Another Governess / The Least Blacksmith: A Diptych (9 page)

I retrace my steps to the bakery but I make a mistake. I do not remember this intersection. I choose a street. The streets by the wharves are narrow and winding. I end up back by the bay. Now I am farther from the forge than I was when I followed the doctor to his office. I pass the muddy stretch on the edge of the bay. The knife with the broken blade is lying on the mud. All around the knife the mud is deeply gouged. There must have been a great struggle on the mud, a struggle for the knife. I slide the knife into the bag with the bread. I examine a dead fish on the mud. If its scales were bright I would pry off the scales with the broken blade of the knife, but the scales are dull. I leave the knife in the bag. Something moves by the hull of an overturned boat. A soldier is crouching by the overturned boat. He gestures. I cannot interpret the gesture of the soldier. The gesture must be a command. I hurry to the soldier. I have never seen a soldier crouched by a boat in the mud. The soldier stands as I approach. His hair and beard are very long, and his uniform is all one piece. I realize the soldier is a monk from the peninsula.

The monks from the peninsula make their uniforms out of cloth from the drapery, the same cloth that is cut into the uniforms for the soldiers. Unlike the uniforms of the soldiers, the uniforms of the monks are not cut into shirts and trousers. Their uniforms are all one piece. A soldier would never wear a uniform that was all one piece. Soldiers need uniforms that are two pieces, shirts and trousers. Now that I know that the soldier is a monk, I do not have to obey his gesture. I can walk away. I hope that I was not seen obeying the monk's gesture. The wharves have emptied, but someone could be watching from an office window or from the high deck of a ship. As I turn to walk away from the monk, I notice he is wearing an iron talisman. The talisman looks familiar. I ask the monk about the talisman, but he shakes his head. He is a monk who does not speak. The monk rummages in his sack. He puts a jar of gooseberry jam in my hand. He holds out his hand. I put the jar back in his hand. The monk continues to hold out his hand with the jar balanced on his palm. Even though I look down at the mud, I can tell that the monk is looking at me.

I begin to walk away from the monk. From behind, I hear a high, thin sound. The sound is high enough to make a pain in my ear. I turn. The monk's arm is straight out, the jar balanced on his hand. The monk is screaming. He has not opened his mouth to scream, or he is screaming with his mouth open to a slit that is hidden by his beard. I go and take the jar from the monk. The monk screams louder. He lifts the empty hand to my face. His fingers are curled. I see the long cracked nails with dirt in the cracks. The nails come close to my mouth. The monk screams louder and louder. Someone will think I am abusing the monk. I put the last of my brother's money in the monk's hand. The monk closes his hand around the money. The scream stops. I can still feel air coming out of the monk. The monk is forcing air from his lungs with no sound. I back away. The monk does not move. He looks at me, with his eyes stretched open wide and his mouth hidden by his beard. He lowers his closed hand to his side.

I am so late that I run up the hill. The clanging from the forge is very loud. My brother is working hard. I go into our house. Nothing has moved. My brother did not break for lunch. Two chairs are pushed out from the table. Our father's ledgers are piled at one end of the table. There are two dishes on the table. There is a fork on each dish. I swat the flies from the dishes. I unwrap the meat. I fry strips of meat. I slide the bread from its paper bag. The crust of the bread has grayed with ink from the newspaper. I fry the bread in the grease from the meat. I put the meat and the bread on the dishes. I put most of the meat and bread on my brother's dish. Before I take the dishes to the forge, I remember to take the knife with the broken blade from the bag. I do not want my brother's help repairing the knife. I should be able to repair the knife easily. I hide the knife in my bed between the bed mat and the frame. I realize I have already begun to refer to the knife as the “champion's knife.” When I repair the knife I will be the champion of the wharves.

My brother is too hungry to ask questions about what I did all day in town. He eats standing up at the anvil. I eat standing at the double doors. I have no difficulty emptying my dish, even though I ate the loaf of bread earlier in the afternoon. I must be growing. I look out at the bay. The sun is low over the bay. The air over the bay contains the highest quantity of salts. My brother told me the air over the bay is so thick with salts the salts cause optical illusions. This is why the sun appears so large over the bay. It is magnified by the prisms of the salts. My brother is wrong. The sun is very large, far larger than it appears over the bay. The sun is larger than the world. Salts in the air must shrink the image of the sun. This is why we see the sun as a disc instead of a burning plane that fills the sky. My brother tries to repeat what our father told him. For the first time I am hearing our father's stories. It must have been different to hear the stories from our father. Our father was never wrong. Something happens to our father's stories when my brother repeats them. They are changed. My brother believes what he repeats. He does not realize there is a difference between the stories he repeats and our father's stories. There must be a difference.

I look out at the bay. The whole sky is bright. The sun is a disc, low and dull in the sky. The brightness of the sky does not come from the disc. The sky and the disc are illusions caused by the salts in the air. Behind them is the burning plane. I can almost see it. I have to open my eyes wide and look toward the outside corner of each eye. Then I can almost see it. No one taught me this skill. I taught myself. I am the only person in the town who can see through the sky. If the doctor ran tests on me in his office, he might discover the physiological basis of this skill. His machines might express the physiological basis of this skill graphically, making finely inked lines. Instead of describing my skill, I could show people a printout from the doctor. Everyone would admire the beautiful waveforms on the printout, waveforms emitted by my brain and inked by the doctor's machines.

My brother comes to make sure I have emptied my dish. I have emptied my dish. It is time to work. My brother takes a leather apron from the nail. He hangs the leather apron from my neck. He has not cut the leather apron to my size like he promised. The skirt of the apron touches the ground. I have to be careful or I will trip. A striker should not trip. It is only excusable to lie on the floor of the forge one time. Our father lay on the floor of the forge one time. He lay on his back and his hair was on fire. His eyelids swelled. His cheeks swelled. The skin on his cheeks split. Fluids ran down the slopes of his cheeks, toward the ears and the chin. My brother doused our father with the water from the tub. Thin black smoke rose from our father's face. My brother sent me to town so I did not have to breathe our father's smoke.

It is difficult to remember faces. To picture our father I look at my brother. When my brother turns his back, I forget how our father looked. I remember our father on his back on the floor. The tip of his nose had been burned away on the coals. There was a hole in our father's nose. It was big enough to hold a cigar. That was not how our father's face looked. Our father's face was changed by the hearth. Only his hands were unchanged. They were big, with dirty grains in the skin. The doctor put our father's hand on his chest. He put the cigar in our father's hand. According to the doctor, this was a natural pose for our father, the pose of our father as a small boy on the wharves. Our father always held a cigar or a knife on the wharves with the doctor. The doctor remembered our father best in this pose.

A storm must have blown in from the ocean after dark. The sky is dense and black. In the flashes of lightning, the dark skin beneath my brother's eyes looks burned. His lips look burned. He banks the fire for the night. In the house, he eats cold meat from the pan. I open the newspaper. I find the obituary for our father. I had not known the date our father was born. I say the date to my brother. My brother already knew the date. He says he has the same birthday as our father. My brother tells me the year he was born. I do the figures in my head. Our father was exactly the age my brother is now when my brother was born. I did not realize our father had my brother so young. My brother does not say anything more. I wonder if he is doing the figures in his head.

I read our father's obituary to my brother. I am not mentioned in our father's obituary as a survivor of our father. My brother says newspapers have limited space for obituaries. It is not practical to list every survivor. My brother is our father's survivor. My brother says he is glad he is listed. The only difference between our father and my brother is the year they were born. The year my brother was born is not mentioned in the obituary. Only my brother's name is mentioned. When they read my brother's name in our father's obituary, people will see that there is no difference between the deceased and the survivor. There has been no interruption in service at the forge. My brother does not recognize the address for the memorial service. I tell him it is the address of the doctor's office. My brother has no interest in going to the doctor's office for the memorial service. He says it is not appropriate for the survivor to be in the same place as the deceased.

Before I go to bed my brother wants me to put him in my mouth. He opens his pants and turns his chair to the side. If he did not turn his chair to the side I would have had to crawl under the table to reach my brother. I rest one hand on the edge of my brother's chair and one hand on the table. I wish my mouth were not so small and dry. My brother is patient with me, but he is disappointed. He has to use his hand while I crouch by the chair.

Lying in bed, I cannot fall asleep. I took longer than I should have near the wharves and my brother had to use his hand. I do not know how to improve myself. If I had followed the doctor into his office perhaps he would have given me one of his capsules. The doctor would not have given me a capsule. Doctors only offer capsules to their patients. He might have given me a capsule for my brother. I decide to stay up all night so I will be awake before my brother in the morning. I will be ready to go to work in the forge. I wake up with a start when my brother shakes my shoulder. He has already fried the meat for breakfast. The air through the windows is salty and fresh with last night's storm.

My brother does not know why there are no customers. He dresses three axes. He forges hoe after hoe. He paces to the double doors of the forge. It is a clear day. On clear days, you can see the peninsula across the bay, the faint gray outline of the mountains. My brother calls to me. He can see the peninsula. I join him at the double doors. The day is exceptionally clear. I can see the stone monasteries set high on the mountains. The peninsula is long and thin. It stretches across the horizon. I do not know where the peninsula attaches to the coast. It must attach some place far away, in the wilderness to the south. The peninsula is not continuous. There are breaks in the peninsula through which ships enter the bay. The ships in the bay fly bright civil ensigns. They have come from far away, across the ocean. They move very quickly through the waters of the bay. The foreigners like to cross the bay at alarming speeds. The speeding ships make crossing from the peninsula to the town dangerous for the monks. The boats of the monks are crudely built, with low sides, and they take on water when they cross the rough waves of the bay. The monks build laughable boats. It is a miracle that their boats stay afloat on the bay.

The foreigners play a game with the monks. The captains of the ships try to drive their ships over the boats of the monks. The foreigners gather on the decks of the ships. They laugh. They look down to the water to see if there are small boats tossing in the wakes of the ships. Monks wash up by the wharves of the town. The doctor's practice is thriving. He has more and more opportunities to use his medical equipment. It is too bad all of the monks died in the same way. It must not be challenging for the doctor. I am sure that the monks do not produce big packets of paper like our father. The monks do not even receive obituaries in the newspaper. Instead there is a tally, a tally of the monks who have washed up by the wharves. This is how the foreigners keep score. Games with the monks keep the captains of the ships from becoming bored in a town as small as ours.

I tell my brother about the monk I saw by the wharves. The monk had not washed up by the wharves. He was lucky and had not lost the game to a captain. He had arrived alive by the wharves of the town. He did not lie face down. He crouched by his boat on the mud. I describe the iron talisman. My brother is not surprised by my description. He says the monks make their own talismans. There is a forge on the peninsula. A long time ago, the man who sold our father's father the forge left the town for the peninsula. He became a monk. He built a new forge on the peninsula. He taught the monks to forge talismans. The monks know how to work iron thanks to the man who sold our father's father the forge.

My brother closes the double doors of the forge. I look at the iron door pulls. They are the same as the monk's talisman. That is why the monk's talisman looked familiar. I feel close to the monks now that I know their talismans are modeled on the pulls of the double doors.

The man who sold our father's father the forge had lost his family to a disease. They could not keep any fluids inside their bodies and even their skin lost its moisture and shrank. It was a common disease. The man buried his family behind the forge. He had no living relatives and so he no longer had any hope for the future of the forge. My brother says that is why the man sold our father's father the forge. He did not care that our father's father changed the name of the forge. The man's name was no longer important. He decided to become a monk on the peninsula. Monks do not have names. They are called brothers. Brother is how they greet each other unless they have taken a special vow. In that case, they exchange only gestures when they meet.

Before the town became prosperous, it was common for men to lose hope. It was good that the peninsula was so close to the town, right across the waters of the bay. Men could leave the town for the peninsula. All they needed was to build a small boat. Speeding ships did not drive over small boats in the bay. The men arrived safely on the peninsula. The monks would welcome the newcomers, even though the newcomers had no hope for the future. Monks do not have sons. If the monks did not welcome newcomers, they would not be able to replace the monks who have died. The order of monks would dwindle. Nobody would inhabit the monasteries on the mountains. The monasteries would become dens for animals, the wild boars that live on the peninsula. Rose bushes would fill the lower stories, the branches would crack the panes of glass in the windows, they would grow through the windows. The windows would become bright with the hips and flowers of roses and the jagged pieces of broken glass. The monasteries are definitely inhabited. The windows are dark.

Now that the foreigners have come, every townsperson benefits from investments in his town. Men no longer lose hope. They do not build small boats to cross the bay. Only the monks cross the bay in small boats. Sometimes the monks take young boys from town back to the peninsula in their boats. By welcoming newcomers and taking young boys, the order of monks has prevented itself from dwindling. Now that there are no newcomers arriving on the peninsula, the monks must take as many young boys as they can. Luckily, the captains play games with the monks and most of the monks arrive face down by the wharves. Those monks cannot take young boys. Instead, they are taken by the doctor, taken to his office at the end of the dead end street.

I wonder if the monks can see our forge from their monasteries on the peninsula. Nothing blocks the view of the forge. The monks must be able to see the red light across the bay. We cannot see the red light of the monks' forge, but the monks' forge might be located on the other side of the monasteries, facing the ocean, or it might be located near the bottom of a ravine.

There are stories of monks taking the young boys from the town in their boats and devouring them down in the ravines of the peninsula. I do not believe these stories. The boys who are taken by the monks must be kept alive so that they can receive instruction. It is important that the next generation of monks learns how to make the jams and the talismans and the boats. If the monks devoured the boys, there would be no young monks to carry on the practices and beliefs of the order. The practices and beliefs of the monks might involve devouring boys, but I do not think the order could have lasted so long if that were the case. Beneath his hair and beard, the monk I saw by the overturned boat did not seem old. Not too long ago he may have been a boy in the town.