2.
His father was a blacksmith. John Carson. A tall, silent, clean-shaven man with fierce cords of muscle in his arms. In his presence, Robert was filled with a sense of the marvelous. His father could lift carriages with those arms and move his mighty anvil without help and swing the heaviest hammer as if it were a fork.
The forge stood about forty yards from the house, at a muddy crossroads beside a stream. A small wooden bridge arched over the stream, part of a post road (the boy soon learned) that carried men and mail on horseback north into Belfast or south toward Dublin. A smaller dirt road moved into the hills behind them or the other way, down to the River Lagan. Sometimes in the night Robert heard horses clattering over the bridge and tried to imagine the places they came from and the places they were going. His father had bought this land because of that bridge and that road. Those horses need shoes, he would say. Those mail carriages need their wheels repaired.
And so he built his forge first, before he built the house, before Robert came into the world, and put a kind of barn around it, with thin plank walls and a roof above it, not worrying about insulation, since in the heat of the forge and the sweat of his labor he welcomed the wind. There was a corner reserved for fueclass="underline" wood at first and then coal or charcoal from England. In another corner he piled a scrap heap with broken shears and ruined horseshoes, pieces of undercarriages, even some lumps of bog iron. All to be melted in the heat (“No metal can resist great heat,” he told his son) and then transformed by his marvelous hands into things new and useful and beautiful. In a small room off to the right, he kept his tools: hammers and tongs, chisels and punches, swages and cutters, all hanging on handmade nails. A dozen different hammers: cross peins and straight peins, dressers and chisel makers, round-faced hammers and double-faced hammers, small leaf hammers, soft-faced hammers for cutlery and blunt-faced hammers for making files and rasps, along with hammers that had no names. Five or six sledges leaned against the wall, each head weighing more than five pounds. When he started a new job, he gently caressed each hammer, as if paying his respects, hefting one or two before making his choice. There were tongs too, box tongs and side tongs, straight-lipped tongs and wedge tongs, and a dozen handmade tongs of his own design; sharp-faced chisels, with handles and without; a box full of punches, shaped like hearts or shamrocks, for special decorations; a selection of swage blocks, along with shears and drills and bits. The boy’s mother told him that she and his father lived in that tool room until the day the roof was placed on the house, while a fiddler played and men danced with women until the rising of the moon. That day, or rather, that night, they went into the house and set the fire in the hearth they believed would last for the rest of their lives.
The forge was the heart of the shop, as the hearth was the soul of the house. It was the place where metal was made soft in order to be worked, and his father had built it himself, using a combination of cut stone and brick from a kiln in Belfast. In Robert’s eyes, the forge resembled a kind of unroofed fort, with the fire burning on a cast-iron grate about a foot below the parapets, all of it about thirty inches above the ground and forty inches square. No marauding army could ever breach that fort. Or so Robert thought. A bellows was plugged into a pipe that entered the forge from the rear and controlled the intensity of the fire.
At some point, without ceremony, his father gave him the gift of work. He was allowed to work the bellows, with its three flat boards, its upper and lower chambers, its leather casing forcing air through the small valve at the end. Man’s work thrilled him. His skin pebbled when he saw the fire suddenly brighten from his own efforts, sparks rising in the air, all of them red, racing for the chimney. Then the rough iron slowly turned red, and then white, and when it was white, more sparks danced like fireflies in the heat. The sweat poured off the boy then, from the heat of the fire, from the pumping of the levers of the bellows, from his excitement, and he wanted to stop, all strength gone, and then glanced at his father, working with his tough intensity, and tried even harder to go on.
“I’ll finish that now, lad,” his father said to him at certain moments.
“No, Da, I can do it.”
“Fair enough,” his father said, and smiled to himself.
In those hours in the forge, his father would say almost nothing else.
The smoke and sparks rose from the fire into an iron canopy and then through a metal chimney into the empty sky. On cold, clear winter nights, the boy would sometimes gaze at the distant stars and wonder if they were frozen sparks from his father’s forge. He asked his father about this one chilly night.
“Aye,” he said. “They all go up into the universe, son.”
“Do they ever burn out?”
“Never. When you see a shooting star, lad, that’s a spark trying to find its way home.”
His father’s beliefs were as simple as the things of his life. One of those things in the forge was the great tub he called the slake bath, half a wine cask filled with clear, stagnant water. Across its top were two rods that held a smaller tub—a bowl, really—that contained brine. He needed water to adjust the temperature of whatever he was making, cooling the piece swiftly in the water, or more slowly in the salty brine, and sometimes he would return it to the fire if it had cooled too much.
“The first time you do something,” he said, “it might not be perfect. But you can’t give up. You must try again.”
To Robert, such words seemed to be said that day for the first time in the long history of the world. You can’t give up. You must try again. Important things to be said by a master for whom the most important of all the things in that shop was the anvil. It stood a few feet to the left of the forge, a mighty workbench that to his boy’s eyes was powerful, mysterious, indestructible, and magical. It was the only object in the shop not made by his father, but John Carson loved it with a passion, the way a fine musician loves a grand piano, and he passed that fervor to his son across a thousand different afternoons.
The anvil had come from Scotland and weighed exactly one hundred and seventy-one pounds. The shape was simple and elegant, a kind of small table with a great curved shoulder called the horn. The body was iron, but the face on top was made of steel two inches thick, welded to the body. From the heel to the tip of the horn, it was about two feet long, the face four inches wide. At the heel of the face, slots were punched through to the bottom: the small round pritchel hole, the wider square slot called the hardie hole. With his tongs, the boy’s father could insert hot iron bars in the pritchel hole and bend them into any shape. Or slot his many smaller attachments into the hardie hole. The anvil was nailed to a smoothly planed block of bog oak, which had been driven several feet into the earth floor. A leather strap ran around the top of the oaken base from which hung many smaller tools. Robert swiftly learned that the anvil could sing. When his father struck it with a hammer, the ringing sound rose into the air, and sometimes was answered by the calls of birds.
In all years and all seasons, he could see his father working iron with his back to the forge, using tongs to lift the molten iron from the fire and then laying it in a white lump upon the anvil and with his tools transforming it into a sickle or a horseshoe, a lamp holder or a pot. His long-fingered hands were very quick, and in movement he seemed all of a piece: arms, hands, hammer, metal. Everything was fitted together to create rhythm and ease and power. The face of the anvil, for example, was on a level with his knuckles, the best height discovered by the old ironmasters for swinging hammers without tearing up the muscles of the back. Sometimes he dipped the iron in the water of the slack tub, adjusting the temperature as he worked, his brow furrowed and creased, his legs spread to create a fulcrum, his mighty arms bringing either raw power or fluid delicacy to the task. Sweat poured from him in all seasons. Even in dead winter, his gray collarless cotton shirt turned black. In summer, he often sent the boy to the stream with a pot for fresh water and drank it down, letting it splash over his body and neck before returning to hammer and iron and heat.