by P. D. Kalnay
“Make sure you show me all the ones you plant,” Ivy said.
The crazy continued on from there. Ivy watched me like a hawk, and the specificity of her instruction led me to add OCD to her list of malfunctions. The afternoon felt as if it lasted forever, but like all things, it did eventually come to an end. That end was a long series of reasons why my use of the garden hose was incorrect. Finally, I shoved the nozzle into Ivy’s hands and went inside. If gardening was that complicated, nobody’d do it. From what I’d seen, plants managed to grow all on their own. Getting to know them personally… wasn’t necessary.
***
I got cleaned up for dinner and found a surprise waiting at the table. Gran had a new boarder. A big man I didn’t recognise sat with Gran, Mr. Ryan, and Ivy. He was tall, thick, and what remained of his hair was dark black with a few wisps of grey. It was hard to say exactly how old he was at a glance; I guessed somewhere in age between Mr. Ryan and my grandmother. His eyes were dark brown, almost black. The only other person I’d seen with similar eyes was my father. When he smiled, I knew there was no relation. My father never smiled.
“Jack, this is Mr. Smith,” Gran said. “Mr. Smith, this is my grandson, Jack.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mr. Smith said.
“Nice to meet you too.” I took the last empty chair at the table.
“Mr. Smith will be staying with us for the week,” Gran told me. “He comes by once a year on business.”
“What business are you in?” I asked. Mr. Smith looked rough around the edges for a businessman.
“I’m a blacksmith,” he said. “The last name is coincidental.”
He made an exaggerated wink, and I couldn’t help laughing.
“What work is there around here for a blacksmith?”
“Technically, I’m working as a farrier right now,” he said. “Do you know what that is?”
Due to my interest in all kinds of oddball stuff, I did.
“You shoe horses.”
“That’s right,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s not the most interesting part of my job, but it pays the bills. There are fancy race horse owners in the area who pay my travel and expenses to come out here every year. I wasn’t going to do it anymore, so I hiked up the rates. Do you know what they did?”
I shook my head.
“They paid them.” He laughed at his own joke. “Your grandmother has the best food in these parts and her own smithy. You can’t argue with that!”
Mr. Smith attacked the ham on his plate with gusto.
“You have a smithy?” I asked Gran. At some point her place had to run out of surprises.
“The small building behind the carriage house,” she said. “This property used to be entirely self-sufficient. Mr. Smith is the only person to use it in the last century.”
“It was well designed by the first guy,” Mr. Smith said around a mouthful of ham. “Except for the dust, it looked like he’d just hung up his tools and walked away. Then somebody locked the door behind him, and I was the first person to see the place in a hundred years. I don’t know if any of that’s true, but it surely felt that way the first time your grandmother let me in. I use it as my home-away-from-home for the days I’m here.”
“I’d like to see that,” I said. “Can I watch you make something?”
“Not a problem. I’ll be around for a week, on and off. I’ll be out there from sunup tomorrow till lunchtime.”
My days were mostly full. Before I could thank him and tell him I was busy, Mr. Ryan spoke.
“I’m going out tomorrow morning, to tie up the last loose ends of the job I was doing. You can take the morning off. Sometimes, a break is a good thing.”
I determined to get up early and see blacksmithing firsthand. I’d watched a lot of YouTube videos, and I was more interested in knives and swords than horseshoes, but it’d still be cool to see.
***
After evening sword practice, I took a quick shower and went to bed early, setting the clock radio for 6 a.m., so I’d be up in good time. It had been a long day, and I fell asleep immediately, only to wake again in the middle of the night. The light of an almost full moon was shining right in my face through the window like an annoying street light. It’s dark around Gran’s house at night. I’m talking dark. Obviously, there are no street lights, but there are also no neighbours or city lights. If you’ve ever been camping or way out in the country you know the dark I’m talking about. Because of that, and because there’s no one to look in, I’d been leaving my curtains wide-open to get the most breeze through the window screens. I got up to shut them and block out the annoying moonlight. That’s when I saw Ivy.
Minus the bright moonlight, a hundred people could have been milling around in Gran’s backyard and I’d never have seen them. Even with the illumination, it took a second to determine what I was looking at. I squinted and pushed my nose up against the screen for a better look. Sure enough, Ivy was outside in the middle of the night, though I couldn’t make out her face. A small girl in a white dress (or nighty) walked the rows of the vegetable garden over and over. It was still pretty dark, but I figured it was her. Who else could it be?
Ivy’s movements were mesmerising, even at a distance. A sound (I believed was her singing) tickled at the edges of my hearing, but it was so faint I couldn’t decide if I’d imagined it. Again and again she walked the garden, slowly retracing her previous steps. Once, I thought I saw a gently glowing footprint left in her wake. Like the singing, it was ethereal, and I chocked it up to imagination and sleepiness. Then Ivy finished whatever it was she was doing, went to the back edge of the lawn, and stared into the dark forest. She stood there for a good while, and I wondered if I should go outside. Maybe sleepwalking was another of her malfunctions. I knew you shouldn’t wake sleep walkers, but I figured you shouldn’t let them wander off into the woods either. At the exact moment I decided to go out, she turned around and walked back to the house. I heard the patio door open and shut below me.
I stumbled back to my bed and dropped into it. The clock radio said I’d been watching her for over two hours, but it had only felt like minutes. Dreams can be like that. When the buzzer went off a few hours later, I was certain I’d dreamt the whole thing.
Chapter 8 – Hammer and Tongs
I felt exhausted when my alarm sounded the next morning, and I considered hitting snooze or turning it off. With Mr. Ryan away, I could have my first sleep-in in a long while. On the other hand, a chance to see real-life blacksmithing might not come again. That thought pushed me out of bed. I looked out the window at the yard and garden, but nothing appeared out of place. Then, I pulled on the clothes I’d left in a heap on the floor and headed to the smithy. Ms. Mopat wouldn’t put out breakfast for another hour, meaning that my rumbling stomach would have to wait. I had looked in the carriage house before, only finding a couple of old flat-tired cars, covered in a thick layer of dust. I’d thought the building behind it was just an old shack. From the outside, there was nothing fancy about the smithy.
The smithy’s two wide doors, that had previously been padlocked, stood wide open. Mr. Smith had pushed them right back against the walls, and he was already at work inside, shoveling coal onto the stone forge. A huge set of bellows hung suspended to one side of the forge, and an anvil, that must have weighed three hundred pounds, sat on an old stump between us. It was dim inside, even with the doors spread wide, but I could see tools hanging on all the walls and half a wooden barrel next to the anvil. A heavy workbench with a leg vise ran down one side wall. Any more stuff and the place would have been crowded. Mr. Smith saw me as he scooped up a last small shovelful of coal from a coal box on the wall opposite the bench.
“Good morning,” he said.
He sounded more awake than I felt.
“Good morning.”
“I’m surprised to see you this early. I liked to sleep-in when I was your age.”
“I didn’t want to miss anything,” I said.
“So
you have a genuine interest then?” Mr. Smith gave me an appraising look.
“Yeah, I’ve read a couple of books and watched some YouTube videos.”
“Ah well, some of those are excellent, and some are junk!” Mr. Smith grinned. “I might as well show you how to do things properly. We’ll start by lighting the forge. You know what this black stuff is, don’t you?”
“Coal?”
“Close. This is coke. Harder to come by these days, but cleaner. I have the bin filled every couple of years.”
“What’s the difference?” I asked.
“You can think of it as diet coal.” Mr. Smith looked at my blank expression and then shrugged.
“Bad joke I guess,” he went on, pushing the black nuggets back from the centre of the forge. “Coke is coal with some of the impurities cooked out in a big oven. Pass me those pieces of wood.”
I handed Mr. Smith some kindling-sized wood from a galvanized pail next to the anvil. He carefully arranged the wood in the little space he’d cleared. Then he pointed up at a long wooden handle attached to a rope and pulley.
“That works the bellows and blows air into the forge. After I light this, you pull that gently to fan the flames.”
The handle moved smoothly downward, and a clever counterweight pulled it back up again. Within a minute, a fire was burning.
“It’ll take a while to heat up,” Mr. Smith said. “Would you do me a favour and fill the barrel with water?”
“Sure, is that the quenching tank?” I asked.
“So you have read up on the subject. That’s the slack tub and for our purposes today the quenching tank too. For finer work, the quenching tank would get oil.”
It took me a while to fill the half barrel with buckets of water. Running back to the hose at the main house took most of that time. When it was full, I asked what came next.
“Would you like to learn how to make something?” Mr. Smith asked.
“Definitely!”
He looked me up and down.
“I have safety glasses and an extra apron, but you should wear steel-toed boots,” he said. “Safety first.”
“I have some in the house.”
“Go get them lad.”
I ran back to the house and up to my room, grabbing my parade boots from military school from under the bed. I’d spent a ridiculous amount of time spit-polishing them over the last year. Quickly, I exchanged footwear and headed back. Mr. Smith looked down at my gleaming boots.
“Those won’t shine back up once you do real work in them.”
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “I’m not going back to military school anyway.”
He handed me a leather apron and a pair of safety glasses. The apron was surprisingly heavy.
“I used to teach classes on the side, to make extra cash,” he said as he moved the coals around with a fire rake. “We always started by making basic tools. Would you like to give it a try?”
I nodded, unable to believe my luck.
One of the best mornings of my life followed as Mr. Smith showed me how to adjust the coals, work the bellows, and to recognise the different colours steel turns at different temperatures. He showed me when it was right for working and when it needed to return to the fire. I learned the names of many of the tools in the smithy and what the various types of hammers were for. Step by step we each made a set of long tongs. Mr. Smith would demonstrate with his, and I’d do my best to copy every strike of his hammer. He showed me how to thicken the metal, and flatten it, and even how to make a hole without a drill. I made a few mistakes, and added to the scrap bin, but Mr. Smith just laughed and said it was all part of learning. The morning passed in what felt like a few glorious minutes.
I’d just finished riveting on the pivot pin and quenching my tongs in a cloud of steam, when I noticed Mr. Ryan watching at the open doorway. It was the first time I’d seen him in a suit. He had a laptop bag slung over one shoulder, and he was giving me a funny look.
“What’s wrong?” I asked with hammer in one hand and new tongs in the other.
Mr. Ryan shook his head.
“Sorry Jack, I had a moment of déjà vu, watching you work.”
He walked the rest of the way into the smithy.
“Did you make those?” He pointed at my tongs.
“He sure did,” Mr. Smith said. “Best student I ever taught. He pays attention to detail, follows instruction, and understands first time.”
“I did make some mistakes,” I said, blushing at the unexpected compliments.
“Never twice and fewer than most. He’s a real natural.”
“May I see them?” Mr. Ryan asked.
I handed him the tongs, and he examined them closely, opening and closing them several times. Then he had a try at wiggling the pivot point side to side.
“Tight, but not binding,” he said handing them back. “Nice.”
“A natural,” Mr. Smith repeated. “You have a knowledgeable look about you too.”
“Only as a shopper,” Mr. Ryan said. “I collected custom knives and swords for a fair number of years, and I got to know a few guys in the business.”
“They’re not that good,” I said. Looking at my tongs, all I could see were the mistakes. “Here the handle is crooked, and the faces of the jaws don’t meet perfectly, and you can see all the places I missed with the hammer.” The longer I looked, the worse they appeared.
Mr. Smith laughed.
“What’s so funny?” I asked.
“That right there is the mark of a true craftsman,” he said. “All you see are the mistakes. I’ve taught dozens of people, of all ages and backgrounds what I taught you this morning, Jack. This is actually the lesson I did on the last day of my three day course. None were as talented as you. In another time and place, folks would be competing to have you for their apprentice.”
I opened and closed the tongs a couple of times, fully embarrassed now.
“Thanks,” I said, “and thanks for teaching me. Oh crap, what time is it?”
“Lunch time,” Mr. Ryan supplied.
“You didn’t get any of your real work done. Didn’t you have to make horseshoes this morning?” I felt terrible about wasting so much of Mr. Smith’s time.
Again, he just laughed.
“I buy the shoes and then adjust them to size on site,” he said. “I use the portable, gas forge on the back of my truck.”
Something didn’t add up.
“Then why do you need Gran’s smithy?”
“I don’t,” Mr. Smith said. “I just enjoy stepping back in time now and then. At home I have a natural gas forge and electric everything; even a pneumatic hammer to do the heavy lifting. This is for fun. Your enthusiasm made my morning. Let’s spread out the coals and have some lunch.”
I looked down at my tongs, not certain what to do with them, but Mr. Smith read my thoughts.
“Most of my students take their first tools home, to begin a hobby shop, or just hang them on a wall to display.” He looked at the wall of tools above the bench. “Seeing as you live here now, it seems like you could add yours to the collection.”
After putting all the smithy’s tools back, there was one spot empty on the wall. My tongs fit perfectly.
Chapter 9 – Eyes in the Darkness
I ate a lunch of sandwiches and salad with Mr. Smith and Mr. Ryan. Mostly, I listened as they discussed sword and knife making. Both were long-time enthusiasts, and the conversation was as intense and exclusive as nerdy conversations always are. It doesn’t matter if they’re about sports, or comics, or music; when people with a genuine love of something meet up, the conversations are always the same. Good-natured arguing ensued over things I didn’t know about, and once I finished my meal, I went out back to find Ivy. I wasn’t sure what there could be to do on the day after planting the seeds. Knowing Ivy—there’d be some kind of crazy.
Ivy had already started working in the garden before I got back there. The bare furrows we’d left the previous day were
covered in green. Little shoots had sprung up across the garden. From a distance, it looked almost as green as the surrounding lawn. I stood and stared, amazed. Ivy was squatting in the closest row; her sundress had slid back revealing most of her smooth, shapely legs. She plucked shoot after shoot, flinging them to the grass beside her. Ivy worked with an expression of intense concentration on her face that was downright adorable. I’m not sure how long I watched her work before she noticed me.
“What are you gaping at, boy?” She asked. Her previous expression was replaced by a scowl.
“Nothing,” I said, trying to cover my embarrassment.
“I’m well accustomed to being gawked at,” Ivy said. She’d returned to her weeding. “Most have the decency to be less obvious.”
What a stuck-up brat!
“I wasn’t gawking at you, so you can get over yourself, Princess. I was just amazed at how much sprouted up overnight.” It was half true.
“Unfortunately, there are far more weeds than vegetables,” Ivy said. “We must pull the bad, to allow the good to flourish.”
“How do you know which is which?”
Ivy gave me her you’re-a-moron scowl and sighed.
“The desirable plants will be in the rows where we planted them. Most of the weeds will not. The pictures on the packets at the end of the rows can be used for comparison. If you’re unsure, ask, and I’ll show you the differences. You can start on the far side.”
Ivy didn’t bother to look at me as she said the last. I wanted to ask if she’d really been out in the night, but how do you bring up something like that? It had almost certainly been a dream, and I didn’t want to give her any more ammunition, so I went to the far side of the garden and started pulling weeds. After weeding my first row, I marvelled again at how fast plants grew. Gran’s vegetable garden was bigger than most people’s whole backyard, and Ivy and I didn’t meet in the middle until just before dinner. My legs and back ached, and I was filthy and sweaty from the gardening and the smithy. We’d avoided talking all afternoon. Ignoring each other had been easy with the width of the garden between us, but the closer she got, the harder I found it to ignore Ivy. We’d be stuck together for the summer. Gran had made that much clear. I decided one of us needed to take the high road and make peace.
