As the boys head back to the house, Rufus sees Wash coming in with a full load of charcoal. He shoves two rods into his died down fire and starts to map out the brand in his mind, muttering to himself what he knows better than to say to those boys.
“I’m making it but I’m damned if I put a leaf on it.”
Wash walks through the door asking him, what? Rufus tells him to get the bellows going. Wash dumps the charcoal in the bin all at once, making a great clatter and a cloud of soot. Rufus frowns at him but Wash keeps at it, asking what’s next? Rufus stays quiet.
As Wash stokes the fire with the bellows, Rufus uses the chalk from his pocket to draw an R on his anvil. Then he measures his line to see how much iron he’ll need to make the letter and where he’ll have room to weld the stem on. His chalk R glows white on the shiny dark anvil but Rufus lays a hammer down over it before Wash has a chance to see.
Sends him for more charcoal just to get him out of there, saying never mind the bin is already full, do what he said do. Wash doesn’t want to leave so he lingers until Rufus gets mad enough to straighten up.
“Tell you what, why don’t you take the week? Go work for Pompey on the old tobacco barn. See can he teach you to mind.”
Wash knows better than to slam the door behind him but he mutters to himself as he stomps off to find Pompey. Rufus watches him go before turning back to his work.
This R brand calls out Rufus’s name just like everything else he makes. There’s a liquid grace to the shapes he coaxes from his iron. Everybody’s work looks a little different. Some is taste and choosing but most is in the rise and fall of one man’s hammer, as individual as a fingerprint. No matter whether he’s making workaday hooks and hinges or fancier specialty items like fire screens or candlesticks, the way Rufus works his metal makes his pieces look like water moving and the boys can charge more for his work than any of the rest of them can charge for theirs.
Even this R is a river, hooking around to loop back on itself. And the leg of this R kicks up at its tip, looking like nothing so much as the foot on a leg running. Rufus does this part on purpose. That foot kicking up is his way of saying good luck, safe passage and God be with you.
Those who get Rufus’s R laid on their face can finger the scar and when they reach that foot at the end of their R, they’ll think about the next time. They’ll feel their own legs running hard through brush and swamp, carrying them right on out of there. The whole way.
Eli rides through the yard, calling for Rufus as he passes by his door. Asking has he got it done yet. Saying hurry up, we’re headed out.
Rufus walks out of his shop carrying his file in one hand and the new brand in the other. The letter is still cooling from orange so he holds the brand halfway down its shaft with a thick gritty rag so he won’t burn himself.
“Ain’t cleaned up good yet.”
“Don’t need to be perfect so long as we can read it. We got three to do over at Henderson’s. Said he might shoot the one who started it so we’ll do a trial run on him. See how it turns out.”
Rufus has already told them he has too much work to ride with them, even though it’s usually him who does the branding. He has a reputation for being quick and careful. But he’s staying here today so he carries the new brand over to where Eli sits on his horse, waiting for his brother. Rufus likes that the brand’s still hot as he hands it up to Eli, who has forgotten his gloves in his rush.
Eli yanks his horse around and spurs him forward, furious with Rufus for once again doing exactly what he told him to. No more, no less. His burned hand stings as he canters down the drive, carrying the brand like a crop.
Rufus does not want to think about the men soon to be branded, so he steps closer to his forge because it radiates the same kind of hot dry heat he remembers from home. He feels the yellowgold sun of his childhood pressing in on him, lying on his skin with a weight like touch.
At home, there was always some air to breathe. No matter how hot and hard and bright the sky pressed down, there was some shade to step inside. But here, it feels like the air has turned into a thick piece of meat you have to bite into to get some for yourself. As blazing as it got at home, as blindingly bright, Rufus never once wondered where his next breath was coming from. In this new world, that worry stays with him every single day of August and sometimes July.
And when it rains, the mud here is never soft and tender like skin. As a child, Rufus had loved the coming of the rainy season as much for a break in the long tension of brittle dryness as for the silky shiny mud, rising ticklish and slick between his toes, and the awakening of long buried frogs, salamanders and lilies.
Here, the wet sticky hot is all the time and not a relief from anything so Rufus moves closer to his forge. And when that dry heat starts to bake him, he falls right back into his past.
∞
A red dirt path curves down out of the mountains, widening into a road as it heads toward a string of villages. There is an altercation on this road. A woman standing there with her two boys. One a small eight and the other a tall twelve. She pulls both sons close against her belly, begging the catchermen, no not these. Please.
She tells them there’s a much bigger stronger man alone in the forest right now. She tells them about Rufus who was not called that then. She describes the sacred clearing where he works alone preparing for tomorrow’s iron smelt. Making offerings and saying prayers so the process will be fruitful. She describes him out there alone and vulnerable, delirious with the heat and the spirit. The men don’t understand and move closer.
She points to their guns and their knives, lifting and dropping her hand as if she is hammering the knife blade flat, then pats her chest as if it is she who made them. As soon as she does this, the men look at each other, running down the list of special orders in their minds. They know there is at least one for a blacksmith. Taken whole and unharmed for an old man named Thompson in North Carolina. For his boys.
As they turn away from her, she feels her heart hammer in her chest. She tells herself there are other smiths. Maybe she figures Rufus can be spared. And she has heard the missionaries talking about how smiths are sorcerers and sorcery is the work of the devil. With the way everything in her world has been turned upside down by these raids, maybe she has begun to think these men of God are right.
At least Rufus is much older and stronger than her boys. He has a better chance of surviving. This is what she tells herself as she hurries her boys home and inside.
The road is hot and sunny but deeper in the mountains there are pockets of cool where the trees have grown so large the ground under them never gets direct sun. These places stay green long into the dry season. Rufus likes to be with these old trees, feel them towering over him. As he prepares his offerings, bending to sweep the ground at the mouth of the furnace’s tall clay chimney, laying out braided grasses and vessels of palm wine, he has the sense something is watching him and it does not feel right. He keeps stopping to listen but does not hear anything.
When he gets to the point where he has to put his whole mind into his prayers, he calls up his spirits and they come to him. Swirling up through his feet and legs, running up his spine to spread across his shoulders like a mantle, shimmering warm at the crown of his head before pouring down his arms and out through his hands. He is in the middle of it all when the catchermen get so spooked by the sucking swirling feeling that they stand from their hiding places, circling him with guns aimed.
He is stunned. Secret sacred chants hang from his mouth like ribbons. No one is supposed to see or hear any of this. He feels betrayed. Why haven’t the spirits let him know? He knew it had been harder to call them up on this day but he had persisted. He had bent them to the strength of his will and they had come. They had come but they had come blind and deaf and they are useless to him now.
He pulls in a deep breath, as if he is trying to suck back inside himself all that these hiding men have just heard, even as he can tell by looking that they don�
��t speak his language. His chest expands with the effort and the air burns his lungs. Time is passing but Rufus cannot take hold of his mind to steer it. One slow step at a time, the circle closes in on him. It is as if he has become one of his beloved trees with roots branching down into the earth from the soles of his feet.
He and his friends had sat around the fire discussing this exact moment again and again. What they would do and how. They sat around their fire, shrouded in the blindness of their youth, determined that such a thing could never happen to them.
The men step closer. He knows if he runs, they might not shoot him in the hopes they can catch him unharmed later. He knows the woods better than they do. He still has time. He sees himself breaking and running, sliding like oil between the outstretched hands of the men. He even sees them turn to look after him empty handed and forlorn.
It is just as he watches himself slipping out of their sight when he feels their hands close on him. They are jubilant, yelling as they grab his arms, jerking his hands behind his back to tie them together. Rufus does not struggle. Something holds him still. They are as surprised as he is, manhandling him to the ground as if he were fighting, until the truth of his stillness seeps through their hands and arms to their heads.
They tell themselves that he must be as dense as he is big, nodding to one another while jerking him with the tying of their knots. But that picture of Rufus standing tall and strong, chanting in front of the furnace, swims in their minds, raising the hair on their arms even as he’s tied on the ground.
They pull him to standing and walk him in the direction of the coast. He can turn his head just enough to see the clearing behind him for the first few steps. Because Rufus is looking over his shoulder and walking downhill while he is being pushed and pulled, the tall clay chimney tilts at a crazy angle, falling down over and over again in great jerky flashes with each step.
How had they found the secret place? Why had he not run? Why had he let himself be marched down the mountain, past the compound of the woman with her two boys, past the edge of his own village? It’s shut up tight as an armadillo during this raid but still full of people hiding as if dead behind smooth clay walls, with the smallest children stuffed inside grain pots or buried underneath mounds of dried corn.
And even though they are hidden, these villagers turn their faces away as Rufus is led past them. They shut their eyes to him, thinking they are escaping, thinking maybe it will be all right because there are other blacksmiths to make their tools, circumcise their boys and do their magic. They hold tight to his family, insisting it would be madness to rush the raiders’ guns, saying it would only lose them many more.
Some soothe themselves by deciding maybe Rufus had been too strong after all. Too young to have so much confidence, too hardheaded to surrender fully to a life of working with the spirits. The ease with which Rufus went through his initiation had troubled some of the elders. They had wondered what would bring Rufus to his knees, give him the humility needed for a long and fruitful life.
His grandfather’s thin keening wail rises fluid and graceful into the hard white sky until someone finds him in the dark of his hiding place and claps a hand over his frail old mouth. The men marching Rufus hesitate but only for a moment, then they spend the next hour debating which animal kept calling like that, as if it were midnight in the middle of the day.
By dusk, his sacred bead has been cut from his neck to lie buried under the waves as he’s loaded onto the huge ship with others from all along the coast. The rumor that Rufus is a blacksmith has become just one story among many.
The captain stands short, thick and watchful. He’s almost as rough with his crew as with his cargo. They are white but they are poor and from nowhere with nothing and nobody. They work like the devil and die like flies. When Rufus sees the captain take some skin off the back of one crewman for hesitating, he knows to keep his head down.
He doesn’t know the word the crewmen keep using for him but he figures it out soon enough because they use it every time they catch him fingering metalwork, whether it’s the fittings on the boat or the chains holding him. He runs his fingers over the hammered metal, picturing which blow where, in what order and how many. Partly to distract himself and partly to feed the picture of himself he’s trying to hold on to in his mind. That picture of himself as a strong useful man with a life and a calling, plenty of chickens, tobacco and pumpkins brought to him in payment for his work.
He is careful to stop his mind before it gets to his wife and the new baby boy who finally came after years of waiting and prayers, before it gets to those catchermen rising up in the midst of his chants. He stops because his neck is still torn up from his last struggle. He was not trying to hurt himself or break free. Nothing is that clear. All he knows is that letting those particular pictures into his mind makes him feel like he’s dreaming a nightmare where the ground keeps disappearing from under him until he’s falling backwards toward some sort of unknown jaggedness and can’t keep himself from thrashing.
They set him apart from the others but he has no idea why. All he knows is he has never let himself be used by anybody except for the spirits and he won’t start now that he’s lost everything else. He clamps his mouth shut. His belly growls and his mouth waters but he refuses food. He does not know where his ancestors are or why they have forsaken him, but he will not let it be said that he turned his back on them by continuing to live even as he is being dragged away from them.
His grandfather always told him this world we live in is merely the marketplace we visit, while the other world where the ancestors live is home. This life we can touch with our fingertips is only the smallest part of the whole. Rufus feels himself small and pulled onto his grandfather’s bony lap. There is much more, the old man would say with longing and excitement in his clouded eyes.
During his own initiation, Rufus learned how right his grandfather had been. It was during those weeks of ritual when Rufus saw for himself how thin the skin is that divides this world from the next, and how easy it can be to move between the two. When he traveled to and through the spirit world, he saw, in strands of glowing light, his connections to all those living in this world, to all those not yet born and to all those dead but not gone. He saw each of us, along with every creature and tree, every stone and river, strung like beads throughout a web both delicate and durable, vast beyond imagining, stretching backward to the beginning of time and forward to its end.
This knowing has always freed Rufus from fear. Until now. He tries to tell himself this ship is only the smallest part of that bigger whole but the farther he is taken from what he knows, the less sure he becomes. It is not that he wants to die. It is not that simple. It is more that he wants to step back through the skin between the worlds before it’s too late.
After several weeks, Rufus’s bones rise beneath the surface of his no longer shiny skin, pulling its ashy grayness taut in the dim light. The captain orders Rufus brought to his cabin. Fifteen hundred dollars is a great deal of money and he is counting on it. Rufus appears in the narrow doorway, pushed from behind until he stumbles and almost falls. Deep shadows fill the hollows of his cheeks and collarbones. His thick muscles have thinned to wiry cords which cross his bony chest like ropes. The expression on his broad face is so inward as to seem blank. The biggest of the crewmen stands behind Rufus holding a chisel and a hammer.
“Can’t get his mouth open.”
“I don’t want you breaking any teeth. This one is my ticket.”
The captain surprises himself by dismissing the burly crewman without having him chain Rufus to the hook in the wall of his cabin. As he ushers the crewman out and shuts the door behind him, he mutters you’re starting to look like a shipwreck yourself as he pulls back a chair for Rufus across the table from his own.
Rufus stares at the smooth golden seat of the wooden chair then back at the captain. There is a chain running down his back from the collar around his neck. It circles his waist where his sh
ackled hands are clipped to it then continues to the shackles at his ankles. This chain rattles against the buttery wood as Rufus sits, shifting to the side to avoid resting on the chain. He holds himself erect as he scans the cabin then locks his eyes onto a jagged scratch on the wooden floor, determined to block out what he has just seen.
The cabin is small and dark but the flickering light licks the treasures brightly enough for Rufus to recognize them. Iron staffs topped by sacred ritual objects. Forged by smiths for use in ceremony. Then sold or bartered, or worse, given to this white man. In appreciation for his business.
Rufus saw the two birds before he managed to look away and they hover in his peripheral vision still. Flanking him. The undersides of their outstretched wings catch the light of the captain’s gas lanterns and Rufus feels the man watching him. He wonders how those birds can possibly help him now.
The captain tugs on a rope hanging from the wall. Soon there’s a knock at the door. Cook hurries in to set a steaming plate in front of the captain. He pulls a knife, fork and glass from pockets in his apron, setting them one by one on the far edge of the table from Rufus, refusing to look at him sitting there, naked and filthy despite the bucket of cold salt water the crewmen had thrown over him before bringing him here. Cook pours a slug of golden rum into the glass from a bottle on the captain’s shelf and leaves without asking if that is everything.
The meal is not fancy but the steam rising from it fills the small cabin with the warm round smell of potatoes and the salty bite of bacon fat. The candlelight catches the golden liquid in the glass, which tilts a little with the roll of the boat, and Rufus feels his mouth water.
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