Baltimore's Mansion

by Wayne Johnston

  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 lin
e 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.

  His father says he will have to go to St. John’s to get a new anvil.

  “First thing tomorrow,” Nan says, but his father shakes his head. The men will come as usual with their horses, and to him it is unthinkable to turn them all away. He does not say it, but they know he cannot stand the thought of the forge without an anvil, does not want it so one second longer than it has to be.

  “You’re not going down the Shore in the darkness by yourself,” Nan says.

  “Gordon can take the punt out with Uncle Will in the morning,” his father says. “Art can come with me to keep me company.” He tells Gordon not to let the fire in the forge go out.

  “How old was that anvil?” he asks his father.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “It used to be my father’s. It’s the only one I’ve ever had.”

  “Fifty years?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.”

  They will have to travel the whole length of the Southern Shore, the forty miles of it from Ferryland to St. John’s and back again, by horse and cart. His father figures they will make it back to Ferryland by noon.

  It is still dark when they crest the Old Shore Road, and for the first time in his life, he sees the city of St. John’s. All he can really see are lights, twin lines of lights that trace out the shapes of streets, clusters that mark neighbourhoods as large as any settlement along the Shore. The bobbing lantern lights of ships keep time with their reflections in the harbour. It makes him think of the stars as they look from his father’s boat when the wind is up but the sky is clear. How could anyone bound for shore find among so many lights one to guide him safely home?

  As they head down Kilbride hill, he smells the city. He is familiar with the smells of smoke and unbarked wood and salt fish, but mixed in with them are smells his father tells him come from breweries and tanneries and places where rope is made from hemp and rolled out on spools the size of wagon wheels.

  When the sun comes up, so much smoke hangs in the air above St. John’s that he thinks there must have been a forest fire. It hangs like a pall of morning fog between the hills that flank the harbour.

  They follow the Waterford River into town. His father has not been to St. John’s often enough to be able to hide how much he is intimidated by it. Their brown mare, Gail, who has made the trip just twice before, tosses her head and veers to one side each time she meets a car.

  Only two cars that he knows of have ever passed through Ferryland, but here they share the street with cabriolets and buggies and men high in the saddle on shiny, sleek black horses and children riding bareback ponies.

  He gapes in disbelief at the size of St. John’s. His father told him it held forty thousand people, but the number is nothing next to what he sees — the cobblestone stretch of Water Street, the country’s one paved road, and on it swarms of people not dressed for work as he understands the word, going in and out of what he imagines must be stores, though they look nothing like the store back home. The sheer number and size of the tall ships in the harbour strikes him dumb. He gawks at the steamers with their towering smokestacks, the barges piled high with wood and coal, the houses joined together in rows like trains without even token breaks between the cars.

  Their mode of dress makes every other man look like a merchant or a minister of some kind. They wear bowler hats, long coats and vests and gleaming boots but pick their way through puddles as if their feet are bare. Women, for no reason he can think of since the sky is clear, walk about beneath umbrellas. The only umbrellas he has seen before are the ones the nuns use on rainy days, going back and forth between the convent and the church. Water Street is busier than the road below the Gaze after Sunday Mass, and it gets busier as the day goes on. How is it that with so many rushing to and from he never sees the same person twice?

  He waits for his father outside the gates of the foundries, stares at the streams of men who come and go, waits for his father to appear, holding Gail by the bridle because he knows that as soon as she sees him she will kick up her forelegs and might break her harness. It is in part his nervousness that makes her restless. Every so often he feeds her the stalk of a carrot or turnip. To thank him she butts him with her head.

  T
hey go from foundry to foundry in search of an anvil.

  He doesn’t know what his father is looking for in an anvil, though his father assures him that no two anvils are alike. He watches from a distance as his father, who has brought a hammer, strikes several dozen anvils experimentally, almost diagnostically, searching for one that will make the hammer rebound to his satisfaction and return the force of the blow into his body in a way that feels indefinably right.

  Each time he tests an anvil, a man stands beside him, watching. Once, when his father is done, he and the man confer, the man looking at his father, his father at the anvil until at last he shakes his head and walks away.

  “What was wrong with that one?” he asks.

  “I’ll come back for it unless I find a better one,” his father says.

  Finally his father emerges from a foundry to announce that he has chosen his anvil. Three men wheel it on a trolley to the gate while his father walks beside it.

  He thought he would get to see up close what a new anvil looked like, but this one is far from new. It looks much older than his father’s. The saddle has begun to rust. It must be years since it was last struck with a hammer. His father scours out the swage fitting and the clamp holes with a file until water poured in one end comes out the other.

  “There. There’s nothing wrong with that,” his father says. “I’ll burn off that rust when we get home.”

  After several men help him load it onto the cart, they set out for Ferryland, the canvas-covered anvil like a catafalque, Gail plodding with what looks like funereal restraint, though they know she is going as fast as she can. He is hungry and wonders if he should ask his father if they can stop somewhere to get a loaf of bread. For the first time he wonders how much the anvil set them back.

  The short winter day is over, and it is getting dark again when they leave the city limits and reach the Old Shore Road. The number of cars and trucks and carriages and buggies on the gravel road grows fewer the farther up the Shore they go. At a certain point, once they have passed through Kilbride, the Goulds, the road to Petty Harbour, his father drops the reins and lets Gail go at her own pace; she knows the way and needs no guidance unless the roads are bad.