The kiln at Lagoa Prieta ticks as it cools, and for the length of one pot's cooling it is the only sound in Ulises Barroca's yard. He listens for it every morning before he lifts the lid. Ulises fires roof tiles, two hundred a week, in a clay-walled kiln his father built over a gas seep, and he has learned to tell a good firing by the pitch of the ticking. A quick, high tick means cracked tiles. A slow, low one means the batch is sound.
The mephit has lived in the flue for eleven years. It is the size of a plucked goose, gray-brown like fired slip, with a lump of a head and two stubby wings that never carry it far. Its skin is dry and gritty to the eye. It sits in the draft hole and breathes out a fine warm dust that smells of struck flint. Ulises does not look at it on the first pass of the morning. He rakes the ash pit, sweeps the threshold, and sets a saucer of lamp oil on the lip of the flue. Everyone in Lagoa Prieta does the same: a saucer of oil, never water, because water makes a mephit sulk and a sulking mephit clogs a chimney with grit the way a cold makes a nose run.
Midmorning he stacks tiles on the barrow and wheels them down the cinder track to the buyer at Ponte Seca, the second settlement, a cluster of salt-whitened houses on a dry creek bed. The track is the one place the naturalist can check what the villagers claim: the dust the mephit exhales settles in a gray fan on the lee side of the kiln, and over my visits that fan has grown from four paces long to nearly nine. Ulises says it grows because the creature is happy. I cannot confirm that. I can say the tiles from this kiln glaze a shade smoother than those from the kilns on either side, and that no neighbor has solved why.
In the afternoon he mends the barrow wheel, eats bread with pepper oil, and sweeps again. The mephit surfaces a second time near dusk, stretches across the kiln dome, and noses the empty saucer. Ulises refills it. That is the whole of their dealings. Tracking one is easy: follow the gray dust and the faint ring of scorched grass. It leaves a pinch of grit on every windowsill it passes. The one exception is the winter solstice firing, when Ulises lets the kiln go cold on purpose and sits in the yard until dark. On that night, and only that night, the mephit comes down off the dome and walks the length of the yard on its own two feet, wings folded, and sits beside him. Neither speaks. Neither has been seen to move for an hour.
- Classification
- Minor earth-and-fire elemental
- Habitat
- Kiln flues, vents, gas seeps
- Danger
- Low
- Size
- the size of a plucked goose
- Activity
- Always
- Realm
- Dry clay country
- Binomial
- Fumiculus lutarius
- Diet
- Lamp oil, hot ash, warm clay
- Temperament
- Sulky, territorial, quietly loyal