He looked at it for a moment. "I want to say something," he said. "You don't have to." "I know I don't have to." He looked up.
He was a large man who took up a lot of space in normal circumstances, and this version of him, with his hat in his hands and something careful in his expression, was different in a way she found she was not satisfied with. It was not the diminishment of him that mattered. It was whatever came after it.
"You were right," he said, "about the pots, about all of it. I laughed because it was easier than taking the arithmetic seriously. That's the honest reason." He paused.
"I have been a damn fool about this." She looked at him. She thought about what to do with an honest apology from a man who had made her life harder for no good reason and had then worked a fire line for 3 hours helping protect the thing he'd mocked. "You weren't the only one who laughed," she said.
"No, but I was the loudest." He shifted his hat between his hands. "I'd like to learn the system. For next year, Ruth and I both want to learn it."
"Come in March," she said. "Rafael's going to be here and we're going to build kilns. Everyone who wants to learn will be learning together." Something in his face loosened that had been held tight.
"All right," he said, just those two words, the same ones he'd said in the field in July when she'd shown him the soil and the vessel and they carried the same weight now that they'd carried then. He left with the seed packet and his hat and without any of the performance of a man working through something, which meant he was actually working through something and doing it privately, which was the only version of it that stuck.
Rafael Ortega returned from the south in late October, which was earlier than his usual circuit and Evie suspected that news of the valley situation had traveled faster than his wagon wheels and he had adjusted his route deliberately. He arrived on a Thursday and she fed him dinner and told him about the season from beginning to end including the fire and the distribution and the families who needed clay vessels and had no source for them. He listened to the whole account without interrupting.
When she finished, he said, "Tell me about the clay deposit." She told him about the bank 2 miles north along the old arroyo cut where the exposed strata showed a reddish gray material she'd noticed in March and had the stationmaster's agricultural contacts confirm as likely pottery grade clay. She'd had a sample tested against the specifications in the circular. The particle size was right. The firing temperature required was achievable with a basic kiln.
She had the sample analysis in the ledger. She opened the ledger to that page and set it in front of him. Rafael read it with the care of a man who had been working with clay his whole life and understood it as another asset. He looked up after a while.