81Holy Deliverance

The walk ends at a small flat-roofed church whose walls are covered in thick white paint troweled into a repeating fan pattern, so the whole building carries a texture like overlapping shells. Painted onto that texture, and now more than half surrendered to it, are three images.

A tall cross in soft ochre. Over it, a shield in pale lavender holding an open black-and-grey Bible with a cross on the cover, flanked by white lilies. And further along, drawn almost entirely in outline, a dove coming down with its wings up and a green olive branch beside it.

All of it is going. Rain has run down the wall in long vertical streaks and taken the colour with it; algae has come up from the ground; whole passages are ghosted back nearly to white. The dove is now more line than paint, which — if you stand there long enough — starts to seem less like decay and more like the point.

The sign on the front says HOLY DELIVERANCE HOUSE OF PRAYER. No plaque explains the paintings, but Creative Waco's public art map does: this is the Peace Mural, painted in 2005 by Chesley Smith — one of three he made for Color Us Proud, the NeighborWorks and Cultural Arts of Waco project that set out to bring colour and pride back to Elm Avenue. Two decades on, the dove is still coming down. They were not made for a trail, or for a camera, or for us. They were made for a congregation, on its own building, and we are the ones who came late.