“Amazing that it’s still intact.”
“Here,” she said, bringing a bottle of India ink and a dip pen, “add your name to the others. Just promise it to a young gaffer some year when you’re getting older. Are you twenty-five now, Xan?”
“Just twenty-four.” Saying it made him feel ashamed, as though it were somehow his fault that Eva had grown old.
“When he was twenty-four and I was twenty-six, we lived on an island near Charleston. Now all that’s gone to condos and hotels. The world changes until it’s not ours.”
She dipped the pen and added a gleaming date to the marver. Afterward, Xan bent to scratch his name in ink below his friend’s wavering inscription.
“You’ll be the fourth to use this marver.”
“Yes.”
“You need a wife who’ll mark the stone when you come to dust.” She gave him a quirk of a smile that discomfited him.
“I hardly have time for a wife.”
“You’re married to the glass,” Eva said.
The absence of Russ had disarranged the space between them. They both felt it. Xan was glad to ease the marver onto his dolly and load it through the hatch of the car. He felt distressed for Eva — there was something he had failed to say or that simply could not be said. Yet she was the last scrap he had of anything approaching family. Prince was a common enough name in western North Carolina, but he hadn’t tried to find kin, not even up in Little Canada. He swept a hand across the marble and slid the box of tools on top.
“Good-bye, dear Eva.” In his embrace she was as brittle as a green man in winter, all snapping twigs and dry stalks.
Then he climbed in his truck, and Eva diminished as he pulled away on the familiar drive that curled around the studio before slinging itself downhill. After that there was nothing but highway and mountains and an occasional flare of flame azalea until he reached the turnoff that led toward Sylva, Cullowhee, and Dillsboro.
Xan checked his watch: almost time for the market to close. Hoping Garland hadn’t already left, he headed straight for the farmer’s rickety table.
Garland waved him over.
“My wife brought the book you wanted. See here—”
He turned the volume so that Xan could see the heading, SALAMANDER, FIRE (NATURAL AND LEGENDARY). The farmer tapped the gilt-edged page with his thumb.
“Right here: ‘If a glassblower will stoke the furnace with myrtle wood for seven days and seven nights, the great heat will give birth to a creature called the fire salamander. The glassblower should not let the cunningness of the form dissuade him, but cut until it bleeds plenteously. If he smears a hand or any part of the body with blood, he may become proof against fire.’ ”
“You don’t—”
“Believe it? My young friend, wonders are all around us and we see them not. The world is a tangle of mystery, rolled into a ball, and soaked in the tears of things—”
“What?” Xan was startled, remembering Eva’s words about the marver.
He thumped the book. “I learned that from the encyclopedia. It’s a kaleidoscope made from splinters of wisdom and craziness. Here Pliny says that a salamander resembles ice and puts out fire. Aristotle talks about a fire moth: ‘Winged creatures, somewhat larger than our housefly, appear in the midst of the fire, walking and flying through it, but dying immediately on leaving the flame.’ And here’s our boy the China traveler, Marco Polo, touting cloth-of-gold woven from salamanders.” He slapped the page. “This is a dream hoard for artists. If you like, borrow the book — so long as it comes back — the encyclopedia’s all I have from my grandfather.”
“Garland, what a character you are!” said Xan, smiling at the other man’s excitement. “Whoever heard of a farmer like you?”
He grinned. “There are plenty of oddballs in the farming trade. The encyclopedia forced me to be an outdoorsman — showed me nature packed with the sublime.” He tucked a leaf in place as a bookmark and shoved the volume across the table. “Just don’t thrust it into one of your ovens, all right?”
“I hate to take it. ”
“I’m pretty fond of S to T, but I know the best entries almost by heart. Right now I’m reading C to Dto my girls.”
Xan settled the book in his arms. “That bit about the creatures like flies of fire? They must have been flakes of oxidized copper or some other metal.”
“Then what’s the salamander?” Garland asked.
“I thought you’d be telling me!” Surely the salamander was nothing but pulsating coals seen by an overtired gaffer, his eyes swimming.
Xan begged a bag from Garland and slipped the encyclopedia inside. “Come by if you need it,” he said, scribbling directions on a scrap of paper, “or just stop in for a visit. Or to fish — I’ve got a trout stream.”
And so the volume was deposited on the marver beside the box of tools.
At home Xan unloaded his inheritance, stowing the gear in his studio. The room was as tidy as a bakery after hours. Tomorrow he might be pulling glass and twisting it like taffy, but today he sat in a rocker, flipping through the book, drinking strong coffee.
“Listen to this,” he said to the cat. “Magicians expected help from salamanders when their houses burned.”
She lay on the ledge before the glory hole, switching her tail.
“Be born a writer, I wouldn’t need to make one of those fire salamanders.” He read aloud: “ ‘ The fire of hell does not harm the scribes, since they are all fire, like the Torah — if flames cannot hurt one anointed with salamander blood, still less can they injure the scribes.’ Garland must have peculiar dreams after reading this book. What do you say, Fritsy?”
The yellow cat leaped down and rolled on the stone floor. Xan had tried to keep her away from the studio but eventually decided that she was indestructible. She must have eaten a peck of glass dust, and her fur occasionally glittered in the sunlight. Fritsy had learned to stay out of the batch, the powder for making glass, but loved to fool with beads or millefiori and had won her name by a fondness for playing with colored frit. More than once he had found her curled in the empty crucible.
His place was a mix of old and new. With the help of a stonemason, he had built the studio on two acres of slope deeded to him by Harold Queen — Queen was an even more common a name than Prince among mountain names — but had left the cabin that had belonged to Harold’s father much as it was. His friend the mason had bartered labor for glass at a time when collectors were beginning to ask for Xan’s work. He was lucky; he knew that. He had been brought along by notable craftsmen. If not for Harold and Russ taking a shine to him, he would be waiting tables in Sylva or pounding nails all summer long to support a glass habit.
He had been struck by glass fever at a fair during a demonstration of lampworking. A seldom-watched foster child of eleven, Xan stayed until dusk and returned the next morning to help the old man set up shop. By thirteen he held an apprenticeship with Harold that demanded three hours after school and all day on Saturdays and vacation days. So deep had been his unhappiness at home and school that he often said the glass saved his life. Harold introduced his young charge to buyers, provided him with tools that he still used, and treated him like family. After his mentor died, Xan dropped out of high school. He was sixteen, strong and determined. Russ and Eva took him in, insisting that he stay with them and finish out his apprenticeship. They never once suggested that he return to school, though Eva gave him books and taught him a smattering of Latin. When asked about college, Xan would declare that Eva was his Alma Mater. But Harold and Russ had made him a gaffer, and the magic and surprise in working the glass still brought him joy. He didn’t need talk of fire moths and magic myrtle fires and salamanders to make him see the craft as wondrous.