Relics

by Mary Anna Evans

  The ground beneath her feet betrayed one of the origins of the Sujosa’s poverty. It eroded easily. Any field plowed in such soil would lose some of its precious topsoil with every rain.

  The Montrose house came into view on her right, set well back from the pathway. She saw no sign of activity. Even the dogs were silent. No doubt Irene was at work, and frail Kiki was asleep. DeWayne was probably kicked back in his easy chair, enjoying the rest of a man being supported by his teenage daughter. Faye was glad when the sight of that unhappy home receded behind her. The deserted forest was peaceful in a way that the Montrose home could never be.

  She rounded a curve and stopped short. The pathway ended at the lip of a deep erosion gully. The chasm was too wide to step across and so deep that only a fool would have risked jumping and falling short. Fortunately, someone had constructed a bridge out of heavy rope, carefully knotted and fortified with wooden slats every few feet. The entire contraption was suspended from a pair of stout trees on either side of the gorge, like a backwoods Golden Gate Bridge.

  The rope and slats had weathered to the same shade of dull gray. Faye paused, wondering whether a critical component was rotten, but smears of fresh red mud told her someone walked across within the past few hours. That was good enough for Faye. Gingerly, she took a step onto the bridge.

  The gaps between the boards were uncomfortably wide, and the bridge swayed with her first step. Faye stepped forward, putting both feet onto the rickety span, then made a major error: She looked down—way down, to the bottom of the gully, some thirty or forty feet away. Her stomach flopped over. This was worse—much worse—than driving on the settlement’s hilly roads. She gripped the supporting ropes until her knuckles turned white, but she had too much sense to stop walking. Five more steps took her safely across, where she paused to wipe the cold sweat off her face before climbing up another steep incline.

  Remembering her earlier fall, she kept her eyes on the ground in front of her. A patch of slick clay here, near the edge of the precipice, could send her on a dangerous skid. Keeping her eyes prudently on her feet meant that the Great Tiger Bluff of Alabama’s Broad River caught her by surprise.

  Stepping into sunlight bright enough to cast sharp-edged shadows of autumn’s leafless trees, she was confronted by a Technicolor abyss. Before her was a broad, sweeping gorge that had carved away a section of hillside in a shape that looked for all the world like God’s own amphitheater. The afternoon sun spread across the face of the bluff, lighting up bands of soil in colors ranging from tangerine to peachy yellow to buff white. She judged that the gorge was at least two hundred feet deep. Danger and beauty intermingled here, as it does in the face of a predator. It was a breathtaking sight, dramatic and lonely in a way that only nature can be.

  But Faye was not alone. Someone was standing in the path that skirted the top of the bluff, perhaps two hundred yards ahead. She was only a silhouette, but she was an easily recognizable one: tall and broad, with heavy breasts and a small child perched on her hip. Ronya Smiley looked over her shoulder and caught sight of Faye, then stepped over the precipice and vanished.

  Faye broke into a run. “Ronya! Can you hear me? Are you okay? Zack!” She reached the spot where the Sujosa woman had disappeared and looked into the yawning pit. The face of the bluff was etched with scores of vertical gullies where the eroding rain washed soil toward the river and toward the sea, one grain at a time. Ronya Smiley was standing in one of those gullies. It seemed to serve as her own personal stairway to the bottom of the bluff.

  It was so deep that Ronya, once in it, could stand at her full height yet remain invisible to most passers-by, and it was broad enough to accommodate Ronya’s considerable girth, leaving room for the bucket and curved wooden board that she carried. Zack was standing beside her, carrying a second bucket with the self-important air of someone who knew his help was indispensable.

  Ronya looked up at Faye and said, “I don’t suppose it would occur to you that a person might not want company.”

  Faye, relieved that she wasn’t looking down at Ronya’s broken and bloodied body, refused to be insulted. “I’ve spent most of my adult life living on an island, all by my lonesome. When you talk about somebody who doesn’t want company, about ninety percent of the time you’re talking about me.”

  She lowered herself into the gully. At regular intervals, the roots of long-gone trees extended across the floor and held the soil in place, resulting in a stair-step configuration that made it possible to descend quickly to an open treeless area at the bottom of the bluff. Climbing back up out of the tremendous hole might be a more difficult undertaking.

  Without looking back, Ronya headed across the barren area toward a patch of trees marking the beginning of a forest that sloped gently downward toward the horizon. Faye followed her, craning her neck all the while to catch the contrast between the colorful face of the bluff with the dark shadows at the base of the erosion gullies.

  As she passed into the first patch of trees, she realized why they grew there. The downward sloping ground intersected with the water table in this area, birthing a bevy of small springs that continuously oozed clear water into a shallow cleft in the sandy soil. Because water is made to flow downhill, this cleft captured all the springs’ output. As it gained water and the water gained momentum, the newborn creek grew deeper and wider, swelling with every step Faye took along its banks. A few of summer’s ferns clung to life in this place, where they were sheltered from wind by the banks of the gorge and from cold by the springwater emerging from the ground at a constant temperature year-round.

  “I bet this place looks like a fairyland in springtime,” Faye said to Ronya’s back, since there was no one else nearby to share her delight. “Ferns and violets and wild azaleas—is it as wonderful as I think it must be?”

  Ronya turned around slowly and said, “You are just not going to go away, are you?”

  “Do I have to?” Faye asked. “I mean, if this is your property, I guess you can throw me off it.”

  “Well, it is my property.”

  “It’s mine, too,” Zack chimed in.

  Faye leaned toward the little boy and whispered, “So—can I stay?”

  Zack looked at his mother for guidance. She set her burdens down and crossed her arms as if to think. Zack quickly did the same.

  “Look at her all covered in mud, son.”

  “She’s pretty dirty,” Zack said gravely.

  “She’s carrying half our property with her, stuck to her clothes. If we send her home now, she’ll be taking it with her,” Ronya pointed out. “We might as well let her help us with our work. Some of our dirt might fall off, if she gets busy enough.”

  “Good idea,” Zack said. “Mama, I’m going to give her my bucket to carry.”

  Faye leaned down to take the bucket and whispered in his ear, “What kind of work will I have to do? Besides carrying this bucket.”

  In a low voice, he replied, “Oh, it’s not all that hard, but it gets you mighty dirty. That’s the fun part.”

  Hurrying after Ronya, who had resumed walking, apparently trusting her son to follow her, Faye said, “Well, I’m already dirty. I might as well have a little fun.”

  As they walked, the creek and the waterside path sloped ever downward, but the banks did not. Within a quarter-mile, even Joe couldn’t have peered out of this miniature canyon carved into the floor of the tremendous one surrounding it. More springs seeped out of its banks and cascaded into the growing creek. Faye reached through the water of one of these springs, trying to figure out why it left a white streak through the colorful soil. She had thought that something white in the water had been deposited on the creek banks, but she found the truth to be the exact opposite. The water had washed loose sand and dirt from the soil’s surface, leaving a bed of white clay exposed beneath the cascades.

  She dug into the soft, plastic clay and looked at the bucket in her hand. There were two gardening trowels
in it. “What will we be carrying back in these buckets? Are you looking for clay to use in your ceramics?”

  Zack nodded vigorously, but Ronya just said, “Well, it’s the wrong time of year to go blackberry picking, wouldn’t you say?”

  The small canyon widened, leaving broad, flat banks on either side of the creek. Following close behind Ronya, Faye got a close look at the curved piece of wood she’d been carrying, which she now recognized to be a yoke shaped to fit the curves of a human’s back. When the buckets were full, Ronya would attach them to either end of the yoke, then throw it over her shoulders for the long trip back home. The yoke had the look of a tool that had been used for generations.

  “Who taught you to find natural clay that’s suited for making pottery?” Faye asked, following where the antique yoke led.

  “My mama.”

  “And where did you and your mama learn to work with clay?” Faye asked. The intuitive part of her was sure that the answer would take her to some of the earliest Sujosa. It had been a long, long time since dishes and vases had been so expensive that it was worthwhile to trudge out into the woods, dig up natural clay, haul it home, mold it into shape, and fire it with wood you’d cut yourself. Ronya didn’t answer.

  They rounded a bend in the creek and into view of a vista that reminded Faye of the pockmarked terrain left behind at Raleigh’s mismanaged excavation. The sides of the canyon walls and the creek banks were studded with pits where clay had been mined by hand. Ronya and her mother couldn’t possibly have dug them all.

  “Who else digs clay here besides you and your mama?”

  “No one. Not even Mama, not any more. Her age is really catching up with her,” Ronya said, surveying the area like someone who’d never really paid attention to the scope of this primitive mining operation. “Mama used to say that, before her time, there were usually three or four potters among the Sujosa, but her mama was the only one left by the time she was born. It’s hard to live here. Whole families keep packing up and moving out. People can’t afford a houseful of children any more, and they can’t afford the time to learn things like pottery that don’t pay the bills.”

  “Pottery pays your bills, doesn’t it?”

  “Some of them. We couldn’t get by without Leo’s paycheck, but I make enough selling my pots and plates so that I don’t have to work outside the settlement. I can stay home and raise Zack.”

  Faye reached into her bucket and pulled out the two trowels, handing one to Ronya. She felt an idea tickling her brain, but wasn’t sure if she should speak yet. “Then let’s quit wasting time. Show me where to dig.” She looked at Zack, whose eyes were fastened on her. “But only if it’s okay with Zack if I use his shovel.”

  Zack looked at his mother, who nodded her approval of Faye taking over his job. Within seconds, he had scrambled up the vertical creek bank, and slid down one of the clay-lined cascades, splashing into the shallow pool at its bottom.

  “You should try that,” Ronya told Faye. “It’s a barrel of fun, and your clothes are already dirty, anyway.”

  “I just might—sometime next summer when it’s warmer.”

  Ronya set Faye to work digging white clay from the area dampened by one of the waterfalls, while she attacked a pocket of greenish clay.

  “Does green pottery sell well?” Faye did not want to tell Ronya that she thought that particular shade of green was remarkably sickly.

  “The green burns off, so it fires up grayish-white. I like to mix it with the white clay you’re working on. The white stuff’s a little chalky, but it’s a pretty color and it takes a glaze real well. The green clay’s easy to work with, but it’s so plastic it’ll hardly hold its shape. Together, they work just fine.”

  Faye squished a chunk of white clay in her left hand. It was stiff and gritty. Scooping up a clod of green clay, she found its texture almost greasy by comparison. “Did you figure out how to use the clays together by yourself?”

  “No, Mama showed me how to do it when I was hardly bigger than Zack. Since then, I’ve done some reading about clay chemistry, so I know that the green clay turns white because it’s got organics in it that burn off in the kiln. And I know that chalky clays shrink when they’re fired, and that keeps the glaze from crazing. Mama didn’t know any of those things. She just knew what worked and what didn’t, and she taught it to me.”

  “And now you’re teaching Zack?”

  Ronya tested the weight of her half-loaded pail and decided that she could carry more. She hacked out another chunk of clay that reminded Faye of a peeled avocado. “I’m not just teaching Zack. It’s too much of a risk to trust a whole family’s wisdom to one person.”

  “Who else are you teaching?”

  “Irene and Jimmie are learning to use a wheel, and Irene likes to paint,” Ronya said. “Of course they both work in Alcaskaki, and then Jimmie’s got his schoolwork and Irene has Kiki, but I give the lessons when they’ve got the time.”

  Ronya walked over and hefted Faye’s bucket. “You can fill this thing up. I’m not going to make a little thing like you carry it all the way back to the settlement.”

  Faye hurriedly scooped a few more pounds of chalky clay into her pail, and Ronya hooked it to one side of the yoke and her own pail to the other. Crouching, she fitted the yoke’s curve to her own shoulders and stood.

  “Aw, Mama,” Zack cried, looking up from his pile of meticulously constructed mud pies. “I’m not ready to go home yet. Can’t we stay a little bit longer?”

  Ronya checked her watch and stood for a moment, considering his request. Faye noticed that her stance was relaxed beneath a considerable burden. The woman was as strong as Joe.

  An idea had been forming since Faye followed Ronya down into Great Tiger Bluff. She’d spent the last hour looking for a fatal flaw, but there wasn’t one. Turning to face Ronya, she asked, “Would you like a part-time job? I’m kinda short-handed.”

  Ronya set down her burden and nodded at Zack, who happily resumed mucking about in the multi-colored mud. The crinkles at the corners of Ronya’s eyes said that she knew all there was to know about Faye’s newly acquired job openings. She scratched her jawbone, leaving an avocado-green smear behind. “I’ve got my pots to make and Zack to take care of, but I could use the money, and that’s for sure. But tell me something—” She eyed Faye closely. “What do you want with me? I don’t think you like me all that much.”

  Faye shrugged. “I don’t know where you got that idea, so if that’s what’s stopping you, don’t worry about it. I don’t hire people based on their charming personalities, anyway. For the record, I thought it was you who didn’t like me.”

  Ronya sized her up for a minute, which made Faye feel awfully puny, then she snorted. “Okay. I’ll do it. You’ll still be short-handed, though. I won’t be able to replace them both.”

  Ronya scooped up a fistful of red clay and rolled it between her palms like a snake. The muscles of her forearms contracted and relaxed as she worked, and Faye thought, Nope, you’ll replace Fred and Jorge, and then some.

  This was a very satisfactory move. Raleigh should be happy to hear that she was complying with project requirements by hiring Sujosa workers. And, despite her high-minded claim that personality didn’t enter into her management decisions, she really did like Ronya.

  Ronya broke off a few inches of her clay snake and shaped them into a ring. “See how it bends without breaking?” she asked. “I could work with this clay all by itself, if I liked the color.”

  “What color pot would this red clay make?”

  “Um…red,” Ronya said, in a tone of voice that suggested she’d heard dumber questions, but not many.

  “Oh. Right,” Faye said, trying and failing to duplicate Ronya’s snake-and-ring test with a piece of white clay.

  Ronya laughed. “I was just messing with you. It usually fires up red, but if you limit the oxygen in the kiln, it’ll turn black.”

  Zack was using a stic
k to draw pictures in the damp sand at the water’s edge. Faye leaned over to see what he was drawing, and he held up the stick in frustration. “It needs a sharper point.”

  “I can fix that,” Faye said, pulling her father’s pocketknife out of her pants pocket. It took only seconds to whittle a point on the end of Zack’s stick. When he reached to take it from her, his muddy little hand touched hers, and she caught her breath. Faye had never in her life met anyone with skin the exact same color as hers.

  She knew that the same could probably be said of everybody. Skin, after all, came in more than four shades, despite the “red and yellow, black and white” song of childhood. Still, Faye had never felt like she looked like anyone—not her practically Caucasian mother and grandmother, not the swampwater-dark father that she’d never met, and certainly not the children at school who were always looking for a way to draw a line and shut someone out. Once, in an Indian restaurant, she’d been served a cup of chai with cream and she thought, This is the color. This is my color. She’d wanted to brew herself a bathtub full of the stuff and climb in, blending completely into her surroundings, just once. She was so mortally tired of standing out in every crowd.

  But Zack didn’t stand out. He’d been born into a settlement full of people who looked more or less like him. Faye swallowed the urge to tell Ronya to keep him there, to never take him out into a world where he’d always be different, just because of how he looked. She didn’t need to say it, because Ronya already knew it.

  Zack tentatively touched the sharpened end of his drawing stick to test it, then smiled his thanks at Faye. He still had all his baby teeth, small and even and white as pearls.

  She looked over his shoulder as he drew in the sand. “Those are very nice tadpoles,” she said. “When you come here in springtime, are there tadpoles in the creek?”

  Zack didn’t answer. He just made more tadpoles.