The Art Room in the Old Depot

“I know.”

“Twenty-eight years.”

“I know, Tom.”

I cried at the four-way stop by the Casey’s, and by the time we were home I was done.

People have asked me since why I did not get up and fight. Why I did not fill that library with parents and make a speech. I will tell you why. Every number Curt read was true. The children were gone. If I had won that argument, the thirty-one thousand dollars would have come out of somebody else, a reading aide or a bus route, and I would have had to look at her in the grocery store. An argument does not put a paintbrush in anybody’s hand. I did not want to be right in a library. I wanted to teach art.

I just did not know yet where.

I finished the year. I packed twenty-eight years into eleven banana boxes. In May the second graders made me a card as long as the hallway, and I folded it up like a road map and took it home.

Then it was summer, and I did what you do. I put up beans. I painted the porch. I did not drive past the school.

On the fourteenth of August the custodian called me. His name is Gene and he has kept that building running since before I was hired.

“Anne,” he said, “I thought you’d want to know. The scrap man’s coming Thursday for the surplus pile. Your kiln’s on it.”

I was standing at the sink. I turned the water off.

“My kiln.”

“The Skutt. They’ve got it down for scrap metal. Nobody bid on it. I didn’t figure anybody would, it’s not the kind of thing people know what to do with.”

That kiln was bought in 2004 with money from a pancake supper. I know because I flipped the pancakes. It had fired, by my count, something over nine thousand pinch pots, and a ceramic turtle for nearly every mother in three townships.

“Gene,” I said, “what does the scrap man pay?”

“For that? Forty dollars, maybe.”

I drove to the district office in my garden shoes. I asked the superintendent whether I could buy a surplus item at the scrap price, and he looked relieved to be asked something he could say yes to. I wrote the district a check for forty dollars and I had the secretary give me a receipt, because I was not going to have anybody in that town say Anne Lindholm walked off with school property.

So I owned a kiln that weighs about three hundred pounds and needs the kind of electrical service you put in for a clothes dryer and then some. And I had no place on God’s earth to plug it in.

I was thinking about that, driving home down Depot Street, when I looked at the depot.

You have to understand that nobody in our town looks at the depot. It has been sitting at the end of that street since 1901, a long yellow building with a deep roof and tall windows, and the last passenger got off there before I was born. Freight trains still go by twice a day and do not slow down. The railroad was going to burn the building in 1989 to be done with it, and a man named Lyle bought it off them for six hundred dollars and has kept a roof on it ever since for no reason he ever gave anybody.