Since there were no windows in the room, he couldn’t determine whether it was night or day. A tube was taped to the back of his hand, his arms and chest bare. His sister was asleep in a chair by the side of the bed. He tried to reach out to her, but there was an unexpected heaviness in his arm. His head throbbed, and he thought he must’ve fallen. The whole building hummed. He could feel it in his shoulders and back, in the back of his legs. He pushed up in bed, and when Marin opened her eyes and saw him, she stood out of the chair.
“I want to go home,” he said. The words sounded like a slurred, off-key lullaby.
But she bent down over him, holding her cheek against his, her hand cradling his head. “I know you do, sweetheart,” she said.
Twenty-six
GRIFF HAD BEEN awake thirty-six hours and now it was after midnight again, the surrounding darkness flashing with unexpected bursts of pastel light. Mulberry, rose and amber. She’s been this tired before.
She knelt at one of the buckets of water she’d carried up from the creek and immersed her head until she was out of breath and sat back gasping. She felt raw, jittery, like she might start cackling and not be able to stop.
She stared down at her forearms, expecting the skin to be split and weeping, but it was just spotted with pinesap, charcoal and clay. She pushed herself up against the rim of the bucket and shuffled to the front of the kiln, where the yellow bricks throbbed with heat.
At dawn he’d said: “You can sleep now. It’s my shift. I’ll stay.”
“We already know that’s a lie.” She’d been standing by the hammock pulling her clothes back on. She’d meant it to sting. Then she asked him to leave. Well rested. Well fucked. This firing was hers.
She pulled on the thick canvas gloves, opened the door to the firebox and laid in the split pine for this last stoking. Her shoulders and knees ached and her ears rang with the fresh roar of the fire. The heat made her stagger.
When the box was filled she latched the door and stripped off the gloves and began mixing the sand and fireclay into a wet slop, one bucket at a time.
She circled the kiln, mudding up the spyports and ventholes and finally the firedoor, careful not to burn her hands. She shut the damper down. She could hear the wet clay sizzling against the metal door, the fire huffing for oxygen. Two days to cool, maybe two and a half, and the colors will be set into the ware. She was so tired she drooled, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand.
She upended the remaining bucket of water over her head and stood there sputtering, shaking her head, trying for a last burst of clarity. Just enough to get home. She put the lanterns out and picked up her thermos and Einar’s old black lunch pail. The kiln groaned in the dark.
She stumbled down the trail out into the meadow above the house and finally across the porch. She stood leaning into the front door, the exhaustion spreading like a drug, but when she stepped inside she could feel their absence like a second bucket of cold water. She didn’t need to check the rooms, just stepped back onto the porch and swept the beam of her flashlight over the workyard. The truck wasn’t there. Oh, God, she thought.
She stood weaving at the table in the hallway, staring down at the blinking message light. She pressed the button.
“Griff, this is Marin. Your grandfather’s all right. He’s had a stroke, but a very minor one. We’re at Saint V’s. He’s resting now so please don’t call back tonight. I’ll call in the morning. About eight. I love you, and he really is going to be all right.”
She sank to the floor, lying over on her side just a minute to rest. A shower would bring her back, a pot of coffee, and she’d be in Billings in three hours, tops.
She woke with the kitchen linoleum cool against the side of her face, then remembered where she was. It was just starting to get light. Five-thirty. She listened to Marin’s message again and called Paul. There wasn’t anyone else she could think of.
“It doesn’t mean he’s going to die,” he said.
She held the receiver away, pressing it against her thigh, then sat at the kitchen table. She could feel her heart drumming in her chest.
“Are you okay?”
“I had to sneeze.” She didn’t want him to know her whole body was buzzing. Like it was filled with birds trying to fly out in every direction. “Marin said she’d call back this morning.”
“I’m coming over.”
“All right.” And then: “Don’t say anything to anybody. Not even McEban.”
“He’s in Cheyenne.”
“Where’s Kenneth?”
“They’re together. McEban called yesterday afternoon. Said they had plans to tear up the town. He said they’d be home when they were done.”
She could hear the morning downdraft rushing in the trees, the songbirds starting up. “I’m getting off now,” she said.
She was sitting on the porchsteps when he got there, and they went in the house. She picked up the phone to check for a dial tone, then set it back in the cradle. “I need to clean up. I didn’t want to get in the shower until you were here.”
“I’ll come get you if she calls,” he said.
She stripped out of her clothes, and washed her hair twice, soaping and rinsing the woodsmoke away, finally standing braced against the side of the stall, crying until the water turned cold. Her eyes were puffy when she came out in her robe. She sat at the table.
He’d made coffee and poured her a cup, but her throat was so dry she coughed it back up through her nose.
She cleaned her face with a paper napkin, dabbing at the stains on the front of her robe. “Do you ever watch yourself?” she asked.
“Sure. Sometimes I do.”
“I watch myself all the time,” she said, “and right now I’m a fucking mess.”
“I think you’re doing fine.”
She held a hand out between them. It was shaking. “You always think I’m doing fine,” she said.
He took a cribbage board from a drawer and talked her into a game, but she had trouble deciding which cards to play. She folded her arms on the table, resting her cheek against a forearm. He reached over to rub her neck.
“Don’t,” she said.
“I wish you’d tell me why you’re mad.”
“I’m not.” She puffed at her hair and it lifted, falling back against her face.
“Then how come you wouldn’t let me help you finish the firing?”
“I wanted to see if I could do it myself. Straight through.”
He tried to comb his fingers through her hair, moving it away from her eyes, and she sat straight up.
“I was tired of looking at you,” she said. “Okay?”
He studied her face. Mostly she looked just tired. “Okay.”
He took a carton of eggs and a package of bacon from the refrigerator and put a pan on the stovetop.
“I’m not hungry,” she said.
“You could try.”
“I tried a piece of toast when I was waiting for you. I felt like I was going to puke.”
The phone rang and she was up and had the receiver even before he could turn toward the sound.
“Are you there? Hello?” Marin’s voice sounded fragile.
“I’m here.”
“I thought I’d call early. I thought you might be worried.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“He’s still asleep, but he’s going to be just fine.”
Paul was staring at her and she turned away, pacing with the phone.
“I can’t picture ‘just fine.’ I don’t know what that looks like.”
“It means we were lucky to be up here in Billings. So close to a hospital. They did a CT scan and put him on a blood thinner right away. An anticoagulant. They don’t think there’ll be any damage. But he needs some rest, and they want to watch him a little bit longer. See how he does on the medication.”
“Is that what the doctor said?”
“He said it was a wake-up call.”
She sat down at the kitchen table. “That’s such a bullshit thing to say. All it means is he’s not dead yet.”