Forge raised one hand to his sunburned brow and gazed out over the vast tract of land. Then he turned to the man beside him, nodding and smiling. “This is the land I’ve waited a lifetime to find,” he said.
The slave, who was called Ben but named Dembe by a mother he could not remember, did not need to shield his eyes as he gazed out over the woodland with its streamlets and springs gushing lustily through the dark bedrock.
“A bit karsty,” he said. “Perhaps we should turn back.”
Forge threw back his head and laughed, then he bent at the waist and snared the lush rye grasses in his hands, reminded once again of why he had brought his favorite slave instead of one of his younger brothers — to properly scout a land only dreamed of, to protect Forge’s life at the expense of his own, and to amuse him.
* * *
A rough, three-bayed cabin was erected next to the stream that came to be known as Forge Run. This remained the dwelling of Samuel Forge for seven years, then became a cabin for slaves when a team of English masons built a new stone house with two stories, as many staircases, gable-end chimneys, and paned windows. But this house shivered thirty years later when the earthquake made the pit silos collapse like old drifts, when Forge Run splashed out of its shallow banks, covering the corn and standing the startled cattle in six inches of slate water, so they bawled down in alarm at their vanished pasterns. When the water withdrew, the left side of the stone house had settled strangely with one shoulder slumped, and it was soon leveled, and the settler’s cabin too. The new Forge home was built two hundred yards north of the stream, a house formed from thousands of pounds of red brick fired by slaves on the land, who packed clay and fired kilns for months. When it was complete, the new house was hardier than its stone predecessor, with a black tile roof and a protruding el porch on its southern side that gazed out over the fields and the creek. Its interior moldings were stained dark, the walls dun, scarlet, and robin’s-egg blue with double-hung windows on all sides, and small ellipse fanlights along the eaves. The sun rose from across the bowl every morning and sparked its many windows, then peered down from high angles all afternoon, so that the house did not appear like a house at all but only a pitch stain on the green fields, and then in the evening, a wide, red, optimistic face. This house stood without complaint through the abandonment of corn for hemp, the building of stone fences by Irish masons, the arrival of neighboring families, the War when Morgan’s men camped alongside the creek and requisitioned all the cattle and horses, then the eventual reintroduction of corn, the selling of many of the original three thousand acres, and the getting up and dying of seven generations. In this house, Henry Forge was born and raised.
The wheals on his back soon faded to a faintly risen road map of pink, then white, then disappeared altogether. He never once placed a foot in the Miller bull yard again, but settled his debt for the bull’s life with a year of remunerative labor in the milking shed. He spent the crisp September mornings in the tie-stall barn, where the dung stench crowded out the clean air as smoke fills a burning room. God, he hated the cows with everything in him. He shuddered when he first gripped the swollen teats, extruding streams of warm milk that whined in the bottom of a tin bucket. He refused to rest his cheek on the hide of the cow as the farmer’s three girls did while they milked, but craned his neck to the side to keep from brushing against the distressing mass of the animal. He endured this indignity every day.
On a September afternoon, when the calves’ seventy days of nursing were through, it was finally time for weaning. The youngest Miller showed him how it was done — a girl of seven with violently red hair, a face mottled with freckles, and knees as fat as pickle jars. She stuck her little fingers into the mouth of a skinny black calf and looked up at Henry, her own mouth a small O of delight. “This is my favorite part,” she said. “I wish I could stick my whole arm in there.” She motioned with her free hand for him to do the same. His calf took his fingers into its urgent mouth, and Henry fought the desire to snatch his hand back, but let it stay, worked and pulled by that alien, suckling muscle.
“Pull them down,” said the little girl, whose name was Ginnie. They guided the calves to their waiting buckets until their hands and the calves’ mouths were bent into new milk. Then Henry slipped his fingers free, and the calf sputtered the white milk, foaming it. This was repeated again and again until the calves finally drank willingly from the bucket. Henry wiped the slime and milk onto his jeans and stared at the foam-spattered face of the calf. It was pathetic how the teatlorn creature so easily traded its mother for a bucket.
“The only thing better than cows,” sighed Ginnie, “is Corgis. The big ones. With tails.”
Henry just moved on to the next calf. The Holstein’s baby black turned a glossy red as a chilling evening light slanted into the crib, casting sudden, severe black shadows across the barn floor. Late autumn brought these shadows early now. The lemony light of summer was done, the fruits were overripe or rotten, the leaves sapped to ocher. The corn stalks were knived and soon, in the fields, the first frost would stiffen any forgotten remainders, encasing them in ice. Staring at this light, Henry turned ten.
Ginnie said, “Henry, are you gonna get married?”
Henry made a face. “Someday, maybe, I don’t know.”
“Let’s you and me get married!”
“You? No way, you’re ugly.”
“I am not!”
Henry sighed. “When I get married, I’m going to marry a beautiful woman. My father says not to waste energy on ugly girls.”
Great dollop tears formed in Ginnie’s eyes. “A pretty girl won’t be half as fun as me!” she whined, but Henry was distracted by the blooms of his breath in the suddenly icy barn air.
“When did it get so cold in here?” he said, jogging to the tack wall, where his winter coat hung from a shaker peg. Through a keyhole knot in a wallboard, he fisheyed the farm, which was now a snowglobe of white interrupted by the dark shape of the calves grown tall. Not so long ago, they had gamboled alongside their mothers, but now stood in staggered, snowy groups. As Henry watched, the dark of the winter wasteland crept over them.
Ginnie, busy shoveling manure in a crib, seemed to have forgiven him and said, “Maybe you can stay late today, and we can play?” She eyed him with sneaky delight. “We can pretend your farm is a wicked kingdom, and you’re a baby I save from the wicked king!”
“Ginnie, I’m too old to play.” Henry yanked a woolen cap down over his copper hair and was moving out the barn door when something was hurled against the back of his jacket. A cow patty.
He said nothing, it would only encourage her.
“I’ll throw more!” Ginnie cried with the passion of young love, which had grown positively anguished as winter warmed under a restless trade wind. When Henry didn’t look back or even acknowledge her, she came charging out of the barn with more manure in her hands, but was stymied by snow melting into mud. Dirty remnants of winter remained draped like old, tattered white cloth all about the farm.