Tinsmith 1865

by Sara Dahmen

  “You’ve been well since I last saw you?” I finally ask Danny.

  “Well enough,” he nods. “And you too?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  It’s not a long walk to the tinshop, and when we arrive, he pauses at the threshold. I turn to look at him, waiting for him to follow me in. He does after a moment, and just like that, the world turns and tilts, with the ground tipping under my feet.

  Change. It hovers around him and folds me into it. Before I can catch a breath, both his hands grab mine, and we stand hand-fasted in the middle of the shop.

  “Marie, I ask this as it’s in my heart. There’s no reason to wait any longer. But—will you be mine? Marry me, be my bride, the woman of my home. I love you, truly, and I believe you feel affection for me, too. Will you?”

  The words are rushed, his wide eyes brimming with hope, and his open face is strained with it. The relief that comes with the long-awaited proposal shocks me in its plainness.

  So it is done. Finally. My answer sits on my lips, more a reaction than a true thought or decision, and with my pause, I find new, unexpected words.

  “You want me to be your bride. What do you mean?”

  He looks surprised, and his fingers tighten.

  “Just that, of course. That you’ll come home with me, and be mine. A wife. A mother. What else do you think?”

  My eyes cast about the shop. The tin sparkles in the slant of light, and the copper is radiant in the shadows like small fires. This place—my trade—has been the strongest thing in my life since coming west.

  “I wonder about this.”

  Danny follows my gaze. “Well, it’s on my family property. I suppose you could leave it here if the shop is so sentimental, but likely my father will want to rent it, or use it, or tear it down, eventually. Perhaps he’ll still sell to the railroad.”

  Percy would be absolutely livid.

  “Who will take care of all the tinkering then, if I should stop the trade?” I wonder, finding jealousy tint my words at the imaginative specter of the tradesman who will replace me.

  “Oh, probably Thad, as he used to.” Danny’s own voice starts to harden. I am sure he did not expect his proposal to be met with discussion or logistics or my worries and questions. If that is so, he does not know me well.

  “That doesn’t seem fair to ask of Thaddeus. He’s alone now, not like it was when we first arrived in Flats Town.”

  Danny sighs, but he does not release my hands. I try to meet his blue eyes, but he casts about the shop, trying to stem the questions I shoot at him.

  “Marie, honestly. It will work out. And I know you have debts, but I can help you settle them. And you might sell the tools. They are very valuable.”

  The notion that I’d rid myself of the machines my family painstakingly brought out west, that I oil with care every day, that were bought with my mother’s money, snaps me out of my mulling.

  “Suppose … well.”

  “Well what?” He leans in, his eyes suddenly bright again. “What can I do?”

  “It’s awkward, but I might like to tinker. I mean, I like to do the tin work, and the copper. Suppose I … I still work on it?” How am I daring to ask this? It is not what a woman would want, but it is something I must ask. I don’t even know what I am asking of him, only that I cannot answer him without saying something about my craft, and the hard-won trade.

  His smile is soft. “You like to make the pretty things?”

  “No. I mean, yes, I do like to make the metal shine and beautiful designs. I like the job. I’d miss it.”

  “It’s served you well,” he agrees. “But you’ll be married.”

  The final, genuine dismissiveness, gently offered, slaps me. The answer has come, though I do not understand it myself. I think I’ve known it for months, though I could not have said so until just now.

  “So I’d not be working the metal?” I have to hear him say it again, my heart thumping ever harder and louder and quicker. “I’d give it up.”

  “Of course, my dear,” he says, nodding twice, his finger pads softly circling the hard ridges of scars on my palms. “A married woman doesn’t do a trade like this. But you know that. And you know the machine sales would help with your debt. You wouldn’t be coming to the marriage so beholden.” This part is true; he knows me enough to know how much such a debt would rub me raw.

  I pull my hands out of Danny’s, and he strings tight and wary. He backtracks quickly, looking extremely anxious.

  “You don’t have to sell them, of course. You won’t need money once we’re married, Marie. I can provide more than enough for you and any children.”

  “I’ll not sell them,” I say. “Who would buy them around here anyway?”

  “Of course. You’re right,” he soothes, but the damage is done.

  Is there a way to be soft about it? It’s foolish of me to deny him, and I swallow the fright that comes with saying what I must, as it closes my chance at finding a husband and cancelling my debt.

  “Danny, I want to stay a smith. I’m no good at the hearth, and I believe we would be unhappy.”

  My eyes go once more to all of the metal surrounding us. There are the ponderous machines, with their wheels and gears, and the brilliancy of the plates and sheets waiting for me to spin and curve to life. I’ve found a sense of self here, and I do not really need a husband to take care of me. I only need to pay my debts. It is a lonely choice, to be sure, but I would crave creativity each day I stirred soup and weeded a garden and chased children.

  “My love isn’t enough?” Danny stares, his own unhappiness dragging at his face and weighing on his shoulders.

  My gut wrenches. It gives me no pleasure to hurt him, to serve him a dose of sorrow. But I cannot lie about what I want—or don’t want, in this case. How can I tell him that in the dark of night, when a sword was pressed against my ribs, I understood how I must find my own way? I will not insult him by giving any sort of false hope. I won’t marry him for money and nothing else. He deserves better. And I want something more from a match.

  Working with my hands gives me strength. Danny cannot know that by asking me to marry him, I’d lose the last bit of familial identity I have left. He doesn’t realize I cannot wed him if it means leaving the one thing that makes me feel like a person. The one thing in life that comes easily to me.

  “Your love is more than enough for any woman,” I reason. “But I’m not really a usual type of woman. I’m a smith. And I’m not going to marry someone I …” It would be too much to tell him I do not love him back. He is hurting enough.

  And I might love him in some way, but I love my work more, and the freedom it affords. I like having an identity beyond the stove of a woman’s world, for all the hardships I face, and the ones yet to come. Marriage is not enough.

  “You won’t leave this?” he asks again, looking bewildered.

  “Don’t ask me to leave what I’ve built. To let go of my family’s legacy. To leave all of myself behind.” I gesture with my arm to encompass the whole of the tools and machines.

  He looks about too, as if he cannot believe what he is hearing, as if the shop is somehow now his enemy for my affections. He doesn’t understand. I see it in every fiber of him, but I cannot erase it by promising more than I can give.

  Somehow, in odd, horrible twists of fate, I have more choice now than I have ever had before.

  “You’re sure, then? You won’t marry me?”

  “No. I’m sorry, Danny.” My voice is so soft I am not sure he hears me, but he must, because he spins away and leaves me standing alone in the shop once more.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  27 October 1867

  With the design sliced into both sides, I must press the tin inside the cavities. If I’ve done it well, and the dovetailed cuts are proper, the tin will bury itself inside the carving. But if something’s off or wrong, it’ll show up at once.

  Can I manage it if I fail at this once more?

  I
stare at the long slim metal. Do I melt the tin first, or just hammer it in? If I melt the tin and apply it hot, will I lose the temper of the sword’s steel? What if the heat discolors the steel? It would be marred completely once more, and I cannot bear the thought of having a third made on account of my ineptitude.

  I pull out a stick of pure solder, and remember flux at the last moment. If I plan to heat it at all, it will need the rosin to melt into any last remaining bubbles of air. But how do I make sure no rosin gets anywhere but in the thin decorative swirls, exactly where I want it?

  It’s foolish of me to try this alone, but I don’t have Father to guide me, and Walter has exhausted his technical knowledge on engraving steel and meshing soft and hard metals together.

  There’s Thaddeus, of course, but I’ve been avoiding him whenever I might since he seems to befuddle me each time we work on the sword. Sometimes he is kind and reasonable, and other times so gruff and hard I want to cringe.

  I hover for a long moment between decisions before finally taking up the warm woolen cloak Danny gave me last year and hiking across the crusty yard. The property is strangely quiet, unearthly so, and I wonder at it briefly before opening the door to the Salomon house.

  Walter is at the fireplace putting in logs, and Berit hums and she starts the midday meal. Sometimes I try to pay for dry goods from Harry Turner’s store, and sometimes Walter lets me, though I think he does not wish me to do so. He understands, perhaps, that I am trying to rescue my pride for all I can’t afford it.

  “I need—I mean, I’m looking for Thaddeus,” I say, announcing my arrival at the back door.

  “Go on through. I think there’s a customer or two from the voices, but he’s in the forge anyway,” Berit offers, smiling warmly at me.

  I walk through the familiar space, but pause on the edge of the door. What if it’s Danny in the forge, visiting Thaddeus about another horse that needs shoeing? Or Lieutenant Balsam asking about the sword?

  And then there is my own irrational reaction to Thaddeus himself, magnified by my deliberate separation from him over the past weeks. We have not had any other projects to work on together save the refitting of iron handles to some copper cookware Toot Warren needed repaired. And that was done efficiently, with sparse words. The silence I’ve stretched does not seem to bother him, and I’m both grateful and hurt by his reaction to my quiet.

  Well, it serves the purpose I wished. I want to be able to pretend, at least, that I do not see him for more than what he has always been: a gruff, irritable friend and fellow tradesman.

  By the silence in the room, it’s apparent Walter and Berit note my pause. She stops stirring and waits for me to go through or speak.

  “Marie? Is everything alright?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Of course it is.”

  Walking into the smithy, I don’t let the door bang wildly, as I know he does not like to be interrupted in the middle of working iron. And working it he is. Tim the farrier waits for a set of shoes, and it looks as though Thaddeus is on the last one.

  “How goes it, Marie?” Tim calls from across the room.

  “Well enough,” I say, taking an edge of the wall where I can be out of the way.

  “Nearly done,” Thaddeus says.

  There is no rushing the work, though, and at least a quarter hour passes before Tim departs with his four shoes.

  “What do you need, Marya?” Thaddeus’s voice is calm and plain.

  “Usługa. Help. I’d like your thoughts.”

  At this, he swings around to look at me, surprise inching across his face and body all at once. “Help with what? What can you possibly need from me?”

  The bite in his words aches and binds my breath for a moment, shooting spikes of fizzling tightness across my ribs. He is so angry sometimes, an anger that sits just below his characteristic crustiness.

  “I need help with the damn sword,” I say. “I have ideas on how to press in the tin. Heat? Hammering? Both? In what order? I don’t want to ruin your sword. I wanted to check once more.”

  He considers, rubbing his hands absently on the leather edge of his apron, then finally sighs and nods.

  “Very well.” He gestures that we should go out, and we do, walking as though we are on a funeral march, trekking across the strangely silent stretch of yard. I glance up, once, wondering if it’s the quiet before a fall storm, but I cannot tell.

  When we get to the tinshop, we go over the options once again. We consider cutting the rosin with whiskey to let it run into the crevasses, and I wonder how hard I should hit into the steel. I list my worries and my contradictory notions. Thaddeus listens without saying a word, picking up his work once again and checking its weight and balance.

  “Even pure bars of tin need to be probably melted down,” I finish. “And then hammered. Maybe.”

  Thaddeus looks cross. “Then hammer it in, Marya. Heating the sword won’t work. The iron will pull the warmth off, which you’ll need to keep the tin running. I think it’s supposed to be pounded in from the start.”

  “Fine.”

  “Just fine?” he wonders. “No argument?”

  “Should there be?”

  He studies the sword again, then sighs and rises to his full height. “I expected more. What is it? Are you so worried about your work?”

  “No. I’m not concerned. I just wanted to make sure to get a final opinion.” If I do the decorations properly, I will not fail, and the saber will be even more beautiful than the original.

  My eyes trickle down the line of the weapon, as if filling in the silvery tin by willpower alone. When Thaddeus taps my shoulder, it makes me jump.

  “You won’t be using the sword to end things, will you?” he asks gruffly. “I can trust you not to—”

  “Damn it, I said I was settled there,” I tell him shortly, unnerved by his reference to my moments of weakness. “You don’t have to worry.”

  Thaddeus considers me, and I let myself meet his eyes briefly, the shock of their greyness sending shivers down my ribs. When he leans over to check on the design near the saber’s hilt end, his chest and arm press into my back briefly. I am so taken with his closeness, it is as though I burn for it. I have not much before, and never like this. His nearness is extraordinary and tainted with sharpness and rejection.

  “You’ve gooseflesh. How can you be cold?” He glances at my hands and forearms, white and striped with scars.

  “It must be a draft.”

  He stares at me as though I am mad. “You are not unwell, are you?”

  Desire courses through me. It is consuming and crisscrosses my breathing and my mind. “No, I’m not poorly,” I reassure him instead.

  “I’ve been thinking on your problems,” he says, suddenly. “The debt and loans and the like. As you were saying that night. The one you don’t like to speak of.” I shrug. “What of it?”

  “Well, I thought on how you hate the chickens so much.” He digs into the deep pocket of his pants and pulls out a handful of shinplasters. “So I sold them. They were nearly past their laying time, anyway. Ornery bastards, the lot. Father and I can get pullets in the spring.”

  My mouth falls open as he places the squares of fractional currency on the tinner’s bench. They flutter slightly, like colored, inky snow. Before I can form words, he dives into his other pocket, pulling out another pile of notes, a mix of legal tender and one greenback.

  “What else did you sell?” I ask, finally finding my voice. “The cow?”

  “I didn’t sell anything else,” he says testily. “It’s Jimmy’s pay. Finally. And back pay. I figure he’d want me to use it—give it—to you. Is it enough?”

  The last name I expect to hear is Jimmy’s, and it takes the air out of my lungs. Looking up at Thaddeus, the only emotion surging through me in this moment is how I want to grasp him near, to feel his strength, to offer my gratitude, to share my heady relief.

  “It’s Jimmy’s?”

  Thaddeus raises his eyebrows. “Tha
t’s what I said.”

  “But—so the Army finally followed through on this? On his money, at least?”

  “Obviously. To hell with all your wondering. Count it. Does this cover your damn debt?”

  I pick up the papers, shuffling them, running the numbers through my mind and turning them over. “It covers most of it. The rest of the lumber loan, and a little over half of what I owe the bank for the months of rent.”

  Thaddeus inhales softly. “Well, it’s something, then.”

  “You don’t need any of Jimmy’s money?”

  “No. He’d want you to have it. I’m sure of that. So, now I can sleep knowing you won’t be driving this sword into your belly. You can be settled, as you say.”

  I crush the money in my hands and then put it back on the wide bench next to the sword. If I could, I would kiss him for his sweetness. I’d like to think he’s right. Jimmy would wish to take care of me. To be free of over half my loans from the bank solidifies my resolve. I will get out from under Percy, from my debt, from the Svendsens.

  I can. I will. I must.

  “Thank you, Tadeusz,” I finally tell him, mustering as much emotion behind the words as I dare. “I feel very fortunate.”

  He nods briefly, dismissively, and moves toward the door. “Well then. So. You’ll be finished with the sword soon. I’ll send word to Fort Randall with David Fawcett.” He gestures to the saber. “You did very well, Marya. It is lovely.” He looks at me fully and completely. Perhaps he is surprised I have managed to make it this far with both the trade and the sword.

  “Yes. I mean, thank you. Again.”

  As he leaves, I call out, feeling I should say something. Anything. Encouragement. That’s what Anette would tell me to do. Give him something.

  “I will be sorry that we no longer have an excuse to work together.”

  He swings around at my voice. “Why would we not? We are both a kowal smith in our own right. The sword is not the last project.” A glimmer of humor flashes across his face. “You cannot be rid of me so quickly.”

  He leaves for his own forge, likely to make sure the coals don’t go out with the early winter chill that creeps in the night’s shade. I can breathe again with the solitude and stare at the money. It heartens me to see it, as if it offers me a new way out, new ideas, plans, notions.