Baltimore's Mansion Read Online Free PDF Page B

his parents on the wall above the mantelpiece.
    His father didn’t just learn to be a blacksmith from
his
father. He inherited, had drilled into him, a certain style of blacksmithing; he mimicked his father’s choice and way ofwielding tools, saw, by watching him, what the period of a hammer stroke should be, how long a certain kind of metal should be heated. He has heard people say that they can see in his father’s work a kind of ghost of his grandfather’s.
    His father’s specialty is grapnel anchors — cod-jigger-shaped, chandelier-size six-fluted anchors that are used by small-boat fishermen like himself.
    He goes outside. The forge in winter is a strange meeting place of warm and cold, water and ice. Snow is falling, and a thin layer of it has collected on the roof. It gets no deeper, for it is also melting constantly. From the eaves of the forge hang icicles that, like the snow, somehow freeze and melt at once. Streams of water run from them as if from spigots.
    The roof of the forge steams like a hot spring. A trench of water has built up around the base of the forge, overflowed and trickled down the hill where it has turned to a lava-like fold of ice. All winter long, a new, overlapping fold has formed with each firing of the forge, so that now the runoff is ten feet deep, a massive, discoloured, ever-growing heap of ice that his mother calls the Melt. She warns him every day to stay away from it, but he ignores her.
    The shingles on the roof of the forge are glued into place with pitch, which flavours the Melt. He goes down to the Melt and breaks off a chunk of pitch-flavoured ice, goes about sucking on it like a Popsicle. His mother blames his every winter illness on the Melt. She tells him the pitch will turn his insides black as coal, asks if he has ever heard of the expression “pitch-black,” tells him horses and other animals contribute to the water from which the Melt is formed, but he doesn’t care. The Melt’s sweet-tasting ice is free.
    He goes back to the house and, hours later, looks out at the forge again. It is dark now and the little structure glows from within, the coal-fired flame of the furnace glinting blue and orange at the windows, the door closed despite the buildup of heat this causes. His father does not want the sound of his hammering to bother his neighbours, whose day is long since done.
    When at last he comes in from the forge, his face is streaked with soot, rivers of black sweat run down his forearms and his neck. The undershirt he wears beneath his leather apron is drenched. His father removes his apron and, with all his strength, throws it against the wall.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Nan says.
    A strange thing has happened, something his father says he has heard of but has never seen before. His anvil, at a single blow of his hammer, shattered into pieces like a block of black ice. It must have frozen to the core the night before and then thawed to the point that with one more blow of the hammer, it would crack.
    He doesn’t believe it. None of them do. They all run out to the forge to see if he is fooling them. He expects to find it in two or three pieces. But it seems more undone, more unmade than broken. It no longer looks like iron, let alone an anvil. It’s as if a chunk of coal has been pulverized into a mound of gleaming ash.
    His father says he will have to go to St. John’s to get a new anvil.
    â€œFirst thing tomorrow,” Nan says, but his father shakes his head. The men will come as usual with their horses, and to him it is unthinkable to turn them all away. He does not say it, but they know he cannot stand the thought of the forgewithout an anvil, does not want it so one second longer than it has to be.
    â€œYou’re not going down the Shore in the darkness by yourself,” Nan says.
    â€œGordon can take the punt out with Uncle Will in the morning,” his father says. “Art can come with me to