Keys of Heaven (8 page)

H
enry was bent over his recipe book, making notes on what he was calling his “sky and water glaze,” which was inadequate shorthand for what he'd envisioned in that moment of clarity by the creek. When two silhouettes blocked the light from the open barn door, he lifted his head, momentarily disoriented by the sudden mental return to barn…farm…ordinary life.

He squinted against the light. “Who's that? Caleb? I thought you were helping your grandpa in the fields today.”

“It's not Caleb, Henry. It's Priscilla. And Eric, who is staying at the Inn.”

He put down the pen and closed the book. “Eric? That kid who was bugging you?”

“That was my brother, Justin.”

So he did talk, this kid who had looked into his sketchbook as if it were the Scriptures or some ancient key to the meaning of life. He got up and held out a hand again, and this time, the kid shook it like he meant business. “Nice to see you again, Eric. What brings you and Priscilla over here?”

He looked at the girl, who was more likely to give him an answer. “He asked to come, so I brought him. And now I've got to be getting home. I have a week's worth of laundry to take in off the line and fold and iron.”

“Thanks,” Eric said to her.

She smiled at both of them, flickered through the barn doors, and was gone. Which left Henry with a teenager who suddenly looked very unsure of himself, now that he'd got what he asked for.

“I hope your parents know where you are,” Henry finally said.

“We told Ginny we were coming. She'll tell them when they get back from the train.”

That was good. Sensible. Very Priscilla-like.

Eric hesitated, as if debating whether to give up too much personal information to a stranger. “They went to Strasburg.”

“Ah, that train. They should enjoy it. Now that you're here, what would you like me to do with you?”

To his surprise, the kid flinched. Just a tiny movement, but Henry immediately saw his mistake. “Not that you're not welcome,” he assured him, and the kid stopped looking like he was going to bolt out the door. “I always enjoy talking to another artist. That is…I got the impression the other day that you were interested in art.”

“I—I wanted to know what you were doing there. At the creek. With the sketches. And stuff.” Each word came out as though he were regurgitating something. As if it was so hard for him to talk about this that he had to force himself to do it.

Talk was hard when something meant a lot to you. Henry got up. “I could use a hand, if you have a little time.”

“With what?”

Eric followed him over to the wedging bench. “The thing about being a potter is that there's always something that needs to be done. And that usually means wedging the clay before you can work on it.”

“I don't know what that means.” The boy's avid gaze took in the bench, the block of clay covered in plastic, the cutting wire with its two wood handles.

“It simply means whacking the air out of it. Caleb usually does it for me—he's the boy from the next farm—but he's with his granddad today.”

With Eric looking on, he cut a piece and began to wedge it, hitting it over and over and leaning his weight into the job. He explained about the bubbles and how they had to be worked out of it, then gave him a fresh piece with both hands.

Eric was tentative at first, then, when he saw that banging it on the bench wouldn't hurt it, he really got into it. The kid was strong for his size—he could put almost as much pressure on the clay as Henry could himself.

“You're a natural at this.”
Bang—thump!

“That's what Priscilla said”—
Bang!
—“this morning when we were”—
Whack!
—“making the beds.”

“You helped her make the beds?”

“Yeah. Never did it before. Justin said he wanted to, but I did it.”

“Does Justin make a habit of doing a lot of talk and not so much action?”
Whack!

“He'd freak if he saw me.”
Whump—flip—bang!

Punctuated by the sounds of wedging, Eric began to talk, the way Henry remembered his female cousins talking as they did the dishes. There was something about repetitive shared labor that freed the mind—and the mouth.

“I want to do art—pottery, maybe, or sculpture—but I can't. At home, I mean. To practice stuff.”

“Why not?”

A sidelong glance. “Do you know what Justin would do?”

“What, make fun of it? Consider the source. You'll have to grow a thick skin sooner or later, Eric. When you show a piece, or even offer it for sale in a booth at a fair, people will feel free to give their opinions about it.”

“I still couldn't. He'd probably break anything I made and say it was an accident that happened while he was admiring it.”

“Is he really that small?”

“No. But he's the oldest. He's used to being the one who gets the attention.”

“But you doing what you love doesn't take away anything from him.”

“He doesn't have anything that he loves doing.”

Henry got a picture of a black hole—those phenomena in space that sucked everything in their orbit into their own dense emptiness. “What about your folks? Wouldn't they be happy that you were doing something you liked?”

“All they care about is grades.”

“That's reasonable. Good grades are important.”

“But I'm only in eighth grade. Nobody cares what middle-schoolers do.”

An idea flashed into Henry's head. “Art academy high schools might care.”

“What?”

The banging and thumping stopped as Henry marshaled his flash of an idea into sense. “You're going to high school next year, aren't you?”

Eric nodded, and from the look in his eyes, he wasn't looking forward to it much. Who would, when your elder brother was probably a senior in the same school?

“What if you asked your parents if you could go to an art academy high school? Then you'd have lots of studio time, and you could keep your pieces there, not at home.”

Eric stared at him. “Is that what you did?”

“I got serious about pottery later, in college. But that was me. There's no reason you couldn't start now, if that's what you want to do.”

“I didn't even know there
were
art high schools.”

“Ginny has a computer upstairs in the library—that place with the couch outside your room. You might do some research, and then bring it up with your parents. I don't know, but you might still have time to get in, and a—” He stopped. “Do you have a portfolio?”

“N-No. Just some drawings. I keep them under the bed so Justin doesn't find them. Manga, mostly. Comics. For fun.”

“Nothing wrong with drawing. You saw my sketchbook—you'll need that skill. But you'll need a portfolio to show the admissions people you're serious. And if you're going for pottery or sculpture, that means a freestanding piece or two.”

Despair flooded into Eric's face. “But how can I do that?”

“Summer classes?”

“We're supposed to go to California to my grandparents' place in two weeks. Me and Justin. For a month.” His eyes filled with tears of frustration, and he banged down his third or fourth piece of wedged clay, leaving it in a lump on the bench as he turned away, fists clenched and shoulders hunched. “This is stupid. I wish I'd never said anything.”

And then he bolted out of the workroom before Henry could say another word. A sound escaped the boy—a sob—a gasp—and in utter shame, he whacked the door open farther and fell through it.

Henry stood frozen in place, cool, forgiving clay under his own hands, as the boy's running footsteps crunched in the gravel—skidded—and then voices rose, one of them
Deitsch
.

Wiping his hands on a rag, Henry hurried to the door to find two boys outside. Eric glared at Caleb, who was blocking him with the air of someone trying to prevent a jumper going off a bridge.

“Get out of the way!” Eric wiped his nose, clearly desperate to make sure no one had seen him crying.

“I'm not in your way. You looked like you hurt yourself on the door,” Caleb said reasonably. “What's the matter?”

“Nothing!”

With an internal sigh, Henry resigned himself to not getting much more work done that day. “Eric, calm down and come back inside.”

“I've gotta go.”

“To what? Your folks won't be back yet, and I could really use a hand with that forty pounds of clay that needs to be wedged. Caleb, I wasn't expecting you.”

“We got finished early. Who is this, Henry?”

“This is Eric Parker, who's staying at the Rose Arbor Inn with his family. He's interested in becoming a sculptor or a potter. We were just discussing his options.”

“
Ja? 
” Caleb looked as though he didn't believe it. He swiped his straw hat off the ground where it had fallen, and jammed it on his head. “Does he know how to wedge clay?”

“Yes.” Eric's tone was sulky, but at least he wasn't running.

“Then why aren't you doing it?”

Henry said smoothly, “Come on. Let's continue our discussion while we work.”

A month ago, if someone had told him he'd be holding a pottery class for teenagers in his aunt's barn, he'd have said they were crazy. But two months ago, if someone said he'd be in Willow Creek at all, he'd have said the same.

The Amish would say it wasn't craziness at all, but the hand of God at work. Henry was going to reserve judgment and simply take the day's twists and turns as they came.

This was quite a twist, in his opinion.

He brought Caleb up to speed with blithe disregard for any sense of privacy Eric might have thought himself entitled to, as they banged the clay on the bench.

“If you can't make something at home, then you'll have to make it here,” Caleb said at last. “Unless you know someone in your town with a barn like Henry's, to make things in.”

“No,” Eric said. “What do you mean, here?”

“When did you say you were going home, Eric?” Henry asked.

“Wednesday.”

“Morning or afternoon?”

“I don't know.”

“What are you going to make?” Caleb asked him. He wrapped his piece of clay, set it on the worktable, and cut the next piece.

“I can't make anything. The closest I've gotten to clay is making a jewelry tray for my mom in second grade.”

“I bet you've had ideas, though,” Henry said. “Choose something simple, without too many additions like handles or lids. Go for shape rather than complexity.”

Eric stopped wedging, his hands wrapped around the lump on the bench. “No way can I make a—a whatever, get it in the kiln, put that glaze stuff on it, and have something the day after tomorrow.”

“Why not?” Caleb gazed at him.

“Because it's impossible, that's why not!”

“The only thing impossible is a portfolio piece that you don't make,” Henry observed mildly. “At least get a start on something. You could make some sketches for something simple, and by Wednesday it could be at what we call the ‘leather hard' stage. Then you'd need to do a bit of cleanup, and it would be ready to dry. Once that's done, I could give it its first firing with the batter bowls I'll have ready to go by then.”

“What if my parents want to leave after breakfast?”

“Then you stall them,” Caleb said. “But I guess breaking a piece of harness wouldn't work for you,
nix?
”

“
Nix.
” But Henry could see the gears grinding into motion in the boy's mind. And once they got started, well oiled with hope, he would bet they wouldn't be stopped.

Green eyes met Henry's gaze. “What about a vase? Can you teach me to do that?”

Henry bobbed his head from side to side as he considered it. “No handles. Shape is all-important. But it takes skill to create that shape—and I'm not sure anyone could develop that skill in the space of an afternoon.”

“Aren't vases kind of ordinary?” Caleb wanted to know. “Isn't this like a contest?”

“Sort of.”

“You should make something nobody else has.”

“Like what?”

“I dunno. You're supposed to be the artist, not me.”

To hide a smile, Henry rubbed his face on his shoulder as if he had an itch. Caleb's honesty left a man nowhere to hide—even in his own mind.

Eric banged his clay one last time and covered it next to the others. He straightened, and his gaze traveled around the barn, clearly seeking inspiration. Walls, beams, loft. Bench, stalls now empty of horses, wire enclosure that held crates instead of chickens. Lamps, green ware batter bowls, shelving, buckets of glaze.

Lamps. Batter bowls.

Henry's eyebrows lifted as he saw the moment an idea kindled in the kid's brain.

“We went to Williamsburg last summer,” Eric said slowly. “They had these lanterns with candles in them, made out of metal with holes in it.”

“Punched tin?” Henry asked.

“Yeah.” He glanced around. “Do you have a piece of paper?”

“Right here.” He handed the boy his sketchbook.

Eric's hand was sure, and in a moment he'd completed a sketch. “What about this? How hard would this be?”

It looked something like a round butter dish, with a domed top and a flat bottom. But the top was cut out so that the light from the candle shone through.

“This is doable.” Henry took the pen and added a sketch below it. “You'd flatten a piece of clay, trim it, and drape it over a shaper of some kind—a mixing bowl, for instance. Then you'd cut out your design with a knife and let it dry. The plate for the bottom is easy. You could get the hang of it in a day or two. The trimming will be tricky, though, with all these internal edges. To say nothing of the glazing, when you get to that point.”