65The Man With the Pushcart

This is the quietest thing on the walk and it may be the best. A tall stucco wall, weathered to bone and grey, blotched with a century of water running down it — and painted across the bottom of it in flat black, a man in a flat cap and a long coat, leaning into the handles of a wooden pushcart with a spoked wheel. He is walking left to right, out of the corner of the building and up the street.

Mounted on the cart, in hand-lettered red on white, is his cargo: CAST THY BURDEN UPON THE LORD, and beneath it, in small black letters, PSALM 55:22. The rest of that verse — the part the sign leaves off — is and he shall sustain thee.

Behind him, in vast weathered grey capitals that he partly walks in front of, is the wall's older life: DEEP ELM. And above that, higher up, two more bands of lettering from something older still, degraded past reading. Nobody has signed this. There is no plaque, no date, no handle in any corner — we looked at every inch of it.

The building matters too. This is 418 Elm Avenue, which held the first Pipkin Drug Store and was later converted into a segregated cinema — the Elm Street Theatre, opened in 1947, renamed the Coronet in 1952, closed in 1954. Cultural Arts of Waco owns it now and is turning it into an arts centre called ArtPlace. Creative Waco's public art inventory, which lists this mural simply as Cast Thy Burden, notes what happens to it next: the historic mural stays, and gets built into the design of the new centre. The man with the cart keeps his wall.