“ ‘Fetch my spalling hammer too, why don’t you? That special one with the claw head. What?’
“ ‘It’s about my eulogy.’
“ ‘I fashioned the claw on this myself. Don’t know why someone didn’t think to do it earlier. Seems a simple enough adaptation. Stand back for a minute. I need some elbow room to swing this thing. What about it?’
“ ‘I don’t mind about the psalms. Anyone would be pleased with those psalms. They’re good psalms.’
“ ‘They’re stately psalms.’
“ ‘Sure,’ Ben said. ‘It’s the eulogy. Seeing as how I was neither eldest son nor youngest, nor even a daughter like Susan, seeing as how I was always sort of lost in there — I ain’t saying misplaced, I ain’t saying forgotten or even mislaid, though mislaid gives some of my sense of it — seeing as how I was just kind of ganged up on by accidental circumstance, I was wondering if you couldn’t sort of distinguish me a little in the eulogy. All you’d really have to do is mention what I just said.’
“His father didn’t answer him. They got through the day, Joe doing the close work, Ben relegated to helper, but a helper, he knew, of little more urgency and use to the blacksmith than the merest customer who might, the smith’s mouth full of nails and his hands busy with tongs and sledge, almost casually tie up the back of his leather apron if it came undone. Joe referred to what his son had said only once. It was after they had finished for the day. He was banking the fires. ‘Don’t think about your eulogy,’ he said.
“ ‘You don’t believe anything’s going to happen?’ Ben asked.
“ ‘Don’t think about your eulogy,’ Joe said. ‘It’s a towering sin for a man to second-guess what folks are going to say about him when he’s gone. Don’t think about your eulogy.’
“But it was all he could think about, all his father gave him the chance to think about. Coddled as he was in the dangerous shop, protected by his dad from any work which could result in a fatal mistake, buffered even from the friendly banter of the customers and idle men who came to watch the blacksmith at his interesting work or hear him talk—‘Stand well back, Ben,’ the smithy warned, ‘these fools are knee slappers and it’s close quarters here. Just a sudden gesture of comradely affection or approval could send something irrevocable flying or shy the horses and bring us down’—he could think of nothing else.
“He was not distracted. Kept at a safe distance from the furnace so that he never had a chance to become acclimated to it, he could feel the heat. Having no reason ever to put on the dark smoked glasses, he saw everything clearly in its natural light.
“He believed what his father said, what the best man he had ever known had told him. He knew it was a towering sin always to be thinking about what the man would say of him in his eulogy. He knew he was wrong, deeply wrong, wrong to the bone, that at last he had the justice and fair play he had begged for when he’d asked his father to allow him to stay and to send his brothers and sister off. He knew he’d always had it and he was ashamed of himself.
“So he was not distracted. He felt the heat. He saw everything in the shop in fine detail.
“He remembered the precise degree of temperature when iron smelted. He could estimate almost as precisely the heat in the shop twenty feet from the fired forge, fifteen feet, ten, five, a few inches. When he opened its door that night after his father and Oliver had gone to bed and put his head inside it, he could make out for an instant the exact color values of the fulgurant ingots and could detect, flaring down from true against the corona of the iron soup, the just darker flecks of slag and carbon like the specks of some stone seasoning.
“Uncle Joe buried Ben alongside Elizabeth, Redford and Susan, his coffin, though Ben was a few inches taller than the others, the same size theirs had been. He spoke the same stately psalms and offered a eulogy which, though richly delivered, did not vary from the earlier ones by so much as a comma.
“ ‘You don’t have to if you don’t want to,’ he told Oliver.
“ ‘Hell,’ said Oliver, ‘we got a tradition. We’re on a roll. You don’t just walk away from a tradition like you’d move out of the kitchen once the dishes are done.’
“ ‘Don’t say hell,’ his father said.
“ ‘And I’m twenty now,’ Oliver said. ‘I got ten months till I’m twenty-one. I figure I got at least that much time to get so expert in the trade that by the time I reach my majority and circumstances swarm me I might even be of some use to you.’
“He was wrong though. Not about his ability to learn, though he was in fact already expert and of great use to his father. He was the one who had hired out, who had driven the disk harrows and tractors and balers, who had handled the plows and cultivators, who was as familiar with the machinery and wagons of agriculture as any cowboy with his mount or musician with the pegs and valves of his instruments. He knew their tensions and faults, could guess from a funny sound in the field just which part had busted off, and was so familiar with their shapes and resistances that he could estimate to within a foot the direction and angle of their roll. What he brought to the business was a knowledge of broken pieces, shard, some synecdochic, jigsaw sense of the whole. ‘Here,’ he’d say, ‘let me do that,’ when some farmer helplessly held out the ruined rude pinnings and copulas, the pegs, dowels, brads, and hasps of his sad, collapsed one-horse-shay equipment.
“ ‘He’s like a jeweler,’ they said. It was true.
“Oliver halved the time that would ordinarily have been given over to fashioning new pieces from scratch, and the business, always steady, began suddenly to flourish.
“ ‘Are you pleased?’ he asked his father one day.
“ ‘I’ll work with the animals and run off the big shapes I’m familiar with,’ Joe said. ‘You do the Swiss watches.’
“He set up a comer of the shop for his son and now the boy was screened from his father and all the activity by the large anvil as ever Ben had been. Few cared to watch him work and, when sometimes people did drift over, they could see very little of what he was doing — his work was too meticulous, it did not lend itself to raillery — and soon moved back to where the grander, more dramatic activity was going on at Joe’s end.
“Oliver listened with his back to them while he worked, much as he had heard the sudden pings and small crashes of the brittle machinery in the fields, hearing everything only after it was already behind him but making his adjustments for deflection and pitch and yaw by the sound of the voice, guessing not only the speaker but the one addressed and listening, too, for the rhythmic, sedative slaps of his father’s hammer on the steel anvil.
“What happened was this:
“Their voices were suddenly lowered. He was fusing a hitch, one he had never seen before but like a delicate ampersand or the treble clef on sheet music.
“ ‘…got what he wanted,’ he heard. ‘…did take…their deaths.’
“ ‘Hush,’ he heard, and a low laugh. And his father’s hammer, the loud crack of steel on steel undiminished, if anything quickened, lending a kind of fillip of assent like a rim shot under a joke.
“He grabbed the sharp, short-handled cooper’s adz he had just set down on his workbench next to his blacksmith’s chisel and rushed from his place to the burly farmer who stood beside his father at the anvil. ‘You son of a bitch!’ he screamed, and raised the tool high above his head.
“ ‘Don’t say son of a bitch,’ his father said without turning.
“The astonished farmer barely had time to step aside. Oliver was already into his downstroke when he stumbled, the momentum of his tremendous blow pulling him forward and causing his head to fall upon the center of the anvil just as his calm, phlegmatic father, that masterful pipe smoker of a man who did not join their gossip but only counseled and advised, was delivering the last packed smash that would put the arch of the horseshoe exactly right.