Wash (16 page)

Takes Rufus a minute of standing there thinking about it before he says anything.

“Can’t make it like the rest. Need a short stem so I can choke up on it good.”

He feels their hesitation and turns away to lift their own stock brand off the wall before turning back to them, letting the heavy tip of the big brand drop toward Eli until it hovers close to his face, T for Thompson just to the right of his nose.

“Long stem on a heavy brand gives you shaky aim. Not much room on a face.”

Rufus can see Eli watching the muscles in his arm working to hold the heavy brand steady, then looking over at Campbell. Then both brothers nod at Rufus, mainly to cut that long moment short, with Campbell saying whatever you think as they leave. There’s not much they can do about it when Rufus is right and he usually is. They can, however, take credit for his good ideas and they usually do.

Eli pauses on the way out, stepping back across the threshold of the shop, saying let me write you an R and looking for some chalk. But Rufus steps in his path before Eli can get too far, making it seem like all he’s doing is reaching for another stock brand he has just finished for Everett Roberts. He lifts it off the wall and lets the head of the brand drop close past Eli’s ear to make a print of the letters in the soft dirt floor. The three men stand there together looking at the E and the R written side by side in the dirt and all Eli can say is all right.

As the boys head back to the house, Rufus sees Wash coming in with a full load of charcoal. He shoves two rods into his died down fire and starts to map out the brand in his mind, muttering to himself what he knows better than to say to those boys.

“I’m making it but I’m damned if I put a leaf on it.”

Wash walks through the door asking him, what? Rufus tells him to get the bellows going. Wash dumps the charcoal in the bin all at once, making a great clatter and a cloud of soot. Rufus frowns at him but Wash keeps at it, asking what’s next? Rufus stays quiet.

As Wash stokes the fire with the bellows, Rufus uses the chalk from his pocket to draw an R on his anvil. Then he measures his line to see how much iron he’ll need to make the letter and where he’ll have room to weld the stem on. His chalk R glows white on the shiny dark anvil but Rufus lays a hammer down over it before Wash has a chance to see.

Sends him for more charcoal just to get him out of there, saying never mind the bin is already full, do what he said do. Wash doesn’t want to leave so he lingers until Rufus gets mad enough to straighten up.

“Tell you what, why don’t you take the week? Go work for Pompey on the old tobacco barn. See can he teach you to mind.”

Wash knows better than to slam the door behind him but he mutters to himself as he stomps off to find Pompey. Rufus watches him go before turning back to his work.

This R brand calls out Rufus’s name just like everything else he makes. There’s a liquid grace to the shapes he coaxes from his iron. Everybody’s work looks a little different. Some is taste and choosing but most is in the rise and fall of one man’s hammer, as individual as a fingerprint. No matter whether he’s making workaday hooks and hinges or fancier specialty items like fire screens or candlesticks, the way Rufus works his metal makes his pieces look like water moving and the boys can charge more for his work than any of the rest of them can charge for theirs.

Even this R is a river, hooking around to loop back on itself. And the leg of this R kicks up at its tip, looking like nothing so much as the foot on a leg running. Rufus does this part on purpose. That foot kicking up is his way of saying good luck, safe passage and God be with you.

Those who get Rufus’s R laid on their face can finger the scar and when they reach that foot at the end of their R, they’ll think about the next time. They’ll feel their own legs running hard through brush and swamp, carrying them right on out of there. The whole way.

Eli rides through the yard, calling for Rufus as he passes by his door. Asking has he got it done yet. Saying hurry up, we’re headed out.

Rufus walks out of his shop carrying his file in one hand and the new brand in the other. The letter is still cooling from orange so he holds the brand halfway down its shaft with a thick gritty rag so he won’t burn himself.

“Ain’t cleaned up good yet.”

“Don’t need to be perfect so long as we can read it. We got three to do over at Henderson’s. Said he might shoot the one who started it so we’ll do a trial run on him. See how it turns out.”

Rufus has already told them he has too much work to ride with them, even though it’s usually him who does the branding. He has a reputation for being quick and careful. But he’s staying here today so he carries the new brand over to where Eli sits on his horse, waiting for his brother. Rufus likes that the brand’s still hot as he hands it up to Eli, who has forgotten his gloves in his rush.

Eli yanks his horse around and spurs him forward, furious with Rufus for once again doing exactly what he told him to. No more, no less. His burned hand stings as he canters down the drive, carrying the brand like a crop.

Rufus does not want to think about the men soon to be branded, so he steps closer to his forge because it radiates the same kind of hot dry heat he remembers from home. He feels the yellowgold sun of his childhood pressing in on him, lying on his skin with a weight like touch.

At home, there was always some air to breathe. No matter how hot and hard and bright the sky pressed down, there was some shade to step inside. But here, it feels like the air has turned into a thick piece of meat you have to bite into to get some for yourself. As blazing as it got at home, as blindingly bright, Rufus never once wondered where his next breath was coming from. In this new world, that worry stays with him every single day of August and sometimes July.

And when it rains, the mud here is never soft and tender like skin. As a child, Rufus had loved the coming of the rainy season as much for a break in the long tension of brittle dryness as for the silky shiny mud, rising ticklish and slick between his toes, and the awakening of long buried frogs, salamanders and lilies.

Here, the wet sticky hot is all the time and not a relief from anything so Rufus moves closer to his forge. And when that dry heat starts to bake him, he falls right back into his past.

∞

A red dirt path curves down out of the mountains, widening into a road as it heads toward a string of villages. There is an altercation on this road. A woman standing there with her two boys. One a small eight and the other a tall twelve. She pulls both sons close against her belly, begging the catchermen, no not these. Please.

She tells them there’s a much bigger stronger man alone in the forest right now. She tells them about Rufus who was not called that then. She describes the sacred clearing where he works alone preparing for tomorrow’s iron smelt. Making offerings and saying prayers so the process will be fruitful. She describes him out there alone and vulnerable, delirious with the heat and the spirit. The men don’t understand and move closer.

She points to their guns and their knives, lifting and dropping her hand as if she is hammering the knife blade flat, then pats her chest as if it is she who made them. As soon as she does this, the men look at each other, running down the list of special orders in their minds. They know there is at least one for a blacksmith. Taken whole and unharmed for an old man named Thompson in North Carolina. For his boys.

As they turn away from her, she feels her heart hammer in her chest. She tells herself there are other smiths. Maybe she figures Rufus can be spared. And she has heard the missionaries talking about how smiths are sorcerers and sorcery is the work of the devil. With the way everything in her world has been turned upside down by these raids, maybe she has begun to think these men of God are right.

At least Rufus is much older and stronger than her boys. He has a better chance of surviving. This is what she tells herself as she hurries her boys home and inside.

The road is hot and sunny but deeper in the mountains there are pockets of cool where the trees have grown so large the ground under them never gets direct sun. These places stay green long into the dry season. Rufus likes to be with these old trees, feel them towering over him. As he prepares his offerings, bending to sweep the ground at the mouth of the furnace’s tall clay chimney, laying out braided grasses and vessels of palm wine, he has the sense something is watching him and it does not feel right. He keeps stopping to listen but does not hear anything.

When he gets to the point where he has to put his whole mind into his prayers, he calls up his spirits and they come to him. Swirling up through his feet and legs, running up his spine to spread across his shoulders like a mantle, shimmering warm at the crown of his head before pouring down his arms and out through his hands. He is in the middle of it all when the catchermen get so spooked by the sucking swirling feeling that they stand from their hiding places, circling him with guns aimed.

He is stunned. Secret sacred chants hang from his mouth like ribbons. No one is supposed to see or hear any of this. He feels betrayed. Why haven’t the spirits let him know? He knew it had been harder to call them up on this day but he had persisted. He had bent them to the strength of his will and they had come. They had come but they had come blind and deaf and they are useless to him now.

He pulls in a deep breath, as if he is trying to suck back inside himself all that these hiding men have just heard, even as he can tell by looking that they don’t speak his language. His chest expands with the effort and the air burns his lungs. Time is passing but Rufus cannot take hold of his mind to steer it. One slow step at a time, the circle closes in on him. It is as if he has become one of his beloved trees with roots branching down into the earth from the soles of his feet.

He and his friends had sat around the fire discussing this exact moment again and again. What they would do and how. They sat around their fire, shrouded in the blindness of their youth, determined that such a thing could never happen to them.

The men step closer. He knows if he runs, they might not shoot him in the hopes they can catch him unharmed later. He knows the woods better than they do. He still has time. He sees himself breaking and running, sliding like oil between the outstretched hands of the men. He even sees them turn to look after him empty handed and forlorn.

It is just as he watches himself slipping out of their sight when he feels their hands close on him. They are jubilant, yelling as they grab his arms, jerking his hands behind his back to tie them together. Rufus does not struggle. Something holds him still. They are as surprised as he is, manhandling him to the ground as if he were fighting, until the truth of his stillness seeps through their hands and arms to their heads.

They tell themselves that he must be as dense as he is big, nodding to one another while jerking him with the tying of their knots. But that picture of Rufus standing tall and strong, chanting in front of the furnace, swims in their minds, raising the hair on their arms even as he’s tied on the ground.

They pull him to standing and walk him in the direction of the coast. He can turn his head just enough to see the clearing behind him for the first few steps. Because Rufus is looking over his shoulder and walking downhill while he is being pushed and pulled, the tall clay chimney tilts at a crazy angle, falling down over and over again in great jerky flashes with each step.

How had they found the secret place? Why had he not run? Why had he let himself be marched down the mountain, past the compound of the woman with her two boys, past the edge of his own village? It’s shut up tight as an armadillo during this raid but still full of people hiding as if dead behind smooth clay walls, with the smallest children stuffed inside grain pots or buried underneath mounds of dried corn.

And even though they are hidden, these villagers turn their faces away as Rufus is led past them. They shut their eyes to him, thinking they are escaping, thinking maybe it will be all right because there are other blacksmiths to make their tools, circumcise their boys and do their magic. They hold tight to his family, insisting it would be madness to rush the raiders’ guns, saying it would only lose them many more.

Some soothe themselves by deciding maybe Rufus had been too strong after all. Too young to have so much confidence, too hardheaded to surrender fully to a life of working with the spirits. The ease with which Rufus went through his initiation had troubled some of the elders. They had wondered what would bring Rufus to his knees, give him the humility needed for a long and fruitful life.

His grandfather’s thin keening wail rises fluid and graceful into the hard white sky until someone finds him in the dark of his hiding place and claps a hand over his frail old mouth. The men marching Rufus hesitate but only for a moment, then they spend the next hour debating which animal kept calling like that, as if it were midnight in the middle of the day.

By dusk, his sacred bead has been cut from his neck to lie buried under the waves as he’s loaded onto the huge ship with others from all along the coast. The rumor that Rufus is a blacksmith has become just one story among many.

The captain stands short, thick and watchful. He’s almost as rough with his crew as with his cargo. They are white but they are poor and from nowhere with nothing and nobody. They work like the devil and die like flies. When Rufus sees the captain take some skin off the back of one crewman for hesitating, he knows to keep his head down.