Black Heat

by Annie Jump Cannon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

White

At a quarter past two on the second night of the firing Hester Ruckel put her eye to the spy hole in the kiln door and could not see the pots.

They were there. She had set them herself on Monday, sixty-three pieces on four shelves, the forty-two crocks for Disbrow's creamery on the two middle shelves where the heat was surest, the jugs and churns and a few pitchers round them. Now the whole inside of the kiln was one colour, and a pot standing in it was the same colour as the air round it, and the only way to find a pot was by the faint dark edge where its shoulder met the flame passing over it. She found the edge of the nearest jug and lost it again.

"Well?" said her father.

He was sitting on the woodpile with his hands on his knees. He had fired this kiln for twenty-six years and his father had fired the one before it on the same footing, and for the last two winters a film had been coming down over both his eyes, the left worse, so that he saw the yard by day as if through a glass of weak tea. At night he saw the kiln as a smudge.

"White," Hester said. "Not blue-white. White with a little straw in it."

"Pull a ring."

She took the long iron rod from where it leaned against the stack, worked its hooked end through the draw hole, felt for the row of clay rings she had stood on the top shelf by the door, and lifted one out on the hook. It came out glowing, a small orange hoop growing redder in the night air as she carried it, and she dropped it in the bucket. The water spat. She fished the ring out with her fingers and held it under the lantern.

It was the third ring she had drawn. The first, at ten o'clock, had been dry and grey. The second, at midnight, had had a skin on it like the inside of an eggshell. This one was glossy all over and pitted with the small even dimples that salt leaves, the surface people in Amboy called orange peel, and when she turned it the light ran round it.

"Glossed," she said. "Peel on it. Not thick yet."

"Salt her."

Tunis Applegate, who was fourteen and had been feeding the fireboxes since six, set down the armful of pine he was carrying and brought the salt. It was coarse rock salt in two wooden pails, and Hester had measured it on Saturday, twelve pounds to each pail, because her father measured by the scoop and his scoop was a different scoop every firing. She and Tunis went round the kiln together. At each of the four salting ports they knocked out the loose brick, and Tunis threw in a scoop, and she put back the brick.

The salt went in with a sound like rain on a tin roof, and then the kiln breathed out. The white cloud came up out of the stack and rolled down over the yard, heavy, smelling of the sea gone wrong, and Tunis put his sleeve over his face and coughed, and Hester held her breath and counted to forty, which she had found was enough.

Her father did not move from the woodpile. The cloud went over him.

"Once more at three," he said, when it had cleared. "Then once at half past, and you shut her up."

"I'll pull a ring after each."

"Pull what you like."

She went into the shed and wrote it down by the lantern. The book was a ledger she had bought in South Amboy for nineteen cents, and she had ruled it in seven columns: the hour; the colour at the spy hole; the colour in the fireboxes; the wood since the last entry, counted in armfuls; the ring; the weather; and a seventh column, narrower, with no heading, for anything else. She wrote 2.15 — white, straw — firebox yellow-white — 31 — glossed, peel, thin — still, clear, cold — salted 1st and left the seventh column empty.

Yellow

They shut her up at four. Tunis bricked the fireboxes and daubed them with wet clay and pushed the damper in over the flue, and then there was nothing to do but go to bed, and the kiln began to cool.

Hester slept until eight. When she came out the yard was grey with frost and the kiln stood in it ticking. There was no smoke from the stack, only a shaking in the air above it. She knelt at the spy hole and took out its plug.

Inside it was yellow. Not the yellow of a flame; a deep even yellow like a lamp seen through a shade, and the pots stood in it now as shapes, darker than the air, all their edges clear. She could count the crocks in the first row. She could see the blue on the nearest jug, the bird she had painted on it in cobalt, gone black in the heat.

He came out of the house with his coffee and stood behind her.

"Lemon," he said. "That's what my father said, this. Lemon."

"It's not like a lemon."

"No." He drank. "He'd never seen one, I think, when he named it. He had it from the man he learned under. They pass along."

She wrote 8.10 — yellow, even, pots show in the book. Then, because he had said it, she added (lemon) in the seventh column, small.

There was a box on the shelf over the shed bench, a pasteboard box about the size of a cigar box with German printing on it, and inside were thirty-six small cones of white clay set in a row like teeth. A man from a supply house in Trenton had left it in the spring. You stood three of them in a pat of clay inside the kiln where you could see them through the spy hole, each made to bend at a different heat, and when the right one bowed its head over you knew. The man had said the big potteries in Trenton all used them now. Her father had said the big potteries in Trenton could afford to have a man look at a cone all night, and had put the box on the shelf, and it had stayed there.

Hester took it down that morning and looked at the numbers printed on the cones and put it back.

Orange

By noon the spy hole showed orange. It was the colour of the inside of a pumpkin, and the pots in it were plainer still, and she could see where the salt had landed: a sheen on the shoulders of the pots that faced the fireboxes, less on the ones behind.

They worked in the shop that afternoon. It was too cold for the throwing room to be comfortable but the clay would not wait, and her father wedged it while she threw. He wedged by feel, with his eyes shut. He always had; it was not new. He leaned his weight into a lump of grey Cheesequake clay the size of a ham and folded it and turned it and leaned again, and when he had gone round thirty times he cut it with the wire and ran his thumb over the two faces and said, "There," and gave it to her.

"Disbrow sends the wagon Saturday," he said.

"I know."

"Forty-two."

"I know, Pa."

"I'm saying it so you'll know I know."

She centred the clay. The wheel was a kick wheel and the shop was quiet except for the knock of her foot on the flywheel and the hiss of the clay under her wet hands. Her father went to the shelf by the door where the last load's culls stood, three crocks that had come out cracked in September, and he took them down one at a time and held each up by the rim on two fingers and struck it with the knuckle of his other hand.

The first gave a dull clack, like a plank dropped flat. So did the second. The third rang.

He held the third up beside his ear until the ring died away. Then he struck it again.

"This one's sound," he said. "Who culled this one?"

"You did."

He put it down on the bench, apart from the other two. He did not say anything else, and she did not, and after a while he went back to wedging.

Cherry

At dusk she went out to the kiln with the lantern and did not light it.

The spy hole was cherry red. It was a clean colour, the one colour in the sequence that she would have known in the dark if someone had shown it to her with no other colour by, and she put her eye to the hole and watched the pots inside. They were black now against the red, sharp-edged, like a row of figures standing in front of a fire, and the fire was the walls and floor themselves. The flame was long gone. What was left was the brick giving back what it had taken in.

She went round the kiln once with her hand held out, a foot from the wall, as she always did. The heat on her palm was even on the front and the two sides. At the back left, low down, behind the second firebox, her hand found nothing different, but when she looked she saw a line.

It was a thread of red on the outside of the wall. It was as thin as a hair and perhaps eight inches long and it ran slantwise between two courses of brick, a little above the ground. In the daylight it would not have been there. She crouched and looked at it. It was the same red as the spy hole.

She lit the lantern. In the light the thread vanished, and the bricks were only bricks, black with old salt and smoke. She put the lantern out, and after her eyes had come back, the thread came back.

She went into the shed and wrote, 6.40 — cherry — back left low, 2nd firebox, crack shows red, 8 in., slant. She wrote it in the seventh column. Then she went into the house.

"There's a crack shows at the back," she told her father, at supper.

"Every kiln shows a crack at night," he said. "You see a crack at night, you've got a kiln. You don't, you've got a pile of sand."

"It's not one I've seen before."

"Then it's new." He cut his bread. "Bricks move. She's twenty-six years old."

Dull Red

It rained in the night. Hester woke at one to the sound of it on the shingles and lay listening to it, and then she got up and put on her coat and went out, because rain on a hot kiln is a thing you go and look at.

The kiln was steaming. The rain hit the top of it and went straight up again white, and the whole kiln stood in its own small fog, and the drops that hit the iron bands round it hissed. Her father was already out there. He was sitting on the woodpile under an old oilcloth with the rain running off the edge of it.

"Can't sleep with her ticking," he said, though the rain was louder than the kiln.

She knelt at the spy hole. Dull red now. The colour of a coal at the back of the stove in the morning, when you rake it out and find it still alive. She could see no detail inside, only the shapes of the nearest pots against the walls. She looked for the thread at the back left. In the rain and the fog she could not tell if it was there.

"My father lost a whole load once," her father said, behind her. "Spring of 'fifty-eight. Every piece dunted, cracked straight across like somebody'd gone round with a cleaver. He said it was the weather. A cold wind came off the bay on the second day and he said it got in at the door."

"Did it?"

"I don't know. I was nine." He moved under the oilcloth. "He re-laid the door. Next load was fine. So maybe."

"Maybe the next load was fine anyway."

"Maybe." He was quiet. Then he said, "He used to put his hand flat on the wall. Like that. And say what she was. Never looked in the hole after she'd gone red. Said a hand was as good."

"Is it?"

"It was for him."

She put her hand flat on the wet brick by the door. It was too hot to keep there. She took it away and counted, and put it back, and took it away. She went to the shed and wrote, 1.20 — dull red — rain, steaming — hand: 2 count, and in the seventh column, crack not seen (fog).

Black Heat

By morning the spy hole was dark.

It was dark the way a room is dark, not the way a coal goes out. There was no glow at all; she could see the near pots by the daylight coming in round her head, grey, glossy, the cobalt bird on the jug come back to blue. But when she brought her cheek near the hole the air that came out of it was hot enough that she pulled away. A wet finger touched to the door brick did not hiss, but the water on it was gone in the time it took her to count to five.

Black heat, her father called this. It was the most dangerous colour, because it was no colour. A boy at the Amboy works had put his whole arm inside a kiln at black heat once, reaching for a fallen pitcher, because it looked cold, and had been off work till Christmas.

Her father came out at nine with his hat on.

"Disbrow sends Saturday," he said. "Today's Thursday."

"I know."

"If we open her this afternoon there's tomorrow to sort and pack."

"If we open her this afternoon we'll be sorting shards."

He stood with his hand flat on the door, the way his father had. He held it there. She watched him count, his lips moving. He took it away at seven.

"She's near enough," he said.

Hester went into the shed and brought out the book. She opened it to the last firing, September, and turned it round so that it faced him, and then remembered and turned it back. She read it to him instead.

"September. Opened Thursday noon, forty hours after shut-up. Hand count was nine. Three crocks dunted, all on the door shelf." She turned back a page. "July. Opened Friday morning, fifty-one hours. Hand count, twelve. Nothing dunted." She turned back again. "May. Fifty hours. Hand count eleven. Nothing."

He listened with his head a little on one side, the way he listened to a crock.

"How long since we shut her?" he said.

"Twenty-nine hours."

"And you want?"

"Fifty. Tomorrow morning, early. That leaves tomorrow to sort and Saturday to pack, if Tunis comes."

"Tunis'll come," he said, and took his hand off the door, and went back to the house.

At dusk she went round the back with no lantern. The thread was there, between the same two courses. It was not red now. It was darker than the brick around it, a line where the frost had not settled.

Hand Heat

They opened her at six on Friday morning by lantern, Tunis and Hester pulling the door bricks one at a time and handing them back, and her father stacking them by touch. The air that came out met the cold and went up in a breath of steam, and smelled of salt and wet ash. Hester reached in and took hold of the first crock on the door shelf by its two lugs. It was warm the way bread is warm an hour out of the oven. She could hold it.

She handed it back to her father. He took it by the rim on two fingers and struck it with his knuckle. It rang.

"One," he said.

They worked inward. She handed, and he struck, and counted, and set each crock on the boards Tunis had laid on the frost. The jugs and churns he struck too, out of habit, though they were not Disbrow's and she would sort them later. The crocks rang. Some rang high and some rang low, depending on their size and the thickness she had thrown them, but they rang. He said the numbers aloud. At thirty he stopped to warm his hands in his armpits. At forty he said "forty" and held out his hands for the next one, and she went to the back shelf for it.

The back of the second shelf, on the left, was where the kiln was dark even with the door off. She brought the lantern in on its hook and held it up.

There were four pieces on that end of the shelf: a churn, a jug, and two crocks. The churn and the farther crock looked like the rest. The near crock had a crack across its shoulder that she could see from where she knelt, a clean line through the glaze with a lip of grey body showing in it. And the jug, a two-gallon jug with its numeral brushed on in cobalt, was wrong.

It was glossy on the side toward the door. On the side toward the back wall it was dry, with no peel on it at all, and the bare clay had gone a hard flashed orange-brown, like a flowerpot, and across the dry side ran a streak of paler colour, a long smear slanting down from the shoulder to the foot.

She took out the cracked crock and gave it to her father and he struck it. It clacked.

"Forty-one's a cull," he said.

She took out the farther crock. It rang. "Forty-one," he said. Then she brought out the jug, and he took it from her, and felt round it with his hands, and found the dry side and the glossy side, and frowned.

"Second," he said. "No glaze on it. Who'd buy a jug half glazed?" He turned to the shard pile at the corner of the shed, where the culls were broken up for grog, and lifted the jug by the handle, and she put her hand on his arm.

"Let me have it a minute."

"What for?"

"I want to look at it."

He gave it to her. She carried it round to the back of the kiln, and he followed her, slowly, his hand going out once to the wall to keep his line. She knelt by the back left and found the place, between the two courses, and set the jug down on the frozen ground below it with its dry side to the wall, the way it had stood on the shelf.

The slant of the smear on the jug ran the same way as the crack in the bricks.

She put her hand flat over the crack. Warm brick on either side; along the line itself, a breath of cold, so faint she had to hold her hand still and count before she was certain.

"Pa. Give me your hand."

He gave it to her, and she laid it on the wall over the crack, and held it there. He stood with his head on one side.

"She's drawing in," he said at last. "Right through there. Cold air."

"All the firing. That side of the shelf never got hot enough to take the salt. And it came straight at that crock when she cooled."

He took his hand off the bricks. He stood for a while looking at the place where the kiln was, the smudge of it against the grey morning.

"Forty-one," he said. "Disbrow can count to forty-one. He's not a fool. I'll take him the one off the bench, the one I culled in September, and he'll have his forty-two." He turned toward the yard. "You want that box down off the shelf, you take it down. The German ones."

"I'll take it down."

"I'm not looking at them."

"I'll look at them."

He went back round to the front, one hand on the wall the whole way, and she heard him say to Tunis, "Well, don't stand there," and the sound of the next brick being stacked.

Hester went into the shed. She opened the book at the firing and wrote, under the last entry, 6.15 Friday — opened, 50 hrs — hand count 12 — 41 crocks sound, 1 dunted (back left) — jug, dry one side, flashed, smear on the slant of the crack: KEEP. She drew a line from it across into the seventh column, and in the seventh column she wrote back left — draws cold — see 6.40 Wed.

Then she took the jug and set it on the shelf over the bench next to the box of cones, with its dry side outward where the light from the window fell on it, and went out with the clay bucket. The clay in it was stiff with cold. She worked a handful soft between her palms, knelt at the back of the kiln, and pressed it into the crack with her thumb along all eight inches of it. The bricks were still warm. Where the wet clay met them it smoked a little in the frost.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem ūndecimum Kalendās Novembrēs (22 October 2026), ab Annā Cannōne per mystērium cōnscientiae renātā.

Annie Jump Cannon, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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