The Art Room in the Old Depot
He went down that same evening with a flashlight. He came back and said the depot had a sixty-amp fuse box from about the Truman administration and he would not plug a toaster into it. Then he spent the next two weekends putting in a new breaker panel and running a sixty-amp circuit back to the freight room in heavy copper, with a proper disconnect on the wall. He called the inspector himself. He paid for the wire himself, and when I asked what it cost he said, “Less than a boat.”
The kiln comes apart in three rings, which is the only reason two people can move it. Tom and Gene carried it out of the school on a Thursday afternoon, one ring at a time, with the scrap man standing there watching forty dollars leave. They set it up in the freight room on its steel stand, a foot and a half off every wall, on a square of cement board for good measure. Tom threw the disconnect and I ran it empty to make sure the elements were sound.
It ticked and hummed like it always had. I stood there with my hand flat on the lid like it was a horse.
I put a notice in the paper and one on the bulletin board at the grocery store. It said: Saturday Art at the Depot. 9 to 12. Any child, kindergarten through eighth grade. No charge. Wear old clothes.
No charge was the whole point, and I will say why, because my sister-in-law told me I was a fool. If I charged ten dollars, I would have had a nice little class of the children whose folks have ten dollars. Those children were going to be fine. The ones I had been lying awake over all summer were the ones who would have stayed home. And if I had gone to the board or the PTA for money, it would have been their program, and they could put it on a line and cut it. This way there was nothing to cut but me.
I bought the clay myself, twelve boxes at fifty pounds a box. I bought tempera and brushes with what was left of my last check. Tom built four long tables out of doors from the lumberyard’s damaged pile and sawhorses.
The first Saturday was the twenty-ninth of August. I got there at seven and tied on my denim apron, the same one, stiff down the front with twenty-eight years of other people’s paint. Lyle was already in his chair by the stove.
“How many you figure?” he said.
“If I get fifteen I’ll be tickled.”
“Ought to keep a register,” he said. “Anything that comes through a depot, you write it down.” And he went into the ticket office and came out with a clipboard, an honest-to-goodness railroad clipboard with a steel clip, and a yellow pad, and he set his chair by the door.
At a quarter to nine there was a minivan. Then a pickup. Then children on bicycles, a string of them coming down Depot Street like ducks. Then I stopped being able to count, because I was handing out paper.
They came in the door past Lyle, and every one of them stopped, because he held out the clipboard and said, “Name and grade, please,” as grave as a man checking tickets to Chicago. The little ones who could not write yet told him, and he printed it for them in block capitals.