George Mills (17 page)

“That was when they quarreled. They did it where their father could not hear them, could not know of it. They had been told that they had to decide by themselves. Logic was useless. These were the claims of need and love. They soon saw that right had nothing to do with it, that each of their arguments was checked and canceled by the equally legitimate arguments of the others.

“ ‘We’ll never convince each other,’ Ben said. ‘We’ll have to fight it out.’

“Even Susan understood that Ben meant physically, that they would have to wrestle and punch for the right to stay with the wonderful old man. They were a blacksmith’s children, had the blacksmith bone and blacksmith muscle. Each had grown up by the forge, each taken his or her turn with the hammer at the anvil. Susan had played with iron as another child might play with sand. They had never quarreled, never fought. They had no idea who was strongest. They didn’t want to hurt each other and, at least in the beginning, each held back, withdrew not as an actual miser might actual money but like some old chivalrous soldier from the hoard of his strength and wile that measured, calibrated advantage he perceived as waste, brutality, overkill, unfair edge. Merely pushing and shoving at first, merely milling about in the baled field of their combat, not so much testing the power of his or her foes as on guard to arrest and counter any sudden thrust. They might have been confronting each other tentatively as so many strikers and scabs, police and demonstrators, so that Redford must have thought of Ben, ‘Why, he’s delicate,’ and Ben of Oliver with whatever of regret his nervousness permitted, ‘Poor frail Ollie, so attenuated finally in those work clothes. He
should
hire out, the outdoors will do him good,’ and Susan of herself, remembering the anvil she had once actually lifted off the ground just to see if she could do it, ‘Perhaps women are stronger than men, perhaps it’s virginity which gives us the advantage, perhaps all force is moral force.’

“They feinted with each other for half an hour until it must have seemed even to themselves like some badly managed charade, even to country people who had never seen an actual prize fight in an actual ring, whose work was with the seasons, who levered Nature and Nature’s crops, more a shy and nebulous routine of courtship, or the obscure, oblique forms preparatory to hard bargaining and doing business, than anything they were really there for.

“ ‘I’ve been fooling with you,’ Susan admitted suddenly, and knocked Redford down with what she did not even know was an uppercut. Ben jumped on her back and tried to ride her to the ground but Oliver grabbed him from behind and pulled him off.

“The sister and brothers were startled by what had happened, amazed and ashamed by the sudden change that had come over them. Mutual protectors, they were mutual protectors still, but furious now, each rushing to the defense of the other, calculating punishment, doing the meticulous equations of violence and charging against the perpetrator the exact measure of the blow that had been struck. Susan, who had knocked Redford down with an uppercut, was knocked down by an uppercut by Ben. Oliver, who had pulled Ben’s head back while Susan carried him across the field, was himself grabbed about the neck by Redford and thrown to the ground. Susan leaped at Redford to avenge Oliver. They struggled this way for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

“ ‘What we got here ain’t no fight,’ Ben managed breathlessly. ‘What we got here is some antifight.’ It was so. All could see it was so.

“ ‘We got to go all out, I guess,’ Oliver said, ‘or we’ll never fix who gets to stay with Pa.’

“Possibly it was Oliver’s logic. More likely it was the invocation of their dear father that brought them round. In either event, there was a battle royal, a free-for-all which bore about as much relation to the first fifteen minutes of their conflict as the last quarter of a football game does to the pregame ceremonies——the marching bands and prancing mascots and flash cards and all the simple pictographs of loyalty.

“In another twenty minutes it was over. Susan almost won. Their father had said that biology made no difference. To him, of course, it didn’t, but her daughter’s—you could have said woman’s—status and distancing had loaned her a strength and fierceness that was unavailable to the boys. They were fighting for the right to stay with their father. She was fighting for the right to remain with her father and also—if this isn’t misunderstood—with a man. But it wasn’t enough. She beat two of the brothers but lost out to the third.

“Redford won the fight, though they still didn’t know who was the strongest. That was beside the point. Their father had said that years made no precedent in love and for that love-rounded man they didn’t, wouldn’t, but Redford was the oldest, had known him the longest, had one or two years more tenure in love, that much more priority and seniority and simple brutal rank with which and for which to fight.

“So it seemed that logic and right had decided it after all, that strength flowed to the one who had the most to lose. Redford won, Susan placed, Oliver, whose boyhood wasn’t finished, showed, and Ben, undistinguished by placement or sex, came in dead last.

“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 swing 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.