George Mills (18 page)

“ ‘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.

“Have you ever seen a barn raising or any of those episodes of country charity where the feelings of the participants are not those of obligation or even duty so much as the sheer amplitude of the heart, its cheerful, generous, almost maritime displacements buoying cause and mission like stalled shipping? Or have you ever been to a surprise party, Dr. Kinsley? Or anniversary, or testimonial dinner? Have you risen to your feet with the others in the hall to give someone who doesn’t expect it a standing ovation? Then you will recognize the inclusive, almost religious good will of such moments. There’s something in it for you, too, though it may not be what you think. It isn’t the sense of a paid-up debt or the satisfaction that is said to come from good behavior. It isn’t anything peripheral or serendipitous or spin-off or sidebar or fallout at all. That barn you helped raise is forever after your barn too, just as the surprise is your surprise—‘Were you really surprised? Did you suspect anything? What did you think when you saw all those cars in the driveway? We’d have parked on the street but all the spots were taken’—and the ovation not just a declaration of your gratitude and love but an affirmation of your taste.

“What Uncle Joe said was repeated all over the state, given motion and impetus by word-of-mouth, some relayed, passed baton or aloft torch quality of marathon unimpedance. And not just Vermont but New Hampshire too, parts of Massachusetts and Maine and New York State and corners of Connecticut.

“It was how I heard—I don’t recall who told me, some friend of a friend who’d been traveling in New England that summer—all that far away in Michigan. It wasn’t astral projection. Joe hadn’t written. His last letter had been when Elizabeth died. She was my mother’s sister, my aunt. I suppose he believed that as a nephew I had a stake in that loss. But he never wrote about Susan or his sons. Perhaps he felt cousins aren’t relatives at all, only friends. Or maybe there’s just something too sour in the death of children. Tragedy, but tragedy spoiled, gone off like meat. It wasn’t anything one would want to write letters about.

“Anyway, the response of the farmers and sportsmen was incredible. It was as if no one in Vermont could mend tack or shoe a horse except my uncle. They brought him their hobbled animals as if they were making a pilgrimage, some long, lame march to a Green Mountain Lourdes. They went out of their way to come to him and, since my uncle had expressed the wish to work alone and no longer be for them that cracker-barrel or wood or potbelly stove or general store philosopher that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, they simply turned their beasts over to him, disengaging the animals from the wagons they pulled as if they not only had come to a sort of hospital but were brought there in a sort of ambulance which they, the lame horses, had had to pull themselves, and then went off to drink or actually register for the night at the local inn. So it cost them money and time too, though possibly they didn’t see it that way, still riding the wave of that conjoined magnanimity and effluent participatory chivalry which is not only the inspiration for surprise parties but the only reason you can get people to come to them in the first place.

“They had to knock now. Then my uncle would come out to them, take their animals and damaged tack, give them a receipt (which they did not always want later to surrender, the slip of paper being the stub, the souvenir of their attendance), and lead their property back into the blacksmith shop.

“I wrote Joe when I heard what had happened and, when he didn’t answer, I wrote again. I wrote a third time, a stolid, solemn letter of patient unput-out condolence. I asked if he wanted to come to Michigan for a while. He didn’t answer.

“I would have gone to him in Vermont. In my last letter I had suggested as much, proposing it as an alternative should he not wish to make the trip to Michigan. So you see, Dr. Kinsley, there was no astral trigger finger, no metempsychotic quick-draw pyrotechnics. I have, as I’ve said, been an adept for more than five years. But I gave up joy-riding long ago. The occult airs are too chill, its weathers too tempestuous. I was forced, you see. I loved my uncle, my dead cousins. To have lost almost all of them at once, as I had casually learned I had, was simply too much. Uncle Joe wouldn’t answer his mail. Perhaps he was holed up in his grief. Perhaps he needed me. Perhaps I needed him.

“I tried to enter his dreams. He had no dreams. He slept like someone napping. I don’t mean fitfully; I don’t mean lightly; maybe I don’t even mean uncomfortably, but with just that hibernant, abeyant doze one sees on the faces of sleepers in railway carriages or in the awry angled heads of passed-out drunks. My uncle could have been an uncle in parlors after family feasts, or paralyzed, all his features—eyes, mouth, nose, forehead, cheeks, chin—in some leaden, unresisting mandragoran acedia, even his bones in coma, not piled so much as stashed unarchitecturally as firewood. Quite simply there was no one home, and his face had about it some lifeless, awful quality of nonuse, like clothes, say, in the closets of the dead.

“I entered his head through his nostrils, thinking my rubbery passage there might act like some chemical reagent, but I know dreamless sleep when I see it. He was as nerveless there as toenail, his body lulled as hair.