Indigenous Clay: Chapter Two
Having received zero encouragement or comment after publishing the first chapter of "Indigenous Clay" I thought I would exhibit my masochist writer's ability for being ignored by publishing the second chapter.
CHAPTER 2
I dropped Jian off for school the next day. She carried her gi in a bag. Mrs. Wu would pick her up after school and take her to the dojo. I entered the Bierstube and enjoyed again the smell of coffee brewing and I went into the kitchen to say hello to Mrs. Badir, who was preparing her own stronger, sweeter brew in a small pot on a burner.“Kristi called and said she had to be an hour late. Zoreh has to leave on time today,” Mrs. Badir told me as she wiped her hands on her apron.“I’ll fill in.”“Don’t you let that girl take advantage of you, Mr. McGuire.”“Yeah, this is the second time this week, isn’t it? Wonder what’s going on with her?”I got a mug of coffee and went out into the bar as Detective Berenson was walking in. He was a regular. Me, being a former reporter, liked to pump him for information. I let him load up his plate and served him coffee when he sat down.“Don’t even ask me about that weird murder out in the county.”“What weird murder out in the county?”“The one I’m not going to tell you about. You’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow morning.”“Anywhere near my place?”“Other side of the county. Oil drum in a ditch finally rusted open. Farmer drove by with his window open and got a good whiff, stopped to take a look, and then called us.”“Male victim? Female?”“Couldn’t tell. Autopsy today. I get to go watch that after I finish breakfast. Pretty slick way to dump a body. Put it in a 55-gallon barrel, ram down the lid and roll it out of the back of a pickup into a ditch.”“No muss, no fuss, except for you when it’s found.”“Yep. We didn’t release the oil drum information. Want to give our officers and the sheriff guys, and a couple of gals, time to check other ditches for any barrels.”“Have a pleasant day,” I said and left the table.“Phil,” he called me back. “Don’t tell anyone about the oil drum, okay.” He knew Jim, the paper’s crime reporter, often stopped in for a drink in the afternoons.“If Jim hears it, it won’t be from me. I promise.”Bernie Berenson was a good cop and Jim was a good reporter. And I was a good bartender who knew when to keep his mouth shut and when to leak.We had a busy breakfast crowd. At eight a.m. I took the deposit bag to the bank and stopped at a grocery story to pick up some items and was back to the bar by 10 a.m. when Zoreh needed to leave.“Sorry I couldn’t stay, today, Mr. McGuire. Bud wanted me to go with him today to pick up his guest lecturer at the airport.”“You’re not expected to stay past 10. It’s my responsibility if someone can’t show up. What do you think of Kristi?”She just looked at me. Zoreh was beautiful. She had an almond-shaped face with black eyes and black hair. She was a Bahai, which is a gentle religion persecuted terribly in the Ayatollah’s Iran, which is why Mrs. Badir had fled her country and lived in the house I owned behind the bar. They didn’t like to say anything bad about anyone.“Kristi has a good heart,” she said, didn’t add the “but” that I could still hear loud and clear.She gathered her tips off the bar and a couple of regulars said goodbye to her and I stepped in and quickly saw that nobody needed anything.Shortly after ten I was glad I had to fill in. A really interesting blonde came in. Slavic face. High cheekbones. Broad forehead. Right-sized jaw. She took a stool at the end of the bar and I walked to her.“What can I get you?”“I’m told the coffee’s really good here,” she said in a voice that if you heard it on the phone you’d swear was a man’s.“Coming right up.”Coffee delivered, she asked: “You’re Phillip McGuire?”“Yep.”“Brian told me you were a pretty good guy.”“We pretty good guys like to recommend each other.”Her smile was slow to come but when it did I liked it. There was a softness to it, making lips pliable that before had seemed hard set. And she had a great set of dimples.“How do you know Brian?” I asked her.“I bought the house next to theirs when I moved to town and found out he was a carpenter and had him do some work for me and, of course, I got to know Meiko. God, that was sad. They were so happy together,” she said.“Yep.“Did you know Meiko means flower bud in Japanese?”“No, I didn’t. How appropriate. Wow. And what is your name?”“Yanina. Finnish. Spelled J A N I N A. My parents worked at the UN when I was born. Yanina is Janice in English, so Jan is fine.”“And what does Yanina mean?”“Janice is Hebrew for God is gracious. Brian tells me he’s building a tea hut on your land.”“He is. I’m told he’s just finished the last wall. I still don’t understand how he’s going to roof it because he said he just wanted to use materials he could get from my land.”“Cedar shingles. He’ll cut down some of your cedar trees, which he says should be thinned anyway, cut the trunks into rectangular chunks and then use a blade called a froe to knock off shingles.”“You seem to know a lot about it.”“We talk. Brian likes to ramble and I’m a good listener. I told him about a project I want to do and he thinks your land would be the perfect place.”“Really?”“I came on faculty last year in the art department. I’m a ceramicist and I want my students to experience what it’s really like to use indigenous materials for ceramics. I studied in Bizen Japanwhere they make a certain kind of pottery using local clay. It’s a very hard unglazed ceramic fired at high temperature in a wood-fired kiln. The kiln is constructed on a hillside so the air flow goes up in a controlled manner. Brian said you’ve got the right slope of a hill for it. And we’ll search for any sources your land might have to make clay we can use.”“Well, sure, why not? Too bad tea bushes won’t grow in this climate. Then I’d have native tea to drink in a tea hut on my land made from the land’s materials and tea cups as well.”“God doesn’t give you everything,” she said.I was starting to like this woman.“And sometimes God takes it away from you. And not very graciously” I said and that got me a hard look from her. Had something been taken from her, too?She wanted to start right away, so I invited her out that afternoon to walk the land and pick a site. She was wearing jeans and as she walked out the door I had to admit she looked damn good in them. And I’d always been a sucker for a girl in a pony tail.Shortly after she left, one of those pop-up thunderstorms released a clap of thunder and then a short deluge that caught Kristi as she was walking from her car. She ran in the front door, water dripping from her brown hair and her soaked sweatshirt, which read I am the Viagra. She put her chest on the bar and announced: “Damn these things get heavy when they’re wet.”*I’ve got a laser beam that crosses my asphalt driveway where it meets the gravel road that leads to my place. It triggers a bong-bongdoorbell in the house. When I heard it I walked out of the front of the house to meet Jan.“Beautiful out here,” she said and walked to me to shake my hand.“I like it here. A lot,” the fingers on her hand were dry and cracked and I guessed that was from handling so much clay. “Shall we go get Brian and he can show us the slope he was talking about?”“Lead the way.”I would rather have followed her. She had a very nice backside.I took her down a path that led through a variety of trees dominated by a huge sycamore on the slope of the hill to the creek. The thunderstorm from the morning had moved on and left huge white clouds in the blue sky. When they passed in front of the sun, the woods darkened. The redbuds were starting to bloom, which meant morel mushrooms might soon be found. The sun came out in full when we reached the clearing and saw Brian on one end of a crosscut saw he was using on a fairly good-sized tree trunk. He stopped and stuck a big paw up to greet us.“Help you with that?” I said and took the other end of the saw and we made quick work of it.“For the roof beam and posts,” he said. “Black locust. I’ll use interlocking joinery. No nails, screws, or bolts.”The four earthen walls were eight feet tall with holes in them for a door and windows, the largest being the one that faced the creek. They looked as solid as cement. Jan was running her hands over one.“These are really cool,” she pronounced her aesthetic judgment.“Jan tells me you think you can make shingles from the cedar trees. How about flooring?”“You’ve got a pretty good-sized white oak that’s half dead. I’d like to take it down and see if there’s good planking in it.”I knew well that tree. Before I had bought the land I had taken a journalism student there for a picnic. Kind of a sacred spot for me and I didn’t like the idea of the tree being cut down.“Save the dead wood. Be good to use to fire the kiln,” Jan said.Farewell tree, I said to myself. Nothing’s permanent.‘Let’s go to the site I think will work,” Brian said and led the way.It wasn’t far from the tea hut under construction.“Looks perfect to me,” Jan announced. “Could I bring some students out tomorrow and we’ll get started.”“Sure. Fine with me. Feel free to come and go as you wish.”We returned to Brian’s construction site and walked through the doorway of the packed earth structure.“I’ll build a fire pit in the center and hang a chain from the beam for a pot to boil water,” he said.Brian seemed more like the old Brian, the one before he got his heart kicked out of him.“Oh, Brian, here,” Jan said and reached into the canvas bag on her shoulder and pulled out a picture.“Piece of cake,” Brian said look at the image of some sort of potter’s wheel.“Called a kick wheel,” Jan explained. “We’ll build a shed big enough for the kiln and also this thing and shelves for the stuff we make on it.”“I can help build that,” Brian offered.“And we’ll pay you. I’ve got school funds. It was part of the package I negotiated.”“Even better,” he said.“Take a break? Come up to the house for something to drink?” I offered.“Not me. You guys go ahead. I’ve got good sunlight left today.”I took us up another route that went by Mrs. Wu’s garden where Swiss chard had survived a mild winter along with sage and some other herbs. I explained who Mrs. Wu was and, using the same somewhat accurate explanation that I used on Jian about her. Jan just nodded her head.When we entered the house she stood and took it all in.“Very nice. She started walking around the open room and went to the wall where two scrolls were hanging. “Those are spectacular.”“Mrs. Wu’s husband was an art history professor who supported contemporary Chinese painters. What would you like? Being a bartender and owning a bar means I have just about anything you want and the knowledge of how to make it.”“Gin martini?”“What kind of gin?”“Bombay. The regular, not the Sapphire. I’m driving.”“I make a good martini. I’ll join you.”The secret to a good martini is the ice. Those little cubes that come from the typical ice machine or refrigerator are too small. Too much surface areas means watered down gin. I got an old fashioned plastic cube tray from the freezer and plopped the cubes into the shaker, added gin, touch of dry vermouth, wrapped a towel around it and said: “Going to get loud now.”I shook the hell out of the shaker. I could tell she was enjoying herself. I was enjoying myself.I poured the drinks into the martini glasses admiring the ice floes that formed on top and under which I slipped the lemon peels.“Cheers. To the success of your kiln.”“This is really good,” she said, having taken those pliant lips from the glass’s rim.“So, from where did KU snatch you?”“Amherst. I was an associate professor who just came back from a year in Japansupported by a grant. When I saw the opening here I put together a proposal to construct a Bizen-style kiln using student labor and that got me the job.”A bong-bong filled the room.“That’ll be Mrs. Wu and Jian,” I announced.Soon, Jian was running into the room and skidded to a full stop when she saw who was with me. Mrs. Wu soon followed.“Mrs. Wu, Jian, this is Jan. She teaches ceramics at KU and is going to build a kiln on the land.”Jian didn’t even bob her head as she normally would do. She said something in Chinese.Mrs. Wu started talking to her in a tone of voice that was sterner than I’d ever heard her use. It caused Jian to run out of the room and go down the stairs to the basement.“I don’t think she liked me,” Jan said.“You speak Chinese?”“I speak girl.”“I told Jian to grow up,” Mrs. Wu said. “Not to be so selfish. Father deserves to see women if he wishes.”“Mrs. Wu, we’re not seeing each other,” I set the record straight.“Not yet,” Mrs. Wu replied and smiled.And there was that smile on Jan’s face with those dimples I now so liked to see.Tic, tic, tic, tic sounds came from the basement and Jan looked at me.“Jian’s into Kung Fu. She hitting her Wing Chun, a sort of a wooden practice post that Brian built for her.”“Would Miss Jan like to stay for dinner?” Mrs. Wu asked, shocking the hell out of me.“Oh, no. Another time,” Jan said and smiled again. “I’ve really got to go. Nice meeting you, Mrs. Wu. And thanks, Phil. There will be five students with me tomorrow.”We listened to the car start up and then bong-bong as it left the driveway.“She’s a good one,” Mrs. Wu said.“Now how can you tell so soon?”“Mrs. Wu can tell.”
CHAPTER 2
I dropped Jian off for school the next day. She carried her gi in a bag. Mrs. Wu would pick her up after school and take her to the dojo. I entered the Bierstube and enjoyed again the smell of coffee brewing and I went into the kitchen to say hello to Mrs. Badir, who was preparing her own stronger, sweeter brew in a small pot on a burner.“Kristi called and said she had to be an hour late. Zoreh has to leave on time today,” Mrs. Badir told me as she wiped her hands on her apron.“I’ll fill in.”“Don’t you let that girl take advantage of you, Mr. McGuire.”“Yeah, this is the second time this week, isn’t it? Wonder what’s going on with her?”I got a mug of coffee and went out into the bar as Detective Berenson was walking in. He was a regular. Me, being a former reporter, liked to pump him for information. I let him load up his plate and served him coffee when he sat down.“Don’t even ask me about that weird murder out in the county.”“What weird murder out in the county?”“The one I’m not going to tell you about. You’ll read about it in the paper tomorrow morning.”“Anywhere near my place?”“Other side of the county. Oil drum in a ditch finally rusted open. Farmer drove by with his window open and got a good whiff, stopped to take a look, and then called us.”“Male victim? Female?”“Couldn’t tell. Autopsy today. I get to go watch that after I finish breakfast. Pretty slick way to dump a body. Put it in a 55-gallon barrel, ram down the lid and roll it out of the back of a pickup into a ditch.”“No muss, no fuss, except for you when it’s found.”“Yep. We didn’t release the oil drum information. Want to give our officers and the sheriff guys, and a couple of gals, time to check other ditches for any barrels.”“Have a pleasant day,” I said and left the table.“Phil,” he called me back. “Don’t tell anyone about the oil drum, okay.” He knew Jim, the paper’s crime reporter, often stopped in for a drink in the afternoons.“If Jim hears it, it won’t be from me. I promise.”Bernie Berenson was a good cop and Jim was a good reporter. And I was a good bartender who knew when to keep his mouth shut and when to leak.We had a busy breakfast crowd. At eight a.m. I took the deposit bag to the bank and stopped at a grocery story to pick up some items and was back to the bar by 10 a.m. when Zoreh needed to leave.“Sorry I couldn’t stay, today, Mr. McGuire. Bud wanted me to go with him today to pick up his guest lecturer at the airport.”“You’re not expected to stay past 10. It’s my responsibility if someone can’t show up. What do you think of Kristi?”She just looked at me. Zoreh was beautiful. She had an almond-shaped face with black eyes and black hair. She was a Bahai, which is a gentle religion persecuted terribly in the Ayatollah’s Iran, which is why Mrs. Badir had fled her country and lived in the house I owned behind the bar. They didn’t like to say anything bad about anyone.“Kristi has a good heart,” she said, didn’t add the “but” that I could still hear loud and clear.She gathered her tips off the bar and a couple of regulars said goodbye to her and I stepped in and quickly saw that nobody needed anything.Shortly after ten I was glad I had to fill in. A really interesting blonde came in. Slavic face. High cheekbones. Broad forehead. Right-sized jaw. She took a stool at the end of the bar and I walked to her.“What can I get you?”“I’m told the coffee’s really good here,” she said in a voice that if you heard it on the phone you’d swear was a man’s.“Coming right up.”Coffee delivered, she asked: “You’re Phillip McGuire?”“Yep.”“Brian told me you were a pretty good guy.”“We pretty good guys like to recommend each other.”Her smile was slow to come but when it did I liked it. There was a softness to it, making lips pliable that before had seemed hard set. And she had a great set of dimples.“How do you know Brian?” I asked her.“I bought the house next to theirs when I moved to town and found out he was a carpenter and had him do some work for me and, of course, I got to know Meiko. God, that was sad. They were so happy together,” she said.“Yep.“Did you know Meiko means flower bud in Japanese?”“No, I didn’t. How appropriate. Wow. And what is your name?”“Yanina. Finnish. Spelled J A N I N A. My parents worked at the UN when I was born. Yanina is Janice in English, so Jan is fine.”“And what does Yanina mean?”“Janice is Hebrew for God is gracious. Brian tells me he’s building a tea hut on your land.”“He is. I’m told he’s just finished the last wall. I still don’t understand how he’s going to roof it because he said he just wanted to use materials he could get from my land.”“Cedar shingles. He’ll cut down some of your cedar trees, which he says should be thinned anyway, cut the trunks into rectangular chunks and then use a blade called a froe to knock off shingles.”“You seem to know a lot about it.”“We talk. Brian likes to ramble and I’m a good listener. I told him about a project I want to do and he thinks your land would be the perfect place.”“Really?”“I came on faculty last year in the art department. I’m a ceramicist and I want my students to experience what it’s really like to use indigenous materials for ceramics. I studied in Bizen Japanwhere they make a certain kind of pottery using local clay. It’s a very hard unglazed ceramic fired at high temperature in a wood-fired kiln. The kiln is constructed on a hillside so the air flow goes up in a controlled manner. Brian said you’ve got the right slope of a hill for it. And we’ll search for any sources your land might have to make clay we can use.”“Well, sure, why not? Too bad tea bushes won’t grow in this climate. Then I’d have native tea to drink in a tea hut on my land made from the land’s materials and tea cups as well.”“God doesn’t give you everything,” she said.I was starting to like this woman.“And sometimes God takes it away from you. And not very graciously” I said and that got me a hard look from her. Had something been taken from her, too?She wanted to start right away, so I invited her out that afternoon to walk the land and pick a site. She was wearing jeans and as she walked out the door I had to admit she looked damn good in them. And I’d always been a sucker for a girl in a pony tail.Shortly after she left, one of those pop-up thunderstorms released a clap of thunder and then a short deluge that caught Kristi as she was walking from her car. She ran in the front door, water dripping from her brown hair and her soaked sweatshirt, which read I am the Viagra. She put her chest on the bar and announced: “Damn these things get heavy when they’re wet.”*I’ve got a laser beam that crosses my asphalt driveway where it meets the gravel road that leads to my place. It triggers a bong-bongdoorbell in the house. When I heard it I walked out of the front of the house to meet Jan.“Beautiful out here,” she said and walked to me to shake my hand.“I like it here. A lot,” the fingers on her hand were dry and cracked and I guessed that was from handling so much clay. “Shall we go get Brian and he can show us the slope he was talking about?”“Lead the way.”I would rather have followed her. She had a very nice backside.I took her down a path that led through a variety of trees dominated by a huge sycamore on the slope of the hill to the creek. The thunderstorm from the morning had moved on and left huge white clouds in the blue sky. When they passed in front of the sun, the woods darkened. The redbuds were starting to bloom, which meant morel mushrooms might soon be found. The sun came out in full when we reached the clearing and saw Brian on one end of a crosscut saw he was using on a fairly good-sized tree trunk. He stopped and stuck a big paw up to greet us.“Help you with that?” I said and took the other end of the saw and we made quick work of it.“For the roof beam and posts,” he said. “Black locust. I’ll use interlocking joinery. No nails, screws, or bolts.”The four earthen walls were eight feet tall with holes in them for a door and windows, the largest being the one that faced the creek. They looked as solid as cement. Jan was running her hands over one.“These are really cool,” she pronounced her aesthetic judgment.“Jan tells me you think you can make shingles from the cedar trees. How about flooring?”“You’ve got a pretty good-sized white oak that’s half dead. I’d like to take it down and see if there’s good planking in it.”I knew well that tree. Before I had bought the land I had taken a journalism student there for a picnic. Kind of a sacred spot for me and I didn’t like the idea of the tree being cut down.“Save the dead wood. Be good to use to fire the kiln,” Jan said.Farewell tree, I said to myself. Nothing’s permanent.‘Let’s go to the site I think will work,” Brian said and led the way.It wasn’t far from the tea hut under construction.“Looks perfect to me,” Jan announced. “Could I bring some students out tomorrow and we’ll get started.”“Sure. Fine with me. Feel free to come and go as you wish.”We returned to Brian’s construction site and walked through the doorway of the packed earth structure.“I’ll build a fire pit in the center and hang a chain from the beam for a pot to boil water,” he said.Brian seemed more like the old Brian, the one before he got his heart kicked out of him.“Oh, Brian, here,” Jan said and reached into the canvas bag on her shoulder and pulled out a picture.“Piece of cake,” Brian said look at the image of some sort of potter’s wheel.“Called a kick wheel,” Jan explained. “We’ll build a shed big enough for the kiln and also this thing and shelves for the stuff we make on it.”“I can help build that,” Brian offered.“And we’ll pay you. I’ve got school funds. It was part of the package I negotiated.”“Even better,” he said.“Take a break? Come up to the house for something to drink?” I offered.“Not me. You guys go ahead. I’ve got good sunlight left today.”I took us up another route that went by Mrs. Wu’s garden where Swiss chard had survived a mild winter along with sage and some other herbs. I explained who Mrs. Wu was and, using the same somewhat accurate explanation that I used on Jian about her. Jan just nodded her head.When we entered the house she stood and took it all in.“Very nice. She started walking around the open room and went to the wall where two scrolls were hanging. “Those are spectacular.”“Mrs. Wu’s husband was an art history professor who supported contemporary Chinese painters. What would you like? Being a bartender and owning a bar means I have just about anything you want and the knowledge of how to make it.”“Gin martini?”“What kind of gin?”“Bombay. The regular, not the Sapphire. I’m driving.”“I make a good martini. I’ll join you.”The secret to a good martini is the ice. Those little cubes that come from the typical ice machine or refrigerator are too small. Too much surface areas means watered down gin. I got an old fashioned plastic cube tray from the freezer and plopped the cubes into the shaker, added gin, touch of dry vermouth, wrapped a towel around it and said: “Going to get loud now.”I shook the hell out of the shaker. I could tell she was enjoying herself. I was enjoying myself.I poured the drinks into the martini glasses admiring the ice floes that formed on top and under which I slipped the lemon peels.“Cheers. To the success of your kiln.”“This is really good,” she said, having taken those pliant lips from the glass’s rim.“So, from where did KU snatch you?”“Amherst. I was an associate professor who just came back from a year in Japansupported by a grant. When I saw the opening here I put together a proposal to construct a Bizen-style kiln using student labor and that got me the job.”A bong-bong filled the room.“That’ll be Mrs. Wu and Jian,” I announced.Soon, Jian was running into the room and skidded to a full stop when she saw who was with me. Mrs. Wu soon followed.“Mrs. Wu, Jian, this is Jan. She teaches ceramics at KU and is going to build a kiln on the land.”Jian didn’t even bob her head as she normally would do. She said something in Chinese.Mrs. Wu started talking to her in a tone of voice that was sterner than I’d ever heard her use. It caused Jian to run out of the room and go down the stairs to the basement.“I don’t think she liked me,” Jan said.“You speak Chinese?”“I speak girl.”“I told Jian to grow up,” Mrs. Wu said. “Not to be so selfish. Father deserves to see women if he wishes.”“Mrs. Wu, we’re not seeing each other,” I set the record straight.“Not yet,” Mrs. Wu replied and smiled.And there was that smile on Jan’s face with those dimples I now so liked to see.Tic, tic, tic, tic sounds came from the basement and Jan looked at me.“Jian’s into Kung Fu. She hitting her Wing Chun, a sort of a wooden practice post that Brian built for her.”“Would Miss Jan like to stay for dinner?” Mrs. Wu asked, shocking the hell out of me.“Oh, no. Another time,” Jan said and smiled again. “I’ve really got to go. Nice meeting you, Mrs. Wu. And thanks, Phil. There will be five students with me tomorrow.”We listened to the car start up and then bong-bong as it left the driveway.“She’s a good one,” Mrs. Wu said.“Now how can you tell so soon?”“Mrs. Wu can tell.”
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