Baltimore's Mansion (3 page)

The heart punch had been Charlie's favourite. Most of his work had a little heart on it somewhere. Why he favoured the heart my father didn't know, but he showed me horseshoes bearing Charlie's trademark heart and on the other side his initials.

Once I pressed the tip of the heart punch into the palm of my hand, pressed it for so long that the shape of the heart was imprinted there. “Look what I did with the heart punch, Dad,” I said, holding out my hand for him to see.

“My father died of a heart attack,” my father said. It was the kind of offhand revelation he often made, telling children things that other grown-ups never would. “Nan found him. Right here in the forge.” He pointed at a spot on the floor beneath the window. “Right there.”

That day, on the drive back from Ferryland, I kept my hand hidden from everyone. When we got home, the print of the heart was still there. I rubbed the palm of my hand with
my thumb, trying to erase the heart, but though I made my whole palm red, the heart was even redder and stood out just as clearly as before. When I went to bed, I kept my hand beneath the blankets, where I couldn't see it, but my palm tingled and I lay awake, picturing the heart, reliving the moment when I held it out for him to see. The heart punch. I was a long time getting to sleep, but I did, and when I woke up in the morning the heart was almost gone.

I
N THE MORNING
, when he looks out the window, the horses are lined up on the hill as always. Over breakfast, his father grumbles that the line is especially long. He will spend the first half of the day fishing, the other half making shoes and shoeing horses without a break. The day will not end for him until long after dark. He will pass the horses on his way down to the wharf where his punt is moored, and for hours while he fishes he will think of them waiting for him on the hill back home.

Men hitch their horses to the rail that runs the length of the hill, from the road past the house, then up to the forge. They go about their day's work, coming back later in the evening to claim their horses, which are now tied to the rail for finished horses on the far side of the road.

The horses and ponies stand side by side on the hill in the gloom of early morning, the zodiacal light of a sun soon to rise showing faintly in the east. The stunted Newfoundland ponies with their disproportionately large heads and overgrown blond manes move their heads from side to side, butt the larger horses out of the way so they can get their share of the hay his father spreads out on the snow. Plumes of steam issue from the
noses of the animals, snorts of steam up and down the line. And steam likewise rises from the droppings they leave behind them on the path. There is so much steam it seems to be coming from the earth itself. There is a steaming trough worn in the snow by horse piss and manure, a yellow stream bed along which, before it has a chance to freeze, discoloured water flows and empties out across the road below, then farther down the hill into the Pool.

There are hundreds of horses in Ferryland, and he knows all of them by name. The wind is calm. Smoke from the chimneys and steam from the horses rise straight up in perfect columns as though the town is quiet in the aftermath of some conflagration.

He does not have to fish today. Tomorrow, but not today. On his way down to the beach, his father does not look at the horses he will have to shoe when his fishing day is done. Gordon walks behind him. After Gordon helps land the morning catch, he will go to school and be strapped for being late. His hands are so callused from hauling nets they will barely feel the blows, but to fool the nun who otherwise might find some new way of inflicting punishment he will tuck his hands in his armpits. He will grin at the other boys when she turns to face the blackboard.

Gordon tells him he should have better sense than to get up so early when he doesn't have to.

He goes up and down the line and talks to the horses, pats their necks and rubs their noses with the flat palm of his hand and feeds them kitchen scraps that he smuggled out while his mother wasn't looking, or pretended that she wasn't, for he thinks she knows he feeds the horses.

He has a special fondness for the ones who are not well cared for by their owners, the unkempt skittish ones who are little more than skin and bones and whose visits to the forge are brief respites from mistreatment or neglect. He stands with them for as much time as he can spare, for as long as he can stand the cold. He knows that when he comes home after school, the horses he is talking to will still be there, tied to the other rail, their flanks white with snow, eyelashes and nose whiskers rimed with frost.

If a horse has not been picked up by evening, his father will ask him to lead it home, for which he will receive some token of reward.

He thinks of all the horses as his father's horses. Everywhere in Ferryland he sees the prints of his father's horseshoes, in the snow, in the gravel, in the mud, in the sand on the beach below the rocks when the tide is out. Prints that bear the shapes of hearts and the initials of his father's name.

He discovered just last week that there was another blacksmith in the world, a man from a place farther south along the shore called Cappahayden whose forge they passed above on the abandoned railway line while they searched for pieces of iron for his father's rough stockpile. It looked so much like Johnston's forge he thought theirs must somehow have been moved.

As if to make up for not telling him about this second forge, his father was scornful of this other blacksmith's work.

Now he has to settle for believing that his father, though not the only blacksmith in the world, is by far the best. But what it was like to believe that his father was not
a
blacksmith but
the
blacksmith, he is unable to remember.

In the past week he noticed for the first time, though they must have been there all along, hoof prints in the snow not shaped like his father's horseshoes. He knew that horses from elsewhere had passed through, and with his boots he scuffed out the prints, erased them with the branches of spruce trees, swept the snow free of the evidence of this other blacksmith, this other, rival forge and horses whose names he did not know.

After school, he looks out the window at his father in the forge, as he hammers away behind great plumes of steam on his iron anvil. The heat pours out through the open door, condenses on contact with the air.

He goes out to the forge to watch his father work. His father's right arm is much thicker than his left and out of all proportion to the rest of his body, as if it has been grafted on to him from some other man.

His father's hands move so fast his eyes can't keep up with them. The heated metal is only usable for seconds, so it has to be bent and hammered with conviction. A misshapened piece cannot be salvaged. If you are lucky, you can make something else from it, minimize your loss and make a nail from what should have been a spike.

Once the metal is removed from the furnace, his father works with the calm urgency of a surgeon bent on saving someone's life. In the interval between the removal of the bit from the furnace and its immersion in the vat, he is oblivious to all else and something takes over that cannot be taught, something that if not for looking so simple would not work.

He hefts the bits of molten metal with a long-handled
clamp that is itself one of his creations, as are all the clamps and pliers that he uses.

His father lets him douse a bit of molten metal in the water; a sudden hiss briefly brings the water to a boil, a cloud of steam rises from the vat, obscuring the instant when the light within goes out and the transformation from ember to object occurs.

He raises a horseshoe nail still steaming from the vat, dripping water. His father takes the clamp from him and holds out the nail for him to touch. “Go on,” he says, “It won't hurt.”

Even though he trusts his father, he is surprised that it doesn't hurt, surprised to find that what he dipped in the vat is no longer fire but something solid, fixed and purposeful. “What happens to it in the water?” he asks.

“It gets cold.”

“It doesn't just get cold,” he says, convinced that his father is keeping something from him.

“It gets cold and it hardens,” his father says, but he smiles as if he is harbouring some secret.

The last thing his father does is temper the nail in the briny slop of the slack tub. “Keeps it from getting rusty,” he says. Then he hangs it up to dry.

His favourite contraption is the bellows, which looks like a flattened accordion with handles attached. It is made of slats of wood overlaid with leather and has all sorts of valves and pipes, levers, balances and counterbalances.

The fire has begun to burn down. He watches as his father pauses from his work to pump the bellows up to full blast. He pedals with one foot and works the handles like he is cutting grass with a massive pair of shears. Red-faced and sweating, his
father concentrates on his efforts while the bellows makes its way through a series of hoots, honks and blares, climbs the musical scale until finally it begins to whistle and the fire in the forge flares up again.

From his pile of rough stock out back, his father makes runners for huge sleds used for hauling wood in the wintertime. He makes skates for his children and for all the children of Ferryland who cannot afford real skates, which is most of them. He welds and fits wagon tires, hub rings. But mostly he shoes horses.

He turns away from the fire to look at a photograph that his sister Freda took. The photograph hangs on the wall of the forge farthest from the fire. In it, their father stands outside the forge, his hands on his hips. Grimy-faced and smiling, his neck-to-foot apron making him seem even shorter and stockier than he is, he looks almost elfin, an assistant fresh from the heat and turmoil of creation, soon to cheerfully resume his task, as if all the world's implements originate from that little shack behind him. Beneath the photograph, there is a little sign that Freda made, which reads “Ferryland's Hephaestus.” His father was greatly taken by it when she explained that Hephaestus was the god of the forge, the guardian of fire who made the armour of all the other gods, Zeus's thunderbolts, Achilles' shield, Diana's arrows and Europa's golden basket.

When she went away to normal school two years ago to become a teacher, Freda gave their father a book called
A History of Newfoundland
by Judge D. W. Prowse. In that book there is a letter written to Lord Baltimore by a man named Edward Wynne, the overseer of the colony at Ferryland. Dated July 28, 1622, it informs Lord Baltimore that “the Forge hath been finished this five weekes.” Counting back five weeks from this
date, his father concluded that the first forge in Ferryland was completed on the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1622, the 125th anniversary of Cabot's landing at Cape Bonavista, and the day, in 1905, of the sighting of the Virgin Berg. His father did not read all of Prowse's history. Freda had underlined that sentence for him and put an asterisk beside it. “The Forge hath been finished this five weekes.” His father considers himself to be one of a long line of blacksmiths, descended if not by blood then by trade from the unnamed smith who worked the forge in 1622.

It is Freda who talks about “the Johnston blacksmiths,” as if that were their hyphenated last name, the Johnston-Blacksmiths, as if she were recounting the history of a lost line of the Johnstons that had petered out before their time. She says there have been Johnston blacksmiths in Ferryland at least since James Johnston set up shop in 1848.

In Ferryland, his father is as essential to the ceremony of matrimony as the priest. It is standard to include a blacksmith on a wedding guest list and to invite him to make a toast to the couple. It is believed he will bring good luck to the bride and groom, “forging” their union forever.

His parents have gone to every Catholic wedding in Ferryland for the past thirty years. They appear in wedding party photographs all over Ferryland. He once went into a house for the first time and was startled to see a picture of his parents on the wall above the mantelpiece.

His father didn't just learn to be a blacksmith from
his
father. He inherited, had drilled into him, a certain style of blacksmithing; he mimicked his father's choice and way of
wielding tools, saw, by watching him, what the period of a hammer stroke should be, how long a certain kind of metal should be heated. He has heard people say that they can see in his father's work a kind of ghost of his grandfather's.

His father's specialty is grapnel anchors — cod-jigger-shaped, chandelier-size six-fluted anchors that are used by small-boat fishermen like himself.

He goes outside. The forge in winter is a strange meeting place of warm and cold, water and ice. Snow is falling, and a thin layer of it has collected on the roof. It gets no deeper, for it is also melting constantly. From the eaves of the forge hang icicles that, like the snow, somehow freeze and melt at once. Streams of water run from them as if from spigots.

The roof of the forge steams like a hot spring. A trench of water has built up around the base of the forge, overflowed and trickled down the hill where it has turned to a lava-like fold of ice. All winter long, a new, overlapping fold has formed with each firing of the forge, so that now the runoff is ten feet deep, a massive, discoloured, ever-growing heap of ice that his mother calls the Melt. She warns him every day to stay away from it, but he ignores her.

The shingles on the roof of the forge are glued into place with pitch, which flavours the Melt. He goes down to the Melt and breaks off a chunk of pitch-flavoured ice, goes about sucking on it like a Popsicle. His mother blames his every winter illness on the Melt. She tells him the pitch will turn his insides black as coal, asks if he has ever heard of the expression “pitch-black,” tells him horses and other animals contribute to the water from which the Melt is formed, but he doesn't care. The Melt's sweet-tasting ice is free.

He goes back to the house and, hours later, looks out at the forge again. It is dark now and the little structure glows from within, the coal-fired flame of the furnace glinting blue and orange at the windows, the door closed despite the buildup of heat this causes. His father does not want the sound of his hammering to bother his neighbours, whose day is long since done.

When at last he comes in from the forge, his face is streaked with soot, rivers of black sweat run down his forearms and his neck. The undershirt he wears beneath his leather apron is drenched. His father removes his apron and, with all his strength, throws it against the wall.

“What's wrong?” Nan says.

A strange thing has happened, something his father says he has heard of but has never seen before. His anvil, at a single blow of his hammer, shattered into pieces like a block of black ice. It must have frozen to the core the night before and then thawed to the point that with one more blow of the hammer, it would crack.

He doesn't believe it. None of them do. They all run out to the forge to see if he is fooling them. He expects to find it in two or three pieces. But it seems more undone, more unmade than broken. It no longer looks like iron, let alone an anvil. It's as if a chunk of coal has been pulverized into a mound of gleaming ash.