George Mills Part 9

"Tell it to the Marines. Ain't I got bills of lading for all the spook house swag the Ca.s.sadaga College of Cardinals sends to suckers all over this G.o.d-fearing country? And that's just in one pocket. Ain't I got promissory notes from the COD, and postal and international money orders and stamps and even cash in the others? We should have tied in with the criminal element long ago. We missed the boat there, George. It's the land of opportunity down here. A few years ago they were running rum, all the boozes, not fifty miles from where we're standing. We missed the boat. We missed the boat they run it in on."

Because his son was the only kid in town. Because he was more than just an errand boy. Because, if the truth be known, it was his dad who was the errand boy, who they paid, and well enough, too, but didn't bother to impress. So he knew it was a sideline, little more than a service to their clients, a nuisance, like free delivery. As a cab driver might write down flat rates to distant cities or a hooker have in her wardrobe, along with her regulation lace panties and see-through bras and garter belts, the odd cat-o'-nine-tails and cruel boots or nun's habit, holding them in readiness not because she was often asked to use this stuff but because they were part of the repertoire, even though she knew that all that was really expected of her was the ordinary push-pull of standardized l.u.s.t.

This was the way with almost the entire army of Ca.s.sadaga spiritualists.

"Many of the faithful have no faith," Professor G. D. Ashmore had told him. "They want the atmospherics of the visible and invisible planes of existence. They know that Death is a misnomer but can't break their Halloween habits, their skull and crossbones prejudices."

It was so. He was errand boy enough to know that much. He had often enough been sent off to borrow a pinch of ghost spice or jar of phantom powder as another child might be sent to neighbors for sugar or milk.

"The Spirit Kingdom is real as Canada," L. R. F. Grunbine-initials preceded their names like train whistles-liked to remind him, "but a.s.sociation drives their wills. They want mortuary silts, floral arrangements, candles, incense, all the hea.r.s.e perfumes and cemetery aromatics. They believe with their noses, love stuck in their olfactories like grime. They want soul thrills but shop like savages, the cheap built into their psyches like bad breath. They gypsy our science and Coney Island our cause. Superst.i.tion is the enemy of the occult, George." And W. A. Oaten Ernest had the same complaint. M. R. R. Keller did. (Mills no longer referred to them as Dr., Professor, Reverend, or Madam, dropping their honorifics before his father ever did, though it was his dad who continued to think of them as crooks and charlatans, addressing them for all that as they listed themselves on what he now called the billboard.) Only Wickland was still Reverend.

Of all the mystics, psychics, theosophists, astrologers, telepaths, palm readers, metapsychologists, diviners, fortune tellers, alchemists, necrophysicists, crystal gazers, and figure flingers in Ca.s.sadaga, only Wickland was Reverend. Nor did George believe any more in Wickland's bona fides than he did in the spiritual and scientific ordainments of Ca.s.sadaga's other metaphysicians. It was a simple matter of distancing.

The town's only child-nephew and grandson to all-he was in on their secrets, the tricks of their trade. Lessoned as a novitiate, closely drilled as an apprentice, often permitted to help with their proofreading, the pamphlets and handbooks they were endlessly writing, the psychic newsletters they were always getting out, he was their confidant, too. He read their mail to them, pet.i.tions of the mortally ill-the divines of Ca.s.sadaga were a forum of last resort: requests for clues to stave off death, appeals from widows, widowers-he learned that couples in their fifties and sixties and seventies still made love, ardent as teenagers; he learned, if not of the sanct.i.ty of marriage, at least of its addictive power, that love was always the last habit broken-to contact their dead.

There were letters of inquiry: "Dear Professor M. R. R. Keller, "I am eighty-two years old and very infirm. I do not expect to live out the year. Indeed, I feel so bad now and everything is so hard for me that I don't much want to. I am not a religious person, but I read your book about contact with the invisible world and I have followed your experiments and truly believe I have benefited from my experiences with discarnated Intelligences.

"I am writing for information. My problem is this. Nowhere in your book are any rules set down on how to behave when I am dead. Is there an etiquette in such things? Will I still be desirable to Lionel? He was only fifty-six when he pa.s.sed. Is it permissible for a woman my age to make the first move?

"I suppose I shall find out soon enough, but if you could suggest what is expected in these matters it might help to avoid awkward and unnecessary embarra.s.sment."

Keller's answer was straightforward as the letter which prompted it.

"Dear Mrs. Line, "I regret to say that my researches have not extended to the delicate areas in which you seek information. Might I suggest, however, that you consult some dear and trusted discarnated Intelligence directly and ask her?"

The Ca.s.sadagans never put a price on these exchanges, though a few dollars almost always accompanied a letter of inquiry. When it didn't the letter was answered anyway. George judged that most psychics were good for between twenty to thirty dollars a week from such correspondence, and though they made more by filling orders for the merchandise his father took into De Land, the merchandise remained the sideline, their psychic services the real business of their lives.

He was permitted to handle the gazing crystals, the clear, flawless globes like temperate, neutral ice, so transparent he felt he held invisible weight. He looked through prisms, altering light as one might pull the strings on marionettes. And tried the Aurospecs, seeing other people as if they were on fire, their green and red and orange radiance exploding off them like ga.s.ses from the surface of a sun, their jeweled and kindled selves seething about their persons like rainbows boiling. And pressed his ear to the seance trumpet and heard the muted sharps and flats of invisible performance.

But it was the letters which interested him most.

"Dear Dr. N. M. M. Kinsley, "I have been a pract.i.tioner of the Kinsley Astral Projection Method for the past five years and have had dozens of successful expeditions. I have visited the homes of several relatives at distances in excess of two thousand miles, although I am still unable to get past the Rocky Mountains.

"Always before, as your method proclaims, I have been most successful where need is greatest, when subliminal, subconscious Soul cries out to sensitized psychic Soul. These, as you well know, have not always been 'pleasant' experiences, the comfort I have been able to impart to a grieving cousin who has lost her young husband or a father temporarily separated from his son by the wall of death, being a fleeting, cold sort of comfort at best. I have tried, as you suggest in your superb tract, to bring them good will and the good news of immortality, but in their grief states I have noticed that they are not always, or even often, responsive. Indeed, since I am unable to take with me the departed's actual astral imprint, I have sometimes come away feeling of no more real use to the family than the ordinary well-intentioned condolence caller from church with her cakes and ca.s.seroles. However helpless I may feel psychologically when even under the best of circ.u.mstances I am able to leave only my well-meaning spiritual calling cards, a gesture which, in terms of lasting benefits, I dismiss in the very act of writing the word 'gesture,' I find that I return to my bed after such dubious house calls, enervated, depleted, exhausted, and profoundly unhappy.

"Here is the burden of my complaint. I am not by nature a Diabolist, no more than yourself. I have never subscribed to the old Manichean principle of the Good/Evil, Light/Dark, Heaven/h.e.l.l contrarieties. But now, well, I'm not so sure. It's not that my belief has been shaken, but really rather the opposite--that my belief has undergone an enhancement. Now I believe everything. everything. There are more things, Dr. Kinsley, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And 'dream,' I think, is the operative word. Those There are more things, Dr. Kinsley, than are dreamt of in your philosophy. And 'dream,' I think, is the operative word. Those I I am privy to through my nocturnal visitations have been, are, depraved. My own grandmother, a religious and even naive woman who has never harmed anyone in all her ninety-one years, has dreams which may not even begin to be described by the word 'randy.' They are filth, Doctor, p.o.r.nographic in the most debased sense of that term. Genitalia are undisguised, not Freudian obelisks or large bodies of water, not telephone poles or dark tunnels, but swollen c.o.c.ks and moistened c.u.n.ts, baby dolls with curling pubic hair about their slits-I am not being 'frank'; if anything I am glossing out of decency-erections severed from their groins and glistening in their dewy juices. My relatives' dreams, my cousins' and in-laws', are the very models of l.u.s.t. Sodomies are become exponential, perpetrated on dead house pets, onanism and f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o commonplace as scratching one's back or getting a haircut. I shan't recount the awful details. You can't imagine them, and I won't describe them, but if this is what is meant by 'Negative Life Forces with their capacity to deflect the subject's concentration from his loss,' then I suggest that further studies be done, that your treatise be updated. If these were simply my own observations I would be willing to discredit them, dismiss them on the grounds of anomaly and insufficient evidence rather than question fundamental scientific principles established over a lifetime of good and careful work, but the experience of other adepts confirms my own. Pract.i.tioners here in Michigan have told me at our monthly meetings of salacities which I dare not write down lest I come into conflict with the rules governing the postal service. They dream, the grieving do, of excesses and improprieties unknown even in the lowest days of the Roman Empire, unknown to history's heathens and pagans and barbarians, unknown, I daresay, even to the great perverts, the rippers and s.e.xual surgeons, innocents all in depravity when compared to these lechers of the hearth. am privy to through my nocturnal visitations have been, are, depraved. My own grandmother, a religious and even naive woman who has never harmed anyone in all her ninety-one years, has dreams which may not even begin to be described by the word 'randy.' They are filth, Doctor, p.o.r.nographic in the most debased sense of that term. Genitalia are undisguised, not Freudian obelisks or large bodies of water, not telephone poles or dark tunnels, but swollen c.o.c.ks and moistened c.u.n.ts, baby dolls with curling pubic hair about their slits-I am not being 'frank'; if anything I am glossing out of decency-erections severed from their groins and glistening in their dewy juices. My relatives' dreams, my cousins' and in-laws', are the very models of l.u.s.t. Sodomies are become exponential, perpetrated on dead house pets, onanism and f.e.l.l.a.t.i.o commonplace as scratching one's back or getting a haircut. I shan't recount the awful details. You can't imagine them, and I won't describe them, but if this is what is meant by 'Negative Life Forces with their capacity to deflect the subject's concentration from his loss,' then I suggest that further studies be done, that your treatise be updated. If these were simply my own observations I would be willing to discredit them, dismiss them on the grounds of anomaly and insufficient evidence rather than question fundamental scientific principles established over a lifetime of good and careful work, but the experience of other adepts confirms my own. Pract.i.tioners here in Michigan have told me at our monthly meetings of salacities which I dare not write down lest I come into conflict with the rules governing the postal service. They dream, the grieving do, of excesses and improprieties unknown even in the lowest days of the Roman Empire, unknown to history's heathens and pagans and barbarians, unknown, I daresay, even to the great perverts, the rippers and s.e.xual surgeons, innocents all in depravity when compared to these lechers of the hearth.

"I have an Uncle Joe in Vermont, a blacksmith by trade and, or so I would have thought, temperament, one of those red and black wool-shirted men who wear the checkerboard, who dress, I mean, like a game. A crony of a man, long underweared and gallused and wide leather belted too, one of the dark pantsed and wood stoved of earth who has the names and faces of his townsmen like a postmaster. A fisherman of a fellow, honest as a hunter, more loyal to the local woods and streams than to any nation, who has all the intricate weathers like a second language. A whittler of course, and volunteer fireman, a loresman of stone and all the materials of Nature, beech and maple, elm and ash, and all the secret, invisible grains of the human heart. Whose word is his bond--and he has many words, as comforting as honest. For children, for men with troubles and for sad ladies, for lame dogs and lamer ducks. You know the type, or if you're lucky do, an unofficial mayor of a man, powerful of course, muscled I mean, with strength that comes as much from virtue and good will as from hammer or heat. His power great but never guarded, not held like a secret or watched like his fire, no caution catching it up or checking it in, not anything fearful. My uncle's great strength, innocent as talent, like a good singing voice, or the gift of speed.

"And no bachelor. Uncle Joe a family man, that organic guy. The sort of man-this didn't happen-who might have married the sister-in-law when the sister died, who found the fit of love, I mean to say, who'd find it anywhere and count it as a wonder that his loved ones, all the folks he wanted most to be with in the world, his wife and children, nephews, sisters, nieces, brothers, should live so close to home, not even in the next valley but right there in the very town, beside him in the very section of the very church he prayed in, the very lake he swam in, the store he bought his staples.

"He married Aunt Elizabeth when both were twenty-eight. They had four children, my cousins Redford and Oliver and Susan and Ben, and raised them, he and Elizabeth-I don't mean strictly, I don't mean by any theory, I don't even mean good-naturedly-as naturally as Aunt Elizabeth might put up strawberries, following nothing more than the natural laws and time-honored processes of canning, first this, then that.

"Elizabeth died when the youngest, Oliver, was still in his teens.

"Fine young men, a lovely woman, whose only quarrel that I can now recall was who would get to stay with Joe. The smith profession is, of course, a languishing one, and while it was never a matter of who would make his way in the world, who would get to go off to the state university at Burlington-none would, none wanted to-but rather which would have to hire out, which would have to work the timber or the nearby farms or go to the factories where the money was, and which would remain-they wouldn't have thought of it as behind-with the benevolent, G.o.dlike father they loved as much for his kindness and wisdom as for his paternity.

" 'Mother's dead,' Susan told him. 'You have no woman, Father, no one to cook your meals or mend and wash or sing for you. The trade is falling on hard times. You're only fifty-two. You don't yet even need our young strength to help you at the forge. Send them away, dear. Let me stay.'

"Redford said, 'I'm the oldest, Father. It's the privilege of the oldest son-I don't say "duty," I say "privilege," I could say "right"-to follow in his father's footsteps, to help him in his profession. I don't want to take it over, sir. For this I care nothing, though should you desire it I would stay at the forge till after the last horse in Vermont had died, and after that as well. I would repair tools, fit new disks, harrows, shape new heads to nails, fashioning your iron as you taught me, building the fire to 1,535 degrees Centigrade, puddling and shingling, adding your water like transfusion. Allow me to remain, Father. I ask in the name of primogeniture.'

" 'I'm the youngest, Pa,' said Oliver. 'My boyhood isn't finished yet. I lost a mother. I'm not ready, Daddy. Don't send me off.'

"And Ben reminded him he was neither oldest son nor youngest, not special at all, not even female like his sister, that nothing about his birth gave him the special prerogatives or claims the three others had lived with all their lives. It was only justice and fair play, qualities whose names he might not even know had he not learned about them, a mute listener, an undistinguished son and brother, in his father's shop all his unexceptional life. It was only retroactive equity and redress he was seeking in asking to be allowed to stay with his father. It was only the presentation of a twenty-odd-year-old bill and quit-claim.

" 'You can't ask me,' Joe told them-they had come separately to make their cases but he answered them together-'to choose among my children. Your s.e.xes and ages are of no importance. Years make no precedence in love. Biology has no claims on it. You shall have to decide among yourselves.'

"It was only the next valley over, Dr. Kinsley, not the next state or county or even village. None was to be exiled, banished. It was understood that they could take their dinners together, not weekly, mind, but daily if they chose. Joe had built rooms onto his house as they were needed, had carpentered the beds and other furniture for each of his children, so that their living arrangements were not only adequate but actually lavish, the house as trim and ordered and ample to the needs of their bodies and imaginations as a child's tree house. It was their sense of seemliness and honor that guided them, their knowledge that if they continued to live together as a family now that all but one of them was grown, it would be as a family that had somehow gone off, spoiled in some acute, vinegarish way.

"That was when they quarreled. They did it where their father could not hear them, could not know of it. They had been told that they had to decide by themselves. Logic was useless. These were the claims of need and love. They soon saw that right had nothing to do with it, that each of their arguments was checked and canceled by the equally legitimate arguments of the others.

" 'We'll never convince each other,' Ben said. 'We'll have to fight it out.'

"Even Susan understood that Ben meant physically, that they would have to wrestle and punch for the right to stay with the wonderful old man. They were a blacksmith's children, had the blacksmith bone and blacksmith muscle. Each had grown up by the forge, each taken his or her turn with the hammer at the anvil. Susan had played with iron as another child might play with sand. They had never quarreled, never fought. They had no idea who was strongest. They didn't want to hurt each other and, at least in the beginning, each held back, withdrew not as an actual miser might actual money but like some old chivalrous soldier from the h.o.a.rd of his strength and wile that measured, calibrated advantage he perceived as waste, brutality, overkill, unfair edge. Merely pushing and shoving at first, merely milling about in the baled field of their combat, not so much testing the power of his or her foes as on guard to arrest and counter any sudden thrust. They might have been confronting each other tentatively as so many strikers and scabs, police and demonstrators, so that Redford must have thought of Ben, 'Why, he's delicate,' and Ben of Oliver with whatever of regret his nervousness permitted, 'Poor frail Ollie, so attenuated finally in those work clothes. He should should hire out, the outdoors will do him good,' and Susan of herself, remembering the anvil she had once actually lifted off the ground just to see if she could do it, 'Perhaps women are stronger than men, perhaps it's virginity which gives us the advantage, perhaps all force is moral force.' hire out, the outdoors will do him good,' and Susan of herself, remembering the anvil she had once actually lifted off the ground just to see if she could do it, 'Perhaps women are stronger than men, perhaps it's virginity which gives us the advantage, perhaps all force is moral force.'

"They feinted with each other for half an hour until it must have seemed even to themselves like some badly managed charade, even to country people who had never seen an actual prize fight in an actual ring, whose work was with the seasons, who levered Nature and Nature's crops, more a shy and nebulous routine of courtship, or the obscure, oblique forms preparatory to hard bargaining and doing business, than anything they were really there for.

" 'I've been fooling with you,' Susan admitted suddenly, and knocked Redford down with what she did not even know was an uppercut. Ben jumped on her back and tried to ride her to the ground but Oliver grabbed him from behind and pulled him off.

"The sister and brothers were startled by what had happened, amazed and ashamed by the sudden change that had come over them. Mutual protectors, they were mutual protectors still, but furious now, each rushing to the defense of the other, calculating punishment, doing the meticulous equations of violence and charging against the perpetrator the exact measure of the blow that had been struck. Susan, who had knocked Redford down with an uppercut, was knocked down by an uppercut by Ben. Oliver, who had pulled Ben's head back while Susan carried him across the field, was himself grabbed about the neck by Redford and thrown to the ground. Susan leaped at Redford to avenge Oliver. They struggled this way for perhaps a quarter of an hour.

" 'What we got here ain't no fight,' Ben managed breathlessly. 'What we got here is some antifight.' It was so. All could see it was so.

" 'We got to go all out, I guess,' Oliver said, 'or we'll never fix who gets to stay with Pa.'

"Possibly it was Oliver's logic. More likely it was the invocation of their dear father that brought them round. In either event, there was a battle royal, a free-for-all which bore about as much relation to the first fifteen minutes of their conflict as the last quarter of a football game does to the pregame ceremonies--the marching bands and prancing mascots and flash cards and all the simple pictographs of loyalty.

"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 s.e.x, 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, American, as he had ever been, the man most likely to break up a lynching, if you know what I mean. 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 pa.s.sed 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 gla.s.ses and long asbestos gloves and opened the door to the furnace to investigate. Behind smoked gla.s.ses 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 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 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 nolo contendere deal with greed and l.u.s.t, 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. deal with greed and l.u.s.t, 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 gla.s.ses 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.'

"So the unadvantaged (not disadvantaged, just only undistinguished by age or s.e.x) Ben put by his axes and saws and cleared his cuffs and cleats and clothes of the wooden flammable chips, shavings and twigs, the residual timber that clung to him like dew, and reported to his father at the forge.

" 'Well, one thing,' his father said, 'now you've got your priority, too.'

" 'Sure,' Ben said.

" 'Work the bellows while I start this fire.'

" 'Sure,' Ben said.

" 'Just remember what I told you. Squeeze it like you would an accordion. Easy. Easy. Try to imagine you're playing a waltz. It ain't no march, it ain't any square dance.'

" 'Sure.'

" 'Still too fast,' the father said. 'What we want is to give this fire a shove in the right direction. We ain't looking to blow it out the other end of the forge.'

" 'Sure,' Ben said.

" 'Ayuh. That's it. That's it. See how the color is evenly distributed? Just like leaves turning up on Kingdom Mountain.'

" 'Sure,' Ben said. 'Father?'

" 'You can put that down now. Why don't you just lay out my tools? I'll be needing my peen and maul. You can hand me the tamp and my small stemmer.'

" 'Sure. Father?'

" 'Fetch my spalling hammer too, why don't you? That special one with the claw head. What?'

" 'It's about my eulogy.'

" 'I fashioned the claw on this myself. Don't know why someone didn't think to do it earlier. Seems a simple enough adaptation. Stand back for a minute. I need some elbow room to swing this thing. What about it?'

" 'I don't mind about the psalms. Anyone would be pleased with those psalms. They're good psalms.'

" 'They're stately psalms.'

" 'Sure,' Ben said. 'It's the eulogy. Seeing as how I was neither eldest son nor youngest, nor even a daughter like Susan, seeing as how I was always sort of lost in there-I ain't saying misplaced, I ain't saying forgotten or even mislaid, though mislaid gives some of my sense of it-seeing as how I was just kind of ganged up on by accidental circ.u.mstance, I was wondering if you couldn't sort of distinguish me a little in the eulogy. All you'd really have to do is mention what I just said.'

"His father didn't answer him. They got through the day, Joe doing the close work, Ben relegated to helper, but a helper, he knew, of little more urgency and use to the blacksmith than the merest customer who might, the smith's mouth full of nails and his hands busy with tongs and sledge, almost casually tie up the back of his leather ap.r.o.n if it came undone. Joe referred to what his son had said only once. It was after they had finished for the day. He was banking the fires. 'Don't think about your eulogy,' he said.

" 'You don't believe anything's going to happen?' Ben asked.

" 'Don't think about your eulogy,' Joe said. 'It's a towering sin for a man to second-guess what folks are going to say about him when he's gone. Don't think about your eulogy.'

"But it was all all he could think about, all his father gave him the he could think about, all his father gave him the chance chance to think about. Coddled as he was in the dangerous shop, protected by his dad from any work which could result in a fatal mistake, buffered even from the friendly banter of the customers and idle men who came to watch the blacksmith at his interesting work or hear him talk-'Stand well back, Ben,' the smithy warned, 'these fools are knee slappers and it's close quarters here. Just a sudden gesture of comradely affection or approval could send something irrevocable flying or shy the horses and bring us down'-he could think of nothing else. to think about. Coddled as he was in the dangerous shop, protected by his dad from any work which could result in a fatal mistake, buffered even from the friendly banter of the customers and idle men who came to watch the blacksmith at his interesting work or hear him talk-'Stand well back, Ben,' the smithy warned, 'these fools are knee slappers and it's close quarters here. Just a sudden gesture of comradely affection or approval could send something irrevocable flying or shy the horses and bring us down'-he could think of nothing else.

"He was not distracted. Kept at a safe distance from the furnace so that he never had a chance to become acclimated to it, he could feel the heat. Having no reason ever to put on the dark smoked gla.s.ses, he saw everything clearly in its natural light.

"He believed what his father said, what the best man he had ever known had told him. He knew it was a towering sin always to be thinking about what the man would say of him in his eulogy. He knew he was wrong, deeply wrong, wrong to the bone, that at last he had the justice and fair play he had begged for when he'd asked his father to allow him to stay and to send his brothers and sister off. He knew he'd always had it and he was ashamed of himself.

"So he was not distracted. He felt the heat. He saw everything in the shop in fine detail.

"He remembered the precise degree of temperature when iron smelted. He could estimate almost as precisely the heat in the shop twenty feet from the fired forge, fifteen feet, ten, five, a few inches. When he opened its door that night after his father and Oliver had gone to bed and put his head inside it, he could make out for an instant the exact color values of the fulgurant ingots and could detect, flaring down from true against the corona of the iron soup, the just darker flecks of slag and carbon like the specks of some stone seasoning.

"Uncle Joe buried Ben alongside Elizabeth, Redford and Susan, his coffin, though Ben was a few inches taller than the others, the same size theirs had been. He spoke the same stately psalms and offered a eulogy which, though richly delivered, did not vary from the earlier ones by so much as a comma.

" 'You don't have to if you don't want to,' he told Oliver.

" 'h.e.l.l,' said Oliver, 'we got a tradition. We're on a roll. You don't just walk away from a tradition like you'd move out of the kitchen once the dishes are done.'

" 'Don't say h.e.l.l,' his father said.

" 'And I'm twenty now,' Oliver said. 'I got ten months till I'm twenty-one. I figure I got at least that much time to get so expert in the trade that by the time I reach my majority and circ.u.mstances swarm me I might even be of some use to you.'

"He was wrong though. Not about his ability to learn, though he was in fact already expert and of great use to his father. He was the one who had hired out, who had driven the disk harrows and tractors and balers, who had handled the plows and cultivators, who was as familiar with the machinery and wagons of agriculture as any cowboy with his mount or musician with the pegs and valves of his instruments. He knew their tensions and faults, could guess from a funny sound in the field just which part had busted off, and was so familiar with their shapes and resistances that he could estimate to within a foot the direction and angle of their roll. What he brought to the business was a knowledge of broken pieces, shard, some synecdochic, jigsaw sense of the whole. 'Here,' he'd say, 'let me do that,' when some farmer helplessly held out the ruined rude pinnings and copulas, the pegs, dowels, brads, and hasps of his sad, collapsed one-horse-shay equipment.

" 'He's like a jeweler,' they said. It was true.

"Oliver halved the time that would ordinarily have been given over to fashioning new pieces from scratch, and the business, always steady, began suddenly to flourish.

" 'Are you pleased?' he asked his father one day.

" 'I'll work with the animals and run off the big shapes I'm familiar with,' Joe said. 'You do the Swiss watches.'

"He set up a comer of the shop for his son and now the boy was screened from his father and all the activity by the large anvil as ever Ben had been. Few cared to watch him work and, when sometimes people did drift over, they could see very little of what he was doing-his work was too meticulous, it did not lend itself to raillery-and soon moved back to where the grander, more dramatic activity was going on at Joe's end.

"Oliver listened with his back to them while he worked, much as he had heard the sudden pings and small crashes of the brittle machinery in the fields, hearing everything only after it was already behind him but making his adjustments for deflection and pitch and yaw by the sound of the voice, guessing not only the speaker but the one addressed and listening, too, for the rhythmic, sedative slaps of his father's hammer on the steel anvil.

"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 a.s.sent 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 b.i.t.c.h!' he screamed, and raised the tool high above his head.