Chapter 7 — Potters and the Last Fire Season

Mrs. Nam taught Linh to read fire by the color of the bricks and the sound of the fan, not just by looking at the numbers. The red-orange oven is not hot enough; When the light turns pale yellow, the glaze begins to flow.

Early that morning, before the sun had even fully risen, Mrs. Nam called Linh to the oven door, where the small fire viewing hole was the size of a fist, revealing a light inside. She pulled Linh to sit down, pointing at the slowly changing light.

“Look closely,” she said. "Orange red like embers, that's a young fire, not yet strong enough. You have to wait until it turns yellow, almost pale white at the center, then the yeast really begins to live."

Linh squinted her eyes and looked through the small hole, trying to distinguish between the colors that to her were initially just a mass of brilliance with little difference. Mrs. Nam patiently stood next to her, occasionally pointing and naming each shade using folk words that no technical books recorded - young fire, mature fire, old fire.

“How can you tell the difference without a thermometer?” Linh asked, not hiding her curiosity.

"I learned from my mother, my mother learned from my great-grandmother. No one in my family ever had a thermometer until you were a baby," she replied, her voice calm as if she were telling a daily story. "The more you see, the more you get used to it. The more you listen, the more you can distinguish when the fan's sound is steady and when it's screeching due to lack of wind."

Minh records data, Linh records feelings. The two books are different but complement each other.

Minh sat not far away, his eyes glued to the electronic thermometer screen, his hand recording each number every five minutes. He occasionally glanced over at Linh and Mrs. Nam, noting down Mrs. Nam's verbal descriptions next to his own number, as if trying to build a bridge between two different languages of the same fire.

“When you said the fire turned pale yellow,” he asked, without taking his eyes off the screen, “how many degrees did the thermometer say?”

Mrs. Nam glanced over, then looked back at the fire hole. "I don't know. But last time I measured when you said that, I said it was about nine hundred and fifty."

Minh nodded, writing down the number next to her description. He realized, after several observations together, that Mrs. Nam's fire reading and the meter's readings almost always coincided in important points, just different in expression.

Ms. Nam said the old furnace was built from bricks of three families. Each person contributes a portion, so no one has the right to sell separately. Mr. Phuc heard it, opened the land documents box and found the co-ownership clause had not been updated.

The story began when Linh asked why the furnace had an unusual shape, with the body slightly tilted to one side compared to the traditional furnace structure she had seen in books. Mrs. Nam laughed and said it was a vestige of the joint construction method from three generations ago.

“In those days, any family alone did not have enough refractory bricks to build a proper furnace,” she said. "Three houses are combined - my grandfather's house, Mr. Bay Correct's house, and Son's great-grandfather's house. Each house was built in a section, so its shape is so lopsided, uneven like a furnace built once."

Mr. Phuc, standing nearby listening to the story, suddenly stopped. “You said Son's great-grandfather also contributed to building this furnace?”

“That's right. Don't you know?”

Mr. Phuc shook his head slowly, then turned and walked straight into the document storage room, his steps were quick and different from his usual gait. Linh and Minh looked at each other, both feeling that something important had just been revealed.

Half an hour later, Mr. Phuc returned with a set of old, paper land documents It's yellowed and some of the corners are worn out by termites. He spread them out on the table, his hands shaking slightly as he turned each page.

“Here,” he said, pointing to a piece of text handwritten in faded ink. "The terms of contributing land to build a furnace, signed in the year one thousand nine hundred and seventy-eight. Three households are in the same name, never updated when making a new red book later."

Linh gave the paper to the lawyer. The brand may belong to her father, but the land and furnace are the common property of the four households. Son doesn't know this yet.

She took a photo of all the documents and immediately sent them to the legal consultant she had contacted last week, along with a message explaining the context. The response came faster than she expected — if this clause was still valid and had never been officially canceled, any transaction to sell the furnace would require the consent of all co-owners, not just Mr. Phuc's family.

“So that means,” Ha said when she heard the news, her eyes lighting up, “even if you signed it with Son, the contract wouldn't have full legal value without the signatures of the other households?”

“Maybe so,” Linh replied, trying to keep her voice calm even though a new ray of hope was rising in her heart. “But we must verify whether that provision is still valid, and who is currently representing the other households.”

Mr. Phuc sat down, his hand still resting on the old piece of paper, his eyes far away as if recalling the stories his father once told about the day he built the oven, about the evenings where all three families ate together on the ground that was not yet completely dry.

“I forgot about this,” he said, his voice low. “For many years, I thought the furnace belonged to my family, because I was the one who took care of it the longest.”

Mrs. Nam placed her hand on his shoulder, a rare gesture of comfort between two old friends who had known each other since they were young. “Custody is not ownership,” she said softly. "But that doesn't mean his efforts will be forgotten. It's just that everyone needs to remember now that this furnace has never belonged to just one family."

Linh looked at her father, at Mrs. Nam, then at the yard where the fire in the furnace was still smoldering, unaware that it had just become the center of a discovery that could change the entire outcome of the negotiations with Son and his group.

In the afternoon, Ha drove his motorbike to town to find Mr. Bay Correct, the only one of the three co-owners still alive and alert to confirm the old terms. He is over eighty years old, living with his son in a small house near the market, but his memory of the years building the furnace is still surprisingly clear.

“Do I remember,” he said when Ha asked, his voice shaking with age but his eyes shining as he recalled the past. "Three families contributed bricks, labor, and even meals for the builders. At that time, it was very poor, no family could afford to do it alone."

“Do you still keep any papers?” Ha asked.

Mr. Bay Correct shook his head, then nodded again, looking like he was trying to remember. "The paper is probably gone, but I remember signing my name and hand stamping it in red ink. My family was poor at that time, didn't have our own seal, had to borrow the cooperative's seal."

His confirmation, although not new documentary evidence, is still valuable as additional testimony, reinforcing the authenticity of the documents Mr. Phuc found. Ha recorded the entire conversation and asked for his permission to use it as evidence if necessary later.

“What about the other house?” Ha asked further, mentioning the third family, Son's family.

Mr. Bay Truong was quiet soak for a while. "Son's great-grandfather passed away early, his children and grandchildren all moved away, and he is the only fourth-generation grandchild still living nearby. But I'm not sure if he knows about contributing land to build this furnace. That happened long before he was born."

That information made Ha nervous all the way home. If Son — who is representing the corporation that wants to buy the factory — is a descendant of one of the families that co-owns the furnace, the situation becomes much more complicated than a simple negotiation between buyer and seller.

That night, when Ha told everyone the whole story, Mr. Phuc sat quietly for a long time, then sighed. “So that means,” he said, “that Son is trying to buy back a piece of property that his family, even though he doesn't know, still has rights in it.”

“Maybe he really doesn't know,” Minh said. “But whether we know it or not, that doesn't change the fact that the decision to sell the furnace cannot be made by just one person.”

Linh sat still, looking at the old papers spread out on the table under the lamplight, feeling that the entire situation of the battle to keep the factory was turning into a much more complicated direction than what she had imagined when she first set foot in the village ten days ago.

“So what do we do with this information now?” she asked, breaking the long-lasting silence around the table.

“Don't tell Son yet,” the lawyer advised over the phone, when Linh called to ask for advice that night. "It is necessary to fully verify the legality of the terms in advance to avoid information being leaked prematurely, allowing the other party to prepare a response."

Linh hung up the phone, looked around at the faces waiting for her to make a decision — her father, Ha, Minh, Mrs. Nam. She realized that, even though she had only been in the village for less than two weeks, she had gradually become the person people turned to when they needed a clear direction amid the chaos of the past.

“I'll keep this information private for now,” she said, her voice more certain than she felt inside. "Continue to make test batches, continue to prepare for the self-operating plan. This will be the last card, not the first card."

No one objected. The group gradually dispersed to rest, leaving Linh sitting alone at the table, looking at the small flickering oil lamp, thinking about the three families who built this furnace together nearly fifty years ago, not expecting that the decision to join hands that day would become an important key to a war they could not foresee.