Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“In another twenty minutes it was over. Susan almost won. Their father had said that biology made no difference. To him, of course, it didn’t, but her daughter’s — you could have said woman’s — status and distancing had loaned her a strength and fierceness that was unavailable to the boys. They were fighting for the right to stay with their father. She was fighting for the right to remain with her father and also — if this isn’t misunderstood — with a man. But it wasn’t enough. She beat two of the brothers but lost out to the third.

“Redford won the fight, though they still didn’t know who was the strongest. That was beside the point. Their father had said that years made no precedent in love and for that love-rounded man they didn’t, wouldn’t, but Redford was the oldest, had known him the longest, had one or two years more tenure in love, that much more priority and seniority and simple brutal rank with which and for which to fight.

“So it seemed that logic and right had decided it after all, that strength flowed to the one who had the most to lose. Redford won, Susan placed, Oliver, whose boyhood wasn’t finished, showed, and Ben, undistinguished by placement or sex, came in dead last.

“They went to the old man to tell them what had been decided. ‘Redford gets to stay, Father,’ Susan said.

“Joe looked at her, at his three sons, and nodded.

“ ‘It’s your decision,’ the blacksmith said, ‘but that’s just about how I’d have handicapped it.’

“Redford took his place at the smithy beside his father and the others, who did not move out after all but went out each day to follow their new pursuits — Ben at timbering, Oliver at farming, Susan in the chain factory — and returned each night for their meals and lodging and to listen to their father’s wonderful afterhours conversation and watch his grand game of checkers by the ancient anvil he used as a table in the snug smithy by the cooling but still warm forge.

“A strange thing happened. At least unusual, at least unexpected. It was as if the addition of Redford to the small business, instead of halving the work, somehow compounded it. Perhaps it was the sense that people had of dealing with the beginning of a dynasty, a House, or perhaps it was simply the practical Vermonter’s suspicion that Joe, by taking on additional help, was getting ready to expand, introduce intricate new refinements to the blacksmith trade. In any event, Doctor, they now came with their horses and broken equipment as never before. They came not only from all over the county but from the next county as well, and some from as far away as the Northeast Kingdom. To the old-timers, and to his new custom, too, Joe was as convivial as ever, as wise as ever, as reasonable, as much the, well, American, as he had ever been, the man most likely to break up a lynching, if you know what I mean.

“Only Redford had the feeling that his father was unhappy with the new arrangement. They never spoke of it, Redford never mentioned it to his brothers or sister — I have it from an astral projection to one of his dreams — yet as time passed Redford was more and more convinced that his dad found fault with his presence. He queried himself constantly, went over and over his behavior and performance to see how he had given offense. He could find nothing. He was tormented. Perhaps he would have preferred Oliver, he thought, perhaps Susan or Ben. He was tormented and his work suffered.

“A blacksmith must concentrate. His work is as dangerous as a surgeon’s. There must be steady-state attention, attention as focused as acetylene, as managed as meditation.

“He was stirring pig iron in the puddling furnace and did not read the gauges properly, mistaking the first 3 in 1,335 centigrade degrees for a 5. He was still 200 degrees below the melting point of iron but did not know this and could not understand the strange and sudden obdurance of the metal. He put on his almost opaque smoked glasses and long asbestos gloves and opened the door to the furnace to investigate. Behind smoked glasses iron ingots look like peeled, pale bananas, less bright than new rope. The brilliant red bed of heat in which they rest is dimmed the color of roofing tile.

“He was a blacksmith, used to heat, as at ease in Celsius as in spring, cozy in Fahrenheit, cold-blooded as fish or bird. Of course he didn’t feel the heat who testing himself as a child had plucked live cinders from the shingled iron with his fingers, moving the hot dross about under his hands like chessmen or checkers in a game. And he was distracted by his good-man-against-the-lynch-mob dad, that serene, knowing, grandfatherly man whom he of all the elder sons on earth was (not as a grandparent and not in fly-fisher affiliation or woods guide relation or even priest counselor one, and all this even if not in actual dotage — Redford himself would already be twenty-four years old on his next birthday — from a fellow getting on, an old-timer, part of whose virtue must have come from things got past, put by, some nolo contendere deal with greed and lust, but as a still in-there, live-and-kicking actual viable Pop) not done with yet, and who for as far ahead as Redford could see would never be done with him, who still had plenty to teach to someone who still had plenty to learn. And if his father’s new queer distance from his eldest boy had any cause at all, it had to lie with Redford, some mysterious, unmanly infraction yet to be decoded. No insubordination or defection or noncompliance, no sedition, putsch or blackleg treason — a breach, blemish, some piddling moral caesura visible only to his pa’s Indian vision.

“So he was distracted, he did not feel the heat. Behind the dark glasses the iron pigs, 200 degrees centigrade below the boil, looked dark as stones on a dull night. He reached forward into the furnace and lifted one out, the size and shape of a small book, bringing it close to his face to examine. His hands ignited like kindling. His head caught fire.

“Joe built the coffin himself. He dug the grave next to Elizabeth’s on the flank of Kingdom Mountain and eloquently spoke the psalms he did not even have to read. He delivered the eulogy.

“Susan took her brother’s place beside her father at the blacksmith shop. She worked as effortlessly as Redford but with better concentration. She was dead within the month. Tearing her hymen in the rough-and-tumble with her brothers, she had somehow ruptured something important in her womb. The hemorrhage had been slow, almost undetectable, the bleached red smear she saw on her toilet paper of no more significance than the trivial spotting after a period. The hemorrhage had been slow, something that happened almost without her, like air deflating from a football in a closet in the off-season. The bruises, green as olives on her belly, she put down to the punches she had traded with her brothers. Oliver’s would be darker, she thought. Ben’s would. It was not the heavy lifting which exacerbated the bleeding; it was the work which she did with the sledge at the anvil, shaking her blood down through the sluices and flumes of her body with each powerful blow of her arm. Finally it was as if she had too vigorously shaken ketchup from its bottle. ‘Perhaps,’ she mused again, when she saw the immense sticky bolus of blood at her feet, felt it in her shoes, between her toes, just before she died, ‘it’s virginity gives us the advantage. Perhaps all force is moral force.’

“Her father buried her as he had Redford, on the same green mountain, in a coffin exactly the dimensions of her eldest brother’s, reciting the same psalms and, word for word, the identical eulogy.

“Oliver came forward.

“ ‘No,’ the father said. ‘I know the sequence. Didn’t I handicap your decisions? Didn’t I have the morning line on it? Your boyhood ain’t finished, you said. Why should you do up the end of your life before you’ve done up its beginning? Ben will work with me.’