Chuck came up the Athenry road behind the black horse and the white one, the near wheel pulling crooked again, the clay jar between his boots so he could feel it at every rut, and the ordinance was on its board by the gate where it always was. Three lines of Latin he had never learned. He read it the way he read a pot, by the wear. The wear was on the last word, rubbed through to bare wood by ten years of fingers tapping it on the way past.
Tinker.
The town outside the town had grown. Lean-tos ran along the foot of the wall like fungus on a log: the alewife who brewed without a license, the grey friar whose house had put him out, the leper who kept his distance and his clapper and lifted a wrapped hand as the carriage went by. Chuck lifted his.
“Back again, tinker,” the friar said.
“Back again, Brother. They’ve holes.”
“They’ll have you gone by the bell.”
“They’ll have their pots first.”
He pitched where he always pitched, between the alewife’s fire and the road, so the road could see him. The boys knew the work: water, charcoal, bellows. His wife drove the pegs with the baby asleep against her, and the black horse and the white one stood in the traces with their heads together like two men agreeing a price.
They came before the tin was soft. Every one of them was out to see a cousin, if asked, and every one had a pot under an arm. He knew the pots, and he knew what his mends became: the cooper’s kettle that sang a quarter hour before rain; the pail from the priest’s house that came up a finger fuller than it went down; the alewife’s jug that went flat under a lie. Those things came on their own. What grew in a mend afterward was the pot’s own business.
The first was a woman in merchant’s grey wool with a three-legged cauldron on her hip like a child. She set it on his board and stood back with her hands in her sleeves.
“Tinker,” she said.
“Chuck,” he said, and turned the pot to the light.
The hole was a thumbnail’s breadth and worn, never struck. One face of the copper had gone thin as a leaf, nine years of the same face to the same flame, and the far side thick as the day it was cast. A tinker made nothing. He came after the making and after the breaking, with a ladle and a jar of mud, and touched a thing once where it had given way. He scraped a ring around the hole until the copper came up bright, greased it with tallow, and unstoppered the jar.
The mud was grey and cool and smelled of somewhere else, of a riverbed under a hill he had once visited. He kneaded a hazelnut of it with spit and built the dam inside the pot, a small wall ringing the hole, pressed with his thumb until it held. The older boy worked the bellows until the tin in the ladle went from grey to mirror.
The younger boy held a flat stone under the hole from outside, and he poured. The tin pooled inside the dam, found the hole and drank it, shivered once, went still, and frosted from the edges in, the way a pond takes ice.
He cracked the dam away with a thumbnail and it came off in crumbs, worth nothing the moment the tin set. That was the trade, he had thought since the first ladle his father put in his hand: a wall that held the melt just long enough and was thrown away after. The town had its own wall. It was holding something until it set. He had never decided what.
He scoured the patch flush with sand on a wet rag until it sat in the dark copper like a coin in peat. He turned the cauldron in his hands, the legs, the bail, the inside, where a wooden spoon had worn a groove down the one side. Nine years of hanging the pot the one way round, because turning it would have meant turning her back on something. A door, he thought, and then saw it, light coming under it and a woman’s attention wearing through it the way the fire had worn through the copper.
Under the door there was another thing, which had no business in this woman’s pot: a name, and nobody’s in her house. He put it by, the way you put by a nail you’ve no use for yet.
He traced the line with his thumb, from the patch up the thin face, over the rim, down the far side to the groove, a line nobody could see and the pot would know. He said the words under his breath, in no tongue the boys could name.
“Turn it on the hook of a morning,” he said. “Let the thick side have its share of the fire. It’ll see you out.”
She had her hand on the patch already. It was warm, and it would stay warm long after the fire was out; that was what this one had decided to be.
“And you can leave off watching the door. He comes in at Michaelmas, by the quay gate, with a Bristol way of talking he’ll lose by Christmas.”
She did not ask how he knew; that was the difference ten years made. She paid in coin and carried the cauldron back toward the gate with her free hand flat on the patch.
He stoppered the jar and set it between his boots, and when he looked up the queue ran from his board halfway to the gate. A skillet, a ewer, a child with a cup in both hands, a man with a cracked bell. The wall stood at their backs. Whatever it had been holding, it had set.
The next was a young woman with red hair uncovered, the only bare head between his board and the gate, and a face the line had been sneaking glances at all morning.
“Sarah,” he said.