The Potter

The rain had come up out of the river country in the night and was still there by morning, so the road below the inn ran thin and brown and the wayfarer gave up on it before noon. The clay village sat low along the bank, roofs close together and more of them than the sheet had shown, huddled the way houses do where the ground itself decides what may be built on it.

A yard under a wide eave took the wayfarer in out of the worst of it. A wheel stood there, and a block of wedged clay beside it, and a woman kneeling at the wheel with her sleeves pushed back finished a bowl, cut it free with a length of wire, and set it on a board with the others.

"You can sit through the rain doing nothing," the Potter said, "or you can sit through it at the wheel. Either way it rains the same."

She cut a fist-sized lump from the block, slapped it onto the wheel head, and had the wayfarer kneel where she had knelt. The wheel turned. The clay did not.

It rose crooked at once, leaning first one way and then the other, and the wayfarer's hands closed on it to hold it still. The lean only got worse. Water splashed. The lump began to whip.

"Do not fight it there," the Potter said. "Feel where it is heavy, low down, and press against that. It will come to the middle on its own once you stop pushing it off."

The wayfarer eased the grip and found the heavy side by feel more than sight, a firmness under the left palm that had not been there under the right. Pressed steady, not hard, the wobble came down by degrees, the way a held rope comes down when the hand stops jerking it. For a few turns of the wheel the lump ran true, a plain wet cone with a shine standing on it.

Then the wayfarer reached for the opening cut too fast, and the whole thing folded sideways and slid off center in one motion, and what had been a cone became a gray fist of ruined clay turning under its own water.

The Potter did not look up from her own wheel. "Cut it loose."

The wire went under it and the failed shape came away whole, a soft gray coil, and went back into a bucket at the Potter's knee already half full of other soft gray coils from her own morning. She wedged a lump from the bucket on the board beside her, working it with the heel of her hand until the air worked out of it and it took a fresh, dumb shape, ready to be centered again by whoever centered it next.

"It does not keep the last pot against you," she said, not stopping her hands. "Wet clay never does."

The wayfarer tried again. The new lump wobbled the same as the first had, exactly the same. Nothing about the clay knew it was a second try. The heavy side came under the left palm again, quicker to find this time, and the wobble came down in fewer turns than before. A wall rose, thin and even for the length of two breaths, then thickened where the hand pressed unevenly, and had to be cut loose again.

By the third lump the centering came almost before the wayfarer noticed doing it, a small settling under the palms that asked no thought at all. Nobody remarked on it. The Potter was already elbow-deep in her own next lump, and a boy came through the yard gate with a plank of dry pots to be carried under cover before the rain found them, and the morning went on being exactly the morning it had been.

Near midday the rain thinned to a mist and the wayfarer stood in the yard gate and counted roofs along the bank while waiting for boots to dry a little at the fire inside. The sheet, unrolled on a dry step, showed the clay village as a handful of marks, far fewer than stood along the water in front of it. The charcoal went in against the count, plain and quick, the way the crossing had been marked half a day off and the inn had needed no mark at all.

The Potter came to the gate to see the wayfarer off, wiping her hands on a cloth that had long since stopped coming clean. She glanced at the boards of drying pots, the good ones and the day's failures both drying gray side by side, nothing yet telling them apart.

"Which ones were the bad throws," the wayfarer asked, "once they dry."

"Ask me again once they are fired," the Potter said, and went back to her wheel, where the next lump was already turning, off center, waiting to be brought around.

The wayfarer shouldered the pack, still damp, and took the road on along the bank through the last thin end of the rain.

This is a teaching-story. It happened nowhere, and it happens all the time.