Brimstone

by Daniel Foster

  The basket and the skillet hit the boardwalk, ringing like a heavy bell as Ella tried to cover her face. Mrs. Malvern’s slaps to her face and neck rang sharp off the shop fronts.

  “Please, please, I’m sorry,” Ella begged.

  Garret had no clue what was happening. It didn’t look like Ella did either. The shop door rattled as she fell against it. Garret took two involuntary steps towards the door. He stopped and bit his lip in fear. Oh sweet Christ now what do I do? Mrs. Malvern might as well be a queen. The entire town was built on her husband’s timber industry. The Malverns could destroy Garret’s livelihood, they could ruin his name and his family. It wasn’t an idle bluff, Garret had seen them do it before. His family could literally starve.

  “My Daphne,” Mrs. Malvern sobbed, still swinging. “She was all I had left of her!”

  Ella cried out again and begged through tears, “Please, I’m sorry, I don’t…”

  Another hard slap and a choking sound from Ella. Garret ran to the door and jerked it open, purposefully standing close so Ella would fall into him. With a cry of surprise from her, they both tumbled into a heap of tears and blacksmithing apron. Garret tried to look surprised too. Maybe he’d get lucky and Mrs. Malvern would think it was an accident. Maybe pigs would fly. But Mrs. Malvern didn’t seem to care. From his position on the ground, Garret stared at her in shock. The always-proper, always-refined, always-composed Mrs. Malvern was a disheveled, grieving wreck.

  She pointed her finger down at Ella, who was curled on Garret, crying, as if Mrs. Malvern was decreeing a death sentence. “My little Daphne! She was the only thing I had left. You’ve taken everything from me.”

  Garret noticed the grease on the napkin, the sorrow in Mrs. Malvern’s eyes. Finally the name “Daphne” rang a bell.

  Oh God. In addition to other absurdly expensive hobbies, Mrs. Malvern raised prize-winning French geese. Her favorite goose, an animal on which she doted and would allow no one else to feed or even touch, was named Daphne.

  Daphne had been a gift from Mrs. Malvern’s daughter Charity, three years before she died.

  Daphne was the last thing Charity had given her mother. Ella worked in Mrs. Malvern’s kitchen. And Mrs. Malvern had gotten up in the middle of a meal and flown from the house in her dressing gown.

  Oh Christ, Garret thought again, suddenly fearing for Ella’s safety. Please no.

  Mrs. Malvern was still standing, but her pointing hand fell to her side as her ranting crumbled. “She was the only thing I had left. The only thing,” Mrs. Malvern sobbed. “Charity…”

  At hearing her own daughter’s name, Mrs. Malvern blanched and cowered. She blinked and looked around at where she was and what she was wearing and what she was doing in the sight of all the slack-jawed, package-toting women on the boardwalk. She stumbled for her carriage, and after three abortive attempts, managed to climb it and partially hide inside. The servants threw themselves into the seat and cracked the reins. “Hiya, hiyah!”

  They rattled and banged their way down Main Street. The carriage looked more like a dog with its tail between its legs.

  * * *

  Garret was worn out. Bent double, he plied the pump handle again and again, letting the cold water sluice over the back of his head and neck. He was later than usual returning home because he’d worked on Molly’s birthday gift, then stopped by the church to measure the hinges on the vestibule doors. Fortunately, Bendetti was going to have a group of men from the church remove and reinstall the doors; Garret and his Pa had only to make the hinges. Thank God. The doors were eight feet tall and the inch deep carvings of the Garden of Eden barely scratched their thickness. Eve was quite a looker, though.

  Garret stood, dried his face, hands, arms, and torso off on his shirt before pulling it over his head again. He checked his shirt front. It was still clean enough to wear inside. His blacksmithing apron caught most of the dark crud which seemed to fill the corners of his life.

  I’m gonna use thicker stock and make the leaves at least three inches longer on the new hinges. Too much strain. Whoever had made the last hinges didn’t know what they were doing.

  Only when Garret started walking towards the house did he hear the yelling. Ma was on about something again, her blaming voice ringing loud out of their small Jenny Lind house. Garret’s heart started to sink, but he jerked it up into place again, set his jaw, and marched towards the house. Pa wouldn’t do anything, so as usual, this would be up to Garret.

  Garret had barely creaked the first step when the front door flew open and Sarn nearly ran over him. Garret hopped to the side, and his brother kept his head down, but Garret caught the hurt twisting his brother’s face. Garret glanced between the front door from which the angry screaming still issued, and his brother’s slumped shoulders, disappearing into the twilight towards the barn.

  After a moment of indecision and teeth-grinding, Garret went after Sarn. Garret and Sarn knew each other’s hiding places well. Ma and Pa didn’t know, and that’s how it would stay, but brothers knew.

  Garret entered the barn, walking quietly as if not wanting to startle a deer. The barn was dark, comfortingly so, and smelt of old hay, old horse, sweat, hard work, and rest. Garret didn’t glance at the hayloft ladder. Sarn often hid behind a certain stack of bales, but tonight he wouldn’t be up there.

  The barn was old enough that the exterior planks were crumbling at the bottom, leaving ragged holes big enough to crawl through in a couple places. In the far back corner of the barn, behind a pile of rusty iron junk, Sarn sat staring out through one of the holes. He didn’t move as Garret approached and sat beside him.

  Sarn stared blankly out across the field, his face wooden. His countenance wasn’t hard, just impassive to the point of looking inhuman. The tears on his cheeks, dull in the low light, betrayed him.

  Sarn acted impassive and unbreakable, but he felt everything deeply, more deeply than anyone else Garret knew. Sarn felt so deeply that he had to hide from the hurts his own family lavished on him. It made Garret want to scream. Instead he put an arm around Sarn’s thick shoulders and grabbed a handful of the boy’s hair, pulling him into something between a hug and a possessive clench.

  Sarn didn’t resist, and so they sat there for a while in the dark, horse-smelling, dirty barn.

  “Why does she do that, Brother?” Sarn whispered huskily.

  “I don’t know.” Garret had to bite his tongue not to say what he wanted to say about people who didn’t care about anyone but themselves, which wouldn’t have helped anything.

  “Pa says she’ll change if we give her time, but I don’t believe him anymore.” Sarn was so wrung out that he didn’t seem to know he was talking. The words sort of fell out of his mouth and splattered on the floor.

  Garret rubbed the back of his brother’s shoulder roughly with a hand.

  After a long time, Sarn said, “Don’t tell Ma you came out here. She’ll say we’re ganging up on her.”

  Garret swallowed a lump so he could talk. With a weak smile, he said, "Well, I guess I won’t tell Ma if you don’t tell Molly that you and I don’t really hate each other.”

  With Sarn’s head still tight against his shoulder, Garret felt the expulsion of Sarn’s breath: a withered, half laugh from his little brother. Garret ruffled Sarn’s hair. A strangled laugh was a pathetic excuse for happiness, but when it came to his brother, Garret would take what he could get.

  Three days before Molly’s birthday

  The following morning, Garret dragged himself to the shop. He’d spent quite a while in the barn with Sarn, neither of them saying anything because nothing needed to be said. He hadn’t let Sarn go back to the house until he’d seen his parent’s light move into their bedroom, and given them enough time to be sound asleep. The barn had grown cruelly cold by that point of night, but it almost felt colder inside the house when they both crept through the door and tiptoed to bed.

  So, the next morning, Garret was tired enough to make the two mile walk to
the shop seem like a thousand mile trek. Rough, narrow logging roads through the forest didn’t help. Of course he could have ridden in the wagon with his parents.

  Like hell.

  When Garret got to the shop, its plain wooden front warming in the first rays of dawn along with the other shops down Main Street, he found the door still locked. Pa and Ma had left before Garret and they’d been in the wagon, yet Garret had still beaten Pa to the shop.

  I don’t even want to know why, Garret thought dully as he unlocked the door.

  The hustle of Main Street was getting off to an early start, with the milkman cursing his recalcitrant old mule, Mrs. Jensen just opening up the doors of the textile shop, and Mr. Fix’s booming voice starting up a conversation with his first hair-cut client of the day.

  Inside the shop, Garret opened the two windows, just rectangles of boards hinged on one side, to let in a bit of light. He’d struck a precious match before he realized he hadn’t cleaned out the clinkers, the glassy lumps that formed in the coal bed. It took longer than it should have, and was more frustrating than it should have been, but eventually, Garret had a glowing fire wisping out between the coals, his leather apron around his neck, and the familiar weight of his favorite cross-peen hammer in his hand.

  His troubles began to quiet as he rummaged the workbench. Soon, the smithy rang with the single note song of Garret’s hammer and anvil, and the tension began to leave his shoulders. Blacksmithing was more than his bread and butter, it was his own heartbeat. It was warmth. It was strength. It was life. And life was beautiful, or at least, it had the right to be.

  Garret’s Pa never understood that. To Pa, iron was a product. A rudiment from which other simple things were made to accomplish simple tasks. Iron was a means to an end. To Garret, iron was alive. His Pa bent, folded, and pounded, pushing iron into the shape he needed. Garret worked more gently with it, and in turn, it worked with him. He had his grandfather to thank for that, and his grandmother, even though she didn’t pick up a hammer in her life. It brought a pang to his heart to think of them. Garret still missed them, even though they’d both been dead for years.

  For the next several hours, Garret performed his craft to the best of his ability, heating, cutting, hammering. He had pounded out the leaves and rolled the barrels for two of the vestibule hinges before he realized he’d started. He upset the ends of the bar stock for the pins, quenched everything, and had two working hinges in record time. His Pa was still nowhere to be seen.

  Garret was most of the way through the third hinge when he threw the project aside and started rummaging through the scrap shelves. There was plenty of paying work to do, but if Pa didn’t care, maybe Garret didn’t either.

  Pa wouldn’t be happy if he knew what Garret was going to do, but if Pa wanted a say, maybe he should show up. Garret needed to do something creative. Most of his work was mending broken tools, re-tiring wagon wheels, etc. But his soul started to shrivel up if he went more than a week without making something beautiful. At last, the small piece of scrap bar he wanted fell to hand. It was nickel. Garret had no idea where it had come from or what it was doing in the shop. He didn’t care either. He grabbed a similarly sized piece of scrap iron from the shelves.

  He laid the nickel on the edge of the forge, picked it up with a pair of flat-nose tongs, and shoved it deep into the coals, close to the edge. With another pair of tongs, he picked up the iron and pushed it into the center of the fire next to its soon-to-be mate. The waves of orange warmth rolled over him.

  A few minutes later, Garret pulled the pieces back out of the fire, both glowing the proper yellow heat. He took them to the anvil, brushed off the crusty fire scale in a shower of sparks, tossed a careless handful of flux on the flat surfaces, and began to pound them together, laminating them into a long, thin bimetallic blade blank. He folded them over and hammed them out. Hammer and fold, hammer and fold. Reheat. Brush. Hammer and fold. Hammer and fold. The wavy pattern of the metal layers began to appear in the blank.

  Pa showed up about an hour later. He was wearing an expression of extreme weariness. For a brief moment, Garret despised him for it. You could fix this any time you wanted to grow a pair, but instead, we’re still right here.

  Garret pulled the blade blank out of the coals, returned to his anvil, grabbed his wire brush and shucked the scale. Hammer and fold, hammer and fold. Garret’s blows were rising, the hammer now coming all the way to forehead level. The sure sign of uncontrolled work. Hammer and fold. Hammer and… damn it Pa. Dropping the hammer, Garret grabbed a pair of tongs, picked up the blade blank off the anvil and shoved it back into the coals.

  “Sarn was in the barn again last night,” Garret said over his shoulder, a little too sharply.

  His Pa said nothing for a minute, but came over and worked the bellows up and down, breathing more life into Garret’s fire.

  I can do it! Garret almost snapped, but bit his tongue. His Pa looked like he’d been beaten with a big stick, mentally anyway. It made Garret hurt, too. He pulled the iron and nickel back out of the fire and returned to his anvil.

  Pa was fiddling with something on the workbench, not yet really working. After Garret had hammered and folded a few more times, Pa finally started to strip the metal tire off of a wagon wheel.

  The door opened and in stepped Mr. Framer. He had a look on his face which Garret didn’t exactly follow, but didn’t like at all. It was guilty, conspiratorial, challenging and a few other things at the same time.

  “Mr. Framer,” Garret said politely, but guarded.

  At the mention of his name, Pa stiffened, and anger crossed his noble features, but was quickly washed away by sorrow. Garret tried to see it as hurt, but he could only see it as weakness. It was the same weakness he always saw in his Pa. It was the same weakness he saw in himself. He hated it. Hated it more than anything. Framer seemed to take confidence from it.

  So that was it, then. Garret’s temperature went through the roof as he eyed the man. Framer had always been overweight and self-centered, but suddenly Garret realized how ugly Mr. Framer was. Garret caught himself thinking how a dozen or so well-placed hammer blows would improve his looks.

  Pa busied himself behind the forge, but Garret saw the tears, and he tried not to hate his Pa for them, which made him feel like the most horrible person who had ever walked the earth.

  Say something! Garret screamed inside his head. Do something! Throw him out on his ass!

  “When is my axe going to be ready?” Framer asked, after looking between their two anvils and stepping towards Garret’s.

  Garret brought the hammer down hard enough to deform the blade blank. Since the cradle, his parents had put the fear of God into him over being rude to an adult, though Ma had done it mostly for her own reasons. It was ingrained so deeply that Garret’s hands shook from the stress when his anger mounted high enough to make him round on Pa.

  “Is he the newest one?” Garret flung the question into the smithy.

  No answer from Pa.

  “Is he?!”

  The forge hissed softly. No reply.

  Everybody’s just going to stand here and do nothing. He rounded on Framer. “Are you?” his voice rang sharp as the iron under his hammer. Framer drew himself up and looked down on Garret. It didn’t intimidate Garret, despite the man’s greater weight, but it did underline the hole Garret was undoubtedly digging.

  “Now look here boy, does your Pa want your nose in your customer’s business? What if that got around town?”

  “My mother, my business, Mr. Framer!”

  “Garret.” It was Pa. The word was soft, broken. Barely audible.

  Garret glared at Pa, who looked about to say something, before the sadness swept it away.

  “Things get around when a man—or a boy,” Framer emphasized that part. “Wants to gossip like an old maid.”

  “Get out!” Garret yelled, startling everyone, but no one more than himself. He pointed his hammer at Mr. Framer’s face, gripping the
handle so tightly that the muscle strands in his thin forearm stood out like a bundle of snakes.

  “Get the hell out of my shop! And take your axe with you!”

  After a stunned blink, and a moment of weighing his size against Garret’s rage, Framer went to the workbench to find his axe. His face was red with anger by the time he exited the shop. He shut the door behind himself.

  In a fit of temper, Garret flung his hammer across the shop, knocking a chunk of brick from the forge hood.

  “Garret,” his Pa reproved tiredly.

  “What?” Garret barked.

  Whenever his Ma would fly off the handle and fillet someone for nothing, Garret would try to intervene. Pa would cut his legs from under him with some placating intervention. Normally, it frustrated Garret until he couldn’t see straight, but now he wanted his Pa to do it. Garret stood there, glaring at his anvil, wanting Pa to come down on him for something, anything, even if it was stupid. Anything for his Pa to show some backbone.

  “What?” Garret barked again, not willing to let Pa go this time. “What!”

  His Pa kept his head down. “You need to be polite to our customers.”

  “I’m polite as fuck!” Garret yelled.

  Garret turned his back on his father, grabbed another hammer which wouldn’t really do well for the job and began pounding on the blade blank, which was no longer hot enough to work.

  “Twenty years ago, I swore to stay by her through thick and thin, Garret.”

  Garret’s anger was suddenly replaced with weariness.

  Pa inspected one of Garret’s hinges so he could duplicate it, and changed the subject. “Mrs. Calvert gave your Ma a ride back to the house so I could keep the wagon. I need to take Mr. Colson’s plough back to him.”

  “I’ll do it.” Garret said, tossing his hammer down and pulling his leather apron over his head.

  Pa made no objection. Everybody needed some space.

  * * *