He didn't like the picture. Didn't want it really, but when he had the chance he took it. Spoils of war. To the victor go the spoils. Whoever owned the place was gone and the stuff was there for the taking. A reward for risking their young lives advancing through the broken land.
When the captain saw the picture he said ``What will you take for it?''
The captain knew a good thing when he saw it. The painting was of a young woman and two children. One obviously her daughter, the other a little African page boy.
But to him it looked like slavery, and he didn't need reminders. He didn't sell the picture to the captain. He'd missed out on the jewelry, the swords and silverware - hell, he'd keep the picture.
He got the picture home safe and his wife loved it. They hung it in the family room and the smiling woman and the two shy children presided over their married lives. Pregnancies, fights, Thanksgiving dinners all took place beneath the three benevolent gazes.
And life was good for him. A new world was opening. Things were changing. He became mayor of his home town, sixteen hundred people, half of them white, and they had elected him once, twice, three times. He'd got funding for the park, the sewer system, the sidewalks down town.
It must have been a mini stroke he had. What else? What else would cause a small black child in an eighteenth century painting to speak across the centuries to an old black man lying on the couch watching Monday night football?
``Take me home,'' the child said.
``Take you home? Where?'' The old man was thinking Africa.
``Take us home,'' the child said, ``we want to go home!''
It wasn't that easy. He had to establish provenance. That meant nothing to him. He just wanted the painting to go back to its owner. He knew the name of the town, he knew what the house looked like. Surely he could find it.
And so one summer he went back. He found the town, but not the house. No sign. No one around who remembered. No one who seemed to care. He went home.
A few years later the captain called.
``Your picture, you still have it? I saw it in a catalog. It belonged to a banker. It was taken. He's gone. Not a one of his family survived. Someone in the town took the picture, maybe he sold it or maybe that was his house where we were billeted.''
``Its all gone now,'' the old man said, ``I went back there. Nothing's the same.''
``There are people want that picture,'' the captain said.
``Spoils of war,'' he answered and hung up the phone.
He'd grown to love the picture. He looked up at the little boy.
``You're staying with me,'' he said.
The woman looked out from her gilded frame and smiled approvingly.