Uncommon Clay (A Deborah Knott Mystery Book 8)

by Margaret Maron

  There on old grainy film was his grandfather, a tall and sturdy young man who turned a large jar on an old-fashioned foot-powered kick wheel as two adolescent boys watched. Impossible to know which was Donald. Davis wanted to stop the tape and run it again in slow motion, but it moved on inexorably to other kilns and other potters. Yet certain of the older potteries kept being mentioned, Nordan and Hitchcock among them, and his patience was rewarded near the end when the camera lingered on old Amos’s face, then moved on to “those who will carry on the Nordan tradition in Seagrove: James Lucas Nordan and his wife Sandra Kay Hitchcock Nordan, and his brother Donny Nordan.”

  As the camera panned across, all three looked up with self-conscious smiles and Davis caught his breath. It was almost like looking in a mirror.

  For the first time since his mother had told him, he felt a sense of loss, of missed connections and missed opportunities to know a part of himself he might never know now.

  The twenty-minute tape was set on automatic replay and he watched it all the way through again.

  When he got back to the Nordan compound, he found a green Chevrolet now parked by the side of the main house, and this time his knock was answered by a tall, plain-faced woman whose hair flared almost straight out from around her face. “Yes?”

  “I’m Davis Richmond. I thought Mr. Nordan was expecting me, but—”

  “He certainly is.” Using both hands, she smoothed her hair back and secured it with a large wooden clasp. “June Gregorich. I keep house for him and he’s been waiting for you down at the pottery all morning.”

  “Oh. I didn’t know. I knocked and—” He was talking to her back.

  The woman was already leading the way down the slope to a pottery workshop that seemed to have been thrown together from old slab siding. At the crude door, she pulled the string latch, then stepped back to let him cross the threshold first.

  Inside, he saw that the rafters were exposed beneath their tin roof and that the floor was dirt, which made sense, Davis thought, immediately noticing how clay dust lay thickly on all the surfaces.

  His grandfather half-sat, half-leaned on a high stool before a motorized turning wheel. A bare light bulb dangled overhead and shone down on the silvery hair, but cast into shadow the short person standing behind him. He looked up from the bowl he was turning and Davis was met with the full force of the old man’s glare, a glare that he immediately softened into something like a smile.

  “Got lost, did you?”

  “Sorry,” Davis said, and explained about his earlier attempt to find someone.

  “No matter. You eat yet?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Well, that’s one thing.” He looked to the woman. “You show him where he’s sleeping?”

  “I thought you’d want to see him first,” she answered.

  Using a thin draw wire, Amos cut the bowl he’d finished off the wheel head and handed it to the . . . boy? short man? . . . who carefully positioned it with a dozen others on a nearby drying rack.

  Amos took another ball of clay, centered it on the wheel, and began turning. Mesmerized, Davis drew closer and watched as the clay ball magically opened and the sides curved upward.

  “Don’t stand there gawking,” Amos said gruffly. “Go put your stuff away and come on back and let’s get started.”

  “I’ll show you,” June said.

  As they stepped back outside into the warm sunshine, she pointed over to the next shed. “You can drive your car right down here if you want. Your room’s upstairs.”

  If possible, this building looked even more dilapidated to him than the first, and after moving his car and retrieving his duffel from the trunk, Davis followed the housekeeper apprehensively into the shadowy depths of the disused workshop. A pile of cardboard shipping boxes were stacked beneath the open steps and made it look more like a storeroom than an active pottery. The large light-filled loft at the top of the stairs came as a happy surprise.

  “Cool!”

  “More than you know,” she said dryly as she pointed out the amenities, or rather the lack of them. “There’s no hot water. But you can come over to the house and shower, if you like, and you’ll take your meals with us. I work around during the week and Jeffy and I aren’t here for lunch some days. That was my son, by the way. Jeffy. You’ll meet him when you go back. He’s a little shy at times. And Bobby Gerard’s around somewhere. He helps around the kiln and mixes clay.”

  She opened the refrigerator to show him milk and juice. “Your Aunt Betty brought over some butter and jam if you just want toast for breakfast. And if you bring your laundry over to the house, I’ll run it through the machines for you. Make sure the worst of the clay’s off first, though, or it’ll clog the pipes. There’s a spigot downstairs where you can hose off.”

  “Thanks, I’ll try to remember that.” He took a faded pair of jeans from his duffel and looked all around the loft again. “Was this where Donald—where my father lived?”

  “Everybody here called him Donny,” she said, “but yes, this was his place.”

  “What was he like?”

  “You’ll have to ask someone else about that,” she said. “I’d only cleaned for your granddad a time or two before the accident. We probably never said more than twenty words to each other.”

  “I’m starting to think Nordans don’t talk much,” he said.

  “Listen,” she said, “you mustn’t take it wrong if Mr. Amos acts a little short with you. He’s been through a lot, you know. But he’s really glad you came the other night and I think he’s been looking forward to today. Now you go ahead and change and get back over there. I’ll see you at suppertime. You do like pork chops, don’t you?”

  “Yes, ma’am!”

  “Good.”

  Ten minutes later, wearing a heavy plastic bibbed apron, Davis stood at the wheel that had belonged to James Lucas. He had been introduced both to Jeffy Gregorich and Bobby Gerard, neither of whom had much to say. Indeed, Gerard soon disappeared out the back door, busy with chores Davis couldn’t begin to name.

  Amos began by showing him how to start and stop the wheel and how to adjust its speed. Jeffy watched, too, and smiled back shyly when Davis smiled at him.

  “Grab that bucket over there and go fill it with water,” said Amos. “Jeffy, show him where the hose pipe is.”

  Obediently, the little man led Davis through a side door and pointed to the hose.

  “I can turn it on,” he said, eager to help, and when the bucket was full, he carefully turned off the tap.

  When Davis was back inside with the water, Amos had him wet the wheel head and his hands, then took a ball of clay about the size of a big orange and plopped it on the wheel as it turned at about half-speed.

  “Cup your hands around it and make it into a round. That’s right,” he encouraged. “Now try to center it. No, just give it a little push with the edge of your hands. Remember that you’re the boss. The clay’s got to do what you tell it. Here, watch me again.”

  Davis watched, wet his hands again, and this time succeeded in centering the ball of cool smooth clay. It felt oddly sensuous as it turned beneath his hands.

  “Now put your thumbs in like this and open it up.”

  Davis pressed in with his wet thumbs, but instead of opening up into a bowl shape, the center immediately rose up from a circular channel like a small tube cake pan.

  Amos pulled his draw wire across the wheel head to free the misshapen clay and dropped it into another bucket where scrap pieces of clay waited till enough had accumulated to be reworked and wedged again.

  On his fourth try, Davis managed to open the ball, but the sides collapsed before they were an inch high.

  The sides stayed up on his fifth try. Unfortunately, when he drew the wire across the wheel, he discovered his bowl was all sides, no bottom.

  Even Jeffy saw the humor of that one.

  It took Davis nearly two hours to achieve a passable cereal bowl shape.

  “T
hat one’ll do,” said Amos. “Now all you got to do is practice till it feels natural. Jeffy, run up to the house and tell your ma we need some drinks down here.”

  Davis straightened up and flexed himself. The muscles in his hands and thumbs were sore and cramped, as were his neck and shoulders from hunching over the wheel with such intense concentration.

  Amos had gone back to his own wheel and Davis watched with a new appreciation for the craft that went into such seeming effortlessness. As Amos cut the bowl free, Davis took it and added it to the drying rack. There had to be nearly a hundred bowls sitting there.

  “You did all these today?”

  “Ain’t nothing to making cereal bowls. I used to like doing jars the best, but I just can’t manage ’em anymore.”

  Davis had noticed the inward curve of his gnarled left hand. “Stroke?” he asked sympathetically.

  “Yeah. How’d you know?”

  “My grandfather—my other grandfather—had a stroke and it left one of his hands like that, too. His right hand.”

  “Yeah? And what’d he do for a living?”

  “He was a painter.”

  “I wouldn’t want to be no painter,” Amos said, reaching for another ball of clay. “Up and down ladders all day? No, thank you. If this was my right hand, I could still hold a brush or a roller, but I couldn’t do no fancy trimwork.”

  Davis decided this was probably not the time to explain that his other grandfather had painted portraits, not houses. Instead, noticing that Amos was down to a single ball, he said, “If you’ll tell me where it is, I’ll get you more clay.”

  “Too bad we can’t send you out with a washtub and a pickax,” a light voice mocked from the doorway.

  He turned and saw short little Jeffy clutching chilled cans of Pepsi to his chest. Behind him was that tall girl cousin, Libbet Hitchcock, with an open can in her hand.

  She took a sip and said, “When Granddaddy was a boy, they used to dig all their clay off the creekbanks.”

  “On after I was growed, too,” Amos said. “We’d take off a couple of weeks, dig out a few tons. Enough to last us all year.”

  “A few tons?”

  “Son, even Libbet here can turn two hundred pounds a day if she puts her mind to it.” He took the drink cans Jeffy was holding out to him and handed one to Davis.

  Davis didn’t need their grandfather’s dry tone to understand that the subtext was, And she’s just a girl. He glanced at Libbet, thinking of the eruption such a put-down would have brought from his sisters, but either she was too used to it to notice or she didn’t care.

  He popped the top on his can and drank deeply. “So where do you get your clay now?”

  “Buy it dry in bags from a wholesaler, mix it, wet it, and work it up ourselves.” As if reminded, he turned to the girl. “Where’s Tom? I thought he was going to come pug us enough for tomorrow.”

  “He and Dad are out back with Bobby, checking on what’s in the drying racks.”

  A few minutes later, the door opened again and a stocky middle-aged man stepped through, followed by a taller boy.

  “Dave, this here’s your uncle, Dillard Hitchcock, and your cousin, Tom,” said Amos.

  “Good to meet you,” Davis said, holding out his hand.

  Dillard Hitchcock’s handshake was strong and forthright and his eyes met Davis’s easily. “Well, now, Davis. Your Aunt Betty was right. You’re the spitting image of Donny.”

  Tom’s handshake was equally strong. Almost too strong? “How’s it going?”

  “Okay.”

  Tom spotted the bowl at the end of the drying rack and picked it up. “This yours?”

  “’Fraid so. Pretty sad, isn’t it?”

  “Not for a first try,” said Dillard.

  “Yeah, he’s got the knack, all right,” Amos said abruptly. “He’s gonna be a real Nordan.”

  Davis sensed that the old man didn’t give praise freely and the scowls that flitted across the faces of both cousins warned him that they were not pleased by that praise.

  He wasn’t too pleased, either. The bowl was a piece of crap—the sides were too thick, the bottom too thin, the proportions all wrong—and it had taken him hours to get one even that good.

  So how come his grandfather was trying to make him sound better than he was?

  CHAPTER

  19

  Whole communities, including potters, are interlocked by kinship, close or distant, direct or by marriage. Wayman Cole says, “They told me they wouldn’t let nobody marry into the family [in the old days] unless they promised to make pots.”

  —Raised in Clay, Nancy Sweezy

  Dill Hitchcock went back to the buffet for another helping of the Crock Pot’s vegetable lasagna. He wasn’t crazy about broccoli, but layered in their homemade sauce like this, he found it real tasty.

  “Get anybody anything?” he asked. “Betty?”

  His wife shook her head. She’d hardly eaten a bite.

  “I believe I’ll have some more of those barbecued ribs,” Edward said, “but I’ll get them, Dad.”

  “What about you, Dave?” Amos asked.

  “Maybe a piece of pie?” Davis said.

  Nancy Olson said pie sounded like a good idea and Amos agreed. “Coconut if they got it. If they don’t, just bring me some of that lemon meringue.”

  The waitress was at their table when they returned. “Everything all right here?” she chirped as she refilled their tea glasses all around.

  “Everything’s just fine,” Amos Nordan told her.

  Like hell, thought Dill as he sat back down with his plate.

  He was acutely aware that Betty was strung tighter than a fiddle string. She had really wanted today to be a family event, a coming together to welcome the addition of a nephew after the loss of her brother, and he thought he’d made it clear to the kids that they were to behave themselves and go along with her plans.

  Tom and Libbet hadn’t said or done anything yet that he could jump on them about, but they certainly weren’t little beams of sunshine, either.

  Only Edward was himself, speaking easily to Davis, who sat on the other side of Nancy, next to Amos. Dill had a feeling that Edward’s fiancée was picking up on the tension, too, but she was doing her part to keep it light. Nice girl, he thought approvingly. Of course, she was probably counting on the fact that she and Edward could leave as soon as this midday meal was over. They were keeping the sales shop open at the Rooster Clay Works today while the rest of his family helped old Amos catch up and had only met them here for lunch.

  And that was another thing, thought Dill. Usually Amos was tight with his money, but today he’d insisted on taking the whole family out to the Crock Pot and treating them to lunch instead of having June fix sandwiches. He’d even had June call ahead and tell them to save him a table for eight for twelve noon, the busiest part of the day.

  “You mean a table for ten,” Betty had said. Although it didn’t occur to anyone to invite Bobby, she was always thoughtful about including June and Jeffy.

  June, however, had shaken her head. “Thanks, Betty, but not this time. I’ll stay and keep the shop open. Today’s a special family occasion for you folks.”

  Except that Amos was making it more like a political fundraiser than a private family party.

  As soon as they stepped into the place, he started introducing Davis to everybody. “This is Donny’s boy. Don’t he look just like Donny? Got Donny’s talent, too. A new Nordan for Nordan Pottery’s new millennium.”

  This time of day, especially on a Saturday, most of Seagrove was here at the Crock Pot and every time someone they knew stopped to say hello, Amos made a point of having them meet Davis, like he was running for mayor or something.

  And there sat Tom and Libbet, looking grimmer and grimmer with each introduction.

  No wonder Betty was getting so wired up. Hell, Davis seemed like a nice enough kid—caught on fast about how to weigh out the clay, help unload the bisque ware from the ki
ln, grind off the rough spots. He’d carried a full share of the work today without complaint, but damned if Dill could see where that made him the genius Amos was telling everybody.

  Besides, fair was fair. For the last two years, Amos had made it clear that Tom was to have Nordan Pottery after James Lucas. By the time everybody in the Crock Pot went to bed tonight, half of Randolph County would have heard that it looked like ol’ Amos had changed his mind and was probably going to give it to his new grandson.

  That’s why, even though it was tearing Betty apart, Dill couldn’t really blame Tom when he stood up and said he reckoned he’d go on back to the pottery and get to work.

  “I’ll go with you,” Libbet said.

  Amos leaned back in his chair. “Well, now, just because they’re in a big hurry to get to work again, that don’t mean the rest of us are.” He signaled their waitress. “I believe I’d like a nice hot cup of coffee. How ’bout you, Betty? Dave?”

  As Libbet and Tom started out the door, another longtime potter entered.

  “Jasper!” Amos called. “Come on over here and meet my new grandson.”

  “Slow down!” Libbet said as Tom took the curve so fast that her braid slapped the window. “Wrecking another car won’t help anything.”

  “He promised me!” Tom said through clenched teeth. “Dammit, Libbet, he promised me!”

  “I know.”

  “I’ve given him weekends, nights. Whenever Uncle James Lucas needed help stacking the groundhog kilns, wasn’t I right there?”

  “You were,” she answered loyally, bracing herself as he weaved in and out of the slower tourists that crowded these back roads on the weekend.

  “God knows what I’m going to tell Brittany tonight.”

  He crossed the double yellow yet again and a car suddenly appeared over the crest of the hill, hurtling straight toward them.

  “Tom, look out!”

  Car horns blared, brakes screeched. At the last possible instant, he swerved around an SUV and back into his own lane, avoiding a head-on collision by mere inches.