The Art Room in the Old Depot

Darius was in sixth grade. I had had him since kindergarten, a quiet, careful boy who never once finished a project on time because he would not quit on it until it was right. He was at the depot the first Saturday. He was number nine on Lyle’s clipboard. And he was there every Saturday after, usually first, usually waiting on the platform with his bike when I pulled up.

Darius is Curt Maas’s grandson. His mother, Kim, is Curt’s daughter. She works at the clinic and raises that boy on her own, and Curt picks him up from school most days and has him out at the implement lot, where he does his homework at a spare desk in the parts department.

I knew all that. I did not treat him one bit different, and I would have been ashamed to. But I will admit that the first time I saw him in my doorway I thought: well. There it is.

He took to the clay. A lot of boys that age will not, because clay tells on you. He spent three Saturdays on one bowl. It was a pinch bowl about the size of a cereal dish. He kept smoothing the inside with the back of a spoon and then deciding the walls were uneven and starting the rim over.

“It’s good, Darius,” I told him. “It’s ready.”

“It leans,” he said.

“A little. That’s how you know a person made it.”

He looked at it a long time. Then he turned it over and scratched something in the bottom with a pencil point, with his arm curled around it so I could not see.

I fired it that week with forty others. I glazed-fired it the week after, a dark blue he picked himself, and it came out of the kiln with the blue gone deep and glassy and pooled in the bottom like a pond. It still leaned.

I did not look at the bottom. It was not mine to read.

The Saturday he took it home, he did not ride his bike. A pickup with the dealership’s name on the door pulled up at noon, and Curt Maas got out.

He had not been in that building, he told me later, since he was a boy seeing an uncle off. He came in the door and stopped, the way they all stopped. Lyle looked up from his chair.

“Curt.”

“Lyle.”

“Name and grade,” Lyle said, and held out the clipboard, with not a thing on his face.

Curt almost smiled. He took the clipboard, because you do when Lyle hands you something. And then he did not hand it back. He stood there inside the door in his seed-corn cap and read it. Lyle had kept every Saturday on that same yellow pad, the first week on top. Curt turned the pages over the clip. Then he turned them back to the first one.

I was across the room rinsing brushes. I kept rinsing them.

He looked at the room. There were maybe thirty children still there, and soup, and Brenda with her roaster, and the clothesline. He looked at it the way I have seen him look at a field.

“Grandpa.” Darius came up with the bowl wrapped in newspaper. He unwrapped it right there. “It’s for your desk. For your paper clips and stuff. So they’re not all over.”

Curt took it in both hands. He turned it over and read the bottom.