Old Masters

There’s nothing as symbolic to me as an urn: a body made of clay, a white hot fire, and ash, but I’ve only made one in my lifetime. My right knee hurts. I also have arthritis in both hands. There are wrinkles on my face and all too. Guess what, I’m still here kicking this wheel.

All I can hear in an empty garage is the sound of harmony. It is the sound of physics, chemistry, geology and biology working together. It is the sound of an old horse-drawn carriage wheel in need of some axle grease. A motor sits idle in the corner and it’s getting rusty. Come to think of it, the rust I’ll sand off and use.

There are times when I sit here and still hear his voice, ‘Do you believe in God?’ whenever I do, I hear it louder than I hear anything else.

‘Do you believe in God?’ is a question I’ve never answered with words, not even today. The things I think about to create a work of art. This didn’t start with an anonymous envelope arriving at my front door addressed to Mr. Leslie Rowe. At first I believed it came in error, but then I thought about it some more. The only person who wrote me letters was my beloved uncle. When I opened it my life ended and began at the same time. This is how it all started thirteen years ago.

Out of breath from having jumped through the second floor bedroom window and then running into the neighbor's garage, the real trauma began there while my father stabbed my mother to death in the middle of the living room.

 Not witnessing it is one thing. Running into a man who resembled my father, with hands and clothes mired in a brown, blood-looking type of dirt is another. He had a cordless house phone which he fumbled because of thick, slippery blood on his hands.

 “Please don’t hurt me, please!” I said, horrified, stepping backwards until I hit the garage wall with the back of my head. My whole body shook like a human earth quake. However, the look in his eyes I believe mirrored the look in mine.

Short of breath and just as traumatized, he dropped the phone and spoke with outstretched hands and with a slow and cautious approach as if he knew exactly what happened, “It’s ok Alexi, I won’t hurt you. This is dirt. You’ll be alright, police are on the way. Come here, come. It’s alright.”

Well If I heard my mother’s screams on my way out the window, so did he. He knew exactly what happened.

He got close but then we both jolted at the sound of a single gunshot. By then I screamed so violently my heart couldn’t take it anymore. I collapsed, my head hit his body and I felt his arms drape around me.

“Do you believe in God?” he asked.

I squeezed him so tightly I thought he would burst, and that became my answer at thirteen.

At the police station I overheard the detective talking to Leslie, “I spoke with his uncle. He says he can get here by morning,”

Leslie got into a temper, “He can stay with me if he wants to just ask him. If you only listened,” he said.

I stayed with Leslie for the night, reflecting on the phone he had in his hand it occurred to me that Leslie might have been calling the police before, but every time they came by mom denied having a problem. The so-called uncle came for me in the morning. Walking down the driveway I turned around to see Leslie standing in the door way.

I kept thinking, ‘How do I get back to safe harbor?’, but my uncle’s grip on my wrist meant I didn’t even need to see where he was taking me.

Exactly thirteen years later, when I received that envelope, and set out to find Leslie again and found him exactly where I left him. My old house looked much different from what I remember. I looked up at the bedroom window and it became clear why I landed uninjured. Everything appeared bigger and taller back then.

Leslie stood in the door way. He watched me walk up as if I came home, greeted me first with a smile and then with a heart-felt embrace, “Alexi, it is so good to see you again!” he said, squeezing the life out of me the way I did to him so many years ago. I could hardly breathe.

“Mr. Rowe—“

“Call me Leslie. You are a man now, please come inside,” he said.

We talked for about an hour over two ice cold beers in the family room, even after that he had no idea why I really came.

Eventually we got to the most obvious question. He leaned back in his lounge, beer bottle in hand and asked, “What brings you back here Alexi? You’ve already sold the house. I’m guessing you spent some of the money on a good education too. Why come back?”

I wondered how happy he must have been to know the house was sold. There was no chance after that for case of my parent’s murder suicide to ever be reopened.

“I did Leslie, but I came back because there is something I want to learn from you. You are a potter, aren’t you?”

“I am. Are you interested in such a humble craft sir Alex?” he asked.

 “I’ll pay you anything you ask, and I’ll pay for everything,” I said, but something changed in him the moment he heard me say it.

He tilted his head slightly to the left, and then leaned forward to put the empty beer bottle on the floor. Then he leaned back again in his lounge chair, silent.

“Did I offend you, I’m sorry sir,” I said, pretending to want to undo the damage but his reply wasn’t what I expected. Leslie couldn’t have been happier.

“Alexi, don’t be fooled by your education. You don’t have to have money to obtain something valuable. I’ll teach you for free, the same way I learned from my teacher many years ago. Don’t pay me for anything,” he said.

“Well can I stay here with you then?” I asked.

“Of course, how else will you learn?” he said.

Back then I scared myself sometimes, the way I could suppress feelings of anger as a means to an end.

Leslie did something I didn’t expect. He picked up his empty beer bottle on the floor then mine and smashed them both on the tiled floor! He watched me react.

Instantly my heart pounded in terror from the sound of shattering glass. The sound of shattering glass entered my ears along with my mother’s screams when I ran into my bedroom that night as she tried to defend herself. I saw the fight again, but I never really saw it.

 Then I heard Leslie’s voice, “Alexi…Alexi.”

“Yes sir, I mean Leslie,” I replied, panting having relived the entire experience. From running and jumping through the window, to running into Leslie’s garage I felt my feet slam into the ground and the back of my head thud against the garage wall, but it didn’t matter to Leslie. If it did he hid it well.

An honest reaction would have meant me lunging at his throat to strangle him but like I said—.

“Alexi, can you clean this up please, don’t throw the broken pieces away. After you figure out what to do with them your first lesson begins. My workshop is still inside the garage, to your right,” he said, and walked away.

I cleaned up the mess and wondered if I made a mistake to go back there after all. When I entered the workshop I became nauseous and ran out but ran into Leslie. He grabbed me by my shoulders and gave me a good jolt, “Stop running away Alexi, turn around and go back in or turn around and go home. It’s time to move on.”

His voice sounded to me like a father talking to his son, something I never heard before. I listened to him, still carrying the bag of glass shards. They were broken pieces of a broken life. I put the bag on the floor and walked around. His workshop was surprisingly well organized and clean, the cleanest and most organized of any craftsman I’ve ever seen with a great variety of pottery on every wall and shelf. When I turned around again Leslie had gone. I needed to figure out what he wanted me to do with a bag of broken glass.

Eventually I located a bag half full of sand in one corner. My bag of shards still wouldn’t fit in, so intuitively I began associating all the tools in the workshop with whatever materials were closest to it and that proved to be an effective method of learning.

The bag of sand was actually a bag of crushed glass. He had a glass crusher right next to it. By the time Leslie came back with two tuna sandwiches it was time for my first lesson.

“I see you’ve figured out how to use the thing,” he said.

“At this rate learning won’t take very long, will it Leslie,” I said with an outstretched hand waiting to receive my tuna sandwich, but he didn’t give it to me.

“How about not eating a sand sandwich, go and wash your hands first, they are covered in glass dust, and next time you do that wear one of the dust masks,” he said.

Instead of one lesson I got three, but food arrived on time with hunger. He spiced up the tuna, which I didn’t mind but there was too much mayo on it for my liking. Those sandwiches came and disappeared like a flash of lightening.

Now I had to ask, “Can you tell me about your new neighbors Leslie?”

“They’re perfect. Sometimes I don’t even remember they’re there,” he said, but when tears welled in my eyes I turned away to stare at the crudely-made potter’s wheel he planted in the middle of his garage.

“You’re not ready,” he said.

“I am ready. Show me how to use it,” I said. It was a hard fight. Unfortunately I still ended up wiping away a single teardrop.

Leslie placed his hand on top of my head and said, “Alexi, you’re not ready son. Your hands shake too much, and salty tears will ruin good pottery.”

Good pottery, I no longer resisted the urge to confront him, “Leslie, I didn’t sell the house, my uncle did. You know a sample of my father’s DNA was taken that night. The man who killed her was not my father... and I think you know who is,”

He didn’t reply. He sat there on the stool as if someone carved him out of it until my solid right hook landed him cheek first on the garage floor and I shouted at him, “You son of a bitch!”

He rolled onto his back in disbelief just in time for me to crouch over and land another left when he tried to get up. I mercilessly pounded his face again and again into the ground.

“Alexi wait—” he shouted, holding his arms out trying to shield himself from volts of emotional electricity flowing down from my heart into my coiled fists.

I screamed at him some more. In a blitz I became my father, “Shut up, you killed her! It’s your fault!”

He cried out one more time, “Stop, Alexi!”

 I only held back the final blow because I wanted to hear the full story, so he told it.

“Alexi, Alexi you are my son. I didn’t know for sure. She wanted to leave long before you were born. By the time you were thirteen I established my name and brand and bought a house far away from here.  I gave her the address and told her to just go, but she told him she was leaving. I planned to meet her there with you, and I would’ve sold this house right after to start anew with both of you.”

The man I called dad was truly a waste of good dirt. I hated him, but knowing the truth would have made a difference, because every night he accused my mother of cheating which she vehemently denied every single time.

None of that mattered anymore. I could only remember him for what he was, a drunkard and an abuser. When I thought about it, Leslie couldn’t come charging across the fence to defend Mom and confirm Dad’s suspicions either. At least he tried to get her out. It just didn’t happen fast enough.

Overwhelming regret shook me to the core knowing how close I came to becoming the very man I hated. I had broken my father’s nose and blackened his eye. When I stared at my bloodied fists I remembered Leslie’s reassuring voice with his mud-stained, outstretched hands.

He tried to get up but couldn’t, and so he stayed on his back and pulled his feet up so that the soles of his shoes rested on the floor. He rocked his knees back and forth pinching his nose to try and stem the bleed.

I could hear blood curdling in the back of his throat when he spoke, “You said you came here to learn. Is that still the truth?” he asked.

“No,”

“Alexi, give me a chance, please. Everything I have is already yours. This house is yours, and so is the one I bought for your mother. All I have left to give is what’s inside my head, having that is a badge of honor you’ll want to wear,” he said.

When his nose stopped bleeding I asked him to let me take him to the hospital, but he said that if I did he would tell all the doctors attending to him the truth. I tried to mend him as best as I could with cotton balls wedged into his nostrils, some gauze tape and frozen meat from his freezer for the black eye.

Before that day I used to tell myself it’s impossible for a man to unintentionally approach a certain level of violence.

Leslie sent me to the pharmacy so that our embarrassing secret wouldn’t get out. It’s a father’s love. On day four he got tired of seeing me suffer in regret.

We sat beside each other on the porch, “Do you want to learn Alexi? I can teach with a broken nose,” he said.

I already learned my first lesson. Everything else turned into an opportunity to bond with a loving father. In his garage one day again I told him that I was ready to sit at the wheel. He told me I’d be ready if I could get myself some clay, so I offered to go and buy some.

He pointed at me then at the wheel, “If you dare I’ll burn it,” he replied, then walked out. He came back with a pick and a shovel, let’s get to work,” he said, we dug a mighty hole that day but even the hole we left behind had a purpose. It became our firing pit, even though he had a perfectly working electric kiln inside the garage.

I learned under his tutelage like this for the next ten years, but it was only a year after I arrived at his house I learned how distinguished he really was. Leslie had sold pottery valued at thousands of dollars just for having his name stamped on it. He created several new techniques along various stages of the process that were sought after by even the most learned and valuable teachers of the craft.

Last week one of his original pieces sold at auction for thirty five thousand, and I have a garage full of them.

I, Alexi Rowe, have never engraved my name on anything I make in his workshop. I use the original seal of Leslie Rowe: Master Potter, on everything I’ve ever made in this garage and the kiln I built in his honor. What he passed on to me is more valuable than everything I have today, even then, this knowledge I have still falls short. The love I received throughout the years from my father was priceless.

The family requested I craft an urn to bear the ashes of Master Leslie Rowe, the man who saved my life, my real father. Ninety nine for him would still be a perfect score. For me, if I could’ve given him back a year from my life I would’ve.

I am throwing this urn from a special kaolin body. I retained ashes from my last pit firing for glazes. A sprinkle of iron oxide will do. It’s the same iron oxide I sanded off the motor. This time I’ve chosen reduction. If it survives the kiln whatever I get I know Leslie wouldn’t care. He’d call it a rare and valuable thing.

Why does my knee hurt so much, bad habits? This time I kick it right, the way he showed me to. Ironically, kicking a potter’s wheel counter clockwise turns back the hands of time. A body of clay, a white hot fire and some ash will produce a masterpiece. One last throw and I’m still learning from old masters.

THE END