The cold hand squeezed harder. Molly felt for the door-frame behind her and held it tightly. “Why do you come here?” she whispered. “Why?”
“It’s all your fault! You spoiled everything. They laugh at me and lock me up. . .”
“And you still come here. Why?”
Suddenly he darted to the workbench and swept it clean. The elephant, the heads, the foot, hands, everything crashed to the floor and he jumped up and down on the pieces, sobbing incoherently, screaming sounds that were not words. Molly didn’t move. The rampage stopped as abruptly as it began. Mark looked down at the gray dust, the fragments that remained.
“I’ll tell you why you come back,” Molly said quietly. She still held the doorframe hard. “They punish you by locking you up in a small room, don’t they? And it doesn’t frighten you. In the small room you can hear yourself, can’t you? In your mind’s eye you see the clay, the stone you will shape. You see the form emerging, and it is almost as if you are simply freeing it, allowing it to come into being. That other self that speaks to you, it knows what the shape is in the clay. It tells you through your hands, in dreams, in images that no one but you can see. And they tell you this is sick, or bad, or disobedient. Don’t they?”
He was watching her now. “Don’t they?” she repeated. He nodded.
“Mark, they’ll never understand. They can’t hear that other self whispering, always whispering. They can’t see the pictures. They’ll never hear or get a glimpse of that other self. The brothers and sisters overwhelm it. The whisper becomes fainter, the images dimmer, until finally they are gone, the other self gives up. Perhaps it dies.” She paused and looked at him, then said softly, “You come here because you can find that self here, just as I could find my other self here. And that’s more important than anything they can give you, or take away from you.”
He looked down at the floor, at the shambles of the pieces he had made, and wiped his face with his arm. “Mother,” he said, and stopped.
Now Molly moved. Somehow she reached him before he could speak again and she held him tightly and he held her, and they both wept.
“I’m sorry I busted everything.”
“You’ll make more.”
“I wanted to show you.”
“I looked at them all. They were very good. The hands especially.”
“They were hard. The fingers were funny, but I couldn’t make them not funny.”
“Hands are the hardest of all.”
He finally pushed away from her slightly, and she let him go. He wiped his face again. “Are you going to hide here?”
“No. They’ll be back looking for me.”
“Why did you come here?”
“To keep a promise,” she said softly. “Do you remember our last walk up the hill, you wanted to climb to the top, and I said next time? Remember?”
“I’ve got some food we can take,” he said excitedly. “I hide it here so when I get hungry I’ll have something.”
“Good. We’ll use it. We’ll start as soon as it gets light enough to see.”
It was a beautiful day, with high thin clouds in the north, the rest of the sky unmarred, breathtakingly clear. Each hill, each mountain in the distance, was sharply outlined; no haze had formed yet, the breeze was gentle and warm. The silence was so complete that the woman and boy were both reluctant to break it with speech, and they walked quietly. When they paused to rest, she smiled at him and he grinned back and then lay with his hands under his head and stared at the sky.
“What’s in your big pack?” he asked as they climbed later. She had made a small pack for him to carry, and she still carried the laundry bag, now strapped to her back.
“You’ll see,” she said. “A surprise.”
And later he said, “It’s farther than it looked, isn’t it? Will we get there before dark?”
“Long before dark,” she said. “But it is far. Do you want to rest again?”
He nodded and they sat under a spruce tree. The spruces were coming down the mountains, she thought, recalling in detail old forestry maps of the region.
“Do you still read much?” she asked.
Mark shifted uneasily and looked at the sky, then at the trees, and finally grunted noncommittally.............