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last thing his father does is temper the nail in the briny slop of the slack tub. “Keeps it from getting rusty,” he says. Then he hangs it up to dry.
    His favourite contraption is the bellows, which looks like a flattened accordion with handles attached. It is made of slats of wood overlaid with leather and has all sorts of valves and pipes, levers, balances and counterbalances.
    The fire has begun to burn down. He watches as his father pauses from his work to pump the bellows up to full blast. He pedals with one foot and works the handles like he is cutting grass with a massive pair of shears. Red-faced and sweating, hisfather concentrates on his efforts while the bellows makes its way through a series of hoots, honks and blares, climbs the musical scale until finally it begins to whistle and the fire in the forge flares up again.
    From his pile of rough stock out back, his father makes runners for huge sleds used for hauling wood in the wintertime. He makes skates for his children and for all the children of Ferryland who cannot afford real skates, which is most of them. He welds and fits wagon tires, hub rings. But mostly he shoes horses.
    He turns away from the fire to look at a photograph that his sister Freda took. The photograph hangs on the wall of the forge farthest from the fire. In it, their father stands outside the forge, his hands on his hips. Grimy-faced and smiling, his neck-to-foot apron making him seem even shorter and stockier than he is, he looks almost elfin, an assistant fresh from the heat and turmoil of creation, soon to cheerfully resume his task, as if all the world’s implements originate from that little shack behind him. Beneath the photograph, there is a little sign that Freda made, which reads “Ferryland’s Hephaestus.” His father was greatly taken by it when she explained that Hephaestus was the god of the forge, the guardian of fire who made the armour of all the other gods, Zeus’s thunderbolts, Achilles’ shield, Diana’s arrows and Europa’s golden basket.
    When she went away to normal school two years ago to become a teacher, Freda gave their father a book called
A History of Newfoundland
by Judge D. W. Prowse. In that book there is a letter written to Lord Baltimore by a man named Edward Wynne, the overseer of the colony at Ferryland. Dated July 28, 1622, it informs Lord Baltimore that “the Forge hath been finished this five weekes.” Counting back five weeks from thisdate, his father concluded that the first forge in Ferryland was completed on the Feast Day of St. John the Baptist, June 24, 1622, the 125th anniversary of Cabot’s landing at Cape Bonavista, and the day, in 1905, of the sighting of the Virgin Berg. His father did not read all of Prowse’s history. Freda had underlined that sentence for him and put an asterisk beside it. “The Forge hath been finished this five weekes.” His father considers himself to be one of a long line of blacksmiths, descended if not by blood then by trade from the unnamed smith who worked the forge in 1622.
    It is Freda who talks about “the Johnston blacksmiths,” as if that were their hyphenated last name, the Johnston-Blacksmiths, as if she were recounting the history of a lost line of the Johnstons that had petered out before their time. She says there have been Johnston blacksmiths in Ferryland at least since James Johnston set up shop in 1848.
    In Ferryland, his father is as essential to the ceremony of matrimony as the priest. It is standard to include a blacksmith on a wedding guest list and to invite him to make a toast to the couple. It is believed he will bring good luck to the bride and groom, “forging” their union forever.
    His parents have gone to every Catholic wedding in Ferryland for the past thirty years. They appear in wedding party photographs all over Ferryland. He once went into a house for the first time and was startled to see a picture of