The Perfect Gold
Keith P. Graham

Leah Greco stood at the door of the workshop looking down the path towards the road. The chill October winds cut through her thin clothes. The doctor hadn't come. The note she sent to him with the postman the day before went unanswered. The Doctor would not come. He'd have no time for a poor family, miles out of town, with no money to pay his fee. The doctor would not go out of his way to help a dying man. With or without the aid of expensive medicines, her father would surely die soon.

Leah's father was lying on a cot in his workshop. A stroke had sliced his brain, cutting him off from her. He could not walk or even talk and he choked when he tried to swallow. Only his eyes seemed to have life left, but the language they spoke was of fear and pain. Leah spent long hours trying to coax a few spoonfuls of soup into him. At well over six feet, her father was far too large for her to move into the house proper. It was all she could do to get him up off the floor where he had fallen and onto a cot.


The low stone chimney of the workshop was cold now. She could not remember a day in her life that its warm gray smoke had not drifted over the little valley.

"I don't have what he needs here," Leah spoke to herself. She knew that she had to walk down to the river and gather herbs, a hike of about 9 miles each way. Her father had to be left alone for many hours and he might die while she was gone. Already dehydrated, the strain on his heart might kill him. She knew what she had to do. Leah went into the main house and found her mother's spell bag. It was made of green velvet and contained small jars of all the things that a wisewoman might need. There was also a silver dagger and tiny Bible. Leah tore a page from the Bible, folded it in half, and put a pinch of gray powder from one of the jars in it. She then put three pinches of yellow flowers of sulfur into the fold of the paper and mixed it with the point of the dagger. Folding the paper into a small square package, she put it in the pocket in her dress.

Leah returned to the workshop and piled up billets of oak in the wide fireplace that her father used for making glass. Under the wood piled in the fireplace, she placed the package and lit it with one of the long matches from an old coffee can.

The package smoked for a moment as the paper burned low and then with a fizzing sound the powder caught fire, shooting green sparks out sideways. The dark green smoke smelled of brimstone. The fire grew brighter and brighter, illuminating the dark workroom with an emerald green light.

Michael Greco's eyes glowed as he watched from his cot. "I have to go, Father, " she said to him. "I have to fetch some medicine, I'll have to leave you alone." Leah tucked the covers more snugly around him. "I'm fixing it so you will be safe. You'll be fed and cleaned while I am away. It will only be but a day."

The fire did not die down, but the green flames spread in glowing spider webs over the oak. The room began to warm with the cozy radiated heat that only an open fire can produce. Leah knelt in front of the fire, sitting on her haunches, and raised her hands to the flames. They reached out and warmed her without burning. They swirled around and the green flow gave her a strange strength as she breathed it in.

The world was full of powers. Great powers walking in with seven league boots and tiny powers made by eddies in the flow of energies. The elementals left wakes in the world where they passed, but the tiny swirls and whirlpools of mystical power had little lives of their own. The old people of the Ohio Appalachians called them fairies or pixies or the little people. They were not people as such, but tiny sparks of supernatural life that flowed from place to place, attracted by warmth and human souls, but always wary and shy.

They could be called upon, with the right thoughts. The fairies could be bargained with coaxed and bribed. They loved the green fire. Bright golden sparks came down the chimney and through the open door. They swirled around the fire, dipping in and out of the flames. They danced in Leah's hair, making it rise with static electricity. The fairies knew and loved her. She had fed them with warm milk and sulfur. She had called on them to help her paint the house with the bright colors that fairies loved and on summer evenings, when heat lightning crackled in the sky, she told them all about her secret thoughts and dreams.

The fairies knew her thoughts, and the glowing gold sparks pulsed with different colors at her sorrow. She explained her father's sickness and the fairies swirled around him glowing dark purples and reds. They pulled the covers up close around his neck and winked in his eyes. The old man could only watch them in silent wonderment. Leah told the fairies she had to leave, pleading with them to feed and clean her father, and to protect him. The little people cried glowing-hot pink tears and reassured her.

They would remain here until she returned. Leah thanked them with sincere tears of her own. The little people, wee sparks of light, caught her tears before they hit the floor, and dried them in the fire.

Leah filled the wheelbarrow with split billets, bringing the staves right into the workshop, next to the fire, so the little people could keep the fire going and her father warm. She pushed the barrow as close as she could to the hearth, moving the wrought iron tongs and barrels filled with clean sand and bone-ash aside. Her father would never make glass again and would not need the tools of his trade anymore.

Leah hung an old sepia picture of her mother on the wall where her father could see it. In the picture, her mother's hair was a pale brown, but in her mind's eye, Leah could see it was a rich golden blond.

Leah's father, Michael Greco, had come to Guernsey County, Ohio for the sand. The sand, under a foot or so of loam, was clean and fine here just right for glass. Michael was a glassmaker in the Venetian tradition. He had started an apprenticeship fifty years before ago in his native Venice, but fled to America before he was established in his home city. He never gave the reason, although Leah suspected that her father, a passionate man, had been in trouble over a woman.

Leah's father said that he had come from Italy in search of the perfect gold. All yellow glass has a touch of green or a hint of red. The metallic additives used to make yellow did not produce a pure color. They were either too pale or had some other color mixed with them. He had read that a medieval monk had made the perfect gold, but the secret recipe had died with him. Her father had come close to the perfect gold, but had never been satisfied. Although he had produced deep blues and emerald greens that were the envy of every glassmaker who had ever seen them, he always had returned to his search for the perfect gold.

Michael Greco had married Esther Taylor, a healer or wisewoman, as the locals sometimes called her. Sometimes they named her witch. Esther had set a break in Michael's leg when a large stone had fallen from its place in the chimney he was building. Leah was their only daughter. Esther had loved the child Leah and tried to make her life happy and as normal as she could, but Esther had died young of a wasting illness when Leah was only ten. Leah, now in her twenties, was a dark haired half-Italian woman. Her neighbors named her, like her mother before, witch. Her dark complexion and odd way of speaking set her apart from them. No boys came a-courting, but occasionally a neighbor came to buy the small charms and spells she made to protect the milk from souring or to keep a child from dying in its crib.

Her mother had taught her much of the secret ways of a woman wise. Leah could call a storm or find water for a well. She could heal a cow sick with murrains and set a broken bone. She also knew darker things about the powers that walked the forests. She could cast out a devil or calm an elemental if the need arose. She could not, however, cure a stroke or prevent an inevitable death. Leah went into the main house and put some bits of dried food into a bag with a jar of water. She took out across the fields towards the river, where the swampy land was. Bark of the willow could be found there. She'd even saw meadowsweet growing, although it was much too late in the season for meadsweet now.

It was late that night when Leah finally returned home. From a mile away, she could see the green glow in the windows of the workshop through the pine trees as she came over the top of the ridge. The little people remained, keeping the fire going and taking care of her father. She knew that if the fire had gone out, it would have been a sign that her father was dead.

The tiny glowing sparks swarmed around in greeting as she entered the room. Her father was propped on pillows, halfway sitting up. He had a fresh flannel shirt on. One side of his face was slack and dead, but the other was wrinkled and pulled into a half smile. He tried to talk, but only a short grunting sound came out. He's smiling, Leah thought, and she smiled back. Obviously, he felt better and was glad to see her. The little people had taken good care of him.

Leah laughed and the light from the little people caught the glow of her smile and the room visibly brightened. "I found willows and took a good bit of bark, " she said. "I'll make you a tea. Mostly you will need rest, but the tea should help. Mother told me once, willow tea and time can help some of the effects of a stroke."

Her father grunted. Leah knew that if he had trouble talking, he might have equal trouble in understanding. Leah smiled at him and gave him a kiss on the cheek. A kiss, he could find easy to understand. His mouth moved, but no sounds came. Leah nodded as though to say, I understand, Daddy.

As she turned to straighten the covers a little, a faint glint from the near the fire caught her eye. A pile of glass at the hearth. Blobs of newly made melted glass forming webs of color and shapeless swirls.

The little people must have known her father's desires and tried to make some glass for him. She touched the pieces, they were still warm. She knew some educated people valued abstract art and this was as abstract as anything that she had ever seen before but it was also, most certainly, art. It was beautiful, full of little details of swirling, shifting color. The glass reminded her of the way motor oil looked when dripped in a puddle, iridescent and whorled in tiny currents.

"This is nice, Father, she said. " I think I'll take it into the house and hang it on the wall." Her father grunted, and she couldn't tell if the practical old man agreed or disagreed with her.

Leah slept in the main house, exhausted from the long walk to the river and back. Drifting off to sleep, she saw a small spark from the corner of her eye. One of the little people looked in on her.

The next morning the coals in the hearth were low and her father was asleep on the cot. She tried to wake him, but he wouldn't open his eyes. He breathing was shallow and quiet. Leah pulled the blanket up around his neck and put a few logs on the fire. She looked at her father. He had once been a giant bear of man with powerful arms, strengthened from pulling on the bellows, but now he was thin and weak. It broke her heart to see him waste away. Because he choked easily, it took Leah most of the day trying to get some tea and broth down his throat. He never quite woke up, but once or twice opened his eyes, to focus on something in the far distance; he didn't seem aware of Leah. Finally, he drifted off into a deeper sleep. His breath came in full drafts, his color became a little less pale. That night, when the fire went out and the little people had all wandered away to follow quicksilver interests, Leah started another fire, this time the usual way. After a bit of smoky hesitation, the fire burned bright. She sat next to her father, staring into the dancing flames. The little workshop was tightly built and soon it was quite warm. Her father snorted in his sleep, but still did not awaken.

Before Leah drifted off to dream of joyous days of summer, she remembered good times before her mother had sickened. Briefly, she was a little girl again, carried in her father's arms.

Leah awoke in the night. The room glowed deep red from the light of the large oak coals. Near to the fire, the hand-made bellows slowly opened and closed; the action of unseen muscles. Tiny sparks of light, as if someone had poked the fire, swirled around the room. They formed a twinkling crown around her father's head. As she watched, the sparks surrounded a glowing red glob resting within the hottest part of the fire. The little people pulled on the glob of molten glass, forming, twisting and working the glass into a strange shape. Smaller globs from other parts of the fire lifted and joined the larger mass and more and more sparks joined in the creation process.

The shape began to take form. It looked like a face. Leah could see a nose and eyes now. Even though the glass glowed deep reds and oranges, she could see the eyes were blue, the cheeks a rich pink. The chin was sharp. Leah gasped as she recognized the face of her mother, dead these last 15 years.

Leah looked at her father. His eyes were open, intent on the glass. The little people moved over the glass as though they were the tools of his thoughts. His hands trembled as he tried to move them. The glass formed and grew. The shape flattened into a dish and then spread into full relief; a perfect image of her mother. Her mother smiled, looking directly into her father's eyes. The small flames flared in time with the bellows draft that made them dance as though in great joy.

As the portrait grew, another large ball of molten glass joined it and spread itself slowly from the head. It glowed gold, like a daisy's eye or the summer afternoon sun. The perfect gold, the color of her mother's hair. Leah now understood that her father's quest for the perfect gold had been won and then lost in her mother. He had found the color, not in his glass, but in his one true love. He had lost that true love fifteen years before, and now in his last act had discovered the perfect golden color once again.

Her father's breath became rough and labored. Leah could see that he was trying to rise and go to the image of his lover. The sparks danced around him faster and faster and the portrait smiled even more. In the shimmering air around the fire, Leah imagined she could read her Mother's lips as they moved silently. "Come" they seemed to say. "Come to me." The twinkling lights stopped for a moment. They pulsed in time with a failing heart. They dimmed and rested, and came together to cover the dying old man, a blanket of lights. They settled on his head and his hands and along his body as though to give him some warmth. As though to give him one last breath.

The old man's mouth opened and he sucked in a breath and held it, his eyes fixed in bright fascination on the glowing glass image. He let the breath out on one last sigh. His eyes unfocused and his head fell back. Motionless now, his eyes stared at an unseen God in the unimaginable distance.

Leah rose and held her hand against his silent heart. She lifted her hand and gently closed her father's eyes. She brushed back his hair and lightly kissed his lips. Then she sat in the old chair next to his cot and let the tears run down her face. The image of her mother flickered in imitation of life with the light of the dying embers. The bellows were silenced and the twinkling lights of the little people were gone, off to their own happier homes in the far fields of Fairy.

The cold dawn found Leah asleep next to her father. When she awoke, she stood stiffly, wrapping a woolen shawl around her against the morning cold. The fire was dead and the image of her mother lie dark against the ashes.

The preacher would come. Leah would pay his sons to dig a grave in the churchyard. They would lay him down next to her mother and the preacher would say comforting words. Leah took the glass portrait of her mother and leaned it against the stones of the fireplace. It burned her hands when she touched it. The heat in the glass had not yet dissipated.

Leah went to the door. She took one look back and blew a farewell kiss. It was directed to the perfect image of her mother as much as to her father. He looked liked he was sleeping, with her mother watching over him.

She opened the door and the chill air made her shiver. As she walked out of the room, a quick wind blew into the workshop, waving the curtains and causing the ashes in the hearth to blow up the chimney in twirling rags of gray. Leah heard a crack and then another. She turned. The cold air on the hot glass had caused the image of her mother to shatter. The pieces fell onto the stone hearth scattering into a million more pieces among the fine gray oak ashes. She ran to save what she could. Moving her fingers through the fragments, Leah sifted for something to keep but all she found was one piece the size of a small coin.

Cleaning the piece on a corner of her skirt she looked at as she held it to the morning light.

All that remained of all of her father's life and dreams was one small piece of glass. All that remained was one small piece of the Perfect Gold.


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