• • •
Jinot began to learn the skills and subtle judgments of ax makers. In the forge house his old river-drive reactions to the quixotries of moving water and rolling logs translated into recognition of gradations of the shapes and colors of hot metals, quickly, delicately turning the ax under the descending hammer blows, all motion in the deafening heat like running dream-like through a chamber of the inferno; it was the Miramichi fire compressed into a bed of coals, the hurricane wind blowing only at the command of the bellows. Those dark wraiths in the room were not men of nerve and skill but demons, beckoning him to their damned society.
Dogg, his tutor, talked about himself. “How I come to leave that Iroquois country in upstate York, why, smart whitemen they get our property. Iroquois don’t think that way. Sell it but we so foolish think it still ours. Whiteman give whiskey, give little presents — and get our huntin land. That land be theirs. They say, ‘Indan, give up them ways you people, Indan, get civilize.’ So I come here to get civilize, get job. That blacksmith, Mr. Bone, pretty nice to me — he see me down by river, I try catch frog — hungry — he fix me up, learn me to be smith. You maybe never think Mr. Bone can find end of his thing but he make a good ax. Good smith. He make a good ax.”
This was difficult to believe, Mr. Bone looked so small and childlike. Later, covertly, Jinot began to study the small frame beneath the black suit, the small hands. He had been deceived by the baby face. The body was small but steely, the little hands callused and hard.
• • •
He was drawn to the trip-hammers. The hammerman had to be something of an artist, shifting the position of the glowing ax clamped in his tongs for the perfect shape, and he had to be fast. Most wracking was the tempering process, which demanded experience and a good eye. Hugh Boss, in his fifties, tall and lopsided from spine-twisting scoliosis, heated a new-shaped ax, then dropped it into a vat of water.
“Makes it so damn brittle the bit will break first time you use it,” said Boss. “So — you got to draw the temper, eh?” He winked at Jinot and again the ax went to the forge, where it was reheated; he worked a file over it. “Watch the colors edge down to the bit.” Jinot saw the color parade from pale yellow to orange, to dark orange to brown. It went again into the water.
“It’ll go all the way to blue, but brown is where we want a ax. There. She’s fixed, now.”
The months slid into years before Mr. Bone was satisfied that the tools Jinot made could withstand thousands of heavy strikes.
• • •
It was the richest and strangest part of his life, for he felt he was no longer Jinot Sel, but someone else, a hybrid creature in a contrived space. Mr. Bone took an interest in him. There were many good Indian men in the factory but he had fastened on Jinot, who, with his fresh, smiling face, looked younger than he was.
• • •
One day, when Mr. Bone had to make a trip to Boston, he told Jinot to come with him.
Alone in the coach neither spoke for an hour until Mr. Bone said earnestly, “I want you to understand all the intricacies of the ax business. I have undertaken to educate Indans such as yourself in the mechanic and manufacturing arts. But there is more to a business than that. The sooner your people leave the forests and adopt useful trades, the sooner the woodlands will become civilized and productive. That is not to say that it will be goose pie all the way — no. I wish you to know the business end of ax making. You must learn how to consort with men of quality.” He took out his repeater and pressed the knob; the watch chimed.
“There are problems and troubles that keep me awake at night — competitors who make an inferior product painted up to look like a Bone ax, workmen who complain they are not paid enough, some who agitate, some who are spies for other ax makers. Now it is time you learn how to conduct yourself and speak with businessmen.” Jinot wanted to say that he did not want to speak with businessmen — he preferred the company of the forge, where, under the blanket of noise, men communicated with hand gestures as did workers in sawmills. He preferred — he didn’t know what he preferred except to be more distant from Mr. Bone’s solicitous interest.
But Mr. Bone’s vaunted enthusiasm for native people did not extend to the forests and shorelines they had inhabited. For Mr. Bone, only when the trees were gone, when houses crowded together and the soil was cultivated to grow European crops was it a real place.
On the return journey he said abruptly, as though he had been long arranging the words in his mind, “I came from Scotland to Philadelphia with my father. My mother died when I was but an infant. And two days after we arrived in this country Father also perished, a victim of some shipboard pestilence. So I was orphaned and thrown on my own resources.” He said nothing more.
• • •
Months later they were again alone in a coach that stank of stale urine on the way to Bangor, and Mr. Bone, who seemed unable to speak of his past unless in jolting motion, continued his history. “Relative to the events of my youth, after I found myself alone in a strange city, at first I begged bread and then coins from passersby, then I fell in with some boys who, like myself, were homeless. We contrived a society of cooperative thievery, taking chickens, garden plunder. For amusement we loitered near the stage stop, the farrier and blacksmith shops, places of interest to all boys. One day I happened to be alone watching one of the smiths and the man looked at me and said, ‘Pump the bellows, boy, my helper run off.’ I pumped that bellows. At day’s end he told me I was employed. I filled the tempering baths, pumped the bellows, ran errands and learned the best uses of the hardies, swages, bicks, holdfasts and mandrels, the twenty kinds of hammers, the fifty kinds of tongs, the punches and chisels. When Mr. Judah Bitter, the smith, saw I was interested he undertook to tutor me in the arcane lore of the forge and anvil. Even blacksmithing has its heroes and Mr. Bitter was such a one. He inculcated in me a love for the black metal. Well do I remember the day I made my first adze.”
Embedded in this strew of words Jinot scented a clue; Mr. Bone favored him because he glimpsed something that made him equate Jinot’s situation with that of the poor orphan emigrant. Jinot could understand that for Joe Dogg, but not for himself. Or did Mr. Bone see him as a lump of raw iron that needed heating and pounding to be made into a tool? His employer drew his gold watch from its pocket and smiled at it. “My family treasure.”
The coach stopped and three more travelers boarded, but Mr. Bone was wrought up and he continued, in a hissing whisper he imagined reached only Jinot’s ear. His breath reeked of strong peppermint from the candy he kept in his pocket.
“Mr. Bitter favored me with an invitation to join him as partner in his smithy. There would be a new sign—‘Bitter and Bone’—it sounds well, does it not?” He noticed then that the entire population of the coach was staring at him agog. And shut up.
But when they were at the rough inn, Mr. Bone returned to his subject. “As I said, Mr. Bitter offered me a partnership. I accepted. But before the arrangements were complete, Mr. Bitter, on his way home from the smithy, was run down by a profligate jehu swilled to the gills. The smithy went by inheritance law to an idiot nephew who could not tell an anvil from an anthill, and once more I was bereft and alone and without resources.
“I looked about me to discover what I might do. I saw the vast forests, saw the great need of thousands of people to build houses and barns, and so I decided on the ax. I recognized the opportunity and vowed my axes would be the best.”
Emboldened by the toddy Jinot had to ask. “Why favor me, Mr. Bone? I do wonder.” There was a long silence, then Mr. Bone stirred, sighed and spoke.