The monks from the peninsula make their uniforms out of cloth from the drapery, the same cloth that is cut into the uniforms for the soldiers. Unlike the uniforms of the soldiers, the uniforms of the monks are not cut into shirts and trousers. Their uniforms are all one piece. A soldier would never wear a uniform that was all one piece. Soldiers need uniforms that are two pieces, shirts and trousers. Now that I know that the soldier is a monk, I do not have to obey his gesture. I can walk away. I hope that I was not seen obeying the monk's gesture. The wharves have emptied, but someone could be watching from an office window or from the high deck of a ship. As I turn to walk away from the monk, I notice he is wearing an iron talisman. The talisman looks familiar. I ask the monk about the talisman, but he shakes his head. He is a monk who does not speak. The monk rummages in his sack. He puts a jar of gooseberry jam in my hand. He holds out his hand. I put the jar back in his hand. The monk continues to hold out his hand with the jar balanced on his palm. Even though I look down at the mud, I can tell that the monk is looking at me.
I begin to walk away from the monk. From behind, I hear a high, thin sound. The sound is high enough to make a pain in my ear. I turn. The monk's arm is straight out, the jar balanced on his hand. The monk is screaming. He has not opened his mouth to scream, or he is screaming with his mouth open to a slit that is hidden by his beard. I go and take the jar from the monk. The monk screams louder. He lifts the empty hand to my face. His fingers are curled. I see the long cracked nails with dirt in the cracks. The nails come close to my mouth. The monk screams louder and louder. Someone will think I am abusing the monk. I put the last of my brother's money in the monk's hand. The monk closes his hand around the money. The scream stops. I can still feel air coming out of the monk. The monk is forcing air from his lungs with no sound. I back away. The monk does not move. He looks at me, with his eyes stretched open wide and his mouth hidden by his beard. He lowers his closed hand to his side.
I am so late that I run up the hill. The clanging from the forge is very loud. My brother is working hard. I go into our house. Nothing has moved. My brother did not break for lunch. Two chairs are pushed out from the table. Our father's ledgers are piled at one end of the table. There are two dishes on the table. There is a fork on each dish. I swat the flies from the dishes. I unwrap the meat. I fry strips of meat. I slide the bread from its paper bag. The crust of the bread has grayed with ink from the newspaper. I fry the bread in the grease from the meat. I put the meat and the bread on the dishes. I put most of the meat and bread on my brother's dish. Before I take the dishes to the forge, I remember to take the knife with the broken blade from the bag. I do not want my brother's help repairing the knife. I should be able to repair the knife easily. I hide the knife in my bed between the bed mat and the frame. I realize I have already begun to refer to the knife as the “champion's knife.” When I repair the knife I will be the champion of the wharves.
7
My brother is too hungry to ask questions about what I did all day in town. He eats standing up at the anvil. I eat standing at the double doors. I have no difficulty emptying my dish, even though I ate the loaf of bread earlier in the afternoon. I must be growing. I look out at the bay. The sun is low over the bay. The air over the bay contains the highest quantity of salts. My brother told me the air over the bay is so thick with salts the salts cause optical illusions. This is why the sun appears so large over the bay. It is magnified by the prisms of the salts. My brother is wrong. The sun is very large, far larger than it appears over the bay. The sun is larger than the world. Salts in the air must shrink the image of the sun. This is why we see the sun as a disc instead of a burning plane that fills the sky. My brother tries to repeat what our father told him. For the first time I am hearing our father's stories. It must have been different to hear the stories from our father. Our father was never wrong. Something happens to our father's stories when my brother repeats them. They are changed. My brother believes what he repeats. He does not realize there is a difference between the stories he repeats and our father's stories. There must be a difference.
I look out at the bay. The whole sky is bright. The sun is a disc, low and dull in the sky. The brightness of the sky does not come from the disc. The sky and the disc are illusions caused by the salts in the air. Behind them is the burning plane. I can almost see it. I have to open my eyes wide and look toward the outside corner of each eye. Then I can almost see it. No one taught me this skill. I taught myself. I am the only person in the town who can see through the sky. If the doctor ran tests on me in his office, he might discover the physiological basis of this skill. His machines might express the physiological basis of this skill graphically, making finely inked lines. Instead of describing my skill, I could show people a printout from the doctor. Everyone would admire the beautiful waveforms on the printout, waveforms emitted by my brain and inked by the doctor's machines.
My brother comes to make sure I have emptied my dish. I have emptied my dish. It is time to work. My brother takes a leather apron from the nail. He hangs the leather apron from my neck. He has not cut the leather apron to my size like he promised. The skirt of the apron touches the ground. I have to be careful or I will trip. A striker should not trip. It is only excusable to lie on the floor of the forge one time. Our father lay on the floor of the forge one time. He lay on his back and his hair was on fire. His eyelids swelled. His cheeks swelled. The skin on his cheeks split. Fluids ran down the slopes of his cheeks, toward the ears and the chin. My brother doused our father with the water from the tub. Thin black smoke rose from our father's face. My brother sent me to town so I did not have to breathe our father's smoke.
It is difficult to remember faces. To picture our father I look at my brother. When my brother turns his back, I forget how our father looked. I remember our father on his back on the floor. The tip of his nose had been burned away on the coals. There was a hole in our father's nose. It was big enough to hold a cigar. That was not how our father's face looked. Our father's face was changed by the hearth. Only his hands were unchanged. They were big, with dirty grains in the skin. The doctor put our father's hand on his chest. He put the cigar in our father's hand. According to the doctor, this was a natural pose for our father, the pose of our father as a small boy on the wharves. Our father always held a cigar or a knife on the wharves with the doctor. The doctor remembered our father best in this pose.
8
A storm must have blown in from the ocean after dark. The sky is dense and black. In the flashes of lightning, the dark skin beneath my brother's eyes looks burned. His lips look burned. He banks the fire for the night. In the house, he eats cold meat from the pan. I open the newspaper. I find the obituary for our father. I had not known the date our father was born. I say the date to my brother. My brother already knew the date. He says he has the same birthday as our father. My brother tells me the year he was born. I do the figures in my head. Our father was exactly the age my brother is now when my brother was born. I did not realize our father had my brother so young. My brother does not say anything more. I wonder if he is doing the figures in his head.
I read our father's obituary to my brother. I am not mentioned in our father's obituary as a survivor of our father. My brother says newspapers have limited space for obituaries. It is not practical to list every survivor. My brother is our father's survivor. My brother says he is glad he is listed. The only difference between our father and my brother is the year they were born. The year my brother was born is not mentioned in the obituary. Only my brother's name is mentioned. When they read my brother's name in our father's obituary, people will see that there is no difference between the deceased and the survivor. There has been no interruption in service at the forge. My brother does not recognize the address for the memorial service. I tell him it is the address of the doctor's office. My brother has no interest in going to the doctor's office for the memorial service. He says it is not appropriate for the survivor to be in the same place as the deceased.