Edward Lee - The Black Train

When they arrived at the small clearing, Collier found the old furnace larger than it had looked from his room. Flat rocks fixed by mortar formed the large conical structure, which sported several vents at various heights.

“This is incredible,” Collier said.

“Yes, sir, it is.” Jiff pointed. “That there’s the charcoal chute, and there, the ore drop. That l’il one there is the outflow, and there a’course, is the airway,” he said, pointing to the pipe that extruded from a bellows the size of a refrigerator. “The smith’d yank this chain, to pump the bellows”—he demonstrated, and they could hear the device whistling air—“and the air’d shoot into the bed. It’d get up to 2,300 degrees in there, turn iron ore or damn near anything else into a red-hot puddle.”

Now Collier noticed other features: a cooling barrel, a tool hanger, a grinding wheel and stand. The anvil, which he’d spotted earlier, had a date engraved: 1856. Collier was finding himself staggered by the nostalgia. These weren’t props; they were genuine relics of a longdead way of life. Real people built this thing, he thought. Some guy, in 1856, MADE that anvil with his own two hands.

“Has anyone used it, I mean, recently?”

Jiff scratched at a mortar seam with a penknife. The material was still hard. “For iron forging? Naw. But there’s no reason why it wouldn’t still work. You melt the ore against a wall of charcoal while pumpin’ the bellows. All we use it for now is cookin’ during holiday weekends. Sometimes we’ll hang a couple of pig quarters inside and smoke ’em for twenty-four hours with hickory. But way back when, they even had to make their own charcoal; they’d pile up twenty, thirty cords of wood, light the middle, then cover it all over with sod. See, when the carbon in the charcoal mixes with the pig iron, it becomes steel. They didn’t even know it back then, but that’s what they were makin’. All by hand.”

Smart guy for a hayseed, Collier thought. “This is pretty specified information. How do you know so much about it?”

“Grew up ’round all this stuff, so I asked. Most folks in these parts all have ancestors going back to even before the war. You learn a lot when you ask the right folks.”

“That you do.” Collier was impressed. Behind the charcoal shed he saw a pile of blocks. He picked one up. “Oh, here’s another mold like the one your mother has displayed. A scissor mold.”

“Shears,” Jiff corrected. “Probably took some poor bastard a full day just to chisel one of those things.”

But Collier saw a veritable pile of them. “That’s an awful lot of molds,” he pointed out. “Two blocks for each single pair of shears? There must be enough there for fifteen pair.”

“Yeah, that is strange. Shears were important tools, a’course, but I don’t know why the smith would make so many molds.”

“Almost like a production line. I’ll bet he made hundreds of pairs with these blocks.” Collier thought about it. “I wonder why?”

“Ya got me, Mr. Collier. But the funny thing is there was only one single pair of shears ever found on the property—the one in the display case.”

It was an unimportant question but one that needled him. What the hell did they need all those shears for?

“Nice, uh, nice car,” Jiff remarked when he got into the Bug. “What, it’s foreign?”

Collier pulled out of the front court, chuckling. “I got stuck with it at the rental office at the airport. I know it looks ridiculous. It’s a woman’s car.”

Jiff raised a brow.

The horizon darkened as they drove down the hill, the air getting cooler. Collier saw the sign again—PENELOPE STREET—and remembered something. “Would this road be named after Penelope Gast?”

“Yes, sir. You must’a seen the portrait at the house. She was Harwood’s freaky wife.”

“Why do you say ‘freaky’?”

Jiff sighed as much to himself as he could. “Just more bad talk. See, Mr. Collier, I love this town and got respect for it. I hate to spread garbage talk.”

“Come on, Jiff. All towns have their folklore and their notorious figures—big deal. I have the impression there’s quite a bit about Harwood Gast that’s actually very interesting. To you, it’s hundred-and-fifty-year-old gossip but to me, it’s fascinating. Let me guess. She killed herself right along with Gast, and now their ghosts prowl the house at night.”

“Naw, naw. It’s just that she weren’t the finest of ladies, if ya know what I mean. She got around.”

“Promiscuous wives are part of every town, Jiff.”

“Yeah, sure, but, see, she weren’t no good at all if ya believe the stories. There’s lots of ’em, and they’re all bad. Makes me feel like I’m bad-mouthin’ my home. We’ve always tried to tone down that kind’a stuff. It could give the town a bad name, hurt my ma’s business.”

Collier grinned, egging him on. “Come on, Jiff. Don’t jive me.”

Jiff shook his head. “All right. Penelope Gast didn’t kill herself, it was her husband that murdered her.”

“Why? Did he go crazy?”

“No, sir, he killed her ’cos he found out she’d been pregnant with some other fella’s kid. What’cha gotta understand is that once the railroad construction started to get close to the Georgia border, Gast would be away from home for weeks at a time. And for months, towards the end.”

“The more track they laid, the farther it took him from his house,” Collier assumed.

“’Zactly. To get back home to visit, he’d have to take one of his own supply trains that kept feeding track and ties. But there weren’t a whole lotta them. He’d have to wait.”

“And while he was away—”

Jiff nodded, morose. “She’d take up with other fellas and got herself pregnant that way three times. She also got herself an abortion three times. They had abortions back then, ya know. I suspect Gast knew all along but waited till the railroad was finished before her killed her.”

“He wanted to see his project completed, in other words.”

“The railroad was very important to him. He told people that he believed by 1863, the Confederate army would have secured Washington, D.C., and his railroad would be crucial in moving supplies father north.”

What a strange way to phrase it, Collier thought. “When you say he ‘told’ people he believed that…do you mean it was just a sham, that there was some other reason he went to the monumental expense and effort of building the railroad?”

“Oh, turn here, Mr. Collier.” Jiff leaned forward, pointing. “Cusher’s is right there on the corner. Yes, sir, you’re gonna love the beer they got.”

“Yes, but do you think Gast might’ve—”

“Folks just rave about the beer, yes sir. And they got several kinds. Beer expert such as yourself’ll really get into it.”

Collier smiled. He’s ducking the topic again. That’s really bizarre. He thought it best to drop it for now, but in all, he couldn’t have been more intrigued.

With the sun dipping behind the mountain now, the light was being sapped. Streetlights with carriage lamp tops were coming on; shop windows glowed bright. Now that they were downtown, Collier thought of a dollhouse community: spotless streets, storefronts and building walls shiny in new paint, picture-perfect flower displays. Even the people were immaculate, mostly married couples strolling the quaint streets, window shopping. No riffraff, Collier saw with some relief. Typically he’d see psychotic bums sullying Rodeo Drive and Crips and Bloods blemishing Redondo.

“And there it is.”

Collier saw the cursive sign—CUSHER’S—topping a slatshingled awning on the corner. CIVIL WAR CUISINE AND HANDCRAFTED BEER. The building itself stood three stories, ideal for a brewery, which processed beer from top floors to the bottom, exploiting gravity. Large windows showed a full dining room.