The Cold Vat

Merit the dyer's daughter had five vats of cloth behind her, and every one had come out pale.

The first was madder root, and the cloth came out the color of weak tea. She said the root was old. The second was woad, and the cloth came out grey. She said the woad was poor that year. The third she tried with walnut hull, the fourth with weld, the fifth with a bark nobody in the valley had used before. Each time she hung the cloth on the line and it hung there, nearly white.

She grieved over each one. She sat on the bench by the river and named what was wrong with the plant, the water, her own eye for color. Each new vat was a new idea, and each new idea was a new death. The village began to say she was a girl of many fine thoughts.

An old woman who sold eggs came by the dye yard in the sixth week. She did not look at the cloth. She did not ask about the roots. She walked to the vat, set her bare palm against the clay, and kept it there.

"Cold," she said.

Merit laughed. Then she stopped. She looked at the stones under the vat. The ash in the pit was grey and flat. She could not remember when she had last carried a coal to it. Perhaps she had never lit it at all. Her mother had always had the fire going before Merit woke, and Merit had never seen it start.

She stood very still. Five vats stood in her mind, and each of them had been a plant, a hope, a small funeral. None of them had been dye. None of them had been heated long enough to begin.

The egg woman had gone on up the road.

Merit did not gather a sixth plant. She knelt at the pit and cleared the old ash with her hands. Then she went to find a coal.