The Clay Head Benediction

by Marty Rafter

thing, but if he doesn’t want to be friends with me, that’s fine. It is not my job to force people to be my friend. After a while of walking, I decide to stop by the noodle restaurant to see if the old woman has been feeding the cats. The paper plate is there, but there is no food on it. I walk over to check the plate to see if it is new, and when I do, the alleyway door opens.

  “Oh, no!” says the old woman as she opens the door and sees me in the alley.

  “I’m sorry” I say, aware of the effect and unexpected person in a dark alley can have.

  She stops the door from swinging closed, and says to me, “Oh. It's you. I thought I told you that I didn’t want you back here”

  “I’m not really back here.” I say

  “You’re back here” she says

  “This is actually the first time I’ve been here since I talked to you, I was just walking by and was curious about the cats”

  “I told you the cats are fine. I am never going to forget to feed the cats”

  “I guess you’ve proved that” I say

  “I wasn’t lying”

  “I wasn’t inferring that you were lying” I say

  “I guess you can be on your way then” she says

  “Can I ask you one favor?”

  “I’d prefer if you weren’t back here”

  “I promise. I won’t be back here again, but I was just wondering…all these newspapers, can I take them?”

  “As long as you don’t come back, yes”

  “I might need to make two trips.” I say

  “Fine. Two trips, then, if I see you here after that...I’m calling the police”

  “Don’t worry..It won’t be a problem. I am just going to take these papers” I say

  And so, I carry the papers back to my apartment. Then I return, and carry the final huge stack back. After that, I sit and read through them for a while, but for the most part, I find the news, even old news depressing, so I force myself to fall asleep. When I sleep, I dream that I am back in the grove, and it is summer, and I am lying down to sleep. The woman from the bus is there, and as I lie down she brings me a blanket, which warms me, and protects me from the wind, and I sleep, and I dream of being asleep, and when I wake up I feel fantastic because my project has finally begun.

  In the morning, after eating, and cleaning up, and doing a bit of work around the building, I have a flash of inspiration that I am surprised has escaped me for so long. So, I walk to the bus stop. After a twenty minute ride, I am at a suburban library. It is a bright open space with simple shelves of hardback best sellers and open desks with free computers. There are a few elderly patrons browsing some low shelves filled with audio books, but otherwise the library is empty. It feels great to be back among the books. I search around for a while and find that the library is mostly free of the literary heavy hitters, but there are still books. I ask the librarian at the desk if my card will allow me to borrow, and she tells me that my card “will work at any library in Allegheny County”. It is a wonderful feeling, but there is one subject in particular that I am interested in. Fortunately, there is a big craft section, and I find exactly what I am looking for, a big illustrated about the art of papier mache. I find a spot at one of the tables and read for the entire afternoon, taking lots of notes.

  When I get home in the evening, and sit down to draw, the idea comes right away. I take a long while making a good detailed sketch. Then, I put another piece of paper over my original sketch, and trace the entire thing again. By the time that process is done, it is nearly one in the morning, but I don’t feel tired, so I unfold a few pieces of newspaper, tape them together into a single sheet, then, using a yardstick, I make a grid on the new large single paper. And then I slowly redraw my more simple design onto the larger paper. When that drawing is done, I am satisfied with the size, and start the process of drafting out the armatures that will create the substructure of the frame of the head using the large draft as a guide. It is dawn by the time that process is complete, and so, I get an early start on some chores around the building. When my work is done, I look through the boiler room and maintenance closets for supplies. There is a pretty good store of things. There is a big piece of dry wall, a jigsaw with a serviceable blade, a bucket of joint compound, two unopened tubes of adhesive, a can of marine varnish for some reason, and a whole pile of the old metal screens.

  I carry the piece of drywall up to my apartment, and transfer my drafts of the frame of the head onto the drywall using the grid method, but when I cut them out with the jigsaw they are too brittle, so I repeat the same process again in duplicate to make thicker pieces which I affix with epoxy and then cover in tape. Once that is done, I return the unused drywall to the boiler room, and go out to buy a dozen rolls of masking tape. With the masking tape, I start to draft out the shape of the cheek bones, chin, forehead, and occipital bun using broad taut strips of tape pulled over the frame. Then, in the voids under that tape, I stuff rolled newspaper until I have roughed out the bulk of the face. The process uses every roll of tape that I bought, along with a big chuck of the newspaper I salvaged from behind the restaurant. By the time that work is done, it is nearly one in the afternoon, and I haven’t slept for 30 hours, but if I sleep now, I may wake up in the middle of the night with no supplies and nothing to do, so I decide to go and check in the recycling container behind the building for more paper, but there is nothing salvageable there, so I call around to a couple of the local newspapers to see what they do with their unsold papers, and they all politely explain that they have other people who buy their unusable and unsold paper for to resale to overseas box makers, but the people at the Post Gazette recommend a place where I can buy whole rolls printing paper, and so, after a short last minute bus trip, I am the owner of a thirty pound roll. After that, I go to the grocery store and buy 15lbs of flour. Then, after a small meal, I fall into a dreamless sleep.

  I wake up shortly after three, and start the project again. With wire from the old screens I start to frame out eyes and a nose and give detail to the chin. Then I start the first layer of the papier mache. By nine, the whole first layer is complete and I stop for a while to do a little work around the building. Over the next week, I repeat the process of adding new layers, and letting them dry. One day, I receive an apologetic call from my mother that she has decided to accept my sister’s last minute offer to spend Christmas with her in St. Louis, where she is to be met by a number of other relatives that she has fond memories of, and I cannot recall at all. She seems genuinely upset about the whole thing, but I assure her that there is no cause for concern, and I promise to fly down and visit her in February. That auspicious development ensures not only that my project will not be interrupted, but also that I can plan for a grand reveal without any interruptions. I work constantly, stopping only to eat and nap and shower and shave and make cursory examinations of the hallways and dumpster areas to make sure they are clean. With the joint compound, I sculpt the details of the head, and the true expression of the figure takes shape. The painting takes until Christmas day. Sixty total hours of paint, all inside my apartment with the windows open to the winter chill for ventilation, and the stereo blaring. When the head is finally done, it looks just as I had planned.

  It is a man’s face with a hawk like narrow nose like Donald’s, and a slight stubble grey beard like Ben, and it has small ears with short earlobes like the girl from the museum, and the thin smiling mouth from the woman at the cathedral, and flat heavy eyebrows like Coats, and the receded chin of Brian Folz, and round cheeks of Maria Olson, and little crow's feet by the eyes like the woman by the fountain. But the eyes are my eyes, and they take the longest to paint. Staring into a handheld mirror, it takes almost eight hours to get the eyes right. I am not a painter, but I do my best, and my best is something I can be proud of. The head has no hair, though. I considered it, going to the barber, and asking for a big bag off all the hair he has swept off of hi
s floor, but I ultimately think better of it because all of the sorting would take forever. But the project is done, hours and hours of work, and wonderful dreamless nights falling asleep exhausted. When I look at the face, I am reminded of how long it has been since I had one of those dreams. In the woods I didn’t, and now here, with my project, still none. I get a flash of panic like the type a reformed cigarette smoker feels when he considers an event in the future that will test his resolve. The time when this project is done, and I am somebody without anything again, maybe there will be dreams, or this will be a dream made real, and it will kill all the dreams, I don’t know. But there is still a lot to do.

  The day after Christmas, I take the advantage of the slow traffic to do a little bit of recognizance in Market Square. When I get there, however, I am surprised to find that there are many more people than I had expected. The square has undergone a transformation from the way it was in my childhood when it was surrounded by head shops and occupied by drug dealers and their desperate customers. Now, Market Square actually reflects the class A office space that surrounds it, and there is a small band playing on a stage in the corner of the square when I arrive, and