of power politics, and the marginalization of tribal cultures. They wound through dark scenes that explored his constant struggle with female relationships, guilt, and desolation. Several she-devils, surrounded by Freudian trappings and displaying bodies that seem modeled on Alberto Vargas pinup girls, can still make his most loyal supporters squirm. No matter what the subject, all of Leno’s paintings displayed his personal sense of color and composition, and his knack for the odd detail. And all of them stirred with the same restless energy that hounded him all his life—as his brother, Bee, said, Leno never could stand to leave anything sitting still.

  Around the Vagabond House, Prestini continued to present himself as a stubborn purist, turning down masonry jobs when he didn’t feel like working and making a point of telling reporters that he painted for himself, not for money. According to local legend, one evening at the Triple R Diner in Clayton he refused a check for $1,500 in exchange for Ghost Riders. Yet there is no question that Leno would have enjoyed more recognition as an artist. In an audiotape of unknown date, his words flow out with fierce intelligence as he sorts through a selection of his paintings, commenting on each one. He contrasts the textured pastel cowboy scenes that were selling in Los Angeles at the time with his own thinner nonlayered technique, explaining how he imparts the lilt of an eye or the crucial moment in a story. He spins a yarn about what happened when cowboy artist Charlie Russell visited entertainer Will Rogers in Southern California. He recalls the flash of orange light in a Rembrandt painting, and the way Michelangelo layered colors to give his Sistine Chapel figures a sculptural feel. He describes his own work in a way that makes it come alive.

  Some people in eastern Washington took notice of his efforts. In early 1961, a show of fifty of Prestini’s paintings at Gonzaga University included an appreciation by an English professor. “Leno Prestini may not be a trained artist,” he wrote, “nor a genius in color and position, but there is more to art than outward form.” The critic went on to compliment Leno’s intense compassion for life and his acute awareness of both time and his fellow man, but some outside observers had to wonder whether the only message Prestini absorbed from this backhanded praise was one of condescension.

  The Gonzaga show traveled north to Colville, and Leno also exhibited paintings at a Spokane art center and Eastern Washington University. But only a handful sold, and Prestini, now in his midfifties, remained lonely and frustrated. Battista said that “his disappointment in choice of girl companionship and loss of mother plus his false teeth giving him trouble” added to Leno’s depression. A doctor prescribed tranquilizers, which Leno did not like at all. But in spite of his problems, he retained his feel for the regional landscape and its people. Those who remember him always remark on his love of coffee and animated conversation. He also continued to practice his craft—when a local auto insurance agent prodded him for a painting in 1962, Leno whipped out a historic scene of Deer Park in exchange for a year’s coverage on his Karmann Ghia convertible.

  He remained a faithful customer at the Clayton tavern, where no tippler could ignore his full-wall mural that memorialized the town’s symbiotic relationship with Washington Brick and Lime. Measuring four by eighteen feet, Leno’s version of the story begins with a gangly drillman pulling his twisted hand auger from the earth. The plant founder kneels close to the test hole and touches his fingers to the fine whitish-gray clay stuck to the drill. A tribal figure wrapped in a tight blanket leans against a leafy green tree, looking on sternly, but there is no stopping the process once it has begun. Stumps and ricks of cordwood appear, separated now by raw red gouged clay pits and eroded gullies. Around these grow large glowing buildings and towering vent stacks. A homesteader guides a horse-drawn plow with one hand as he pushes a wheelbarrow of bricks toward a kiln with the other. Flames lick from the top of the chimney above Kiln Number Three, and the stacks behind the terra-cotta building pour black smoke into the sky. A Leno-like vagabond, young and jaunty, heads away from the smokestacks toward the flashing lights of a big city in sight beyond the hills.

  A central giant dominates the mural’s foreground, split in half between youth and age, flanked on his right by a choirboy, a puppy, and an hourglass full of time’s sand. The base of the sand co
lumn records the operating dates of the terra-cotta plant, 1907 to 1945, and the curled horns of a ram’s head—echoing the Clayton terra-cotta figures that grace the first-floor frieze at Spokane’s signature luxury hotel—frame the title of the mural, From Clay to Clay. The ram’s nose and chin droop across the pages of an open book, on which Prestini has penned one of his introspective poems. “Clay is my heritage,” it begins “like this image of the craftsman in clay.”

  In his arms, the chiseled craftsman in the center of the mural cradles a finely ornamented art deco office building, but a long rough chain around his shoulders binds him to the picture frame itself. To his left, the sands of a second hourglass have almost run out, and his companions have been reduced to a nodding drunk and an exhausted old dog. Behind them, the aged vagabond returns from the city to a snowy, ruined landscape and a shuttered brick factory. A drunk man at the bar represents both Leno’s cherished mentor Frank Frey and the pathos of the company town; the vagabond’s struggles and the entire chaotic world. “I too, am chained to this picture,” reads the second page of the poem, “until the time when clay shall inherit me.”

  Originally mounted in Matt’s Tavern in Clayton, From Clay to Clay is only one of several Prestini originals that graced the walls of businesses in the small town. In the mid-1950s, when a fast-moving fire tore through Clayton’s single main street, flames destroyed one of his murals that hung over the produce section of the local mercantile. Racing ahead of the inferno, anxious citizens descended on Matt’s Tavern and rescued Leno’s painting of the brick plant. All of its disparate elements—from the leering company founder to the grim reaper leading a besotted Frank Frey to his grave; from a quiet Catholic church to the blue star in the window of an honorable war veteran; from the snow-covered terra-cotta building to the eerie purple and ocher bands of night’s descending sky—were rolled up on an ax handle and carried out of harm’s way.

  In the early months of 1963, Leno drove to Los Angeles to visit Battista. There, Bee said that his brother acted “very nervous and unhappy, then painted a couple of paintings with a spatula and didn’t like them so he threw them in the trash.” As Leno prepared to return to Clayton, Battista rescued the pieces from his garbage can and made his brother promise that he would go see a doctor as soon as he returned home. Two days later, Burton Stewart called to say that Leno had shot himself and was in the local hospital with a bullet wound to the head. He lingered for almost a month but never regained consciousness.

  Battista refused to let his brother’s memory fade completely away. Over several summers, with the help of friends in the Clayton community, he and his wife constructed an A-frame building for a museum. They combined a large selection of Leno’s work with their own lifelong accumulations from Washington Brick and Lime and gave guided tours all through the 1970s and early ’80s. When Bee grew too old to keep up the museum, a younger generation of descendants auctioned off its contents, but buyers within the family managed to retain most of Leno’s paintings and many of his effects.

  Neal Fosseen, the son of A. B., served as the president of Washington Brick and Lime after World War II as it fought its way through bankruptcy, building trends, and consolidation with other Spokane brickyards. In an interview, Neal Fosseen clearly evoked the atmosphere around his family’s Clayton operation in the 1930s, when fine terra-cotta was being modeled up on the fourth floor. He snorted audibly when Leno’s name was mentioned—“sometimes Prestini could be a little tough to deal with,” he remarked. But he remembered the fun parts as well. Fosseen recalled that Leno would slip his own handmade terra-cottas—pieces such as Two Fishermen in a Boat—into the kiln just before it was sealed off for firing. And he counted off the years during the 1930s when his family delivered Leno’s picture tiles to friends as Christmas cards.

  When asked what he thought of Leno’s more ambitious paintings and the way his reputation as an artist had swelled beyond Clayton, Neal Fosseen snorted again, quietly. “That’s not the way I think of him at all,” he said. “To me, he was just Leno.”

  Fosseen then recounted how the realities of the Depression in the latter 1930s meant that there were often no orders for the terra-cotta plant to fill. During those periods, Leno would be laid off to pursue whatever caught his fancy, and, Lord knows, he did all kinds of things. But if a call came in, Prestini would dependably show up at work and resume his post as head modeler. “Look,” said Neal Fosseen. “He was a terra-cotta man.”

  VIII

  SISTERS

  Kicking the Mound

  The spring morning had been cool, and at first the gentle mound that rose beside the big ponderosa pine seemed lifeless. But as glints of sunlight began to filter through the trees, a few ants emerged from the pile.

  “Red ants!” hollered one of the students who had been watching the mound.

  “Actually,” I said. “They’re called ‘thatching ants.’ ”

  “No, no. Red ants. Let’s watch ’em and see what they do.”

  The students policed themselves for the next several minutes, barking at anyone who attempted to pick up a stick or edge closer for a kick. We talked about a golden currant bush that the colony had engulfed, and the way each of its profusion of yellow flowers might grow into a fruit over time. Were the ants going to change that? Would they eat the sweet currants?

  One girl spread her arms wide, palms facing each other, then swung them ninety degrees to gauge the breadth and height of the mound. She judged the pile to be almost four feet in diameter and more than two feet tall at its peak. Another member of the group was sure that there was a queen hidden deep within, whose responsibility involved laying eggs.

  As more ants trickled into view and began to spread across the surface of the half globe, one boy plucked a loose individual from the edge and held it up to his face for examination: “See?” he sneered at his partner. “They’re not all red—only the head and middle. The back’s shiny black.” He paused, twitched his nose, and held the flailing ant close to his face. “What’s that smell?”

  Now all the kids were leaning in. The ants were still moving slowly enough that the students could marvel at their different sizes, but it wasn’t long before one student got nipped. With that, the circle of humans jumped two steps back.

  “Fire ants! They’ll sting you!”

  “Thatching ants,” I said. “And it’s a bite, not a sting.”

  The victim, sort of in agreement, shook off his wound and blended back into the class. Two students who had ignored the casualty pointed to a black hole that was opening on one side of the mound. We could see the way workers were moving material this way and that, enlarging the hole.

  “That one, see, he’s got a little rock!”

  I slipped in the fact that since every ant moving within our view was a female, it must be a she carrying the little rock. One of the girls who had first noticed the tunnel entrance pondered the seething mass of sisters. Then she straightened up and backed away from her classmates. The girl extended her left arm straight out in front of her face before deliberately raising her right arm past her ear at a forty-five-degree upward angle. She bent down to grab a handy stick and repeated the pose:

  “Kendo fighting position! Hah!”

  She broke rank to march around the outside of the circle: stick aloft and stiff-armed, she deftly imitated an ant she had watched parade with a fragment of a pine needle. Man, I thought. If only Dr. Hansen were here to see this.

  But I couldn’t dwell on the professor’s absence. Another student had tweezered a single ant between his fingers and stuck it in a girl’s face. She drew in a sharp breath, then sniffed again. “It’s lemon,” she said. “That’s the smell!”

  Someone else had a brother who had been through Air Force survival school, where he had been taught that in a pinch, he should drink ants crushed in water to keep going. The recruit swore they tasted like lemonade, and it sure beat drinking your own urine.

  “Pissants!” came the quick response to that news.<
br />
  “Thatching ants,” I said. “But they do smell like lemons.”

  “Pissants!”

  Energized either by the human commotion or the heightening sun, the level of ant activity around the mound steadily increased. More scouts combined to push back the perimeter of kids. Ant kendo masters moved materials identified by student eyes as bits of bark, broken pine needles, twigs, pebbles, and grass blades. Several lugged tiny bobbing jewels that turned out to be drops of hard pine resin reflecting the sun. Others hauled cricket legs and—much to everyone’s delight—an occasional dead ant. Around the upper reaches of the mound, two more tunnels opened like chanting Buddha mouths.

  “It’s alive,” one boy muttered. “The whole thing is alive!”

  Several were still shouting “Pissants!” when a teacher arrived to edge the group away from the mound toward the next station on their schedule.

  Inside the Colony

  Dr. Laurel Hansen is a member of the biology department at a community college in Spokane. She has also coauthored a monograph on North American carpenter ants, genus Camponotus, that delves into their life history on every conceivable level. I initially heard about her when neighbors called an exterminator to deal with an ant invasion in their kitchen. Dr. Hansen showed up to assess the situation—as a longtime consultant with many of the area’s pest control companies, she often joined operators in the field. Her brief appearance set the neighborhood abuzz, because, several friends later informed me, this ant lady had a reputation for solving difficult cases.