Roku by Travis Stephens

On again, she volunteered me for wood cutting detail. A tree felled in one of last winter’s storms, back yard. The owner had a flatbed trailer; I had my Stihl — plus long hours, child and man, with axes, saws, chunk & splitters. This I could do.

“Do you mind? The noise gets to him.”

She was speaking of the man she dated long ago, a ceramicist giant she called The Mudman. “He is doing a roku firing. You should see it.”

That Saturday I put an edge to the chainsaw, oil and gasoline. Tree owner, my fellow bucker, is professor of economics and was promised some roku pots. Barter is one of the tenets of a non-cash economy, after all. After the flatbed was loaded, his wife brought us bottles of beer and ham sandwiches.

“You men made quick work of that,” she said and rode with us to the firing. It was a line from childhood; something Mother would have said.

Mudman had set rings of brick, made a chimney of blocks slathered with riverbank clay. When we brought the wood the kiln was a smoky blue center of students. I watched him feed the fire, how the flare goldened the lines in his face, the dead tooth. His amber eyes found mine.

“Hey.”

To the professor, “Did you bring the sawdust?”

A bucket of saw bites, twigs. What I saw were red-hot pots lifted from the kiln and set into a box of sawdust, leaves and junk until it was all aflame. Mudman smoked a short pipe. A young woman with dreadlocks to her ass offered a joint all around. Her hips were like those of a pitcher.

My wife has a line of vases on the windowsill and would run a loving hand over them. Her work has always been two dimensional, too much realism for some galleries. She lets me build frames.

Original roku was for tea service. A precise measuring of heat and time. Mudman explained that, due to the wood, the box of burning and even the variances of clay, every roku firing was unpredictable. Results will vary. His eyes slid past me.

“You cannot duplicate this”, he said. A careful smile. “You never make the same mistake twice.”

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Travis Stephens is a tugboat captain who resides with his family in California. A graduate of University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, recent credits include: Gyroscope Review, 2River, Gravitas, Sky Island Journal and The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature.

Photo: Viviane Okubo