“They went to the old man to tell them what had been decided. ‘Redford gets to stay, Father,’ Susan said.
“Joe looked at her, at his three sons, and nodded.
“ ‘It’s your decision,’ the blacksmith said, ‘but that’s just about how I’d have handicapped it.’
“Redford took his place at the smithy beside his father and the others, who did not move out after all but went out each day to follow their new pursuits—Ben at timbering, Oliver at farming, Susan in the chain factory—and returned each night for their meals and lodging and to listen to their father’s wonderful afterhours conversation and watch his grand game of checkers by the ancient anvil he used as a table in the snug smithy by the cooling but still warm forge.
“A strange thing happened. At least unusual, at least unexpected. It was as if the addition of Redford to the small business, instead of halving the work, somehow compounded it. Perhaps it was the sense that people had of dealing with the beginning of a dynasty, a House, or perhaps it was simply the practical Vermonter’s suspicion that Joe, by taking on additional help, was getting ready to expand, introduce intricate new refinements to the blacksmith trade. In any event, Doctor, they now came with their horses and broken equipment as never before. They came not only from all over the county but from the next county as well, and some from as far away as the Northeast Kingdom. To the old-timers, and to his new custom, too, Joe was as convivial as ever, as wise as ever, as reasonable, as much the, well, American, as he had ever been, the man most likely to break up a lynching, if you know what I mean.
“Only Redford had the feeling that his father was unhappy with the new arrangement. They never spoke of it, Redford never mentioned it to his brothers or sister—I have it from an astral projection to one of his dreams—yet as time passed Redford was more and more convinced that his dad found fault with his presence. He queried himself constantly, went over and over his behavior and performance to see how he had given offense. He could find nothing. He was tormented. Perhaps he would have preferred Oliver, he thought, perhaps Susan or Ben. He was tormented and his work suffered.
“A blacksmith must concentrate. His work is as dangerous as a surgeon’s. There must be steady-state attention, attention as focused as acetylene, as managed as meditation.
“He was stirring pig iron in the puddling furnace and did not read the gauges properly, mistaking the first 3 in 1,335 centigrade degrees for a 5. He was still 200 degrees below the melting point of iron but did not know this and could not understand the strange and sudden obdurance of the metal. He put on his almost opaque smoked glasses and long asbestos gloves and opened the door to the furnace to investigate. Behind smoked glasses iron ingots look like peeled, pale bananas, less bright than new rope. The brilliant red bed of heat in which they rest is dimmed the color of roofing tile.
“He was a blacksmith, used to heat, as at ease in Celsius as in spring, cozy in Fahrenheit, cold-blooded as fish or bird. Of course he didn’t feel the heat who testing himself as a child had plucked live cinders from the shingled iron with his fingers, moving the hot dross about under his hands like chessmen or checkers in a game. And he was distracted by his good-man-against-the-lynch-mob dad, that serene, knowing, grandfatherly man whom he of all the elder sons on earth was (not as a grandparent and not in fly-fisher affiliation or woods guide relation or even priest counselor one, and all this even if not in actual dotage—Redford himself would already be twenty-four years old on his next birthday—from a fellow getting on, an old-timer, part of whose virtue must have come from things got past, put by, some nolo contendere deal with greed and lust, but as a still in-there, live-and-kicking actual viable Pop) not done with yet, and who for as far ahead as Redford could see would never be done with him, who still had plenty to teach to someone who still had plenty to learn. And if his father’s new queer distance from his eldest boy had any cause at all, it had to lie with Redford, some mysterious, unmanly infraction yet to be decoded. No insubordination or defection or noncompliance, no sedition, putsch or blackleg treason——a breach, blemish, some piddling moral caesura visible only to his pa’s Indian vision.
“So he was distracted, he did not feel the heat. Behind the dark glasses the iron pigs, 200 degrees centigrade below the boil, looked dark as stones on a dull night. He reached forward into the furnace and lifted one out, the size and shape of a small book, bringing it close to his face to examine. His hands ignited like kindling. His head caught fire.
“Joe built the coffin himself. He dug the grave next to Elizabeth’s on the flank of Kingdom Mountain and eloquently spoke the psalms he did not even have to read. He delivered the eulogy.
“Susan took her brother’s place beside her father at the blacksmith shop. She worked as effortlessly as Redford but with better concentration. She was dead within the month. Tearing her hymen in the rough-and-tumble with her brothers, she had somehow ruptured something important in her womb. The hemorrhage had been slow, almost undetectable, the bleached red smear she saw on her toilet paper of no more significance than the trivial spotting after a period. The hemorrhage had been slow, something that happened almost without her, like air deflating from a football in a closet in the off-season. The bruises, green as olives on her belly, she put down to the punches she had traded with her brothers. Oliver’s would be darker, she thought. Ben’s would. It was not the heavy lifting which exacerbated the bleeding; it was the work which she did with the sledge at the anvil, shaking her blood down through the sluices and flumes of her body with each powerful blow of her arm. Finally it was as if she had too vigorously shaken ketchup from its bottle. ‘Perhaps,’ she mused again, when she saw the immense sticky bolus of blood at her feet, felt it in her shoes, between her toes, just before she died, ‘it’s virginity gives us the advantage. Perhaps all force is moral force.’
“Her father buried her as he had Redford, on the same green mountain, in a coffin exactly the dimensions of her eldest brother’s, reciting the same psalms and, word for word, the identical eulogy.
“Oliver came forward.
“ ‘No,’ the father said. ‘I know the sequence. Didn’t I handicap your decisions? Didn’t I have the morning line on it? Your boyhood ain’t finished, you said. Why should you do up the end of your life before you’ve done up its beginning? Ben will work with me.’
“So the unadvantaged (not disadvantaged, just only undistinguished by age or sex) Ben put by his axes and saws and cleared his cuffs and cleats and clothes of the wooden flammable chips, shavings and twigs, the residual timber that clung to him like dew, and reported to his father at the forge.
“ ‘Well, one thing,’ his father said, ‘now you’ve got your priority, too.’
“ ‘Sure,’ Ben said.
“ ‘Work the bellows while I start this fire.’
“ ‘Sure,’ Ben said.
“ ‘Just remember what I told you. Squeeze it like you would an accordion. Easy. Easy. Try to imagine you’re playing a waltz. It ain’t no march, it ain’t any square dance.’
“ ‘Sure.’
“ ‘Still too fast,’ the father said. ‘What we want is to give this fire a shove in the right direction. We ain’t looking to blow it out the other end of the forge.’
“ ‘Sure,’ Ben said.
“ ‘Ayuh. That’s it. That’s it. See how the color is evenly distributed? Just like leaves turning up on Kingdom Mountain.’
“ ‘Sure,’ Ben said. ‘Father?’
“ ‘You can put that down now. Why don’t you just lay out my tools? I’ll be needing my peen and maul. You can hand me the tamp and my small stemmer.’
“ ‘Sure. Father?’
“ ‘Fetch my spalling hammer too, why don’t you? That special one with the claw head. What?’
“ ‘It’s about my eulogy.’
“ ‘I fashioned the claw on this myself. Don’t know why someone didn’t think to do it earlier. Seems a simple enough adaptation. Stand back for a minute. I need some elbow room to swin
g this thing. What about it?’
“ ‘I don’t mind about the psalms. Anyone would be pleased with those psalms. They’re good psalms.’
“ ‘They’re stately psalms.’
“ ‘Sure,’ Ben said. ‘It’s the eulogy. Seeing as how I was neither eldest son nor youngest, nor even a daughter like Susan, seeing as how I was always sort of lost in there—I ain’t saying misplaced, I ain’t saying forgotten or even mislaid, though mislaid gives some of my sense of it—seeing as how I was just kind of ganged up on by accidental circumstance, I was wondering if you couldn’t sort of distinguish me a little in the eulogy. All you’d really have to do is mention what I just said.’
“His father didn’t answer him. They got through the day, Joe doing the close work, Ben relegated to helper, but a helper, he knew, of little more urgency and use to the blacksmith than the merest customer who might, the smith’s mouth full of nails and his hands busy with tongs and sledge, almost casually tie up the back of his leather apron if it came undone. Joe referred to what his son had said only once. It was after they had finished for the day. He was banking the fires. ‘Don’t think about your eulogy,’ he said.
“ ‘You don’t believe anything’s going to happen?’ Ben asked.
“ ‘Don’t think about your eulogy,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a towering sin for a man to second-guess what folks are going to say about him when he’s gone. Don’t think about your eulogy.’
“But it was all he could think about, all his father gave him the chance to think about. Coddled as he was in the dangerous shop, protected by his dad from any work which could result in a fatal mistake, buffered even from the friendly banter of the customers and idle men who came to watch the blacksmith at his interesting work or hear him talk—‘Stand well back, Ben,’ the smithy warned, ‘these fools are knee slappers and it’s close quarters here. Just a sudden gesture of comradely affection or approval could send something irrevocable flying or shy the horses and bring us down’—he could think of nothing else.
“He was not distracted. Kept at a safe distance from the furnace so that he never had a chance to become acclimated to it, he could feel the heat. Having no reason ever to put on the dark smoked glasses, he saw everything clearly in its natural light.
“He believed what his father said, what the best man he had ever known had told him. He knew it was a towering sin always to be thinking about what the man would say of him in his eulogy. He knew he was wrong, deeply wrong, wrong to the bone, that at last he had the justice and fair play he had begged for when he’d asked his father to allow him to stay and to send his brothers and sister off. He knew he’d always had it and he was ashamed of himself.
“So he was not distracted. He felt the heat. He saw everything in the shop in fine detail.
“He remembered the precise degree of temperature when iron smelted. He could estimate almost as precisely the heat in the shop twenty feet from the fired forge, fifteen feet, ten, five, a few inches. When he opened its door that night after his father and Oliver had gone to bed and put his head inside it, he could make out for an instant the exact color values of the fulgurant ingots and could detect, flaring down from true against the corona of the iron soup, the just darker flecks of slag and carbon like the specks of some stone seasoning.
“Uncle Joe buried Ben alongside Elizabeth, Redford and Susan, his coffin, though Ben was a few inches taller than the others, the same size theirs had been. He spoke the same stately psalms and offered a eulogy which, though richly delivered, did not vary from the earlier ones by so much as a comma.
“ ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he told Oliver.
“ ‘Hell,’ said Oliver, ‘we got a tradition. We’re on a roll. You don’t just walk away from a tradition like you’d move out of the kitchen once the dishes are done.’
“ ‘Don’t say hell,’ his father said.
“ ‘And I’m twenty now,’ Oliver said. ‘I got ten months till I’m twenty-one. I figure I got at least that much time to get so expert in the trade that by the time I reach my majority and circumstances swarm me I might even be of some use to you.’
“He was wrong though. Not about his ability to learn, though he was in fact already expert and of great use to his father. He was the one who had hired out, who had driven the disk harrows and tractors and balers, who had handled the plows and cultivators, who was as familiar with the machinery and wagons of agriculture as any cowboy with his mount or musician with the pegs and valves of his instruments. He knew their tensions and faults, could guess from a funny sound in the field just which part had busted off, and was so familiar with their shapes and resistances that he could estimate to within a foot the direction and angle of their roll. What he brought to the business was a knowledge of broken pieces, shard, some synecdochic, jigsaw sense of the whole. ‘Here,’ he’d say, ‘let me do that,’ when some farmer helplessly held out the ruined rude pinnings and copulas, the pegs, dowels, brads, and hasps of his sad, collapsed one-horse-shay equipment.
“ ‘He’s like a jeweler,’ they said. It was true.
“Oliver halved the time that would ordinarily have been given over to fashioning new pieces from scratch, and the business, always steady, began suddenly to flourish.
“ ‘Are you pleased?’ he asked his father one day.
“ ‘I’ll work with the animals and run off the big shapes I’m familiar with,’ Joe said. ‘You do the Swiss watches.’
“He set up a comer of the shop for his son and now the boy was screened from his father and all the activity by the large anvil as ever Ben had been. Few cared to watch him work and, when sometimes people did drift over, they could see very little of what he was doing—his work was too meticulous, it did not lend itself to raillery—and soon moved back to where the grander, more dramatic activity was going on at Joe’s end.
“Oliver listened with his back to them while he worked, much as he had heard the sudden pings and small crashes of the brittle machinery in the fields, hearing everything only after it was already behind him but making his adjustments for deflection and pitch and yaw by the sound of the voice, guessing not only the speaker but the one addressed and listening, too, for the rhythmic, sedative slaps of his father’s hammer on the steel anvil.
“What happened was this:
“Their voices were suddenly lowered. He was fusing a hitch, one he had never seen before but like a delicate ampersand or the treble clef on sheet music.
“ ‘…got what he wanted,’ he heard. ‘…did take…their deaths.’
“ ‘Hush,’ he heard, and a low laugh. And his father’s hammer, the loud crack of steel on steel undiminished, if anything quickened, lending a kind of fillip of assent like a rim shot under a joke.
“He grabbed the sharp, short-handled cooper’s adz he had just set down on his workbench next to his blacksmith’s chisel and rushed from his place to the burly farmer who stood beside his father at the anvil. ‘You son of a bitch!’ he screamed, and raised the tool high above his head.
“ ‘Don’t say son of a bitch,’ his father said without turning.
“The astonished farmer barely had time to step aside. Oliver was already into his downstroke when he stumbled, the momentum of his tremendous blow pulling him forward and causing his head to fall upon the center of the anvil just as his calm, phlegmatic father, that masterful pipe smoker of a man who did not join their gossip but only counseled and advised, was delivering the last packed smash that would put the arch of the horseshoe exactly right.
“They hadn’t even been talking about him. It was a joke about a necrophile. Farmers always lowered their voices when they told smoking car stories, even when women weren’t around. His father supposed it was the way decent men cheated on their wives.
“The burly farmer, who had stepped aside instinctively, tried to apologize, his eyes still wet with laughter from the good story he’d told, but Joe already understood.
“ ‘He wasn’t quite twenty-one yet,’ he
said. ‘Ayuh. Kids go off half-cocked sometimes.’
“Over the last casket he would ever have to build, the blacksmith said the psalms one last time. He didn’t change the eulogy because it was a father’s duty to treat his children equally, but he added a final statement for the cronies and customers who had turned out to hear him.
“ ‘Being a pa’s a terrible burden,’ he said. ‘Now maybe I can get some peace. I’ve learned from all this. Maybe I ain’t so good a blacksmith as I thought I was. I couldn’t do the delicate work good as my boy, though no one’s better with livestock than I am, I think. A man should stick to what he does best. If it’s small motor control, as it was with my Oliver, then he should stick a jeweler’s loupe in his eye, keep it there, and leave the heavy lifting to others. My son would be alive today if he hadn’t gone for the fences with that last big bulldozer cavalry charge.
“ ‘I’ll continue to honor your custom and do the best I can with your horses and tack, though after what’s happened I think I’d prefer to work by myself for a bit.’
“It was better than an ad. Indeed, it was an ad, almost a decree, nothing barker or ballyhoo about it or undifferentiated as the handbill stuck under your windshield wiper or circular shoved through the letter slot with your mail, but touching, sort of, and tremendously official and solemn and even final, like banns or the little notice of bankruptcy in the public press that the bankrupt has to pay for himself, something understated, even unspoken, but there anyway, like those sad little admissions of guilt and responsibility in the classifieds when there’s a divorce and the husband publicly disavows liability for his wife’s debts. You know the lawyer made him put it there, that it wouldn’t have occurred to him otherwise.
“So Joe’s announcement that he was best with livestock was no boast, the reverse rather, a kind of confession that he was good with little else, the Swiss movements of agricultural machinery or children either.
“Whatever, it had its effect, even if it was an effect my uncle could not have anticipated.
George Mills Page 14
