That sav’d a wretch like me...
My God, she thinks: The voice of the anvil is like the voice of a bell.
“Who’d like to give it a try?” the blacksmith says.
Already his eyes are upon her.
The complex where she lives was built in the eighties, and everything here is a little run down. The garage door opener should probably be replaced, but she dreads calling the maintenance office. It takes her forever to get the door open so the delivery-men can back the truck in. When they lift the antique anvil from the back of their truck, she can see the muscles straining under their shirts and overalls. Her empty garage suddenly smells of their sweat, of the Appalachian hills themselves, of the barn where she found and bought the relic, of manure and gasoline. They set the blackened object on top of a tree stump. One of them asks if her husband really is intending to do his blacksmithing in such a small space. There just isn’t enough roof clearance, another explains.
“I’m not married,” she says. “It’s for me.”
This shushes them. They accept their tips and shuffle out with smiles on their faces and perhaps their tongues in their cheeks.
It’s not as easy as you’d think to buy an anvil. The cheap ones she can afford at the big-box stores are made of cast iron, and every one of the ironworker websites warns against them. But buying a new, unblemished one made of steel can easily consume more than half her monthly income. They are just that expensive. But she soon learns that most smithies buy their tools at auctions or barter with other collectors or craftsmen. And this is what she does, follows one local lead after another until she finds a retired farm auctioneer who sells antiquated tools out of his barn.
Everyone she meets — everyone — assumes she is taking up smithing, because that’s what so many of the artistic young people of the region seem to be doing these days. They’re returning in droves to the old folkways. Part of her thinks that’s actually a fine cover. Fred would probably be proud of her for exploiting such a misdirection.
But she only wants to hear that sound again. Her confidence is robust for someone so young, but she knows she has a few things going for her. She knows music, she can sight-read, and she has a good ear. Every instructor she’s ever had has told her this, and she has no reason to doubt them. Of course she has a good ear. She is a good student. She will work as hard as she can. She will not fail.
But the anvil is tough.
She has no way of knowing if the assortment of hammers she’s bought at the big-box store are appropriate. On the subject of playing the anvil as a musical instrument, the Internet is largely silent. She finds countless videos of Verdi’s Anvil Chorus from Il Trovatore, of leather-aproned men or women pounding out that famous melody as the chorus of gypsies sings along. But she longs to conjure a sound that is wholly different.
More delicate, elegant, and purer.
For a long time, the sound emanating from the steel seems flat and dull. There is none of the distinct loveliness she heard that day in the old smithy’s barn.
But she tries. Oh, she tries.
The music store at the mall coughs up some decent sheet music, which she uses as a guide only. And strangely, she discovers that she only wants to play church music. “Amazing Grace,” of course. “Ave Maria.” “How Great Thou Art.” At the tractor store — she cannot believe the day she walks into it — she finds a pair of roomy overalls that sprout loops at her hips and promise to give her thighs the requisite range of movement.
Each night that summer she sucks down her dinner and retires to the garage to squat over the thing and play. The anvil sounds again and again, and each night, after a few hours, her ears ring and her hands hurt and her palms stiffen.
At work, while she files paperwork, she hears it still.
The sound is good. Just not good enough.
Like her.
If the smithy is surprised to see a woman so young dressed in overalls and work boots and so closely quizzing him on this particular sideline of his craft, he doesn’t show it. He listens to her story as he sits at the picnic table behind his shop and tears into a pulled pork sandwich doused with smoky orange sauce. His voice is gravelly, his teeth bad, his glasses distinctly unstylish.
He is plainly ugly.
But the second she thinks this, she begs his silent forgiveness. Am I such a bad person? she wonders. Was the old me really that bad?
“You’re lucky buying an old one,” he tells her. “Most of the anvils made today are just not going to give you that ringing sound. They really don’t make them the way they used to. The rest is just practice.” He cocks his head, crowlike, and asks, “How are you holding the hammers?”
Good question. She holds them as if she is about to drive a nail, but he scoffs when she tells him this. He looks at his scuffed Timex.
“You want it to be like a drumstick. Firm, but loose and gentle-like. You want to cultivate muscle memory. You know what that is?”
“Like I know it but don’t know I know it.”
“Yep. Like your hands just know what to do. Look, I don’t have much time, but I can show you a few things. If you were looking to apprentice, I got to say no. I just don’t do that anymore. I’m just putting on a show for the tourists here.”
“I just want to make it sing.”
“Well, okay then. I can show you a few things. But you mind my asking something? Why in the heck would a pretty girl like yourself want to do such a thing?”
She is appalled that she doesn’t have an answer.
It’s only later, when the weather turns and the mall grows ever busier, that she begins to get the first glimmer of an answer. But it is not an answer she can articulate clearly. She can only feel it building within her when she plays. Only then do the faces of the dead recede and seem to bear witness to her concerts.
So much of her life is on autopilot now. In the back of her mind as she works the day job is the thrum of sound, the plink and patter of the hammer. Up, dress, work, lunch, work, back home — and then the steel. On weekends when she can, she prowls the flea markets on Old Highway 6, looking for various types of hammers and chisels she can use to produce different sounds. At night sometimes when she collapses in front of the TV she can feel herself running the notes the way she used to do when she was studying the piano.
Amazing grace...
Her closed fist taps out the melody on empty air.
How sweet the sound...
And this is why she doesn’t quite know how to respond to the question the smithy asked her a month ago now. If pushed, she will only say that she wants to make music. Beautiful music. She needs it to be beautiful. But that alone is not enough. She cannot deny that when she’s beating out a melody against that steel, she derives a pleasure she never felt when she played the piano, or even the bells.
You knew, didn’t you? You knew all along that it was wrong.
Yes, I knew. But damn you for saying so.
Tink.
Damn you, Eddie, for asking me to do it.
Tink, tink, tink. Smack.
Damn the feds for making her life so banal and lonely.
Oh, really? Poor you. People died.
All she wants to do is strike the hammer. To crush and pound it until it reverberates in her soul. Her life this past year has massed itself into a ball of anguish. Each night, as she makes the journey from the flat to the horn, she imagines she is chasing the pain away, nattering it, worrying it to the edge of the steel until it drops away into space.