The queer thing was this: he owned a load of myrtle. Crape myrtle wasn’t the one proper to the Middle East, not the kind of myrtle that Zechariah saw in a vision of branches and red horses and an angel. But it was what sprang up when a Southerner thought of “myrtle.” If mixed with resinous pine and the windfall oak that he had split and stacked, perhaps that would do.
“What if I did that? What if I worked the glass for seven days and seven nights? Even if I didn’t end up with a living creature in the coals, it would be a feat.” Like many another wedded to a craft, he’d gotten into the habit of talking to himself. Some days his own was the only voice he heard. He got up to see that his blowpipes and punty rods and all the gear and tackle of his trade — the puffer, the tagliol, the blow hose, the threading wheel, the pastorale, and so on — were in order, ready for the first gather from the furnace. He shifted squares of beeswax so that they lay beside the jacks, and ran his hand across the shears and paddles. Satisfied, he went to the door. April humus mixed with the fragrance of an unknown flower, and a rampant scent like bruised garlic pleased him — he could have gone hunting for his own greens, but he had a liking for Garland and thought that he would like to know the man better.
Xan split wood until bedtime and afterward dreamed of nothing but a slow fall through a well of night, ending with strands of a glass dawn. In the morning he kindled the fire with splinters of fatwood and some split crape myrtle. After heaping on oak, he shut the cat in the cabin — separated from the realm of flame by a dogtrot — and went out for groceries. On return he poured cullet into the furnace and began planning the day’s work while Fritsy batted and chased a ricocheting pellet of glass. Animated by the blaze, glass cracked and bounced in the crucible. He left it alone and took a nap, curled on a daybed. When he woke, the fire sat just above two thousand degrees and the glass was a sunny orange in the bowl.
“For you, Russ.”
The first gather of the day was colored with blue and white frit. Xan rolled the glass on the dead man’s marver and afterward brought the blowpipe to the bench. He seated himself close to one of its arms, with his jacks and diamond shears on the table and wood blocks in a bucket of water. While shaping the vessel, he wished for an apprentice to help him with the large gathers. He set the pitcher in the heated garage to wait for a lip wrap and handle. When he was ready, the body would be heated once more, this time in the glory hole; using a punty rod, he would bring a dollop of glass from the furnace and attach the handle and thread the lip.
He kept quiet much of the time. If he spoke, it was to the cat. Intermittently he whistled a minor tune.
All day long he worked, moving from furnace to bench to garage, from garage to glory hole to bench, from bench to the annealers, where the pieces would slowly cool. When the cullet was finished off, he melted the batch and left it alone to “fine out,” bubbles slowly seeping up to the surface. He stripped off his damp T-shirt and dozed again. On waking he took a pipe from the water barrel and heated it.
Before nightfall the annealers held bowls, pitchers, and vases. Strands of ruby and gold trailed through glass the color of a wild persimmon after first frost. A series of tiny fluted bowls and vases were blue and green with a peacock’s metallic luster; he had tossed newspaper into the glory hole to rob it of oxygen and “reduce” the color.
“Today I worked fast, Miss Fritsy. Filled orders for a big sky blue pitcher and a group of smalls. Next I’ll be fussy and start with a shimmery vase with green stems and leaves. Bloodroot. Or uvularia.”
He yawned as he threw on more wood, and that night his brief sleeps had no trace of dream.
Days passed, sometimes snailing as slowly as lampwork — time stretching out like a glittering length of twisted cane. Other times it seemed to fly as swiftly as a teardrop of hot golden glass spiraling around the belly of a vase.
By the sixth day, shadows had gathered under the glassblower’s eyes, and his ears rang with a noise like a hundred delicate glass ornaments shattering at once. At two A.M. he looked from the window as a twinkling star leaped over the horns of a crescent moon. He had become fixated and paused only to nap or shower. Sometimes he forgot to eat. Long moments he spent staring into the crucible, for it gave him a strange joy to see the living glass breathe and sparkle. Meanwhile the annealers were jammed with pieces, iridescent, opalescent, and clear. Half-asleep, he looked up and saw a child close to the still-hot vases, but when he cried out, she vanished. He felt more conscious of his body than ever before — the sorely tested strength in his arms and back and legs, the weariness that lay along his neck and made it droop.
On the seventh day he wanted only to rest but forced himself to go on; he was too close to success and could not let the fire die. Everything he made that day and the following night was a shadowy blue and purple and green flecked with gold. The wares in the annealers looked like dream glass — vessels the inhabitants of another world might take for granted, but never of this. The yellow cat patted at a drop of twilight sealed to the floor and bolted away. Xan caught himself reaching for the hot glow of a bowl and slapped his cheek. He was being pulled hard toward slumber. Shapes were dwindling. He made a tiny pot on four legs, the dream kettle of a witch. He made a thumbprint vase. He made a fluted vase, a flower vase, a fat-bellied vase: slightly crude but lovely. Drifting into a doze while holding the blowpipe, he ruined a calyx and woke, shaking his head like a dog fresh from the stream. The sleep flew away in drops, but a fresh tide of drowsiness rose up to drown him.
In the last hours of morning before the end, he made a vase small enough to hide in his fist. It was as mysterious and dusky as the others. Never had he made so much glass — never had it come as such a surprise. When he looked in the annealers and on the countertops, the vases and bowls and pitchers seemed a fanciful townscape from an alien realm, sweeping from the dawn brightness of the early days toward the twilight pieces of the last.
His heart was stirred by the shapes and colors and the light spangling on surfaces. Tears blurred the toy landscape.
“It’s good.” The words washed against his ears like syllables heard in a shell.
Glove raised to protect his face, he peered into the rippled fire of the furnace. The orange glow laved the coals like bright water over stones.
“What—”
Backing away, he stumbled. His glance settled on shadowy vases that only increased his unease. What had he seen? He groped for a blowpipe and carried it to the furnace. Probing the depths, he grew certain: something was creeping in the bed of coals.
He shivered, the tiredness in him moving like ice in his marrow.
Taking the long-handled pastorale, he scooped up coals with the flat plate and drew it from the furnace. His face burned, though the temperature was dropping; he had quit laying on fresh wood. With shears he nudged the coals away until there was only one left.
A creature had curled around the shuddering orange as if for warmth and camouflage.
Xan groped at the mystery with a gloved hand: it shrank from him. Grasping the coal with tweezers, he shook it gently. In response, the little animal hugged itself tightly against the glowing wood. Then, all at once, it sprawled onto the plate.
He spilled the incandescent creature onto the marver. As he bent to examine what the fire had done, a surge of delight made him tremble. Slowly the orange flush began to ebb. The substance of the body proved clear at the outer edges but was tinted a pale ruddy color elsewhere, with coppery flecks on the back and front legs. It was unmistakably a salamander of living glass.