Keys of Heaven Read Free Page A

flattened out of it completely.”
    “Oomph!” The boy hefted a big lump of clay like a bag of chicken feed and slammed it on the wedging table.
    “Try cutting it in half,” Henry suggested, then returned his attention to the batter bowl he had on the wheel.
    “I can manage,” Caleb panted. “Do you think I’ll have muscles like yours by the end of the summer?”
    “I think you’ll have a slipped disc and carpal tunnel syndrome. Don’t try to save time by wedging a big piece and then cutting it. Cut one or two pounds at a time, enough for a single mug or bowl. I tacked up a chart for you, see? You’ll be better able to pound the bubbles out of a smaller lump.”
    “This is an important commission and we can’t mess it up. Ja , I know.” He took the words out of Henry’s mouth, which made him realize just how often he must have said them in the last couple of weeks.
    “Point taken,” Henry told him. “Now you take mine. And yes, you’ll have some definition by the end of this job, if that’s what you’re after. Working clay is hard physical labor.”
    “Daadi doesn’t believe me. He thinks I ought to be helping him and Uncle Josh in the fields.” Caleb took the cutting wire and sliced the lump into three as easily as Henry himself might have. The boy was a quick study in some things, he’d give him that.
    “Maybe you ought to obey your grandfather.”
    “But I want to do this.” Slam! Slam! “Anybody can follow a horse up and down. But not everybody knows how to work clay. Can I make the handles?”
    “I need someone to wedge more than I need someone to make handles. Those only take a minute. That’s probably enough on that lump, Caleb. If you overdo it, then it won’t do what I ask it to on the wheel.”
    “How do you ask it?” The boy wrapped the damp clay in plastic and set it with the row of others that would be today’s batch.
    “With my hands.”
    Was that what had happened to him when his fiancée, Allison, had died in that car accident? Too many slaps—too much slamming against the brick walls of life, rendering him unable to do what God asked him to do?
    Maybe.
    But things were better now. He didn’t know why. Coming to the home his aunt had left him, to the community of Amish relatives he’d visited in his youth, should have made things worse. He’d been running from his upbringing for most of his life, so it was strange that running back to it had brought him a measure of peace and allowed him to get his hands back into clay again.
    Not that he was coming all the way back to it, mind you. That was never going to happen. But he was getting used to living in the quiet, nonelectrified farmhouse that had once rung with the voices and shouts of someone else’s family. Of living on a farm that other men tilled and cared for. Of making friends with other people’s children.
    Like Caleb, and a few of the teenagers like Priscilla Mast, whose dad’s farm abutted his and Sarah Yoder’s on one corner. After a hoedown party had ended in a grass fire a couple of months ago, the local teens had evidently decided he was on their side when he didn’t press charges or hand anyone over to the local sheriff. He overlooked the fact that nonretaliation was the Amish way, and told himself it was because they hadn’t really done much harm to that old fallow field. The Youngie would greet him on the road when they were driving by in their courting buggies, and now and again he’d find a plate of cookies or a pie on his doorstep when he came in from the studio he’d created in the barn.
    Sarah Yoder sent the odd plate over, too, but not with this kind of frequency.
    It felt a little strange to be accepted by a bunch of local kids. A nice kind of strange. As Caleb had pointed out in a rare moment of sense in all his chatter, Henry and the local teenagers were on the same side of the baptismal fence. They hadn’t joined church yet, and neither had he.
    Except in his case, there was no yet