Stanley Elkin - George Mills

“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.

“They hadn’t even been talking about him. It was a joke about a necrophile. Farmers always lowered their voices when they told smoking car stories, even when women weren’t around. His father supposed it was the way decent men cheated on their wives.

“The burly farmer, who had stepped aside instinctively, tried to apologize, his eyes still wet with laughter from the good story he’d told, but Joe already understood.

“ ‘He wasn’t quite twenty-one yet,’ he said. ‘Ayuh. Kids go off half-cocked sometimes.’

“Over the last casket he would ever have to build, the blacksmith said the psalms one last time. He didn’t change the eulogy because it was a father’s duty to treat his children equally, but he added a final statement for the cronies and customers who had turned out to hear him.

“ ‘Being a pa’s a terrible burden,’ he said. ‘Now maybe I can get some peace. I’ve learned from all this. Maybe I ain’t so good a blacksmith as I thought I was. I couldn’t do the delicate work good as my boy, though no one’s better with livestock than I am, I think. A man should stick to what he does best. If it’s small motor control, as it was with my Oliver, then he should stick a jeweler’s loupe in his eye, keep it there, and leave the heavy lifting to others. My son would be alive today if he hadn’t gone for the fences with that last big bulldozer cavalry charge.

“ ‘I’ll continue to honor your custom and do the best I can with your horses and tack, though after what’s happened I think I’d prefer to work by myself for a bit.’

“It was better than an ad. Indeed, it was an ad, almost a decree, nothing barker or ballyhoo about it or undifferentiated as the handbill stuck under your windshield wiper or circular shoved through the letter slot with your mail, but touching, sort of, and tremendously official and solemn and even final, like banns or the little notice of bankruptcy in the public press that the bankrupt has to pay for himself, something understated, even unspoken, but there anyway, like those sad little admissions of guilt and responsibility in the classifieds when there’s a divorce and the husband publicly disavows liability for his wife’s debts. You know the lawyer made him put it there, that it wouldn’t have occurred to him otherwise.

“So Joe’s announcement that he was best with livestock was no boast, the reverse rather, a kind of confession that he was good with little else, the Swiss movements of agricultural machinery or children either.

“Whatever, it had its effect, even if it was an effect my uncle could not have anticipated.

“Have you ever seen a barn raising or any of those episodes of country charity where the feelings of the participants are not those of obligation or even duty so much as the sheer amplitude of the heart, its cheerful, generous, almost maritime displacements buoying cause and mission like stalled shipping? Or have you ever been to a surprise party, Dr. Kinsley? Or anniversary, or testimonial dinner? Have you risen to your feet with the others in the hall to give someone who doesn’t expect it a standing ovation? Then you will recognize the inclusive, almost religious good will of such moments. There’s something in it for you, too, though it may not be what you think. It isn’t the sense of a paid-up debt or the satisfaction that is said to come from good behavior. It isn’t anything peripheral or serendipitous or spin-off or sidebar or fallout at all. That barn you helped raise is forever after your barn too, just as the surprise is your surprise—‘Were you really surprised? Did you suspect anything? What did you think when you saw all those cars in the driveway? We’d have parked on the street but all the spots were taken’—and the ovation not just a declaration of your gratitude and love but an affirmation of your taste.

“What Uncle Joe said was repeated all over the state, given motion and impetus by word-of-mouth, some relayed, passed baton or aloft torch quality of marathon unimpedance. And not just Vermont but New Hampshire too, parts of Massachusetts and Maine and New York State and corners of Connecticut.

“It was how I heard — I don’t recall who told me, some friend of a friend who’d been traveling in New England that summer — all that far away in Michigan. It wasn’t astral projection. Joe hadn’t written. His last letter had been when Elizabeth died. She was my mother’s sister, my aunt. I suppose he believed that as a nephew I had a stake in that loss. But he never wrote about Susan or his sons. Perhaps he felt cousins aren’t relatives at all, only friends. Or maybe there’s just something too sour in the death of children. Tragedy, but tragedy spoiled, gone off like meat. It wasn’t anything one would want to write letters about.

“Anyway, the response of the farmers and sportsmen was incredible. It was as if no one in Vermont could mend tack or shoe a horse except my uncle. They brought him their hobbled animals as if they were making a pilgrimage, some long, lame march to a Green Mountain Lourdes. They went out of their way to come to him and, since my uncle had expressed the wish to work alone and no longer be for them that cracker-barrel or wood or potbelly stove or general store philosopher that had gotten him into trouble in the first place, they simply turned their beasts over to him, disengaging the animals from the wagons they pulled as if they not only had come to a sort of hospital but were brought there in a sort of ambulance which they, the lame horses, had had to pull themselves, and then went off to drink or actually register for the night at the local inn. So it cost them money and time too, though possibly they didn’t see it that way, still riding the wave of that conjoined magnanimity and effluent participatory chivalry which is not only the inspiration for surprise parties but the only reason you can get people to come to them in the first place.

“They had to knock now. Then my uncle would come out to them, take their animals and damaged tack, give them a receipt (which they did not always want later to surrender, the slip of paper being the stub, the souvenir of their attendance), and lead their property back into the blacksmith shop.

“I wrote Joe when I heard what had happened and, when he didn’t answer, I wrote again. I wrote a third time, a stolid, solemn letter of patient unput-out condolence. I asked if he wanted to come to Michigan for a while. He didn’t answer.

“I would have gone to him in Vermont. In my last letter I had suggested as much, proposing it as an alternative should he not wish to make the trip to Michigan. So you see, Dr. Kinsley, there was no astral trigger finger, no metempsychotic quick-draw pyrotechnics. I have, as I’ve said, been an adept for more than five years. But I gave up joy-riding long ago. The occult airs are too chill, its weathers too tempestuous. I was forced, you see. I loved my uncle, my dead cousins. To have lost almost all of them at once, as I had casually learned I had, was simply too much. Uncle Joe wouldn’t answer his mail. Perhaps he was holed up in his grief. Perhaps he needed me. Perhaps I needed him.