Clay Hand by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

then watched their circle of light rise and fall along the road until it was lost among the first stores. A minute later the siren sounded once. Six o’clock.
    “Do you want your breakfast or no?” the widow called.
    He went into the house. “Just coffee, Mrs. O’Grady.”
    “You’ll not go long on coffee. You better let me fix you a couple of eggs. They’re just out of the nest, you might say.”
    “Just coffee, thank you.”
    She rattled the cup in the saucer as she poured it. He took it from her hand to the table. The spoons were in a glass on the table, and in another glass were paper napkins.
    “Fill it up with cream there. If I heat some biscuits will you eat them? I’ve a jar of honey.”
    “No thanks. I’m not used to eating this early.”
    “Then what did you get up for?”
    Having no particular answer for it, he gave none. She gathered the used breakfast dishes in a stack and hobbled across to the sink with them. She returned, bringing a half-filled cup of coffee with her. “You’re sore at me for what I said about him last night, aren’t you?”
    “No,” he said. “I’m disturbed by it. That’s all.”
    She leaned close to him, the smell of sleep and liniment still on her. “Do you think that one up there is disturbed about it? No sir. Not her.”
    He nearly scalded himself getting the coffee down. He got his overcoat and went out. The chickens were coming alive in the coop, and although the sky still seemed dark, a light haze was shimmering along the ground. He would not lessen her venom by escaping it himself. And God knows, he thought, how hard it is for the mind to stand up straight when the body is bent in two. He went back and asked her if there was anything he could do before he left.
    “Will you open the door of the chicken coop, the way I can feed them over the rail?”
    “Anything else? Can I feed them for you?”
    “No. I’ll want a mouthful of air. It’ll be daylight soon, and that simple one’ll come up to help me.” She reached her hand toward him. “You mustn’t think I want to be hard on Dickie, for I was a long time fond of him.”
    “He was just here six weeks,” Phil said.
    “There’s three weeks longer than I had a husband.”
    At the corner of Lavery’s he turned up, and climbed the long slope to the church. He had seen many a city cemetery smaller than the one there, with so many of its markers identical except for the names on them. In the little distance they were like white sheaves stacked side by side in a long, smooth field. The great harvest.
    He entered the church, startled by the huge angel in the vestibule. Dick had written of it. As the door closed behind him, the flames of the candles on the altar quivered. Only the priest himself was present. He moved the missal and then turned, speaking aloud, his rich voice reverberating through the empty church. “You may turn on the light if you wish. The switch is in the vestibule behind the statue.” He returned to the missal and bowed his head.
    Phil stayed the Mass out in the semi-darkness. The first light of dawn was caught in the stained glass windows. As it heightened, he read the in memoriams inscribed on each window…. Burke, Halitski, and the foremost, IN BELOVED MEMORY OF FATHER JAMES DUFFY. For him Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes, and Phil thought, perhaps in His wondrous way He did, for surely the good priest had need of them.
    As Father Joyce turned for the last blessing, Phil got his first good look at him, a handsome ascetic-looking man—far from home in Winston? Who was he to say that, having seen him only at the climax of his devotion? Phil left the church before the priest came down from the altar, passing again the great angel, and seeing in the growing light a greenish cast to it where the paint had chipped away.
    He drove to the cliff from which Dick had fallen. This time he started up the hill at its nearest slope to the road, keeping a few feet from its edge. The ground