Twenty-three
THEY CAME UP from the toolshed with their tongues thick in their mouths, the blood throbbing in their temples. McEban stopped twice, bending over with his hands braced against his knees, hacking up a yellowish slime. They drank from the garden hose at the side of the house, dousing their heads before stepping up on the porch to heel their boots off. Paul went in and mixed a pitcher of iced tea, stirring in three tablespoons of sugar. He brought the glasses out, set them on the edge of the porchboards and waded down into the overgrowth of mint that skirted the porch, picking a handful of leaves and rubbing them between his palms until they were just a damp, green pulp. He cupped his hands over his nose, inhaling, then pinched some mint for their tea. They sprawled on the steps sipping from their glasses, satisfied to be still at the end of the day.
All summer they’d pulled the noxious weeds from around the buildings and along the creek, piling the stalks with their blossoms in the workyard to dry. This morning they burned the pile, spending the rest of the day out spraying an herbicide on the patches of spurge and thistle, the hound’s-tongue and bindweed, idling along on the ATV, a portable, thirty-four-gallon tank mounted on the rack behind the seat. Paul’s joints ached like he had the flu, and he felt uneasy about spreading this poison, but there weren’t enough hours in the summer to kill it all by hand. When they heard the phone ringing McEban went in for it.
“I’m driving down right now,” he said, stepping back out on the porch with the cordless. “I know what time of day it is,” he said, then tossed the phone onto a chair and stripped his shirt over his head.
“Is he hurt?” Paul asked.
“No, he’s fine, but he got put in jail.”
Paul tossed what was left of his tea out into the yard. “I can go with you if you want.”
“You can make me a thermos of coffee and some sandwiches.” McEban stood in the doorway. When he noticed his boots standing to the side he picked them up by their tops. “I need to shower this shit off and then I’m gone.”
Paul brewed the coffee and packed a little cooler with sandwiches, fruit and a handful of the protein bars McEban favored for snacks. He gassed up the truck at the bulk tank by the shop and was pulling alongside the porch when McEban came out carrying a small duffel.
“Just keep it running,” he shouted, and Paul stepped out of the truck.
“Anything special you want me to take care of while you’re gone?”
McEban threw the duffel across the seat. “Just keep an eye on things.” He patted his breast pocket. “I’ve got the cell if you need me.”
Paul had time to tack new shoes on the boy’s horse before dinner, afterward backing the stock truck around to the ricks of cordwood stacked against the side of the barn.
When he’d come home for Christmas holiday McEban had borrowed a Belgian mare broken to harness from an old bachelor who raised draft horses out by Ucross. They felled the dead-standing lodgepole off a quarter section of beetle-killed pine, limbing the trunks, cutting them to eight-foot lengths and skidding them through the snow to a loading ramp. The last week of December they sawed it all down to fit in the woodstove in the shop, splitting and stacking it there out of the weather.
He threw two cords up onto the bed of the truck, one stick at a time, then showered and changed, idling out in compound to the paved road.
They’d built this kiln when she was fifteen and he was in his last year of high school. Einar had hired Curtis Hanson to grade a track up the creek from the buildings, graveling it just enough that the cement truck wouldn’t get stuck, then they poured and leveled the pad in an afternoon.
Her high-school art teacher knew a potter from the Archie Bray outfit in Helena and convinced him to come down and oversee the construction. Hermann was a large man, thick through the gut and ass and arms, and they lined up the cinderblock for the base and stacked the firebrick, McEban welding the angle-iron armature, the hinges and hardware. Then they set the arch, layering two inches of insulating fiber over the top with a half inch of Portland cement, a fireclay-and-slurry coating over that. When they were done Griff was left with this small, cross-draft kiln, the chimneystack built back against the sidehill. She named it Prometheus.
Lastly, they set posts at the corners and midway down each side of the pad to support the beams and a corrugated tin roof, so they could fire in any sort of weather. The sides stood open.
This evening she was almost finished loading the bisque and greenware into the firing chamber when Paul backed in and started stacking the wood off close to the firedoor. She already had half a cord of kindling split and arranged by the stokeholes, and a hammock strung between two posts. The air smelled of pinepitch and earth and the mixed fragrance of wildflowers.
She stood to the side of the open chamber, her face streaked with sweat, her hands lumpy with fireclay and sawdust from wadding the individual pieces so they wouldn’t adhere to the shelving or fuse to one another in the heat. Behind her was an assortment of ribs, metacarpals, a pair of clavicles, a taloned foot, a femur, buffalo-sized vertebrae, a beaked skull, the hooves of an equid and a pair cloven, a single spiraled horn. Some of the pieces had wrappings of grasses and feathers that would burn away, adding texture to their surfaces.
“You sure you want to do this?” She was dressed in a tank top and shorts and lace-up workboots with her arms folded across her chest like some young archeologist posing by a newly unearthed ossuary. There was a breeze in her hair.
“I’ve always helped,” he said.
“Just checking.”
They built a starter fire and she latched the door closed, then sank down sideways in the hammock with her firing journal in her lap. He squeezed in beside her, the hammock sagging lower, swinging lightly. She recorded the exact time, noting that the kindling was damp. She could feel his leg pressed against hers.
“I got you a going-away present,” she said.
She rocked back to get a hand in her pocket and held the small, black thing up in the evening light and he took it from her and pressed a button on the bottom that lit up its screen yellow and green, with lines forming to indicate the contour of the valley and numbers for their elevation and barometric pressure.
“I already loaded the maps of Africa,” she said, feeling an unexpected calmness about his departure.
“I brought you something too.” He struggled out of the hammock. “It’s in the truck.”
She watched him walk away, working at the GPS with both thumbs, and got up to tend the fire, intent on keeping it small and constant for the next five hours, candling the kiln so the ware would cure without cracking.
He came back with a skull balanced on a palm, its front teeth yellow as beeswax.
“Oh, my God,” she said.
“The whole skeleton’s up by the dams on Horse Creek, but this was all I could bring down without getting bucked off.”
He set it on a round of fir at the edge of the pad and she knelt down to examine it.
“He felled a tree right on top of himself,” he said. “Probably the wind caught it.”
“They’re related to squirrels. Did you know that?”
“Yeah, I did.”
When she got up to check the fire he lay back down in the hammock, nodding off just before dark, and she let him sleep and at midnight lit two white-gas lanterns and hung them under the eaves, and the kiln’s arch and chimney rose up out of the night in the lamplight, shadowed yellow and tan. She stacked in the two-foot lengths of pine, building the fire up all at once. She could hear the flames rushing back through the congestion of shelving and clay and thought of the accretion of fly ash upon the surfaces, the unexpected cocoas, ochres and terra-cotta colorings it would produce. She thought of the women he’d meet. Dark women, city women. She closed the front stokehole and looked back at his sleeping face. He was beautiful. The women would find him beautiful. Of course they would.
At one in the morning she opened the secondary vents a half inch, the mouseholes a quarter, and the fire breathed hotter. When she threw the door back to lay in more wood the flames folded, rushing from her like the burning wings of a dragon.
He raised his head from the hammock. “I’m good to go.”
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’ll wake you later if I’m not.”
He lay back to sleep.
It would be their bodies that knew, she thought, looking away into the darkness to search for the hands, breasts and thighs already dreaming of him. The patches of dampened hair. Sweat ran down her back, so she stripped her top off and wet it in the bucket before pulling it back on. She could hear the fire carrying the alkalies back against the ware, the flames licking out the sideports like bright horns.
At three she opened more vents, snapped on her welder’s goggles and squinted through the spyholes, the flames lean at the rear of the kiln. She eased the damper down and watched them pulse yellow and white, fattening. She could hear the fire moan, hear the women’s laughter bubbling against his body, her wet shirt steaming in the heat.
At four she took up the long-handled poker to stir the firebed, the draft thrown open so the ash and embers could ride the currents of gas and flame, settling more heavily on the ware. And there were the plans they’d made when they were younger, just kids—a family, a home. He shifted in his sleep.
At the five o’clock stoking she singed the hair off her right forearm, standing there watching the pieces shimmer on the top shelves, reflecting in the flamelight. What a fool she’s been. Foolish in love. She rubbed the burned hair from her arm.
She turned the lanterns out at dawn, stacked in as much wood as the firebox would hold and opened the primary vents front and back, knowing that the pieces near the floor, where the oxygen was thinnest, would color purple and maroon. She was short of breath and gasped and watched him turn in his sleep, yawning, then blinking up at her.
“I can do this without you,” she said.
She’d already seen cone six bending at the top back, and increasing the heat at a rate of three hundred degrees an hour will bend cone nine by noon. Tonight cone eleven, twenty-three hundred degrees. She could feel the heat rising inside her. And at midnight, just seventeen hours away, she will make the last stoke and seal up the firebox. Any hotter and the clay could flare and melt, running as though poured from the center of the earth, pooling on the floor of the kiln. That’s when she’ll sleep.
“What time is it?” He dug at his eyes.
She stepped to him, bending down to unbutton his jeans, working them loose from his waist. He arched his hips, wanting to help, and she knelt and took him in her mouth, but he tasted only of ash.
She gripped his hands, pulling him to his feet, and peeled her shorts down to the tops of her steel-toed boots, then fell back across the hammock and opened her legs, her knees winging out, guiding him into her. “The world tastes of ash,” she said.
She shut her eyes.